Baird stood stock still; if Latimer had been awake to externals he would have seen that it was because he could not move—or speak. He was like a man stunned.
Latimer continued:
“She was sitting in her little room alone when I entered it. She looked as if she had been passing through hours of convulsive sobbing. She sat with her poor little hands clutching each other on her knees. Hysteric shudders were shaking her every few seconds, and her eyes were blinded with weeping. A child who had been beaten brutally might have sat so. She was too simple and weak to bear the awful terror and woe. She was not strong enough to conceal what there was to hide. She did not even get up to greet me, but sat trembling like an aspen leaf.”
“What did you say to her?” Baird cried out.
“I only remember as one remembers a nightmare,” the other man answered, passing his hand over his brow. “It was a black nightmare. I saw before I spoke, and I began to shake as she was shaking. I sat down before her and took both her hands. I seemed to hear myself saying, ‘Margery—Margery, don’t be frightened—don’t be afraid of Lucian. I will help you, Margery; I have come to talk to you—just to talk to you.’ That was all. And she fell upon the floor and lay with her face on my feet, her hands clutching them.”
For almost five minutes there was no other word spoken, but the breathing of each man could be heard.
Then Latimer’s voice broke the stillness, lower and more monotonous.
“I had but one resolve. It was to save her and to save my mother. All the soul of our home and love was bound up in the child. Among the desperate plans I had made in the long nights of lying awake there had been one stranger than the rest. I had heard constantly of Americans encountering each other by chance when they went abroad. When one has a secret to keep one is afraid of every chance, however remote. Perhaps my plan was mad, but it accomplished what I wanted. Years before I had travelled through the mountain districts of North Carolina. One day, in riding through the country roads, I had realised their strange remoteness from the world, and the fancy had crossed my mind that a criminal who dressed and lived as the rudely scattered population did, and who chose a lonely spot in the woods, might be safer there than with the ocean rolling between him and his secret. I spent hours in telling her the part she was to play. It was to be supposed that we had gone upon the journey originally planned. We were to be hidden—apparently man and wife—in some log cabin off the road until all was over. I studied the details as a detective studies his case. I am not a brilliant man, and it was intricate work; but I was desperate. I read guide-books and wrote letters from different points, and arranged that they should be sent to our mother at certain dates for the next few months.
“My stronghold was that she was quite ignorant of travel and would think of nothing but that the letters came from me and were about Margery. I made Margery write two or three. Then I knew I could explain that she was not strong enough to write herself. I was afraid she might break down before we could leave home; but she did not. I got her away. By roundabout ways we travelled to the North Carolina mountains. We found a deserted cabin in the woods, some distance from the road. We dressed ourselves in the rough homespun of the country. She went barefooted, as most of the women did. We so secluded ourselves that it was some time before it was known that our cabin was inhabited. The women have a habit of wearing deep sunbonnets when about their work. Margery always wore one and kept within doors. We were thought to be only an unsociable married pair. Only once she found herself facing curious eyes. A sharp-faced little hoosier stopped one day to ask for a drink of water when I was away. He stared at her so intently that she was frightened; but he never came again. The child was born. She died.”
“When it was born,” Baird asked, “who cared for her?”
“We were alone,” answered Latimer. “I did not know whom to call. I read medical books—for hours each day I read them. I thought that perhaps I might be able to do—what was necessary. But on the night she was taken ill—I was stricken with terror. She was so young and childlike—she had lived through months of torture—the agony seemed so unnatural to me, that I knew I must go for help—that I was not mentally calm enough to go through the ordeal. A strange chance took me to a man who had years before studied medicine as a profession. He was a singular being, totally unlike his fellows. He came to her. She died with her hand in his.”
“Did the child die too?” Baird asked, after a pause.
“No; it lived. After she was laid in the earth on the hillside, I came away. It was the next day, and I was not sane. I had forgotten the child existed, and had made no plans for it. The man I spoke of—he was unmarried and lonely, and a strange, huge creature of a splendid humaneness—he had stood by me through all—a mountain of strength—the man came to my rescue there and took the child. It would be safe with him. I know nothing more.”
“Do you not know his name?” Baird asked.
“Yes; he was called Dwillerby by the country people. I think he had been born a gentleman, though he lived as the mountaineers did.”
“Afterwards,” said Baird, “you went abroad as you had planned?”
“Yes. I invented the story of her death. I wrote the details carefully. I learned them as a lesson. It has been my mother’s comfort—that story of the last day—the open window—the passing peasants—the setting sun—I can see it all myself. That is my lie. Did you suspect it when I told it?”
“No, God knows!” Baird answered. “I did not.”
“Never?” inquired Latimer.
“What I have thought was that you had suffered much more than you wished your mother to know; that—perhaps—your sister had suffered more than you would reveal; and that you dreaded with all your being the telling of the story. But never such tragedy as this—never—never!”
“The man—the man who wrought that tragedy,” began Latimer, staring darkly before him, “somewhere he stands to-night—unless his day is done. Somewhere he stands—as real a man as you.”
“With all his load upon him,” said Baird; “and he may have loved her passionately.”
“It should be a heavy load,” said Latimer, with bitter gloom; “heavy—heavy.”
“You have not once uttered his name,” said Baird, the thought coming to him suddenly.
“No,” said Latimer; “I never knew it. She prayed so piteously that I would let her hide it. She knelt and sobbed upon my knee, praying that I would spare her that one woe. I could spare her no other, so I gave way. She thanked me, clinging to me and kissing my hand. Ah, her young, young heart wrung with sobs and tears!”
He flung himself forward against the table, hiding his face upon his arms, and wept aloud. Baird went and stood by him. He did not speak a word or lay his hand upon the shaking shoulders. He stood and gazed, his own chest heaving and awful tears in his eyes.
In later years, one at least of the two men never glanced back upon the months which followed without a shudder. And yet outwardly no change took place in their relations, unless they seemed drawn closer. Such a secret being shared between two people must either separate or bind them together. In this case it became a bond. They spoke of it but little, yet each was well aware that the other remembered often. Sometimes, when they sat together, Latimer recognised in Baird’s eyes a look of brooding and felt that he knew what his thought was; sometimes Baird, glancing at his friend, found his face darkened by reverie, and understood. Once, when this was the case, he said, suddenly:
“What is your feeling about—the man? Do you wish to kill him?”
“It is too late,” Latimer answered. “It would undo nothing. If by doing it I could bring her back as she was before she had seen his face—if I could see her again, the pretty, happy child, with eyes like blue convolvulus, and laughing lips—I would kill him and gladly hang for it.”
“So would I,” said Baird, grimly.
“To crucify him would not undo it,” said Latimer, looking sickly pale. “She was crucified—she lived through terror and shame; she died—afraid that God would not forgive her.”
“That God would not——!” Baird gasped.
Latimer’s bony hands were twisted together.
“We were brought up to believe things like that,” he said. “I was afraid, too. That was the damnable part of it. I could not help her. I have changed since then—I have changed through knowing you. As children we had always been threatened with the just God! The most successful preachers gained their power by painting pictures of the torments of hell. That was the fashion then,” smiling horribly.
“It is a wonderful thing that even the fashion in Gods changes. When we were shut up together in the cabin on the hillside, she used to be overwhelmed by paroxysms of fear. She read the Bible a great deal—because sinners who wanted to repent always read it—and sometimes she would come upon threats and curses, and cry out and turn white and begin to shiver. Then she would beg me to pray and pray with her. And we would kneel down on the bare floor and pray together. My prayers were worse than useless. What could I say? I was a black sinner, too—a man who was perjuring his soul with lies—and they were told and acted for her sake, and she knew it. She used to cling about my neck and beg me to betray her—to whiten my soul by confession—not to allow her wickedness to destroy me—because she loved me—loved me. ‘Go back to them and tell them, Lucien,’ she would cry, ‘I will go with you if I ought—I have been wicked—not you—I have been shameful; I must bear it—I must bear it.’ But she could not bear it. She died.”
“Were you never able to give her any comfort?” said Baird. His eyes were wet, and he spoke as in bitter appeal. “This had been a child in her teens entrapped into bearing the curse of the world with all its results of mental horror and physical agony.”
“What comfort could I give?” was the answer. “My religion and my social creed had taught me that she was a vile sinner—the worst and most shameful of sinners—and that I was a criminal for striving to save her from the consequences of her sin. I was defying the law of the just God, who would have punished her with heart-break and open shame. He would not have spared her, and He would not spare me since I so strove against Him. The night she died—through the long hours of horrible, unnatural convulsions of pain—when cold sweat stood in drops on her deathly childish face, she would clutch my hands and cry out: ‘Eternal torments! For ever and ever and ever—could it be like this, Lucien—for ever and ever and ever?’ Then she would sob out, ‘God! God! God!’ in terrible, helpless prayer. She had not strength for other words.”
Baird sprang to his feet and thrust out his hand, averting his pallid face.
“Don’t tell me any more,” he said. “I cannot—I cannot bear it.”
“She bore it,” said Latimer, “until death ended it.”
“Was there no one—to save her?” Baird cried. “Was she terrified like that when she died?”
“The man who afterwards took her child—the man D’Willerby,” Latimer answered, “was a kindly soul. At the last moment he took her poor little hand and patted it, and told her not to be frightened. She turned to him as if for refuge. He had a big, mellow voice, and a tender, protecting way. He said: ‘Don’t be frightened. It’s all right,’ and his were the last words she heard.”
“God bless the fellow, wheresoever he is!” Baird exclaimed. “I should like to grasp his hand.”
The Reverend John Baird delivered his lectures in many cities that year. The discussion they gave rise to had the natural result of awakening a keen interest in them. There were excellent souls who misinterpreted and deplored them, there were excellent souls who condemned; there were even ministers of the gospel who preached against the man as an iconoclast and a pagan, and forbade their congregations to join his audiences. But his lecture-halls were always crowded, and the hundreds of faces upturned to him when he arose upon his platform were the faces of eager, breathless, yearning creatures. He was a man speaking to men, not an echo of old creeds. He uttered no threats, he painted no hells, he called aloud to that God in man which is his soul.
“That God which is in you—in me,” he proclaimed, “has lain dormant because undeveloped man, having made for himself in the dark ages gods of wood and stone, demanding awful sacrifice, called forth for himself later a deity as material, though embodied in no physical form—a God of vengeance and everlasting punishments. This is the man-created deity, and in his name man has so clamoured that the God which is man’s soul has been silenced. Let this God rise, and He will so demand justice and noble mercy from all creatures to their fellows that temptation and suffering will cease. What! can we do no good deed without the promise of paradise as reward? Can we refrain from no evil unless we are driven to it by the threat of hell? Are we such base traffickers that we make merchandise of our souls and bargain for them across a counter? Let us awake! I say to you from the deepest depths of my aching soul—if there were no God to bargain with, then all the more awful need that each man constitute himself a god—of justice, pity, and mercy—until the world’s wounds are healed and each human thing can stand erect and claim the joy of life which is his own.”
On the morning of the day he said these words to the crowd which had flocked to hear him, he had talked long with Latimer. For some weeks he had not been strong. The passion of intensity which ruled him when he spoke to his audiences was too strong an emotion to leave no physical trace. After a lecture or sermon he was often pallid and shaken.
“I have things to say,” he exclaimed feverishly to Latimer. “There are things which must be said. The spoken word lives—for good or evil. It is a sound sent echoing through all the ages to come. Some men have awakened echoes which have thrilled throughout the world. To speak one’s thought—to use mere words—it seems such a small thing—and yet it is my conviction that nothing which is said is really ever forgotten.”
And his face was white, his eyes burning, when at night he leaned forward to fling forth to his hearers his final arraignment.
“I say to you, were there no God to bargain with, then all the more awful need that each man constitute himself a god of justice, pity, and mercy—until the world’s wounds are healed and each human thing can stand erect and claim the joy of life which is his own.”
The people went away after the lecture, murmuring among themselves. Some of them carried away awakening in their eyes. They all spoke of the man himself; of his compelling power, the fire of meaning in his face, and the musical, far-reaching voice, which carried to the remotest corner of the most crowded buildings.
“It is not only his words one is reached by,” it was said. “It is the man’s self. Truly, he cries out from the depths of his soul.”
This was true. It was the man himself. Nature had armed him well—with strength, with magnetic force, with a tragic sense of the anguish of things, and with that brain which labours far in advance of the thought of the hour. Men with such brains—brains which work fiercely and unceasingly even in their own despite—reach conclusions not yet arrived at by their world, and are called iconoclasts. Some are madly overpraised, some have been made martyrs, but their spoken word passes onward, and if not in their own day, in that to-morrow which is the to-day of other men, the truth of their harvest is garnered and bound into sheaves.
At the closing of his lectures, men and women crowded about him to speak to him, to grasp his hand. When they were hysterical in their laudations, his grace and readiness controlled them; when they were direct and earnest, he found words to say which they could draw aid from later.
“Am I developing—or degenerating—into a popular preacher?” he said once, with a half restless laugh, to his shadow.
“You are not popular,” was Latimer’s answer. “Popular is not the word. You are proclaiming too new and bold a creed.”
“That is true,” said Baird. “The pioneer is not popular. When he forces his way into new countries he encounters the natives. Sometimes they eat him—sometimes they drive him back with poisoned arrows. The country is their own; they have their own gods, their own language. Why should a stranger enter in?”
“But there is no record yet of a pioneer who lived—or died—in vain,” said Latimer. “Some day—some day——”
He stopped and gazed at his friend, brooding. His love for him was a strong and deep thing. It grew with each hour they spent together, with each word he heard him speak. Baird was his mental nourishment and solace. When they were apart he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among his people at Janney’s Mills—squalid because he had not the elasticity to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which makes a man friends. Baird possessed this temperament, and his home was a centre of all that was most living. It was not the ordinary Willowfield household. The larger outer world came and went. When Latimer went to it he was swept on by new currents and felt himself warmed and fed.
There had been scarcely any day during years in which the two men had not met. They had made journeys together; they had read the same books and encountered the same minds. Each man clung to the intimacy.
“I want this thing,” Baird had said more than once; “if you want it, I want it more. Nothing must rob us of it.”
“The time has come—it came long ago—” his Shadow said, “when I could not live without it. My life has grown to yours.”
It was Latimer’s pleasure that he found he could be an aid to the man who counted for so much to him. Affairs which pressed upon Baird he would take in hand; he was able to transact business for him, to help him in the development of his plans, save him frequently both time and fatigue. It fell about that when the lectures were delivered at distant points the two men journeyed together.
Latimer entered Baird’s library on one occasion just as a sharp-faced, rather theatrical-looking man left it.
“You’ll let me know your decision, sir, as soon as possible,” the stranger departed, saying. “These things ought always to be developed just at the right moment. This is your right moment. Everybody is talking you over, one way or another.” When the stranger was gone, Baird explained his presence.
“That is an agent,” he said; “he proposes that I shall lecture through the States. I—don’t know,” as if pondering the thing.
“The things you say should be said to many,” remarked Latimer.
“The more the better,” said Baird, reflectively; “I know that—the more the better.”
They sat and talked the matter over at length. The objections to it were neither numerous nor serious.
“And I want to say these things,” said Baird, a little feverishly. “I want to say them again and again.”
Before they parted for the night it was decided that he should accede to the proposal, and that Latimer should arrange to be his companion.
“It is the lecture ‘Repentance,’ he tells me, is most in demand,” Baird said, as he walked to the door, with a hand in Latimer’s.
Frequenters of the Capitol—whether loungers or politicians—had soon become familiar with the figure of one of the De Willoughby claimants. It was too large a figure not to be quickly marked and unavoidably remembered. Big Tom slowly mounting the marble steps or standing on the corridors was an object to attract attention, and inquiries being answered by the information that he was a party to one of the largest claims yet made, he not unnaturally was discussed with interest.
“He’s from the depths of the mountains of North Carolina,” it was explained; “he keeps a cross-roads store and post-office, but he has some of the best blood of the South in his veins, and his claim is enormous.”
“Will he gain it?”
“Who knows? He has mortgaged all he owns to make the effort. The claim is inherited from his father, Judge De Willoughby, who died at the close of the war. As he lived and died within the Confederacy, the Government holds that he was disloyal and means to make the most of it. The claimants hold that they can prove him loyal. They’ll have to prove it thoroughly. The Government is growing restive over the claims of Southerners, and there is bitter opposition to be overcome.”
“Yes. Lyman nearly lost his last election because he had favoured a Southern claim in his previous term. His constituents are country patriots, and they said they weren’t sending a man to Congress to vote for Rebs.”
“That’s the trouble. When men’s votes are endangered by a course of action they grow ultra-conservative. A vote’s a vote.”
That was the difficulty, as Tom found. A vote was a vote. The bitterness of war had not yet receded far enough into the past to allow of unprejudiced judgment. Members of political parties were still enemies, wrongs still rankled, graves were yet new, wounds still ached and burned. Men who had found it to their interest to keep at fever heat the fierce spirit of the past four years of struggle and bloodshed, were not willing to relinquish the tactics which had brought fortunes to them. The higher-minded were determined that where justice was done it should be done where it was justice alone, clearly proved to be so. There had been too many false and idle claims brought forward to admit of the true ones being accepted without investigation and delay. In the days when old Judge De Willoughby had walked through the streets of Delisleville, ostracized and almost hooted as he passed among those who had once been his friends, it would not have been difficult to prove that he was loyal to the detested Government, but in these later times, when the old man lay quiet in what his few remaining contemporaries still chose to consider a dishonoured grave, undeniable proof of a loyalty which now would tend to the honour and advantage of those who were of his blood was not easy to produce.
“The man lived and died in the Confederacy,” was said by those who were in power in Washington.
“He was constructively a rebel. We want proof—proof.”
Most of those who might have furnished it if they would, were either scattered as to the four winds of the earth, or were determined to give no aid in the matter.
“A Southerner who deserted the South in its desperate struggle for life need not come to Southern gentlemen to ask them to help him to claim the price of his infamy.” That was the Delisleville point of view, and it was difficult to cope with. If Tom had been a rich man and could have journeyed between Delisleville and the Capital, or wheresoever the demands of his case called him, to see and argue with this man or that, the situation would have simplified itself somewhat, though there would still have remained obstacles to be overcome.
“But a man who has hard work to look his room rent in the face, and knows he can’t do that for more than a few months, is in a tight place,” said Tom. “Evidence that will satisfy the Government isn’t easily collected in Dupont Circle. These fellows have heard men talk before. They’ve heard too many men talk. There’s Stamps, now—they’ve heard Stamps talk. Stamps is way ahead of me where lobbying is concerned. He knows the law, and he doesn’t mind having doors shut in his face or being kicked into the street, so long as he sees a chance of getting indemnified for his ‘herds of cattle.’ I’m not a business man, and I mind a lot of things that don’t trouble him. I’m not a good hand at asking favours and sitting down to talk steadily for a solid hour to a man who doesn’t want to hear me and hasn’t five minutes to spare.” But for Rupert and Sheba he would have given up the claim in a week and gone back to Talbot’s Cross-roads content to end his days as he began them when he opened the store—living in the little back rooms on beans and bacon and friend chicken and hominy.
“That suited me well enough,” he used to say to himself, when he thought the thing over. “There were times when I found it a bit lonely—but, good Lord! loneliness is a small thing for a man to complain of in a world like this. It isn’t fits or starvation. When a man’s outlived the habit of expecting happiness, it doesn’t take much to keep him going.”
But at his side was eager youth which had outlived nothing, which believed in a future full of satisfied yearnings and radiant joys.
“I am not alone now,” said Rupert; “I must make a place and a home for Sheba. I must not be only a boy in love with her; I must be a man who can protect her from everything—from everything. She is so sweet—she is so sweet. She makes me feel that I am a man.”
She was sweet. To big Tom they were both sweet in their youth and radiant faith and capabilities for happiness. They seemed like children, and the tender bud of their lovely young passion was a thing to be cherished. He had seen such buds before, but he had never seen the flower.
“I’d like to see the flower,” he used to say to himself. “To see it would pay a man for a good deal he’d missed himself. The pair of them could set up a pretty fair garden of Eden—serpents and apple-trees being excluded.”
They were happy. Even when disappointments befell them and prospects were unpromising they were happy. They could look into each other’s eyes and take comfort. Rupert’s dark moods had melted away. He sometimes forgot they had ever ruled him. His old boyish craving for love and home was fed. The bare little rooms in the poor little house were home. Sheba and Tom were love and affection. When they sat at the table and calculated how much longer their diminishing store would last, even as it grew smaller and smaller, they could laugh over the sums they worked out on slips of paper. So long as the weather was warm enough they strolled about together in the fragrant darkness or sat in the creeper-hung porch, in the light of summer moons; when the cold nights came they sat about the stove or the table and talked, while Sheba sewed buttons on or worked assiduously at the repairing of her small wardrobe. Whatsoever she did, the two men sat and admired, and there was love and laughter.
The strenuous life which went on in the busier part of the town—the politics, the struggles, the plots and schemes, the worldly pleasures—seemed entirely apart from them.
Sometimes, after a day in which Judge Rutherford had been encouraged or Tom had had a talk with a friendly member who had listened to the story of the claim with signs of interest, they felt their star of hope rising; it never sinks far below the horizon when one’s teens are scarcely of the past—and Sheba and Rupert spent a wonderful evening making plans for a future of ease and fortune.
At Judge Rutherford’s suggestion, Tom had long sought an interview with a certain member of the Senate whose good word would be a carrying weight in any question under debate. He was a shrewd, honest, business-like man, and a personal friend of the President’s. He was much pursued by honest and dishonest alike, and, as a result of experience, had become difficult to reach. On the day Tom was admitted to see him, he had been more than usually badgered. Just as Tom approached his door a little man opened it cautiously and slid out, with the air of one leaving within the apartment things not exhilarating on retrospect. He was an undersized country man, the cut of whose jeans wore a familiar air to Tom’s eye even at a distance and before he lifted the countenance which revealed him as Mr. Stamps.
“We ain’t a-gwine to do your job no good to-day, Tom,” he said, benignly. “He’d ‘a’ kicked me out ef I hadn’t ‘a’ bin small—jest same es you was gwine ter that time I come to talk to ye about Sheby. He’s a smarter man than you be, an’ he seed the argyment I hed to p’int out to you. Ye won’t help your job none to-day!”
“I haven’t got a ‘job’ in hand,” Tom answered; “your herds of stock and the Judge’s coal mines and cotton fields are different matters.”
He passed on and saw that when his name was announced the Senator looked up from his work with a fretted movement of the head.
“Mr. De Willoughby of Talbot’s Cross-roads?” he said. Tom bowed. He became conscious of appearing to occupy too much space in the room of a busy man who had plainly been irritated.
“I was told by Judge Rutherford that you had kindly consented to see me,” he said.
The Senator tapped the table nervously with his pencil and pushed some papers aside.
“Well, I find I have no time to spare this morning,” was his brutally frank response. “I have just been forced to give the time which might have been yours to a little hoosier who made his way in, heaven knows how, and refused to be ordered out. He had a claim, too, and came from your county and said he was an old friend of yours.”
“He is not an old enemy,” answered Tom. “There is that much foundation in the statement.”
“Well, he has occupied the time I had meant to give you,” said the Senator, “and I was not prepossessed either by himself or his claim.”
“I think he’s a man to gain a claim,” said Tom; “I’m afraid I’m not.”
“It is fair to warn you that I am not friendly to claims made by the families of men who lived in a hot-bed of secession,” said the Senator. He had been badgered too much this morning, and this big, rather convincing looking applicant worried him. “I have an appointment at the White House in ten minutes.”
“Then this is no place for me,” said Tom. “No man is likely to be friendly to a thing he has no time to talk of. I will bid you good-morning.”
“Good-morning,” returned the Senator, brusquely.
Tom went away feeling that he was a blunderer. The fact was that he was a neophyte and, it was true, did not possess the qualities which make a successful lobbyist. Mr. Stamps had wheedled or forced his way into the great man’s apartment and had persisted in remaining to press his claim until he was figuratively turned out by the shoulders. Big Tom had used only such means to obtain the interview as a gentleman might; he had waited until he was called to take his turn, and so had lost his chance. When he had found the Senator hurried and unwilling to spend time on him he had withdrawn at once, not feeling Mr. Stamps’s method to be possible.
“I suppose I ought to have stayed and buttonholed him in spite of himself,” he thought, ruefully. “I’m a greenhorn; I suppose a man in my place ought to stand his ground whether it’s decent or indecent, and make people listen to what he has to say, and be quite willing to be kicked downstairs after he has said it. I’m a disgrace to my species—and I don’t think much of the species.”
As he was walking through one of the corridors he saw before him two men who were evidently visitors to the place. He gathered this from their leisurely movements and the interest with which they regarded the objects about them. They looked at pictures and remarked upon decorations. One was a man who was unusually well-built. He was tall and moved well and had lightly silvered hair; his companion was tall also, but badly hung together, and walked with a stoop of the shoulders.
Tom walked behind them for some yards before his attention was really arrested, but suddenly a movement of one man’s head seemed to recall some memory of the past. He did not know what the memory was, but he knew vaguely that it was a memory. He followed a few yards further, wondering idly what had been recalled and why he should be reminded of the mountains and the pine-trees. Yes, it was the mountains and pine-trees—Hamlin County, but not the Hamlin County of to-day. Why not the Hamlin County of to-day? why something which seemed more remote? Confound the fellow; he had made that movement again. Tom wished he would turn his face that he might see it, and he hurried his footsteps somewhat that he might come within nearer range. The two men paused with their backs towards him, and Tom paused also. They were looking at a picture, and the taller of the two made a gesture with his hand. It was a long, bony hand, and as he extended it Tom slightly started. It all came back to him—the memory which had been recalled. He smelt the scent of the pines on the hillside; he saw the little crowd of mourners about the cabin door; inside, women sat with bent heads, upon two wooden chairs rested the ends of a slender coffin, and by it stood a man who lifted his hand and said to those about him: “Let us pray.”
The years swept back as he stood there. He was face to face again with the tragic mystery which had seemed to end in utter silence. The man turned his face so that it was plainly to be seen—sallow, rugged, harsh in line. The same face, though older, and perhaps less tragic—the face of the man he had left alone in the awful, desolate stillness of the empty room.
The next moment he turned away again. He and his companion passed round a corner and were gone. Tom made no attempt to follow them.
“There is no reason why I should,” was his thought, “either for Sheba’s sake or his own. She is happy, and he feels his secret safe—whatsoever it may have been. Perhaps he has had time to outlive the misery of it, and it would all be brought to life again.”
But the incident had been a shock. There was nothing to fear from it, he knew; but it had been a shock nevertheless. He did not know the man’s name; he had never asked it. He was plainly one of the many strangers who, in passing through the Capital, went to visit the public buildings. The merest chance might have brought him to the place; the most ordinary course of events might take him away. Tom went back to Dupont Circle in a thoughtful mood. He forgot the claim and the Senator who had had no leisure to hear the statement of his case.
Rupert and Sheba were waiting for his return. Rupert had spent the afternoon searching for employment. He had spent many a long day in the same way and with the same result.
“They don’t want me,” he had said when he came home. “They don’t want me anywhere, it seems—either in lawyers’ offices or dry-goods stores. I have not been particular.”
They had sat down and gazed at each other.
“I sometimes wonder,” said Sheba, “what we shall do when all our money is gone—every penny of it. It cannot last long now. We cannot stay here and we cannot pay our way back to the mountains. What shall we do?”
“I shall go out every day till I find something to do,” said Rupert, with the undiscouraged fervour of youth. “I am not looking for employment for a gentleman, in these days; I am looking for work—just as Uncle Matt is.”
“He chopped some wood yesterday and brought home two dollars,” Sheba said. “He made me take it. He said he wanted to pay his ‘bode.’”
She laughed a little, but her eyes were wet and shining.
Rupert took her face between his hands and looked into it adoringly.
“Don’t be frightened, Sheba,” he said; “don’t be unhappy. Lovely darling, I will take care of you.”
She pressed her soft cheek against his hand.
“I know you will,” she said, “and of Uncle Tom, too. I couldn’t be unhappy—we all three love each other so. I do not believe we shall be unhappy, even if we are poor enough to be hungry.”
So their moment of dismay ended in smiles. They were passing through a phase of life in which it is not easy to be unhappy. Somehow things always brightened when they drew near each other. His observation of this truth was one of Tom’s pleasures. He knew the year of waiting had managed to fill itself with sweetness for them. Their hopes had been alternately raised and dashed to earth; one day it seemed not improbable that they were to be millionaires, the next that beggary awaited them after the dwindling of their small stock of money; but they had shared their emotions and borne their vicissitudes together.
When Tom entered the room they rose and met him with questioning faces.
“Was it good fortune?” they cried. “Did you see him, Uncle Tom? What did he say?”
He told his story as lightly as possible, but it could not be transformed, by any lightness of touch, into an encouraging episode. He made a picture of Stamps sidling through the barely opened door, and was terse and witty at the expense of his own discomfiture and consciousness of incompetence. He laughed at himself and made them laugh, but when he sat down in his accustomed seat there was a shade upon his face.
The children exchanged glances, the eyes of each prompting the other. They must be at their brightest. They knew the sight of their happiness warmed and lightened his heart always.
“He is tired and hungry,” Sheba said. “We must give him a beautiful hot supper. Rupert, we must set the table.”
They had grown used to waiting upon themselves, and their domestic services wore more or less the air of festivities. Sheba ran downstairs to Miss Burford’s kitchen, where Uncle Matt had prepared the evening meal in his best manner. As the repasts grew more and more simple, Matt seemed to display greater accomplishments.
“It’s all very well, Miss Sheba,” he had said once, when she praised the skill with which he employed his scant resources. “It’s mighty easy to be a good cook when you’se got everythin’ right to han’. The giftness is to git up a fine table when you ain’t got nuffin’. Dat’s whar dish yer niggah likes to show out. De Lard knows I’se got too much yere dis ve’y minnit—to be a-doin’ credit to my ’sperience—too much, Miss Sheba.”
He was frying hoe-cake and talking to Miss Burford when Sheba came into the kitchen. He was a great comfort and aid to Miss Burford, and in a genteel way the old lady found him a resource in the matters of companionship and conversation. Her life was too pinched and narrow to allow her even the simpler pleasure of social intercourse, and Matt’s journeys into the world, and his small adventures, and his comments upon politics and social events were a solace and a source of entertainment to her.
Just now he was describing to her the stories he had heard of a celebrated lecturer who had just arrived in the city.
“Whether he’s a ’vivalist or jes’ a plain preacher what folks is runnin’ after, I cayn’t quite make out, ma’am,” he was saying. “I ain’t quite thinkin’ he’s a ’vivalist, but de peoples is a-runnin’ after him shore—an’ seems like dey doin’ it in ev’y city he goes to. Ev’ybody want to heah him—ev’ybody—rich en pore—young en ole. De Rev’end John Baird’s his name, an’ he’s got a fren’ travellin’ with him as they say is like Jonathan was to David in dese yere ole Bible times. An’ I heern tell ev when he rise in de pulpit de people’s jest gets so worked up at what he preach to ’em—dey jest cries an’ rocks de benches. Dat’s what make me think he might be a ’vivalist—cos we all knows dat cryin’ an’ rockin’ an’ clappin’ hands is what makes a ’vival.” He was full of anecdotes concerning the new arrival whose reputation had plainly preceded him.
“He gwine ter preach nex’ Sat’day on ‘’Pentance,’” he said to Sheba, with a chuckle. “Dat’s his big lecture ev’ybody want to hear. De hall shore to be pack full. What I’m a-hopin’ is dat it’ll be pack full er Senators an’ members er Congrest, an’ he’ll set some of ’em a-’pentin’, dey ain’t ’tend to dere business an’ git people’s claims through. Ef I know’d de gen’leman, I’d ax him to menshun dat special an’ pertickler.”
As they sat at supper, Sheba repeated his stories and comments. All the comments were worthy of repetition, and most of the anecdotes were suggestively interesting, illustrating, as they did, the power of a single man over many.
“I should like to go and hear him myself,” she said. “Uncle Tom, have you anything to repent? Rupert, have you? Uncle Tom, you have not forgotten the Senator. You look at me as if you were thinking of something that was not happy.”
“The Senator was not particularly happy,” remarked Tom. “He had just had an interview with Stamps, and he certainly was not happy at the sight of me. He thought he had another on his hands. He’s in better spirits by this time.”
Sheba got up and went to his side of the table. She put her arms round his neck and pressed her cheek against his.
“Forget about him,” she said.
“I am not remembering him particularly,” said Tom, the shade passing from his eyes; “I am remembering you—as you were nineteen years ago.”
“Nineteen years ago!” said Sheba. “I was a baby!”
“Yes,” answered Tom, folding a big arm round her, and speaking slowly. “I saw a man to-day who reminded me of the day you were born. Are you glad you were born, Sheba? that’s what I want to be sure of.”
The two pairs of young eyes met glowing. Tom knew they had met, by the warmth of the soft cheek touching him.
“Yes, I am glad—I am glad—I am glad!” with grateful sweetness.
“And I—and I,” cried Rupert. He sprung up and held out an impetuous boyish hand to Tom. “You know how glad, Uncle Tom—look at her—look at me—see how glad we both are; and it is you—you who have made it so.”
“It’s a pretty big thing,” said Tom, “that two people should be glad they are alive.” And he grasped the ardent hand as affectionately as it was offered.