The moment ceased to be so fanciful and curiously exalted when his hand was grasped and a big, kind palm laid on his shoulder, though Tom’s face was full of emotion.
“I think I should have known it,” he said. “Welcome to you. Yes,” looking at him with an affection touched with something like reverence. “Yes, indeed—Delia Vanuxem!”
“I’ve come to you,” the young fellow said, with fine simplicity, “because I am the only De Willoughby left except yourself. I am young and I’m lonely—and my mother always said you had the kindest heart she ever knew. I want you to advise me.”
“Come in to the porch,” said Tom, “and let us sit down and talk it over.”
He put his arm about Sheba and kept his hand on Rupert’s shoulder, and walked so, with one on either side, to the house. Between their youthful slimness he moved like a protecting giant.
“Where did you come from?” he asked when they sat down.
“From Delisleville,” Rupert answered. “I did not think of coming here so late to-night, but it seems I must have missed my road. I was going to ask for lodgings at a place called Willet’s Farm. I suppose I took the wrong turning; and when I saw this house before me, I knew it must be yours from what I had heard of it. It seemed as if Fate had brought me here. And when I came up the path I saw Sheba. She was standing on the little verandah in the moonlight with the roses all around her; and she looked so white that I stopped to look up at her.”
“Uncle Tom,” said Sheba, “we—we knew each other.”
“Did you?” said Tom. “That’s right.”
His middle-aged heart surprised him by giving one quick, soft beat. He smiled to himself after he had felt it.
“The first moment or so I only stood and looked,” Rupert said; “I was startled.”
“And so was I,” said Sheba.
“But when she leaned forward and looked down on me,” he went on, “I remembered something——”
“So did I,” said Sheba. “I leaned forward like that and looked down at you from the porch at the tavern—all those years ago, when I was a little child.”
“And I looked up at you—and afterwards I asked about you,” said Rupert. “It all came back when you spoke to-night, and I knew you must be Sheba.”
“You knew my name, but I did not know yours,” said Sheba. “But, after all,” rather as if consoling herself, “Sheba is not my real name. I have another one.”
“What is it?” asked the young fellow, quite eagerly. His eyes had scarcely left her face an instant. She was standing by Tom’s chair and her hands were on his shoulders.
“It is Felicia,” she said. “Uncle Tom gave it to me—because he wanted me to be happy.” And she curved a slim arm round Tom’s neck and kissed him.
It was the simplest, prettiest thing a man could have seen. Her life had left her nature as pure and translucent as the clearest brook. She had had no one to compare herself with or to be made ashamed or timid by. She knew only her own heart and Tom’s love, and she smiled as radiantly into the lighting face before her as she would have smiled at a rose, or at a young deer she had met in the woods. No one had ever looked at her in this way before, but being herself a thing which had grown like a flower, she felt no shyness, and was only glad. Eve might have smiled at Adam so in their first hours.
Big Tom, sitting between them, saw it all. A man cannot live a score of years and more, utterly cut off from the life of the world, without having many a long hour for thought in which he will inevitably find himself turning over the problems which fill the life he has missed. Tom De Willoughby had had many of them. He had had no one to talk to whose mind could have worked with his own. On winter nights, when Sheba had been asleep, he had found himself gazing into the red embers of his wood fire and pondering on the existence he might have led if fate had been good to him.
“There must be happiness on the earth somewhere,” he would say. “Somewhere there ought to have been a woman I belonged to, and who belonged to me. It ought all to have been as much nature as the rain falling and the corn ripening in the sun. If we had met when we were young things—on the very brink of it all—and smiled into each other’s eyes and taken each other’s hands, and kissed each other’s lips, we might have ripened together like the corn. What is it that’s gone wrong?” All the warm normal affections of manhood, which might have remained undeveloped and been cast away, had been lavished on the child Sheba. She had represented his domestic circle.
“You mayn’t know it, Sheba,” he had said once to her, “but you’re a pretty numerous young person. You’re a man’s wife and family, and mother and sisters, and at least half a dozen boys and girls.”
All his thoughts had concentrated themselves upon her—all his psychological problems had held her as their centre, all his ethical reasonings had applied themselves to her.
“She’s got to be happy,” he said to himself, “and she’s got to be strong enough to stand up under unhappiness, if—if I should be taken away from her. When the great thing that’s—that’s the meaning of it all—and the reason of it—comes into her life, it ought to come as naturally as summer does. If her poor child of a mother—Good Lord! Good Lord!”
And here he sat in the moonlight, and Delia Vanuxem’s son was looking at her with ardent, awakened young eyes.
How she listened as Rupert told his story, and how sweetly she was moved by the pathos of it. Once or twice she made an involuntary movement forward, as if she was drawn towards him, and uttered a lovely low exclamation which was a little like the broken coo of a dove. Rupert did not know that there was pathos in his relation. He made only a simple picture of things, but as he went on Tom saw all the effect of the hot little town left ruined and apathetic after the struggle of war, the desolateness of the big house empty but for its three rooms, its bare floors echoing to the sound of the lonely pair of feet, the garden grown into a neglected jungle, the slatternly negro girl in the kitchen singing wild camp-meeting hymns as she went about her careless work.
“It sounds so lonely,” Sheba said, with tender mournfulness.
“That was what it was—lonely,” Rupert answered. “It’s been a different place since Matt came, but it has always been lonely. Uncle Tom,” putting his hand on the big knee near him, as impulsively as a child, “I love that old Matt—I love him!”
“Ah, so do I!” burst forth Sheba. “Don’t you, Uncle Tom?” And she put her hand on the other knee.
Rupert looked down at the hand. It was so fair and soft and full of the expression of sympathy—such an adorably womanly little hand, that one’s first impulse was to lay one’s own upon it. He made a movement and then remembered, and looked up, and their eyes met and rested on each other gently.
When the subject of the claim was broached, Sheba thought it like a fairy tale. She listened almost with bated breath. As Rupert had not realised that he was pathetic in the relation of the first part of his story, so he did not know that he was picturesque in this. But his material had strong colour. The old man on the brink of splendid fortune, the strange, unforeseen national disaster sweeping all before it and leaving only poverty and ruin, the untouched wealth of the mines lying beneath the earth on which battles had been fought—all the possibilities the future might hold for one penniless boy—these things were full of suggestion and excitement.
“You would be rich,” said Sheba.
“So would Uncle Tom,” Rupert answered, smiling; “and you, too.”
Tom had been listening with a reflective look on his face. He tilted his chair back and ran his hand through his hair.
“At all events, we couldn’t lose money if we didn’t gain any,” he said. “That’s where we’re safe. When a man’s got to the place where he hasn’t anything to lose, he can afford to take chances. Perhaps it’s worth thinking over. Let’s go to bed, children. It’s midnight.”
When they said good-night to each other, the two young hands clung together kindly and Sheba looked up with sympathetic eyes.
“Would you like to be very rich?” she asked.
“To-night I am rich,” he answered. “That is because you and Uncle Tom have made me feel as if I belonged to someone. It is so long since I have seemed to belong to anyone.”
“But now you belong to us,” said Sheba.
He stood silently looking down at her a moment.
“Your eyes look just as they did when you were a little child,” he said. He lifted her hand and pressed his warm young lips to it.
He awoke the next morning with a glow in his heart which should not be new to youth, but was new to him. He remembered feeling something rather like it years before when he had been a little boy and had wakened on the morning of his birthday and found his mother kissing him and his bed strewn with gifts.
He went downstairs and, strolling on to the porch, saw Sheba in the garden. As he went to join her, he found himself in the midst of familiar paths and growths.
“Why,” he exclaimed, stopping before her, “it is the old garden!”
“Yes,” Sheba answered; “Uncle Tom made it like this because he loved the other one. You and I have played in the same garden. Good-morning,” laughing.
“Good-morning,” he said. “It is a good-morning. I—somehow I have been thinking that when I woke I felt as I used to do when I was a child and woke on my birthday.”
That morning she showed him her domain. To the imaginative boy she led with her, she seemed like a strange young princess, to whom all the land belonged. She loved it so and knew so well all it yielded. She showed him the cool woods where she always found the first spring flowers, the chestnut and walnut trees where she and Tom gathered their winter supply of nuts, the places where the wild grapes grew thickest, and those where the ground was purple-carpeted with violets.
They wandered on together until they reached a hollow in the road, on one side of which a pine wood sloped up a hillside, looking dark and cool.
“I come here very often,” she said, quite simply. “My mother is here.”
Then he saw that a little distance above the road a deserted log cabin stood, and not far from it two or three pine trees had been cut down so that the sun could shine on a mound over and about which flowers grew. It was like a little garden in the midst of the silent wildness.
He followed her to the pretty spot, and she knelt down by it and removed a leaf or a dead flower here and there. The little mound was a snowy mass of white blossoms standing thick together, and for a yard or so about the earth was starred with the same flowers.
“You see,” she said, “Uncle Tom and I plant new flowers for every month. Everything is always white. Sometimes it is all lilies of the valley or white hyacinths, and then it is white roses, and in the autumn white chrysanthemums. Uncle Tom thought of it when I was a little child, and we have done it together ever since. We think she knows.”
She stopped, and, still kneeling, looked at him as if suddenly remembering something.
“You have not heard,” she said; “she died when I was born, and we do not even know her name.”
“Not her name!” Rupert said; but the truth was that he had heard more of the story than she had.
“My father was so stunned with grief, that Uncle Tom said he seemed to think of nothing but that he could not bear to stay. He went away the very night they laid her here. I suppose,” she said slowly, and looking at the mass of white narcissus instead of at him, “I suppose when people love each other, and one dies, the other cannot—cannot——”
Rupert saw that she was unconsciously trying to explain something to herself, and he interposed between her and her thoughts with a hurried effort.
“Yes, yes,” he said; “it must be so. When they love each other and one is taken, how can the other bear it?”
Then she lifted her eyes from the flowers to his again, and they looked very large and bright.
“You see,” she said, in an unsteady little voice, “I had only been alive a few hours when he went away.”
Suddenly the brightness in her eyes welled up and fell in two large crystal drops, though a smile quivered on her lips.
“Don’t tell Uncle Tom,” she said; “I never let him know that it—it hurts my feelings when I think I had only been alive such a few hours—and there was nobody to care. I must have been so little. If—if there had been no Uncle Tom——”
He knelt down by her side and took her hand in his.
“But there was,” he said; “there was!”
“Yes,” she answered, her sweet face trembling with emotion; “and, oh! I love him so! I love him so!”
She put her free hand on the earth among the white flowers on the mound.
“And I love her, too,” she said; “somehow I know she would not have forgotten me.”
“No, no, she would not!” Rupert cried; and they knelt together, hand in hand, looking into each other’s eyes as tenderly as children.
“I have been lonelier than you,” he said; “I have had nobody.”
“Your mother died, too, when you were very young?”
“Yes, Sheba,” hesitating a moment. “I will tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“Uncle Tom loved her. He left his home partly because he could not stay and see her marry a man who—did not deserve her.”
“Did she marry someone like that?” she asked.
His forehead flushed.
“She married my father,” he said, “and he was a drunken maniac and broke her heart. I saw it break. When I first remember her, she was a lovely young girl with eyes like a gazelle’s—and she cried all their beauty away, and grew tired and old and haggard before I was twelve. He is dead, but I hate him!”
“Oh!” she said; “you have been lonely!”
“I have been something worse than that!” he answered, and the gloom came back to his face. “I have been afraid.”
“Afraid!” said Sheba. “Of what?”
“That I might end like him. How do I know? It is in my blood.”
“Oh, no!” she cried.
“We have nearly all been like that,” he said. “He was the maddest of them all, but he was only like many of the others. We grow tall, we De Willoughbys, we have black eyes, we drink and we make ourselves insane with morphine. It’s a ghastly thing to think of,” he shuddered. “When I am lonely, I think of it night and day.”
“You must not,” she said. “I—I will help you to forget it.”
“I have often wondered if there was anyone who could,” he answered. “I think perhaps you might.”
When they returned to the Cross-roads there were several customers loitering on the post-office porch, awaiting their arrival, and endeavouring to wear an air of concealing no object whatever. The uneventful lives they led year after year made men and women alike avid for anything of the nature of news or incident. In some mysterious way the air itself seemed to communicate to them anything of interest which might be impending. Big Tom had not felt inclined to be diffuse on the subject of the arrival of his nephew, but each customer who brought in a pail of butter or eggs, a roll of jeans or a pair of chickens, seemed to become enlightened at once as to the position of affairs.
“Ye see,” Tom heard Doty confiding to a friend as they sat together outside a window of the store; “ye see, it’s this way—the D’Willerbys was born ’ristycrats. I dunno as ye’d think it to look at Tom. Thar’s a heap to Tom, but he ain’t my idee of a ’ristycrat. My idee is thet mebbe he let out from D’lisleville kase he warn’t ’ristycratic enough fur ’em. Thar wus a heap of property in the family, ’pears like. An’ now the hull lot of ’em’s dead ’cept this yere boy that come last night. Stamps hes seen him in D’lisleville, an’ he says he’s a-stavin’ lookin’ young feller, an’ thet thar’s somethin’ about a claim on the Guv’ment thet ef Tom an’ him don’t foller up, they’re blamed fools. Now Tom, he ain’t no blamed fool. Fur not bein’ a blamed fool, I’ll back Tom agin any man in Hamlin.”
So, when the two young figures were seen sauntering along the road towards the store, there were lookers-on enough to regard them with interest.
“Now he’s my idee of a ’ristycrat,” remarked Mr. Doty, with the manner of a connoisseur. “Kinder tall an’ slim, an’ high-sperrity lookin’; Sheby’s a gal, but she’s got it too—thet thar sorter racehorse look. Now, hain’t she?”
“I want you to see the store and the people in it,” Sheba was saying. “It’s my home, you know. Uncle Tom took me there the day after I was born. I used to play on the floor behind the counter and near the stove, and all those men are my friends.”
Rupert had never before liked anything so much as he liked the simple lovingness of this life of hers. As she knew the mountains, the flowers, and the trees, she knew and seemed known by the very cows and horses and people she saw.
“That’s John Hutton’s old gray horse,” she had said as she caught sight of one rider in the distance. “That is Billy Neil’s yoke of oxen,” at another time. “Good-morning, Mrs. Stebbins,” she called out, with the prettiest possible cheer, to a woman in an orange cotton skirt as she passed on the road. “It seems to me sometimes,” she said to Rupert, “as if I belonged to a family that was scattered over miles and lived in scores of houses. They all used to tell Uncle Tom what would disagree with me when I was cutting my teeth.”
They mounted the steps of the porch, laughing the light, easy laugh of youth, and the loiterers regarded them with undisguised interest and admiration. In her pink cotton frock, and blooming like a rose in the shade of her frilled pink sunbonnet, Sheba was fair to see. Rupert presented an aspect which was admirably contrasting. His cool pallor and dense darkness of eyes and hair seemed a delightful background to her young tints of bloom.
“Thet thar white linen suit o’ his’n,” Mr. Doty said, “might hev been put on a-purpose to kinder set off her looks as well as his’n.”
It was to Mr. Doty Sheba went first.
“Jake,” she said, “this is my cousin Mr. Rupert De Willoughby from Delisleville.”
“Mighty glad to be made ’quainted, sir,” said Jake. “Tom’s mightily sot up at yer comin’.”
They all crowded about him and went through the same ceremony. It could scarcely be called a ceremony, it was such a simple and actually affectionate performance. It was so plain that his young good looks and friendly grace of manner reached their hearts at once, and that they were glad that he had come.
“They are glad you have come,” Sheba said afterwards. “You are from the world over there, you know,” waving her hand towards the blue of the mountains. “We are all glad when we see anything from the outside.”
“Would you like to go there?” Rupert asked.
“Yes,” she answered, with a little nod of her head. “If Uncle Tom will go—and you.”
They spent almost an hour in the store holding a sort of levée. Every newcomer bade the young fellow welcome and seemed to accept him as a sort of boon.
“He’s a mighty good-lookin’ young feller,” they all said, and the women added: “Them black eyes o’ his’n an’ the way his hair kinks is mighty purty.”
“Their feelings will be hurt if you don’t stay a little,” said Sheba. “They want to look at you. You don’t mind it, do you?”
“No,” he answered, laughing; “it delights me. No one ever wanted to look at me before. But I should hardly think they would want to look at me when they might look at you instead.”
“They have looked at me for eighteen years,” she answered. “They looked at me when I had the measles, and saw me turn purple when I had the whooping-cough.”
As they were going away, they passed a little man who had just arrived and was hitching to the horse-rail a raw-boned “clay-bank” mare. He looked up as they neared him and smiled peacefully.
“Howdy?” he said to Rupert. “Ye hain’t seen me afore, but I seen you when I was to Delisleville. It wuz me as told yer nigger ye’d be a fool if ye didn’t get Tom ter help yer to look up thet thar claim. Ye showed horse sense by comin’. Wish ye luck.”
“Uncle Tom,” said Sheba, as they sat at their dinner and Mornin walked backwards and forwards from the kitchen stove to the dining-room with chicken fried in cream, hot biscuits, and baked yams, “we saw Mr. Stamps and he wished us luck.”
“He has a claim himself, hasn’t he?” said Rupert. “He told Matt it was for a yoke of oxen.”
Tom broke into a melodious roar of laughter.
“Well,” he said, “if we can do as well by ours as Stamps will do by his, we shall be in luck. That yoke of oxen has grown from a small beginning. If it thrives as it goes on, the Government’s in for a big thing.”
“It has grown from a calf,” said Sheba, “and it wasn’t six weeks old.”
“A Government mule kicked it and broke its leg,” said Tom. “Stamps made veal of it, and in two months it was ‘Thet heifer o’ mine’—in six months it was a young steer——”
“Now it’s a yoke of oxen,” said Rupert; “and they were the pride of the county.”
“Lord! Lord!” said Tom, “the United States has got something to engineer.”
It was doubtless Stamps who explained the value of the De Willoughby claim to the Cross-roads. Excited interest in it mounted to fever heat in a few days. The hitching rail was put to such active use that the horses shouldered each other and occasionally bit and kicked and enlivened the air with squeals. No one who had an opportunity neglected to appear at the post-office, that he or she might hear the news. Judge De Willoughby’s wealth and possessions increased each time they were mentioned. The old De Willoughby place became a sort of princely domain, the good looks of the Judge’s sons and daughters and the splendour of their gifts were spoken of almost with bated breath. The coal mines became gold mines, the money invested in them something scarcely to be calculated. The Government at Washington, it was even inferred, had not money enough in its treasury to refund what had been lost and indemnify for the injury done.
“And to think o’ Tom settin’ gassin’ yere with us fellers,” they said, admiringly, “jest same es if he warn’t nothin’. A-settin’ in his shirt sleeves an’ tradin’ fer eggs an’ butter. Why, ef he puts thet thar claim through, he kin buy up Hamlin.”
“I’d like ter see the way he’d fix up Sheby,” said Mis’ Doty. “He’d hev her dressed in silks an’ satins—an’ diamond earrings soon as look.”
“Ye’ll hev to go ter Washin’ton City sure enough, Tom,” was the remark made oftenest. “When do ye ’low to start?”
But Tom was not as intoxicated by the prospect as the rest of them. His demeanour was thoughtful and unexhilarated.
“Whar do ye ’low to build yer house when ye come into yer money, Tom?” he was asked, gravely. “Shall ye hev a cupoly? Whar’ll ye buy yer land?”
The instinct of Hamlin County tended towards expressing any sense of opulence by increasing the size of the house it lived in, or by building a new one, and invariably by purchasing land. Nobody had ever become rich in the neighbourhood, but no imagination would have found it possible to extend its efforts beyond a certain distance from the Cross-roads. The point of view was wholly primitive and patriarchal.
Big Tom was conscious that he had become primitive and patriarchal also, though the truth was that he had always been primitive.
As he sat on the embowered porch of his house in the evening and thought things over, while the two young voices murmured near him, his reflections were not greatly joyful. The years he had spent closed in by the mountains and surrounded by his simple neighbours had been full of peace. Since Sheba had belonged to him they had even held more than peace. The end had been that the lonely unhappiness of his youth had seemed a thing so far away that it was rather like a dream. Only Delia Vanuxem was not quite like a dream. Her pitying girlish face and the liquid darkness of her uplifted eyes always came back to him clearly when he called them up in thought. He called them up often during these days in which he was pondering as to what it was best to decide to do.
“It’s the boy who brings her back so,” he told himself. “Good Lord, how near she seems! The grass has been growing over her for many a year, and I’m an old fellow, but she looks just as she did then.”
The world beyond the mountains did not allure him. It was easier to sit and see the sun rise and set within the purple boundary than to face life where it was less simple, and perhaps less kindly. It was from a much less advanced and concentrated civilisation he had fled in his youth, and the years which had passed had not made him more fitted to combat with what was more complex.
“Trading for butter and eggs over the counter of a country store, and discussing Doty’s corn crop and Hayworth’s pigs hasn’t done anything particular towards fitting me to shine in society,” he said. “It suits me well enough, but it’s not what’s wanted at a ball or a cabinet minister’s reception.” And he shook his head. “I’d rather stay where I am—a darned sight.”
But the murmuring voices went on near him, and little bursts of laughter rang out, or two figures wandered about the garden, and his thoughts always came back to one point—a point where the sun seemed to shine on things and surround them with a dazzling radiance.
“Yes, it’s all very well for me,” he concluded more than once. “It’s well enough for me to sit down and spend the rest of my life looking at the mountains and watching summer change into winter; but they are only beginning it all—just beginning.”
So one night he left his chair and went out and walked between them in the moonlight, a hand resting on a shoulder of each.
“See,” he said, “I want you two to help me to make up my mind.”
“About going away?” asked Rupert, looking round at him quickly.
“Yes. Do you know we may have a pretty hard time? We’ve no money. We should have to live scant enough, and, unless we had luck, we might come back here worse off than we left.”
“But we should have tried, and we should have been on the other side of the mountains,” said Sheba.
“So we should,” said Tom, reflectively. “And there’s a good deal in seeing the other side of the mountains when people are young.”
Sheba put her hand on his and looked at him with a glowing face.
“Uncle Tom,” she said, “oh, let us go!”
“Uncle Tom,” said Rupert, “I must go!”
The line showed itself between his black brows again, though it was not a frown. He put his hand in his pocket and held it out, open, with a solitary twenty-dollar bill lying in it.
“That’s all I’ve got,” he said, “and that’s borrowed. If the claim is worth nothing, I must earn enough to pay it back. All right. We’ll all three go,” said Tom.
The next day he began to develop the plans he had been allowing to form vaguely as a background to his thoughts. They were not easy to carry out in the existing condition of general poverty. But at Lucasville, some forty miles distant, he was able to raise a mortgage on his land.
“If the worst comes to the worst,” he said to Sheba, “after we have seen the other side of the mountains, do you think you could stand it to come back and live with me in the rooms behind the store?”
Sheba sat down upon his knee and put her arms round his neck, as she had done when she was ten years old.
“I could live with you anywhere,” she said. “The only thing I couldn’t stand would be to have to live away from you.”
Tom laughed and kissed her. He laughed that he might smother a sigh. Rupert was standing near and looking at her with the eyes that were so like Delia Vanuxem’s.
For an imaginative or an untravelled person to approach the city of Washington at sunrise on a radiant morning, is a thing far from unlikely to be remembered, since a white and majestic dome, rising about a white structure set high and supported by stately colonnades, the whole gleaming fair against a background of blue sky, forms a picture which does not easily melt away.
Those who reared this great temple of white stone and set it on a hilltop to rule and watch over the land, builded better than they knew. To the simple and ardent idealist its white stateliness must always suggest something symbolic, and, after all, it is the ardent and simple idealist whose dreams and symbols paint to prosaic human minds the beautiful impossibilities whose unattainable loveliness so allures as to force even the unexalted world into the endeavour to create such reproductions of their forms as crude living will allow.
Tom leaned against the side of the car window and watched the great dome with an air of curious reflection. Sheba and Rupert leaned forward and gazed at it with dreaming eyes.
“It looks as the capitol of a great republic ought to look,” Rupert said. “Spotless and majestic, and as if it dominated all it looks down upon with pure laws and dignity and justice.”
“Just so,” said Tom.
In the various crises of political excitement in Hamlin County he had taken the part of an unbiassed but humorous observer, and in that character had gained much experience of a primitive kind. What he had been led chiefly to remark in connection with the “great republic” was that the majesty and spotlessness of its intentions were not invariably realised by mere human units.
“Well,” he said, as he took down his valise from the rack, “we’re coming in here pretty well fixed for leaving the place millionaires. If we had only fifteen cents in our pockets, it would be a dead sure thing, according to all the biographers I ever read. The only thing against us is that we have a little more—but it’s not enough to spoil our luck, that I’ll swear.”
He was not without reason in the statement. Few voyagers on the ocean of chance could have dared the journey with less than they had in their possession.
“What we’ve got to do,” he had said to Rupert, “is to take care of Sheba. We two can rough it.”
They walked through the awakening city, finding it strange and bare with its broad avenues and streets ill-paved, bearing traces everywhere of the tragedy of war through which it had passed. The public buildings alone had dignity; for the rest, it wore a singularly provincial and uncompleted aspect; its plan was simple and splendid in its vistas and noble spaces, but the houses were irregular and without beauty of form; negro shanties huddled against some of the most respectable, and there were few whose windows or doors did not announce that board and lodging might be obtained within. There was no look of well-being or wealth anywhere; the few equipages in the streets had seen hard service; the people who walked were either plainly dressed or shabby genteel; about the doors of the principal hotels there were groups of men who wore, most of them, dispirited or anxious faces. Ten years later the whole aspect of the place was changing, but at this time it was passing through a period of natural fatigue and poverty, and was not an inspiring spectacle to penniless new-comers.
“It reminds me a little of Delisleville, after all,” said Rupert.
Beyond the more frequented quarters of the town, they found broad, unkempt, and as yet unlevelled avenues and streets, where modest houses straggled, perched on high banks with an air of having found themselves there quite by accident. The banks were usually grass-covered, and the white picket fences enclosed bits of ground where scant fruit-trees and disorderly bushes grew; almost every house possessed a porch, and almost every porch was scrambled over by an untidy honeysuckle or climbing rose which did its best to clothe with some grace the dilapidated woodwork and the peeled and blistered paint.
Before one of these houses Tom stopped to look at a lopsided sign in the little garden, which announced that rooms were to be rented within.
“Perhaps we can find something here,” he said, “that may suit the first ventures of millionaires. It’s the sort of thing that will appeal to the newspaper man who writes the thing up; ‘First home of the De Willoughbys when they arrived in Washington to look up their claim.’ It’ll make a good woodcut to contrast with ‘The great De Willoughby mansion in Fifth Avenue. Cost five hundred thousand!’”
They mounted the wooden steps built into the bank and knocked at the door. Rupert and Sheba exchanged glances with a little thrill. They were young enough to feel a sort of excitement even in taking this first modest step.
A lady with a gentle, sallow face and a faded black cotton gown, opened the door. Her hair hung in depressed but genteel ringlets on each side of her countenance; at the back it formed a scant coil upheld by a comb. Tom thought he observed a gleam of hope in her eye when she saw them. She spoke with the accent of Virginia.
“Yes, suh, we have rooms disengaged. Won’t you come in?” she said.
She led them into a neat but rather painful little parlour. The walls were decorated with photographs of deceased relatives in oval frames, and encased in glass there was a floral wreath made of hair of different shades and one of white, waxen-looking flowers, with a vaguely mortuary suggestion in their arrangement. There was a basket of wax fruit under a shade on the centre table, a silver ice-water pitcher on a salver, and two photograph albums whose binding had become loosened by much handling. There was also a book with a red and gold cover, bearing in ornate letters the title “Life of General Robert Lee.”
“The rooms are not lawge,” the lady said, “but they are furnished with the things I brought from my fawther’s house in Virginia. My fawther was Judge Burford, of the Burford family of England. There’s a Lord Burford in England, we always heard. It is a very old family.”
She looked as if she found a vague comfort in the statement, and Tom did not begrudge it to her. She looked very worn and anxious, and he felt it almost possible that during the last few months she might not always have had quite enough to eat.
“I never thawt in the days when I was Judge Burford’s dawtah of Burfordsville,” she explained, “that I should come to Washington to take boarders. There was a time when it was thawt in Virginia that Judge Burford might reach the White House if he would allow himself to be nominated. It’s a great change of circumstances. Did you want board with the rooms?”
“Well——” began Tom.
She interrupted him in some little hurry.
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be convenient for me to board anyone,” she said; “I’ve not been accustomed to providing for boarders, and I’m not conveniently situated. If—if you preferred to economize——”
“We do,” said Tom. “We have come to look up a claim, and people on that business are pretty safe to have to economize, I’ve been told!”
“Ah, a claim!” she ejaculated, with combined interest and reverence. “Indeed, you are quite right about its being necessary to economize. Might I enqu’ah if it is a large one?”
“I believe it is,” Tom answered; “and it’s not likely to be put through in a month, and we have not money enough to keep us in luxury for much more. Probably we shall be able to make it last longer if we take rooms and buy our own food.”
“I’m sure you would, suh,” she answered, with a little eager flush on her cheek. “When people provide for themselves, they can sometimes do without—things.” She added the last word hurriedly and gave a little cough which sounded nervous.
It was finally agreed that they should take three little rooms she showed them, in one of which there was a tiny stove, upon which they could prepare such simple food as they could provide themselves with. The arrangement was not a luxurious one, but it proved to be peculiarly suitable to the owners of the great De Willoughby claim.
As they had not broken fast, Tom went out to explore the neighbourhood in search of food. He thought he remembered having seen in a side street a little store. When he returned, after some wanderings, a wood fire was crackling in the stove and Sheba had taken off her hat and put on a white apron.
“Hello!” exclaimed Tom.
“I borrowed it from Miss Burford,” she said. “I went down to see her. She let us have the wood, too. Rupert made the fire.”
She took the paper bags from Tom’s hands and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, smiling sweetly at his rather troubled face.
“All my life you have been doing things for me. Now it is my turn,” she said. “I have watched Mornin ever since I was born. I am going to be your servant.”
In an hour from the time they had taken possession of their quarters, they were sitting at a little table before an open window, making a breakfast of coffee and eggs. Sheba was presiding, and both men were looking at her flushed cheeks adoringly.
“Is the coffee good, Uncle Tom?” she said. “Just tell me it is good.”
“Well,” said Tom, “for the first effort of a millionairess, I should say it was.”
The year before this Judge Rutherford had been sent to Congress by the Republican Party of Hamlin County. His election had been a wildly exciting and triumphant one. Such fiery eloquence as his supporters displayed had rarely, if ever, been poured forth before. It was proved by each orator that the return of the Democratic candidate would plunge the whole country into the renewal of bloodshed and war. This catastrophe having been avoided by the Judge’s election, the nation—as represented by Hamlin County—had settled down with prospects of peace, prosperity, and the righting of all old grievances. The Judge bought a new and shining valise, a new and shining suit of broadcloth, and a silk hat equally shining and new, and went triumphantly to Washington, the sole drawback to his exultation being that he was obliged to leave Jenny behind him with the piano, the parlour furniture, and the children.
“But he’ll hev ye thar in the White House, ef ye give him time,” said an ardent constituent who called to congratulate.
There seemed no end to a political career begun under such auspices but the executive mansion itself. The confidence of the rural communities in their representatives was great and respectful. It was believed that upon their arrival at the capital, business in both Houses was temporarily postponed until it had been supported by their expression of opinion and approval. It was believed also that the luxury and splendour of a Congressman’s life was such as ancient Rome itself might have paled before and envied.
“A man in Washin’ton city with a Congristman’s wages has got to be a purty level-headed feller not to get into high-falutin’ ways of livin’ an’ throwin’ money about. He’s got to keep in his mind that this yere’s a republic an’ not a ’ristycratic, despotic monarchy.”
This was a sentiment often expressed, and Tom De Willoughby himself had had vaguely respectful views of the circumstances and possible surroundings of a representative of his country.
But when he made his first visit to Judge Rutherford, he did not find him installed in a palatial hotel and surrounded by pampered menials. He was sitting in a back room in a boarding-house—a room which contained a folding bedstead and a stove. He sat in a chair which was tilted on its hind legs, and his feet rested on the stove’s ornamental iron top. He had just finished reading a newspaper which lay on the floor beside him, and his hands were thrust into his pockets. He looked somewhat depressed in spirits.
When Tom was ushered into the room, the Judge looked round at him, uttered a shout of joy, and sprang to his feet.
“Tom,” he cried out, falling upon him and shaking his hand rather as if he would not object to shaking it off and retaining it as an agreeable object forever. “Tom! Old Tom! Jupiter, Tom! I don’t know how you got here or where you came from, but—Jupiter! I’m glad to see you.”
He went on shaking his hand as he dragged him across the room and pushed him into a dingy armchair by the window; and when he had got him there, he stood over him grasping his shoulder, shaking his hand still. Tom saw that his chin was actually twitching in a curious way which made his goatee move unsteadily.
“The legislation of your country hasn’t made you forget home folks, has it?” said Tom.
“Forget ’em!” exclaimed the Judge, throwing himself into a seat opposite and leaning forward excitedly with his hands on his knees. “I never remembered anything in my life as I remember them. They’re never out of my mind, night or day. I’ve got into a way of dreaming I’m back to Barnesville, talking to the boys at the post-office, or listening to Jenny playing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ or ‘The Maiden’s Prayer.’ I was a bit down yesterday and couldn’t eat, and in the night there I was in the little dining-room, putting away fried chicken and hot biscuits as fast as the nigger girl could bring the dishes on the table. Good Lord! how good they were! There’s nothing like them in Washington city,” he added, and he heaved a big sigh.
“Why, man,” said Tom, “you’re homesick!”
The Judge heaved another sigh, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets and looking out of the window.
“Yes, by Jingo!” he said; “that’s what I am.”
He withdrew his gaze from the world outside the window and returned to Tom.
“You see,” he said, “I’ve lived different. When a man has been born and brought up among the mountains and lived a country life among folks that are all neighbours and have neighbourly ways, city life strikes him hard. Politics look different here; they are different. They’re not of the neighbourly kind. Politicians ain’t joking each other and having a good time. They don’t know anything about the other man, and they don’t care a damn. What’s Hamlin County to them? Why, they don’t know anything about Hamlin County, and, as far as I’ve got, they don’t want to. They’ve got their own precincts to attend to, and they’re going to do it. When a new man comes in, if he ain’t a pretty big fellow that knows how to engineer things and say things to make them listen to him, he’s only another greenhorn. Now, I’m not a big fellow, Tom; I’ve found that out! and the first two months after I came, blamed if I wasn’t so homesick and discouraged that if it hadn’t been for seeming to go back on the boys, durned if I don’t believe I should have gone home.”
Big Tom sat and regarded his honest face thoughtfully.
“Perhaps you’re a bigger man than you know,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll find that out in time, and perhaps other people will.”
The Judge shook his head.
“I’ve not got education enough,” he said. “And I’m not an orator. All there is to me is that I’m not going back on the boys and Hamlin. I came here to do the square thing by them and the United States, and blamed if I ain’t going to do it as well as I know how.”
“Now, look here,” said Big Tom, “that’s pretty good politics to start with. If every man that came here came to stand by his party—and the United States—and do the square thing by them, the republic would be pretty safe, if they couldn’t do another durned thing.”
The Judge rubbed his already rather rough head and seemed to cheer up a little.
“Do you think so?” he said.
Big Tom stood up and gave him a slap on his shoulder.
“Think so?” he exclaimed, in his great, cheerful voice. “I’m a greenhorn myself, but, good Lord! I know it. Making laws for a few million people is a pretty big scheme, and it’s the fellows who intend to do the square thing who are going to put it through. This isn’t ancient Greece, or Sparta, but it’s my impression that the men who planned and wrote the Constitution, and did the thinking and orating in those days, had a sort of idea of building up a thing just as ornamental and good to write history about as either one; and, what’s more, they counted on just such fellows as you to go on carrying the stones and laying them plumb, long after they were gone.”
“Jupiter, Tom!” the Judge said, with something actually like elation in his voice, “it’s good to hear you. It brings old Hamlin back and gives a man sand. You’re an orator, yourself.”
“Am I?” said Tom. “No one ever called my attention to it before. If it’s true, perhaps it’ll come in useful.”
“Now, just think of me sitting here gassing,” exclaimed the Judge, “and never asking what you are here for. What’s your errand, Tom?”
“Perhaps I’m here to defraud the Government,” Tom answered, sitting down again; “or perhaps I’ve got a fair claim against it. That’s what I’ve come to Washington to find out—with the other claimant.”
“A claim!” cried the Judge. “And you’ve left the Cross-roads—and Sheba?”
“Sheba and the other claimant are in some little rooms we’ve taken out near Dupont Circle. The other claimant is the only De Willoughby left beside myself, and he is a youngster of twenty-three. He’s my brother De Courcy’s son.”
The Judge glowed with interest. He heard the whole story, and his excitement grew as he listened. The elements of the picturesque in the situation appealed to him greatly. The curiously composite mind of the American contains a strong element of the romantic. In its most mercantile forms it is attracted by the dramatic; when it hails from the wilds, it is drawn by it as a child is drawn by colour and light.
“It’s a big thing,” the Judge ejaculated at intervals. “When I see you sitting there, Tom, just as you used to sit in your chair on the store-porch, it seems as if it could hardly be you that’s talking. Why, man, it’ll mean a million!”
“If I get money enough to set the mines at work,” said Tom, “it may mean more millions than one.”
The dingy square room, with its worn carpet, its turned-up bedstead, shabby chairs, and iron stove, temporarily assumed a new aspect. That its walls should contain this fairy tale of possible wealth and power and magnificence made it seem quite soberly respectable, and that Big Tom, sitting in the second-hand looking armchair, which creaked beneath his weight, should, in matter-of-fact tones, be relating such a story, made Judge Rutherford regard him with a kind of reverent trouble.
“Sheba, now,” he said, “Sheba may be one of the biggest heiresses in the States. Lord! what luck it was for her that fellow left her behind!”
“It was luck for me,” said Tom. And a faint, contemplative grin showed itself on his countenance. He was thinking, as he often did, of the afternoon when he returned from Blair’s Hollow and opened the door of the room behind the store to find the wooden cradle stranded like a small ark in the corner.