Kitabı oku: «The Happy Average», sayfa 5

CHAPTER X
PUT-IN-BAY

The little steamer for the islands rolled out of Sandusky Bay with Lavinia sitting by the forward rail. She had yielded to her father’s wishes with an easy complaisance that made him suspicious, and yet, as he stood solicitously by, he was persistent in his determination to realize for her all the delights he had so extravagantly predicted for the journey. He tried to rouse her interest by pointing out Johnson’s Island, but it did not possess for her, as the place where the Confederate prisoners were confined during the war, the interest an old soldier was able to discover in it, and though he tried his best, with an effort at entertainment that was well-nigh pathetic, she only smiled wanly.

He left her, after a while, her chin in her hands, looking over into the light green waters, watching the curve of the waves the steamer tossed away from its sharp prow. The lake was in one of its most smiling and happy moods, though they were then at a point where storms easily lash its shallow depths into billows that might satisfy the rage of the North Atlantic. The lighthouse on the rocks at Marblehead had a fascination for Lavinia; it seemed waiting for her humor, and she watched it until the steamer had gone far on toward Kelly’s Island, and left the lighthouse behind, a white spot gleaming in the sun.

When they entered the little archipelago of the Wine Islands, with their waters a deeper green than those out in the lake and overcast in strange ways by mysterious shadows and cool weird reflections of the green of the islands all about, Judge Blair came back to her and asked if she had been seasick and how she had enjoyed the little journey. As she met him with her strange perplexing smile, he began to doubt her again; something assured him that she still clung to her purpose of love, and he found himself almost wishing that she had kept to her defiant temper of the Sunday afternoon that now seemed so far away.

When they had reached Put-in-Bay and bounded on the trolley across the island to the huge hotel, they had their dinner and Lavinia perplexed the judge further by retiring to her room. She said she would rest, though she had persisted all the morning that she was not tired.

As soon as she had closed the door on her father, leaving him in doubt and confusion, she began a long letter to Marley. She described her trip in detail, jealous of every trifle of experience that had befallen her; she told him of the bridal couple she had seen board the train at Clyde, and of the showers of rice that had been thrown by the laughing bridal party, though she omitted the lone father of the bride standing apart on the platform craning his head anxiously for another sight of his daughter, and trying to smile. But she gave him a sense of the romance that had stirred in her at the sight of the lighthouse on its lonely point of rocks and the stone towers that made the wine-cellars on Kelly’s Island look like castles.

After supper Lavinia left her father to the pleasure of renewing acquaintance with the lawyers who thronged the lobby, and stole down to the rocks that marked the shelving shore of the island. She saw stately schooners, with white sails spread, and she watched, until its black banner of smoke was but a light wraith, a big propeller towing its convoy of grain barges across the far horizon. This calm serene passing of the life of the lakes soothed her, filled her with a thousand fancies, and stirred her emotions with deep, hidden hints of the mystery of all life. As she sat there and gazed, now and then tears came to her eyes. The waters were spread smoothly before her under the last reflection of the sun, the twilight was coming across the lake; and as the light followed the sun and the darkness crept behind, she looked toward the south in the direction, as she felt, of Macochee, and thought of her home and of her mother, of Connie and of Chad, and then she thought of Glenn.

Far out in the lake a cluster of yellow lights moved swiftly along—one of the big passenger steamers that nightly ply between Detroit and Buffalo, and she read in that moving girdle of light new meanings; then suddenly a fear seized her, a fear that was part of the ache in her heart, and she ran into the hotel and up to her room. Then she took up her letter again and poured out all her new sensations, her longings, and her fears in a lengthy postscript. When she had finished, she began to address the envelope; and she wrote on it, with pride:

“Mr. Glenn—”

And then she paused. She did not know whether he spelt his name “Marly,” or “Marley,” or “Marlay.” She tried writing it each way, dozens of times, but the oftener she tested it the less able she was to decide. It was too ridiculous; she became exasperated with herself; then humiliated and ashamed. When she heard her father’s step in the hall, she hastily locked her letter in her little traveling bag. The judge greeted her warmly; he was flushed and happy, and in the highest spirits. During the afternoon he had been meeting lawyers from all over Ohio; the evening boats from Cleveland and Toledo had brought more of them to the island; they were all eminent, respectable, rich, the attorneys of big corporations. The judges of the Supreme Court and of the Circuit Courts were there, and the excitement had reached its height when the boat from Cleveland brought an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court to deliver the chief address of the meeting.

Judge Blair reveled in meeting all these distinguished men; he enjoyed the flattery in their way of addressing and introducing him. But his conscience smote him when he saw Lavinia. He drew up a chair and sat beside her, holding his cigar at arm’s length. It was an excellent cigar, better than he ordinarily smoked, and the thin thread of smoke that wavered up from it filled the room almost instantly with its delicate perfume.

“Did my little girl think her father had deserted her?” he said, speaking of her in the third person, after the affectionate way of parents. “He must pay better attention to her. She must come down and meet the lawyers; they will be delighted; a justice of the Supreme Court has just come on from Washington! She will want to meet him!”

The judge paused and twisted his head about for a puff at his cigar, and then waited for Lavinia to glow at the prospect. But when she looked at him, and tried to smile again, he saw the glint of tears in her eyes.

“Why come, come, dear!” he said. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you having a good time? Never mind, when this meeting’s over we’ll go to Detroit, and maybe up the lakes for a little trip. That’ll bring the roses back!”

He pinched her cheeks playfully, but she did not respond; she looked at him pleadingly.

“Why, Lavinia,” he cried, “you aren’t homesick?”

She winked bravely to stem the flood of tears and then nodded.

“Well!” he said, nonplussed. “You know, dear, we can’t—”

The tears were brimming in her blue eyes, and he left his sentence uncompleted to go on:

“So you’re homesick, eh? For mama, and Connie?”

She nodded, and he studied her closely for a moment, and then he could not resist the question that all along had been torturing him.

“And for—?”

She confirmed his fear, with quick decisive little nods. She got out her handkerchief and hastily brushed her tears away, and then with an effort to control herself, she looked at him and said, as if she were ready to have it all out then:

“Yes, father, I haven’t treated him right. I came away without telling him.”

Judge Blair scowled and turned away, and bit the end of his cigar. Then he sat and studied it. Lavinia waited; she was ready for the final contest. Presently the judge arose.

“Well, dear,” he said. “Well—we’ll see; of course, we can’t go back just yet—I have my address to read to-morrow, and besides, some of the boys are talking of me for president of the Bar Association. And I had thought, I had thought, that a little trip over to Detroit, and maybe up to Mackinac—”

“Father,” said Lavinia, looking at him now calmly, “I don’t want to go to Detroit or up to Mackinac. I’ll do, of course, as you say; I’ll wait until the Bar meeting is over, but I want to go home. You might as well know now, father—we might as well understand each other—it can be no other way.”

Judge Blair looked at his daughter a moment, and she kept her eyes directly and firmly in his.

“Oh well,” he said with a sigh, “of course, dear, if you say. I’d like to stay until after the election though. Will you?”

“Of course,” she consented.

CHAPTER XI
MACOCHEE

Marley had not learned of Lavinia’s departure until Monday afternoon; he had the news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman who had taken Judge Blair and Lavinia to the train; for whenever any of the quality go away from Macochee they always ride to the station in the hack, though at other times they walk without difficulty all over the town. When Marley reached the office, and found Wade Powell, as he usually found him, sitting with his feet on his table, smoking and reading a Cincinnati paper, the lawyer looked up casually, but when he saw Marley’s expression he suddenly exclaimed:

“Hello! What’s the matter?”

Marley shook his head.

“Something’s troubling you,” said Powell.

Marley shook his head again, and Powell looked at him as at a witness he was cross-examining.

“I know better,” he said.

Marley affected to busy himself at his desk, but after a while, he turned about and said:

“Something is troubling me, Mr. Powell; my—prospects.” He had been on the point of confessing his real trouble, but with the very words on his lips, he could not utter them, and so let the conversation take another turn.

“Oh, prospects!” said Powell. “I can tell you all about prospects; I’ve had more than any man in Gordon County. When I was your age, opinion was unanimous in this community that my prospects were the most numerous and the most brilliant of any one here!”

Powell laughed, a little bitterly.

“If I’d only been prudent enough to die then, Glenn,” he went on, “I’d have been mourned as a potential judge of the Supreme Court, senator and president.”

“It’ll be three years before I can be admitted, won’t it?” asked Marley.

“Yes,” said Powell; “but that isn’t long; and it isn’t anything to be admitted.”

“Well, it takes time, anyway,” said Marley, “and then there’s the practice after that—how long will that take?”

“Well, let’s see,” said Powell, plucking reflectively at the flabby skin that hung between the points of his collar. “Let’s see.” His brows were twitching humorously. “It’s taken me about thirty years—I don’t know how much longer it’ll take.”

Powell smoked on for a few moments, and then added soberly:

“Of course, I had to fool around in politics for about twenty-five years, and save the people.”

“Do you think,” Marley said, after a moment’s silence that paid its own respect to Powell’s regrets, “that there’s an opening for me here in Macochee?”

“No, Glenn, I’ll tell you. There’s no use to think of locating in Macochee or any other small town. The business is dead here. It’s too bad, but it’s so. When I began there was plenty of real estate law to do, and plenty of criminal law, but the land titles are all settled now—”

“That’s what Judge Blair said,” interrupted Marley.

“So you’ve been to him, have you?”

Marley blushed.

“Well, not exactly,” he said. “I heard him say that.”

“Yes,” mused Powell. “Well, he feathered his nest pretty well while they were being settled. But as I was saying—the criminal business has died out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals haven’t any money any more, that is, the old kind of criminals; the corporations have it all now—if you want to make money, you’ll have to have them for clients. Of course, the money still goes to the criminal lawyer just as it used to.”

“I like Macochee,” said Marley, his spirits falling fast.

“Well, it’s a nice old town to live in,” Powell assented. “But the devil of it is how’re you going to live? Of course, you can study here just as well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact; you have plenty of time, and plenty of quiet. But as for locating here—why, it’s utterly out of the question for a man who wants to make anything of himself and has to get a living while he’s doing it—and I don’t know any other kind that ever do make anything out of themselves.”

“I had hoped—” persisted Marley, longing for Powell to relent.

“Oh, I know,” the lawyer replied almost impatiently, “but it’s no use, there’s nothing in it. No one with ambition can stay here now. The town, like all these old county-seats, is good for nothing but impecunious old age and cemeteries. It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the railroad came, and since then it’s been nothing but a water-tank; if it keeps on it’ll be nothing but a whistling-post, and the trains won’t be bothered to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing but gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy; they are so mean that they hate themselves, and think all the time they’re hating each other. Just look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley, over there in his bank; he owns the whole town, and he thinks he’s a bigger man than old Grant. Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on, squinting at the preacher out of his sore little eyes, and waiting for him to say something he can get the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that religion. Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning farmers and poor widows out of their miserable little pennies, and he calls that business; Does he ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the street at the laugh of a child? He’s the kind of man that runs this town, and he makes the rest of the people like it. Well, he don’t run me! God! If I’d only had some sense twenty years ago I’d have pulled out and gone to the city and been somebody to-day.”

It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee; he had never heard him rage so violently at the town, though he was always sneering at it. To Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance; he liked the name the Indian village had left behind when it vanished; he liked the old high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed to identify himself with Macochee, to think of it as his home.

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” Powell went on, his tone suddenly changing to one of angry resolution as he flung his feet heavily to the bare floor and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist, “I’ll tell you one thing, I’m through working for nothing; they’ve got to pay me! I’m going to squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same as old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before he went on the bench; that’s what I’m going to do. I’m getting old and I’ve got to quit running a legal eleemosynary institution.”

Powell’s eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the room, and Powell and Marley glanced at the door.

“Well, what do you want?” said Powell.

An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a crisis, was on the threshold.

“Oh, Mr. Powell,” she began in a wailing voice, “would you come quick!”

“What for?”

“Charlie’s in ag’in.”

“Got any money?” demanded Powell, in the angry resolution of a moment before. He clenched his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old woman.

The woman hung her head and stammered:

“Well, you know—I hain’t just now, but by the week’s end, when I get the money for my washin’—”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Powell, getting to his feet, “that’s all right. We won’t talk of that now. I beg your pardon. We’ll walk down to the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over with him and see what’s to be done.”

He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on his head.

“What’s he been doing this time?” he said to the old woman as they went out the door.

Marley watched them as they passed the open window and disappeared. A smile touched his lips an instant, and then he became serious and depressed once more.

He had had no word from Lavinia, and her going away immediately after his scene with Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it out, but he could reach no conclusion save that it was all at an end. Lavinia’s sudden, unexplained departure proved that. And yet he could not, he would not, think that she had changed; no, her father had borne her away—that was it—forcibly and cruelly borne her away. For a long while he sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy that came over him, and then suddenly he was aroused by the boom of the town clock. The heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and he counted them—five. It was time to go. And Powell had not returned. It was not surprising; Powell often went out that way and did not come back, and, often, somehow to Marley’s chagrin, men and women sat and waited long hours in the dumb patience of the poor and then went away with their woes still burdening them. They must have been used to woes, they carried them so silently.

Marley was walking moodily down Main Street, feeling that he had no part in the bustling happiness of the people going home from their day’s work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in her surrey. Instantly she jerked the horse in toward the curb and beckoned to him.

“Why, Glenn! I’m so glad I met you!” she said, her face rosy with its smile. “I have something for you.”

She raised her eyebrows in a significant way and began fumbling in her lap. Presently she leaned out of the surrey and pressed something into his hand.

“Just between ourselves, you know!” she said, with the delicious mystery of a secret, and then gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy horse.

He looked after her a moment, then at the thick envelope he held in his hand. On it was written in the long Anglican characters of a young girl, these words:

“For Glenn.”

CHAPTER XII
A CONDITIONAL SURRENDER

Judge Blair and Lavinia returned home Saturday.

“I guess it’s no use,” the judge said to Mrs. Blair when she had followed him up stairs, where he had gone to wash off the dust he had accumulated during the six hours the train had consumed in jerking itself from Sandusky to Macochee.

“No, I could see how relieved she was to get home,” replied Mrs. Blair, musing idly out of the window. She was not so sure that she was pleased with the result she had done her part to accomplish.

“I guess you were right,” the judge said.

“I?” asked Mrs. Blair, suddenly turning round.

“Yes—in saying that it would be best not to dignify it by too much notice. That might only add to its seriousness.”

Mrs. Blair looked out of the window again.

“Of course,” the judge went on presently, “I wouldn’t want it considered as an engagement.”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Blair acquiesced.

“You’d better have a talk with her,” he said. She saw that he was seeking his usual retreat in such cases, and she was now determined not to take the responsibility. Spiritually they tossed this responsibility back and forth between them, like a shuttlecock.

“But wouldn’t that make it look as if we were taking too much notice of it?”

“Well,” the judge said, “I don’t know. Do just as you think best.”

“Didn’t you talk to her about it when you were away?” Mrs. Blair asked.

“M-m yes,” the judge said slowly.

“And what did she say?”

“Nothing much, only—”

“Only what?”

“Only that she would not give him up.”

“Oh!”

Mrs. Blair waited, and the judge dawdled at his toilet. Some compulsion she could not resist, though she tried, distrusting her own weakness, drove Mrs. Blair to speak first, and even then she sought to minimize the effect of her surrender.

“Of course, Will,” she said, “I want to be guided by you in this matter. It’s really quite serious.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “you’re capable of managing it.”

“You said you knew his father, didn’t you?” she asked after a while.

“Slightly; why?”

“I was just wishing that we knew more of the family. You know they have not lived in Macochee long.”

“That’s true,” the judge assented, realizing all that the objection meant.

“And yet,” Mrs. Blair reassured him, though she was trying to reassure herself at the same time, “his father is a minister; that ought to count for something.”

“Yes, it ought, and still you know they say that ministers’ sons are always—”

“But,” Mrs. Blair interrupted, as if he were wholly missing the point, “ministers’ families always have a standing, I think.”

They were silent, then, until Mrs. Blair began:

“I suppose I really ought to call on Mrs. Marley.”

“Why?”

“Well, it seems, you know—it seems to me that I ought.”

“But wouldn’t that—?”

“I considered that, and still, it might seem more so if I didn’t, don’t you see?”

The judge tried to grasp the attenuated point, and expressed his failure in the sigh with which he stooped to fasten his shoes. Then he drew on his alpaca coat, and just as he was leaving the room, his wife stopped him with:

“But, Will!”

He halted with his hand on the door-knob. For an instant his wife looked at him in pleasure. He was rather handsome, with his white hair combed gravely, his ruddy face fresh from his shaving, and his stiff, white collar about his neck.

“What did you say?” he asked, recalling her from her reverie of him.

“Oh!” she said; “only this—maybe he won’t feel like coming around here any more. You know you practically sent him away.”

The judge gave a little laugh.

“I guess that will work itself out. Anyway I’ll leave it to you—or to them.”

Still smiling at his own humor, he turned the door-knob, and then hesitated. His smile had vanished.

“She’s so young,” he said with a regret. “She’s so young. How old did you say you were when we were married?”

“Eighteen,” Mrs. Blair replied.

“And Lavinia can’t be more than—”

“Why, she’s twenty,” said Mrs. Blair.

“So she is,” said the judge. “So she is. But then you—”

Mrs. Blair had come close to him, and stood picking a bit of thread from his shoulder.

“It was different with us, wasn’t it, dear?” she said, looking up at him.

He kissed her.