A Certain Rich Man Part 5

It was a poor starved-to-death school that the boys found at Lawrence in those days; with half a dozen instructors--most of whom were still in their twenties; with books lent by the instructors, and with appliances devised by necessity. But John was happy; he was making money with his horses, doing ch.o.r.es for his board, and carrying papers night and morning besides. The boy's industry was the marvel of the town. His limp got him sympathy, and he capitalized the sympathy.

Indeed, he would have capitalized his soul, if it had been necessary.

For his Yankee blood was beginning to come out. Before he had been in school a year he had swapped, traded, and saved until he had two teams, and was working them with hired drivers on excavation contracts. In his summer vacations he went to Topeka and worked his two teams, and by some sharp practice got the t.i.tle to a third. He was rollicking, noisy, good-natured, but under the boyish veneer was a hard indomitable nature. He was becoming a stickler for his rights in every transaction.

"John," said Bob, one day after John had cut a particularly lamentable figure, gouging a driver in a settlement, "don't you know that your rights are often others' wrongs?"

John was silent a moment. He looked at the driver moving away, and then the boy's face set hard and he said: "Well--what's the use of blubbering over him? If I don't get it, some one else will. I'm no charitable inst.i.tution for John Walruff's brewery!" And he snapped the rubber band on his wallet viciously, and turned to his books.

But on the other hand he wrote every other day to his mother and every other day to Ellen Culpepper with unwavering precision. He told his mother the news, and he told Ellen Culpepper the news plus some Emerson, something more of "Faust," with such dashes of Longfellow and Ruskin as seemed to express his soul. He never wrote to Ellen of money, and so strong was her influence upon him that when he had written to her after his quarrel with the driver, he went out in the night, hunted the man up, and paid him the disputed wages. Then he mailed Ellen Culpepper's letter, and was a lover living in an ethereal world as he walked home babbling her name in whispers to the stars.

Often when this mood was not upon him, and a letter was due to Ellen, he went downstairs in the house where he lived and played the piano to bring her near to him. That never failed to change his face as by a miracle. "When John comes upstairs," wrote Bob Hendricks to Molly, "he is as one in a dream, with the mists of the music in his eyes. I never bother him then. He will not speak to me, nor do a thing in the world, until that letter is written, sealed, and stamped. Then he gets up, yawns and smiles sheepishly and perhaps. .h.i.ts me with a book or punches me with his fist, and then we wrestle over the room and the bed like bear cubs. After the wrestle he comes back to himself. I wonder why?"

And Ellen Culpepper read those letters from John Barclay over and over, and curiously enough she understood them; for there is a telepathy between spirits that meet as these two children's souls had met, and in that concord words drop out and only thoughts are merchandized. Her spirit grew with his, and so "through all the world she followed him."

But there came a gray dawn of a May morning when John Barclay clutched his bedfellow and whispered, "Bob, Bob--look, look." When the awakened one saw nothing, John tried to scream, but could only gasp, "Don't you see Ellen--there--there by the table?" But whatever it was that startled him fluttered away on a beam of sunrise, and Bob Hendricks rose with the frightened boy, and went to his work with him.

Two days later a letter came telling him that Ellen Culpepper was dead.

Now death--the vast baffling mystery of death--is Fate's strongest lever to pry men from their philosophy. And death came into this boy's life before his creed was set and hard, and in those first days while he walked far afield, he turned his face to the sky in his lonely sorrow, and when he cried to Heaven there was a silence.

So his heart curdled, and you kind gentlemen of the jury who are to pa.s.s on the case of John Barclay in this story, remember that he was only twenty years old, and that in all his life there was nothing to symbolize the joy of sacrifice except this young girl. All his boyish life she had nurtured the other self in his soul,--the self that might have learned to give and be glad in the giving. And when she went, he closed his Emerson and opened his Trigonometry, and put money in his purse.[1]

There came a time when Ellen Culpepper was to him as a dream. But she lived in her mother's eyes, and through all the years that followed the mother watched the little girl grow to maturity and into middle life with the other girls of her age. And even when the little headstone on the Hill slanted in sad neglect, Mrs. Culpepper's old eyes still saw Ellen growing old with her playmates. And she never saw John Barclay that she did not think of Ellen--and and what she would have made of him.

And what would she have made of him? Maybe a poet, maybe a dreamer of dreams--surely not the hard, grinding, rich man that he became in this world.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] To the Publisher.--"In returning the Mss. of the life of John Barclay, which you sent for my verification as to certain dates and incidents, let me first set down, before discussing matters pertaining to his later life, my belief that your author has found in the death of Ellen Culpepper an incident, humble though it is, that explains much in the character of Mr. Barclay. The incident probably produced a mental shock like that of a psychological earthquake, literally sealing up the spring of his life as it was flowing into consciousness at that time, and the John Barclay of his boyhood and youth became subterranean, to appear later in life after the weakening of his virility under the strain of the crushing events of his fifties. Yet the subterranean Barclay often appeared for a moment in his life, glowed in some kind act and sank again. Ellen Culpepper explains it all. How many of our lives are similarly divided, forced upward or downward by events, Heaven only knows. We do not know our own souls. I am sure John never knew of the transformation. Surely 'we are fearfully and wonderfully made.'... The other dates and incidents are as I have indicated.... Allow me to thank you for your kindness in sending me the Mss., and permit me to subscribe myself,

"Yours faithfully,

"Philemon R. Ward."

CHAPTER VI

John Barclay returned to Sycamore Ridge in 1872 a full-fledged young man. He was of a slight build and rather pale of face, for five years indoors had rubbed the sunburn off. During the five years he had been absent from Sycamore Ridge he had acquired a master's degree from the state university, and a license to practise law. He was distinctly dapper, in the black and white checked trousers, the flowered cravat, and tight-fitting coat of the period; and the first Monday after he and his mother went to the Congregational Church, whereat John let out his baritone voice, he was invited to sing in the choir. Bob Hendricks came home a year before John, and with Bob and Watts McHurdie singing tenor at one end of the choir, and John and Philemon Ward holding down the other end of the line, with Mrs. Ward, Nellie Logan, Molly Culpepper, and Jane Mason of Minneola,--grown up out of short dresses in his absence,--all in gay colours between the sombre clothes of the men, the choir in the Congregational Church was worth going miles to see--if not to hear.

Now you know, of course,--or if you do not know, it is high time you were learning,--that when Fate gives a man who can sing a head of curly hair, the devil, who is after us all, quits worrying about that young person. For the Old Boy knows that a voice and curly hair are mortgages on a young man's soul that few young fellows ever pay off.

Now there was neither curly head nor music in all the Barclay tribe, and when John sang "Through the trees the night winds murmur, murmur low and sweet," his mother could shut her eyes and hear Uncle Leander, the black sheep of three generations of Thatchers. So that the fact that John had something over a thousand dollars to put in General Hendricks' bank, and owned half a dozen town lots in the various additions to the town, made the mother thankful for the Grandfather Barclay's blood in him. But she saw a soul growing into the boy's face that frightened her. What others admired as strength she feared, for she knew it was ruthlessness. What others called shrewdness she, remembering his Grandfather Barclay, knew might grow into blind, cruel greed, and when she thought of his voice and his curly hair, and recalled Uncle Leander, the curly-headed, singing ne'er-do-well of her family, and then in the boy's hardening mouth and his canine jaw saw Grandfather Barclay sneering at her, she was uncertain which blood she feared most. So she managed it that John should go into partnership with General Ward, and Bob Hendricks managed it that the firm should have offices over the bank, and also that the firm was made attorneys for the bank,--the highest mark of distinction that may come to a law firm in a country town. The general realized it and was proud. But he thought the young man took it too much as a matter of course.

"John," said the general, one day, as they were dividing their first five-hundred-dollar fee, "you're a lucky dog. Everything comes so easily with you. Let me tell you something; I've figured this out: if you don't give it back some way--give it back to the world, or society, or your fellows,--or G.o.d, if you like to bunch your good luck under one head,--you're surely going to suffer for it. There is no come-easy-go-easy in this world. I've learned that much of the scheme of things."

"You mean that I've got to pay as I go, or Providence will keep books on me and foreclose?" asked John, as he stood patting the roll of bills in his trousers pocket.

"That's the idea, son," smiled the elder man.

The younger man put his hand to his chin and grinned. "I suppose," he replied, "that's why so many men keep the t.i.tle to their religious proclivities in their wife's name." He went out gayly, and the elder man heard the boyish limp almost tripping down the stairs. Ward walked to the window, straightening his white tie, and stood looking into the street at the young man shaking hands and bowing and raising his hat as he went. Ward's hair was graying at the temples, and his thin smooth face was that of a man who spends many hours considering many things, and he sighed as he saw John turn a corner and disappear.

"No, Lucy, that's not it exactly," said the general that afternoon, as he brought the sprinkler full of water to the flower bed for the eighth time, and picketed little Harriet Beecher Ward out of the watermelon patch, and wheeled the baby's buggy to the four-o'clocks, where Mrs. Ward was working. "It isn't that he is conceited--the boy isn't that at all. He just seems to have too little faith in G.o.d and too much in the ability of John Barclay. He thinks he can beat the game--can take out more happiness for himself than he puts in for others."

The wife looked up and put back her sunbonnet as she said, "Yes, I believe his mother thinks something of the kind."

One of the things that surprised John when he came home from the university was the prominence of Lige Bemis in the town. When John left Sycamore Ridge to go to school, Bemis was a drunken sign-painter married to a woman who a few years before had been the scandal of half a dozen communities. And now though Mrs. Bemis was still queen only of the miserable unpainted Bemis domicile in the sunflowers at the edge of town, Lige Bemis politically was a potentate of some power. General Hendricks consulted Bemis about politics. Often he was found in the back room of the bank, and Colonel Culpepper, although he was an unterrified Democrat, in his campaign speeches referred to Bemis as "a diamond in the rough." John was sitting on a roll of leather one day in Watts McHurdie's shop talking of old times when Watts recalled the battle of Sycamore Ridge, and the time when Bemis came to town with the Red Legs and frightened Mrs. Barclay.

"Yes--and now look at him," exclaimed John, "dressed up like a gambler, and referred to in the _Banner_ as 'Hon. E. W. Bemis'! How did he do it?"

McHurdie sewed two or three long st.i.tches in silence. He leaned over from his bench to throw his tobacco quid in the sawdust box under the rusty stove, then the little man sc.r.a.ped his fuzzy jaw reflectively with his blackened hand as if about to speak, but he thought better of it and waxed his thread. He showed his yellow teeth in a smile, and motioned John to come closer. Then he put his head forward, and whispered confidentially:--

"What'd you ruther do or go a-fishing?"

"But why?" persisted the young man.

"Widder who?" returned Watts, grinning and putting his hand to his ear.

When John repeated his question the third time, McHurdie said:--

"I know a way you can get rich mighty quick, sonny." And when the boy refused to "bite," Watts went on: "If any one asks you what Watts McHurdie thinks about politics so long as he is in the harness business, you just take the fellow upstairs, and pull down the curtain, and lock the door, and tell him you don't know, and not to tell a living soul."

With Bob Hendricks, John had little better success in solving the mystery of the rise of Bemis. "Father says he's effective, and he would rather have him for him than against him," was the extent of Bob's explanation.

Ward's answer was more to the point. He said: "Lige Bemis is a living example of the power of soft soap in politics. We know--every man in this county knows--that Lige Bemis was a horse thief before the war, and that he was a cattle thief and a camp-follower during the war; and after the war we know what he was--he and the woman he took up with.

Yet here he has been a member of the legislature and is beginning to be a figure in state politics,--at least the one to whom the governor and all the fellows write when they want information about this county. Why? I'll tell you: because he's committed every crime and can't denounce one and goes about the country extenuating things and oiling people up with his palaver. Now he says he is a lawyer--yes, sir, actually claims to be a lawyer, and brought his diploma into court two years ago, and they accepted it. But I know, and the court knows, and the bar knows it was forged; it belonged to his dead brother back in Hornellsville, New York. But Hendricks downstairs said we needed Lige in the county-seat case, so he is a member of the bar, taking one hundred per cent for collecting accounts for Eastern people, and giving the country a black eye. A man told me he was on over fifty notes for people at the bank; he signs with every one, and Hendricks never bothers him. He managed to get into all the lodges, right after the war when they were reorganized, and he sits up with the sick, and is pall-bearer--regular professional pall-bearer, and I don't doubt gets a commission for selling coffins from Livingston."

Ward rose from the table his full six feet and put his hands in his pocket and stretched his legs as he added, "And when you think how many Bemises in the first, second, or third degree there are in this government, you wonder if the Democrats weren't right when they declared the war was a failure."

The general spoke as he did to John partly in anger and partly because he thought the youth needed the lesson he was trying to implant. "You know, Martin," explained the general, a few days later, to Colonel Culpepper, "John has come home a Barclay--not a Barclay of his father's stripe. He has taken back, as they say. It's old Abijah--with the mouth and jaw of a wolf. I caught him palavering with a juror the other day while we had a case trying."

The colonel rested his hands on his knees a moment in meditation and smiled as he replied: "Still, there's his mother, General. Don't ever forget that the boy's mother is Mary Barclay; she has bred most of the wolf out of him. And in the end her blood will tell."

And now observe John Barclay laying the footing stones of his fortune.

He put every dollar he could get into town lots, paying for all he bought and avoiding mortgages. Also he joined Colonel Culpepper in putting the College Heights upon the market. "For what," explained the colonel, when the propriety of using the name for his addition was questioned, when no college was there nor any prospect of a college for years to come--"what is plainer to the prophetic eye than that time will bring to this magnificent city an inst.i.tution of learning worthy of our hopes? I have noticed," added the colonel, waving his cigar broadly about him, "that learning is a shy G.o.ddess; she has to be coaxed--hence on these empyrean heights we have provided for a seat of learning; therefore College Heights. Look at the splendid vista, the entrancing view, in point of fact." It was the large white plumes dancing in the colonel's prophetic eyes. So it happened that more real estate buyers than clients came to the office of Ward and Barclay. But as the general that fall had been out of the office running for Congress on the Greeley ticket, still protesting against the crime of paying the soldiers in paper and the bondholders in gold, he did not miss the clients, and as John saw to it that there was enough law business to keep Mrs. Ward going, the general returned from the canva.s.s overwhelmingly beaten, but not in the least dismayed; and as Jake Dolan put it, "The general had his say and the people had their choice--so both are happy."

As the winter deepened John and Colonel Culpepper planted five hundred elm trees on the campus on College Heights, lining three broad avenues leading from the town to the campus with the trees. John rode into the woods and picked the trees, and saw that each one was properly set.

And the colonel noticed that the finest trees were on Ellen Avenue and spoke of it to Mrs. Culpepper, who only said, "Yes, pa--that's just like him." And the colonel looked puzzled. And when the colonel added, "They say he is shining up to that Mason girl from Minneola, that comes here with Molly," his wife returned, "Yes, I expected that sooner than now." The colonel gave the subject up. The ways of women were past his finding out. But Mrs. Culpepper had heard Jane Mason sing a duet in church with John Barclay, and the elder woman had heard in the big contralto voice of the girl something not meant for the preacher. And Mrs. Culpepper heard John answer it, so she knew what he did not know, what Jane Mason did not know, and what only Molly Culpepper suspected, and Bob Hendricks scoffed at.

As for John, he said to Bob: "I know why you always want me to go over with you and Molly to get the Mason girl--by cracky, I'm the only fellow in town that will let you and Molly have the back seat coming home without a fuss! No, Robbie--you don't fool your Uncle John." And so when there was to be special music at the church, or when any other musical event was expected, John and Bob would get a two-seated buggy, and drive to Minneola and bring the soloist back with them. And there would be dances and parties, and coming from Minneola and going back there would be much singing. "The fox is on the hill, I hear him calling still," was a favourite, but "Come where the lilies bloom"

rent the midnight air between the rival towns many times that winter and spring of '73. And never once did John try to get the back seat.

But there came a time when Bob Hendricks told him that Molly told him that Jane had said that Molly and Bob were pigs--never to do any of the driving. And the next time there was a trip to Minneola, John said as the young people were seated comfortably for the return trip, "Molly, I heard you said that I was a pig to do all the driving, and not let you and Bob have a chance. Was that true?"

"No--but do you want to know who did say it?" answered Molly, and Jane Mason looked straight ahead and cut in with, "Molly Culpepper, if you say another word, I'll never speak to you as long as I live." But she glanced down at Barclay, who caught her eye and saw the smile she was swallowing, and he cried: "I don't believe you ever said it, Molly,--it must have been some one else." And when they had all had their say,--all but Jane Mason,--John saw that she was crying, and the others had to sing for ten minutes without her, before they could coax away her temper. And crafty as he was, he did not know it was temper--he thought it was something entirely different.

For the craft of youth always is clumsy. The business of youth is to fight and to mate. Wherever there is young blood, there is "boot and horse," and John Barclay in his early twenties felt in him the call for combat. It came with the events that were forming about him. For the war between the states had left the men restless and unsatisfied who had come into the plain to make their homes. They had heard and followed in their youth the call John Barclay was hearing, and after the war was over, they were still impatient with the obstacles they found in their paths. So Sycamore Ridge and Minneola, being rival towns, had to fight. The men who made these towns knew no better settlement than the settlement by force. And even during his first six months at home from school, when John sniffed the battle from afar, he was glad in his soul that the fight was coming. Sycamore Ridge had the county-seat; but Minneola, having a majority of the votes in the county, was trying to get the county-seat, and the situation grew so serious for Sycamore Ridge that General Hendricks felt it necessary to defeat Philemon Ward for the state senate so that Sycamore Ridge could get a law pa.s.sed that would prevent Minneola's majority from changing the county-seat. This was done by a law which Hendricks secured, giving the county commissioners the right to build a court-house by direct levy, without a vote of the people,--a court-house so large that it would settle the county-seat matter out of hand.

The general, however, took no chances even with his commissioners. For he had his son elected as one, and with the knowledge that John was investing in real estate in the Ridge and had an eye for the main chance, the general picked John for the other commissioner. The place was on the firing-line of the battle, and John took it almost greedily. As the spring of '73 opened, there were alarms and rumours of strife on every breeze, and youth was happy and breathed the fight into its nostrils like a balsam. For all the world of Sycamore Ridge was young then, and all the trees were green in the eyes of the men who kept up the town. Each town had its hired desperadoes, and there were pickets about each village, and drills in the streets of the two towns, and a martial spirit all over the county. And as John limped about his tasks in those stirring spring days, he felt that he was coming into his own. But it was all a curious mock combat,--that between the towns,--for though the pickets drilled, and the bad men swaggered on the streets, and the bullies roared their anathemas, the social relations between the towns were not seriously disturbed.

Youths and maidens came from Minneola to the Ridge for parties and dances, and from the Ridge young men went to Minneola to weddings and festivals of a social nature unmolested, for it takes a real war--and sometimes more than that--to put a bar across the mating ground of youth. So Bob and Molly and John drove to Minneola time and again for Jane Mason, and other boys and girls came and went from town to town, while the bitterness and the bickering and the mimic war between the rival communities went on.