"Is that all?" asked Hendricks.

"Well—" a pause and then finally—"yes," came the voice.

"Well, my answer is no," said Hendricks, and while he was trying to get central the voice called again and said:—

"Just one word more: if you still maintain your present decision, a copy of that letter you wrote will be put into the hands of Mr. Brownwell of the Banner before the meeting; I tell you this to protect you. He and Mrs. Brownwell and Mrs. Barclay will be in town to-morrow evening on the Barclay car from the West on No. 6; you will have until then to reconsider your decision; after that you act at your own risk."

Again the voice ceased, and Hendricks learned from central who had been talking with him. It was after banking hours, and he sat for a time looking the situation squarely in the face. The reckoning had come. He had answered "no" with much bravery over the telephone—but in his heart a question began to rise, and his decision was clouded.

Hendricks walked alone under the stars that night, and as he walked he turned the situation over and over as one who examines a strange puzzle. He saw that his "no" could not be his own "no." Molly must be partner in it. For to continue his fight for clean water he must risk her good name. He measured Bemis, and remembered the old quarrel. The hate in the face of the bribe-giver, thrown out of the county convention a quarter of a century before, came to Hendricks, and he knew that it was no vain threat he was facing. So he turned up the other facet of the puzzle. There was Adrian. For an hour he considered Adrian Brownwell, a vain jealous old man with the temper of a beast. To see Molly, tell her of their common peril, get her decision, and be with it at the meeting before Adrian saw the note, all in the two hours between the arrival of the train bearing the Brownwells and Mrs. Barclay, and the time of the meeting in Barclay Hall, was part of Hendricks' puzzle. He believed that by using the telephone to make an appointment he could manage it. Then he turned the puzzle over and saw that to save Molly Brownwell's good name and his father's, human lives must be sacrificed by permitting the use of foul water in the town. And in the end his mind set. He knew that unless she forbade it, the contest must go on to a righteous finish, through whatever perils, over any obstacles. Yet as he walked back to the bank, determined not to take his hand from the plough, he saw that he must prepare to go into the next day as though it were his last. For in his consciousness on the other side of the puzzle—always there was the foolish Adrian, impetuous at best, but stark mad in his jealousy and wrath.

And Elijah Westlake Bemis, keeping account of the man's movements, chuckled as he felt the struggle in the man's breast. For he was a wise old snake, that Lige Bemis, and he had seduced many another man after the brave impulsive "no" had roared in his face. Just before midnight when he saw the electric light flash on in the private office of the president of the Exchange National Bank, Lige Bemis, libertine with men, strolled home and counted the battle won. "He's writing his speech," he said to Barclay over the telephone at midnight. And John Barclay, who had fought the local contest in the election with Bemis to be loyal to a friend, and to help one who was in danger of losing the profit on half a million dollars' investment in the Sycamore Ridge waterworks, laughed as he walked upstairs in his pajamas, and said to himself, "Old Lige is a great one—there is a lot of fight in the old viper yet." It was nothing to Barclay that the town got its water from a polluted pond. That phase of the case did not enter his consciousness, though it was placarded on the bill-boards and had been printed in the Banner a thousand times during the campaign. To him it was a fight by the demagogues against property interests, and he was with property, even a little property—even a miserable little dribble of property like half a million dollars' worth of waterworks bonds.

And Robert Hendricks—playfellow of John Barclay's boyhood, partner of his youth—sat working throughout the night, a brave man, going into battle without a tremor. He went through his books, made out statements of his business relations, prepared directions for the heads of his different concerns, as a man would do who might be going on a long journey. For above everything, Robert Hendricks was foresighted. He prepared for emergencies first, and tried to avoid them afterwards. And with the thought of the smallness of this life in his soul, he looked up from his work to see the hard gray lines of the dawn in the street outside of his office, bringing the ugly details from the shadows that hid them during the day, and he sighed as he wondered in what bourne he should see the next dawn break.

It was a busy day for Robert Hendricks, that next day, and through it all his mind was planning every moment of the time how he could protect Molly Brownwell. Did he work in the bank, behind his work his mind was seeking some outlet from his prison. If he went over the power-house at the electric plant, always he was looking among the wheels for some way of refuge for Molly. When he spent an hour in the office of the wholesale grocery house, he despatched a day's work, but never for a second was his problem out of his head. He spent two hours with his lawyers planning the suit against the water company, pointing out new sources of evidence, and incidentally leaving a large check to pay for the work. But through it all Molly Brownwell's good name was ever before him, and when he thought how twenty years before he had walked through another day planning, scheming, and contriving, all to produce the climax of calamity that was hovering over her to-day, he was sick and faint with horror and self-loathing.

But as the day drew to its noon, Hendricks began to feel a persistent detachment from the world about him. It floated across his consciousness, like the shadow anchor of some cloud far above him. He began to watch the world go by. He seemed not to be a part of it. He became a spectator. At four o'clock he passed Dolan on the street and said, absently, "I want you to-night at the bank at seven o'clock sharp—don't forget, it's very important."

As he walked down Main Street to the bank, the shadow anchor of the cloud had ceased to flit across his consciousness. Life had grown all gray and dull, and he was apart from the world. He saw the handbills announcing the meeting that night as one who sees a curious passing show; the men he met on the street he greeted as creatures from another world. Yet he knew he smiled and spoke with them casually. But it was not he who spoke; the real Robert Hendricks he knew was separated from the pantomime about him. When he went into the bank at five o'clock, the janitor was finishing his work. Hendricks called up the depot on the telephone and found that No. 6 was an hour late. With the realization that a full hour of his fighting time had been taken from him and that the train would arrive only a scant hour before the meeting, the Adrian face of his puzzle turned insistently toward Hendricks. It was not fear but despair that seized him. The cloud was over him. And for want of something to do he wrote. First he wrote abstractedly and mechanically to John Barclay, then to Neal Ward—a note for the Banner—and as the twilight deepened in the room, he squared his chair to the table and wrote to Molly Brownwell; that letter was the voice of his soul. That was real. Six o'clock struck. Half-past six clanged on the town clock, and as Jake Dolan opened the bank door, Hendricks heard the roar of the train crossing at the end of Main Street.

"There goes Johnnie's private car, switching on the tail of her," said Dolan, standing in the doorway.

Hendricks sent Dolan to a back room of the bank, and at seven-twenty went to the telephone. "Give me 876, central," he called. "Hello—hello—hello," he cried nervously, "hello—who is this?" The answer came and he said, "Oh, I didn't recognize your voice." Then he asked in a low tone, as one who had fear in his heart: "Do you recognize me? If you do, don't speak my name. Where is Adrian?" Then Mr. Dolan, listening in the next room, heard this: "You say Judge Bemis phoned to him? Oh, he was to meet him at eight o'clock. How long ago did he leave?" After a moment Hendricks' answer was: "Then he has just gone; and will not be back?" Hendricks cut impatiently into whatever answer came with: "Molly, I must see you within the next fifteen minutes. I can't talk any more over the telephone, but I must come up." "Yes," in a moment, "I must have your decision in a matter of great importance to you—to you, Molly." There was a short silence, then Dolan heard: "All right, I'll be there in ten minutes." Then Hendricks turned from the telephone and called Dolan in. He unlocked a drawer in his desk, and began speaking to Dolan, who stood over him. Hendricks' voice was low, and he was repressing the agitation in his heart by main strength.

"Jake," he said, talking as rapidly as he could, "I must be ungodly frank with you. It doesn't make any difference whether he is right or not, but Adrian Brownwell may be fooled into thinking he has reason to be jealous of me." Hendricks was biting his mustache. "He's a raging maniac of jealousy, Jake, but I'm not afraid of him—not for myself. I can get him before he gets me, if it comes to that, but to do it I'll have to sacrifice Molly. And I won't do that. If it comes to her good name or my life—she can have my life." They were outside now and Dolan was unhitching the horse. He knew instinctively that he was not to reply. In a moment Hendricks went on, "Well, there is just one chance in a hundred that it may turn that way—her good name or my life—and on that chance I've written some letters here." He reached in his coat and said, "Now, Jake, put these letters in your pocket and if anything goes wrong with me, deliver them to the persons whose names are on the envelopes—and to no one else. I must trust everything to you, Jake," he said.

Driving up the hill, he met Bemis coming down town. He passed people going to the meeting in Barclay Hall. He did not greet them, but drove on. His jaw was set hard, and the muscles of his face were firm. As he neared the Culpepper home he climbed from the buggy and hitched the horse to the block in front of his own house. He hurried into the Culpepper yard, past the lilac bushes heavy with blooms, and up the broad stone steps with the white pillars looming above him. It was a quarter to eight, and at that minute Bemis was saying to Adrian Brownwell, "All right, if you don't believe it, don't take my word for it, but go home right now and see what you find."

Molly Brownwell met Hendricks on the threshold with trembling steps. "Bob, what is it?" she asked. They stood in the shadow of the great white pillars, where they had parted a generation ago.

"It's this, Molly," answered Hendricks, as he put his hand to his forehead that was throbbing with pain; "Lige Bemis has my letter to you. Yes," he cried as she gasped, "the note—the very note, and to get it I must quit the waterworks fight and go to the meeting to-night and surrender. I had no right to decide that alone. It is our question, Molly. We are bound by the old life—and we must take this last stand together."

The woman shrank from Hendricks with horror on her face, as he personified her danger. She could not reply at once, but stood staring at him in the dusk. As she stared, the feeling that she had seen it all before in a dream came over her, and the premonition that some awful thing was impending shook her to the marrow.

"Molly, we have no time to spare," he urged. "I must answer Bemis in ten minutes—I can do it by phone. But say what you think."

"Why—why—why—Bob—let me think," she whispered, as one trying to speak in a dream, and that also seemed familiar to her. "It's typhoid for my poor who died like sheep last year," she cried, "or my good name and yours, is it, Bob? Is it, Bob?" she repeated.

He put his hand to his forehead again in the old way she remembered so well—to temples that were covered with thin gray hair—and answered, "Yes, Molly, that's our price."

Those were the last words that she seemed to have heard before; after that the dialogue was all new to her. She was silent a few agonized seconds and then said, "I know what you think, Bob; you are for my poor; you are brave." He did not answer, fearing to turn the balance. As she sank into a porch chair a rustling breeze moved the lilac plumes and brought their perfume to her. From down the avenue came the whir of wheels and the hurrying click of a horse's hoofs. At length she rose, and said tremulously: "I stand with you, Bob. May God make the blow as light as He can."

They did not notice that a buggy had drawn up on the asphalt in front of the house. Hendricks put out his hand and cried, "Oh, Molly—Molly—Molly—" and she took it in both of hers and pressed it to her lips, and as Adrian Brownwell passed the lilac thicket in the gathering darkness that is what he saw. Hendricks was halfway down the veranda steps before he was aware that Brownwell was running up the walk at them, pistol in hand, like one mad. Before the man could fire, Hendricks was upon him, and had Brownwell's two hands gripped tightly in one of his, holding them high in the air. The little man struggled.

"Don't scream—for God's sake, don't scream," cried Hendricks to the woman in a suppressed voice. Then he commanded her harshly, "Go in the house—quick—Molly—quick."

She ran as though hypnotized by the force of the suggestion. Hendricks had his free hand over Brownwell's mouth and around his neck. The little old man was kicking and wriggling, but Hendricks held him. "Not here, you fool, not here. Can't you see it would ruin her, you fool? Not here." He carried and dragged Brownwell across the grass through the shrubbery and into the Hendricks yard. No one was passing, and the night had fallen. "Now," said Hendricks, as he backed against a pine tree, still holding Brownwell, "I shall let you go if you'll promise to listen to me just a minute until I tell you the whole truth. Molly is innocent, man—absolutely innocent, and I'll show you if you'll talk for a moment. Will you promise, man?"

Brownwell nodded his assent; Hendricks looked at him steadily for a second and then said, "All right," and set the little man on his feet. The glare of madness came into Brownwell's eyes, and as he turned he came at Hendricks with his pistol drawn. An instant later there was a shot. Brownwell saw the amazement flash into Hendricks' eyes, and then Hendricks sank gently to the foot of the pine tree.

And Molly Brownwell, with the paralysis of terror still upon her, heard the shot and then heard footsteps running across the grass. A moment later her husband, empty-handed, chattering, shivering, and white, stumbled into the room. Rage had been conquered by fear. For an agonized second the man and woman stared at one another, speechless—then the wife cried:—

"Oh—oh—why—why—Adrian," and her voice was thick with fear.—

The man was a-tremble—hands, limbs, body—and his mad eyes seemed to shrink from the woman's gaze. "Oh, God—God—oh, God—" he panted, and fell upon his face across the sofa. They heard a hurrying step running toward the Hendricks house, there came a frightened, choked cry of "Help!" repeated twice, another and another sound of pattering feet came, and five minutes after the quaking man had entered the door the whole neighbourhood seemed to be alive with running figures hurrying silently through the gloom. The thud of feet and the pounding of her heart, and the whimpering of the little man who lay, face down, on the sofa, were the only sounds in her ears. She started to go with the crowd. But Adrian screamed to her to stay.

"Oh," he cried, "he sank so softly—he sank so softly—he sank so softly! Oh, God, oh, God—he sank so softly!"

And the next conscious record of her memory was that of Neal Ward bursting into the room, crying, "Aunt Molly—Aunt Molly—do you know Mr. Hendricks has committed suicide? They've found him dead with a pistol by his side. I want some whiskey for Miss Hendricks. And they need you right away."

But Molly Brownwell, with what composure she could, said, "Adrian is sick, Neal—I can't—I can't leave him now." And she called after Neal as he ran toward the door, "Tell them, Neal, tell them—why I can't come." There was a hum of voices in the air, and the sound of a gathering crowd. Soon the shuffle and clatter of a thousand feet made it evident that the meeting at Barclay Hall had heard the news and was hurrying up the hill. The crowd buzzed for an hour, and Molly and Adrian Brownwell waited speechless together—he face downward on the sofa, she huddled in a chair by the window. And then the crowd broke, slowly, first into small groups that moved away together and then turned in a steady stream and tramped, tramped, tramped down the hill.

When the silence had been unbroken a long time, save by the rumble of a buggy on the asphalt or by the footsteps of some stray passerby, the man on the sofa lifted his head, looked at his wife and spoke, "Well, Molly?"

"Well, Adrian," she answered, "this is the end, I suppose?"

He did not reply for a time, and when he did speak, it was in a dead, passionless voice: "Yes—I suppose so. I can't stay here now."

"No—no," she returned. "No, you should not stay here."

He sat up and stared vacantly at her for a while and then said, "Though I don't see why I didn't leave years and years ago; I knew all this then, as well as I do now." The wife looked away from him as she replied: "Yes, I should have known you would know. I knew your secret and you—"

"My secret," said Adrian, "my secret?"

"Yes—that you came North with your inherited money because when you were in the Confederate army you were a coward in some action and could not live among your own people."

"Who told you," he asked, "who told you?"

"The one who told you I have always loved Bob; life has told me that, Adrian. Just as life has told you my story." They sat without speaking for a time, and then the woman sighed and rose. "Two people who have lived together twenty-five years can have no secrets from each other. In a thousand, ways the truth comes out."

"I should have gone away a long time ago," he repeated, "a long time ago; I knew it, but I didn't trust my instincts."

"Here comes father," she said, as the gate clicked.

They stood together, listening to the slow shuffle of the colonel coming up the walk, and the heavy fall of his cane. The wife put out her hand and said gently, "I think I have wronged you, Adrian, more than any one else."

He did not take her hand but sighed, and turned and went up the wide stairway. He was an old man then, and she remembered the years when he tripped up gayly, and then she looked at her own gray hair in the mirror and saw that her life was spent too.

As the colonel came in gasping asthmatically, he found his daughter waiting for him. "Is Adrian better?" he asked excitedly. "Neal said Adrian was sick."

"Yes, father, he's upstairs packing. He is going out on the four o'clock train."

"Oh," said the colonel, and then panted a moment before asking, "Has any one told you how it happened?"

"Yes," she replied, "I know everything. I think I'll run over there now, father." As she stood in the doorway, she said, "Don't bother Adrian—he'll need no help."

And so Molly Brownwell passed the last night with her dead lover. About midnight the bell rang and she went to the door.

"Ah, madam," said Jacob Dolan, as he fumbled in his pockets, and tried to breathe away from her to hide the surcease of his sorrow, "Ah, madam," he repeated, as he suddenly thought to pull off his hat, "I did not come for you—'twas Miss Hendricks I called for; but I have one for you, too. He gave the bundle to me the last thing—poor lad, poor lad." He handed her the letter addressed to Mrs. Brownwell, and then asked, "Is the sister about?"

And when he found she could not be seen he went away, and Molly Brownwell sat by the dead man's body and read:—

"My darling—my darling—they will let a dead man say that to you—won't they? And yet, so far as any thought of mine could sin against you, I have been dead these twenty years. Yet I know that I have loved you all that time, and as I sit alone here in the bank, and take the bridle off my heart, the old throb of joy that we both knew as children comes back again. It is such a strange thing—this life—such a strange thing." Then there followed a burst of passionate regret from the man's very heart, and it is so sacred to a manly love that curbed itself for a score of years, that it must not be set down here.

Over and over Molly Brownwell read the letter and then crept out to her lilac thicket and wept till dawn. She heard Adrian Brownwell go, but she could not face him, and listened as his footsteps died away, and he passed from her life.

And John Barclay kept vigil for the dead with her. As he tossed in his bed through the night, he seemed to see glowing out of the darkness before him the words Hendricks had written, in the letter that Dolan gave Barclay at midnight. Sometimes the farewell came to him:—

"It is not this man of millions that I wish to be with a moment to-night, John—but the boy I knew in the old days—the boy who ran with me through the woods at Wilson's Creek, the boy who rode over the hill into the world with me that September day forty years ago; the boy whose face used to beam eagerly out of yours when you sat playing at your old melodeon. I wish to be near him a little while to-night. When you get this, can't you go to your great organ and play him back into consciousness and tell him Bob says good-by?"

At dawn Barclay called Bemis out of bed, and before sunrise he and Barclay were walking on the terrace in front of the Barclay home.

"Lige," began Barclay, "did you tell Adrian of that note last night?" Bemis grinned his assent.

"And he went home, found Bob there conferring with Mrs. Brownwell about his position in the matter, and Adrian killed him."

"That's the way I figured it out myself," replied Bemis, laconically, "but it's not my business to say so."

"I thought you promised me you would just bluff with that note and not go so far, Lige Bemis," said Barclay.

"Did he just bluff with me when he called me a boodler and threw me downstairs in the county convention?"

"Then you lied to me, sir," snapped Barclay.

"Oh, hell, John—come off," sneered Bemis. "Haven't I got a right to lie to you if I want to?"

The two men stared at each other like growling dogs for a moment, and then Barclay turned away with, "What is there in the typhoid talk?"

"Demagogery—that's all. Of course there may be typhoid in the water; but let 'em boil the water."

"But they won't."

"Well, then, if they eat too much of your 'Old Honesty' or drink too much of my water unboiled, they take their own risk. You don't make a breakfast food for hogs, and I can't run my water plant for fools."

"But, Lige," protested Barclay, "couldn't we hitch up the electric plant—"

"Hitch up the devil and Tom Walker, John Barclay. When the wolves got after you, did I come blubbering to you to lay down and take a light sentence?" Barclay did not answer. Bemis continued: "Brace up, John—what's turned you baby when we've got the whole thing won? We didn't kill Hendricks, did we? Are you full of remorse and going to turn state's evidence?"

Barclay looked at the ground for a time, and said: "I believe, Lige, we did kill Bob—if it comes to that; and we are morally responsible for—"

"Oh, bag your head, John; I'm going home. When you can talk some sense, let me know."

And Bemis left Barclay standing in the garden looking at the sunrise across the mill-pond. Presently the carrier boy with a morning paper came around, and in it Barclay read the account of Hendricks' reported suicide, corroborated by his antemortem statement, written and delivered to Jacob Dolan an hour before he died.

"When I took charge of the Exchange National Bank," it read, "I found that my father owed Garrison County nine thousand dollars for another man's taxes, which he, my father, had agreed to pay, but had no money to do so. The other man insisted on my father forging a note to straighten matters up. It seemed at that time that the bank would close and the whole county would be ruined if my father had not committed that deed. I could not put the money back into the treasury without revealing my father's crime, so I let the matter run for a few years, renewing the forged note, and then, as it seemed an interminable job of forgery, I forged the balance on the county books, one afternoon between administrations in 1879. Mr. E. W. Bemis, who is trying to force polluted water on Sycamore Ridge, has discovered this forgery and has threatened to expose me in that and perhaps other matters. So I feel that my usefulness in the fight for pure water in the town is ended. I leave funds to fight the matter in the courts, and I feel sure that we will win."

Barclay sat in the warm morning sun, reading and re-reading the statement. Finally Jane Barclay, thin, broken and faded, on whom the wrath of the people was falling with crushing weight, came into the veranda, and put her hands on her husband's shoulders.

"Come in, John, breakfast is ready."

The woman whom the leprosy of dishonest wealth was whitening, walked dumbly into the great house, and ate in silence. "I am going to Molly," she said simply, as the two rose from their meal. "I think she needs me, dear; won't you come, too?" she asked.

"I can't, Jane—I can't," cried Barclay. And when his wife had pressed him, he broke forth: "Because Lige Bemis made Adrian kill Bob and I helped—" he groaned, and sank into his chair, "and I helped."

When Neal Ward came to the office the next morning, he found Dolan waiting for him. Ward opened the envelope that Dolan gave him, and found in it the mortgage Hendricks had owned on the Banner office, assigned to Ward, and around the mortgage was a paper band on which was written: "God bless you, my boy—keep up the fight; never say die."

Then Ward read Adrian Brownwell's valedictory that was hanging on a copy spike before him. It was the heart-broken sob of an old man who had run away from failure and sorrow, and it need not be printed here.

On Memorial Day, when they came to the cemetery on the hill to decorate the soldiers' graves, men saw that the great mound of lilacs on Robert Hendricks' grave had withered. The seven days' wonder of his passing was ended. The business that he had left prospered without him, or languished and died; within a week in all but a dozen hearts Hendricks' memory began to recede into the past, and so, where there had been a bubble on the tide, that held in its prism of light for a brief bit of eternity all of God's spectacle of life, suddenly there was only the tide moving resistlessly toward the unknown shore. And thus it is with all of us.



CHAPTER XXVIII

In the summer of 1904, following the death of Robert Hendricks, John Barclay spent much time in the Ridge, more time than he had spent there for thirty years. For in the City he was a marked man. Every time the market quivered, reporters rushed to get his opinion about the cause of the disturbance; the City papers were full of stories either of his own misdeeds, or of the wrong-doings of other men of his caste. His cronies were dying all about him of broken hearts or wrecked minds, and it seemed to him that the word "indictment" was in every column of every newspaper, was on every man's lips, and literally floated in the air.

So he remained in Sycamore Ridge much of the time, and every fair afternoon he rowed himself up the mill-pond to fish. He liked to be alone; for when he was alone, he could fight the battle in his soul without interruption. The combat had been gathering for a year; a despair was rising in him, that he concealed from his womenkind—who were his only intimate associates in those days—as if it had been a crime. But out on the mill-pond alone, casting minnows for bass, he could let the melancholy in his heart rage and battle with his sanity, without let or hindrance. His business was doing well; the lawsuits against the company in a dozen states were not affecting dividends, and the department in charge of his charities was forwarding letters of condolence and consolation from preachers and college presidents, and men who under the old regime had been in high walks of life. Occasionally some conservative newspaper or magazine would praise him and his company highly; but he knew the shallowness of all the patter of praise. He knew that he paid for it in one way or another, and he grew cynical; and in his lonely afternoons on the river, often he laughed at the whole mockery of his career, smiled at the thought of organized religion, licking his boots for money like a dog for bones, and then in his heart he said there is no God. Once, to relieve the pain of his soul's woe, he asked aloud, who is God, anyway, and then laughed as he thought that the bass nibbling at his minnow would soon think he, John Barclay, was God. The analogy pleased him, and he thought that his own god, some devilish fate, had the string through his gills at that moment and was preparing to cast him into the fire. Up in the office in the city, they went on making senators and governors, and slipping a federal judge in where they could, but he had little hand in it, for his power was a discarded toy. He sat in his boat alone, rowing for miles and miles, from stump to stump, and from fallen tree-top to tree-top, hating the thing he called God, and distrusting men.

But when he appeared in the town, or at home, he was cheerful enough; he liked to mingle with the people, and it fed his despair to notice what a hang-dog way they had with him. He knew they had been abusing him behind his back, and when he found out exactly what a man had said, he delighted in facing the man down with it.

"So you think John Barclay could have saved Bob Hendricks' life, do you, Oscar?" asked Barclay, as he overhauled Fernald coming out of the post-office.

"Who said so?" asked Fernald, turning red.

"Oh," chuckled Barclay, "I got it from the hired girls' wireless news agency. But you said it all right—you said it, Oscar; you said it over to Ward's at dinner night before last." And Barclay grinned maliciously.

Fernald scratched his head, and said, "Well, John, to be frank with you, that's the talk all over town—among the people."

"The people—the people," snapped Barclay, impatiently, "the people take my money for bridges and halls and parks and churches and statues and then call me a murderer—oh, damn the people! Who started this story?"

"See Jake Dolan, John—it's up to him. He can satisfy you," said Fernald, and turned, leaving Barclay in the street.

Up the hill trudged the gray-clad little man, with his pugnacious shoulders weaving and his bronzed face set hard and his mean jaw locked. On the steps of the court-house he found Jake Dolan, smoking a morning pipe with the loafers in the shade of the building.

"Here you, Jake Dolan," called Barclay, "what do you mean by accusing me of murdering Bob Hendricks? What did I have to do with it?"

"Easy, easy, Johnnie, my boy," returned Dolan, knocking the ashes from his pipe on the steps between his feet. "Gentlemen," said Dolan, addressing the crowd, "you've heard what our friend says. All right—come with me to my office, Johnnie Barclay, and I'll show you." Barclay followed Dolan into the basement of the court-house, with the crowd at a respectful distance. "Right this way—" and Dolan switched on an electric light. "Do you see that break in the foundation, Mr. Barclay? You do? And you know in your soul that it opens into the cave that leads to the cellar of your own house. Well, then, Mr. Johnnie Barclay—the book that contained the evidence against Bob Hendricks did not go out of this court-house by the front door, as you well know, but through that hole—stolen at night when I was out; and the man who stole it was the horse thief that used to run the cave—your esteemed friend, Lige Bemis."

The crowd was gaping at the rickety place in the foundation, and one man pulled a loose stone out and let the cold air of the cave into the room.

"Lige Bemis came to your house, Mr. Johnnie Barclay, got into the cave from your cellar, broke through this wall, and stole the book that contained the forgery made to cover General Hendricks' disgrace. And who caused that disgrace but the overbearing, domineering John Barclay, who made that old man steal to pay John Barclay's taxes, back in the grasshopper year, when the sheriff and the jail were almost as familiar to him as they are now,—by all counts. Ah, John Barclay," said the Irishman, turning to the crowd, "John Barclay, John Barclay—you're a brave little man sometimes; I've seen you when I was most ungodly proud of you; I've seen you do grand things, my little man, grand things. But you're a coward too, Johnnie; sitting in your own house while your horse-thief friend used your cellar to work out the disgrace of the man who gave his good name to save your own—that was a fine trick—a damn fine trick, wasn't it, Mr. Barclay?"

Barclay started to go, but the crowd blocked his way. Dolan saw that Barclay was trying to escape. "Turn tail, will you, my little man? Wait one minute," cried Dolan. "Wait one minute, sir. For what was you conniving against the big man? I know—to win your game; to win your miserable little game. Ah, what a pup a man can be, Johnnie, what a mangy, miserable, cowardly little pup a man can be when he tries—and a decent man, too. Money don't mean anything to you—you got past that, but it's to win the game. Why, man, look at yourself—look at yourself—you'd cheat your own mother playing cards with matches for counters—just to win the game." Dolan waved for the crowd to break. "Let him out of here, and get out yourselves—every one of you. This is public property you're desecrating."

Dolan sat alone in his office, pale and trembling after the crowd had gone. Colonel Culpepper came puffing in and saw the Irishman sitting with his head in his hands and his elbows on the table.

"What's this, Jake—what's this I hear?" asked the colonel.

"Oh, nothing," answered Dolan, and then he looked up at the colonel with sad, remorseful eyes. "What a fool—what a fool whiskey in a man's tongue is—what a fool." He reached under his cot for his jug, and repeated as he poured the liquor into a glass, "What a fool, what a fool, what a fool." And then, as he gulped it down and made a wry face, "Poor little Johnnie at the mill; I didn't mean to hit him so hard—not half so hard. What a fool, what a fool," and the two old men started off for the harness shop together.

Neal Ward that night, in the Banner office alone, wrote to his sweetheart the daily letter that was never mailed.

"How sweet it is," he writes, "to have you at home. Sometimes I hear your voice through the old leaky telephone, talking to Aunt Molly; her phone and ours are through the same board, and your voice seems natural then, and unstrained, not as it is when we meet. But I know that some way we are meeting—our souls—in the infinite realm outside ourselves—beyond our consciousness—either sleeping or waking. Last night I dreamed a strange dream. A little girl, like one of the pictures in mother's old family photograph album, seemed to be talking with me,—dressed so quaintly in the dear old fashion of the days when mother taught the Sycamore Ridge School. She seemed to be playing with me in some way, and then she said: 'Oh, yes, I am your telephone; she knows all about it. I tell her every night as we play together.' And then she was no longer a little girl but a most beautiful soul and she said with great gentleness: 'In her heart she loves you—in her heart she loves you. This I know, only she is proud—proud with the Barclay pride; but in her heart she loves you; is not that enough?' What a strange dream! I wonder where we are—we who animate our bodies, when we sleep. What is sleep, but the proof that death is but a sleep? Oh, Jeanette, Jeanette, come into my soul as we sleep."

He folded the letter, sealed and addressed it, and dated the envelope, and put it in his desk—the desk before which Adrian Brownwell had sat, eating his heart out in futile endeavour to find his place in the world. Neal Ward had cleaned out one side of the desk, and was using that for his own. Mrs. Brownwell kept her papers in the other side, and one key locked them both. As he walked home that night under the stars, his heart was full of John Barclay's troubles. Neal knew Barclay well enough to know that the sensitive nature of the man, with his strongly developed instinctive faculty for getting at the truth, would be his curse in the turmoil or criticism through which he was going. So a day or two later Neal was not surprised to find a long statement in the morning press despatches from Barclay explaining and defending the methods of the National Provisions Company. He proved carefully that the notorious Door Strip saved large losses in transit of the National Provisions Company's grain and grain produce, and showed that in paying him for the use of these strips the railroad companies were saving great sums for widowed and orphaned stockholders of railroads—sums which would be his due for losses in transit if the strips were not used.

Neal Ward knew what it had cost Barclay in pride to give out that statement; so the young man printed it on the first page of the Banner with a kind editorial about Mr. Barclay and his good works. That night when the paper was off, and young Ward was working on the books of his office, he was called to the telephone.

"Is this you, Nealie Ward?" asked a woman's voice—the strong, clear, deep voice of an old woman. And when he had answered, the voice went on: "Well, Nealie, I wish to thank you for that editorial about John to-night in the paper; I'm Mary Barclay. It isn't more than half true, Nealie; and if it was all true, it isn't a fraction of what the truth ought to be if John did what he could, but it will do him a lot of good—right here in the home paper, and—Why, Jennie, I'm speaking with Nealie Ward,—why, do you think I am not old enough to talk with Nealie without breeding scandal?—as I was saying, my dear, it will cheer John up a little, and heaven knows he needs something. I'm—Jennie, for mercy sakes keep still; I know Nealie Ward and I knew his father when he wasn't as old as Nealie—did his washing for him; and boarded his mother four winters, and I have a right to say what I want to to that child." The boy and the grandmother laughed into the telephone. "Jennie is so afraid I'll do something improper," laughed Mrs. Barclay. "Oh, yes, by the way—here's a little item for your paper to-morrow: Jennie's mother is sick; I think it's typhoid, but you can't get John to admit it. So don't say typhoid." Then with a few more words she rang off.

When the Banner printed the item about Mrs. Barclay's illness, the town, in one of those outbursts of feeling which communities often have, seemed to try to show John Barclay the affection that was in their hearts for the man who had grown up among them, and the family that had been established under his name. Flowers—summer flowers—poured in on the Barclays. Children came with wild flowers, prairie flowers that Jane Barclay had not seen since she roamed over the unbroken sod about Minneola as a girl; and Colonel Culpepper came marching up the walk through the Barclay grounds, bearing his old-fashioned bouquet, as grandly as an ambassador bringing a king's gift. Jane Barclay sent word that she wished to see him.

"My dear," said the colonel, as he held the flowers toward her, "accept these flowers from those who have shared your bounty—from God's poor, my dear; these are God's smiles that they send you from their hearts—from their very hearts, my dear, from their poor hearts wherein God's smiles come none too often." She saw through glistening eyes the broken old figure, with his coat tightly buttoned on that July day to hide some shabbiness underneath. But she bade the colonel sit down, and they chatted of old times and old places and old faces for a few minutes; and the colonel, to whom any sort of social function was a rare and sweet occasion, stayed until the nurse had to beckon him out of the room over Mrs. Barclay's shoulder.

General Ward sent a note with a bunch of monthly blooming roses.

"MY DEAR JANE (he wrote): These roses are from slips we got from John's mother when we planted our little yard. This red one is from the very bush on which grew the rose John wore at his wedding. Pin it on the old scamp to-night, and see how he will look. He was a dapper little chap that night, and the years have hardly begun their work on him; or perhaps he is such a tough customer that he dulls the chisel of time. I do not know, and so long as it is so, you do not care, but we both know, and are both glad that of all the many things God has sent you in thirty years, he has sent you nothing so fine as the joy that came with the day John wore this rose for you—a joy that has grown while the rose has faded. And may this rose renew your joy for another thirty years."

John read the note when he came in from the mill that evening, and Jane watched the years slip off his face. He looked into the past as it spread itself on the carpet near the bed.

"Well, well, well," he said, as he smiled into the picture he saw, "I remember as well the general bringing that rose down to the office that morning, wrapped in blue tissue paper from cotton batting rolls! The package was tied with fancy red braid that used to bind muslin bolts." He laughed quietly, and asked, "Jane, do you remember that old red braid?" The sick woman nodded. "Well, with the little blue package was a note from Miss Lucy, which said that my old teacher could not give me a present that year—times were cruelly hard then, you remember—but that she could and did put the blessing of her prayers on the rose, that all that it witnessed at my wedding would bring me happiness." He sat for a moment in silence, and, as the nurse was gone, he knelt beside the sick woman and kissed her. And as the wife stroked his head she whispered, "How that prayer has been answered, John—dear, hasn't it?" And the great clock in the silent hall below ticked away some of the happiest minutes it had ever measured.

But when he passed out of the sick room, the world—the maddening press of affairs, and the combat in his soul—snapped back on his shoulders with a mental click as though a load had fallen into its old place. He stood before his organ, and could not press the keys. As he sat there in the twilight made by the shaded electric lamps, the struggle rose in his heart against the admission of anything into his scheme of life but material things, and the conflict raged unchecked. What a silliness, he said, to think that the mummery of a woman over a rose could affect a life. Life is what the succession of the days brings. The thing is or is not, he said to himself, and the gibber about prayer and the moral force that moves the universe is for the weak-minded. So he took his hell to bed with him as it went every night, and during the heavy hours when he could not sleep, he tiptoed into the sick room, and looked at the thin face of his wife, sleeping a restless, feverish sleep, and a great fear came into his heart.

Once as the morning dawned he asked the nurse whom he met in the hall, "Is it typhoid?"

She was a stranger to the town, and she said to him, "What does the doctor tell you?"

"That's not the point," he insisted. "What do you think?"

She looked at him for an undecided moment and replied, "I'm not paid to think, Mr. Barclay," and went past him with her work. But he knew the truth. He went to his bed, and threw himself upon it, a-tremble with remorse and fear, and the sneer in his heart stilled his lips and he could not look outside himself for help. So the morning came, and another day, bringing its thousand cares, faced him, like a jailer with his tortures.

Time dragged slowly in the sick room and at the mill. One doctor brought another, and the Barclay private car went far east and came flying back with a third. The town knew that Mrs. John Barclay was dangerously sick. There came hopeful days when the patient's mind was clear; on one of these days Mrs. McHurdie called, and they let her see the sick woman. She brought some flowers.

"In the flowers, Jane," she said, "you will find something from Watts." Mrs. McHurdie smiled. "You know he sat up till 'way after midnight last night, playing his accordion. Oh, it's been years since he has touched it. And this morning when I got up, I found him sitting by the kitchen table, writing. It's a poem for you." Mrs. McHurdie looked rather sheepish as she said: "You know how Watts is, Jane; he just made me bring it. You can read it when you get well."

They hurried Mrs. McHurdie out, and when Jane Barclay went to sleep, they found tears on her pillow, and in her hand the verses,—the limping, awkward verses of an old man, whose music only echoed back from the past. The nurses and the young doctor from Boston had a good laugh at it. Each of the four stanzas began with two lines that asked: "Oh, don't you remember the old river road, that ran through the sweet-scented wood?" To them it was a curious parody on something old and quaint that they had long since forgotten. But to the woman who lay murmuring of other days, whose lips were parched for the waters of brooks that had surrendered to the plough a score of years ago, the halting verses of Watts McHurdie were laden with odours of grape blossoms, of wild cucumbers and sumach, of elder blossoms, and the fragrance of the crushed leaves of autumn. And the music of distant ripples played in her feverish brain and the sobbing voice of the turtle dove sang out of the past for her as she slept. All through the day and the night and for many nights and days she whispered of the trees and the running water and the wild grass and the birds.

And so one morning when it was still gray, she woke and said to John, who bent over her, "Why, dear, we are almost home; there are the lights across the river; just one more hill, dearie, and then—" And then with the water prattling in her ears at the last ford she turned to the wall and sank to rest.

Day after day, until the days and nights became a week and the week repeated itself until nearly a month was gone, John Barclay, dry-eyed and all but dumb, paced the terrace before his house by night, and by day roamed through the noisy mill or wandered through his desolate house, seeking peace that would not come to him. The whole foundation of his scheme of life was crumbling beneath him. He had built thirty-five years of his manhood upon the theory that the human brain is the god of things as they are and as they must be. The structure of his life was an imposing edifice, and men called it great and successful. Yet as he walked his lonely way in those black days that followed Jane's death, there came into his consciousness a strong, overmastering conviction, which he dared not accept, that his house was built on sand. For here were things outside of his plans, outside of his very beliefs, coming into his life, bringing calamity, sorrow, and tragedy with them into his own circle of friends, into his own household, into his own heart. As he walked through the dull, lonely hours he could not escape the vague feeling, though he fought it as one mad fights for his delusion, that all the tragedies piling up about him came from his own mistakes. Over and over again he threshed the past. Molly Brownwell's cry, "You have sold me into bondage, John Barclay," would not be stilled, though at times he could smile at it; and the broken body and shamed face of her father haunted him like an obsession. Night after night when he tried to sleep, Robert Hendricks' letter burned in fire before his eyes, and at last so mad was the struggle in his soul that he hugged these things to him that he might escape the greater horror: the dreadful red headlines in the sensational paper they had sent him from the City office which screamed at him, "John Barclay slays his wife—Aids a water franchise grab that feeds the people typhoid germs and his own wife dies of the fever." He had not replied to the letter from the law department of the Provisions Company which asked if he wished to sue for libel, and begged him to do so. He had burned the paper, but the headlines were seared into his brain.

Over and over he climbed the fiery ladder of his sins: the death of General Hendricks, the sacrifice of Molly Culpepper, the temptation and fall of her father, the death of his boyhood's friend, and then the headlines. These things were laid at his door, and over and over again, like Sisyphus rolling the stones uphill, he swept them away from his threshold, only to find that they rolled right back again. And with them came at times the suspicion that his daughter's unhappiness was upon him also. And besides these things, a hundred business transactions wherein he had cheated and lied for money rose to disturb him. And through it all, through his anguish and shame, the faith of his life kept battling for its dominion.

Once he sent for Bemis and tried to talk himself into peace with his friend. He did not speak of the things that were corroding his heart, but he sat by and heard himself chatter his diabolic creed as a drunkard watches his own folly.

"Lige," he said, "I'm sick of that infernal charities bureau we've got. I'm going to abolish it. These philanthropic millionaires make me sick at the stomach, Lige. What do they care for the people? They know what I know, that the damn people are here to be skinned." He laughed viciously and went on: "Sometimes I think we filthy rich are divided into two classes: those of us who keep mistresses, and those of us who have harmless little entanglements with preachers and college presidents. Neither the lemon-haired women nor the college presidents interfere with our business; they don't hamper us—not the slightest. They just take our money, and for a few idle hours amuse us, and make us feel that we are good fellows. As for me, I'll have neither women nor college presidents purring around my ankles. I'm going to cut out the philanthropy appropriation to-day."

And he was as good as his word. But that did not help. The truth kept wrenching his soul, and his feet blindly kept trying to find a path to peace.

It was late one night in August, and a dead moon was hanging in the south, when, treading the terrace before his house, he saw a shadow moving down the stairway in the hall. At first his racked nerves quivered, but when he found that it was his mother, he went to meet her, exclaiming as he mounted the steps to the veranda, "Why, mother, what is it—is anything wrong?"

Though it was past midnight, Mary Barclay was dressed for the day. She stood in the doorway with the dimmed light behind her, a tall, strong woman, straight and gaunt as a Nemesis. "No, John—nothing is wrong—in the house." She walked into the veranda and began as she approached a chair, "Sit down, John; I wish to talk with you."

"Well, mother—what is it?" asked the son, as he sat facing her.

She paused a moment looking earnestly at his face and replied, "The time has come when we must talk this thing out, John, soul to soul."

He shrank from what was coming. His instinct told him to fight away the crisis. He began to palaver, but his mother cut him short, as she exclaimed:—

"Why don't you let Him in, John?"

"Let who in?" asked her son.

"You know Whom, John Barclay; that was your grandfather speaking then, the old polly foxer. You know, my boy. Don't you remember me bending over the town wash-tub when you were a child, Johnnie? Don't you remember the old song I used to sing—of course you do, child—as I rubbed the clothes on the board: 'Let Him in, He is your friend, let Him in, He is your friend; He will keep you to the end—let—Him—in!' Of course you remember it, boy, and you have been fighting Him with all your might for six months now, and since Jane went, the fight is driving you crazy—can't you see, John?"

The son did not reply for a moment, then he said, "Oh, well, mother, that was all right in that day, but—"

"John Barclay," cried the mother sternly, as she leaned toward him, "the faith that bore your father a martyr to the grave, sustained me in this wilderness, and kept me happy as I scrubbed for your bread, shall not be scoffed in my presence. We are going to have this thing out to-night. I, who bore you, and nursed you, and fed you, and staked my soul on your soul, have some rights to-night. Here you are, fifty-four years old, and what have you done? You've killed your friend and your friend's father before him—I know that, John. You've wrecked the life of the sister of your first sweetheart, and put fear and disgrace in her father's face forever—forever, John Barclay, as long as he lives. I know that too; I haven't been wrapped in pink cotton all these years, boy—I've lived my own life since you left my wing, and made my own way too, as far as that goes. And now you are trying to quench the fires of remorse in your soul because your wife died a victim of your selfish, ruthless, practical scheme of things. More than that, my son—more than that, your child is suffering all the agony that a woman can suffer because of your devilish system of traffic in blood for money. You know what I mean, John. That boy told the truth, as you admit, and he could either run or lie, and for being a man you have broken up a God-sent love merely to satisfy your own vanity. Oh, John—John," she cried passionately, "my poor, blind, foolish boy—haven't you found the ashes in the core of your faith yet—aren't you ready to quit?"

He began, "Don't you think, mother, I have suffered—"

"Suffered, boy? Suffered? Of course you have suffered, John," she answered, taking his hands in hers. "I have seen the furnace fires smoking your face, and I know you have suffered, Johnnie; that's why I am coming to you—to ask you to quit suffering. Look at it, my boy—what are you suffering for? Is it material power you want? Well, you have never had it. The people are going right along running their own affairs in spite of you. All your nicely built card houses are knocked over. In the states and in the federal government, in spite of your years of planning and piecing out your little practical system, at the very first puff of God's breath it goes to pieces. The men whom you bought and paid for don't stay bought—do they, my boy? Oh, your old mother knows, John. Men who will sell are never worth buying; and the house that relies on them, falls. You have built a sand dam, son—like the dams you used to build in the spring stream when you were a child. It melts under pressure like straw. You have no worldly power. In this practical world you are a failure, and good old Phil Ward, who went out into the field and scattered seeds of discontent at your system—he is seeing his harvest ripen in his old age, John," she cried. "Can't you see your failure? Look at it from a practical standpoint: what thing in the last thirty years have you advocated, and Philemon Ward opposed, that to-day he has not realized and you lost? His prescription for the evils may have been wrong many times, but his diagnosis of them was always right, and they are being cured, in spite of all your protest that they did not exist. Which of you has won his practical fight in this practical world—his God or your God; the ideal world or the material world, boy? Can't you see it?" The old woman leaned forward and looked in her son's dull, unresponsive face. "Can't you see how you have failed?" she pleaded.

They rose together and began to pace the long floor of the veranda. "Oh, mother," he cried, as he put his arm about her, "I am so lonely—so tired, so sick in the heart of me."

They didn't speak for a time, but walked together in silence. At length the mother began again. "John," she said, as they turned at the end of the porch, "I suppose you are saying that you have your money—that it is material—solid, substantial, and undeniable. But is it? Isn't it all a myth? Leave it where it is—in the shape of securities and stocks and credits—what will it do? Will it bring Jane back? Will it give Jeanette her heart's desire, and make her happy all her life? You know, dear, that it will only make me miserable. Has it made you happy, John? Turn it into gold and pile it up in the front yard—and what will it buy that poor Phil Ward has not had all of his life—good food, good clothing—good enough, at least—a happy family, useful children, and a good name? A good name, John, is rather to be chosen than great riches—than all your money, my son—rather to be chosen than all your money. Can you buy that with your millions piled on millions?"

They were walking slowly as she spoke, and they turned into the terrace. There they stood looking at the livid moon sinking behind the great house.

"Is there more joy in this house than in any other house in town, John—answer me squarely, son—answer me," she cried. He shook his head sadly and sighed. "A mother, whose heart bleeds every hour as she sees her son torturing himself with footless remorse; that is one. A heart-broken, motherless girl, whose lover has been torn away from her by her father's vanity and her own pride, and whose mother has been taken as a pawn in the game her father played with no motive, no benefit, nothing but to win his point in a miserable little game of politics; that is number two. And a man who should be young for twenty years yet, who should have been useful for thirty years—and now what is he? powerless, useless, wretched, lonely, who spends his time walking about fighting against God, that he may prove his own wisdom and nothing more."

"Mother," cried Barclay, petulantly, "I can't stand this—that you should turn on me—now." He broke away from her, and stood alone. "When I need you most, you reproach me. When I need sympathy, you scorn all that I have done. You can't prove your God. Why should I accept Him?"

The gaunt old woman stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, John Barclay, prove your god. Tell him to come and give you a moment's happiness—set him to work to restore your good name; command him to make Jeanette happy. These things my God can do! Let your Mammon," she cried with all the passion of her soul, "let your Mammon come down and do one single miracle like that." Her voice broke and she sobbed. "What a tower of Babel—an industrial Babel, you are building, John—you and your kith and kind. The last century gave us Schopenhauers and Kants, all denying God, and this one gives us Railroad Kings and Iron Kings and Wheat Kings, all by their works proclaiming that Mammon has the power and the glory and the Kingdom. O ye workers of iniquity!" she cried, and her voice lifted, "ye wicked and perverse—"

She did not finish, but broken and trembling, her strength spent and her faith scorned, she sank on her knees by a marble urn on the terrace and sobbed and prayed. When she rose, the dawn was breaking, and she looked for a moment at her son, who had been sitting near her, and cried: "Oh, my boy, my little boy that I nursed at my breast—let Him in, He is your friend—and oh, my God, sustain my faith!"

Her son came to her side and led her into the house. But he went to his room and began the weary round, battling for his own faith.

As he stood by his open window that day at the mill, he saw Molly Brownwell across the pond, going into his home. He watched her idly and saw Jeanette meet her at the door, and then as his memory went back to the old days, he tried to find tears for the woman who had died, but he could only rack his soul. Tears were denied to him.

He was a rich man—was John Barclay; some people thought that, taking his wealth as wealth goes, all carefully invested in substantial things—in material things, let us say—he was the richest man in the Mississippi Valley. He bought a railroad that day when he looked through the office window at Molly Brownwell—a railroad three thousand miles long. And he bought a man's soul in a distant city—a man whom he did not know even by name, but the soul was thrown in "to boot" in a bargain; and he bought a woman's body whose face he had never seen, and that went as part of another trade he was making and he did not even know they had thrown it in. And he bought a child's life, and he bought a city's prosperity in another bargain, and bought the homage of a state, and the tribute of a European kingdom, as part of the day's huckstering. But with all his wealth and power, he could not buy one tear—not one little, miserable tear to moisten his grief-dried heart. For tears, just then, were a trifle high. So Mr. Barclay had to do without, though the man whose soul he bought wept, and the woman whose body came with a trade, sobbed, and the dead face of the child was stained with a score of tears.

They went to Jeanette Barclay's room,—the gray-haired woman and the girl,—and they sat there talking for a time—talking of things that were on their lips and not in their hearts. Each felt that the other understood her. And each felt that something was to be said. For one day before the end Jeanette's mother had said to her: "Jennie, if I am not here always go to Molly—ask her to tell you about her girlhood." The mother had rested for a while, and then added, "Tell her I said for you to ask her, and she'll know what I mean."

"Jeanette," said Molly Brownwell, "your mother and I were girls together. Your father saw more of her at our house than he did at her own home, until they married. Did you know that?" Jeanette nodded assent. "So one day last June she said to me, 'Molly, sometime I wish you would tell Jennie all about you and Bob.'"

Mrs. Brownwell paused, and Jeanette said, "Yes, mother told me to ask you to, Aunt Molly." Tears came into the daughter's eyes, and she added, "I think she knew even then that—"

And then it all came back, and after a while the elder woman was saying, "Well, once upon a time there lived a princess, my dear. All good stories begin so—don't they? She was a fat, pudgy little princess who longed to grow up and have hoop-skirts like a real sure-enough woman princess, and there came along a tall prince—the tallest, handsomest prince in all the wide world, I think. And he and the princess fell in love, as princesses and princes will, you know, my dear,—just as they do now, I am told. And the prince had to go away on business and be gone a long, long time, and while he was gone the father of the princess and the friend of the prince got into trouble—and the princess thought it was serious trouble. She thought the father of the prince would have to go to jail and maybe the prince and his friend fail. My, my, Jeanette, what a big word that word fail seemed to the little fat princess! So she let a man make love to her who could lend them all some money and keep the father out of jail and the prince and his friend from the awful fate of failure. So the man lent the money and made love, and made love. And the little princess had to listen; every one seemed to like to have her listen, so she listened and she listened, and she was a weak little princess. She knew she had wronged the prince by letting the man make love to her, and her soul was smudged and—oh, Jeanette, she was such a foolish, weak, miserable little princess, and they didn't tell her that there is only one prince for every princess, and one princess for every prince—so she took the man, and sent away the prince, and the man made love ever so beautifully—but it was not the real thing, my dear,—not the real thing. And afterwards when she saw the prince—so young and so strong and so handsome, her heart burned for him as with a flame, and she was not ashamed; the wicked, wicked princess, she didn't know. And so they walked together one night right up to the brink of the bad place, dearie—right up to the brink; and the princess shuddered back, and saved the prince. Oh, Jeanette, Jeanette, Jeanette," sobbed the woman, in the girl's arms, "right in this room, in this very room, which was your mother's room in the old house, I came out of the night, as bad a woman as God ever sent away from Him. And your mother and I cried it out, and talked it out, and I fought it out, and won. Oh, I won, Jeanette—I won!"

The two women were silent for a time, and then the elder went on: "That's what your mother wished you to know—that for every princess there is just one real prince, and for every prince there is just one real princess, my dear, and when you have found him, and know he is true, nothing—not money, not friends, not father nor mother—when he is honest, not even pride—should stand between you. That is what your mother sent you, dearie. Do you understand?"

"I think I do, Aunt Molly—I think so," repeated the girl. She looked out of the window for a moment, and then cried, "Oh, Aunt Molly—but I can't, I can't. How could he, Aunt Molly—how could he?" The girl buried her face in the woman's lap, and sobbed.

After a time the elder woman spoke. "You know he loves you, don't you, dear?"

The girl shook her head and cried, "But how could he?" and repeated it again and again.

"And you still love him—I know that, my dear, or you could not—you would not care, either," she added.

And so after a time the tears dried, as tears will, and the two women fell back into the pale world of surfaces, and as Molly Brownwell left she took the girl's hand and said: "You won't forget about the little pudgy princess—the dear, foolish, little weak princess, will you, Jeanette? And, dearie," she added as she stood on the lower steps of the porch, "don't—don't always be so proud—not about that, my dear—about everything else in the world, but not about that." And so she went back into the world, and ceased to be a fairy godmother, and took up her day's work.

John Barclay went to the City that night for the first time in two months, and Jeanette and her Grandmother Barclay kept the big house alone. In ten days he came back; his face was still hard, and the red rims around his eyes were dry, and his voice was sullen, as it had been for many weeks. His soul was still wrestling with a spirit that would not give up the fight. That night his daughter tried to sit with him, as she had tried many nights before. They sat looking at the stars in silence as was their wont. Generally the father had risen and walked away, but that night he turned upon her and said:—

"Jeanette, don't you like to be rich? I guess you are the richest girl in this country. Doesn't that sound good to you?"

"No, father," she answered simply, and continued, "What can I do with all that money?"

"Marry some man who's got sense enough to double it, and double it," cried Barclay, harshly. "Then there'll be no question but that you'll be the richest people in the world."

"And then what?" asked the girl.

"Then—then," he cried, "make the people in this world stand around—that's what."

"But, father," she said as she put her hand on his arm, "what if I don't want them to stand around? Why should I have to bother about it?"

"Oh," he groaned, "your grandmother has been filling you full of nonsense." He did not speak for a time, and at length she rose to go to bed. "Jeanette," he cried so suddenly that it startled her, "are you still moping after Neal Ward? Do you love him? Do you want me to go and get him for you?"

The girl stood by her father's chair a moment and then answered colourlessly: "No, father, I don't want you to get him for me. I am not moping for him, as you call it."

Her desolate tone reached some chord in his very heart, for he caught her hand, and put it to his cheek and said softly, "But she loves him—my poor little girl loves him?"

She tried to pull away her hand and replied, in the same dead voice: "Oh, well—that doesn't matter much, I suppose. It's all over—so far as I am concerned." She turned to leave him, and he cried:—

"My dear, my dear—why don't you go to him?"

She stopped a moment and looked at her father, and even in the starlight she could see his hard mouth and his ruthless jaw. Then she cried out, "Oh, father, I can't—I can't—" After a moment she turned and looked at him, and asked, "Would you? Would you?" and walked into the house without waiting for an answer.

The father sat crumpled up in his chair, listening to the flames crackling in his heart. The old negation was fighting for its own, and he was weary and broken and sick as with a palsy of the soul. For everything in him trembled. There was no solid ground under him. He had visited his material kingdom in the City, and had seen its strong fortresses and had tried all of its locks and doors, and found them firm and fast. But they did not satisfy his soul; something within him kept mocking them; refusing to be awed by their power, and the eternal "yes" rushed through his reason like a great wind.

As he sat there, suddenly, as from some power outside, John Barclay felt a creaking of his resisting timbers, and he quit the struggle. His heart was lead in his breast, and he walked through the house to his pipe organ, that had stood silent in the hall for nearly a year. He stood hesitatingly before it for a second, and then wearily lay him down to rest, on a couch beside it, where, when he had played the last time, Jane lay and listened. He was tired past all telling, but his soul was relaxed. He lay there for hours—until the tall clock above his head chimed two. He could not sleep, but his consciousness was inert and his mind seemed limp and empty, as one who has worked past his limit. The hymn that the clock chimed through the quarter hours repeated itself over and over again without meaning in his brain. Something aroused him; he started up suddenly, and lying half on his elbow and half on his side he stared about him, and was conscious of a great light in the room: it was as though there was a fire near by and he was alarmed, but he could not move. As he looked into space, terrified by the paralysis that held him, he saw across the face of the organ, "Righteousness exalteth a Nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."

Quick as a flash his mind went back to the time that same motto stared meaninglessly at him from above the pulpit in the chapel at West Point, to which he had been appointed official visitor at Commencement many years before. But that night as he gazed at the text its meaning came rushing through his brain. It came so quickly that he could not will it back nor reason it in. Righteousness, he knew, was not piety—not wearing your Sunday clothes to church and praying and singing psalms; it was living honestly and kindly and charitably and dealing decently with every one in every transaction; and sin—that, he knew—was the cheating, the deceiving, and the malicious greed that had built up his company and scores of others like it all over the land. That, he knew—that bribery and corruption and vicarious stealing which he had learned to know as business—that was a reproach to any people, and as it came to him that he was a miserable offender and that the other life, the decent life, was the right life, he was filled with a joy that he could not express, and he let the light fail about him unheeded, and lay for a time in a transport of happiness. He had found the secret.

The truth had come to him—to him first of all men, and it was his to tell. The joy of it—that he should find out what righteousness was—that it was not crying "Lord, Lord" and playing the hypocrite—thrilled him. And then the sense of his sinning came over him, but only with joy too, because he felt he could show others how foolish they were. The clock stopped ticking; the chimes were silent, and he lay unconscious of his body, with his spirit bathed in some new essence that he did not understand and did not try to understand. Finally he rose and went to his organ and turned on the motor, and put his hands to the keys. As he played the hymn to the "Evening Star," John Barclay looked up and saw his mother standing upon the stair with her fine old face bathed in tears. And then at last—

Tears? Tears for Mr. Barclay? All these months there have been no tears for him—none, except miserable little corroding tears of rage and shame. But now there are tears for Mr. Barclay, large, man's size, soul-healing tears—tears of repentance; not for the rich Mr. Barclay, the proud Mr. Barclay, the powerful, man-hating, God-defying Mr. Barclay of Sycamore Ridge, but for John Barclay, a contrite man, the humblest in all the kingdom.

And as John Barclay let his soul rise with the swelling music, he felt the solace of a great peace in his heart; he turned his wet face upward and cried, "Oh, mother, mother, I feel like a child!" Then Mary Barclay knew that her son had let Him in, knew in her own heart all the joy there is in heaven over one sinner that repenteth.



CHAPTER XXIX

It is written in the Book that holds the wisdom of our race that one who is reborn into the Kingdom of God, enters as a little child. It is there in black and white, yet few people get the idea into their consciousnesses. They expect regeneration to produce an upright man. God knows better than that. And we should know better too when it is written down for us. And so you good people who expect to see John Barclay turn rightabout face on the habits of a lifetime are to be disappointed. For a little child stumbles and falls and goes the wrong way many times before it learns the way of life. There came days after that summer night of 1904, when John Barclay fell—days when he would sneak into the stenographers' room in his office in the City and tear up some letter he had dictated, when he would send a telegram annulling an order, when he would find himself cheating and gouging his competitors or his business associates,—even days when he had not the moral courage to retrace his steps although he knew he was wrong. Shame put her brand on his heart, and his face showed to those who watched it closely—and there were scores of fellow-gamblers at the game with him, whose profits came from watching his face—his face showed forth uncertainty and daze. So men said, "The old man's off his feed," or others said, "Barclay's losing his nerve"; and still others said, "Can it be possible that the old hypocrite is getting a sort of belated conscience?"

But slowly, inch by inch, the child within him grew; he gripped his soul with the iron hand of will that had made a man of him, and when the child fell and ached with shame, Barclay's will sustained the weakling. We are so hidden by our masks that this struggle in the man's soul, though guessed at by some of those about him, was unknown to the hundreds who saw him every day. But for him the universe had changed. And as a child, amazed, he looked upon the new wonder of God's order about him and went tripping and stumbling and toppling over awkwardly through it all as one learning some new equilibrium. There were times when his heart grew sick, and he would have given it all up. There were hours when he did surrender; when he did a mean thing and gloried in it, or a cowardly thing and apologized for it. But his will rose and turned him back to his resolve. He found the big things easy, and the little things hard to do. So he kept at the big things until they had pushed him so far toward his goal that the little things were details which he repaired slowly and with anguish of humiliation in secret, and unknown even to those who were nearest to him.

And all this struggle was behind the hard face, under the broad, high forehead, back of the mean jaw, beneath the cover of the sharp brazen eyes. Even in Sycamore Ridge they did not suspect the truth until Barclay had grown so strong in his new faith that he could look at his yesterdays without shuddering.

The year of our Lord nineteen hundred and six was a slow year politically in Sycamore Ridge, so in the parliament at McHurdie's shop discussion took somewhat wider range than was usual. It may interest metaphysicians in the world at large to know that the McHurdie parliament that August definitely decided that this is not a material world; that sensation is a delusion, that the whole phantasmagoria of the outer and material world is a reaction of some sort upon the individual consciousness. Up to this point the matter is settled, and metaphysicians may as well make a record of the decision; for Watts McHurdie, Jacob Dolan, Philemon Ward, Martin Culpepper, and sometimes Oscar Fernald, know just exactly as much about it as the ablest logician in the world. It is, however, regrettable that after deciding that the external world is but a divine reaction upon the individual consciousness, the parliament was unable to reach any sort of a decision as to whose consciousness received the picture. Mr. Dolan maintained vigorously that his consciousness was the one actually affected, and that the colonel and the general and Watts were mere hallucinations of his. The general held that Jake and the others were accessory phantasms of his own dream, and Watts and the colonel, being of more poetical temperament, held that the whole outfit was a chimera in some larger consciousness, whose entity it is not given us to know. As for Oscar, he claimed the parliament was crazy, and started to prove it, when it was thought best to shift and modify the discussion; and, therefore, early in September, when the upper currents of the national atmosphere were vocal with discordant allegations, denials, accusations, and maledictions, in Watts McHurdie's shop the question before the house was, "How many people are there in the world?" For ten days, in the desultory debate that had droned through the summer, the general, true to his former contention, insisted that there was only one person in the world. Mr. Dolan, with the Celtic elasticity of reason, was willing to admit two.

"You and me and no more—all the rest is background for us," he proclaimed. "If the you of the moment is the colonel—well and good; then the colonel and I for it; but if it is the general and I—to the trees with your colonel and Watts, and the three billion others—you're merely stage setting, and become third persons."

"But," asked McHurdie, "if I exist this minute with you, and then you focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists, what becomes of me when you turn your head from me?"

Dolan did not answer. He dipped into the Times and read awhile; and the colonel and the general got out the checkerboard and plunged into a silent game. At length Dolan, after the fashion of debaters in the parliament, came out of his newspaper and said:—

"That, Mr. McHurdie, is a problem ranging off the subject, into the theories of the essence of time and space, and I refuse to answer it."

Me Hurdie kept on working, and the hands of the clock slipped around nearly an hour. Then the bell tinkled and Neal Ward came in on his afternoon round for news to print in the next day's issue of the Banner.

"Anything new?" he asked.

"Mrs. Dorman is putting new awnings on the rear windows of her store—did you get that?" asked McHurdie.

The young man made a note of the fact.

"Yes," added Dolan, "and you may just say that Hon. Jacob Dolan, former sheriff of Garrison County, and a member of 'C' Company, well known in this community, who has been custodian of public buildings and grounds in and for Garrison County, state of Kansas, ss., is contemplating resigning his position and removing to the National Soldiers' Home at Leavenworth for the future."

Young Ward smiled, but did not take the item down in his note-book.

"It isn't time yet," he said.

"Why not?" asked Dolan.

"Only two months and a half since I printed that the last time. It can't go oftener than four times a year, and it's been in twice this year. Late in December will time it about right."

"What's the news with you, boy?" asked Dolan.

"Well," said the young man, pausing carefully as if to make a selection from a large and tempting assortment, but really swinging his arms for a long jump into the heart of the matter in his mind, "have you heard that John Barclay has given the town his pipe organ?"

"You don't say!" exclaimed McHurdie.

"Tired of it?" asked Dolan, as though twenty-five-thousand-dollar pipe organs were raining in the town every few days.

"It'll not be that, Jake," said Watts. "John is no man to tire of things."

"No, it's not that, Mr. Dolan," answered Neal Ward. "He has sent word to the mayor and council that he is going to have the organ installed in Barclay Hall this week at his own expense, and he accompanied the letter with fifty thousand dollars in securities to hire a permanent organist and a band-master for the band; and a band concert and an organ concert will alternate in the hall every week during the year. I gather from reading his letter that Mr. Barclay believes the organ will do more good in the hall than in his house."

The general and the colonel kept on at their game. Dolan whistled, and Watts nodded his head. "That's what I would say he did it for," said McHurdie.

"Are the securities N.P.C. stock?" asked Dolan, tentatively.

"No," replied Neal; "I saw them; they are municipal bonds of one sort and another."

"Well, well—Johnnie at the mill certainly is popping open like a chestnut bur. Generally when he has some scheme on to buy public sentiment he endows something with N.P.C. stock, so that in case of a lawsuit against the company he'd have the people interested in protecting the stock. This new tack is certainly queer doings. Certainly queer doings for the dusty miller!" repeated Dolan.

"Well, it's like his buying the waterworks of Bemis last month, and that land at the new pumping station, and giving the council money to build the new dam and power-house. He had no rebate or take back in that—at least no one can see it," said the young man.

"Nellie says," put in Watts, "that she heard from Mrs. Fernald, who got it from her girl, who got it from the girl who works in the Hub restaurant, who had it from Mrs. Carnine's girl—so it come pretty straight—that Lige made John pay a pretty penny for the waterworks, and they had a great row because John would give up the fight."

"Yes," replied Dolan, "it come to me from one of the nigger prisoners in the jail, who has a friend who sweeps out Gabe's bank, that he heard John and Lige dickering, and that Lige held John up for a hundred thousand cold dollars for his bargain."

"The Associated Press to-day," said young Ward, "has a story to the effect that there is a great boom in certain railroad stocks owing to some secret operations of Mr. Barclay. They don't know what he is doing, but things are pretty shaky. He refuses to make a statement."

"He's a queer canny little man," explained Watts. "You never know where he'll break out next."

"Well, he's up to some devilment," exclaimed Dolan; "you can depend on that. Why do you suppose he's laying off the hands at the strip factory?"

The young man shook his head. "Give it up. I asked Mr. Mason and the best I could get out of him was a parrot-like statement that 'owing to the oversupply of our commodity, we have decided to close operations for the present. We have, therefore,' he said pompously, 'given each of our employees unable to find immediate work here, a ticket for himself and family to any point in the United States to which he may desire to go, and have agreed to pay the freight on his household goods also.' That was every word I could get out of him—and you know Mr. Mason is pretty talkative sometimes."

"Queer doings for the dusty miller," repeated Dolan.

The group by the bench heard the slap of the checkerboard on its shelf, and General Ward cut into the conversation as one who had never been out of it. "The boy's got good blood in him; it will come out some day—he wasn't made a Thatcher and a Barclay and a Winthrop for nothing. Lizzie was over there the other night for tea with them, and she said she hadn't seen John so much like himself for years."

Young Ward went about his afternoon's work and the parliament continued its debate on miscellaneous public business. The general pulled the Times from Dolan's pocket and began turning it over. He stopped and read for a few moments and exclaimed:—

"Boys—see here. Maybe this explains something we were talking about." He began reading a news item sent out from Washington, D.C. The item stated that the Department of Commerce and Labour had scored what every one in official circles believed was the most important victory ever achieved by the government outside of a war. The item continued:—

"Within the last ten days, the head of one of the largest so-called trusts in this country called at the department, and explained that his organization, which controls a great staple commodity, was going into voluntary liquidation. The organization in question has been the subject of governmental investigation for nearly two years, and investigators were constantly hampered and annoyed by attempts of politicians of the very highest caste, outside of the White House, trying to get inspectors removed or discredited, and all along the line of its investigations the government has felt a powerful secret influence shielding the trust. As an evidence of his good faith in the disorganization, the head of the trust, while he was here, promised to send to the White House, what he called his 'political burglar's kit,' consisting of a card index, labelling and ticketing with elaborate cross references and cabinet data, every man in the United States who is in politics far enough to get to his state legislature, or to be a nominee of his party for county attorney. This outfit, shipped in a score of great boxes, was dumped at the White House to-day, and it is said that a number of the cards indicating the reputation of certain so-called conservative senators and congressmen may be framed. There is a great hubbub in Washington, and the newspaper correspondents who called at the White House on their morning rounds were regaled by a confidential glimpse into the cards and the cabinets. It is likely that the whole outfit will be filed in the Department of Commerce and Labour, and will constitute the basis of what is called around the White House to-day, a 'National Rogues' Gallery.' The complete details of every senatorial election held in the country during twelve years last past, showing how to reach any Senator susceptible to any influence whatsoever, whether political, social, or religious, are among the trophies of the chase in the hands of the Mighty Hunter for Big Game to-day."

When General Ward had finished reading, he lifted up his glasses and said: "Well, that's it, boys; John has come to his turn of the road. Here's the rest. It says: 'The corporation in question is practically controlled by one man, the man who has placed the information above mentioned in the hands of the government. It is a corporation owning no physical property whatever, and is organized as a rebate hopper, if one may so style it. The head of the corporation stated when he was here recently that he is preparing to buy in every share of the company's stock at the price for which it was sold and then—' Jake, where is page 3 with the rest of this article on it?" asked the general.

"Why, I threw that away coming down here," responded Dolan.

"Rather leaves us in the air—doesn't it?" suggested the colonel.

"Well, it's John. I know enough to know that—from Neal," said the general.

The afternoon sun was shining in the south window of the shop. Dolan started to go. In the doorway McHurdie halted him.

"Jake," he cried, pointing a lean, smutty finger at Dolan, "Jake Dolan, if there are only two people in the world, what becomes of me when you begin talking to Mart? If you knew, you would not dodge. In philosophy no man can stand on his constitutional rights. Turn state's evidence, Jake Dolan, and tell the truth—what becomes of me?"

"'Tis an improper question," replied Dolan, and then drawing himself up and pulling down the front of his coat, he added, "'Tis not a matter that may be discussed among gentlemen," and with that he disappeared.

The front door-bell tinkled, and the parliament prepared to adjourn. The colonel helped the poet close his store and bring in the wooden horse from the sidewalk, and then Molly Brownwell came with her phaeton and drove the two old men home. On the way up Main Street they overhauled Neal Ward. Mrs. Brownwell turned in to the sidewalk and called, "Neal, can you run over to the house a moment this evening?" And when he answered in the affirmative, she let the old nag amble gently up the street.

"How pretty you are, Aunt Molly," exclaimed Neal, as the gray-haired woman who could still wear a red ribbon came into the room where he sat waiting for her. The boy's compliment pleased her, and she did not hesitate to say so. But after that she plunged into the subject that was uppermost in her heart.

"Neal," she said, as she drew her chair in front of him so that she could see his face and know the truth, no matter what his lips might say, "we're partners now, aren't we, or what amounts to the same thing?" She smiled good-naturedly. "I own the overdraft at the bank and you own the mortgage at the court-house. So I am going to ask you a plain question; and if you say it isn't any of my business, I'll attempt to show you that it is. Neal," she asked, looking earnestly into his face, "why do you write to Jeanette Barclay every day of your life and not mail the letters?"

The youth flushed. "Why—Aunt Molly—how did you know?—I never told—"

"No, Neal, you never told me; but this afternoon while you we're out I was looking for Adrian's check-book; I was sure we paid Dorman's bill last April, and that I took the check over myself. I was going through the desk, and I got on your side, thinking I might have left the check-book there by mistake, and I ran into the very midst of those letters, before I knew what I was about. Now, Neal—why?"