John March, Southerner

"LINES OF LIGHT ON A SULLEN SEA"

From the first hour of Johanna's attendance March began to mend. Whence she came, whither she went, as she moved in and out so pleasantly, he never thought to ask, and never found out that her bed was a pallet laid on the stair-landing just at his door.

The young bloods down in the street were keenly amused. "Doctor, if he was anybody but John March aw she anybody but Johanna"—the rest was too funny for words. "How is he to-day, anyhow? Improving rap'—well! good fo' that! Come, gentlemen, let's—Come, Shot. Doctor, won't you—" And as they went they all agreed that the dark maiden's invincible modesty was like some "subtle emana-ation," as Shotwell expressed it, which charmed all evil out of the grossest eye.

True it was in the convalescent's case, that while Johanna's mere doings had their curative value, her simple presence had more. Yet her greatest healing was in her words; in what she told him. She only answered questions; but these he lightly plied on any and every trivial matter that promised to lead up—or around—to one subject which seemed to allure him without cessation. Yet always at her first pause after entering upon any phase of this topic, he would say, "But that's not what—hem!—I was speaking of," and starting once more, at any distance away, would begin to steal yet another approach toward the same enticing theme.

So the brief time of her appointed service came to its end, neither the Doctor, nor the convalescent, nor even her young mistress, for one moment imagining what dear delight, yet withal what saintly martyrdom to Johanna, this three days' task had been.

In its last hour, when she, to end all well, prepared and brought up the captive's evening meal, she found him sitting up in bed talking to Henry Fair.

"Doctor thinks I can go down to my office Monday. Yes, I knew what ailed me better than he did. I began to recover the moment I quit trying to convince the Lord that He ought to run this world in my private interest. Ah! Johanna, so this is the last, is it? I'm pow'ful sorry! Mr. Fair, you remember Johanna, don't you?"

Mr. Fair remembered, the maid courtesied, and March, a trifle unduly animated, ran on—"Johanna's the salt of the earth, Mr. Fair. Don't often see best salt that color, do you?" Then dropping his tone—"O! you know, if my chief concern were still, as it was at first, to recover my fortunes, or even to vindicate my abilities, I reckon I could make out to accept defeat—almost. For, really, I'm just about the only sufferer—outwardly, at least. Of course, there's an awful shrinkage here, but all our home people have made net gains—unless it is Proudfit; I—eh—Johanna, you needn't stay in here; only don't go beyond call."

The maid closed the door after her, took her accustomed rocking-chair and needle on the stair-landing, and being quite as human as if she had been white, listened. Fair's words were very indistinct, but March's came through the thin door-panels as clean as rifle-balls. "O! yes," was one of his replies, "I know that with even nothing left but the experiences, I'm a whole world richer, in things that make a real manhood and life, than when I was land-poor with my hundred thousand acres. As far as I am concerned, I can afford to deny myself all the reprisals, and revenges too, that litigations could ever give me. I've got sixty acres of Widewood to begin over with—By Jo'! Garnet, himself, began with less!" He let go a feverish laugh.

"If I come to that," he added, "I've got, besides, a love of study and a talent for teaching, two things he never had." Fair asked a question and he laughed again. "O! no, it was only a passing thought. If anybody 'busts Rosemont wide open' it'll have to be Leggett. O! no, I——" He played with his spoon.

Fair's response must have been complimentary. "Thank you," said March; "why, thank you!" Then the visitor spoke again and the convalescent replied:

"Ah! a 'diligent and vigilant patience'—yes, I don't doubt it would serve me best—provided, my dear sir, it didn't turn out simply a virtue of impotency; or, worse yet, what I once heard called 'the thrifty discretion of a short-winded courage!'"

When Fair responded this time March let him speak long. Johanna bent her ear anxiously. Her patient seemed to be neglecting his food; but as he began to reply she resumed her needle.

"Fair," she heard him say, "—why—why, Fair, that's a mighty handsome offer to come from such a prudent business man as you. My George! sir, men don't often put such valuable freight into a boat that's aground. Why—why, you spoil my talk; I positively don't know what—what to say!" There was a choke in his voice. Fair made some answer which March gratefully cut short.

"O! I wish I could! It hurts me all over and through to decline it. But I must; I've got to! 'Think it over'—O! I've thought it over probably before you ever thought of it at all! I know my capabilities. I'm not in such a fierce hurry for things as I used to be, but I've got what brains I ever had—and spine, too—and I know that even without your offer there's a better chance for me North than here. But—O! it's no use, Fair, I just can't go! I mustn't! Yes. Yes. O! yes, I know all that, but, my dear sir, I can't afford—You know, this Suez soil isn't something I can shake off my shoes as you might. George! I'm part of it! I'm not Quixotic—not a bit! I'm only choosing between two sorts of selfishness, one not quite so narrow as the other; but—I've got to stay here."

Fair, after a short silence, asked if this was his only reason.

"Only reason? Why—why, yes, that's my only reason! To be sure, there's a sense in which—why, conscience! isn't it enough? O! of course, I could think up other considerations, but they're not reasons—I don't allow them to bias me at all! Fact is, I was never before quite so foot-free. Why did you ask? Did you fancy I might be contemplating marriage? O, go 'long! why, my good gracious, Fair, I—it's an honest fact—I haven't even been to see one marriageable girl since I came back from Europe! No, the reason I give is the reason. It covers everything else.

"O! if you are thinking of debts, I could cancel them at least as fast if I went as if I stayed. They're not large, the money debts. O! no; it's—Fair—I spent a year in Europe coaxing men to leave their mother-country for better wages in this. Of course, that was all right. But it brought one thing to my notice: that when our value is not mere wages, it isn't every man who's got the unqualified right to pick up and put out just whenever he gets ready. Look out that window. There's the college where for five years I got my education—at half price!—and with money borrowed here in Suez! Look out this one. Mr. Fair, right down there in those streets truth and justice are lying wounded and half-dead, and the public conscience is being drugged! We Southerners, Fair, don't believe one man's as good as another; we think one man in his right place is worth a thousand who can't fill it. My place is here!—No! let me finish; I'm not fatigued at all! How I'm to meet this issue God only knows, but who'll even try to do it if I don't? Halliday's too far off. Ravenel looks on as silent as a gallows! Proudfit—poor old Proudfit hasn't been sober since the day he got home. Father Tombs has grown timid and slow-sighted, and the whole people, Fair, the whole people! have let themselves be seduced in the purse and are this day betrayed as foully in their fortunes as in their souls!" The speaker ended in a high key. He was trembling with nervous exhaustion. In an effort to jerk higher in the pillow his knee struck the tray, the crockery slid and crashed, and Johanna found him in the middle of the room, fiercely shaking the skirt of his dressing-gown.

"O! never mind me; get the milk out of the bed!"

She saw how overwrought he was, yet turned to obey. Fair, to aid her, snatched away the pillows. A small thing from under them fluttered out upon the carpet and lay before the three. With a despairing murmur the invalid picked it up, and the two men stood facing each other. Fair colored slightly, March slowly crimsoned. Then Fair smiled. March smiled too, but foolishly. Johanna made herself very busy with the bed, but she saw all. Fair pushed forward a rocking-chair, into which March sank. Then with gentle insistence he drew from March's hand the worn photograph—for such it was—leaned against a window and gazed on it, while March turned his brow into the cushioned back of his chair and wept as comfortably as any girl.

Johanna took out the tray and its wreck, and in a moment was back with fresh sheets. March had lain down on the bare mattress and, with his cheek on a pillow, was smiling in mild amusement at Fair's account of a brief talk he had had with Leggett while the train waited at Pulaski City.

"Yes," said March, moving enough to let the bed be made, "he pretends to keep a restaurant there now; but where he gets all the money he spends is more than I can make out, unless it's from men who can't afford to let him tell what he knows."

A servant of the house tapped at the door and said Major Garnet was in the office, waiting for Johanna. March rose to his elbow and gave her a hand.

"Why, I shan't ever know how to be sick without you any mo'!" he said, as her dark fingers slipped timidly from his friendly hold. "Johanna!—now—now, don't you go tellin' things you'd oughtn't to; will you?"

"No, seh," came from the maid slowly, yet with a suspicious readiness quite out of keeping with the limp diffidence of her attitude.

"Hold on a moment, Johanna," he called, as she turned to go. "Just wait an instant—sounds like——" He rose higher. Fair stepped to the west window. Loud words were coming from the sidewalk under it. March started eagerly. "That's Proudfit's——" Before he could finish the bang of a pistol rang, evidently in the office door, another, farther within, roared up through the house, and a third and fourth re-echoed it amid the wailings of Johanna as she flew down the stairs crying:

"Mahs John Wesley! O Lawdy, Lawdy! Mahs John Wesley! Mahs John Wesley!"

At the same instant came Tom Hersey's voice, remote, but clear:

"Stop! Great God! Stop! Don't you see he's dying?"

Fair was already on the staircase and March was whipping on his boots, when Shotwell, coming up by leaps, waved them back into the room. "It's all ova, Mr. Fair. Po' Proudy's gone, John. He fi-ud an' missed, and got Garnet's first bullet in his heart an' the othe's close to it. Garnet's locked himself into Tom Hersey's private room an' sent for Fatheh Tombs, to——"

"Fair!" interrupted March, "go! Go tell her he's safe and will not be—interfered with! I'll make your word good; go, Fair, go!"

But Fair answered with hardly less emotion, "I cannot, March! It isn't a man's errand! It isn't a man's errand!"

"Take Mrs. Ravenel!" cried March, and read quick assent in his friend's face. "But make her go dressed as she is; you've got to outrun rumor! Captain, go tell Tom to give him Firefly, won't you? She's mine, Fair," he continued, following to the stairs; "she's the mare I cured for Bulger; perfectly gentle, only—Fair!—don't touch her with the whip!"

"If you do," drawled Shotwell to Fair, as they hurried down into the lamplight, "you'll think the devil's inside of her with the jimjams. Still, she's lovely as long as you don't. Ah me! this is no time to jest! Po' Proudfit! He leaves a spotless characteh!"

Through the unnatural bustle, amid which Crickwater at the door of the closed office stood answering or ignoring questions and showing his intimates where Proudfit's wild shot had chopped out a large lock of his hair, they went to Hersey's door and so on to the stable. "Garnet's the man to pity, Mr. Fair. I couldn't say it befo' March, who's got family reasons—through his motheh—faw savin' Garnet whateveh he can of his splendid reputaation, but I'm mighty 'fraid they won't be a rag of it left, seh, big enough for a gun-wad! Mr. Fair, you've got a hahd drive befo' you, seh, an' if you'll allow me to suggest it, seh, I think it would be only wise, befo' you staht, faw us to take a drink, seh."

"Thank you," said the Northerner, "I hardly think—Do you suppose Major Garnet's firing those last two shots after——"

"Will ruin him? O Lawd, not that! We all know, and always have, that he's perfectly cra-azy when he's enra-aged. No, my deah seh, Miz Proudfit has confessed! She says——"

"Are you not surprised that Major Garnet was armed?" Fair interrupted.

"O! no, seh, Colonel Proudfit was too much of a gentleman to be lookin' faw a man, with a gun, an' not send him word! And, besides, Miz Proudfit's revela-a-tions——"

But the horse and buggy were ready, and at last March—to whom, as he stood at his window fully dressed, the few moments had seemed an hour—saw Fair drive swiftly by and fade into the gloom. Charlie Champion came toward the hotel, bringing Parson Tombs. March put on his hat, but for many minutes only paced the darkening room. Finally he started for the stairs, and half way down them met the Doctor.

"Why, bless my soul, John," he good-naturedly cried, "this is quite too fast."

"I reckon not, Doctor; I believe I'm well. I don't understand it, but it's so." He endured the Doctor's hand for a moment on his wrist and temples.

"Why, I declare!" laughed the physician with noisy pleasure, "I believe yo' right!" As they descended he explained how such recoveries are possible and why they are so rare, citing from medical annals a case or two whose mention John thought very unflattering.

"I should like to know what's become of Johanna," said March at the foot of the stairs.

"Johanna? O they say she ran all the way to Fannie Ravenel's, and they harnessed up the fast colt and put off for Rosemont, Johanna driving!"

"Why, of course! I might have known it! But"—John stopped—"Why, then, where's Fair?"

"O I saw him. He drove on to overtake 'em. He'll have a job of it!"

"Firefly can do it," said March, picturing the chase to himself. "But I—I wonder what—This is no time—Why—why, what did he want to do it for?"

"O he may have had the best of reasons," said the amiable Doctor, and departed.

Outside a certain door—"Why, John March!" murmured Tom Hersey. The voices of Garnet and Parson Tombs could be heard within. They ceased as the landlord modestly rattled the knob, and when he gave the visitor's name Garnet's voice said:

"Ask him in."

As March entered, only Parson Tombs rose to meet him. He had a large handkerchief in his fingers, his eyes were very red, and he gave his hand in silence. Garnet, too, had been weeping. He shaded his downcast eyes from the lamp. March had determined to give himself no time for feelings, but his voice was suddenly not his own as he began, "Major Garnet," and stopped, while Garnet slowly lifted his face until the light shone on it. March stood still and felt his heart heave between loathing and compassion; for on that lamp-lit face one hour of public shame had written more guilt than years of secret perfidy and sin, and the question rushed upon the young man's mind, Can this be the author of all my misfortunes and the father of?—he quenched the thought and driving back a host of memories said:

"Major, Doctor Coffin has just pronounced me well. I am at your disposal, sir, for anything that ought to be done."

Garnet shaded his eyes again. "Thank you, John," was his subdued reply. "It's such a clear case of self-defence—I hear there will be no arrest. Still, I shall remain here to-night. Johanna's gone home, I believe. There's only one thing, the deepest yearning of my heart, John; but before I ask that boon, I want you to know, John, that I acknowledge my sin! my awful, awful sin of years! O my God! my God! why did I do it?"

Parson Tombs wept again. "He's confessed everything, John," he said with eager tenderness.

"God knows," responded Garnet, "God knows I never concealed it but to save others from misery! and while I concealed it I could not master it! Now I have purged my sin-blackened soul of all its hideous secret and evil purpose! The thorn in my flesh is plucked out and I cast myself on the mercy of God and the charity of his people!"

"Pra-aise Gawd!" murmured Parson Tombs, "no sinneh eveh done that in va-ain!"

"O John," moaned Garnet, "God only knows what I've suffered and must suffer! But it's all right! all right! I pray He may lop off every unfruitful branch of my life—honors, possessions—till nothing is left but Rosemont, the lowly work He called me to, Himself! Let Him make me as one of his hired servants! But, John," he continued while March stood dumb with wonder at his swift loss of subtlety, "I want you to know also that I feel no resentment—I cannot—O I cannot—against her who shares my guilt and shame!"

"Great Heaven!" murmured March, with a start as if to turn away.

"No, thank God! her vanity and jealousy can drive me to no more misdeeds! She made me send Mademoiselle Eglantine to Europe, when she knew I had to sell her husband's stock in both companies to bribe the woman to go! John, the cause of her betraying me to him at last was my faithful refusal to break off my engagement with your mother!"

"Major Garnet, I prefer——"

"Will you tell your mother that, John? It's the one thing you can do for me! Tell her I beseech her in the name of a love——"

"Stop!" murmured March in a voice that quivered with repulsion.

"—A love that has dared all, and lost all, for hers——"

"Stop!" said John again, and Garnet turned a beseeching eye upon the pastor.

"John," tearfully said the old man, "let us not yield to ow feelings when the cry of a soul in shipwreck"—he stopped to swallow his emotions. "Ow penitent brother on'y asks you to bear his message. It's natu'al he should cling to the one pyo tie that holds him to us. O John, 'in wrath remembeh mercy!' An' yet you may be the nearest right, God knows! O brethren, let's kneel and ask Him faw equal love an' wisdom!"

Garnet rose to kneel, but March put out a protesting hand. "I wouldn't do that, sir." The tone was gentle, almost compassionate. "I don't suppose God would strike you dead, but—I wouldn't do it, sir." He turned to go, and, glancing back unexpectedly, saw on Garnet's face a look so evil that it haunted him for years.

BARBARA FINDS THE RHYME

Barbara walked along the slender road in front of Rosemont's grove. The sun was gone. Her father had not arrived yet with Johanna, but she questioned every stir of the air for the sound of their coming. A yearning which commonly lay very still in her bosom and ought in these two long years to have got reconciled to its lovely prison, was up once more in silent mutiny.

With slow self-compulsion she turned toward the house. The dim, vacated dormitories grew large against the fading after-glow. The thrush's song ceased. Remotely from the falling slope beyond the unlighted house the voices of a negro boy and girl, belated in the milking-pen, came to her ear more lightly than the gurgle of the shallow creek so near her feet. Suddenly the cry of the whip-Will's-widow filled the grove—"whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow!"—in headlong importunity until the whole air sobbed and quivered with the overcharge of its melancholy passion. Then as abruptly it was hushed, the echoes died, and Barbara, at the grove gate, recalled the other twilight hour, a counterpart of this in all but its sadness, when, on this spot, she had bidden John March come the next day to show Widewood to Henry Fair.

And now Henry Fair "some day soon," his unexpected letter said, was to come again. And she was letting him come. One of his sweet mother's letters—always so welcome—had ever so delicately hinted a hope that she would do so, the fond mother affectionately imputing to the father's wisdom the feeling that Henry's present life contained more uncertainties than were good for his, or anyone's, future. He was coming at last for her final word, and in her meditations, his patient constancy, like a great ambassador, pleaded mightily in advance.

Henry Fair, gentle, strong, and true, will come; the other never comes. The explanation is very simple; she has made it to Johanna twice within the year: a strained relation—it happens among the best of men—between him and Rosemont's master. Besides, Mr. March, she says, visits nowhere. He is, as Fannie herself testifies, more completely out of all Suez's little social eddies than even the overtasked young mistress of Rosemont, and does nothing day or night but buffet the flood of his adversities. As she reminds herself of these things now, she recalls Fannie's praise of his "indomitable pluck," and feels a new, warm courage around her own heart. For as long as men can show valor, she gravely reflects, surely women can have fortitude. How small a right, at best—how little honest room—there is in this huge world of strifes and sorrows for a young girl's heart to go breaking itself with its own grief and longing.

The right thing is, of course, to forget. She should! She must! But—she has said so every evening and morning for two years. Old man! old woman! do you remember what two years meant when you were in the early twenties? Even yet, with the two years gone, by hard crowding of the hours with cares, as a ship crowds sail or steam, it seems at times as if her forgetting were about to make headway; but just then the unexpected happens—merely the unexpected. O why not the romantic? She hears him praised or blamed; or, as now, he is ill; or she meets him in a dream; or between midnight and dawn she cannot sleep; or, worst of all, by some sad mischance she sees him, close by, in a throng or in a public way—for an instant—and, when it is too late, knows by his remembered look that he wanted to speak; and the flood lifts and sweeps her back, and she must begin again. The daylight hours are the easiest; there is so much to do and see done, and just the clear, lost, silent-hearted mother's ways to follow. One can manage everything but the twilights with their death of day, their hush of birds, the mind gazing back into the past and the heart asking unanswerable questions of the future. For the evenings there are books, though not all; especially not Herrick, any more; nor Tennyson, for it opens of itself at "Mariana," who wept, "I am aweary, aweary. Oh, God, that I were dead!"

Barbara walked again. Moving at a slow pace, so, one can more soberly—She heard wheels. A quarter of a mile away they rumbled on a small bridge and were unheard again, and while she still listened to hear them on the ground others sounded on the bridge. She hurried back to the steps of the house and had hardly reached them when Johanna drove into the grove and Fannie's voice called,

"Is that you, Barb?"

"Yes. Where's pop-a? Has anything happened?"

"He's got to stay in town to-night. Barb," said the visitor, springing to the ground, "Mr. Fair's just behind. He's only come so's to take me back to my baby."

"Fannie, something's happened!"

"Yes, Barb, dear, come into the house."

About midnight—"Doctor, her head hasn't stopped that motion since it touched the pillow," murmured Fannie. Fair had gone back and brought the physician. But the patient was soon drugged to slumber, and Fannie and Fair started for town to return early in the morning. The doctor and Johanna watched out the night. At dawn Fair rose from a sleepless couch.

At sunrise he could hear no sound through March's door; but as he left the hotel he saw Leggett come up from the train, tap at Garnet's door and go in.

Barbara awoke in a still bliss of brain, yet wholly aware of what had befallen.

"Johanna"—the maid showed herself—"has Miss Fannie gone home?"

"Yass'm. But she comin' back. She be here ve'y soon now, I reckon."

Barbara accepted a small cup of very black coffee. When it was drunk, "Johanna," she said, with slow voice and gentle gaze, "were you in the hotel?"

"Yass'm," murmured the maid. "I uz in Mr. March's room. He uz talkin' wid Mr. Fair, an' knock' his suppeh by accident onto de flo', an'"—she withdrew into herself, consulted her conscience and returned. "Miss Barb——"

"What, Johanna?"

Johanna told.

Long after she was done her mistress lay perfectly still gazing into vacancy. But the moment Fannie was alone with her she dragged the kind visitor's neck down to her lips and with unaccountable blushes mingled her tears with bitter moanings.

By and by—"And Fannie, dear, make them stay to breakfast. And thank Mr. Fair for me, as sweetly as you can. I don't know how I can ever repay him!"

"Don't you?" dryly ventured Fannie; but her friend's smile was so sad that she went no farther. Tears sprang to her eyes, as Barbara, slowly taking her hand, said,

"Of course pop-a can't keep Rosemont now. If he tries to begin a new life, Fannie, wherever it is, I shall stay with him."

Fair gave the day mainly to the annual meeting of the trustees at Suez University. The corner-stone was not to be laid until the morrow. March reopened his office, but did almost no work, owing to the steady stream of callers from all round the square coming to wish him well with handshake and laugh, and with jests which more or less subtly implied their conviction that he was somehow master of the hour. When Ravenel came others slipped out, although he pleasantly remarked that they need not, and those who looked in later and saw the two men sitting face to face drew back. "That thing last night," said Weed to Usher, going to the door of their store to throw his quid into the street, "givm the Courier about the hahdest kick in the ribs she evva got." But no one divined Ravenel's errand, unless Garnet darkly suspected it as he waited beside Jeff-Jack's desk for its owner's return, to ask him for ten thousand dollars on a mortgage of his half of Widewood, with which to quiet, he serenely explained, any momentary alarm among holders of his obligations. And even Garnet did not guess that Ravenel would not have telegraphed, as he did, to a bank in Pulaski City in which he was director, to grant the loan, had not John March just declined his offer of a third interest in the Courier.

At evening March and Fair dined together in Hotel Swanee. They took a table at a window and talked but little, and then softly, with a placid gravity, on trivial topics, keeping serious ones for a better privacy, though all other guests had eaten and gone. Only Shotwell, unaware of their presence, lingered over his pie and discussed Garnet's affair with the head waitress, an American lady. He read to her on the all-absorbing theme, from the Pulaski City Clarion; whose editor, while mingling solemn reprobations with amazed regrets, admitted that a sin less dark than David's had been confessed from the depths of David's repentance. In return she would have read him the Suez Courier's much fuller history of the whole matter; but he had read it, and with a kindly smile condemned it as "suspended in a circumaambient air of edito'ial silence."

"I know not what co'se othe's may take, my dea' madam, but as faw me, give me neither poverty naw riches; give me political indispensability; the pa-apers have drawn the mantle of charity ove' 'im, till it covers him like a circus-tent."

"Ah! but what'll his church do?" The lady bent from her chair and tied her slipper.

"My dea' madam, what can she do? She th'ows up—excuse the figgeh—she th'ows up, I say, her foot to kick him out; he tearfully ketches it in his ha-and an' retains it with the remahk, 'I repent!' What can his church do? She can do jest one thing!"

"What's that?" asked the lady, gathering his dishes without rising.

"Why she can make him marry Miz Proudfit!"

The lady got very red. "Captain Shotwell, I'll thaynk you not to allude to that person to me again, seh!" She jerked one knee over the other and folded her arms.

"My dea' madam! I was thoughtless! Fawgive me!" The Captain stood up. "I'm not myself to-day. Not but what I'm sobeh; but I—oh, I'm in trouble! But what's that to you?" He pulled his soft hat picturesquely over his eyes, and starting out, discovered March and Fair. He looked sadly mortified as he saluted them, but quickly lighted up again and called March aside.

"John, do you know what Charlie Champion's been doin'? He's been tryin' to get up a sort o' syndicate to buy Rosemont and make you its pres—O now, now, ca'm yo'self, he's give it up; we all wish it, but you know, John, how ow young men always ah; dead broke, you know. An' besides, anyhow, Garnet may ruin Rosemont, but, as Jeff-Jack says, he'll neveh sell it. It's his tail-holt. Eh—eh—one moment, John, I want to tell you anotheh thing. You've always been sich a good friend—John, I've p'posed to Miss Mahtha-r again, an' she's rejected me, as usual. I knew you'd be glad to hear it." He smiled through his starting tears. "But she cried, John, she did!—said she'd neveh ma' anybody else!"

"Ah, Shot, you're making a pretty bad flummux of it!"

"Yes, John, I know I am—p'posin' by da-aylight! It don't work! But, you know, when I wait until evenin' I ain't in any condition. Still, I'll neveh p'pose to her by da-aylight again! I don't believe Eve would 'a' ma'd Adam if he'd p'posed by da-aylight."

The kind Captain passed out. He spent the night in his room with our friend, the commercial traveler, who, at one in the morning, was saying to him for the tenth time,

"I came isstantly! For whareverss Garness's troubl'ss my trouble! I can't tell you why; thass my secret; I say thass my secret! Fill up again; this shocksh too much for me! Capm—want to ask you one thing: Muss I be carried to the skies on flow'ry bedge of ease while Garnet fighss to win the prise 'n' sails through bloody seas? Sing that, Capm! I'll line it! You sing it!" Shotwell sang; his companion wept. So they closed their sad festivities; not going to bed, but sleeping on their arms, like the stern heroes they were.

"Why, look at the droves of ow own people!" laughed Captain Champion at the laying of the corner-stone. And after it, "Yes, Mr. Fair's address was fi-ine! But faw me, Miz Ravenel, do you know I liked just those few words of John March evm betteh?"

"They wa'n't so few," drawled Lazarus Graves, "but what they put John on the shelf."

The hot Captain flashed. "Politically, yes, seh! On the top shelf, where we saave up ow best men faw ow worst needs, seh!"

Fair asked March to take a walk. They went without a word until they sat down on the edge of a wood. Then Fair said,

"March, I have a question to ask you. Why don't you try?"

"Fair, she won't ever let me! She's as good as told me, up and down, I mustn't. And now I can't! I'm penniless, and part of her inheritance will be my lost lands. I can't ignore that; I haven't got the moral courage! Besides, Fair, I know that if she takes you, there's an end of all her troubles and a future worthy of her—as far as any future can be. What sort of a fellow would I be—Oh, mind you! if I had the faintest reason to think she'd rather have me than you, I George! sir——" He sprang up and began to spurn the bark off a stump with a strength of leg that made it fly. "Fair, tell me! Are you going to offer yourself, notwithstanding all?"

"Yes. Yes; if the letter I expect from home to-morrow, and which I telegraphed them to write, is what I make no doubt it will be; yes."

March gazed at his companion and slowly and soberly smiled. "Fair," he softly exclaimed, "I wish I had your head! Lord! Fair, I wish I had your chance!"

"Ah! no," was the gentle reply, "I wish one or the other were far better."

A third sun had set before Barbara walked again at the edge of the grove. Two or three hours earlier her father had at last come home, and as she saw the awful change in his face and the vindictive gleam with which he met her recognition of it, she knew they were no longer father and daughter. The knowledge pierced like a slow knife, and yet brought a sense of relief—of release—that shamed her until she finally fled into the open air as if from suffocation. There she watched the west grow dark and the stars fill the sky while thoughts shone, vanished, and shone again in soft confusion like the fireflies in the grove. Only one continued—that now she might choose her future. Her father had said so with an icy venom which flashed fire as he added, "But if you quit Rosemont now, so help me God, you shall never own it, if I have to put it to the torch on my dying bed!"

She heard something and stepped into hiding. What rider could be coming at this hour? John March? Henry Fair? It was neither. As he passed in at the gate she shrank, gasped, and presently followed. Warily she rose up the front steps, stole to the parlor blinds, and, peering in, saw her father pay five crisp thousand dollar bills to Cornelius Leggett.

In her bed Barbara thought out the truth: that Cornelius still held some secret of her father's; that in smaller degree he had been drawing hush money for years; and that he had concluded that any more he could hope to plunder from the blazing ruin of his living treasury must be got quickly, and in one levy, ere it fell. But what that secret might be she strove in vain to divine. One lurking memory, that would neither show its shape nor withdraw its shadow, haunted her ringing brain. The clock struck twelve; then one; then two; and then she slept.

And then, naturally and easily, without a jar between true cause and effect, the romantic happened! The memory took form in a dream and the dream became a key to revelation. When Johanna brought her mistress's coffee she found her sitting up in bed. On her white lap lay the old reticule of fawn-skin. She had broken the clasp of its inner pocket and held in her hand a rudely scrawled paper whose blue ink and strutting signature the unlettered maid knew at a glance was from her old-time persecutor, Cornelius. It was the letter her father had dropped under the chair when she was a child. Across its face were still the bold figures of his own pencil, and from its blue lines stared out the secret.

Garnet breakfasted alone and rode off to town. The moment he was fairly gone Johanna was in the saddle, charged by her mistress with the delivery of a letter which she was "on no account to show or mention to anyone but——"

"Yass'm," meekly said Johanna, and rode straight to the office of John March.

A kind greeting met her as she entered, but it was from Henry Fair, and he was alone. He, too, had been reading a letter, a long one in a lady's writing, and seemed full of a busy satisfaction. Mr. March, he said, had ridden out across the river, but would be back very shortly. "Johanna, I may have to go North to-night. I wonder if it's too early in the day for me to call on Miss Garnet?"

"No-o, seh," drawled the conscientious maid, longing to say it was. "H-it's early, but I don't reckon it's too early," and was presently waiting for Mr. March, alone.

Hours passed. He did not come. She got starving hungry, yet waited on. Men would open the door, look in, see or not see her sitting in the nearest corner, and close it again. About two o'clock she slipped out to the Hotel Swanee, thinking she might find him at dinner. They said he had just dined and gone to his office. She hurried back, found it empty, and sat down again to wait. Another hour passed, and suddenly the door swung in and to again, and John March halted before his desk. He did not see her. His attitude was as if he might wheel and retrace his steps.

Mrs. March had broken off her engagement promptly. But when Garnet, by mail, still flattered and begged, the poetess, with no notion of relenting, but in her love of dramatic values and the gentle joy of perpetuating a harrowing suspense, had parleyed; and only just now had her tyrannical son forced a conclusion unfavorable to the unfortunate suitor. So here in his office March smote his brow and exclaimed,

"O my dear mother! that what is best for you should be so bad for me! Ahem! Why—why, howdy, Johanna? Hmm!"

With silent prayers and tremors the girl watched him read the letter. At the first line he sank into his chair, amazed and pale. "My Lord!" he murmured, and read on. "O my Lord! it can't be! Why, how?—why—O it shan't be!—O—hem! Johanna, you can go'long home, there's no answer; I'll be there before you."

At the post-office March reined in his horse while Deacon Usher brought out a drop letter from Henry Fair. But he galloped as he read it, and did not again slacken speed till he turned into the campus—except once. At the far edge of the battle-field, on that ridge where in childhood he had first met Garnet, he overtook and passed him now. As he went by he slowed to a trot, but would not have spoken had Garnet not glared on him like a captured hawk. The young man's blood boiled. He stood up in his stirrups.

"Don't look at me that way, sir; I've just learned your whole miserable little secret and expect to keep it for you." He galloped on. When, presently, he looked behind, Garnet had turned back—to find Leggett. That search was vain. Cornelius and his "Delijah," kissing their hands to their creditors, were already well on their way into that most exhilarating of all conundrums, the wide, wide world.

From Pulaski City Garnet returned on the early morning train to Suez, intending to ride out to Rosemont without a moment's delay. But on the station platform he came face to face with John March. They went to the young man's office and sat there, locked in, for an hour. Another they used up in the court-house and in Ravenel's private office with him between them in the capacity of an attorney. Yet when the three men parted Ravenel had neither asked nor been told what the matter was which had occasioned the surprising legal transaction that they had just completed.

"Now," said Garnet, briskly, "I must hurry home, for I want to leave on the evening train."

He rode out alone upon the old turnpike and over the knoll where Suez still hopes some day to build the reservoir, and reached the spot where he and his young adjutant picked blackberries that first day we ever saw them. There he stopped, and looking across the land to the roofs of distant Rosemont, straightened up in the saddle with a great pride, and then, all at once, let go a long groan of anguish and, covering his face, heaved with sobs that seemed as though each tore a separate way up from his heart. Then, as suddenly, he turned his horse's head and rode slowly back. Twice, as he went, he handled something in the pocket of his coat's skirt, and the third time drew it out—a small repeater. He did not raise the weapon; he only looked down at it in his trembling hand, the old thimbles still in the three discharged chambers, the lead peeping from the other two, and, thinking of the woman who shared his ruin, said in his mind, "One for each of us."

But it never happened so. He often wishes, yet, that it had, although he is, and has been for years, a "platform star;" "the eloquent Southern orator, moralist and humorist"—yes, that's the self-same man. He's booked for the Y. M. C. A. lecture course in your own town this season. His lecture, entitled "Temptation and How to Conquer It," is said to be "a wonderful alternation of humorous and pathetic anecdotes, illustrative, instructive and pat." I have his circular. His wife travels with him. They generally put up at hotels; tried private hospitality the first season, but it didn't work, somehow.

They have never revisited Dixie; and only once in all these years have they seen a group of Suez faces. But a season or two ago—I think it was ninety-three—in Fourteenth Street, New York, wife and I came square upon Captain Charlie Champion, whom I had not seen for years, indeed, not since his marriage, and whom my wife, never having been in Suez, did not know. Still he would have us up to dinner at his hotel with Mrs. Champion. He promised me I should find her "just as good and sweet and saane as of old, and evm prettieh!" Plainly the hearty Captain was more a man than ever, and she had made him so! He told us we should meet Colonel Ravenel and also—by pure good luck!—Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fair. You may be sure we were glad to go.

Ravenel had to send us word from the rotunda begging us to go in to dinner without him and let him join us at table. Champion neglected his soup, telling us of two or three Suez people. "Pettigrew?—O he left Suez the year Rosemont chaanged haynds. Po' Shot!—he's ow jail-keepeh, now, you know—he says one day, s'e, 'Old Pettie may be in heavm by now, but I don't believe he's happy; he'll neveh get oveh the loss of his sla-aves!'"

Fair spoke of John March, saying his influence in that region was not only very strong but very fine. Whereto Champion responded,

"—Result is we've got a betteh town and a long sight betteh risin' generation than we eveh had befo'. I don't reckon Mr. Fair thinks we do the dahkeys justice. John says we don't and I don't believe we do. When it comes to that, seh, where on earth does the under man get all his rights? But we come neareh toe it in the three counties than anywheres else in Dixie, and that I know."

I dropped an interrogative hint as to how March stood with Ravenel.

The Captain smiled. "They neveh cla-ash. Ravenel's the same mystery he always was, but not the same poweh; his losin' Garnet the way he did, and then John bein' so totally diffe'nt, you know—John don't ofm ask Jeff-Jack to do anything, but he neveh aasks in vaain.—John's motheh? Yes, she still lives with him.—No, she ve'y seldom eveh writes much poetry any mo', since heh book turned out to be such a' unaccountable faailu'e. She jest lives with him, and really"—he dropped his voice—"you'd be amaazed to see how much she's sort o' sweetened and mellered under the influence of—Ah! there's Colonel Ravenel——"

He broke off with a whisper of surprise. At a table near the door Garnet's wife sat smiling eagerly after her husband as if it was at her instigation he had risen and effusively accosted Ravenel; and both she and Garnet knew that we all saw, when Ravenel said with an unmoved face and colorless voice,

"No. No, I'm perfectly sure I never saw you before, sir." It may have been wholly by chance, but in drawing a handkerchief as he spoke he showed the hand whose thumb he had lost in saving Garnet's life.

The "star" hurried back to his seat and resumed conversation with the partner of his fate—for a moment. But all at once she rose and went out, he following, leaving their meal untouched.

Wife, as it was right she should, fell in love with Mrs. Fair on the spot, and agreed with me by stolen glances I knew how to interpret, that she was as lovely and refined a woman as she had ever met. Boston had not removed that odd, winning drawl so common in the South, and which a Southerner learns to miss so in the East. But when wife tried to have her talk about Suez and its environs she looked puzzled for an instant and then, with a light of mild amusement in her smile, said,

"O!—I never saw Suez; I was born and brought up in Chicago."

"No," said Ravenel, "it's Mrs. Champion who can tell you all about Suez."

"That's so!" cried Champion, and turning to his wife, added, "What the Saltehs don't know about Suez ain't wuth knowin', is it, Mahtha?"

That night I told wife this whole story. As I reached this point in it she interposed a strong insinuation that I am a very poor story-teller.

"I thought," she continued, "I thought I had heard you speak of John March as a married man, father of vast numbers of children."

To the last clause I objected and she modified it. "But, anyhow, you leave too much to be inferred. I want to know what Garnet's fatal secret was; and—well, I don't care especially what became of the commercial traveler, but I do want to hear a little about Barbara! Did she marry the drummer?"

I said no, apologized for my vagueness and finished, in effect, thus:

Before Barbara came down-stairs, at Rosemont, that day, to see Mr. March, she sent him Leggett's letter. Cornelius had caught scent of the facts in it from Uncle Leviticus's traditions and had found them in the county archives, which he had early learned the trick of exploring. The two Ezra Jaspers, cousins, one the grantee of Widewood, the other of Suez, had had, each, a generous ambition to found a college. He of Suez—the town that was to be—selected for his prospective seat of learning a parcel of sixty acres close against the western line of Widewood. Whereupon the grantee of Widewood good-naturedly, as well as more wisely, "took up" near the Suez tract the sixty acres which eventually became Rosemont. Both pieces lay on the same side of the same creek and were both in Clearwater County, as was much, though not the most, of Widewood. Moreover, both were in the same "section" and "range," and in their whole description differed scarcely more than by an N and an S, one being in the northwest and the other in the southwest corner of the same township. On the ill-kept county records these twin college sites early got mixed. When Garnet founded Rosemont his friends in office promised to tax that public benefaction as gently as they dared, and he was only grateful and silent, not surprised, when his tax-bill showed no increase at all. But while Rosemont was still small and poor and he seriously embarrassed by the cost of an unsuccessful election, came this letter of Leggett's to open his eyes and complete his despair. There across it were his own pencilings of volume and page to show that he had seen the record. In one of his mad moments, and in the hopeful conviction that the mulatto would soon get himself shot or hung, he paid him to keep still. From that time on, making Leggett's silence just a little more golden than his speech, he had, "in bad faith," as the lawyers say, been pouring all his gains, not worse spent, into property built on land belonging to the Widewood estate; that is, into Rosemont. When Judge March found his Clearwater taxes high, he was only glad to see any of his lands growing in value. When John came into possession, Garnet, his party being once more in power, had cunningly arranged for Rosemont not to be taxed on its improvements, but only on its land, and March discovered nothing. In the land boom Garnet kept the odd sixty acres, generally supposed to be a part of Widewood, out of sight, and induced John to deed it to his mother. But when John came back from Europe landless, there arose the new risk that he might persuade her to sell the odd sixty acres, and, on looking into the records to get its description, find himself and his mother the legal owners of Rosemont.

"That's why the villain was so anxious to marry her!" said John to himself audibly as he paced up and down in the Rosemont parlor.

"Mr. March," said Barbara's slow voice. She had entered as she spoke.

"Miss—Miss Garnet!"

"Please be seated." There was a tempest in her heart, but her words were measured and low. "You were very kind to come." She dragged her short sentences and at the same time crowded them upon each other as if afraid to let him speak. He sat, a goodly picture of deferential attention, starving to see again her old-time gaze; but she kept her eyes on the floor. "Mr. March, of course—of course, this is terrible to—me. I only say it because I don't want to seem heartless to—others—when I tell you I thank God—O please don't speak yet, sir"—her hands trembled—"I thank God this thing has come to light. For my dear father's own sake I am glad, gladder than I can tell, that he has lost Rosemont. The loss may save him. But I'm glad, too, Mr. March, that it's come to you—please hear me—and to your mother. Of course I know your lost Widewood isn't all here; but so much of it is. I wish——"

March stopped her with a gesture. "I will not—O I cannot—hear any more! I'm ashamed to have let you say so much! Rosemont is yours and shall stay yours! That's what I came to say. Two properties were exchanged by accident when each was about as near worthless as the other, and your mother's family and my father's have lived up to the mistake and have stood by it for three generations. I will not take it! My mother will not! She renounced it this morning! Do you understand?"

Barbara gave a start of pain and murmured, "I do." Her heart burned with the knowledge that he was waiting for her uplifted glance. He began again.

"The true value of Rosemont never came out of Widewood. It's the coined wealth of your mother's character and yours!" He ceased in a sudden rage of love as he saw the colors of the rose deepen slowly on the beautiful, half-averted face, and then, for very trepidation, hurried on. "O understand me, I will not be robbed! Major Garnet cannot have Rosemont. But no one shall ever know I have not bought it of him. And it shall first be yours; yours in law and trade as it is now in right. Then, if you will, you, who have been its spirit and soul, shall keep it and be so still. But if you will not, then we, my mother and I, will buy it of you at a fair price. For, Miss—Miss——"

"Barb—" she murmured.

"O thank you!" cried he. "A thousand times! And a thousand times I promise you I'll never misunderstand you again! But hem!—to return to the subject; Miss Barb—I—O well, I was going to add merely that—that, eh—I—hem!—that, eh—O—However!" She raised her eyes and he turned crimson as he stammered, "I—I—I've forgotten what I was going to say!"

"I can neither keep Rosemont nor sell it, Mr. March. It's yours. It's yours every way. It's yours in the public wish; my father told me so last night. And there's a poetic justice——"

"Poetic—O!"

"Mr. March, didn't we once agree that God gives us our lives in the rough for us to shape them into poetry—that it's poetry, whether sad or gay, that makes alive—and that it's only the prose that kills?"

"Oh! do you remember that?"

"Yes." Her eyes fell again. "It was the time you asked me to use your first name."

"O! Miss Barb, are you still going to hold that against me?"

"Rosemont should be yours, Mr. March. It rhymes!" She stood up.

"No! No, no! I give it to you!" he said, springing to his feet.

"Will you, really, Mr. March?" She moved a step toward the door.

"O Miss Barb, I do! I do!"

"But your mother's consent——"

A pang of incertitude troubled his brave face for an instant, but then he said, "Oh, there can be no doubt! Let me go and get it!" He started.

"No," she falteringly said, "don't do it."

"Yes! Yes! Say yes! Tell me to go!" He caught her hand beseechingly. As their eyes gazed into each other's, hers suddenly filled and fell.

"Go," was her one soft word. But as he reached the door another stopped him:

"John——"

He turned and stood trembling from head to foot, his brow fretted with an agony of doubt. "Oh, Barbara Garnet!" he cried, "why did you say that?"

"Johanna told me," she murmured, smiling through her tears.

He started with half-lifted arms, but stopped, turned, and with a hand on his brow, sighed, "My mother!"

But a touch rested on his arm and a voice that was never in life to be strange to him again said, "If you don't say 'our mother,' I won't call you John any——"

Oh! Oh! Oh! men are so rough sometimes!

THE END.

BONAVENTURE. A Prose Pastoral of Arcadian Louisiana.

DR. SEVIER.

THE GRANDISSIMES. A Story of Creole Life.

OLD CREOLE DAYS.

STRANGE TRUE STORIES OF LOUISIANA. Illustrated

OLD CREOLE DAYS. Cameo Edition with Etching

OLD CREOLE DAYS.

MADAME DELPHINE.

THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. Illustrated from drawings by Pennell.

THE SILENT SOUTH, Together with the Freedman's Case in Equity and the Convict Lease System. With Portrait.