A Certain Rich Man Part 13

CHAPTER XIII

The spring sun of 1875 that tanned John Barclay's face gave it a leathery masklike appearance that the succeeding years never entirely wore off. For he lived in the open by day, riding among his fields in three townships, watching the green carpet of March rise and begin to dimple in April, and billow in May. And at night he worked in his office until the midnight c.o.c.kcrow. His back was bowed under a score of burdens. But his greatest burden was the bank; for it gave him worry; and worry weighed upon him more than work. It was in April--early April when the days were raw and cloudy, and the nights bl.u.s.tery and dreary--that Barclay sat in his office one night after a hard day afield, his top-boots spattered with mud, his corduroy coat spread out on a chair to dry, and his wet gray soft hat on his desk beside him. Jane was with her parents in Minneola, and Barclay had come to his office without eating, from the stable where he left his team. The yellow lights in the street below were reflected on the mists outside his window, and the dripping eaves and cornices above him and about him seemed to mark the time of some eery music too fine for his senses, and the footfalls in the street below, hurrying footfalls of people shivering through the mists, seemed to be the drum beats of the weird symphony that he could not hear.

Barclay drew a watch from, the pocket of his blue flannel shirt, and looked at it and stopped writing and stood by the box-stove. He was looking at the door when he heard a thud on the stairs. It was followed by a rattling sound, and in a moment Adrian Brownwell and his cane were in the room. After the rather gorgeous cadenza of Brownwell's greeting had died away and Barclay had his man in a chair, Barclay opened the stove door and let the glow of the flames fight the shadows in the room.

"Well," said Barclay, turning toward his visitor brusquely, "why won't you renew that accommodation paper for me again?"

The Papins and the Dulangpres shrugged their shoulders and waved their hands through Brownwell rather nastily as he answered, "Circ.u.mstances, Mr. Barclay, circ.u.mstances!"

"You're not getting along fast enough, eh?" retorted Barclay.

"Yes--and no," returned Brownwell.

"What do you mean?" asked Barclay, half divining the truth.

"Well--it is after all our own affair--but since you are a friend I will say this: three times a week--sometimes four times a week I go out to pay my respects. Until November I stayed until nine, at Christmas we put on another hour; now it is ten-thirty. I am a man, John Barclay--as you see. She--she is an angel. Very good. In that way, yes. But," the Papins and Dulangpres came back to his face, and he shook his head. "But otherwise--no. There we stand still. She will not say it."

Barclay squinted at the man who sat so complacently in the glow of the firelight, with his cane between his toes and his gloves lightly fanning the air. "So I take it," said John, "that you are like the Memorial Day parade, several hours pa.s.sing a given point!"

"Exactly," smiled back Brownwell. He drew from his pocket a diamond ring. "She will look at it; she will admire it. She will put it on a chain, but she will not wear it. And so I say, why should I put my head in a noose here in your bank--what's the use? No, sir, John Barclay--no, sir. I'm done, sir."

Barclay knew wheedling would not move Brownwell. He was of the mulish temperament. So Barclay stretched out in his chair, locked his hands back of his head, and looked at the ceiling through his eyelashes.

After a silence he addressed the cobwebs above him: "Supposing the case. Would a letter from me to you, setting forth the desperate need of this accommodation paper, not especially for me, but for Colonel Culpepper's fortunes and the good name of the Hendricks family--would that help your cause--a letter that you could show; a letter,"

Barclay said slowly, "asking for this accommodation; a letter that you could show to--to--well, to the proper parties, let us say, to-night; would--that kind of a letter help--" Barclay rose suddenly to an upright position and went on: "Say, Mr. Man, that ought to pretty nearly fix it. Let's leave both matters open, say for two hours, and then at ten o'clock or so--you come back here, and I'll have the note for you to sign--if you care to. How's that?" he asked as he turned to his desk and reached for a pen.

"Well," replied Brownwell, "I am willing to try."

And so Barclay sat writing for five minutes, while the glow of the flames died down, and the shadows ceased fighting and were still.

"Read this over," said Barclay at length. "You will see," he added, as he handed Brownwell the unfolded sheets, "that I have made it clear that if you refuse to sign our notes, General Hendricks will be compelled to close the bank, and that the examination which will follow will send him to prison and jeopardize Bob, who has signed a lot of improper notes there to cover our transactions, and that in the crash Colonel Culpepper will lose all he has, including the roof over his head--if you refuse to help us." ("However," snarled Barclay, at his conscience, "I've only told the truth; for if you take your money and go and shut down on the colonel, it would make him a pauper.")

With a flourishing crescendo finale Adrian Brownwell entered the dark stairway and went down into the street. Barclay turned quickly to his work as if to avoid meditation. The scratch of his pen and the murmur of the water on the roof grew louder and louder as the evening waxed old. And out on the hill, out on Lincoln Avenue, the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house--that stately house of a father's pride and--

At ten o'clock John Barclay heard a light footstep and a rattling cane upon the stair, and Brownwell, a human whirligig of gay gestures, came tripping into the room. "A pen, a pen,"--he cried, "my kingdom for a pen." He was tugging at his gloves as he spoke, and in the clatter that he made, Barclay found the blank note and pushed it toward the table's edge to Brownwell, who put his ornate copy-book signature upon it with a flourish.

When he had gone, Barclay wrote a note to Jane telling her of Molly's engagement to Brownwell, and then he sat posting his books, and figuring up his accounts. It was after midnight when he limped down the stairs, and the rain had ceased. But a biting wind like a cruel fate came out of the north, and he hurried through the deserted street, under lowering clouds that scurried madly across the stars.

But John Barclay could not look up at the stars, he broke into a limping run and head downward plunged into the gale. And never in all his life could he take a square look at Molly Culpepper's diamond ring.

As the spring deepened Bob Hendricks felt upon him at his work the pressure of two distinct troubles. One was his sweetheart's att.i.tude toward him, and the other was the increasing weakness of his father.

Molly Culpepper's letters seemed to be growing sad; also they were failing in their length and frequency--the young man felt that they were perfunctory. His father's letters showed a physical breakdown.

His handwriting was unsteady, and often he repeated himself in successive letters. The sister wrote about her father's weakness, and seemed to think he was working too hard. But the son suspected that it was worry rather than work, and that things were not going right in the bank. He did not know that the Golden Belt Wheat Company had sapped the money of the bank and had left it a husk, which at any time might crumble. The father knew this, and after the first of the year every morning when he opened the bank he feared that day would be the last day of its career.

And so it fell out that "those that look out of the windows" were darkened, and General Hendricks rose up with the voice of the bird and was "afraid of that which was high" and terrors were in the way. So on his head, the white blossom of the almond tree trembled; and one noon in March the stage bore to this broken, shaking old man a letter from Kansas City that ran the sword of fear into his heart and almost stopped it forever. It ran:--

"Dear General: I have just learned from talking with a banker here that an inspector is headed our way. He probably will arrive the day after this reaches you. Something must be done about that tax check of yours. The inspector should not find it in the drawer again. Once was all right, but you must get it out now. Put it in the form of a note.

Make it Carnine's note. He is good for twice that. Don't bother him with it, but make it out for ninety days, and by that time we can make another turn. But that note must be in there. Your check won't do any longer. The inspector has been gossiping about us up here--and about that check of yours. For G.o.d's sake, don't hesitate, but do this thing quick."

The letter was not signed, but it came in Barclay's envelope, and was addressed by Barclay's hand.

The general fumbled with the pad of blank notes before him for a long time. He read and reread Barclay's letter. Then he put away the pad and tore the letter into bits and started for the front door. But a terror seized him, and he walked behind the counter and put his palsied hand into the box where he kept cancelled checks, and picked out one of Gabriel Carnine's checks. He folded it up, and started for the door again, but turned weakly at the threshold, and walked to the back room of the bank.

When it was done, and had been worked through the books, General Hendricks, quaking with shame and fear, sat shivering before his desk with jaws agape and the forged name gashed into his soul. And "the strong men" bowed themselves as he shuffled home in the twilight. The next day when the inspector came, "all the daughters of music were brought low" and the feeble, bent, stricken man piped and wheezed and stammered his confused answers to the young man's questions, and stood paralyzed with unspeakable horror while the inspector glanced at the Carnine note and asked some casual question about it. When the bank closed that night, General Hendricks tried to write to his son and tell him the truth, but he sat weeping before his desk and could not put down the words he longed to write. Bob Hendricks found that tear-stained letter half finished in the desk when he came home, and he kept it locked up for years. And when he discovered that the date on the letter and the date on the forged note were the same, the son knew the meaning of the tears. But it was all for the Larger Good, and so John Barclay won another game with Destiny.

But the silver cord was straining, and morning after morning the old pitcher went to the fountain, to be battered and battered and battered. His books, which he kept himself, grew spotted and dirty, and day by day in the early spring the general dreaded lest some depositor would come into the bank and call for a sum in cash so large that it would take the cash supply below the legal limit, and that an inspector would suddenly appear again and discover the deficiency.

Except Barclay the other directors knew nothing of the situation. They signed whatever reports the general or Barclay put before them; there came a time in April when any three of a dozen depositors could have taken every penny out of the bank. When the general was unusually low in spirits, Barclay sent Colonel Culpepper around to the bank with his anthem about times being better when the spring really opened, and for an hour the general was cheerful, but when the colonel went, the general always saw the axe hanging over his head. And then one morning late in April--one bright Sunday morning--the wheel of the cistern was broken, and they found the old man cold in his bed with his face to the wall.

John Barclay was on a horse riding to the railroad--four hours away, before the town was up for late Sunday morning breakfast. That afternoon he went into Topeka on a special engine, and told a Topeka banker who dealt with the bank of Sycamore Ridge the news of the general's death, and asked for five thousand dollars in silver to allay a possible run. At midnight he drove into the Ridge with the money, and the bank opened in the morning at seven o'clock instead of nine, so that a crowd might not gather, and depositors who came, saw back of Barclay a great heap of silver dollars, flanked by all the gold and greenbacks in the vault, and when a man asked for his money he got it in silver, and when Oscar Fernald presented a check for over three thousand dollars, Barclay paid it out in silver, and in the spirit of fun, Sheriff Jake Dolan, who heard of the counting and recounting of the money while it was going on, brought in a wheelbarrow and Oscar wheeled his money to his hotel, while every loafer in town followed him. At noon Fernald came back with his money, and Barclay refused to take it. The town knew that also. Barclay did not step out of the teller's cage during the whole day, but Lige Bemis was his herald, and through him Barclay had Dolan refuse to give Fernald protection for his money unless Fernald would consent to be locked up in jail with it. In ten minutes the town knew that story, and at three o'clock Barclay posted a notice saying the bank would remain open until nine o'clock that night, to accommodate any depositors who desired their money, but that it would be closed for three days following until after the funeral of the president of the bank.

The next day he sat in the back room of the bank and received privately nearly all the money that had been taken out Monday, and several thousand dollars besides that came through fear that Fernald's cash would attract robbers from the rough country to the West who might loot the town. To urge in that cla.s.s of depositors, Barclay asked Sheriff Dolan to detail a guard of fifty deputies about the bank day and night, and the day following the cash began coming in with mildew on it, and Adrian Brownwell appeared that night with a thousand dollars of old bank-notes, issued in the fifties, that smelled of the earth. Thursday John limped up and down the street inviting first one business man and then another into the bank to help him count cash and straighten out his balance. And each of a dozen men believed for years that he was the man who first found the balance in the books of the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge, after John Barclay had got them tangled. And when Barclay was a great and powerful man in the world, these men, being interviewed by reporters about the personality of Barclay, took pride in telling this story of his blundering. But when Bob Hendricks reached Sycamore Ridge Thursday noon, confidence in the safety of the bank was founded upon a rock.

So when the town closed its stores that afternoon and took the body of the general, its first distinguished citizen to die, out upon the Hill, and laid it to rest in the wild prairie gra.s.s, John Barclay and Jane, his wife, rode in the carriage with the mourners, and John stood by his friend through the long service, and when the body was lowered into the grave, the most remote thought in all the world from John's mind was that he was responsible for the old man's death.

Bob Hendricks saw Molly Culpepper for the first time in twenty months, standing by her father with those who gathered about the general's grave, and as soon as he could leave the friends who came home with him and his sister, he hurried to the Culpeppers'. As he left his home, he could see Molly sitting on the veranda behind one of the pillars of great pride. She moved down the steps toward the gate to meet him. It was dusk,--deep dusk,--but he knew her figure and was thrilled with joy. They walked silently from the gate toward the veranda, and the youth's soul was moved too deeply for words. So deeply indeed was his being stirred, that he did not notice in his eagerness to bring their souls together how she was holding him away from her heart.

The yellow roses were blooming, and the pink roses were in bud. They strayed idly to the side of the house farthest from the street, and there they found the lilacs, heavy with blooms; they were higher than the girl's head,--a little thicket of them,--and behind the thicket was a rustic seat made of the grape-vines. He stepped toward the chair, pulling her by the hand, and she followed. He tried to gather her into his arms, but she slid away from him and cried, "No--no, Bob--no!"

"Why--why--why! what's wrong?" gasped the youth.

The girl sank on the seat and covered her face with her hands. He touched her shoulder and her hair with his finger-tips, and she shivered away from him. "Oh, Bob--Bob, Bob!--" she cried in agony, still looking at the gra.s.s before her.

The young man looked at her in perplexity. "Why, dear--why--why, darling--why, Molly," he stammered, "why--why--"

She rose and faced him. She gripped herself, and he could feel the unnatural firmness in her voice as she spoke.

"Bob, I am not the little girl you left." He put out his arms, but she shrank back among the lilacs; their perfume was in her face, and she was impressed with that odd feeling one sometimes has of having had some glimpse of it all before. She knew that she would say, "I am not worthy--not worthy any more--Bob, do you understand?"

And when he had stepped to ward her again with piteous pleading face,--a face that she had never seen before, yet seemed always to have known,--she felt that numb sense of familiarity with it all, and it did not pain her as she feared it would when he cried, "Oh--G.o.d, Molly--nothing you ever could do would make you unworthy of me--Molly, Molly, what is it?" The anguish in his face flashed back from some indefinite past to her, and then the illusion was gone, and the drama was all new. He caught her, but she fought herself away.

"Don't--don't!" she cried; "you have no right--now." She dropped into the seat, while he stood over her with horror on his face. She answered the question of his eyes, rocking her body as she spoke, "Bob--do you understand now?" He shook his head, and she went on, "We aren't engaged--not any more, Bob--not any more--never!" He started to speak, but she said: "I'm going to marry Mr. Brownwell. Oh, Bob--Bob, I told you I was unworthy--now do you understand?"

The man turned his face starward a second, and then dropped his head.

"Oh," he groaned, and then sat down beside her at the other end of the bench. He folded his hands on his knees, and they sat silent for a time, and then he asked in a dead voice, "You know I love you--still, don't you, Molly?"

She answered, "Yes, that's what makes it hard."

"And do you love me?" he cried with eagerness.

She sat for a minute without replying and then answered, "I am a woman now, Bob--a grown woman, and some way things are different."

They sat without speaking; then he drew a deep breath and said, "Well, I suppose I ought to go." His head rested on his hand which was supported by an arm of the chair. He did not offer to rise.

She rose and went to him, kneeling before him. She put her hands upon his shoulders, and he put them aside, and she felt him shudder. She moaned, and looked up at him. Her face was close to his, but he did not come closer. He stared at her dumbly, and kept shaking his head as if asking some mute question too deep for words. Then he put out his hand and took hers. He put it against his cheek and held it in both his own. She did not take her eyes from his face, but his eyes began to wander.

"I will never see you again, Bob--I mean like this." She paused.