Albert seemed in an amiable mood as, divesting himself of his outer garments, he drew up a chair by the fire, offered Seth a cigar from his case and lighted one himself. He examined Seth’s face by the flame of the match, as the latter lighted his cigar, and appeared to be satisfied with the inspection.
“Sit down here,” he said pleasantly. “I want a good long talk with you. It was too bad to keep you waiting so long, but there was no help for it. I couldn’t see the people in New York that I wanted to see until to-day, and it was only by good fortune that I caught the train as it was. Then we were delayed on the road, of course. If an engineer on this one-horse line should ever get a train through on time I believe he’d have a fit, just from the shock of the thing. And then I had to wake up the man at the livery stable in Thessaly—fancy his being asleep at eight o’clock!—and he would only bring me as far as the foot of the hill, because he had been up to a dance all the previous night. But of course, in my position now, running for office, I couldn’t complain. Beside, I ought to be used to all these little delights of rural existence by this time.”
Albert stretched his feet out comfortably on the rail of the stove, and leaned back in his chair with an air of enjoyment. He had been growing very stout this past year, Seth noticed, and the bald spot on his crown had visibly spread. He seemed unwontedly good-natured too—a natural and proper accompaniment to increasing obesity.
“But all this has nothing to do with my asking you to come here, has it? Did Workman raise any objections to your coming?”
“No, of course not, after he read your letter.”
The lawyer smiled complacently: “I thought that letter would fetch him. Of course, my boy, the harshness of the letter was for effect on him, not on you. It simply gave you a chance to say you had got to come.”
Seth did not find himself wholly clear on this point, but he nodded assent. Albert looked at him, and seemed a trifle annoyed at having the conversation all to himself, but he went on after a moment’s pause, speaking now with good humored gravity:
“First of all, I ought to tell you how proud I have been of your fine progress on the Chronicle. I doubt if there is another young man of your age in the State who has done so much climbing in so short a time. I take a real satisfaction in thinking that you are my brother. I can’t tell you how often I say to myself: ‘Albert Fairchild, the best thing you ever did in your life, or ever will do, was to give that boy a chance.’”
This was gall and wormwood to the young man. He had almost succeeded in regaining the composure so abruptly scattered by Albert’s unexpected arrival. The fluttering agitation came back now, and brought with it a painful sense of shame and self-reproach as Albert’s words recalled the scene which his entrance had interrupted. Seth did not look his brother in the face, but murmured some commonplace of gratitude. He was glad that there was a red shade on the lamp; it might conceal his flush of humiliation.
Albert went on: “But you were not invited here so peremptorily just to hear this. Brotherly pride and affection are things that don’t need words—that can be taken for granted—are they not?”
Seth tried to smile, and said, “Yes, of course they are.”
“Well, youngster, I am taking them for granted in your case. Mind, as I said in my letter, I am not saying a word about gratitude. I don’t want the thing to be put on that footing at all. Brothers ought to be able to help each other, and all that, without lugging in the question of gratitude. I am talking to you as one man should to another who bears the same name, and was of the same mother. By George! poetry, isn’t it? Well, the point is this. The time has come when you can help me, help me immensely. I am not in this fight for myself alone. Personally I care very little about going to Congress. But I have got the family to consider, and I am in a position now where I can make a ten-strike for it. A good deal of it I have created myself. These countrymen up here in Dearborn County fancy they are shrewd politicians, but it has taken me, almost a novice in politics, less than two years to get the whole machinery right under my thumb. It’s in the blood, I tell you! There wasn’t another manager in this whole section that could hold a candle to the old Senator, in his day,—and if he could keep track of things now I imagine he’d admit that his grandson was no slouch.”
Albert chuckled quietly at the slang word, the expressiveness of which pleased him, and at the vision of the satisfaction of the departed ancestor which it suggested. He proceeded:
“I can’t tell you all my plans, but I am in a big combination. I have made use of my large connections as a lawyer in New York to arrange some things which would open your eyes if you knew them. It is all settled that I am going on to a Committee which will be worth while, I can tell you. And then, once started in the thing, with my grandfather’s name back of me, there is no telling where I may not climb. A name that has figured in the blue book as ours has is a tremendous power. The Republic derides heredity, but the public believes in it. It is human nature, my boy. And in this rehabilitation of the family name you have as much concern as I have—in fact more than I have—for you will enjoy even more than I shall the fame and wealth I am going to get out of this thing, for the family.”
“Where does the wealth come in, Albert? There is no money honestly to be made in politics.” Seth had forgotten his earlier embarrassment now, and the spirit of dispute was rising within him.
“My dear fellow,” said the elder brother, comfortably contemplating the rings of cigar smoke he was making, “to the wise there is money everywhere. The word ‘honesty’ in politics is a purely relative term, just as it is in your line, or in law, or in medicine. If we lawyers strictly graded our charges by the net value of our services to our clients, if doctors refused to make all calls upon patients that were not altogether necessary, and based their bills rigidly upon the actual good they had done—by George! the poor-houses would have to be enlarged. Take your own business, for instance, or I ought to call it a profession, too, I suppose. Are editors invariably candid with their readers, do you think? Do they always tell the disagreeable truth about people they make their money from? And don’t they have an open hand behind the back about the same as other folks do? Occasionally, I admit, an ass like our brother John does drift into the profession, and retains his childhood belief that the moon is made of green cheese. But I have noticed that such fellows as he, who run their papers on an exalted moral plane, generally come around to borrow money from the ungodly, toward the close of the year, to make their accounts balance. I am sorry to see that John and Ansdell have filled your head with all this nonsense. A newspaper man tearing his shirt in defense of financial fastidiousness in politics presents rather a comical spectacle, if you only knew it.”
“You have no right at all to say that!” Seth answered hotly. “I believe firmly that the newspaper men of this country, considering their influence and the great temptation to make money out of it, are as honest a body of men as you can find in America. This conventional talk about their venality is the cruellest kind of libel, and if you knew them as I do you wouldn’t lend yourself to circulating it.”
“Oh, I am not entirely without acquaintance in this white-winged profession of yours,” replied the lawyer, smilingly. “I know Mr. Mortimer Samboye, for example. I could tell you too, you confiding youngster, just his figure, and where the cheque, made payable to his wife, was cashed.”
“If you do know about Samboye, you know what I believe to be the one exception to the rule in the State. I don’t for a moment believe that there is another editor whom your people could have bought. It is an odious exception, to be sure, but exceptions prove the rule. If journalists and journals were in the market, as you and your machine friends seem to imagine, there would be no such widespread bolt against your machine ticket to-day.”
“Oh, you think so, do you?”
The lawyer was getting vexed. He stood up, thrust his hands deep into his trowsers pockets, and spoke with more sharpness than before.
“You think so! Why, man alive, this same d——d Chronicle of yours has been in the market since before you were born. I bet you to-day that Workman would rather plank out five thousand dollars from his own pocket than let me cross-examine him in the witness box on his recollections of the Chronicle’s record. Why, that is the very last paper in the State that has a title to throw stones! Do you want to know when this new reforming zeal of Workman’s was born? I can tell you. It was the day that another man (Dick Folts, if you wish names), was appointed to the Territorial Governorship that Workman wanted for his brother. So you thought it was only high morality and noble patriotic sentiments that ailed the Chronicle, did you? You never suspected that it was simply a bad case of brother—that it all happened because Samuel M. Workman of Toboggan was compelled to continue to adorn a private station? You think the world is run on kid-gloved, scriptural ethics? It reminds me of a novel I read here awhile ago. It set out to describe An American Politician—and in almost every scene in the book where he appeared, he was drinking tea in some lady’s drawing room, declaiming to the fair sex on how he was going to reform politics. He thought he was a deuce of a fellow, and so did the women and the author too. This politician was a good sample of all your reformers. I tell you, the men who go to afternoon teas in America, exert no more influence on American politics than—than a hen who was too refined to scratch in the barn-yard for worms would exert on the question of female suffrage. Now don’t make a fool of yourself, Seth. Your predecessor, Samboye, was in no way your equal—some fellow at the club once, I remember, just hit him off in a phrase which he had hunted up in the dictionary to sling at him: ‘a nugipolyloquous numbskull ’—but he knew enough to feather his own nest, and to take men as they are, and not as the Prophet Jeremiah might think they ought to be. Don’t make me angry with this pharisaical nonsense! You are very young yet. You will see things differently when you have rubbed up against the world a while longer.”
Seth also stood up now, with his hands deep in his pockets—a trick of all the Fairchilds when they were excited.
“I have no desire to make you angry,” he answered, beginning with an effort at calmness, but soon raising his voice, “and I shouldn’t have dreamed of inflicting my juvenile views on you if you hadn’t insisted, even to the point of a threat, on my coming here. I would rather not argue the thing at all. We regard politics from totally different standpoints. I believe that your methods and aims—by ‘your’ I mean your wing of the party—are scandalous, corrupting and ruinous. I believe that if some check is not put upon the rule of the machine, if the drift of public acquiescence in debased processes of government is not stopped, it will soon be too late to save even the form of our institutions from the dry rot of venality.”
“Seems to me I’ve read all this. Don’t work your old leaders off on me. Talk sense!” said Albert.
Seth dropped rhetoric: “All this is very real, very big, to me. To you it is impracticable and meaningless. You don’t at all believe in the dangers which are so apparent to me. Perhaps if you did you wouldn’t care. That is all right. I have no desire to convert you, or to debate the question with you. I simply want to explain that there is no community of premises, even, between us on this subject. As for your explanation of the motives underlying the Chronicle’s attitude, I shan’t contradict you. So far as I am concerned, the matter is not in argument. It is enough for me that we bolt the State ticket, and occupy the ground we do. It is no concern of mine by what path we got there.”
Albert had heard his brother through with contemptuous impatience. He said now, with one foot on the stove hearth, and in a voice which, by its very coldness of calm, ought to have warned Seth of the temper underlying it:
“You may bolt the State ticket as much as you d——d please. I don’t like your doing it, and it will injure you more than any efforts of mine can make good, but I can’t help it, and it wasn’t for that that I wanted to see you. But if you bolt me, Mr. Seth, or put so much as a straw in my path, by God! I’ll grind you, and your paper, and everybody responsible for it, finer than tooth-powder! However—we will exhaust the other side of the subject first. I’ve had it in mind for a long while, in fact ever since I first procured you a place there, to buy you a share in the Chronicle. Workman would be glad of the ready money—he itches for it as much as any living man—and it would be a good thing for you. Would you like that?”
“You haven’t told me yet what you dragged me up here, away from my work, for,” said Seth. “You presumably had an object of some sort.”
“Ah, you want to get down to business, do you? You shall have it, in a nutshell. I want you to see Ansdell, and get him to promise that if I beat him in the Convention he will support me squarely at the polls; I want you to get a pledge from Workman that the Chronicle will come out for me, solid, the day after I am nominated. That’s what I want, and it is mighty little for me to ask of you! And you may tell Workman for me that if he and his paper give me the smallest ground for complaint, and waver in the least in backing me up, I’ll start a paper in Tecumseh before Christmas that will crush the Chronicle out of sight. The paper is no good, anyway. I know hundreds of good citizens who would rejoice to have a decent substitute for it.” The pride of the editor was wounded. “You seem to worry a good deal about this worthless paper, at all events,” he said, bitterly.
“Don’t bandy words with me, youngster!” cried Albert, scowling and pacing the floor. “I want your answer, or the answer of your employer—yes or no! I’ll have none of your impudence!”
Seth held his temper down. He could not help feeling that his brother, from the fraternal standpoint at least, had some pretty strong arguments on his side. He made answer:
“I should have no influence with Ansdell, one way or the other, even if I talked with him. He knows his own business best, and if he has made up his mind to a certain course, nothing that I could say would move him. As for the Chronicle we’ve kept our hands off, thus far, on your account, and we’ve said nothing at all about your leading the Dearborn County delegates into the machine camp at the State Convention, although the whole rest of the State is ringing with it. But I am charged to say that that is as much as we can do. If you are nominated, we can’t and won’t support you. It is not a nice thing for me to have to say to you, but there’s no good mincing matters. Besides, you know—there may be a way out of it; you may not be nominated to-morrow.”
“All hell can’t prevent it!” The words came forth in an explosion of wrath. Albert stamped his foot and clenched his fists as Seth had never seen him do before. He tapped his breast three or four times, significantly, as if there were something in the pocket to which he was referring—Seth remembered the gesture long afterward—and repeated that his nomination was assured. He seemed to dislike his passion, and strive to restrain it, but the choleric vein between his brows grew more swollen, and his black, keen eyes flashed more angrily than ever, as he strode up and down before the stove.
“Yes, and I’ll be elected too! All the white-livered hounds in Adams County, from my own brother up, shall not stop me! I’ll stump the district every night and day till election. I’ll speak in Tecumseh—yes, in Tecumseh, at the biggest meeting money and organisation can get together—and I’ll handle this whole bolting business so’s to warm the hearts of honest men all over the State. By God! I’ll shake Workman as a terrier shakes a rat, in view and hearing of his whole community! Won’t he squirm though! And won’t the crowd enjoy having him shown up! And you”—there followed some savage personal abuse, profane in form—“after to-morrow morning, never let me lay eyes on you again!”
“It is not for the pleasure of seeing you that I come here, ever,” Seth retorted, the words coming quick and fierce. “Be sure I’d never trouble you again, if you were the only one in this house!”
The lawyer’s eyes sparkled with a sardonic meaning, and Seth, as he saw it, bit his tongue with impatience at the thoughtless form of his speech; for he read in this cold, glancing light that nothing had been lost upon his brother’s perception when he entered the room.
There was a full minute’s silence, in which the two men faced each other. Albert was busy thinking how to put most effectively the things he was now moved to say. At last he spoke, coolly, incisively once more, while Seth, flushed and anxious, pretended to regulate the flame of the lamp.
“Yes, I have no illusions about the motive of your visits to the farm. I am not blind; even if I were, others about the house are not. I am not going to say what you are doubtless expecting. I might point out to you that a young man who comes to a brother’s house—I will say nothing of the debt of gratitude he owes him—and steals chances to make love to that brother’s wife, is a pitiful cur. Stop!”—for Seth had straightened himself angrily at this epithet, despite his consciousness of self-reproach.
“I repeat that I might say this—but I will not. I prefer to view it in another light. I don’t think you are a knave. To be that requires intelligence. You are a fool,—a conceited, presumptuous, offensive fool. You set yourself up to judge me; you arrogate to yourself airs of moral superiority, and assume to regulate affairs of State by the light of your virtue and wisdom—and you have not brains enough meanwhile to take care of yourself against the cheapest wiles of a silly woman, who amuses herself with young simpletons just to kill time. You take upon yourself to lay down the law to a great National party—and you don’t know enough to see through even so transparent a game as this. Get out of my sight! I have wasted too much time with you. It annoys me to think that such an idiot belongs to the family.”
Albert had rightly calculated that he could thus most deeply and surely wound Seth, but he was mistaken in his estimate of the nature of the response. If Seth’s vanity was scalded by his brother’s words, he at least didn’t show it. But he did advance upon Albert with clenched fists, and gleaming eyes, and shout fiercely at him:
“A man who will speak that way of his wife is a coward and a scoundrel! And if it is my cousin Isabel he means, he is a liar to boot! If you were not my brother——”
“If I were not, what then?”
Albert waited a moment for the answer, which the conflict between Seth’s rage and his half-guilty consciousness choked in the utterance, and then calmly turned on his heel and left the room, by the same outside door at which he had entered.
As Seth went upstairs, he heard Isabel’s door close softly. “I wonder how much of it she heard?” he said to himself.
ALBERT walked across the yard toward the larger of the new stable buildings. It was a dry, warm, luminous night, radiant overhead with the glory of a whole studded heaven of stars. The moon, the full, shining-faced moon of October, would rise in an hour or so, and then would come pale mists along the valley bottom-lands, and perhaps clouds in the eastern sky. But one could walk bareheaded in this soft starlight now, without a fear of cold.
The lawyer paid no sort of attention to the night, but strode across the grass, swung himself over the stile, and pulled back the great stable door, creaking shrilly on its rollers, with angry energy. He stopped upon the threshold of the darkness, through which the shapes of carriages covered with white sheets vaguely loomed, and called out:
“Milton!”
There was the answering sound of footsteps overhead. A door at the top of the stairs was opened, and a flood of light illumined the staircase.
“Oh, you’ve got back, ay?” said a voice from the top.
It had been Milton’s idea, when the new buildings were erected, to achieve complete domestic autonomy by arranging for himself a residential room above the carriage place. The chamber was high and commodious. It had been lathed and plastered, and, in lieu of wall-paper, the sides were decorated with coarsely-colored circus bills, or pictures from sporting weeklies, all depicting women in tights. There was a good corded bed in one corner. Two chairs, a stained pine table on which, beside the lamp, were some newspapers, a little wood stove, and a mantel-shelf covered with tin-types and cheap photographs, completed the scene. Milton enjoyed living here greatly. It comported with his budding ideas of his own personal dignity, and it freed him from the disagreeable supervision which the elder Miss Fairchild was so prone to exercise over all who lived in the house. Only the Lawton girl, Melissa, came across the yard each forenoon, to tidy up the room, and chuckle over the pictures and the tastes which these, and the few books Milton from time to time brought home from a sporting-library at Thessaly, indicated.
“It’s lucky you hadn’t gone to bed,” said the lawyer, curtly, pulling his hat over his eyes to shade them from the flaring light, and sitting down. “I was going to wake you up. What’s your news?”
“I’ve been over to Tyre twice to see Beekman, ’n’ no use. Once he wouldn’t talk at all—jis’ kep his ole lantern-jaws tight shet, ’n’ said ’Ef Albert Fairchild wants to see me, he knaows where I kin be faound.’ Th’ other time he was more talkative—tried his best to fine aout what I was drivin’ at, but I couldn’t git no satisfaction aout o’ him. He wouldn’t bine himself to nothin’. He jis’ stood off et arm’s lenth, ’n’ sized up what I was a sayin’ in that dum sly way o’ his. I couldn’t make head nor tail of him. He wouldn’t say he would take money, ’n’ he wouldn’t say he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t say yes or nao to th’ post office scheme, or anythin’ else. He jis’ kep’ his big eyes on me, as much as to say, ‘You ketch a weasel asleep!’ ’n’ listened. Naow yeh knaow th’ hull of it. If yeh want anythin’ more done, yeh better do it yerself.”
The lawyer looked attentively at his hired man, and drummed with his fingers on the-table. “So that’s all, is it? You are no further ahead with Beek-man than when the Convention adjourned? You’ve got no proposition from him—no statement as to how he takes my proposals?”
“That’s it, Albert—jest it!”
Something in Milton’s tone seemed to annoy Albert even more than his confession of failure had done. He rose to his feet abruptly. “Don’t ‘Albert’ me!” he said, raising his voice out of its accustomed calm; “I don’t like it! You take too much upon yourself. But—I am to blame for it myself. I’ve let you run things with too free a hand, and trusted affairs to you that I ought to have kept to myself. It is always my way,” he went on, in petulant selfcriticism. “I never did trust anybody who was worth the powder to blow him up. I ought to be used to it by this time. But to encounter two such fools in one evening—and this evening of all others, too—by George! it’s enough to make a man strike his mother!”
“I ain’t no fool, Mister Fairchild”—the hired man was standing up too, and his harsh tones gave the title an elaborate, almost ridiculous emphasis—“’n’ I’ll thank yeh to keep yer tongue civil, tew! Ef yeh don’t like my style, yeh kin git sum’un else to do yer dirty work for yeh. I’ve no hankerin’ fer it. I’m hired to manage this farm, I am. Nothin’ was said ’baout my hevin’ to run a Congresshn’l campaign into th’ bargain. I ain’t sayin’ but what I kin do it’s well’s some other folks. I ain’t sayin’ that it’s beyon’ me. P’raps I’ve got my pull ’n’ this caounty, ’s well ’s some other people. P’raps ’f I was amine to, I could knock somebuddy’s game skyhigh, jis’ by liftin’ my little finger tomorrer. I ain’t sayin’ I’m goin’ to dew it. I ain’t findin’ no fault with yeh. All I say is I ain’t goin’ to take one ioty o’ slack from you, or anybody else, about this thing. You hear me!”
The hired man had spoken aggressively and loudly, with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest, and his shaggy head well up in the air. He knew his employer pretty well, and had estimated with some precision the amount of impudence he would bear. This full measure he was not disposed to abate one atom. He had failed to buy the Jay County boss, or even to satisfactorily gauge his intentions, it was true, but that was no reason why he should submit to being called a fool by Albert Fairchild, who couldn’t run his farm, let alone his Congressional campaign, without him. So the mean-figured, slouching countryman, with his cheap, ill-fitting clothes, frowzy beard, and rough, red hands truculently spread palm outward on his breast, stood his ground before the city lawyer and grinned defiance at him.
The lawyer did not immediately reply. He was not ordinarily at a loss for words or decisions in his dealings with men, but this rude, uncouth rustic, with his confident air and his fund of primordial cunning, puzzled him. There was some uneasiness in the feeling, too, for he could not remember the exact limits of his confidences with Milton. Moreover he could not afford, at any price, to quarrel with him now on the eve of the Convention. “After the election we’ll clip your wings, my fine fellow,” he thought to himself, but he gave the words upon which he finally decided a kindlier turn.
“Yes, I hear you. Almost anybody on the side-hill could, the way you are talking. There is no reason why you should lose your temper. If you couldn’t fix Beekman, why that’s all there is to it. We must go at it in a different way. I can see through him. He’s standing out for a cash payment. The old fox wants money down.”
“Well, you’ve got it fur him, hain’t yeh? Go ’n’ give it to him, straight aout!”
“But that’s it—I wanted you to bring back an idea of his figure.”
“His figger. How much hev yeh got?”
“Never mind that—it’s a d——d sight more than the office is worth; but when a man gets into a fight of this sort, he’s got to force his way through, cost or no cost.”
“Air yeh sure it can’t be traced? Wuz yeh careful to raise it so nobuddy cud spot yeh, and give aout that yeh got so much money together for purposes o’ bribery?”
“Yes, it is perfectly safe. There is no record.”
“’N’ nobuddy on airth knaows yeh’ve got th’ money?”
“Not a living soul!”
The two men communed together as to the importance of immediate action. The Convention was to reassemble at Tyre, fifteen miles away, at eleven the following forenoon. The political master of Jay County, Abe Beekman, who held in his hands the deciding power, lived near Tyre, but in the valley some miles further on. The first train from Thessaly in the morning would be too late, for Beekman would have already arrived on the ground at Tyre, coming from the opposite direction, and would have begun work on his own hook. He must be seen at his home, early in the morning. The question was—how to encompass this.
“You might drive across to-night,” Albert suggested; “it can’t be more than twenty miles. It’s a bad, up-hill road, but four or five hours ought to do it, easily enough. By George—I believe I’ll go myself—start at once, see Beekman about daybreak, and then come back to Tyre by breakfast time; as if I had just driven over from here. No one will suspect a thing.”
“Yes, thet’s a fust-rate idee,” assented Milton; “only be keerful ’n’ put yer money in a safe place.”
The lawyer again slapped his breast with a confident “Never fear about that,” and went to the house to get some wraps for the night ride, leaving Milton to harness the grays, and drag out the sidebar buggy with the pole. The hired-man hummed to himself as he moved quietly, dextrously in the semi-darkness in the performance of this task.
Albert returned, just as the hame straps were being buckled.
“Everybody seems to be asleep in the house,” he said. “If they ask any questions in the morning, mind you know nothing whatever. That brother of mine is no friend. Be careful what you say to him. Let him walk to the depot in the morning. It’ll do him good. Oh yes, by the way, better let me have one of those revolvers of yours—you have ’em upstairs, haven’t you—give me the one that strikes fire every time.”
Milton came down and out presently, saying that he just remembered having lent the weapon. “’Tother’s no good,” he added; “yeh don’t need no pistol anyway. Th’ moon’ll be up direc’ly.”
Albert gathered up the lines, and drove out slowly toward the road.
“Yeh better save th’ beasts till after yeh git over Tallman’s hill, ’n’ rest ’em there by th’ gulf!” Milton called after him, as a last injunction.
The hired man stood at the stable door, and watched the buggy pass the darkened, silent house, turn out on the high-road, and disappear beneath the poplars. The moon was just coming up, beyond this line of trees, and it made the gloom of their shadow deeper. His eyes, from following the vehicle ranged back to the house, which reared itself black against the whitening sky. There was there no sound, nor any sign of life. He took a revolver out of his pocket, and examined it in the starlight, cocking it again and again to make sure that there had been no mistake. Satisfied with the inspection, he put it back in his side coat-pocket. He went upstairs, changed his hat, took a drink out of a flat brown bottle in his cupboard, and spent a minute or two looking at one of the tin-type portraits on the mantel-shelf. He held the picture to the light, and grinned as he gazed—then put it in his breast pocket, blew out the lamp, and felt his way softly down stairs.
A few minutes later he came out from the stable, leading the swift black mare. She was saddled and bridled, and seemed to understand, as he led her over the grass, that he wanted no noise made. The man and beast, throwing long, grotesque shadows on the lawn, in the light of the low moon, stole past the house, and out upon the road. Milton here climbed into the saddle, and with an exultant little cluck, started in the direction his master had gone, still keeping the black mare on the grass. They, too, disappeared under the poplars.
The moon mounted into the heavens, pushing aside the aspiring clouds which sought to dispute her passage, then clothing them in her own livery of light, and drawing them upward after her, in a glittering train of attendance. All over the hill-side the calm radiance rested. The gay hues with which autumn’s day brush painted the woods, the hedge rows, the long stretches of orchard, stubble, and field, sought now to only hint at their beauty, as they yielded new outlines, mystic suggestions of form and color, in the soft gray picture of mezzotint. Thin films of vapor rose to enwrap the feet of the dark firs, nearer to the sky, and in the valley below the silver of the moonlight lost itself on the frost-like whiteness of the gathering mist. It was a night for the young to walk together, and read love’s purest, happiest thoughts in each other’s eyes—for the old to drink in with thankful confession the faith that the world was still gracious and good.
Milton was walking the mare now, still on the grass. He could hear the sound of wheels, just ahead.
Seth had gone up to his room in a state of wretchedness which, seeming insupportable at the outset, had grown steadily worse upon reflection. He said to himself that he had never before in his whole life been so humiliated and unhappy, and then smiled with pitying contempt for the inadequacy of such a statement of the case. One’s career must have been titanic in its tragic experiences to warrant such a comparison. “I have never known before what suffering was,” he thought, as he paced up and down his little room, scourging himself with the lash of bitter reflections.
To try to sleep did not enter his head. He sat for a long time on the side of the bed, seeking to evolve something like order from the chaos of his wits, but he could not think. Had he tried to write, to discuss the thing in a letter, the simple familiar operation of the pen might have led him out of the cul de sac. As it was, whichever turn his mind sought to take, there rose an impassable barrier of shame, or rage or self-recrimination. In whatever light he tried to view the situation, it was all pain. He had been curtly, cruelly thrown off by his brother—the man to whom he owed everything—and he had had to listen to the most cutting, insulting language from this brother before they parted. Then, as he clenched his fists and fumed with impotent anger at the recollection of this language, there would come to divert this wrath, and turn it back upon himself, the facts that he had interposed his own boyish vanity and conceit to balk this brother’s purposes, and had been caught trembling on the very brink of making love to this brother’s wife. Did he not richly merit Albert’s scorn? He could remember—should he ever forget?—the exact words of Albert’s contemptuous characterization: “A conceited, presumptuous, offensive fool.” Did he not deserve them all? He owed this brother everything: the honest boy insisted upon saying this to himself over and over again, as the basis of all argument on the subject; the opportunity came for him to repay something of this debt. How had he improved it? By setting himself up to oppose this brother in the chief object of his life, and, as if this were not enough, by yielding weakly to the temptation to rob him of his domestic honor as well! “I must be a villain as well as a fool, must I!” the youngster growled between his set teeth, as he threw himself from the bed, and began the gloomy pacing up and down again.
He had not lighted his lamp. The soft half-darkness of the starlight, sufficing barely to render objects visible in the room, suited his mood. He heard the sound of wheels now on the gravel below. Looking out, he could see that the grays were being driven out; as they turned the corner of the house, the full moonlight fell upon them and the carriage, and Seth saw distinctly that it was his brother who was driving, and that he was wrapped as for an all-night ride.
“He won’t even stay under the same roof with me!” he said half-aloud, with a fresh bitterness of self-accusation—and then the torment of reproaching voices began in his breast again.
As he turned from the window he heard a low rapping at his door; a minute later, he heard Isabel’s voice, almost a whisper:
“Seth! Don’t open the door, but tell me, who was it that went out with the carriage just now? I heard it, but from my window I could see nothing. Was it he?”
Seth answered, as calmly as he could: “Yes, I am sure of it. I recognized him.” He stood close to the door, and the thought that only the thin pine panels divided him from her was uppermost in his mind.
There was a little pause. Once his hand involuntarily moved toward the latch, but he drew it back. Then she spoke again:
“You had a terrible quarrel, didn’t you, and all for me! I heard your answer, Seth, way up here. How nobly you spoke! It went straight to my heart, to hear his brutality rebuked in that manly way. I shan’t forget it.”
There was a moment’s silence; then she whispered with a lingering softness, “Good night!” and he heard the faint rustling of her garments down the hall.
Brief as the interruption was, it had changed the whole spirit of his thoughts. The vindictive accusing demons had vanished, and left no more than a numbing sense of past torture in his breast. The anguish of self-condemnation, the crushing burden of self-humiliation, had passed away. The moonlight, as it spread over the slope toward Thessaly village, seemed to bring healing in its peaceful radiance. His own provocation grew mountain high; his brother’s justification for his insults and barbarity diminished. “I was doing only my duty in opposing him,” he said confidently, and there was no voice of dissent now. “Still more was I right in defending poor Isabel from his unmanly imputations. If a man is incapable of appreciating such a wife——.”
He did not follow out his thought, but surrendered himself instead to calling up, and enjoying in detail, the sweet scene which Albert’s coming had so rudely broken into. How delicious it all was, as fancy now limned its outlines—yet not all the dainty graces of imagination and memory could reproduce in its full charm the original. He could think, and think, until the whole room seemed instinct with her presence, but how poor a counterfeit it all was, lacking the perfume of her hair and laces, the deep, languorous glow of her eyes, the thrilling melody of her low voice. The tender, caressing prolongation of syllables in that whispered “good night” made soft soul-music still in his ears. The insane thought—he did not dare ask himself if it were also a hope—that she might come again, took possession of him, and he stood for a long time close by the door, listening, waiting.
It was while Seth stood thus, seeing only with the eyes of the mind, that Milton stole past on the grass below, with the black mare, on his mission of murder. Had the young man been at the window instead, much that followed might have been different.
Seth stood at the door for what seemed to him a long time, until gradually the futility of the action became apparent to him. “Of course she would not come!” he said, and resumed his pacing once more.
The Faust-like vision began to dance before his eyes again, but with a witchery now which was uncanny. The calm of waiting had brought him enough strength of control to feel the presence of the cloven hoof in it all. The temptation was more urgent, strenuous than ever, but he was conscious of a deeper, more dogged spirit of resistance within him than ever, as well. There was no renewal of the savage, chaotic war of emotions under which he had suffered at the outset, groaning in the self-infliction of purposeless pain. This was a definite, almost scientific, struggle between two distinct forces, and though they fought their battle with all manner of sophistical weapons, and employed feints, pretended retreats and false advances in highest strategical form, he was never deceived for a moment as to which was the bad and which the good.
The issue forced itself upon him, finally, with a demand for decision which was imperative. He could stay no longer in his room. There was neither sleep nor rest of any kind there for him.
He went to the door, and opened it. Through the blackness he could see a faint vertical line of light at the front end of the low hall, as of a lamp burning, and a door left ajar. The yellow ray gleamed as he looked at it, and seemed to wave itself in fascinating motions of enticement. He stood for a moment undecided, all his impulses strongly swaying towards the temptation, all his resisting reasons growing weaker in their obstruction, and some even turning coward, and whispering, as they laid down their arms, “After all, youth has its rights.” Then he squared his shoulders, with the old gesture of resolution, and walked steadily away from the line of light, down the stairs, and out of the door, bareheaded under the stars.
He had walked for a long, long time, before he became conscious that he had left his hat behind. The night air was exceptionally mild for the season, but it grew cool enough to bring this fact to his notice. As he put his hand to his head, and stopped short at the discovery, his whole mind seemed to clarify itself. He had been walking aimlessly, almost unconsciously—it must have been for much more than an hour. In a vague way, he knew where his steps had led him. He had walked through the orchard to his mother’s grave, and stood for some time by the brier-clad wall and fence which surrounded it, thinking of his boyhood, and of her. Then he had struck across through Sir Thomas’s pasture, to the main road; thence by the way of the school-house, and skirting the hill, to the Burfield road, at the farthermost end of the line of poplars.
As he stopped here now collecting his thoughts, awakening himself as it were, the sound of chorussinging reached him, faint at first, then growing more distinct. A wagon-load of young people were returning from Leander Crump’s husking, enjoying themselves in the fair moonlight. From the sounds, they must have been about in front of the Fairchild homestead, and they were coming rapidly toward Seth. If he remained in the road, they must pass and recognize him.
There was a division line of thorn hedge, long since grown into tall young trees, coming to the road here, and a path beside it leading to a rude stile in the turnpike fence. This path went straight to Mrs. Warren’s house, as Seth had known from boyhood, but he gave this no thought as he stepped over the stile, and moved along in the shadow of the thorns. He walked a score of yards or so, and then stepped closer into the obscurity of the hedge, to wait till the hay-wagon and its caroling crew had passed by on the road outside. He was feeling very cold now, and tired to boot, and said to himself that as soon as the road was clear he would go home and go to bed.
To his surprise the singing came to an abrupt halt, just as the wagon approached the end of the hedge.
There was a chorus of merry “whoas!” as the horses drew up, and through the clear air Seth could hear a confused babel of voices, all jovially discussing something. One male voice, louder than the rest, called out:
“You’d better let me come along with you!”
There was some giggling audible, out of which rose a clear, fresh girlish voice which Seth knew:
“No, thanks! I can cut across by this path in less than no time. I’m not afraid. The tramps are all abed and asleep by this time, like other honest people.”
With more laughter, and a salvo of “good nights!” the wagon started off again, and Annie Fairchild, singing lightly to herself the refrain of the chorus, and holding her face up to catch the full radiance of the moonlight, came walking briskly down the path.
Despite her valiant confidence the young woman gave a visible start of alarm as Seth stepped out from the shadows to speak to her. She threw herself forward as if to run, then looked again, stopped, and then gave a little tremulous laugh, and cried:
“Why, Seth! is that you. Mercy! How you frightened me!”
He could think of nothing better than a feeble parody of her words: “Yes, it is time all honest people were abed and asleep.”
He said this with a half-smile, but the girl’s face grew more serious still as she looked at her cousin. She spoke eagerly:—
“Why, what’s the matter with you to-night? Where is your hat? You look as white as a ghost! Oh—have you come from our house? Is it something about grandmother?”
“No, it’s nothing about her. I haven’t been nearer your place than this. I only stepped in here so as to avoid the wagon. I didn’t want them to see me like this.”
“But why should you be like this? Now, Seth, I know something has happened. What is it? Am I wanted? Can I do anything?”
“Let me walk with you to your house,” he said, and they turned together down the path. “Something has happened. I don’t know that I can tell you what it is, but only to be with you like this rests and comforts me.”
He was walking in the shadow; the strong light, which only tipped his shoulder occasionally, enveloped her. He watched her furtively as they moved along, and, just in proportion as he found relief and solace in the contemplation of her clear, frank, serene face, he shrank from confiding his own weak woes to her. But, as he said, it was a comfort to be with her.
They had walked almost to within sight of the Warren farmhouse before he broke the silence. She had scarcely looked at him since they started, but kept her gray eyes straight ahead, as if viewing some fixed, distant object. Her lips were tightly pressed together—the only sign of emotion on her face—and this proof that she was hard at work thinking tended further to embarrass him.
“I truly don’t know how to tell you, Annie,” he said at last. “But Albert and I have—have had words together; in fact—we’ve quarrelled.”
Her lips quivered a little. She did not turn her face toward him, but said, nervously: “I have been expecting that.”
Seth did not ask himself the cause of his cousin’s anticipatory confidence, but went on gloomily: “Well, it has come. We had it out, this evening, to the very last word. And then, as if that were not enough, the devil himself got hold of me afterward, and tugged and tore at me to—but I can’t tell you that. I can scarcely realize myself what I’ve been through this night. Why, I’ve been wandering about here on the hill-side for hours, not knowing where I was going, or even what I was thinking of, like a mad man. You can see how my hands are scratched, and my clothes torn; that is from the berry-bushes, I suppose, up by mother’s grave. I remember being there. I didn’t even know that my head was bare, until just before the wagon came up.” Before this remarkable recital of insane things, Annie was properly silent.
Seth added, after a pause, “But it is all over now. And I can’t tell you, you can’t begin to guess, how it brings me to my senses, and soothes and restores me to have met you like this.”
As he paused suddenly, they both turned to listen and look. From the knoll to the east, where the turnpike ran through a cutting, there came a curiously muffled sound, like yet unlike the first measured drumming of a partridge. It swelled a second later into something more definite, as they saw a dark horse, the rider crouching low over its neck, galloping like the wind along the high-road toward Thessaly. The pace was something prodigious—the horse had vanished like an apparition before they could look twice. But there had been nothing like a commensurate volume of sound.
“The horse was running on the grass beside the road,” Seth remarked.
“Probably going for a doctor,” was her comment. “I wonder who is ill!”
“It looked to me more like the headless horseman than a sick-messenger.”
As he said this, and they turned to walk again, his face lighted up once more. The thought seemed to please him, and he smiled on her as he added:
“Let me be superstitious enough to fancy that the thing which just flashed by, in a rumble of low thunder, was the demon that has been torturing me all this while. We will say that he has been defeated, baffled, and has fled in despair, and that”—he looked still more smilingly at her—“the fiend has been beaten and driven away by you. Do you know, Annie, that here in this lovely light you are the very picture of a good angel? Perhaps angels don’t wear seal-skin cloaks, or have such red cheeks, but if they knew how becoming they were, they would.”
Annie’s face, which had been immobile in thought, softened a little. She was accustomed to her cousin’s hyperbole.
“I am delighted if you feel better,” she laughed back. “But it is no credit specially to me. Contact with any other rational human being would probably have had the same effect upon you. If I had helped you in any way, or advised you, perhaps I might own the angelic impeachment. But I don’t even know the first thing about your trouble, except that you’ve quarrelled with Albert, and—and had a temptation.”
She had begun gayly enough, but she uttered the last words soberly, almost gravely. Instinct and observation alike told her that Seth’s experiences had been of a deeply serious nature.
He sighed heavily, and looked on the ground. How much could he tell her?—in what words should he put it? Even as he sought in his mind for safe and suitable phrases, an Idea—a great, luminous, magnificent Idea—unfolded itself before his mental vision. It was not new to him—years ago he had often entertained and even nourished it—yet it had been hidden, dormant so long, and it burst forth now so grandly transformed and altered, that for an instant he stopped abruptly, and put his hand to his breast as if to catch his breath. Then he walked on again, still with his eyes on the ground. He fancied that he was meditating; instead, he was marvelling at the apotheosized aptness of the Providence which had sent this Idea at just this time, and swearing grateful fealty to it with all the earnestness of his being.
He looked up at last, and drew her arm through his. They were near the house now. “I am going to make a clean breast of it, Annie,” he said. “If I have not finished when we get to the bars, shall we turn back? I want you to hear it all.”
“It is pretty late, Seth,” she said, but neither in tone, nor in the manner in which she allowed her arm to be taken, was there the kind of refusal which dismays.
There was no need now to seek words. They came fast, keeping pace with the surge of his thoughts.
“Annie,” he began, “I have been as near the gates of hell to-night as it is given to a man to go, and bring back his soul. I have fancied all this while that I was strong because I was successful; that I was courageous because I happened to be clever. I found myself put to the test to-night, and I was weak as water. I am afraid of myself. More, I have been making a fool of myself. I know now the measure of my weakness. I have the brains, perhaps, but I have no balance-wheel. I fly off; I do insensate things; I throw myself away. I need a strong, sweet, wise nature to lean upon, to draw inspiration from. Oh if you could realize the peace, the happiness your simple presence brought me this evening! I haven’t said it yet, Annie, but you have guessed it—I want to pledge myself to you, to swear that you are to be my wife.”
The girl had drawn her arm from his before the last sentence was finished, and stood facing him. They were within call of the house, but she did not offer to renew the walk. She answered him with no trace of excitement, looking him candidly in the face:
“I am not sure just how to answer you, Seth. Hardly any girl would know, I think, how to treat such a declaration as that. Wait a moment—let me finish! In the first place, I am in doubt whether I ought to treat it seriously at all. You are disturbed, excited, to-night; when we first met you looked and acted like a madman. And then again—understand, I am trying to talk to you as a friend of all your life, instead of a mere girl acquaintance—I would not marry any man who I did not firmly believe loved me. You have not even pretended that you love me. You have simply complimented me on my disposition, and pledged yourself to a partnership in which I was to be a balance-wheel.”
“You are laughing at me!”
“No, Seth, my dear cousin, not at all. I am only showing you the exact situation. You are too excited, or too unpractical, to see it for yourself. You talk now about being at the gates of hell and expressions like that—wild words which signify only that you have had trouble during the evening. I fancy that all men are apt to exaggerate such things—I know you are. Why, do you even know what trouble is? Have I had no trouble? Have I not lived a whole life of trial here with a bed-ridden invalid? And there are other things that—that I might speak of, if I chose to complain. For instance”—her face brightened as she spoke, now, and a suggestion of archness twinkled in her eyes—“was it not a terrible thing that I should have waded into the water, that day of the fishing party, and got you out all by myself, and then heard the credit coolly given to another—person, who never got so much as the soles of her shoes wet?”
Annie had begun seriously enough, but the softness of her real mood toward her cousin, together with the woman’s natural desire to have justice done her in affairs of the heart, had led her into a halfplayful revelation of pique. Seth would have answered here, but she held up her hand, and went on: “Wait till I am through. You didn’t know the truth in that matter of the log-jam. I understand that. There are a good many other things the truth of which you don’t know. You don’t, for instance, know the real facts about your own mind. You have had trouble to-night—for all your talk about making a clean breast of it you haven’t told me yet what it was—and your imagination makes a mountain out of what was probably a molehill, and you straightway rush off bareheaded to wander about like a ghost, and frighten people out of their wits; and then, happening to meet a girl who, by the deceptive light of the moon, looks as if she had some sense about her, you take without consideration the most important step a man can take in his whole life. Isn’t that a fair statement of the case? And, thinking it all over, don’t you agree with me that you would better tie my handkerchief about your head and go home and go to bed?”
Seth laughed—a reluctant, in-spite-of-himself laugh. “You always would make fun of me when I tried to be serious. But if I ever was serious in my life, it is now. Listen to me, Annie! It is not my fault if I see you now, truly as you are, for the first time. I have been a fool. I know it I said so at the start. But a man is the creature of circumstances, you know. Things have happened tonight which have opened my eyes. I realize now that you have been closest to my heart all the while, that I have loved you all——”
Annie stopped him, with her hand upon his arm.
“I don’t want you to finish that to-night. Please don’t, Seth. It would not be fair to me—or to yourself. Perhaps some other time when you have thought it over calmly—we will talk about it—that is, if you are of the same mind. If you are not, why, everything shall be just as it was before. And more than that, Seth, you—you mustn’t feel in the least bound by what has been said to-night. You know that I am older than you—two whole months! That isn’t as much as four years”—the meekest of her sex could scarcely have foregone that shaft—“but it gives me some sort of authority over you. And I am going to use it for your good. If it becomes necessary, I shall treat you like a perverse little boy, who doesn’t in the least know what is good for him.”
There was no discouragement to Seth in the tones of her speech, however non-committal its text might be. He put his arm about her and murmured:
“To think that I never knew until now! Ah, you make me very happy, Annie. And shall you be happy, too, do you think, happier than if we hadn’t met?”
She smiled as she disengaged herself, and gave him both hands to say that they must separate: “Happier at least than on the night of the fishing party. I cried myself to sleep that night.”
Seth found the house wholly dark, upon his return. He had no difficulty in getting to sleep, and his heavy slumber lasted until long after the breakfast hour the following forenoon.