The Romance of a Plain Man Part 53

"Is George aware of it?" I asked irrelevantly, moved by I know not what spirit of averseness.

"Yes, we've let George into it, but I'm not perfectly sure that he approves. The idea came to the General and to me almost at the same instant, and that is a very good thing to be said of any idea. It proves it to be an elastic one anyway."

She talked merrily through supper, breaking into smiles from time to time, caressing evidently this idea, which was so elastic, and which she declined provokingly to divulge. But I, also, had my secret, for my mind, responding to the springs of hope, toyed ceaselessly with the possibility of escape. For several weeks this dream of ultimate freedom possessed my thoughts, and then, at last, when the copper trade, instead of reviving, seemed paralysed for a season, I awakened with a shock, to the knowledge that I had lost Sally's little fortune as irretrievably as I appeared to have lost my larger one. Clearly my financial genius was asleep, or off a.s.sisting at a sacrifice; and it did little good, as I toiled home in the afternoon, to curse myself frantically for a perverse and a thankless brute. It was too late now; I had played the fool once too often and the money was gone. Was my brain weakened permanently by the fever, I wondered? Had the muscles of my will dwindled away and grown flabby, like the muscles of my body?

As I left the car, a group of school children ran along the pavement in front of me, and then scattering like pigeons, fluttered after a big, old-fas.h.i.+oned barouche that had turned the corner. When it came nearer, I saw that the barouche was the General's, a piece of family property which had descended to him from his father, and that the great man now sat on the deep, broadcloth-covered cus.h.i.+ons, his legs very far apart, his hands clasped on his gold-headed walking-stick, and his square, mottled face staring straight ahead, with that look of tenacity, as if he were saying somewhere back in his brain, "I'll hang on to the death."

Before our door, where Sally was waiting in her hat and veil, the barouche drew up with a flourish; Balaam, the old negro coachman, settled himself for a doze on the box, and the pair of fat roans began switching their long tails in the faces of the swarming school children.

"So you're just in time, Ben," remarked the General, while he hobbled out in order to help Sally in. "I thought you'd have been at home at least an hour ago. Meant to come earlier, but something went wrong at the stables. Something always is wrong at the stables. I wouldn't be in George's shoes for a mint of money. Never a day pa.s.ses that he isn't fussing about his horses, or his traps, or his groom. Well, you're ready, Sally? I like a woman who is punctual, and I never in my life knew but one who was. That was your Aunt Matoaca. You get it from her, I suppose. Ah, _she_ never kept you waiting a minute,--no fussing about gloves or fans or handkerchiefs. Always just ready when you came for her, and looking like an angel. Never saw her in a rose-lined bonnet, did you, my dear?"

"Only in black, General," replied Sally, as she took her seat in the barouche. "Come, get in, Ben, we're going to reveal our secret at last, and we want you to be with us."

The General got in again with difficulty, groaning a little; I entered and sat down opposite to them, with my back to the horses; and the old negro coachman, disappointed at the length of the wait, pulled the reins gently and gave a slight, admonis.h.i.+ng flick at the broad flanks of the roans. Behind the barouche the school children still fluttered, and turning in his seat, the General looked back angrily and threatened them with a wave of his big ebony walking-stick.

"What is it, Sally?" I asked, striving to force a curiosity my wretchedness prevented me from feeling; "can't you unfold the mystery?"

"Be patient, be patient," she responded gaily, leaning back beside the General, as we rolled down the wide street under the wilted, dusty leaves of the trees. "Haven't you noticed for weeks that the General and I have had a secret?"

"Yes, I've noticed it, but I thought you'd tell me when the time came."

"We shan't tell him, shall we, General?--We'll show him."

"Ah, there's time enough, time enough," returned the General, absent-mindedly, for he had not been listening. His resolute, bulldog face, flushed now by the heat and covered with a fine perspiration, had taken on an absorbed and pondering look. "I never come along here that it doesn't put me back at least fifty years," he observed, leaning over his side of the barouche, and peering down one of the side streets that led past the churchyard. "Sorry they've been meddling with that old church. Better have left it as it used to be in my boyhood. Do you see that little house there, set back in the yard, with the chimney crumbling to pieces? That was the first school I ever went to, and it was taught by old Miss Deborah Timberlake, the sister of William Timberlake who shot all those stags' heads you've got hanging in your hall. n.o.body ever knew why she taught school. Plenty to eat and drink.

William gave her everything that she wanted, but she got cranky when she'd turned sixty, and insisted on being independent. Independent, she said! Pis.h.!.+ Tush. Never learned a word from her. Taught us English history, then Virginia history. As for the rest of America, she used to say it didn't have a history, merely a past. Mentioned the Boston tea party once by mistake, and had to explain that _that_ was an incident, not history. Well, well, it seems a thousand years ago. Never could understand, to save my life, why she took to teaching. Had all she wanted. Her brother William was an odd man. A fine toast. I never heard a better story--I remember them even as a boy--and often enough I've got them off since his death. Used to ill-treat his slaves, though, they said, and had queer ideas about women and property. Married his wife who didn't have a red penny, and on his wedding journey, when she called him by his name, replied to her, 'Madam, my dependants are accustomed to address me as Mr. Timberlake.' Ha, ha! a queer bird was William."

The street was the one down which I had pa.s.sed so many years ago, wedged tightly between my mother and Mrs. Kidd, to the funeral of old Mr.

Cudlip; and it seemed to me that it held unchanged, as if it had stagnated there between the quaint old houses, that same atmosphere of sadness, of desolation. The houses, still half closed, appeared all but deserted; the aged negresses, staring after us under their hollowed palms, looked as if they had stood there forever. Progress, which had invaded the neighbouring quarters, had left this one, as yet, undisturbed.

Opposite to me, Sally smiled with beaming eyes when she met my gaze. I knew that she was hugging her secret, and I knew, in some intuitive way, that she expected this secret to afford me pleasure. The General, peering from right to left in search of a.s.sociations, kept moving his lips as if he were thinking aloud. On his face, in the deep creases where the perspiration had gathered, the dust, rising from the street, had settled in greyish streaks. From time to time, in an absent-minded manner, he got out his big white silk handkerchief and wiped it away.

"There now! I've got it! Hold on a minute, Balaam. That's the house that Robert Carrington built clean over here on the other side of the hill.

There it is now--the one with that pink c.r.a.pe myrtle in the yard, and the four columns, you can see it with your own eyes. Theophilus tried to prove to me that Robert lived in Bushrod's house, and that he'd attended him there in his last illness. Last illness, indeed! The truth is that Theophilus isn't what he once was. Memory's going and he doesn't like to own it. No use arguing with him--you can't argue with a man whose memory is going--but there's Robert Carrington's house. You've seen it with your own eyes. Drive on, Balaam."

Balaam drove on; and the carriage, leaving the city and the thinning suburbs, pa.s.sed rapidly into one of the country roads, white with dust, which stretched between ragged borders of yarrow and pokeberry that were white with dust also. The fields on either side, sometimes planted in corn, oftener grown wild in broomsedge or life-everlasting, s.h.i.+mmered under the heat, which was alive with the whirring of innumerable insects. Here and there a negro cabin, built close to the road, stood bare in a piece of burned-out clearing, or showed behind the thick fanlike leaves of gourd vines, with the heads of sunflowers nodding heavily beside the open doorways. Occasionally, in the first few miles, a covered wagon crawled by us on its way to town, the driver leaning far over the dusty horses, and singing out "Howdy!" in a friendly voice,--to which the General invariably responded "Howdy," in the same tone, as he touched the wide brim of his straw hat with his ebony stick.

"Hasn't got on the scent, has he?" he enquired presently of Sally, with a sly wink in my direction. "Are you sure George hasn't let it out?

Never could keep a secret, could George. He's one of those close-mouthed fellows that shuts a thing up so tight it explodes before he's aware of it. He can't hide anything from me. I read him just as if he were a book. It's as well, I reckon, as I told him the other day, that he isn't still in love with your wife, Ben, or it would be written all over him as plain as big print."

My eyes caught Sally's, and she blushed a clear, warm pink to the heavy waves of her hair.

"Not that he'd ever be such a rascal as to keep up a fancy for a married woman," pursued the great man, unseeing and unthinking. "The Bolingbrokes may have been wild, but they've always been men of honour, and even if they've played fast and loose now and then with a woman, they have never tried to pilfer anything that belonged to another man."

"I think we're coming to it," said Sally suddenly, trying to turn the conversation to lighter matters.

"Ah, so we are, so we are. That's a good view of the river, and there's the railroad station at the foot of the hill not a half mile away. It's the very thing you need, Ben, it will be the making of you and of the youngster, as I said to Sally when the idea first entered my mind."

The barouche made a quick turn into a straight lane bordered by old locust trees, and stopped a few minutes later before a square red brick country house, with four white columns supporting the portico, and a bower of ancient ivy growing over the roof.

"Here we are at last! Oh, Ben, don't you like it?" said Sally, springing to the ground before the horses had stopped.

"Like it? Of course he likes it," returned the General, impatiently, as he got out and followed her between the rows of calycanthus bushes that edged the walk. "What business has he got not to like it after all the trouble we've been to on his account? It's the very thing for his health--that's what I said to you, my dear, as soon as I heard of Miss Mitty's legacy. 'The old Bending place is for sale and will go cheap,' I said. 'Why not move out into the country and give Ben and the youngster a chance to breathe fresh air? He's beginning to look seedy and fresh air will set him up.'"

"But I really don't believe he likes it," rejoined Sally, a little wistfully, turning, as she reached the columns of the portico, and looking doubtfully into my face.

"You know I like anything that you like, Sally," I answered in a voice which, I knew, sounded flat and unenthusiastic, in spite of my effort; "it's a fine house and there's a good view of the river, I dare say, at the back."

"I thought it would please you, Ben. It seemed to the General and me the very best thing we could do with Aunt Mitty's money."

There was a hurt look in her eyes; her mouth trembled as she spoke, and all the charming mystery had fled from her manner. If we had been alone I should have opened my arms to her, and have made my confession with her head on my shoulder; but the square, excited figure of the General, who kept marching aimlessly up and down between the calycanthus bushes, put the restraint of a terrible embarra.s.sment upon my words. Tell her I must, and yet how could I tell her while the little cynical bloodshot eyes of the great man were upon us?

"Let's go to the back. We can see the river from the terrace," she said, and there was a touching disappointment in her smile and her voice.

"Yes, we'll go to the back," responded the General, with eagerness.

"Follow this path, Ben, the one that leads round the west wing," and he added when we had turned the corner of the house, and stopped on the trim terrace, covered with beds of sweet-william and foxglove, "What do you think of that for a view now? If those big poplars were out of the way, you could see clear down to Merrivale, the old Smith place, where I used to go as a boy."

Meeting the disappointment in Sally's look, I tried to rise valiantly to the occasion; but it was evident, even while I uttered my empty phrases, that to all of us, except the General, the mystery had been blighted by some deadly chill in the very instant of its unfolding. The great man alone, with that power of ignoring the obvious, which had contributed so largely to his success, continued his running comments in his cheerful, dogmatic tone. Some twenty minutes later, when, after an indifferent inspection of the house on our part, and a vigilant one on the General's, we rolled back again in the barouche over the dusty road, he was still perfectly unaware that the surprise he had sprung had not been attended by a triumph of pleasure for us all.

"You're foolish, my dear, about those big poplars," he said a dozen times, while he sat staring, with an unseeing gaze, at the thin red line of the sunset over the corn-fields. "They ought to come down, and then you could see clean to the old Smith place, where I used to go as a boy.

I learned to shoot there. Fell in love, too, when I wasn't more than twelve with Miss Lucy Smith, my first flame--pretty as a pink, all the boys were in love with her."

Sally's hand stole into mine under the muslin ruffles of her dress, and her eyes, when she looked at me, held a soft, deprecating expression, as if she were trying to understand, and could not, how she had hurt me.

When at last we came to our own door and the General, after insisting again that the only improvement needed to the place was that the big poplars should come down, had driven serenely away in his big barouche, we ascended the steps in silence, and entered the sitting-room, which was filled with the pale gloom of twilight. While I lighted the lamp, she waited in the centre of the room, with the soft, deprecating expression still in her eyes.

"What is it, Ben?" she asked, facing the lamp as I turned; "did you mind my keeping the idea a secret? Why, I thought that would please you."

"It isn't that, Sally, it isn't that,--but--I've lost the money."

"Lost it, Ben?"

"I saw what I thought was a good chance to speculate--and I speculated."

"You speculated with the ten thousand dollars?"

"Yes."

"And lost it?"

"Yes."

For a moment her face was inscrutable.

"When did it happen?"

"I found out to-day that it was gone beyond hope of recovery."

"Then you haven't known it all along and kept it from me?"

"I was going to tell you as soon as I came up this afternoon, but the General was here."