The Voice of the People Part 60

Galt delivered the message to d.i.c.kson and walked uptown to Webb's house, where he expected to find him. He had not lunched, and he remembered suddenly that Nicholas had also gone hungry; but the thought brought a smile as he rang Webb's bell. "Oh, for once in a lifetime a man may be heroic," he said. Then he entered the house and found, not Dudley, but Eugenia.

At the sound of his name she had risen and come swiftly forward with outstretched hand. Her face was white and her eyes heavy with anxiety, but he felt then, as always, the calm n.o.bility of her carriage. In the added fulness of her figure her beauty showed majestic.

He took her hand, holding it warmly in his own. "My dear Eugenia, if you are in trouble, remember that I am an ign.o.ble edition of Juliet."

"Oh, I want you, not Juliet," she said. "I have sent for Dudley, but he has not come--I took the paper at the door by chance--and I find that Colonel Diggs has brought up that old dead lie about the governor. He dares to say that the people of Kingsborough believe it--the coward!

They never believed it--it is false--as false as the lie itself. Oh, if I were a man I would kill him for it, but I am a woman, and you--"

"Kill him!" He laughed harshly. "We don't kill men who blacken our friend's honour; we wait till they attack our own lives--that's our code for you. If it were otherwise, I should act upon it with pleasure. But I came to see Webb about this thing. Where is he?"

"Oh, he is coming."

She sat down, keeping her excited eyes upon him. "It was Bernard, my own brother," she said pa.s.sionately. "You know this, and the world must know it. The world shall know it if I have to utter it from the housetops.

Oh, I have sinned enough in ignorance; now I will speak."

She bit her lips to keep back the quick tears, tapping her foot upon the floor. The red was in her cheeks and her eyes were as black as night.

Her bosom quivered from the lash of her scorn.

"But you must keep out of it, my dear Eugie. Dudley and I will manage it. We'll see Diggs and get a retraction from him--that's sensible and simple. There's no scandal the better for dragging a woman into it."

She stopped him fiercely. "Then I give you fair warning. If you do not stop it, I shall. Ah, here's Dudley!"

She met him as he entered the room, clasping her hands upon his arm.

"Dudley, have you seen it--this falsehood?"

He let her hands fall from his arm and drew her with him to the fireside. "Yes; I have seen it," he answered, and as he shook hands heartily with Galt he made a casual remark about the weather.

"Oh, Dudley, what does the weather matter?" cried Eugenia. "No, don't sit down. You are to go at once to Colonel Diggs and tell him everything--and not spare any one--and you may tell him also that--I despise him!"

He smiled at her vehemence--it was so unlike Eugenia. "I didn't know you took so much interest in these things," he said lightly. "I thought the baby had cured you."

But she caught his hand and held it in her own. "Don't, Dudley," she implored. "You know what it means to me. You know all."

His face softened as he met her eyes; but instead of replying to her appeal he turned with a question to Galt. "Can I do any good?" he asked.

"I am willing, of course, to do what I can."

"I was going to ask you to see Diggs," said Galt quietly. "We shall endeavour to keep his speech out of the morning papers, but it has already appeared in the evening issue. You might secure a card from him retracting his statements. I hardly think he knew them to be false."

"I'll go at once," replied Dudley. He went into the hall and took up his hat, but as Galt opened the door he lingered an instant and looked at his wife. She came to him, her eyes shining, and in a flash he realised that to Eugenia it was a question of his own honour as well as of the governor's. With a smile he lifted her chin and met her gaze. "Are you satisfied, my lady?" he asked; but before she could respond he had joined Galt upon the pavement.

There he paused to light a cigar, while Galt hesitated and looked at his watch. "I suppose I may leave it in your hands," suggested the older man. "Diggs isn't on the best of terms with me, you know."

Dudley took the cigar from his mouth and threw the match over the railing into the gra.s.s. "Oh, I'll do my best," he answered readily, "and I'll see that the statements are delivered to the newspapers at once. I am as much interested in it as you are. It was a dirty piece of work."

And leaving Galt, he quickened his pace as he crossed the street.

Diggs was at his hotel and somewhat relieved at the sudden turn of affairs. "Honestly, I hated it," he frankly admitted. "It's the kind of job I'd like to wash my hands of. But Major Rann took oath on the truth of the story, and he convinced me that I owed it to the community to expose Burr's character. I don't know why I believed it, except that it never occurs to one to doubt evil. However, I'm glad you called. I a.s.sure you I'll take more pleasure in retracting the statements than I did in making them."

He wrote the notes and gave them into Dudley's hands. "If they don't get in to-morrow's issue, they must wait over till election day. It's a pity this is Sat.u.r.day--but you'll have them in, I dare say."

"Yes; I'll take them down," said Dudley. He descended in the elevator, walking rapidly when he reached the pavement. Diggs's parting words came back to him and he repeated them as he went. Tomorrow's was the last paper before election day. If the speech were reported in the morning issue and Burr's friends made no denial, there would be, as far as the country voters were concerned, a silence of two days. The contest was not yet decided, this he knew--it would be a close one, and a straw's weight might turn the scales of public favour. Rann realised this too, for he did not fling slime at men for nothing--there was a serious purpose underneath the last act of his play. He was doing it for the sake of those Democrats whose const.i.tuents were divided against themselves, and he was trusting to himself to hold the votes that came his way when the cloud should have pa.s.sed from Burr again. It was all so evident that Dudley held his breath for one brief instant. The whole scheme lay bare before him--he had but to drop these letters into the nearest box, and Rann's purpose would be fulfilled. In the howl of reprobation that followed the hounding of Burr his own hour would come.

And granted that the governor was cleared before the meeting of the caucus--well, men are easier to keep than to win--and he might not be cleared after all.

A clock near at hand struck the hour. He raised his head and saw the "Standard" office across the street--and the temptation pa.s.sed as swiftly as it had come. The instinct of generations was stronger than the appeal of the moment--he might sin a great sin, but he could never commit a meanness.

With sudden energy he crossed the street and ran up the stairs.

V

Again he was returning to Kingsborough. The familiar landscape rushed by him on either side--green meadow and russet woodland, gray swamp and dwarfed brown hill, unploughed common and sun-ripened field of corn. It was like the remembered features of a friend, when the change that startles the unaccustomed eye seems to exist less in the well-known face than in the image we have carried in our thoughts.

It was all there as it had been in his youth--the same and yet not the same. The old fields were tilled, the old lands ran waste in broomsedge, but he himself had left his boyhood far behind--it was his own vision that was altered, not the face of nature. The commons were not so wide as he had thought them, the hills not so high, the hollows not so deep--even the blue horizon had drawn a closer circle.

A man on his way to the water-cooler stopped abruptly at his side.

"Well, I declar, if 'tain't the governor!"

Nicholas looked up, and recognising Jerry Pollard, shook his outstretched hand. "When did you leave Kingsborough?" he inquired.

"Oh, I jest ran up this morning to lay in a stock of winter goods.

Trade's thriving this year, and you have to hustle if you want to keep up with the tastes of yo' customers. Times have changed since I had you in my sto'."

"I dare say. I am glad to hear that you are doing well. Was the judge taken ill before you left Kingsborough?"

"The judge? Is he sick? I ain't heard nothin' 'bout it. It wa'n't more'n a week ago that I told him he was lookin' as young as he did befo' the war. It ain't often a man can keep his youth like that but his Caesar is just such another. Caesar was an old man as far back as I remember, and, bless you, he's spryer than I am this minute. He'll live to be a hundred and die of an accident."

"That's good," said the governor with rising interest. "Kingsborough's a fine place to grow old in. Did you bring any news up with you?"

"Well, I reckon not. Things were pretty lively down there last night, but they'd quieted down this morning. They brought a man over from Hagersville, you know, and befo' I shut up sto' last evening Jim Brown came to town, talkin' mighty big 'bout stringin' up the fellow. Jim always did talk, though, so n.o.body thought much of it. He likes to get his mouth in, but he's right particular 'bout his hand. The sheriff said he warn't lookin' for trouble."

"I'm glad it's over," said the governor. The train was nearing Kingsborough, and as it stopped he rose and followed Jerry Pollard to the station.

There was no one he knew in sight, and, with his bag in his hand, he walked rapidly to the judge's house. His anxiety had caused him to quicken his pace, but when he had opened the gate and ascended the steps he hesitated before entering the hall, and his breath came shortly. Until that instant he had not realised the strength of the tie that bound him to the judge.

The hall was dim and cool, as it had been that May afternoon when his feet had left tracks of dust on the shining floor. Straight ahead he saw the garden, lying graceless and deserted, with the unkemptness of extreme old age. A sharp breeze blew from door to door, and the dried gra.s.ses on the wall stirred with a sound like that of the wind among a bed of rushes.

He mounted the stairs slowly, the weight of his tread creaking the polished wood. Before the threshold of the judge's room again he hesitated, his hand upraised. The house was so still that it seemed to be untenanted, and he shivered suddenly, as if the wind that rustled the dried gra.s.ses were a ghostly footstep. Then, as he glanced back down the wide old stairway, his own childhood looked up, at him--an alien figure, half frightened by the silence.

As he stood there the door opened noiselessly, and the doctor came out, peering with shortsighted eyes over his lowered gla.s.ses. When he ran against Nicholas he coughed uncertainly and drew back. "Well, well, if it isn't the governor!" he said. "We have been looking for Tom--but our friend the judge is better--much better. I tell him he'll live yet to see us buried."

A load pa.s.sed suddenly from Nicholas's mind. The ravaged face of the old doctor--with its wrinkled forehead and its almost invisible eyes--became at once the mask of a good angel. He grasped the outstretched hand and crossed the threshold.

The judge was lying among the pillows of his bed, his eyes closed, his great head motionless. There was a bowl of yellow chrysanthemums on a table beside him, and near it Mrs. Burwell was measuring dark drops into a winegla.s.s. She looked up with a smile of welcome that cast a cheerful light about the room. Her smile and the colour of the chrysanthemums were in Nicholas's eyes as he went to the bed and laid his hand upon the still fingers that clasped the counterpane.

The judge looked at him with a wavering recognition. "Ah, it is you, Tom," he said, and there was a yearning in his voice that fell like a gulf between him and the man who was not his son. At the moment it came to Nicholas with a great bitterness that his share of the judge's heart was the share of an outsider--the crumbs that fall to the beggar that waits beside the gate. When the soul has entered the depths and looks back again it is the face of its own kindred that it craves--the responsive throbbing of its own blood in another's veins. This was Tom's place, not his.