The Debtor Part 5

They were looking for a rear door, with the view of a stealthy egress and a skirting of the bushes on the lawn un.o.bserved until they should gain the shelter of the carriage, when there was a movement at their backs, and a voice observed, "Good-afternoon, ladies," and they turned, and there was Captain Arthur Carroll. He was a man possibly well over forty, possibly older than that, but his face was as smooth as a boy's, and he was a man of great stature, with nevertheless a boyish cant to his shoulders. Captain Arthur Carroll was a very handsome man, with a viking sort of beauty. He was faultlessly dressed in one of the lightest of spring suits and a fancy waistcoat, and he held quite gracefully the knot of violets which had fallen from Mrs. Van Dorn's bonnet.

The two stood before him, gasping, coloring, trembling. For both of them it was horrible. All their lives they had been women who had held up their heads high in point of respectability and more. None was above them in Banbridge, no shame of wrong-doing or folly had ever been known by either of them, and now both their finely bonneted heads were in the dust. They stood before this handsome, courteously smiling gentleman and were conscious of a very nakedness of spirit.

Their l.u.s.t of curiosity was laid bare, they were caught in the act.

Mrs. Van Dorn opened her mouth, she tried to speak, but she only made a strange, croaking sound. Her face was now flaming. But Mrs. Lee was pale, and she stood rather unsteadily.

Arthur Carroll at first looked merely bewildered. "Aren't the ladies at home?" said he. "Have you seen the ladies?" He glanced at Mrs. Van Dorn's deflowered bonnet, and extended the bunch of violets. "Yours, I think," he said. Mrs. Van Dorn took them with an idiotic expression, and he asked again if they had seen the ladies.

The spectacle of two elderly, well-dressed females of Banbridge quaking before him in this wise, and of their sudden appearance in his house, was a mystery too great to be grasped at once even by a clever man, and he was certainly a clever man. So he stared for a second, while the two remained standing before him, holding their card-cases in their shaking, white-gloved fingers, and Mrs. Van Dorn with the violets; then suddenly an expression of the most delighted comprehension and amus.e.m.e.nt overspread his face.

"Oh," he said, politely, with a great flourish, as it were of deference, "the ladies are not in. They will be exceedingly sorry to have missed your call. But will you not come in and sit down?"

Mrs. Van Dorn gained voice enough to gasp that she thought they must go. Captain Carroll stood back, and the two women, pressing closely together, tottered through the hall towards the front door.

Captain Carroll followed, beaming with delighted malice. "I hope you will call again, when the ladies are home," he said to Mrs. Van Dorn, whom he recognized as the leader.

She made an inarticulate attempt at "Thank you." She was making for the door, like a scared hare to the entrance of its cover.

"But I have not your names, ladies, that I may inform Mrs. Carroll who has called?" said Captain Carroll, in his stingingly polite voice.

Both women looked over their shrinking shoulders at him at that.

Suddenly the hideous consequences of it all, the afterclap, sounded in their ears. That was the end of their fair fame in Banbridge, in their world. Life for them was over. Their faces, good, motherly, elderly village faces, after all, were pitiful; the shame in them was a shame to see, so ignominious was it. They stood convicted of such a mean fault, that the shame was the meaner also.

Suddenly Mr. Carroll's face changed. It became broadly comprehensive, so generously lenient that it was fairly grand. A certain gentleness also was evident, his voice was kind.

"Never mind, ladies," said Arthur Carroll. "There is really very little use in your telling me your names, because my memory is so bad. I remember neither names nor faces. If I should meet you on the street, and should fail to recognize you on that account, I trust that you will pardon me. And--" said Captain Carroll, "on that account, I will not say anything about your call to the ladies of my family; I should be sure to get it all wrong. We will wait, and trust that you will find them at home the next time you call.

Good-afternoon, ladies." Captain Carroll had further mercy. He allowed the ladies to leave the house unattended and to dive desperately into the waiting coach.

"Home at once," Mrs. Van Dorn cried, hoa.r.s.ely, to Samson Rawdy, waking from his nap in some bewilderment.

Captain Carroll was standing on the porch with a compound look of kindest pity and mirth on his face when the Carroll ladies came strolling round that way from the pond. He kissed them all, as was his wont; then he laughed out inconsequently.

"What are you laughing at, dear?" asked Amy.

"At my thoughts, sweetheart."

"What are your thoughts, daddy?" asked Charlotte.

"Thoughts I shall never tell anybody, honey," he replied, with another laugh. And Captain Arthur Carroll never did tell.

Chapter III

History often repeats itself where one would least expect it, and the world-old tide of human nature has a way of finding world-old channels. Therefore it happened in Banbridge, as in ancient times, that there was a learned barber, or perhaps, to be more strictly accurate, a barber who thought that he was learned. He would have been entirely ready, had his customers coincided with his views, to have given his striped pole its old signification of the ribbon bandage which bound the arm of a patient after bleeding, and added surgery to his hair-cutting and his beard-shaving. John Flynn had the courage of utter conviction as to his own ability to master all undertakings at which he chose to tilt. An aspiration once conceived, he never parted with, but held to it as a part of his life.

Non-realization made not the slightest difference. His sense of time as a portion of eternity never left him, and therefore his patience under tardy fulfilment of his desires never faltered. Some ten years before, he decided that he would at some earlier or later date become mayor of Banbridge, and his decision was still impregnable. After every new election of another candidate, he begged his patrons for their votes another time, and was not in the least disturbed nor daunted that they had failed in their former promises. Flynn's good-nature was as unfaltering as his self-esteem, perhaps because of his self-esteem. He only smiled with fatuous superiority when from time to time, after the elections, his patrons would chaff him about his failure to secure the mayoralty. They did so with more effect since there were always among the horse-players on such occasions a few who would cast votes for the barber, esteeming it as a choice and perennial joke, and his reading his name among the unsuccessful candidates served to foster his delusion and keep Flynn's ambition alive.

One Sunday, shortly after the Carrolls had moved to Banbridge, John Flynn was shaving Jacob Rosenstein, who kept the princ.i.p.al dry-goods store of the village, and a number of men were sitting and lounging about, waiting their turns. Flynn's shop was on the main street in the centre of the business district--his shop, or his "Tonsorial Parlor," as his sign had it. It was quite an ornate establishment.

There was a lace lambrequin in the show-window, a palm in each corner, between which stood a tank of gold-fish, and below the lace lambrequin swung a gilt cage containing an incessantly hopping, though silent, yellow canary.

Flynn was intensely proud and fond of the establishment, and was insulted if it was alluded to as a barber-shop. He himself never even thought of it, much less spoke of it, as such. "Well, I must be going to the 'Parlor,'" he would say when setting out to business. He was unmarried, and lived in a boarding-house.

As Flynn shaved Rosenstein, who was naturally speechless, his landlady's husband, Billy Amidon, was talking a good deal. Amidon was always shaved for nothing, in consideration of the fact that his wife supported him with board money, and the barber had an undefined conviction that it was mean to take it back after he had just paid it. Amidon was a notorious talker, and was called a very "dry sort of man," which, in the village vernacular, signified that he was esteemed a wit.

"Well," he said to another man, who was leaning with a relaxation of all his muscles against the little strip of counter, which contained a modest a.s.sortment of hair-oils and shaving-brushes and soaps which n.o.body was ever seen to buy--"well, John has lost ten pounds since the election, Tappan."

Tappan ran a milk-route between Banbridge and Ardmoor, a little farming-place six miles out. Tappan was an Ardmoor man. His milk-wagon stood in front of the "Tonsorial Parlor." He had a drink of beer at Frank Steinbach's saloon next door, and now was waiting for his Sunday shave before going home. His milk-peddling was over for the day. He was a hard-working-man, and had been on the road since four o'clock. He had a heavy look about his eyes, and he greeted Amidon's facetiousness with a weary and surly hitch.

"Has he?" he replied, indifferently.

But a very young, very small man, sitting in one of the "Parlor"

arm-chairs, laughed like a child, with intense enjoyment. "Yep," he said, "I've noticed that. As much as ten pounds has went since election, sure."

"Shet up," replied Flynn, carefully sc.r.a.ping his patron's face. He said "Shet up" with an expression of foolish pride. The postmaster of Banbridge, who was sitting somewhat aloof and held himself with a constraint of exclusiveness (he was new to his office and had not yet lost the taste of its dignity), laughed.

"Let me see, how many votes did you have this year, John?" he asked, condescendingly.

"Five," replied John, with open exultation.

"Now, John, why didn't you get more than that, I'd like to know?"

Flynn laughed knowingly. "Oh," he said, "it's the old story--not money enough."

"But a lot promised they'd vote for you, didn't they, John?"

persisted the postmaster, Sigsbee Ray, with a wink of humorous confidence at the others.

"Yep, but damme, who expects anybody to keep an election promise if he ain't paid for it? I ain't unreasonable. What's elections for? You wait."

"Haven't you given up yet, John?"

"Well, I guess not. You wait."

"Say, John," interposed Amidon, "how much did you pay them five what voted for you this year, hey?"

Flynn looked up from Rosenstein's belathered face with a burst of simple triumph. "I didn't pay any of them a penny," said he. "There is d.a.m.n fools everywhere, and you wait," said he, "an' see ef there ain't more come to light next time. I'll fetch it yet, along of the fools, an' ef I can raise a leetle money, an' I begin to see my way clear to that."

"How's that?" John was asked by the small young man.

"I'm layin' low 'bout that," replied John, mysteriously.

"Now, John," said the postmaster, "you wouldn't lay low if there was a good chance to make some money, and not give us poor devils a chance?"

The postmaster spoke consciously. He expected what came, the buzz of remonstrance at his cla.s.sing himself in his new office with poor devils.

"You'd better talk about poor devils," growled the milkman, Tappan.

"You'd better talk. Huh! here you be, don't hev to git to work till eight o'clock, an' quittin' at eight nights, and fifteen hundred a year. You'd better talk, Mr. Ray. If you was a man gittin' up at three of a winter's mornin', and settin' out with a milk-route at four, an' makin' 'bout half a penny a quart, an' cussed at that 'cause it ain't all cream--if you was as dead tired as I be this minute you might talk."

"Well, I'm willing to allow that I am not as hard pushed as you are,"

said the postmaster, with magnanimous humility.