A Certain Rich Man Part 34

The girl stood by her father's chair a moment and then answered colourlessly: "No, father, I don't want you to get him for me. I am not moping for him, as you call it."

Her desolate tone reached some chord in his very heart, for he caught her hand, and put it to his cheek and said softly, "But she loves him--my poor little girl loves him?"

She tried to pull away her hand and replied, in the same dead voice: "Oh, well--that doesn't matter much, I suppose. It's all over--so far as I am concerned." She turned to leave him, and he cried:--

"My dear, my dear--why don't you go to him?"

She stopped a moment and looked at her father, and even in the starlight she could see his hard mouth and his ruthless jaw. Then she cried out, "Oh, father, I can't--I can't--" After a moment she turned and looked at him, and asked, "Would you? Would you?" and walked into the house without waiting for an answer.

The father sat crumpled up in his chair, listening to the flames crackling in his heart. The old negation was fighting for its own, and he was weary and broken and sick as with a palsy of the soul. For everything in him trembled. There was no solid ground under him. He had visited his material kingdom in the City, and had seen its strong fortresses and had tried all of its locks and doors, and found them firm and fast. But they did not satisfy his soul; something within him kept mocking them; refusing to be awed by their power, and the eternal "yes" rushed through his reason like a great wind.

As he sat there, suddenly, as from some power outside, John Barclay felt a creaking of his resisting timbers, and he quit the struggle.

His heart was lead in his breast, and he walked through the house to his pipe organ, that had stood silent in the hall for nearly a year.

He stood hesitatingly before it for a second, and then wearily lay him down to rest, on a couch beside it, where, when he had played the last time, Jane lay and listened. He was tired past all telling, but his soul was relaxed. He lay there for hours--until the tall clock above his head chimed two. He could not sleep, but his consciousness was inert and his mind seemed limp and empty, as one who has worked past his limit. The hymn that the clock chimed through the quarter hours repeated itself over and over again without meaning in his brain.

Something aroused him; he started up suddenly, and lying half on his elbow and half on his side he stared about him, and was conscious of a great light in the room: it was as though there was a fire near by and he was alarmed, but he could not move. As he looked into s.p.a.ce, terrified by the paralysis that held him, he saw across the face of the organ, "Righteousness exalteth a Nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."

Quick as a flash his mind went back to the time that same motto stared meaninglessly at him from above the pulpit in the chapel at West Point, to which he had been appointed official visitor at Commencement many years before. But that night as he gazed at the text its meaning came rushing through his brain. It came so quickly that he could not will it back nor reason it in. Righteousness, he knew, was not piety--not wearing your Sunday clothes to church and praying and singing psalms; it was living honestly and kindly and charitably and dealing decently with every one in every transaction; and sin--that, he knew--was the cheating, the deceiving, and the malicious greed that had built up his company and scores of others like it all over the land. That, he knew--that bribery and corruption and vicarious stealing which he had learned to know as business--that was a reproach to any people, and as it came to him that he was a miserable offender and that the other life, the decent life, was the right life, he was filled with a joy that he could not express, and he let the light fail about him unheeded, and lay for a time in a transport of happiness. He had found the secret.

The truth had come to him--to him first of all men, and it was his to tell. The joy of it--that he should find out what righteousness was--that it was not crying "Lord, Lord" and playing the hypocrite--thrilled him. And then the sense of his sinning came over him, but only with joy too, because he felt he could show others how foolish they were. The clock stopped ticking; the chimes were silent, and he lay unconscious of his body, with his spirit bathed in some new essence that he did not understand and did not try to understand.

Finally he rose and went to his organ and turned on the motor, and put his hands to the keys. As he played the hymn to the "Evening Star,"

John Barclay looked up and saw his mother standing upon the stair with her fine old face bathed in tears. And then at last--

Tears? Tears for Mr. Barclay? All these months there have been no tears for him--none, except miserable little corroding tears of rage and shame. But now there are tears for Mr. Barclay, large, man's size, soul-healing tears--tears of repentance; not for the rich Mr.

Barclay, the proud Mr. Barclay, the powerful, man-hating, G.o.d-defying Mr. Barclay of Sycamore Ridge, but for John Barclay, a contrite man, the humblest in all the kingdom.

And as John Barclay let his soul rise with the swelling music, he felt the solace of a great peace in his heart; he turned his wet face upward and cried, "Oh, mother, mother, I feel like a child!" Then Mary Barclay knew that her son had let Him in, knew in her own heart all the joy there is in heaven over one sinner that repenteth.

CHAPTER XXIX

It is written in the Book that holds the wisdom of our race that one who is reborn into the Kingdom of G.o.d, enters as a little child. It is there in black and white, yet few people get the idea into their consciousnesses. They expect regeneration to produce an upright man.

G.o.d knows better than that. And we should know better too when it is written down for us. And so you good people who expect to see John Barclay turn rightabout face on the habits of a lifetime are to be disappointed. For a little child stumbles and falls and goes the wrong way many times before it learns the way of life. There came days after that summer night of 1904, when John Barclay fell--days when he would sneak into the stenographers' room in his office in the City and tear up some letter he had dictated, when he would send a telegram annulling an order, when he would find himself cheating and gouging his compet.i.tors or his business a.s.sociates,--even days when he had not the moral courage to retrace his steps although he knew he was wrong. Shame put her brand on his heart, and his face showed to those who watched it closely--and there were scores of fellow-gamblers at the game with him, whose profits came from watching his face--his face showed forth uncertainty and daze. So men said, "The old man's off his feed," or others said, "Barclay's losing his nerve"; and still others said, "Can it be possible that the old hypocrite is getting a sort of belated conscience?"

But slowly, inch by inch, the child within him grew; he gripped his soul with the iron hand of will that had made a man of him, and when the child fell and ached with shame, Barclay's will sustained the weakling. We are so hidden by our masks that this struggle in the man's soul, though guessed at by some of those about him, was unknown to the hundreds who saw him every day. But for him the universe had changed. And as a child, amazed, he looked upon the new wonder of G.o.d's order about him and went tripping and stumbling and toppling over awkwardly through it all as one learning some new equilibrium.

There were times when his heart grew sick, and he would have given it all up. There were hours when he did surrender; when he did a mean thing and gloried in it, or a cowardly thing and apologized for it.

But his will rose and turned him back to his resolve. He found the big things easy, and the little things hard to do. So he kept at the big things until they had pushed him so far toward his goal that the little things were details which he repaired slowly and with anguish of humiliation in secret, and unknown even to those who were nearest to him.

And all this struggle was behind the hard face, under the broad, high forehead, back of the mean jaw, beneath the cover of the sharp brazen eyes. Even in Sycamore Ridge they did not suspect the truth until Barclay had grown so strong in his new faith that he could look at his yesterdays without shuddering.

The year of our Lord nineteen hundred and six was a slow year politically in Sycamore Ridge, so in the parliament at McHurdie's shop discussion took somewhat wider range than was usual. It may interest metaphysicians in the world at large to know that the McHurdie parliament that August definitely decided that this is not a material world; that sensation is a delusion, that the whole phantasmagoria of the outer and material world is a reaction of some sort upon the individual consciousness. Up to this point the matter is settled, and metaphysicians may as well make a record of the decision; for Watts McHurdie, Jacob Dolan, Philemon Ward, Martin Culpepper, and sometimes Oscar Fernald, know just exactly as much about it as the ablest logician in the world. It is, however, regrettable that after deciding that the external world is but a divine reaction upon the individual consciousness, the parliament was unable to reach any sort of a decision as to whose consciousness received the picture. Mr. Dolan maintained vigorously that his consciousness was the one actually affected, and that the colonel and the general and Watts were mere hallucinations of his. The general held that Jake and the others were accessory phantasms of his own dream, and Watts and the colonel, being of more poetical temperament, held that the whole outfit was a chimera in some larger consciousness, whose ent.i.ty it is not given us to know.

As for Oscar, he claimed the parliament was crazy, and started to prove it, when it was thought best to shift and modify the discussion; and, therefore, early in September, when the upper currents of the national atmosphere were vocal with discordant allegations, denials, accusations, and maledictions, in Watts McHurdie's shop the question before the house was, "How many people are there in the world?" For ten days, in the desultory debate that had droned through the summer, the general, true to his former contention, insisted that there was only one person in the world. Mr. Dolan, with the Celtic elasticity of reason, was willing to admit two.

"You and me and no more--all the rest is background for us," he proclaimed. "If the you of the moment is the colonel--well and good; then the colonel and I for it; but if it is the general and I--to the trees with your colonel and Watts, and the three billion others--you're merely stage setting, and become third persons."

"But," asked McHurdie, "if I exist this minute with you, and then you focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists, what becomes of me when you turn your head from me?"

Dolan did not answer. He dipped into the _Times_ and read awhile; and the colonel and the general got out the checkerboard and plunged into a silent game. At length Dolan, after the fashion of debaters in the parliament, came out of his newspaper and said:--

"That, Mr. McHurdie, is a problem ranging off the subject, into the theories of the essence of time and s.p.a.ce, and I refuse to answer it."

Me Hurdie kept on working, and the hands of the clock slipped around nearly an hour. Then the bell tinkled and Neal Ward came in on his afternoon round for news to print in the next day's issue of the _Banner_.

"Anything new?" he asked.

"Mrs. Dorman is putting new awnings on the rear windows of her store--did you get that?" asked McHurdie.

The young man made a note of the fact.

"Yes," added Dolan, "and you may just say that Hon. Jacob Dolan, former sheriff of Garrison County, and a member of 'C' Company, well known in this community, who has been custodian of public buildings and grounds in and for Garrison County, state of Kansas, ss., is contemplating resigning his position and removing to the National Soldiers' Home at Leavenworth for the future."

Young Ward smiled, but did not take the item down in his note-book.

"It isn't time yet," he said.

"Why not?" asked Dolan.

"Only two months and a half since I printed that the last time. It can't go oftener than four times a year, and it's been in twice this year. Late in December will time it about right."

"What's the news with you, boy?" asked Dolan.

"Well," said the young man, pausing carefully as if to make a selection from a large and tempting a.s.sortment, but really swinging his arms for a long jump into the heart of the matter in his mind, "have you heard that John Barclay has given the town his pipe organ?"

"You don't say!" exclaimed McHurdie.

"Tired of it?" asked Dolan, as though twenty-five-thousand-dollar pipe organs were raining in the town every few days.

"It'll not be that, Jake," said Watts. "John is no man to tire of things."

"No, it's not that, Mr. Dolan," answered Neal Ward. "He has sent word to the mayor and council that he is going to have the organ installed in Barclay Hall this week at his own expense, and he accompanied the letter with fifty thousand dollars in securities to hire a permanent organist and a band-master for the band; and a band concert and an organ concert will alternate in the hall every week during the year. I gather from reading his letter that Mr. Barclay believes the organ will do more good in the hall than in his house."

The general and the colonel kept on at their game. Dolan whistled, and Watts nodded his head. "That's what I would say he did it for," said McHurdie.

"Are the securities N.P.C. stock?" asked Dolan, tentatively.

"No," replied Neal; "I saw them; they are munic.i.p.al bonds of one sort and another."

"Well, well--Johnnie at the mill certainly is popping open like a chestnut bur. Generally when he has some scheme on to buy public sentiment he endows something with N.P.C. stock, so that in case of a lawsuit against the company he'd have the people interested in protecting the stock. This new tack is certainly queer doings.

Certainly queer doings for the dusty miller!" repeated Dolan.

"Well, it's like his buying the waterworks of Bemis last month, and that land at the new pumping station, and giving the council money to build the new dam and power-house. He had no rebate or take back in that--at least no one can see it," said the young man.

"Nellie says," put in Watts, "that she heard from Mrs. Fernald, who got it from her girl, who got it from the girl who works in the Hub restaurant, who had it from Mrs. Carnine's girl--so it come pretty straight--that Lige made John pay a pretty penny for the waterworks, and they had a great row because John would give up the fight."

"Yes," replied Dolan, "it come to me from one of the n.i.g.g.e.r prisoners in the jail, who has a friend who sweeps out Gabe's bank, that he heard John and Lige d.i.c.kering, and that Lige held John up for a hundred thousand cold dollars for his bargain."