The Plum Tree Part 7

"Yes. I hated to do it, too, for d.i.c.k was one of my best friends. But Doc was too useful to us. In his line he's without an equal."

"How did he get that scar?" said I.

"n.o.body knows. He left here when he was a boy,--to avoid being sent to the reformatory. When he turned up, after a dozen years, he said he had been a doctor, but didn't say where or how. And he had that scar. One day a man asked him how he got it. He picked up a bottle, and, with his pleasant laugh, broke it over the fellow's jaw. 'About like that,' said he. People don't ask him questions."

"He's my man," said I.

VII

BYGONES

A telegram had been thrust under my door--"I must see you. Don't fail to stop off here on your way back. Answer. Carlotta."

Again she was at the station in her phaeton. Her first look, long before I was near enough for speech, showed me how her mood had changed; but she waited until we were clear of the town. "Forgive me," she then said in the abrupt, direct manner which was the expression of her greatest charm, her absolute honesty. "I've got the meanest temper in the world, but it don't last, and as soon as you were gone I was ashamed of myself."

"I don't understand why you are making these apologies," said I, "and I don't understand why you were angry."

"That's what it means to be a man," she replied. "Your letter about your mother made me furious. You hadn't ever urged me to hurry up the wedding on your own account. And your letter made me feel as if, while you personally didn't care whether we ever married or not, still for your mother's sake you were willing to--to sacrifice yourself."

"Let me see my letter," said I.

"I tore it into a thousand pieces," said she. "But I don't mean that you really wrote just that. You didn't. But you made me jealous of your mother, and my temper got hold of me, and then I read the meanest kind of things into and under and all round every word. And--I'm sorry."

I could find nothing to say. I saw my freedom slipping from me. I watched it, sick at heart; yet, on the other hand, I neither tried nor wished to detain it, though I could easily have made a renewal of our engagement impossible. I have no explanation for this conflict of emotions and motives.

"Don't make it so hard for me," she went on. "I never before in my life told anybody I was sorry for anything, and I thought I never would. But I _am_ sorry, and--we'll have the wedding the first day of August."

Still I found nothing to say. It was so painfully obvious that, true to her training, she had not given and was not giving a thought to the state of my mind and feelings. What _she_ wished, that she would do--the rest did not interest her.

"Are you satisfied, my lord?" she demanded. "Have I humbled myself sufficiently?"

"You haven't humbled yourself at all," said I. "You have only humbled me."

She did not pause on my remark long enough to see what it meant. "Now that it's all settled," she said gaily, "I don't mind telling you that I began to make my preparations to be married on the first of August--when, do you think?"

"When?" I said.

"The very day I got your nasty letter, putting me second to your mother." And she laughed, and was still laughing, when she added: "So, you see, I was determined to marry you."

"I do," said I dryly. "I suppose I ought to feel flattered."

"No, you oughtn't," she retorted. "I simply made up my mind to marry you. And I'd do it, no matter what it cost. I get _that_ from father.

But I've got mother's disposition, too--and that makes me far too good for such a cold, unsentimental, ambitious person as you."

"Don't you think you're rather rash to confess so frankly--when I could still escape?"

"Not at all," was her confident answer. "I know you, and so I know nothing could make you break your word."

"There's some truth in that,"--and I hope that I do not deceive myself in thinking I was honest there. "More truth, perhaps, than you guess."

She looked shrewdly at me--and friendlily. "Don't be too sure I haven't guessed," said she. "n.o.body's ever so blind as he lets others think.

It's funny, isn't it? There are things in your mind that you'd never tell me, and things in my mind that I'd never tell you. And each of us guesses most of them, without ever letting on." She laughed queerly, and struck the horse smartly so that he leaped into a gait at which conversation was impossible.

When we resumed, the subject was the details of our wedding.

At home again, I found my mother too ill to leave her bed. She had been ill before,--many times when she wouldn't confess it, several times when she was forced to admit it, but never before so ill that she could not dress and come down stairs. "I shall be up to-morrow," she a.s.sured me, and I almost believed her. She drew a letter from under her pillow.

"This came while you were away," she went on. "I kept it here, because--" a look of shame flitted across her face, and then her eyes were steady and proud again,--"why should I be ashamed of it? I had the impulse to destroy the letter, and I'm not sure but that I'm failing in my duty."

I took it,--yes, it was from Boston, from Betty. I opened it and fortunately had nerved myself against showing myself to my mother. There was neither beginning nor end, just a single sentence:

"From the bottom of my broken heart I am thankful that I have been spared the horror of discovering I had bound myself for life to a coward."

The shot went straight to the center of the target. But----There lay my mother--did _she_ not have the right to determine my destiny--she who had given me my life and her own? I tore up Betty's letter, and I looked at mother and said, "There's nothing in that to make me waver--or regret." It was the only lie I ever told her. I told it well, thank G.o.d, for she was convinced, and the look in her face repaid me a thousandfold. It repays me once more as I write.

Carlotta and I were married at her bedside, and she lived only until the next day but one. When the doctor told me of the long concealed mortal disease that was the cause of her going, he ended with: "And, Mr.

Sayler, it pa.s.ses belief that she managed to keep alive for five years.

I can't understand it." But _I_ understood. She simply refused to go until she felt that her mission was accomplished.

"We must never forget her," said Carlotta, trying to console me by grieving with me.

I did not answer,--how could I explain? Never forget her! On the contrary, I knew that I must forget, and that I must work and grow and so heal the wound and cover its scar. I lost not a day in beginning.

To those few succeeding months I owe the power I have had all these years to concentrate my mind upon whatever I will to think about; for in those months I fought the fight I dared not lose--fought it and won. Let those who have never loved talk of remembering the dead.

I turned away from her grave with the resolve that my first act of power would be to stamp out Dominick. But for him she would not have gone for many a year. It was his persecutions that involved us in the miseries which wasted her and made her fall a victim to the mortal disease. It was his malignity that poisoned her last years, which, but for him, would have been happy.

As my plans for ousting Dunkirk took shape, I saw clearly that, if he were to be overthrown at once, I must use part of the existing control of the machine of the party,--it would take several years, at least three, to build up an entirely new control. To work quickly, I must use Croffut, Dunkirk's colleague in the Senate. And Croffut was the creature of Dominick.

Early in September Woodruff came to me, at Fredonia, his manner jubilant. "I can get Dominick," he exclaimed. "He is furious against Dunkirk because he's just discovered that Dunkirk cheated him out of a hundred thousand dollars on that perpetual street railway franchise, last winter."

"But we don't want Dominick," said I.

My face must have reflected my mind, for Woodruff merely replied, "Oh, very well. Of course that alters the case."

"We must get Croffut without him," I went on.

Woodruff shook his head. "Can't get him," he said. "Dominick controls the two southern ranges of counties. He finances his own machine from what he collects from vice and crime in those cities. He gives that branch of the plum tree to the boys. He keeps the bigger one, the corporations, for himself."

"He can be destroyed," said I, waving aside these significant reminders.

"Yes, in five years or so of hard work. Meanwhile, Dunkirk will run things at the capital to suit himself. Anyhow, you're taking on a good deal more than's necessary--starting with two big fights, one of 'em against a man you ought to use to do up the other. It's like breaking your own sword at the beginning of the duel."

"Go back to the capital," said I, after a moment's thought; "I'll telegraph you up there what to do."