Asa Holmes Part 7

"n.o.body more nor less than a _multimillionaire_! The big boot and shoe man, William A. Maxwell. Mrs. Powers bought a bill of goods this morning as long as your arm. It's a windfall for _her_. He offered to pay regular summer-resort-hotel prices, because she's living on the old farm where he was born and raised, and he fancied getting back to it for a spell."

"Family coming with him?" queried Cy Akers, after a moment's meditation over the surprising fact that a millionaire with the world before him should elect such a place as the Cross-Roads in which to spend his vacation.

"No, you can bet your bottom dollar they're not. And they're all abroad this summer or _he'd_ never got here. They'd had him dragged off to some fas.h.i.+onable watering-place with them. But when the cat's away the mice'll play, you know. Mrs. Powers says it is his first visit here since his mother's funeral twenty years ago, and he seems as tickled as a boy to get back.

"Yesterday evening he followed the man all around the place while she was getting supper. She left him setting up in the parlour, but when she went in to ask him out to the table, he was nowhere to be seen. Pretty soon he came walking around the corner of the house with a pail of milk in each hand, slos.h.i.+ng it all over his store clothes. He'd done the milking himself, and seemed mightily set up over it."

"Lawzee! Billy Maxwell! Don't I remember him?" exclaimed Bud Hines.

"Seems like 'twas only yesterday we used to sit on the same bench at school doin' our sums out of the same old book. The year old man Prosser taught, we got into so much devilment that it got to be a regular thing for him to say, regular as clock-work, almost, 'I'll whip Bud Hines and Billy Maxwell after the first arithmetic cla.s.s this morning.' I don't s'pose he ever thinks of those old times since he's got to be one of the Four Hundred. Somehow I can hardly sense it, his bein' so rich. He never seemed any smarter than the rest of us. That's the way of the world, though, seesaw, one up and the other down. Of course it's my luck to be the one that's down. Luck always was against me."

"There he is now," exclaimed the storekeeper, and every head turned to see the stranger stepping briskly along the platform in front of the depot, on his way to the telegraph office.

He had the alertness of glance and motion that comes from daily contact with city corners. If there was a slight stoop in his broad shoulders, and if his closely cut hair and beard were iron gray, that seemed more the result of bearing heavy responsibilities than the token of advancing years. His immaculate linen, polished low-cut shoes, and light gray business suit would have pa.s.sed unnoticed in the metropolis, but in this place, where coats and collars were in evidence only on Sunday, they gave him the appearance of being on dress parade.

Perkins's oldest eyed him as he would a zebra or a giraffe, or some equally interesting curiosity escaped from a Zoo. He had heard that his pockets were lined with gold, and that he had been known to pay as much as five dollars for a single lunch. Five dollars would board a man two weeks at the Cross-Roads.

With his mouth agape, the boy stood watching the stranger, who presently came over to the group on the porch with smiling face and cordial outstretched hand. Despite his gray hair there was something almost boyish in the eagerness with which he recognised old faces and claimed old friends.h.i.+ps. Bowser's store had been built since his departure from the neighbourhood, so few of the congenial spirits accustomed to gather there were familiar to him. But Bud Hines and Cy Akers were old schoolfellows. When he would have gone up to them with old-time familiarity, he found a certain restraint in their greeting which checked his advances.

If he thought he was coming back to them the same freckle-faced, unconventional country lad they had known as Billy Maxwell, he was mistaken. He might feel that he was the same at heart; but they looked on the outward appearance. They saw the successful man of the world who had outstripped them in the race and pa.s.sed out of their lives long ago.

They could not conceive of such a change as had metamorphosed the boy they remembered into the man who stood before them, without feeling that a corresponding change must have taken place in his att.i.tude toward them.

They were not conscious that this feeling was expressed in their reception of him. They laughed at his jokes, and indulged in some reminiscences, but he felt, in a dim subconscious way, that there was a barrier between them, and he could never get back to the old familiar footing.

He turned away, vaguely disappointed. Had he dared to dream that he would find his lost youth just as he had left it? The fields and hills were unchanged. The very trees were the same, except that they had added a few more rings to their girth, and threw a larger circling shade. But the old chums he had counted on finding had not followed the same law of growth as the trees. The shade of their sympathies had narrowed, not expanded, with the pa.s.sing years, and left him outside their contracted circle.

Perkins's oldest, awed by reports of his fabulous wealth, could hardly find his tongue when the distinguished visitor laid a friendly hand on his embarra.s.sed tow head, and inquired about the old swimming-hole, and the mill-dam where he used to fish. But the boy's interest grew stronger every minute as he watched him turning over the limited a.s.sortment of fis.h.i.+ng tackle. The men he knew had outlived such frivolous sports. It was a sight to justify one's gazing open-mouthed,--a grown man deliberately preparing for a month's idleness.

If the boy could have seen the jointed rods, the reels, the flies, all the expensive angler's outfit left behind in the Maxwell mansion; if he could have known of the tarpon this man had caught in Florida bays, and the fis.h.i.+ng he had enjoyed in northern waters, he would have wondered still more; wondered how a man could be considered in his right mind who deliberately renounced such privileges to come and drop a common hook, on a pole of his own cutting, into the shallow pools of the Cross-Roads creek.

After his purchases no one saw him at the store for several days, but the boy, dodging across lots, encountered him often,--a solitary figure wandering by the mill stream, or cras.h.i.+ng through the woods with long eager strides; lying on the orchard gra.s.s sometimes with his hat pulled over his eyes; leaning over the pasture bars in the twilight, and following with wistful glance the little foot-path stretching white across the meadows. A pathetic sight to eyes wise enough to see the pathos,--a world-weary, middle-aged man in vain quest of his lost boyhood.

On Sunday, Polly, looking across the church from her place in the miller's pew, recognised the stranger in their midst, and straightway lost the thread of the sermon in wondering at his presence. She had gone to school with his daughter, Maud Maxwell. She had danced many a german with his son Claude. They lived on the same avenue, and pa.s.sed each other daily; but this was the first time she had seen him away from the shadow of the family presence, that seemed to blot out his individuality.

She had thought of him only as Maud's father, a simple, good-natured nonent.i.ty in his own household. A good business man, but one who could talk nothing but leather, and whose only part in the family affairs was to furnish the funds for his wife and children to s.h.i.+ne socially.

"Oh, your father's opinion doesn't count," she had heard Mrs. Maxwell say on more than one occasion, and the children had grown up, unconsciously copying her patronising att.i.tude toward him. As Polly studied his face now in the light of other surroundings, she saw that it was a strong, kindly one; that it was not weakness which made him yield habitually, until he had become a mere figurehead in his own establishment. It was only that his peace-loving nature hated domestic scenes, and his generosity amounted to complete self-effacement when the happiness of his family was concerned.

His eyes were fixed on the chancel with a wistful reminiscent gaze, and Polly read something in the careworn face that touched her sympathy.

"Grandfather," she said, at the close of the service, "let's be neighbourly and ask Mr. Maxwell home to dinner with us. He looks lonesome."

She was glad afterward that she had suggested it, when she recalled his evident pleasure in the old man's company. There were chairs out under the great oak-trees in the yard, and the two sat talking all afternoon of old times, until the evening shadows began to grow long across the gra.s.s. Then Polly joined them again, and sat with them till the tinkle of home-going cowbells broke on the restful stillness of the country Sabbath.

"All the orchestras in all the operas in the world can't make music that sounds as sweet to me as that does," said Mr. Maxwell, raising his head from the big armchair to listen. Then he dropped it again with a sigh.

"It rests me so after the racket of the city. If Julia would only consent, I'd sell out and come back to-morrow. But she's lost all interest in the old place. I'm country to the core, but she never was.

She took to city ways like a duck to water, just as soon as she got away from the farm, and she laughs at me for preferring katydids to the whirr of electric cars."

A vision rose before the old miller of a little country girl in a pink cotton gown, who long ago used to wait, bright-eyed and blus.h.i.+ng, at the pasture bars, for Billy to drive home the cows. Many a time he had pa.s.sed them at their trysting-place. Then he recalled the superficial, ambitious woman he had met years afterward when he visited his son. He shook his head when he thought of her renouncing her social position for the simple pastoral life her husband longed to find the way back to.

Presently he broke the silence of their several reveries by turning to Polly.

"What's that piece you recited to me the other night, little girl, about old times? Say it for Mr. Maxwell." And Polly, clasping her hands in her lap, and looking away across the August meadows, purple with the royal pennons of the ironweed, began the musical old poem:

"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle, Way down the darkening dingle The cows come slowly home.

(And old-time friends and twilight plays And starry nights and sunny days Come trooping up the misty ways, When the cows come home.)

"'And over there on Merlin Hill Hear the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill.

And the dewdrops lie on the tangled vines, And over the poplars Venus s.h.i.+nes, And over the silent mill.

"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle, With ting-aling and jingle The cows come slowly home.

(Let down the bars, let in the train Of long-gone songs and flowers and rain, For dear old times come back again, When the cows come home.)'"

Once as Polly went on, she saw the tears spring to his eyes at the line "and mother-songs of long-gone years," and she knew that the

"same sweet sound of wordless psalm, The same sweet smell of buds and balm,"

that had been his delight in the past, were his again as he listened.

But, much to her surprise, as she finished, he rose abruptly, and began a hurried leave-taking. She understood his manner, however, when his mood was revealed to her a little later.

At her grandfather's suggestion she walked down to the gate with him, to point out a short cut across the fields to Mrs. Powers's. Outside the gate he paused, hat in hand.

"Miss Polly," he began, as if unconsciously taking her into his confidence, "old times never come back again. Seems as if the bottom had dropped out of everything. I've done my best to resurrect them, but I can't do it. I thought if I could once get back to the old place I could rest as I've not been able to rest for twenty years--that I'd have a month of perfect enjoyment. But something's the matter.

"Many a time when I've been off at some fas.h.i.+onable resort I've thought I'd give a fortune to be able to drop my hook in your grandfather's mill-stream, and feel the old thrill that I used to feel when I was a boy. I tried it the day I came--caught a little speckled trout, the kind that used to make me tingle to my finger ends, but somehow it didn't bring back the old sensation. I just looked at it a minute and put it back in the water, and threw my pole away.

"Even the swimming-hole down by the mill didn't measure up to the way I had remembered it. I've fairly ached for a dip into it sometimes, in the years I've been gone. Seemed as if I could just get into it once, I could wash myself clear of all the cares and worries of business that pester a man so. That was a disappointment, too. The change is in me, I guess, but nothing seems the same."

Polly knew the reason. He had tried so long to mould his habits to fit his wife's exacting tastes, that he had succeeded better than he realised. He could not a.n.a.lyse his feelings enough to know that it was the absence of long accustomed comforts that made him vaguely dissatisfied with his surroundings; his luxuriously appointed bathroom, for instance; the perfect service of his carefully trained footmen. Mrs.

Powers's noisy table, where with great clatter she urged every one "to fall to and help himself," jarred on him, although he was unconscious of what caused the irritation. As for the rank tobacco Bowser furnished him when he had exhausted his own special brand of cigars with which he had stocked his satchel, it was more than flesh and blood could endure. That is, flesh and blood that had acquired the pampered taste of a millionaire whose wife is fastidious, and only allows first-cla.s.s aromas in the way of the weed.

But Polly knew another reason that his vacation had been a failure. She divined it as the little Yale pin, stuck jauntily into the front of her white dress, met the touch of her caressing fingers. The girl in the pink cotton gown was long dead, and the woman who had grown up in her stead had no part in the old scenes that he still fondly clung to, with a sentiment she ridiculed because she could not understand. _There must always be two when you turn back searching for your lost Eldorado, and even the two cannot find it, unless they go hand in hand._

Next day Bowser had another piece of news to impart. "Mr. Maxwell went home this morning. He told Mrs. Powers it was like taking a vacation in a graveyard, and he'd had enough. He'd have to get back to work again.

So he paid her for the full month, and took the first train back to the city."

"Well, I'll be switched!" was Bud Hines's comment. "If I had as much money as he's got, I'd never bother my head about work. I'd sit down and take it easy all the rest of my born days."

"I don't know," answered Bowser, meditatively. "I reckon a man who's worked the way Mr. Maxwell has, gets such a big momentum on to himself that he can't stop, no matter how bad he wants a vacation."

"He's a fool for coming back here for it," said Bud Hines, looking out across the fields that stretched away on every side in unbroken monotony.

But miles away, in his city office, the busy millionaire was still haunted by an unsatisfied longing for those same level meadows. Glimpses of the old mill-stream and the willows still rose before him in tantalising freshness, and whenever he closed his tired eyes, down twilight paths, where tinkling cowbells called, there came again the glimmer of a little pink gown, to wait for him as it had waited through all the years, beside the pasture bars.

Chapter XII