The Debatable Land Part 3

"I intend to prevent it, Morgan."

"In Nellie's interest, sir?"

"I regard it as in her interest."

"I mean, is that your interest in it?"

"I shall not say."

"I didn't feel encouraged to think it was an interest in me. But it's natural to ask."

"Quite natural."

The squire walked a few steps, stopped and looked back, his eyebrows drooping over their melancholy caves. "I take no interest in your success in any direction. I shall be measurably interested in your failures. Whenever you have a failure to report, and are inclined to report it personally, I shall be glad to see you."

"That's an odd offer, sir." Morgan swung his gun over his shoulder. "I never saw any real need of a row, and I don't yet. And I don't pretend to understand the mixture now."

The squire went his way without answering. Morgan looked after him, then at his hunting-dog sniffing among the heaps of fallen leaves, at Windless Mountain, and found nothing suggestive. He walked slowly towards the Bourn house.

Ordinarily a man spent his time better in understanding his own purposes than the purposes of other men. On the whole, they were more easily thrust aside than understood. That was Morgan's settled conviction or characteristic. He did not mean to make an exception in favor of the squire. At the same time, "take an interest in your failures" had an odd sound, and inviting him to come and report them was a bit cool, if he only wanted to gloat over them. Hardly in "dad's" style, anyway.

"Gloating" was a futile occupation. The way the squire had taken that row had been futile enough. But the question was whether he could really do anything to make a nuisance of himself. It not appearing how he could, Morgan concluded to shake off the subject, quickened his pace, and whistled to his dog.

Mr. Paulus remarked, despondently, from his philosophic distance, "I most thought they'd do some b.u.t.tin'."

His despondency led to reminiscence. "Seems to me folks ain't so lively as when I was a boy. The town's runnin' down."

He stood in his shirt-sleeves, though there was a bleakness in the wind that hinted of December. The bare branches of the maples creaked, and the dead leaves fled up the road in a whirl of dust.

It was late in December when Thaddeus came to Hagar again, a Hagar of gray, frozen roads, little patches of dry, drifted snow, and nights falling early. Mr. Paulus sat by a lamp in the rear of the half-lit store, out of sorts with rheumatism and by reason of human nature. It was five o'clock. Thaddeus entered with an air of happy secrecy, planted himself, white-skinned, wrinkled, smiling, before Mr. Paulus's red-and-round-faced gloom.

"Pete, I've been to see Gerald Map. Upon my word! Singular interview, which I shall not tell you anything about."

"Ain't no need," grumbled Mr. Paulus. "Been agreein' on your epitaphs, an' it's about time. Like to make epitaphs for all the danged fools in town myself, an' fit the corpses to the dates."

Thaddeus sat down carefully, and wiped his gla.s.ses with snowy handkerchief, leaning forward to the light; adjusted them, leaned back, and rubbed his hands softly.

"Pete, when you've made up your mind about something, it's a satisfaction to happen on--a--unexpectedly--a moral justification of it.

It really is."

"Don't want one. Wouldn't have no use for it. After those folks'd seen their epitaphs I'd writ 'em, if they didn't do what was decent--"

"A--I was referring," Thaddeus insinuated, "to myself."

"You were!" Mr. Paulus reflected, dropped his eyelid, and grew a shade more cheerful. "Moral justification! Well--I caught c.u.mmings's boy stealin' plug tobacco th' other day. An' he said he wanted it for Halligan. Guess he did. Likely Halligan give him three cents for a five-cent plug. He looked the picture of virtue, anyhow; said he never chawed: he wa'n't up to no such viciousness. Moral justification! It's a good thing."

Thaddeus smiled absently, pursed his lips, and was silent.

"Pete," he said at last, "how does green paint feel?"

Mr. Paulus's gloom faded away, and his interest, his love of life, came gently back.

"Wet," he said, thoughtfully. "Gets stiff after dryin'."

"Ah," murmured Thaddeus, "exactly."

A few days later Helen and Thaddeus took their way down the Wyantenaug Valley to Hamilton, and left Hagar to the wintry hills and Widow Bourn to her own manner of content.

Chapter V

Introducing Hamilton and Saint Mary's Organ

Hamilton took its name from a little English hamlet. The statesman was a coincidence. It lies in a bend of the Wyantenaug River, which hardly ripples on the piers of its docks, ten miles from the sea and at the head-water of the river's navigation. Its colonial memories gather about the Common where the first settlers built their church and cl.u.s.ter of shingled houses, and about the docks where ships from the South Seas used to come in at flood-tide, from the capes and the Indian Ocean, from the West Indies and from England, whalers, too, and many fishing-smacks.

The Common is half a mile from the docks. The old church stands in the centre of it. Century elms and oaks are scattered about, not planted in regular rows; but wherever it had seemed to be a good place for a tree, there the tree had grown. On the south side, or Main Street, are the courthouse and city hall; on the east side, or Charles Street, are the Const.i.tution and Wyantenaug clubs and a church with twin steeples; on the north side, or James Street, square brick and stuccoed residences, with lawns, and sometimes a silent fountain or solitary marble statue, such as that dancing faun which appears to dislike its occupation; on the west side, or Academy Street, there are stores and a hotel, but farther up Academy Street are the law-school buildings, farther still the academy itself, founded in the reign of William and Mary, where from of old the Latin declensions were learned with the aid of a ferule and curiously called "humane letters."

All the flat, green meadows that once stretched west and south from near by the Common as far as the river are filled with brick blocks and industry now--stores, factories, and tenements. Two railroads run in subways to the station and bridge at the bend in the river. Jamaica, India, and Academy streets follow the old meadow roads, along which merchants in tie-wigs used to drive leisurely to the docks, where a leisurely ship or two would be lying, and there examine their consignments. North and east of the Common in the angle between Main and Academy streets lies the section in which those for the most part used to live who maintained mahogany tables and were able to exercise choice as to where they would live. Shannon Street runs from the northwest corner of the Common diagonally northeastward, crossing three irregular openings, miscalled squares, where muddles of streets came together, and monuments have been erected to commemorate two wars and a distinguished judge. It ends in Temple Square, which marks its exclusiveness, and at the same time admits the aristocracy of Shannon Street by having no other entrance than Shannon Street. The houses about the square are much alike, stuccoed, severe, with small porches, pillars, and iron fences close to the sidewalk. The centre of the square has a high iron fence about it, gates with scrollwork, which are commonly shut.

The house of Thaddeus faced on Philip's Road and Shannon Street, not far from the monument to the War of 1812, the two streets meeting at dull angles in front. There was more of it on Philip's Road, but it was numbered with Shannon Street, because to live on Shannon Street was a better principle. The street signs of Philip's Road at different times had been changed to "Pequot Avenue," with a view to euphony and a securer social position, but the commissioners were not persistent enough, and nature was against them. The name hinted it once to have been an Indian trail, or at least that some person had said so; and whether this person was truthful and informed was forgotten, too. The chronicles but mentioned the tradition. The road showed a certain furtive vagrancy, running from the theatre at the corner of the fair grounds barbarously and disorderly through two blocks, otherwise of a shape without reproach, and shying away from the law school--an instinct of untamed nature. It approached Shannon Street gradually with sullen suspicion, caught sight of the monument of 1812, plunged suddenly across, ran riot through a number of blocks, and escaped into the open country. So that Thaddeus's house was numbered on Shannon Street.

Charles Street ran by it on the west, and so past Saint Mary's Church directly to the Common. Helen looked first from the west window of her room on Charles Street and saw bare boughs of maple-trees shining in the cold moonlight, and across the way a long row of glimmering vestibules and curtains; then from the south window, and saw a house with a large, glowing window beyond a vacant s.p.a.ce of lawn, over it the apse at the rear of a church, with two small steeples, and farther on and up the big steeple and gilded cross glittering in the mist of the moon. A lady walked past and past the glowing window. The room within looked warm, mellow, peaceful, but she seemed restless. Once she stopped and even seemed to gaze up at Helen, but her face was in shadow. Helen thought she was tall and had thick hair.

Some one was playing the organ in Saint Mary's, a sombre mutter and deep breathing underneath, wild voices calling and crying above. More voices gathered; they struggled, strained, shrieked reproach, and wailed for pity, till one by one they were hushed and only the measured breathing went on.

In the morning Thaddeus said: "You've done very well. I've heard that the two things most worth while in Hamilton now are to see Mrs. Mavering and hear Gard Windham's playing. Personally--" Thaddeus poised his coffee-cup, "as regards Mrs. Mavering, I believe that to be correct. As regards the other, it has sometimes seemed to me that it was not exactly--a--civilized; that, in point of fact, it appeared to be at times--it might be said to be at times--a kind of description of society among the fallen angels--an objectionable subject for comment so public, I should say, distinctly. It appears, I might say, to lack restraint--a--good taste. I seem to see a person in impossible garments dancing on the roof of Saint Mary's with great impatience, and stating his distress in strong language. Personally, therefore, I wish Gard Windham would keep his spectres out of my back yard, and--my dear Helen!

I beg of you, don't look at me in such a--a--vast manner. Mr. Windham is considered a remarkable musician."

"I saw him too, Uncle Tad."

"On my word! Where?"

"On the roof. He was acting that way you said."

"Well, bless my soul!"

Thaddeus walked down-town thoughtfully. "She'll run off after one of Gard Windham's ghosts the next thing. No more than likely. She has an imagination that's as honest as the bank and the finest pair of eyes, my word, in Hamilton."

In the afternoon Morgan came with his trotting stallion, Consul, and drove her by Philip's Road to the fair grounds to show his paces on the track. The day was cold, dry, blue, and still, but on the track the speed made a rush of air against her face. The fair grounds were empty, the track with a patch of snow here and there, the stands staring from thousands of empty seats.

The great horse lengthened his stride. He was all power and ease. Such controlled crescendo of speed seemed to mean deep reserves. There was a thrill in the sense of those reserves.