David Malcolm Part 8

"Penelope," he began, "you are fortunate--very fortunate--in having such an uncle. Mr. Blight is a prominent man, and I might say"--glancing apologetically at the guest--"a rich man." Then, meeting no contradiction, he added--"a very rich man, who can give you such advantages as would be far beyond my means, even were you my daughter."

"I don't want advantages," said Penelope, hardly above a whisper, and for want of a better resting-place she dropped her head on her uncle's shoulder and burst into tears.

"There--there--there--" cried Mr. Blight, patting her clumsily on the back. Had she been a full-grown woman, he could hardly have been more embarra.s.sed, yet he was pleased that she clung to him thus, for he was smiling. "I'll not give you any advantages you don't want--I promise you. I just wish to make you happy. What's the use of my working all my life, piling up money, capturing the steel trade, adding mills and mills to my plants, if I have no one to look after. There--there--there--now, child, don't cry. Won't you come with your poor, lonely, old uncle?"

Even to my prejudiced mind, he was playing his part well, for this awkward kindness touched Penelope at last. She did not reply, nor did she demur, but she clung closer to him in silence. I saw my danger and hers, and ran to him and grasped his knees.

"Oh, Mr. Blight, don't take her away!" I cried. "I promised the Professor I'd look after her. I promised----"

"Dav-id!" exclaimed my father, and he grasped my arm and began to draw me away.

My fear of him even could not restrain me, and I resisted, digging my fingers into the knees, clutching the folds of the trousers where Mr.

Blight had so carefully arranged them to prevent them bagging. He intervened, as much, I think, to save his immaculate clothes as me from being torn asunder.

"Dav-id!" cried my father.

"Mr. Blight--Mr. Blight--don't take her away!" I pleaded.

Mr. Blight began to laugh. "Judge--Judge--release him," he said, and freeing me from the paternal grasp, he drew me toward him. When he had ironed out the wrinkled knees with his hand, he patted me on the head.

"You are a good boy, David," he went on, "and I understand exactly how you feel. What you have done for Penelope will never be forgotten, will it, my little girl?" The emphasis on the last phrase of possession extinguished the spark of hope in me, and had he stopped there I should have surrendered feebly, but turning to my father, he added: "You have a fine boy, Judge, and I like him. When I get home I shall send him a gun.

What kind of a gun do you want, David?"

Young as I was then, I had not yet learned to value the good things of life in terms of dollars, and to the power of the dollar my eyes were just being opened. This man wielded it. He was enticing Penelope behind the barrier of his fat, oily prosperity where I could not reach her.

Holding her there, he was magnanimously compensating me with a gun, as though we were making a trade in which the profit were mine, as though he were valuing her in money. My dislike, born of the Professor's contemptuous reference to him, had turned to distrust and aversion as I watched him weaving his toils about Penelope. Now I hated him and drew back from him as though his touch were baneful; I stamped a foot and shook a fist and shouted: "I don't want your old gun; Penelope doesn't want your money. You have no right----"

My father's arms were about me. He lifted me from my feet and carried me to the door, and as I struggled blindly to free myself and return to the attack I looked back at Rufus Blight. It was not to see him sinking under the shame of my anathema. Signs of anger in him would have incensed me far less than his lofty unconcern. He even interceded for me, but this only proved how secure was his victory, and that to his view what fell to me was of little moment.

"Don't be hard on Davy, Judge," he said, interrupting my father's apologies for my rudeness. "He's just a boy. I don't know but what, if I were in his place, I should do exactly the same thing--feel exactly the same way."

This was small consolation to me, for Penelope's head was buried in his shoulder; her face was hidden by her tousled hair, but I could hear her sobbing: "Uncle--uncle--let me stay with Davy."

In the plea alone she acknowledged her kin to him and surrendered. He could well afford to be generous. By every law of custom I had merited severe punishment at my father's hands, and that his hands were stayed by Mr. Blight's intercession was but another evidence of his power. When my father reasoned with me kindly, instead of whipping me, I yielded, not to his sophistry but to that masterful influence before which even he seemed to bend. I realized the hopelessness of my cause, and found myself facing Mr. Blight again, an humble suppliant for his pardon. Humbly I asked him if I might not soon see Penelope again, and she joined in my pet.i.tion. Humbly I asked that some day he would bring her back to the valley, and she seconded my prayer, standing at my side, clasping my hand and looking up at her uncle from tearful eyes. He promised everything.

He took my hand and hers, and for the moment it seemed that this little circle was my real family, and that my father and mother, standing over us, were hardly more than law-given preceptors. Before our guest's expanding smile and the magic of his tongue the clouds fled. Those which hung heaviest he brushed away with his restless hands. Soon, very soon, I was to go to that bustling, pushing town of Pittsburgh and with Penelope explore its wonders. We should ride behind the fastest pair of trotters in the State--his trotters; we should see the greatest mills in the country--his mills--where steel was worked like wax into a thousand giant forms; we should take long excursions on the river in a wonderful new boat--his boat-- Why it would make a boy of him just to have us with him!

Under the spell of his words an hour flew by, and then my mother led Penelope away to make her ready for the journey. She brought her back to us decked in a hat and frock born of many days of planning and three trips to the county town. The humble art of Malcolmville had not been intrusted with so important a commission as Penelope's best clothes. For these the shops of Martinsburg, crammed with the latest fashions of Philadelphia, had been ransacked; the smartest modiste in Martinsburg had trimmed the hat with many yards of tulle and freighted it with pink roses; the smartest couturiere in Martinsburg had created that wonderful blue chintz frock, with ribbons woven through mazes of flounces; the last touch was my mother's--the plait of hair, done so masterfully that even the weight of the great blue bow could not bend it.

I looked at Penelope in awe. She was no longer the little girl whom I had met by the mountain stream. I was still an uncouth boy, with face smudged with the dust of the fields and hands blackened in play. Yet she did not see the wide gulf which separated us, and, forgetting the hat, the frock, the chaff that clung to my matted hair and the grime of my shirt, she ran to me, threw her arms about my neck and cried: "Davy--Davy--I don't want to go!"

I knew that she had to go, and though the tears seemed to burst up in a great flood from my heart, I would not show them in my eyes. Tears are unmanly--unboyly rather--and I fought them back, but for them I could not speak. My father took Penelope from me. He lifted her in his arms and carried her out of the house and down the path to the gate, where the carriage was waiting. He placed her on the seat; he straightened out her rumpled frock, and even crossed her hands upon her lap, as though she were quite incapable of doing anything for herself. Then he kissed her.

It was the first time I had ever seen him kiss her. When he spoke it was to say good-by to Rufus Blight, who was in his seat, pulling on a pair of yellow gloves.

"We shall all meet again, very soon," said Mr. Blight omnipotently, as though Fate were a henchman of his. "You must all come to Pittsburgh to see us. It's a lively, pushing town, and you'll enjoy it." Leaning from the carriage and holding out his hand to me, he added: "And you, Davy--you will come very, very soon."

I believed him. But the dream that he had conjured for us of the days to come, of his lively, pushing town, the fastest trotters, the wonderful boat, were shattered by contact with the harsh fact of this parting.

I looked past him at Penelope, sitting very straight, with her hands in her lap as my father had placed them. There was a giant frog in my throat, but I conquered it as I had conquered my tears, and speaking very steadily, I said: "Good-by, Penelope--I'll not forget. Some day I will take care of you."

She did not turn. Her eyes held right ahead, but she answered bravely: "Good-by, Davy. I'll see you soon--very soon. Remember----"

The rest I did not hear. A medley of hoofs, harness and wheels broke in and she was away to a new world and a new life. The brave little figure bowed suddenly, and the roses and the tulle, the precious creation of the Martinsburg modiste, were ruthlessly crushed against the sleek bulk of the man who had never had a real idea.

CHAPTER VII

That the Professor, with fear at his heels and the devils of retribution clutching at his flying coat-tails, should have plunged into silence when the bush closed around him was not strange. Every circ.u.mstance of his parting argued a long absence, a discreet obliteration of self. But Penelope left the valley in prosaic fashion, in a livery wagon, with a man as easy to find as his own bustling, pushing town; yet the dust-clouds which closed around them as they drove away shut them from my ken as the mountains had enclosed her father in their most secret hiding-places. It was the fault of Rufus Blight. He had blown beautiful bubbles to divert us in those last hours of his visit, and bubbles bursting silently into nothingness were not more fragile than his promises. To the true value of those promises I awoke slowly, as the months went by and there came no hint of their fulfilment.

I wrote to Penelope. My letters would have made volumes were their length commensurate with the pain of composition. Even the heart of Rufus Blight would have been touched could he have seen me, bent over a table, digging my teeth into my tongue and my pen into the paper as letter by letter and word by word I constructed those messages of my boyish love. But he knew only the finished gem, and not the labor of its cutting. The more I sought to break the silence, the surer I became that he, the omnipotent one, had ordained it, and I fancied him reading my letters and destroying them, a thin smile lighting his chubby face as he thought of the easy way in which I was being outwitted. I went to my mother for help. She knew nothing of my unavailing struggles, and was herself offended and heart-sick. At my entreaty she overcame her pride and wrote to Mr. Blight inquiring as to Penelope's welfare. In return her existence was recognized; hardly more than that, for the great man did not trouble himself with a personal answer. His reply was given vicariously, through one P. T.

Mallencroft, his secretary, on flawless paper, three sentences in bold clear type and a Spencerian signature closing it. It was a bloodless thing. It spoke the commands of omnipotence as though carved on tablets of stone.

Mrs. Malcolm's favor of the 10th ultimo was acknowledged; Mr. Blight instructed Mr. Mallencroft to thank Mrs. Malcolm for the interest which she had shown, and to a.s.sure her that Miss Penelope was quite well.

It was perfectly polite. It was the finished bow with which Rufus Blight was backing from our presence, never to trouble us again. I knew this when I saw the sheet drop from my mother's limp fingers and, sinking to a chair, she tossed her ap.r.o.n over her head and rocked violently to an accompaniment of m.u.f.fled sobs.

It was clear to me that Rufus Blight was not only neglectful of our claims, but had been so with purpose, and as I wandered aimlessly through the fields in the wake of James, and as in the evening I sat again with him on the barn-bridge, looking over the darkening valley, there held one enduring thought in the chaos of my brain. Looking back now, I see in my childish enmity toward Rufus Blight the impulse that set me on my course. But for that I might have stayed in the valley, dozing, as the Professor had said, like the very dogs. In Rufus Blight I was conscious of an opposing force. He had taken Penelope from me; he had cheated me with flattery and broken promises; and the dominating sense in my mind was one of conflict with him. I looked to the west.

Mountains rose there, range beyond range, and beyond them, miles away, was his bustling, pushing town. To cross them and to close with him was my one desire, and though time dulled the edges of my purpose and the figures of the Professor, of Penelope and of Rufus Blight grew dim in the distance, and at last the old motive was lost beneath a host of new impelling forces, still it was Mallencroft's letter that touched the quick and aroused me from my canine slumber.

The Professor's words came back to me. The mountains seemed to echo them always. "Wake up, Davy! Do something; be somebody; get out of the valley." Here was my shibboleth. I must do something; I must be somebody; I must get out of the valley! And then I should go to Penelope Blight, and a hundred urbane, unctuous uncles could not defraud me of my right in her.

In my father I found the first mountain on the way that I had chosen, for to his mind my destiny was settled and to be envied. All that was his would some day be mine--the best farm in the county, his Pennsylvania Railroad stock, his shares in the bridge company, and his Kansas bonds. The dear soul had arranged my course so comfortably and in such detail that in me he would have been living his own life over again. And what my father said, my mother echoed. Was I too proud to follow in his footsteps? Was I, a child in years, to hold myself above the ways of my forebears?

Such arguments came too late to my rebellious spirit. I should no longer have told the Professor that I was going to be like my father.

Necessity had made me more ambitious. I dreamed now of the power and fame of a Washington, a Webster, a Grant--names which stood to me as symbols of accomplishment. So what my parents at first brushed aside as the idle dreaming of a boy they soon realized to be a vague but persistent purpose which must be beaten down. They gave me a certain dignity by descending to debate. What did I want to be? How could I answer, who could not even name the vocations in which men won their way to coveted heights? My mother gave me the key which opened the world to me.

"William," she said, addressing my father, "I do believe Davy is thinking of being a minister and is kind of ashamed to own it."

I caught the softening note in my mother's voice and in her eyes a light of pride as she regarded me inquiringly. Whatever obligation lay on me to till the ancestral acres, there was a higher duty which would absolve it. This she had pointed out. My plans at once took a concrete form, and though my first faltering a.s.sent might have savored of hypocrisy, I was soon sincere in my determination. And now the opposition crumbled and my parents found pride in a son whose heart at the age of ten was stirred by the need of lost humanity. My father discovered that it had been his own early ambition to be a minister; it was as though I was to erect the edifice to which he had feared to put his strength, and it comforted him. He delighted to lay his hand upon my head in the presence of company and to announce that his David was going to do the work to which he had always believed he had himself been called. With my mother the son's gifts became a subject on which she never tired dilating, and naturally such flattery reconciled me to a calling far removed from all my old ambitions; but had it been intimated to me that I might become a plumber I should have accepted that vocation just as readily, provided that by following it I should go out of the valley, over the mountains, to Pittsburgh and the presence of Rufus Blight.

Now arose Mr. Pound to help me. Here was the crowning incongruity in a chain of incongruous events. I had never liked Mr. Pound. He had overwhelmed me too often. His sermon was the rack on which I was stretched for an hour every Sunday to endure untold agonies of restlessness; his house the temple to which too often I had to carry propitiatory offerings of vegetables and chickens. And then his persecution of my friend the Professor still rankled in me. Yet I found myself, of necessity, using him as the one known quant.i.ty in the equation over which I worked. He became my model. I fancied myself attaining a mien like his, a deep, resonant voice and a vocabulary of marvellous words. I dressed myself in material garments like his, in spreading folds of awe-inspiring black; I wrapped myself in his immaterial cloak, his dignity and goodness. I faced Rufus Blight and he quailed before a presence so imposing, and when I spoke in a voice vibrating truth my eloquence smothered his feeble, shifty protests.

Always I a.s.serted my right to Penelope and led her from her prison.

And always, it seemed, with that victory I cast off my Pound-like sanct.i.ty and became as other men. With it the great task of my ministry was accomplished, though there was a certain charm in the idea of continuing it in the hunting fields of Africa, an appeal of romance in a kraal, a cork hat, and the picture of Penelope and me setting forth with a band of faithful converts to the slaughter of elephants and lions.

Idle dreams of boyhood! Absurd, incongruous fancies! And but for them I might at this very moment be dozing in the valley; I might be another distinguished Judge Malcolm, with my little court of ministers and squires, with old Mr. Smiley as master-of-the-horse and Miss Agnes Spinner as lady-in-waiting. Instead? I did not stay in the valley.

Aroused by the sense of antagonism to Rufus Blight, and spurred on by the ambition to confront and defeat him, I began my struggle to cross the mountains, and Mr. Pound became my support and guide. He never knew the real truth behind my commendable resolution. The inspiring thought in my mind, as he insisted on judging it, was born of his own teaching. As my father had planned to live his life over again in me, so Mr. Pound saw a hope of his own intellectual immortality. Were not the evidences of grace so suddenly revealed in me the reward of his own labors?

When he came to the house, summoned in consultation over my future, he placed a hand upon my head and solemnly repeated the lines of the grand old hymn: "G.o.d works in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform."

There was here a gentle hint that my past had not been altogether good or full of promise, and as Mr. Pound undoubtedly believed this, it made more generous his conduct toward me. He was a narrow man, an egotist, unlearned, too, save in the cruder forms of his calling, but he was sincere. He sought to mould me to what he thought the form a man should take, and now as I look back on the five years through which he labored with me, I may smile at the memory of his mien, his pomposity, his bigotry, yet I smile too with affection. He taught me without pay.

His study became my school-room, and when at times I chafed under his vigilant tutelage and wearied in my well-doing, he steeled himself with the remembrance that Job endured more than he without complaint. In my sulkiness or open rebellion he found evidences to confirm his belief in the doctrine of innate evil; he seemed to rush singing into battle with the devil that was in me.

Through this intimate a.s.sociation I became a little Mr. Pound. How could it have been otherwise when day after day, books in hand, I walked down to his house to recite my lesson of Latin and Greek, and with him worked through the mysteries of algebraic calculation and studied the strange habits of the right line? He pressed me into his mould. Years went by. In the valley the Professor was forgotten, and to me Penelope was but a dim figure in the past. Even the memory of Rufus Blight ceased to awaken rancor, and I could contemplate with growing cynicism my old-time hatred of him. Unconsciously new ambitions stirred within me, and they were fostered by the flattery of my elders. In that Africa of my dream-land I no longer pictured myself in a cork helmet slaying lions, but dying at the stake, a martyr to my duty and--must I add it?--being preached about afterward from a thousand pulpits.

Mr. Pound was my model of deportment, my gla.s.s of fashion. I see him now as we used to sit, vis-a-vis, at his study table. Samson's physical strength came from his hair. From the same source, it seemed to me, Mr. Pound derived that mental vigor with which he pulled down the temples of ignorance and slew the thousand devils of unorthodoxy which sprang from my doubting mind. From the top of his head a red lock flamed up, licking the air; over its sides the hair tumbled in cataracts, breaking about his ears; then the surging hair lost itself in orderly currents which flowed, waving, from his cheeks, leaving a rift from which sprang a generous nose and a round chin with many folds. His mouth was formed for the enunciation of large words and pompous phrases. From it monosyllables fell like bullets from a cannon. He seldom descended to conversation. He declaimed. He sought to impress on me the importance of using resounding sentences which he said would keep reverberating in the caverns of the mind. For this effect he had a theory that words ending in "ation" and "ention" were especially fitted. Trumpet-words, he called them, brazen notes which penetrated the deepest crevices of the brain. I must admit that in the practice of his theory he was wonderfully successful, for after thirty years I can still hear his sonorous voice filling the church with the announcement that the "Jewish congregation was a segregation for the preservation of the Jewish nation." I can see him pausing in his discourse to lubricate his vocal chords with a gla.s.s of ice-water, and then drawing himself to his full height, fix his eyes on his hushed people and cry: "What did I say the Jewish congregation was? Let me refresh your recollection." His answer must ring to-day in the caverns of many minds. Others of his phrases, I know, still echo in my own.

But this is because so often in my own room I practised declaiming them, striving to enunciate them with my mentor's finish.

Was it a wonder that I became a little Mr. Pound? I suppose, too, that I became a veritable little cad. Conscious of my advantages in birth and breeding, much impressed on me by my mother, I had never been intimate with the village boys. Now I shunned them altogether. To me they were thoughtless heathen and unprofitable company. I strove for a time to correct their evil ways and to bring them to repentance. That was something which I could properly do without unnecessary a.s.sociation. I had for my reward only taunts. They called me "Goody"

and "Miss Malcolm," and like names contemplated to shame me from the course which I had chosen, but in the martyrdom which they made me suffer I only gloried, and I could have let them stone me to death and forgiven them, provided, of course, that Mr. Pound preached about me afterward and that my name were enrolled in the company of well-known martyrs. Looking back, I realize that I was playing. There was a fine excitement in being hunted in my comings and goings through the village. It became my Africa, where any tree might hide a deadly enemy, and any fence an ambush. I discovered secret pa.s.sages through backyards. I matched cunning against overwhelming force, and sometimes, when the odds were not too great against me, I remembered Joshua and another David and turned on the Philistines and smote them right manfully. At other times the hostilities lagged, but they never ceased entirely, and often they broke out suddenly with increased fury.

It was a ma.s.s and cla.s.s war. To the butcher's son and the blacksmith's boy and their like, the restless ma.s.ses, I was indeed a b.u.mptious Malcolm. Conscious of the superior quality of the blood of the McLaurins, and a little inflated with the pride of wealth, I had long patronized them, so there was needed only my a.s.sumption of virtue to fan the flames. But as I grew in years and knowledge, and the days of my departure from the valley drew nearer, I relied less on my fists for protection and more on a defensive armor of dignity. I became less a target for missiles and more an object of jibes. These I met with contempt, for I was going to college; I was going to McGraw University, the alma mater of Mr. Pound, and this thought alone nerved me to step out of the course of a flying stone with unconcern and to move down the street with Pound-like mien.