The Reverend John Baird and his friend the Reverend Lucien Latimer were lodged in a quiet house in a quiet street. The lecturing tour had been fatiguing, and Baird was glad of such repose as he could secure. In truth, the excitement and strain of his work, the journeying from place to place, the hospitalities from which he could not escape, had worn upon him. He had grown thinner, and often did not sleep well at night. He used to find himself lying awake repeating to himself mechanically words from his own lecture. “Repentance is too late,” his voice would whisper to the darkness. “Repentance cannot undo.”
His audiences found him an irresistible force. He had become more than the fashion of the hour; he was its passion. People liked to look at as well as to hear him. He was besieged by lion-hunters, overwhelmed with attentions in each town or city he visited. Reporters followed him, interviewers besought appointments, agreeable people invited him to their houses, intrusive people dogged him. Latimer stood between him and as many fatigues as he could. He transacted business for him, and interviewed interviewers; and he went to tiring functions.
“When I enter a room without you, and make your excuses, they must make the most of my black face; and they make the most of it, but they don’t love me,” he said. “Still it is a thing to be borne if it saves you when you need all your forces. What does it matter? I have never expected to be smiled at for my own sake as they smile at me for yours.”
In these days of close companionship each found in each new qualities increasing the tie between them. Latimer felt himself fed by the public affection surrounding the man who was his friend. He was thrilled by the applause which thundered forth at his words; he was moved by the mere sense of his success, and the power he saw him unknowingly exercise through mere physical charm.
“I am nearer being a happy, or at least a peaceful, man than I had ever thought to be,” he said to Baird; “your life seems to fill mine, and I am less lonely.” Which was indeed a truth.
On the evening of the day on which big Tom had caught his glimpse of the two strangers in the corridor of the Capitol, Baird dined at the house of the Senator, whose adverse mood had promised such small encouragement to the De Willoughby claim. And in the course of the meal the host spoke of both claim and claimants.
“The man is a sort of Colossus,” he said, “and he looked all the heavier and bigger because my last visitor had been the smallest and most insignificant of the hoosier type.”
“Is this man a hoosier?” was asked.
“No. He has lived among the most primitive, and Rutherford tells me is a sort of county institution; but he is not a hoosier. He has a large, humane, humorous face, and a big, humorous, mellow voice. I should rather have liked the fellow, confound him, if I hadn’t lost my patience before he came into the room.”
“Did he tell you the story of the claim?” enquired his married daughter.
“No, I didn’t let him. I was feeling pretty sick of claims, and I had no time.”
“Oh, father, I wish you had let him tell it,” exclaimed the pretty young woman. “The truth is, I am beginning to be interested in that claim myself. I am in love with Judge Rutherford and his stories of Jenny and Tom Scott. His whole soul is bound up in ‘pushing this thing through’—that’s what he calls it. He is the most delightful lobbyist I ever met. He is like a bull in a china shop—though I don’t believe anyone ever saw a bull in a china shop.”
“He does not know enough to give his friends a rest,” said the Senator. “If he was not such a good fellow he would bore a man to death. He bores many a man as it is, and people in office won’t stand being bored. He’s too ingenuous. The shrewd ones say his ingenuousness is too good to be true. He can’t keep De Willoughby’s virtues out of his stories of him—and a man’s virtues have nothing much to do with his claim.”
“I met him in one of the squares yesterday,” said Mrs. Meredith, “and he almost cried when he spoke of the claim. He told me that everything was going wrong—that it was being pushed aside by all sorts of things, and he had lost heart. His eyes and nose got quite red, and he had to wink hard to keep back the tears.”
“The fellow believes in it, at any rate,” said the Senator; “he has that to support him.”
“He believes in everything,” said Mrs. Meredith, “and it would have touched your heart to hear him talk about the claimants. There is a young nephew and a beautiful girl creature, who is big Mr. De Willoughby’s adopted daughter. She is not a claimant, it is true, but they all adore each other, and the nephew is in love with her; and if the claim goes through they will be happy forever afterwards. I saw the nephew once, and he was a beautiful boy with Southern eyes and a charming expression. Upon the whole, I think I am in love with the young couple, too. Their story sounded like a pastoral poem when Judge Rutherford told it.”
“Suppose you tell it to us, Marion,” said the Senator, with a laugh, and a glance round the table. “It may appeal to our feelings and advance the interests of the claim.”
“Pray, tell it, Mrs. Meredith,” Baird put in; “the mere mention of it has appealed to my emotions. Perhaps Senator Harburton and Mr. Lewis will be moved also, and that will be two votes to the good—perhaps more.”
“The charm of it is that it is a story without a plot,” Mrs. Meredith said. “There is nothing in it but youth and love and innocence and beauty. It is Romeo and Juliet without the tragedy. Romeo appeared on a moonlight night in a garden, and Juliet stood upon a balcony among roses—and their young souls cried out to each other. It is all so young and innocent—they only want to spend their lives together, like flowers growing side by side. They want nothing but each other.”
“And the claim,” added the Senator.
“They cannot have each other if the claim fails. They will have to starve to death in each other’s arms like the ‘Babes in the Wood’; I am sure the robins will come and cover them with leaves.”
“But the big uncle,” her father asked.
“Poor fellow,” Mrs. Meredith said. “Judge Rutherford is finest when he enlarges on him. He says, over and over again, as if it were a kind of argument, ‘Tom, now—Tom, he wants those two young ones to be happy. He says nature fixed it all for them, so that they could be happy—and he doesn’t want to see it spoiled. He says love ain’t treated fair, as a rule, and he wants to see it given a show—a real show.’”
At least one pair of deeply interested listener’s eyes were fixed upon her. They were the Reverend John Baird’s.
“It might be a beautiful thing to see,” he said. “One does not see it. There seems a fate against it. The wrong people meet, or the right ones do not until it is too late.”
“I should like to see it myself,” said the host, “but I am afraid that the argument—as an argument—would not support a claim on the Government.”
“I am going to see the claimants and hear all the arguments they can bring forward,” was Mrs. Meredith’s conclusion. “I want to see Romeo and Juliet together.”
“May I go with you?” asked Baird.
Latimer had not come in when he returned to their lodgings. He also had been out to spend the evening. But it was not many minutes before Baird heard his latch-key and the opening of the front door. He came upstairs rather slowly.
“You are either ill,” Baird said, when he entered, “or you have met with some shock.”
“Yes; it was a shock,” was the answer. “I have been dragged back into the black pit of twenty years ago.”
“Twenty years?” said Baird.
“I have seen the man who—was with us in the hillside cabin, through that night she died. He passed me in the street.”
Baird stood still and looked at him without speaking. What was there to be said?
“He is such a noticeable looking fellow,” Latimer went on, “that I felt sure I could find out who he was. In the mountains they called him ‘Big Tom D‘Willerby.’ His real name is De Willoughby, and he has been here for some months in pursuit of a claim, which is a great deal talked about.”
“The great De Willoughby claim?” said Baird. “They talked of it to-night at dinner.”
Latimer tapped the table nervously with the fingers of an unsteady hand.
“He may be living within a hundred yards of us—within a hundred yards,” he said. “We may cross each other’s path at any moment. I can at least know—since fate has brought us together again—I should never have sought him out—but one can know whether—whether it lived or died.”
“He has with him,” said Baird, “a girl of nineteen who is his adopted daughter. I heard it to-night. She is said to be a lovely girl who is in love with a lovely boy who is De Willoughby’s nephew. She is happy.”
“She is happy,” murmured Latimer, biting his livid lips. He could not bring himself back to the hour he was living in. He could only see again the bare little room—he could hear the cries of terrified anguish. “It seems strange,” he murmured, “that Margery’s child should be happy.”
It was not difficult to discover the abiding place of the De Willoughby claimants. The time had come when there were few who did not know who occupied the upper floor of Miss Burford’s house near the Circle. Miss Burford herself had gradually become rather proud of her boarders, and, as the interest in the case increased, felt herself becoming a prominent person.
“If the claim goes through, the De Willoughby family will be very wealthy,” she said, genteelly. “They will return to their Southern home, no doubt, and restore it to its fawmah magnificence. Mr. Rupert De Willoughby will be lawd of the mannah.”
She spent many hours—which she felt to be very aristocratic—in listening to Uncle Matt’s stories of the “old De Willoughby place,” the rice-fields in “South Ca’llina,” and the “thousands of acres of gol’ mines” in the mountains. There was a rich consolation in mere conversation on the subject of glories which had once had veritable substance, and whose magnitude might absolutely increase if fortune was kind. But it was not through inquiry that Latimer discovered the whereabouts of the man who shared his secret. In two days’ time they met face to face on the steps of the Capitol.
Latimer was going down them; big Tom was coming up. The latter was lost in thought on his affairs, and was not looking at such of his fellow-men as passed him. Suddenly he found himself one or two steps below someone who held out a hand and spoke in a low voice.
“De Willoughby!” the stranger exclaimed, and Tom lifted his eyes and looked straight into those of the man he had seen last nineteen years before in the cabin at Blair’s Hollow.
“Do you know me again?” the man asked. “It’s a good many years since we met, and I am not as easy to recognise as you.”
“Yes, I know you,” answered big Tom, grasping the outstretched hand kindly. “I saw you a few days ago and knew you.”
“I did not see you,” said Latimer. “And you did not speak to me?”
“No,” answered Tom, slowly; “I thought it over while I walked behind you, and I made up my mind that it might do you no good—and to hold back would do none of us any harm.”
“None of us?” questioned Latimer.
Big Tom put a hand on his shoulder.
“Since you spoke to me of your own free will,” he said, “let’s go and have a talk. There are plenty of quiet corners in this place.”
There were seats which were secluded enough, though people passed and repassed within sight of them. People often chose such spots to sit and talk together. One saw pairs of lovers, pairs of politicians, couples of sightseers.
They found such a seat and sat down. Latimer could not well control the expression his face wore.
“None of us?” he said again.
Tom still kept a friendly hand on his shoulder.
“She is a beautiful young woman, though she will always seem more or less of a child to me,” he said. “I have kept her safe and I’ve made her happy. That was what I meant to do. I don’t believe she has had a sad hour in her life. What I’m sick of is seeing people unhappy. I’ve kept unhappiness from her. We’ve loved each other—that’s what we’ve done. She’s known nothing but having people about who were fond of her. They were a simple, ignorant lot of mountain hoosiers, but, Lord! they loved her and she loved them. She’s enjoyed the spring, and she’s enjoyed the summer, and she’s enjoyed the autumn and the winter. The rainy days haven’t made her feel dull, and the cold ones haven’t made her shiver. That’s the way she has grown up—just like a pretty fawn or a forest tree. Now her young mate has come, and the pair of them fell deep in love at sight. They met at the right time and they were the right pair. It was all so natural that she didn’t know she was in love at first. She only knew she was happier every day. I knew what was the matter, and it made me happy just to look on. Good lord! how they love each other—those children. How they look at each other every minute without knowing they are doing it; and how they smile when their eyes meet—without knowing why. I know why. It’s because they are in paradise—and God knows if it’s to be done I’m going to keep them there.”
“My God!” broke from Latimer. “What a heart you have, man!” He turned his face to look at him almost as if in reverent awe. “Margery’s child! Margery’s child!” he repeated to himself. “Is she like her mother?” he asked.
“I never saw her mother—when she was happy,” Tom answered. “She is taller than her mother and has eyes like a summer morning sky. It’s a wonderful face. I sometimes think she must be like—the other.”
“I want to see her,” said Latimer. “She need know nothing about me. I want to see her. May I?”
“Yes. We are staying here to push our claim, and we are living near Dupont Circle, and doing it as cheaply as we can. We haven’t a cent to spare, but that hasn’t hurt us so far. If we win our claim we shall be bloated bondholders; if we lose it, we shall have to tramp back to the mountains and build a log hut, and live on nuts and berries until we can raise a crop. The two young ones will set up a nest of their own and live like Adam and Eve—and I swear they won’t mind it. They’d be happy rich, but they’ll be happy poor. When would you like to come and see her?”
“May I come to-morrow?” asked Latimer. “And may I bring a friend with me? He is the human being who is nearest to me on earth. He is the only living soul who knows—what we know. He is the Reverend John Baird.”
“What!” said Tom. “The man who is setting the world on fire with his lectures—the ‘Repentance’ man?”
“Yes.”
“She’ll like to see him. No one better. We shall all like to see him. We have heard a great deal of him.”
They did not part for half an hour. When they did Latimer knew a great deal of the past. He knew the story of the child’s up-growing, with the sun rising from behind one mountain and setting behind another; he seemed to know the people who had loved and been familiar with her throughout her childish and girlish years; he knew of the fanciful name given her in infancy, and of the more fanciful one her primitive friends and playmates had adopted. He knew the story of Rupert, and guessed vaguely at the far past in which Delia Vanuxem had lived and died.
“Thank God I saw you that day!” he said. “Thank God I went to you that night!” And they grasped hands again and went their separate ways.
Latimer went home and told Baird of the meeting and of the appointment for the following day.
“I felt that you would like to see the man,” he said. “He is the finest, simple being in the world. Soul and body are on a like scale.”
“You were right in thinking I should like to see him,” answered Baird. “I have thought of him often.” He regarded his friend with some anxiety.
“To meet her face to face will be a strange thing,” he added. “Do you think you can hide what you must feel? It will not be easy—even for me.”
“It will not be easy for either of us—if she looks at us with Margery’s eyes. You will know them. Margery was happy, too, when the picture you have seen was made.”
That—to see her stand before them in her youth and beauty, all unknowing—would be a strange thing, was the thought in the mind of each as they walked through the streets together, the next evening. The flare of an occasional street-lamp falling on Latimer’s face revealed all its story to his companion, though it might not have so revealed itself to another. Baird himself was wondering how they should each bear themselves throughout the meeting. She would be so wholly unconscious—this girl who had always been happy and knew nothing of the past. To her they would be but a middle-aged popular lecturer and his unattractive-looking friend—while each to himself was a man concealing from her a secret. They must eliminate it from their looks, their voices, their air. They must be frank and courteous and conventional. Baird turned it all over in his mind. When they reached the house the second-story windows were lighted as if to welcome them. Matt opened the door for them, attired in his best and bowing low. To receive such guests he felt to be an important social event, which seemed to increase the chances of the claim and point to a future when distinguished visitors would throng to a much more imposing front door. He announced, with an air of state, that his master and young mistress were “receivin’,” and took ceremonious charge of the callers. He had brushed his threadbare coat and polished each brass button singly until it shone. An African imagination aided him to feel the dignity of hospitality.
The sound of a girl’s voice reached them as they went upstairs. They glanced at each other involuntarily, and Latimer’s breath was sharply drawn. It was not the best preparation for calmness.
A glowing small fire was burning in the stove, and, plain and bare as the room was, it was filled with the effect of brightness. Two beautiful young people were laughing together over a book, and both rose and turned eager faces towards the door. Big Tom rose, too, and, advancing to meet the visitors, brought the girl with him.
She was built on long and supple lines, and had happy eyes and lovely bloom. The happy eyes were Margery’s, though they were brown instead of harebell blue, and looked out from a face which was not quite Margery’s, though its smile was hers. Latimer asked himself if it was possible that his manner wore the aspect of ordinary calm as he stood before her.
Sheba wondered at the coldness of his hand as she took it. She was not attracted by his anxious face, and it must be confessed that his personality produced on her the effect it frequently produced on those meeting him for the first time. It was not he who was the great man, but she felt timid before him when he spoke to her.
No one was shy of Baird. He produced his inevitable effect also. In a few minutes he had become the centre of the small company. He had made friends with Rupert, and launched Tom in conversation. Sheba was listening to him with a brightness of look charming to behold.
They sat about the table and talked, and he led them all back to the mountains which had been seeming so far away. He wanted to hear of the atmosphere, the life, the people; and yet, as they answered his queries and related anecdotes, he was learning from each one something bearing on the story of the claim. When Tom spoke of Barnesville and Judge Rutherford, or Rupert of Delisleville and Matt, their conversation was guided in such manner that business details of the claim were part of what was said. It was Tom who realised this first and spoke of it.
“We are talking of our own business as if it was the one subject on earth,” he said. “That’s the worst of people with a claim. I’ve seen a good many of them since I’ve been in Washington—and we are all alike.”
“I have been asking questions because the subject interests me, too,” said Baird. “More people than yourselves discuss it. It formed a chief topic of conversation when I dined with Senator Milner, two nights ago.”
“Milner!” said Tom. “He was the man who had not time to hear me in the morning.”
“His daughter, Mrs. Meredith, was inquiring about you. She wanted to hear the story. I shall tell it to her.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Tom; “if you tell it, it will have a chance.”
“Perhaps,” Baird laughed. “I may be able to help you. A man who is used to audiences might be of some practical value.”
He met Sheba’s eyes by accident. A warm light leaped into them.
“They care a great deal more than they will admit to me,” she said to him, when chance left them together a few minutes later, as Tom and Rupert were showing Latimer some books. “They are afraid of making me unhappy by letting me know how serious it will be if everything is lost. They care too much for me—but I care for them, and if I could do anything—or go to anyone——”
He looked into her eyes through a curious moment of silence.
“It was not all jest,” he said after it, “what I said just now. I am a man who has words, and words sometimes are of use. I am going to give you my words—for what they are worth.”
“We shall feel very rich,” she answered, and her simple directness might have been addressed to a friend of years’ standing. It was a great charm, this sweet acceptance of any kindness. “But I thought you were going away in a few days?”
“Yes. But I shall come back, and I shall try to set the ball rolling before I go.”
She glanced at Latimer across the room.
“Mr. Latimer—” she hesitated; “do you think he does not mind that—that the claim means so much for us? I was afraid. He looked at me so seriously——”
“He looked at you a great deal,” interposed Baird, quickly. “He could not help it. I am glad to have this opportunity to tell you—something. You are very like—very like—someone he loved deeply—someone who died years ago. You must forgive him. It was almost a shock to him to come face to face with you.”
“Ah!” softly. “Someone who died years ago!” She lifted Margery’s eyes and let them rest upon Baird’s face. “It must be very strange—it must be almost awful—to find yourself near a person very like someone you have loved—who died years ago.”
“Yes,” he answered. “Yes—awful. That is the word.”
When the two men walked home together through the streets, the same thought was expressed again, and it was Latimer who expressed it.
“And when she looked at me,” he said, “I almost cried out to her, ‘Margery, Margery!’ The cry leaped up from the depths of me. I don’t know how I stopped it. Margery was smaller and more childlike—her eyes are darker, her face is her own, not Margery’s—but she looks at one as Margery did. It is the simple clearness of her look, the sweet belief, which does not know life holds a creature who could betray it.”
“Yes, yes,” broke from Baird. The exclamation seemed involuntary.
“Yet there was one who could betray it,” Latimer said.
“You cannot forget,” said Baird. “No wonder.”
Latimer shook his head.
“The passing of years,” he said, “almost inevitably wipes out or dims all things; but sometimes—not often, thank Fate—there comes a phase of suffering in some man or woman’s life which will not go. I once knew a woman—she was the kind of woman people envy, and whose life seems brilliant and full; it was full of the things most people want, but the things she wanted were not for her, and there was a black wound in her soul. She had had a child who had come near to healing her, and suddenly he was torn out of her being by death. She said afterwards that she knew she had been mad for months after it happened, though no one suspected her. In the years that followed she dared not allow herself to speak or think of that time of death. ‘I must not let myself—I must not.’ She said this to me, and shuddered, clenching her hands when she spoke. ‘Never, never, never, will it be better. If a thousand years had passed it would always be the same. One thought or word of it drags me back—and plunges me deep into the old, awful woe. Old—it is not old—it never can be old. It is as if it had happened yesterday—as if it were happening to-day.’ I know this is not often so. But it is so with me when a thing drags Margery back to me—drags me back to Margery. To-night, Baird; think what it is to-night!”
He put a shaking hand on Baird’s hand, hurrying him by the unconscious rapidity of his own pace.
“Think what it is to-night,” he repeated. “She seems part of my being. I cannot free myself. I can see her as she was when she last looked at me, as her child looked at me to-night—with joyful bright eyes and lips. It was one day when I went to see her at Boston. She was doing a little picture, and it had been praised at the studio. She was so happy—so happy. That was the last time.”
“Don’t, don’t,” cried Baird; “you must not call it back.”
“I am not calling it back. It comes, it comes! You must let me go on. You can’t stop me. That was the last time. The next time I saw her she had changed. I scarcely knew how—it was so little. The brightness was blurred. Then—then comes all the rest. Her growing illness—the anxiousness—the long days—the girl at the mills—the talk of those women—the first ghastly, damnable fear—the nights—the lying awake!” His breath came short and fast. He could not stop himself, it was plain. His words tumbled over each other as if he were a man telling a story in delirium.
“I can see her,” he said. “I can see her—as I went into her room. I can see her shaking hands and lips and childish, terrified eyes. I can feel her convulsive little fingers clutching my feet, and her face—her face—lying upon them when she fell down.”
“I cannot bear it,” cried Baird; “I cannot bear it.” He had uttered the same cry once before. He had received the same answer.
“She bore it,” said Latimer, fiercely. “That last night—in the cabin on the hillside—her cries—they were not human—no, they did not sound human——”
He was checked. It was Baird’s hand which clutched his arm now—it seemed as if for support. The man was swaying a little, and in the light of a street-lamp near them he looked up in a ghastly appeal.
“Latimer,” he said. “Don’t go on; you see I can’t bear it. I am not so strong as I was—before I began this work. I have lost my nerve. You bring it before me as it is brought before yourself. I am living the thing. I can’t bear it.”
Latimer came back from the past. He made an effort to understand and control himself.
“Yes,” he said, quite dull; “that was what the woman I spoke of told me—that she lived the thing again. It is not sane to let one’s self go back. I beg your pardon, Baird.”
“It’s a curious job, that De Willoughby claim,” was said in a committee-room of the House, one day. “It’s beginning to attract attention because it has such an innocent air. The sharp ones say that may be the worst feature of it, because ingenuousness is more dangerous than anything else if a job is thoroughly rotten. The claimants are the most straightforward pair the place has ever seen—a big, humourous, well-mannered country man, and a boy of twenty-three. Rutherford, of Hamlin County, who is a monument of simplicity in himself, is heart and soul in the thing—and Farquhar feels convinced by it. Farquhar is one of the men who are not mixed up with jobs. Milner himself is beginning to give the matter a glance now and then, though he has not committed himself; and now the Reverend John Baird, the hero of the platform, is taking it up.”
Baird had proved his incidental offer of aid to have been by no means an idle one. He had been obliged to absent himself from Washington for a period, but he had returned when his lecture tour had ended, and had shown himself able in a new way. He was the kind of man whose conversation people wish to hear. He chose the right people and talked to them about the De Willoughby claim. He was interesting and picturesque in connection with it, and lent the topic attractions. Tom had been shrewdly right in saying that his talk of it would give it a chance.
He went often to the house near the Circle. Latimer did not go with him, and had himself explained his reasons to big Tom.
“I have seen her,” he said. “It is better that I should not see her often. She is too much like her mother.”
But Baird seemed to become by degrees one of the household. Gradually—and it did not take long—Tom and he were familiar friends. They had long talks together, they walked side by side through the streets, they went in company to see the men it was necessary to hold interviews with. Their acquaintance became an intimacy which established itself with curious naturalness. It was as if they had been men of the same blood, who, having spent their lives apart, on meeting, found pleasure in the discovery of their relationship. The truth was that for the first time in his life big Tom enjoyed a friendship with a man who was educated and, in a measure, of the world into which he himself had been born. Baird’s world had been that of New England, his own, the world of the South; but they could comprehend each other’s parallels and precedents, and argue from somewhat similar planes. In the Delisleville days Tom had formed no intimacies, and had been a sort of Colossus set apart; in the mountains of North Carolina he had consorted with the primitive and uneducated in good-humoured, even grateful, friendliness; but he had mentally lived like a hermit. To have talked to Jabe Doty or Nath Hayes on any other subjects than those of crops and mountain politics or sermons would have been to bewilder them hopelessly. To find himself in mental contact with a man who had lived and thought through all the years during which he himself had vegetated at the Cross-roads, was a wonderful thing to him. He realised that he had long ago given up expecting anything approaching such companionship, and that to indulge in it was to live in a new world. Baird’s voice, his choice of words, his readiness and tact, the very carriage of his fine, silvering head, produced on him the effect of belonging to a new species of human being.
“You are all the things I have been missing for half a lifetime,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was I was making up my mind to going without—but it was such men as you.”
On his own part, Baird felt he had made a rich discovery also. The large humour and sweetness, the straightforward unworldliness which was still level-headed and observing, the broad kindliness and belief in humanity which were so far from unintelligent or injudicious, were more attractive to him than any collected characteristics he had met before. They seemed to meet some strained needs in him. To leave his own rooms, and find his way to the house whose atmosphere was of such curious, homely brightness, to be greeted by Sheba’s welcoming eyes, to sit and chat with Tom in the twilight or to saunter out with him with an arm through his, were things he soon began to look forward to. He began also to realise that this life of home and the affections was a thing he had lived without. During his brief and wholly unemotional married life he had known nothing like it. His years of widowerhood had been presided over by Mrs. Stornaway, who had assumed the supervision of his child as a duty. Annie had been a properly behaved, rather uninteresting and unresponsive little person. She had neat features and a realisation of the importance of respectability and the proprieties which was a credit to Willowfield and her training. She was never gay or inconsequent or young. She had gone to school, she had had her frocks lengthened and been introduced at tea-parties, exactly as had been planned for her. She never committed a breach of discretion and she never formed in any degree an element of special interest. She greatly respected her father’s position as a successful man, and left it to be vaguely due to the approbation of Willowfield.
Big Tom De Willoughby, in two wooden rooms behind a cross-roads store, in a small frame house kept in order by a negro woman, and in the genteel poverty of Miss Burford’s second floor, had surrounded himself with the comforts and pleasures of the affections. It was not possible to enter the place without feeling their warmth, and Baird found himself nourished by it. He saw that Rupert, too, was nourished by it. His young good looks and manhood were developing under its influence day by day. He seemed to grow taller and stronger. Baird had made friends with him, too, and was with them the night he came in to announce that at last he had got work to do.
“It is to sell things from behind a counter,” he said, and he went to Sheba and lifted her hand to his lips, kissing it before them all. “We know a better man who has done it.”
“You know a bigger man who has done it,” said Tom. “He did it because he was cut out for a failure. You are doing it because you are cut out for a success. It will be a good story for the reporters when the claim goes through, my boy.”
Baird perceived at once that it was a good story, even at this particular period—a story which might be likely to arouse curiosity and interest at a time when the awakening of such emotions was of the greatest value. He told it at the house of a magnate of the Supreme Court, the next night. He had a varied and useful audience of important politicians and their wives and daughters, the latter specially fitted to act as mediums of transmission to other audiences. He told the anecdote well. It was a good picture, that of the room on Miss Burford’s upper floor, the large claimant smiling like a benign Jove, and the handsome youngster bending his head to kiss the girlish hand as if he were doing homage to a queen.
“I think his feeling was that his failure to get a better thing was a kind of indignity done her,” Baird explained. “He comes of a race of men who have worshipped women and beauty in a romantic, troubadour fashion; only the higher professions, and those treated in a patrician, amateur style, were possible to them as work. And yet, as he said, a better man than himself had done this same thing. What moves one is that he has gone out to find work as if he had been born a bricklayer. He tells me they are reaching the end of all they depend on.”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Senator Milner to his daughter, a few days afterwards; “this is going to be a feminine claim. There was a time when I swore I wouldn’t touch it, but I foresee what is going to happen. I’m going to give in, and the other opposers are going to give in, and in the end the Government will give in. And it will be principally because a force of wives and daughters has marshalled itself to march to the rescue. No one ever realises what a power the American woman is, and how much she is equal to accomplishing. If she took as much interest in politics as English women do, she would elect every president and control every party. We are a good-natured lot, and we are fond of our womenkind and believe in them much more than other nations do. They’re pretty clever and straight, you know, as well as being attractive, and we can’t help realising that they are often worth listening to. So we listen, and when they drive a truth home we are willing to believe in it. If the feminine halves of the two Houses decide that the De Willoughby claim is all right, they’ll prove it to us, and there you are.”
“I believe we can prove it to you,” answered Mrs. Meredith. “I went to see the people, and you could prove anything straightforward by merely showing them to the Houses in session. They could not conceal a disingenuous thought among them—the delightful giant, the boy with the eyelashes, the radiant girl, and the old black man put together.”
In the meantime Judge Rutherford did his honest best. He had been too sanguine not to do it with some ruefulness after the first few months. During the passage of these few months many of his ingenuous ideals had been overthrown. It had been borne in upon him that honest virtue was not so powerful a factor as he had believed. The obstacles continually arising in his pathway were not such as honest virtue could remove. The facts that the claim was “as straight as a string,” and that big Tom De Willoughby was the best fellow in Hamlin were bewilderingly ineffective. When prospects seemed to shine they might be suddenly overshadowed by the fact that a man whose influence was needed, required it to use for himself in other quarters; when all promised well some apparently unexplainable obstacle brought things to a standstill.
“Now you see it and now you don’t,” said Tom, resignedly. “That’s the position. This sort of thing might go on for twenty years.”
He was not aware that he spoke prophetically; yet claims resting on as solid a basis as his own passed through the same dragging processes for thirty years before they were finally settled. But such did not possess the elements of unprofessional picturesqueness this particular one presented told to its upholders and opposers.
Uncle Matt himself was to be counted among these elements. He had made himself as familiar and popular a figure in the public places of the Capital as he had been in Delisleville. He made friends in the market-house and on the steps of the Capitol and the Treasury and the Pension Office; he hung about official buildings and obtained odd jobs of work, his grey wool, his polished air of respectfulness, his readiness and amiability attracted attention and pleased those who came in contact with him. People talked to him and asked him friendly questions, and when they did so the reason for his presence in Washington and the importance of the matter which had brought his young master to the seat of government were fully explained.
“I belongs to de gen’elmen dat’s here tendin’ to de De Willoughby claim, sah,” he would say. “Co’se, sah, you’ve heern ’bout it up to de Capitol. I’se yere waitin’ on Marse Rupert De Willoughby, but co’se he don’ live yere—till ye gets his claim through—like he do in de ole family mansh’n at Delisleville—an’ my time hangs heavy on my han’s, cos I got so much ledger—so I comes out like dish yer—an’ takes a odd job now an’ agen.”
It was not long before he was known as the De Willoughby claimant, and loiterers were fond of drawing him out on the subject of the “gol’ mines.” He gathered a large amount of information on the subjects of claims and the rapid methods of working them. He used to come to Tom sometimes, hot and excited with his struggles to comprehend detail. “What all dish yer ’bout Marse Rupert’s granpa‘n’ bein’ destructively disloyal? Dar warn’t no disloyal ’bout it. Ef dar was a fault to be foun’ with the old Judge it was dat he was mos’ too loyal. He couldn’ hol’ in, an’ he qu’ol with mos’ ev’y gen’elman he talk to. He pass shots with one or two he had a disagreement with. He pass shots with ’em. How’s de Guv’ment gwine call a gen’elman ‘destructively disloyal’ when he ready any minit to pass shots with his bes’ fren’s, ef dey don’ ’gree with his pol’tics—an’ his pol’tics is on de side er Marse Ab’am Lincoln an’ de Yankees?”
The phrase “constructively disloyal” rankled in his soul. He argued about it upon every possible occasion, and felt that if the accusation could be disproved the De Willoughby case would be triumphantly concluded, which was in a large measure true.
“I steddies ’bout dat thing day an’ night,” he said to Sheba. “Seems like dar oughter be someone to tes’ify. Ef I had de money to travel back to Delisleville, I’d go an’ try to hunt someone up.”
He was seated upon the steps of a Government building one afternoon, discussing his favourite subject with some of his coloured friends. He had been unusually eloquent, and had worked himself up to a peroration, when he suddenly ceased speaking and stared straight across the street to the opposite side of the pavement, in such absorption that he forgot to close his mouth.
He was gazing at an elderly gentleman with a hook nose and the dashing hat of the broad brim, which was regarded as being almost as much an insignia of the South as the bonnie blue flag itself.
Uncle Matt got up and shuffled across the street. He had become unconsciously apish with excitement. His old black face worked and his hands twitched.
He was so far out of breath when he reached the stranger’s side that he could scarcely make himself heard, as, pulling his hat off, he cried, agitatedly:
“Doctah! Doctah Atkinson, sah! Doctah Williams Atkinson!”
The stranger did not hear him distinctly, and waved him off, evidently taking him for a beggar.
“I’ve nothing for you, uncle,” he said, with condescending good-nature.
Uncle Matt found some of his breath, though not enough to steady his voice. But his strenuousness was almost passionate. “Doctah Williams Atkinson,” he said, “I ain’t beggin’, Doctah Atkinson, sah; on’y axin’ if I might speak a few words to you, sah!” His shrewd insistance on the name was effective.
The elderly gentleman turned and looked at him in surprised questioning.
“How do you know me?” he said. “This is the first time I have been in Washington—and I’ve not been here an hour.”
“I knowed you, Doctah Atkinson, sah, in Delisleville, Delisle County. Ev’ybody knowed you, Doctah! I was dar endurin’ er de war. I was dar de time you—you an’ Judge De Willoughby passed shots ’bout dat Confed’ate flag.”
“What do you want?” said Dr. Atkinson, somewhat unsmilingly. These were days when stories of the Confederate flag were generally avoided. Northerners called it the rebel flag.
Matt had had the discretion to avoid this mistake. He was wild with anxious excitement. Suddenly here had appeared a man who could give all the evidence desired, if he would do so. He had left Delisleville immediately on the close of the war and had not been heard of. He might, like so many, be passing on to some unknown point, and remain in the city only between trains. There was no time to find any better qualified person than himself to attend to this matter. It must be attended to upon the spot and at this moment. Uncle Matt knew all the incongruities of the situation. No one could have known them better. But a sort of hysteric courage grew out of his desperation.
“Doctah Williams Atkinson, sah!” he said. “May I take de liberty of walking jes’ behin’ you an’ axin’ you a question. I mustn’t keep you standin’. I beg you to ’scuse me, sah. I kin talk an’ walk at de same time.”
Dr. Williams Atkinson was an amenable person, and Matt’s imploring old darky countenance was not without its pathos. He was so evidently racked by his emotions.
“What is it all about?” he enquired.
Matt stood uncovered and spoke fast. The hand holding his hat was shaking, as also was his voice.
“I’m nothin’ but a ole niggah man, Doctah Atkinson, sah,” he said. “It ain’t for myself I’se intrudin’ on ye; it’s cos dar wasn’t time to go fer Marse De Willoughby that could talk it like it oughter be. I jes’ had to push my ole niggah self in, fear you’d be gone an’ we’d nevah set eyes on you agin.”
“Walk along by me,” said the Doctor. “What about the De Willoughbys; I thought they were all dead.”
“All but Marse Thomas and Marse Rupert. Dey’s yere ’tendin’ to de claim. Has you done heern ’bout de claim, Doctah Atkinson?”
“No,” the Doctor answered. “I have been in too far out West.”
Whereupon Matt plunged into the story of the “gol’ mines,” and the difficulties which had presented themselves in the pathway of the claimant, and the necessity for the production of testimony which would disprove the charge of disloyalty. The detail was not very clear, but it had the effect of carrying Dr. Williams Atkinson back to certain good old days in Delisleville, before his beloved South had been laid low and he had been driven far afield to live among strangers, an alien. For that reason he found himself moved by the recital and listened to it to its end.
“But what has this to do with me?” he asked. “What do you want of me?”
“When I seed you, sah,” Uncle Matt explained, “it all come back to me in a minnit, how you an’ de Judge pass shots ’bout dat flag; how you axed him to a dinner-party, an’ dar was a Confed’ate officer dar—an’ a Confed’ate flag hung up over de table, an’ de Judge when he seed it he ’fused p’int blank to set down to de table, an’ it ended in you goin’ out in de gyardin’ an’ changin’ shots.”
“Yes, damn it all,” cried Dr. Atkinson, but melted the next moment. “The poor old fellow is dead,” he said, “an’ he died in disgrace and without friends.”
“Yes,” Uncle Matt protested, eagerly; “without a single friend, an’ all ’lone ’ceptin’ of Marse Rupert—all ’lone. An’ it was ’cos he was so strong for de Union—an’ now de Guv’ment won’t let his fambly have his money ’cos dey’s tryin’ to prove him destructively disloyal—when he changed shots with his bes’ friend ’cos he wouldn’t set under de Confed’ate flag.”
A grim smile wakened in Dr. Atkinson’s face.
“What!” he said; “do you want me to explain to the Government that the old scamp would have blown my brains out if he could?”
“Doctah Atkinson, sah,” said Uncle Matt, with shrewd gravity, “things is diff’rent dese days, an’ de Guv’ment don’t call dem gen’elmen scamps as was called dat in de Souf.”
He looked up under the broad brim of his companion’s hat with impassioned appealing.
“I jes’ ’member one thing, sah,” he said; “dat you was a Southern gen’elman, and when a enemy’s dead a Southern gen’elman don’t cherish no harm agin him, an’ you straight from Delisleville, an’ you deed an’ heerd it all, an’ de Guv’ment ken see plain enough you’s no carpet-bag jobber, an’ ef a gen’elman like you tes’ify, an’ say you was enemies—an’ you did pass shots count er dat flag, how’s dey gwine talk any more about dis destructive disloyal business? How dey gwine ter do it?”
“And I am to be the means of enriching his family—the family of an obstinate old fool, who abused me like a pickpocket and spoiled a dress-coat for me when dress-coats were scarce.”
“He’s dead, Doctah Williams Atkinson, sah, he’s dead,” said Matt. “It was mighty lonesome the way he died, too, in dat big house, dat was stripped by de soldiers, an’ ev’ybody dead belonging to him—Miss De Willoughby, an’ de young ladies, an’ Marse Romaine, an’ Marse De Courcy—no one lef but dat boy. It was mighty lonesome, sah.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Dr. Atkinson, reflectively. After a few moments’ silence, he added, “Whom do you want me to tell this to? It may be very little use, but it may serve as evidence.”
Uncle Matt stopped upon the pavement.
“Would you let me ’scort you to Senator Milner, sah?” he said, in absolute terror at his own daring. “Would you ’low me to ’tend you to Senator Grove? I knows what a favior I’se axin’. I knows it doun to de groun’. I scarcely dars’t to ax it, but if I loses you, sah, Marse Thomas De Willoughby an’ Marse Rupert may lose de claim. Ef I lose you, sah, seems mos’ like I gwine to lose my mind.”
There were a thousand chances to one that Senator Milner might not be where Uncle Matt hoped to find him; there were ten thousand chances to one that he might be absorbingly engaged; there were uncountable chances against them obtaining an interview with either man, and yet it so happened they had the curious good luck to come upon Senator Milner absolutely without searching for him. It was rather he who came upon them at one of the entrances of the Capitol itself, before which stood his daughter’s carriage. Mrs. Meredith had spent the morning in the Senate, being interested in the subject under debate. She was going to take her father home to lunch, and as she was about to enter her carriage her glance fell upon the approaching figures of Uncle Matt and his companion.
“Father,” she said, “there is the faithful retainer of the De Willoughby claimants, and there is not a shadow of a doubt that he is in search of you. I am convinced that he wishes to present that tall Southerner under the big hat.”
In a moment’s space Uncle Matt was before them. The deprecatory respect implied by his genuflections could scarcely be computed.
“Senator Milner, sah,” he said, “Doctah Williams Atkinson of Delisleville has had de kindness to say he do me de favior to come yeah, sah, to tes’ify, sah——”
The large hat was removed by its owner with a fine sweep. “The old fellow thinks I can do his people a service, Senator,” explained Dr. Atkinson. “He is the servant of the De Willoughby claimants, and it seems there has been some question of Judge De Willoughby’s loyalty. During the war, sir, he was called disloyal by his neighbours, and was a much hated man.”
Uncle Matt’s lips were trembling. He broke forth, forgetting the careful training of his youth.
“Dar wasn’t a gen’elman in de county,” he cried, “dar wasn’t a gen’elman in de State, mo’ hated an’ ’spised an’ mo’ looked down on.”
The lean Southerner nodded acquiescently. “That’s true,” he said. “It’s quite true. He was a copperhead and a firebrand. We detested him. He insulted me at my own table by refusing to sit down under the Southern flag, and the matter ended with pistols.”
“This is interesting, by Jove,” said the Senator, and he looked from Uncle Matt to his capture. “I should like to hear more of it.”
“Will you confer a pleasure on me by coming home to lunch with us?” said Mrs. Meredith, who had begun to look radiant. “I am interested in the De Willoughby claim; I would give a great deal to see my father entirely convinced. He has been on the verge of conviction for some time. I want him to hear the story with all the details. I beg you will let us take you home with us, Dr. Atkinson.”
“Madame,” replied Dr. Williams Atkinson, with an eighteenth century obeisance, “Judge De Willoughby and I lived in open feud, but I am becoming interested in the De Willoughby claim also. I accept your invitation with pleasure.” And they drove away together.