A Certain Rich Man Part 15

"No," cried Barclay, in a loud voice. "Come off your high horse and take the profits we'll make on our wheat, pay off old Brownwell and marry her."

"And let the bank bust and the farmers slide?" asked Hendricks, "and buy back Molly with stolen money? Is that your idea?"

"Well," Barclay snapped, "you have your choice, so if you think more of the bank and your old hayseeds than you do of Molly, don't come blubbering around me about selling her."

"John," sighed Hendricks, after a long wrestle--a final contest with his demon, "I've gone all over that. And I have decided that if I've got to swindle seventy-five or a hundred farmers--most of them old soldiers on their homesteads--out of their little all, and cheat five hundred depositors out of their money to get Molly, she and I wouldn't be very happy when we thought of the price, and we'd always think of the price." His demon was limp in the background of his soul as he added: "Here are some papers I brought over. Let's get back to the settlement--fix them up and bring them over to the bank this morning, will you?" And laying a package carefully on the table, Hendricks turned and went quickly out of the room.

After Hendricks left the office that May morning, Barclay sat whistling the air of the song of the "Evening Star," looking blankly at a picture of Wagner hanging beside a picture of Jay Gould. The tune seemed to restore his soul. When he had been whistling softly for five minutes or so, the idea flashed across his mind that flour was the one thing used in America more than any other food product and that if a man had his money invested in the manufacture and sale of flour, he would have an investment that would weather any panic. The idea overcame him, and he shut his eyes and his ears and gripped his chair and whistled and saw visions. Molly Culpepper came into the room, and paused a moment on the threshold as one afraid to interrupt a sleeper.

She saw the dapper little man kicking the chair rounds with his dangling heels, his flushed face reflecting a brain full of blood, his eyes shut, his head thrown far back, so that his Adam's apple stuck up irrelevantly, and she knew only by the persistence of the soft low whistle that he was awake, clutching at some day-dream. When she cleared her throat, he was startled and stared at her foolishly for a moment, with the vision still upon him. His wits came to him, and he rose to greet her.

"Well--well--why--h.e.l.lo, Molly--I was just figuring on a matter,"

he said as he put her in a chair, and then he added, "Well--I wasn't expecting you."

Even before she could speak his lips were puckering to pick up the tune he had dropped. She answered, "No, John, I wanted to see you--so I just came up."

"Oh, that's all right, Molly--what is it?" he returned.

"Well--" answered the young woman, listlessly, "it's about; father.

You know he's badly in debt, and some way--of course he sells lots of land and all, but you know father, John, and he just doesn't--oh, he just keeps in debt."

Barclay had been lapsing back into his revery as she spoke, but he pulled himself out and replied: "Oh, yes, Molly--I know about father all right. Can't you make him straighten things out?"

"Well, no. John, that's just it. His money comes in so irregularly, this month a lot and next month nothing, that it just spoils him. When he gets a lot he spends it like a prince," she smiled sadly and interjected: "You know he is forever giving away--and then while he's waiting he gets in debt again. Then we are as poor as the people for whom he pa.s.ses subscription papers, and that's just what I wanted to see you about."

Barclay took his eyes off Jay Gould's picture long enough to look at the brown-eyed girl with an oval face and a tip of a chin that just fitted the hollow of a man's hand; there were the smallest brown freckles in the world across the bridge of her nose, and under her eyes there was the faintest suggestion of dark shading. Youth was in her lips and cheeks, and when she smiled there were dimples. But John's eyes went back to Jay Gould's solemn black whiskers and he said from his abstraction, "Well, Molly, I wish I could help you."

"Well, I knew you would, John, some way; and oh, John, I do need help so badly." She paused a moment and gazed at him piteously and repeated, "So badly." But his eyes did not move from the sacred whiskers of his joss. The vision was flaming in his brain, and with his lips parted, he whistled "The Evening Star" to conjure it back and keep it with him. The girl went on:--

"About that money Mr. Brownwell loaned father, John." She flushed and cried, "Can't you find some way for father to borrow the money and pay Mr. Brownwell--now that your wheat is turning out so well?"

The young man pulled himself out of his day-dream and said, "Well--why--you see, Molly--I--Well now, to be entirely frank with you, Molly, I'm going into a business that will take all of my credit--and every cent of my money."

He paused a moment, and the girl asked, "Tell me, John, will the wheat straighten things up at the bank?"

"Well, it might if Bob had any sense--but he's got a fool notion of considering a straight mortgage that those farmers gave on their land as rent, and isn't going to make them redeem their land,--his share of it, I mean,--and if he doesn't do that, he'll not have a cent, and he couldn't lend your father any money." Barclay was anxious to get back to his "Evening Star" and his dream of power, so he asked, "Why, Molly, what's wrong?"

"John," she began, "this is a miserable business to talk about; but it is business, I guess." She stopped and looked at him piteously. "Well, John, father's debt to Mr. Brownwell--the ten-thousand-dollar loan on the house--will be due in August." The young man a.s.sented. And after a moment she sighed, "That is why I'm to be married in August." She stood a moment looking out of the window and cried, "Oh, John, John, isn't there some way out--isn't there, John?"

Barclay rose and limped to her and answered harshly: "Not so long as Bob is a fool--no, Molly. If he wants to go mooning around releasing those farmers from their mortgages--there's no way out. But I wouldn't care for a man who didn't think more of me than he did of a lot of old clodhoppers."

The girl looked at the hard-faced youth a moment in silence, and turned without a word and left the room. Barclay floated away on his "Evening Star" and spun out his dream as a spider spins his web, and when Hendricks came into the office for a mislaid paper half an hour later, Barclay still was figuring up profits, and making his web stronger. As Hendricks, having finished his errand, was about to go, Barclay stopped him.

"Bob, Molly's been up here. As nearly as I can get at it, Brownwell has promised to renew the colonel's mortgage in August. If he and Molly aren't married by then--no more renewals from him. Don't be a fool, Bob; let your sod-busters go hang. If you don't get their farms, some one else will!"

Hendricks looked at his partner a minute steadily, grunted, and strode out of the room. And the incident slipped from John Barclay's mind, and the web of the spider grew stronger and stronger in his brain, but it cast a shadow that was to reach across his life.

After Hendricks went from his office that morning, Barclay bounded back, like a boy at play, to the vision of controlling the flour market. He saw the waving wheat of Garrison County coming to the railroad, and he knew that his railroad rates were so low that the miller on the Sycamore could not ship a pound of flour profitably, and Barclay's mind gradually comprehended that through railroad rates he controlled the mill, and could buy it at his leisure, upon his own terms. Then the whole scheme unfolded itself before his closed eyes as he sat with his head tilted back and pillowed in his hands. If his railroad concession made it possible for him to underbid the miller at the Ridge, why could he not get other railroad concessions and underbid every miller along the line of the Corn Belt road, by dividing profits with the railroad officials? As he spun out his vision, he could hear the droning voices of General Ward and Colonel Culpepper in the next room; but he did not heed them.

They were discussing the things of the day,--indeed, the things of a fortnight before, to be precise,--the reception given by the Culpeppers to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. The windows were open, and Barclay could hear the men's voices, and he knew vaguely that they were talking of Lige Bemis. For Barclay had tactfully asked the colonel as a favour to invite Mr. and Mrs. Bemis to the silver wedding reception. So the Bemises came. Mrs. Bemis, who was rather stout, even for a woman in her early forties, wore black satin and jet ornaments, including black jet ear bobs of tremendous size. And Watts McHurdie was so touched by the way ten years under a roof had tamed the woman whom he had known of old as "Happy Hallie,"

that he wrote a poem for the _Banner_ about the return of the "Prodigal Daughter," which may be found in Garrison County sc.r.a.p-books of that period. As for Mr. Bemis, he went slinking about the outskirts of the crowd, showing his teeth considerably, and making it obvious that he was there.

So as John Barclay rode his "Evening Star" to glory, in the next room General Ward turned to the colonel, who stood puffing in the doorway of the general's law-office. "Martin, did John Barclay make you invite that woman to your house--that Bemis woman?"

The colonel got his breath slowly after climbing the stair, and he did not reply at once. But he smiled, and stood with his arms akimbo a few seconds before he spoke. "Well now, General--since you ask it, I may as well confess it pointedly--I am ashamed to say he did!"

Ward motioned the colonel to a seat and asked impatiently, "Ashamed?"

"Well," responded Culpepper, as he put his feet in the window ledge, "she's as good as I am--if you come down to that! Why shouldn't I, who pretend to be a gentleman,--a Virginia gentleman, I may say, sir,--why shouldn't I be ashamed, disgraced, sir, disgraced in point of fact, that I had to be forced to invite any person in all G.o.d's beautiful world to my home?"

Ward looked at the colonel coldly a moment and then blurted out: "Ah, shucks, sir--stuff and nonsense! You know what she was before the war--Happy Hally! My gracious, Martin, how could you?"

Martin Culpepper brought his chair down with a bang and turned squarely to Ward. "General, the war's over now. I knew Happy Hally--and I knew the Red Legs she trained with. And we're making senators and governors and state officers and indeed, I may say, prominent citizens out of them. Why not give Hally her show? You d.a.m.n cold-nosed Yankee Brahmins--you have Faith and you have Hope, but you have no more Charity than a sausage-grinder." The colonel rose, and cried with some asperity, "General, if you'd preach about the poor less, and pray with 'em more, you'd know more about your fellow-men, sir!"

Perhaps this conversation should not have been set down here; for it has no direct relation to the movement of this narrative. The narrative at this point should be hurrying along to tell how John Barclay and Bob Hendricks cleared up a small fortune on their wheat deal, and how that autumn Barclay bought the mill at Sycamore Ridge by squeezing its owner out, and then set about to establish four branches of the Golden Belt Wheat Company's elevator service along the line of the new railroad, and how he controlled the wheat output of three counties the next year through his enterprise. These facts carry John Barclay forward toward his life's goal. And while these two middle-aged gentlemen--the general and the colonel--were in the next room wrangling over the youthful love affairs of a middle-aged lady, a great dream was shaping in Barclay's head, and he did not heed them.

He was dreaming of controlling the wheat market of the Golden Belt Railroad, through railroad-rate privileges, and his fancy was feeling its way into flour, and comprehending what might be done with wheat products.

It was a crude dream, but he was aflame with it, and yet--John Barclay, aged twenty-five, was a young man with curly hair and flattered himself that he could sing. And there was always in him that side of his nature, so the reader must know that when Nellie Logan came to his office that bright summer morning and found him wrapped in his day-dream of power, she addressed herself not to the Thane of Wheat who should be King hereafter, but to the baritone singer in the Congregational choir, and the wheat king scampered back to the dream world when John replied to Nellie's question.

"So it's _your_ wedding, is it, Nellie--your wedding," he repeated.

"Well, where does Watts come in?" And then, before she answered, he went on, "You bet I'll sing at your wedding, and what's more, I'll bring along my limping Congregational foot, and I'll dance at your wedding."

"Well, I just knew you would," said the young woman.

"So old Watts thought I wouldn't, did he?" asked Barclay. "The old skeezicks--Well, well! Nellie, you tell him that the fellow who was with Watts when he was shot ten miles from Springfield isn't going to desert him when he gets a mortal wound in the heart." Then Barclay added: "You get the music and take it down to Jane, and tell her to teach me, and I'll be there. Jane says you're going to put old Watts through all the gaits."

He leaned back in his swivel chair and smiled at his visitor. He had a slow drawl that he used in teasing, and one who heard that voice and afterward heard the harsh bark of the man in driving a bargain or browbeating an adversary would have to look twice to realize that the same man was talking. A little over an hour before in that very room he had looked at Bob Hendricks from under wrinkled brows with the vertical line creased between his eyes and snarled, "Well, then, if you think she's going to marry that fellow because I got him to lend the colonel some money, why don't you go and lend the colonel some more money and get her back?"

But there was not a muscle twitching in his face as he talked to Nellie Logan, not a break in his voice, not a ruffle of a hair, to tell her that John Barclay had broken with the friend of his boyhood and the partner of his youth, and that he had closed and bolted the Door of Hope on Molly Culpepper. He drawled on: "Jane was saying that you were going to have Bob and Molly for best man and bridesmaid.

Ought you to do that? You know they--"

He did not finish the sentence, but she replied: "Oh, yes, I know about that. I told Watts he ought to have Mr. Brownwell; but he's as stubborn as a mule about just that one thing. Everything else--the flower girls and the procession and the ring service and all--he's so nice about. And you know I just had to have Molly."

John slapped the arms of his chair and laughed. "As old Daddy Mason says, 'Now hain't that just like a woman!' Well, Nellie, it's your wedding, and a woman is generally not married more than once, so it's all right. Go it while you're young."

And so he teased her out of the room, and when Sycamore Ridge packed itself into the Congregational Church one June night, to witness the most gorgeous church wedding the town ever had seen, John opened the ceremonies by singing the "Voice that breathed o'er Eden" most effectively, and Sycamore Ridge in its best clothes, rather stuffed and uncomfortable thereby, was in that unnatural att.i.tude toward the world where it thought John Barclay's voice, a throaty baritone, with much affectation in the middle register, a tendency to flat in the upper register, and thick fuzz below "C," was beautiful, though John often remembered that night with unalloyed shame. He saw himself as he stood there, primped to kill, like a prize bull at a fair, bellowing out a mawkish sentiment in a stilted voice, and he wondered how the Ridge ever managed to endure him afterwards.

But this is a charitable world, and his temperament was such that he did not realize that no one paid much attention to him, after the real ceremony started. When the bride and the bridesmaid came down the aisle, Nellie Logan radiant in the gown which every woman in the church knew had come from Chicago and had been bought of the drummer at wholesale cost, saving the bride over fifteen dollars on the regular price--what did the guests care for a dapper little man singing a hymn tune through his nose, even if he was the richest young man in town? And when Molly Culpepper--dear little Molly Culpepper--came after the bride, blushing through her powder, and looking straight at the floor for fear her eyes would wander after her heart and wondering if the people knew--it was of no consequence that John Barclay's voice frazzled on "F"; for if the town wished to notice a man at that wedding, there was Watts McHurdie in a paper collar, with a white embroidered bow tie and the first starched shirt the town had ever seen him wear, badly out of step with the procession, while the best man dragged him like an unwilling victim to the altar; and of course there was the best man,--and a handsome best man as men go,--fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed, with a good glow on his immobile face and rather sad eyes that, being in a man's head, went boldly where they chose and where all the women in the town could see them go. So there were other things to remember that night besides John Barclay's singing and the festive figure he cut at that wedding: there was the wedding supper at the Wards', and the wedding reception at the Culpeppers', and after it all the dance in Culpepper Hall. And all the town remembers these things, but only two people remember a moment after the reception when every one was hurrying away to the dance and when the bridesmaid--such a sweet, pretty little bridesmaid--was standing alone in a deserted room with a tall groomsman--just for a moment--just for a moment before Adrian Brownwell came up bustling and bristling, but long enough to say, "Bob--did you take my gloves there in the carriage as we were coming home from the church?" and long enough for him to answer, "Why, did you lose them?" and then to get a good square look into her eyes. It was only a few seconds in the long evening--less than a second that their eyes met; but it was enough to be remembered forever; though why--you say! It was all so commonplace; there was nothing in it that you would have thought worth remembering for a moment. "Bob, did you take my gloves?" "Why, did you lose them?" and then a glance of the eyes. Surely there are more romantic words than these. But when a man and a woman go in for collecting antiques in their dialogues, Heaven only knows what old rubbish you will find in their attics, scoured off and rebuilt and polished with secret tears until the old stuff glows like embers.

And that is why, when the music was silent in Culpepper Hall, and the tall young man walked slowly home alone, as he clicked his own gate behind him, he brought from his pocket two little white gloves,--just two ordinary white gloves,--and held them to his lips and lifted his arms in despair once and let them drop as he stood before his doorstep. And that is why a girl, a little girl with the weariest face in the town, looked out of her bedroom window that night and whispered over and over to herself the name she dared not speak. And all this was going on while the town was turning over in its bed, listening to the most tumultuous charivari that Sycamore Ridge has ever known.

Night after night that summer faithful Jake Dolan walked the streets of Sycamore Ridge with Bob Hendricks. By day they lived apart, but at night the young man often would look up the elder, and they would walk and walk together, but never once did Hendricks mention Molly's name nor refer to her in any way; yet Jake Dolan knew why they walked abroad. How did he know? How do we know so many things in this world that are neither seen nor heard? And the Irish--they have the drop of blood that defies mathematics; the Irish are the only people in the world whom kind Providence permits to add two and two together to make six. "You say 'tis four," said Dolan, one night, as he and Hendricks stood on the bridge listening to the roar from the dam. "I say 'tis six. There is this and there is that and you say they make the other.

Not at all; they make something else entirely different. You take your two and your two and make your four and try your four on the world, and it works--yes, it works up to a point; but there is something left over, something unexplained; you don't know what. I do. It's the other two. Therefore I say to you, Mr. Robert Hendricks, that two and two make six, because G.o.d loves the Irish, and for no other reason on earth."

So much for the dreams of Molly, the memories of Bob, and the vagaries of Mr. Dolan. They were as light as air. But in John Barclay's life a vision was rising--a vision that was real, palpable, and vital; a vision of wealth and power,--and as the days and the months pa.s.sed, the shadow of that vision grew big and black and real in a score of lives.

CHAPTER XV