The Strollers Part 22

"Well," remarked Barnes as they sped down the road, "it was a happy coincidence for me that led the anti-renters to the patroon's house last night."

And he proceeded to explain how when he had sought the magistrate, he found that official organizing a _posse comitatus_ for the purpose of quelling an antic.i.p.ated uprising of lease-holders. In answer to the manager's complaint the custodian of the law had a.s.serted his first duty was generally to preserve the peace; afterward, he would attend to Barnes' particular grievance. Obliged to content himself as best he might with this meager a.s.surance, the manager, at his wit's end, had accompanied the party whose way had led them in the direction the carriage had taken, and whose final destination--an unhoped-for consummation!--had proved the ultimate goal of his own desires.

On reaching, that afternoon, the town where they were playing, Susan was the first of the company to greet Constance.

"Now that it's all over," she laughed, "I rather envy you that you were rescued by such a handsome cavalier."

"Really," drawled Kate, "I should have preferred not being rescued.

The owner of a coach, a coat of arms, silver harness, and the best horses in the country! I could drive on forever."

But later, alone with Susan, she looked hard at her:

"So you fainted yesterday?"

"Oh, I'm a perfect coward," returned the other, frankly.

Kate's mind rapidly swept the rough and troubled past; the haphazard sea upon which they had embarked so long ago--

"Dear me!" she remarked quietly, and Susan turned to conceal a blush.

Owing to the magistrate's zeal in relating the story of the rescue, the players' success that night was great.

"The hall was filled to overflowing," says the manager in his date book. "At the end of the second act, the little girl was called out, and much to her inward discomfiture the magistrate presented her with a bouquet and the audience with a written speech. Taking advantage of the occasion, he pointed a political moral from the tale, and referred to his own candidacy to the legislature, where he would look after the interests of the rank and file. It was time the land-owners were taught their places--not by violence--Oh, no--no French methods for Americans!--by ballot, not by bullet! Let the people vote for an amendment to the const.i.tution!

"As we were preparing to leave the theater, the magistrate appeared behind the scenes. 'Of course, Mr. Barnes, you will appear against the patroon?' he said. 'His prosecution will do much to fortify the issue.'

"'That is all very fine,' I returned, satirically. 'But will the Lord provide while we are trying the case? Shall we find miraculous sustenance? We live by moving on, sir. One or two nights in a place; sometimes, a little longer! No, no; 'tis necessary to forget, if not to forgive. You'll have to fortify your issue without us.'

"'Well, well,' he said, good-naturedly, 'if it's against your interests, I have no wish to press the matter.' Whereupon we shook hands heartily and parted. I looked around for Constance, but she had left the hall with Saint-Prosper. Have I been wise in asking him to join the chariot? I sometimes half regret we are beholden to him--"

From the Shadengo Valley Barnes' company proceeded by easy stages to Ohio, where the roads were more difficult than any the chariot had yet encountered. On every hand, as they crossed the country, sounded the refrains of that memorable song-campaign which gave to the state the fixed sobriquet of "Buckeye." Drawing near the capital, where the convention was to be held, a log cabin, on an enormous wagon, pa.s.sed the chariot. A dozen horses fancifully adorned were harnessed to this novel vehicle; flowers over-ran the cabin-home, hewn from the buckeye logs of the forest near Marysville. In every window appeared the faces of merry lads and la.s.ses, and, as they journeyed on, their chorus echoed over field and through forest. The wood-cutter leaned on his ax to listen; the plowman waved his c.o.o.nskin cap, his wife, a red handkerchief from the doorway of their log cabin.

"Oh, tell me where the Buckeye cabin was made?

'Twas built among the boys who wield the plow and spade, Where the log-cabin stands in the bonnie Buckeye shade."

From lip to lip the song had been carried, until the entire country was singing it, and the log-cabin had become a part of the armorial bearings of good citizenship, especially applicable to the crests of presidents. Well might the people ask:

"Oh, what has caused this great commotion All the country through?"

which the ready chorus answered:

"It is a ball a-rolling on For Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!"

The least of the strollers' troubles at this crucial period of their wanderings were the bad roads or the effects of song and log-cabin upon the "amus.e.m.e.nt world," the greatest being a temperance orator who thundered forth denunciations of rum and the theater with the bitterness of a Juvenal inveighing profligate Rome. The people crowded the orator's hall, upon the walls of which hung the customary banners: a serpent springing from the top of a barrel; the steamboat, Alcohol, bursting her boiler and going to pieces, and the staunch craft, Temperance, safe and sound, sailing away before a fair wind. With perfect self-command, gift of mimicry and dramatic gestures, the lecturer swayed his audience; now bubbling over with witty anecdotes, again exercising his power of graphic portraiture. His _elixir vitae_--animal spirits--humanized his effort, and, as Sir Robert Peel played upon the House of Commons "as on an old fiddle," so John B.

Gough (for it was the versatile comic singer, actor and speaker) sounded the chords of that homely gathering.

Whatever he was, "poet, orator and dramatist, an English Gavazzi," or, "mountebank," "humbug," or "backslider," Mr. Gough was, even at that early period, an antagonist not to be despised. He had been out of pocket and out at the elbows--indeed, his wardrobe now was mean and scanty; want and privation had been his companions, and, from his grievous experiences, he had become a sensational story-teller of low life and penury. Certainly Barnes had reason to lament the coincidence which brought players and lecturer into town at the same time, especially as the latter was heralded under the auspices of the Band of Hope.

The temperance lectures and a heavy rain combined to the undoing of the strollers. Majestically the dark clouds rolled up, outspread like a pall, and the land lay beneath the ban of a persistent downpour.

People remained indoors, for the most part, and the only signs of life Barnes saw from the windows of the hotel were the landlord's Holderness breed of cattle, mournfully chewing their monotonous cuds, and some Leicester sheep, wofully wandering in the pasture, or huddled together like b.a.l.l.s of stained cotton beneath the indifferent protection of a tree amid field.

Exceptional inducements could not tempt the villagers to the theater.

Even an epilogue gained for them none of Mr. Gough's adherents. "The Temperance Doctor" failed miserably; "Drunkard's Warning" admonished pitiably few; while as for "Drunkard's Doom," no one cared what it might be and left him to it.

After such a disastrous engagement the manager not only found himself at the end of his resources, but hopelessly indebted, and, with much reluctance, laid the matter before the soldier who had already advanced Barnes a certain sum after their conversation on the night of the country dance and had also come to his a.s.sistance on an occasion when box-office receipts and expenses had failed to meet.

Moreover, he had been a free, even careless, giver, not looking after his business concerns with the prudent anxiety of a merchant whose ventures are ships at the rude mercy of a troubled sea. To this third application, however, he did not answer immediately.

"Is it as bad as that?" he said at length, thoughtfully.

"Yes; it's hard to speak about it to you," replied the manager, with some embarra.s.sment, "but at New Orleans--"

The soldier encountered his troubled gaze. "See if you can sell my horse," he answered.

"You mean--" began the other surprised.

"Yes."

"Hanged if I will!" exclaimed the manager. Then he put out his hand impulsively. "I beg your pardon. If I had known--but if we're ever out of this mess, I may give a better account of my stewardship."

Nevertheless, his plight now was comparable to that of the strollers of old, hunted by beadles from towns and villages, and cla.s.sed as gypsies, vagabonds and professed itinerants by the constables. He was no better served than the mummers, clowns, jugglers, and petty chapmen who, wandering abroad, were deemed rogues and st.u.r.dy beggars. Yet no king's censor could have found aught "unchaste, seditious or unmete"

in Barnes' plays; no cause for frays or quarrels, arising from pieces given in the old inn-yards; no immoral matter, "whatsoever any light and fantastical head listeth to invent or devise;" no riotous actors of rollicking interludes, to be named in common with fencers, bearwards and vagrants.

"Better give it up, Mr. Barnes," said a remarkably sweet and sympathetic voice, as the manager was standing in the hotel office, turning the situation over and over in his mind.

Barnes, looking around quickly to see who had read his inmost thoughts, met the firm glance of his antagonist.

"Mr. Gough, it is an honor to meet one of your talents," replied the manager, "but"--with an attempt to hide his concern--"I shall not be sorry, if we do not meet again."

"An inhospitable wish!" answered the speaker, fixing his luminous eyes upon the manager. "However, we shall probably see each other frequently."

"The Fates forbid, sir!" said Barnes, earnestly. "If you'll tell me your route, we'll--go the other way!"

"It won't do, Mr. Barnes! The devil and the flesh must be fairly fought. 'Where thou goest'--You know the scriptural saying?"

"You'll follow us!" exclaimed the manager with sudden consternation.

The other nodded.

"Why, this is tyranny! You are a Frankenstein; an Old-Man-of-the Sea!"

"Give it up," said the orator, with a smile that singularly illumined his thin, but powerful features. "As I gave it up! Into what dregs of vice, what a sink of iniquity was I plunged! The very cleansing of my soul was an Augean task. Knavery, profligacy, laxity of morals, looseness of principles--that was what the stage did for me; that was the labor of Hercules to be cleared away! Give it up, Mr. Barnes!" And with a last penetrating look, he strode out of the office.

In spite of Barnes' refusal, the soldier offered to sell his horse to the landlord, but the latter curtly declined, having horses enough to "eat their heads off" during the winter, as he expressed it. His Jeremy Collier aversion to players was probably at the bottom of this point-blank rebuff, however. He was a stubborn man, czar in his own domains, a small princ.i.p.ality bounded by four inhospitable walls. His guests--having no other place to go--were his subjects, or prisoners, and distress could not find a more unfitting tribunal before which to lay its case. There was something so malevolent in his vigilance, so unfriendly in his scrutiny, that to the players he seemed an emissary of disaster, inseparable from their cruel plight.

Thus it was that the strollers perforce reached a desperate conclusion when making their way from the theater on the last evening. By remaining longer, they would become the more hopelessly involved; in going--without their host's permission--they would be taking the shortest route toward an honorable settlement in the near future; a paradoxical flight from the brunt of their troubles, to meet them squarely! This, to Barnes, ample reason for unceremonious departure was heartily approved by the company in council a.s.sembled around the town pump.

"Stay and become a county burden, indeed!" exclaimed Mrs. Adams, tragically.