The Romance of a Plain Man

At midnight the doctor came, and when he left, I followed him to the front steps.

"I'll come again at dawn," he said, "and in the meantime look out for your wife. She's been strained to the point of breaking."

"You think, then, that the child is – is hopeless?"

"Not hopeless, but very serious. I'll be back in a few hours. If there's a change, send for me, and remember, as I said, look out for your wife."

I went indoors, found some port wine left in Miss Mitty's bottles, poured out a glass, and carried it to her.

"Drink this, darling," I said.

As I held it to her lips, she swallowed it obediently, and then, looking up, she thanked me with her unfailing smile.

"Oh, we'll drink outer de healin' fountain, by en bye, lil' chillun,"

crooned Aunt Euphronasia softly, and the tune has rung ever afterwards somewhere in my brain. To escape from it at the time, I went out upon the front steps, closed the door, and walked, restless as a caged tiger, up and down the deserted pavement. A homeless dog or two, panting from thirst, lay in the gutter; otherwise there was not a sound, not a living thing, from end to end of the long dusty street.

For two hours I walked up and down there, entering the house from time to time to see if Sally needed me, or if she had moved. Then, as the light broke feebly, the doctor came, and we went in together. Sally was still sitting there, as she had sat all night, rigid in the dim glow of the lamp, and over her Aunt Euphronasia still waved the palm-leaf fan with its black, flitting shadow. Then, as we crossed the threshold, there was a sudden sharp cry, and when I sprang forward and caught them both in my arms, I found that Sally had fainted and the child was dead on her knees.

We buried the child in the old Bland section at Hollywood, where a single twisted yew-tree grew between the graves, obliterated by ivy, of Edmond Bland and his wife, Caroline Matilda, born Fairfax. On the way home Sally sat rigid and tearless, with her hand in mine, and her eyes fixed on the drawn blinds of the carriage, as though she were staring intently through the closed window at something that fascinated and held her gaze in the dusty street.

"Does your head ache, darling?" I asked once, and she made a quick, half-impatient gesture of denial, with that strained, rapt look, as if she were seeing a vision, still in her face. Only when we reached home, and Aunt Euphronasia met her with outstretched arms on the threshold, did this agonised composure break down in passionate weeping on the old negress's shoulder.

The strength which had upheld her so long seemed suddenly to have departed, and all night she wept on my breast, while I fanned her in the hot air, which had grown humid and close. Not until the dawn had broken did my arm drop powerless with sleep, and the fan fell on the pillow. Then I slept for an hour, worn out with grief and exhaustion, and when presently I awoke with a start, I saw that she had left my side, and that her muslin dressing-gown was missing from the chintz-covered chair where it had lain. When I called her in alarm, she came through the doorway that led to the kitchen, freshly dressed, with a coffeepot in her hand.

"For God's sake, Sally," I implored, "don't make coffee for me!"

"I've made it, dear," she answered. "I couldn't let you go out without a mouthful to eat. You did not sleep a wink."

"And you?" I demanded.

"I didn't sleep either, but then I can rest all day." Her lip trembled and she pressed her teeth into it. "By the time you are dressed, Ben, breakfast will be ready."

Her eyes were red and swollen, her mouth pale and tremulous, all her radiant energy seemed beaten out of her; yet she spoke almost cheerfully, and there was none of the slovenliness of sorrow in her fresh and charming appearance. I dressed quickly, and going into the sitting-room, drank the coffee she had made because I knew it would please her. When it was time for me to start, she went with me to the door, and turning midway of the block, I saw her standing on the steps, smiling after me, with the sun in her eyes, like the ghost of herself as she had stood and smiled the morning after my failure. In the evening I found her paler, thinner, more than ever like the wan shadow of herself, yet meeting me with the same brave cheerfulness with which she had sent me forth. Could I ever repay her? I asked myself passionately, could I ever forget?

The dreary summer weeks dragged by like an eternity; the autumn came and passed, and at the first of the year I was sent down, with a salary of ten thousand dollars, to build up traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina Railroad, which the Great South Midland and Atlantic had absorbed. Sally went with me, but she was so languid and ill that the change, instead of invigorating her, appeared to exhaust her remaining vitality. She lived only when I was with her, and when I came in unexpectedly, as I did sometimes, I would find her lying so still and cold on the couch that I would gather her to me in a passion of fear lest she should elude the lighter grasp with which I had held her. Never, not even in her girlhood, had I loved her with the intensity, the violence, of those months when I hardly dared clasp her to me in my terror that she might dissolve and vanish from my embrace. Then, at last, when the spring came, and the woods were filled with flowering dogwood and red-bud, she seemed to revive a little, to bloom softly again, like a flower that opens the sweeter and fresher after the storm.

"Is it the mild air, or the spring flowers?" I asked one afternoon, as we drove through the Southern woods, along a narrow deserted road that smelt of the budding pines.

"Neither, Ben, it is you," she replied. "I have had you all these months. Without that I could not have lived."

"You have had me," I answered, "ever since the first minute I saw your face. You have had me always."

"Not always. During those years of your great success I thought I had lost you."

"How could you, Sally, when it was all for you, and you knew it?"

"It may have been for me in the beginning, but success, when it came, crowded me out. It left me no room. That's why I didn't really mind the failure, dear, and the poverty – that's why I don't now really mind this burden of debt. Success took you away from me, failure brings you the closer. And when you go from me, Ben, there's something in me, I don't know what – something, like Aunt Matoaca in my blood – that rises up and rebels. If things had gone on like that, if you hadn't come back, I should have grown hard and indifferent. I should have found some other interest."

"Some other interest?" I repeated, while my heart throbbed as if a spasm of memory contracted it.

"Oh, of course, I don't know now just what I mean – but when I look back, I realise that I couldn't have stood many years like that with nothing to fill them. I'd have done something desperate, if it was only going over gates after Bonny. There's one thing they taught me, though, Ben," she added, "and that is that poor Aunt Matoaca was right."

"Right in what, Sally?"

"Right in believing that women must have larger lives – that they mustn't be expected to feed always upon their hearts. You tell them to let love fill their lives, and then when the lives are swept bare and clean of everything else, in place of love you leave mere vacancy – just mere vacancy and nothing but that. How can they fill their lives with love when love isn't there – when it's off in the stock market or the railroad, or wherever its practical affairs may be?"

"But it comes back in the evening."

"Yes, it comes back in the evening and falls asleep over its cigar."

"Well, you've got me now," I responded cheerfully, "there's no doubt of that, you've got me now."

"That's why I'm getting well. How delicious the pines are! and look at the red-bud flowering there over the fence! It may be wicked of me, but, do you know – I've never been really able to regret that you lost your money."

"It is rather wicked, dear, to rejoice in my misery."

"I didn't say I 'rejoiced' – only that I couldn't regret. How can I regret it when the money came so between us?"

"But it didn't, Sally, if you could only understand! I loved you just as much all that time as I do now."

"But how was I to be sure, when you didn't want to be with me?"

"I did want to be with you – only there was always something else that had to be done."

"And the something else came always before me. But my life, you see, was swept bare and clean of everything except you."

"I had to work, Sally, I had to follow my ambition."

"You work now, but it is different. I don't mind this because it isn't working with madness. Just as you felt that you wanted your ambition, Ben, I felt that I wanted love. I was made so, I can't help it. Like Aunt Matoaca, my life has been swept and garnished for that one guest, and if it were ever to fail me, I'd – I'd go wild like Aunt Matoaca, I suppose."

A red bird flew out of the pines across the road, and lifting her eyes, she followed its flight with a look in which there was a curious blending of sadness with passion. The truth of her words came home to me, with a quiver of apprehension, while I looked at her face, and by some curious freak of memory there flashed before me the image of George Bolingbroke as he had bent over to lay the blossom of sweet alyssum beside her plate. In all those months George, not I, had been there, I remembered, and some fierce resentment, which was half jealousy, half remorse, made me answer her almost with violence as my arm went about her.

"But you had the big things always, and it is the big things that count in the end."

"Yes, the big things count in the end. I used to tell myself that when you forgot all the anniversaries. You remember them now."

"I have time to think now, then I hadn't." As I uttered the words I was conscious of a sudden depression, of a poignant realisation of what this "time to think" signified in my life. The smart of my failure was still there, and I had known hours of late when my balked ambition was like a wild thing crying for freedom within me. The old lust of power, the passion for supremacy, still haunted my dreams, or came back to me at moments like this, when I drove with Sally through the restless pines, and smelt those vague, sweet scents of the spring, which stirred something primitive and male in my heart. The fighter and the dreamer, having fought out their racial battle to a finish, were now merged into one.

We drove home slowly, the lights of the little Southern village shining brightly through a cloudless atmosphere ahead – and the lights, like the spring scents and the restless soughing of the pines, deepened the sense of failure, of incompleteness, from which I suffered. My career showed to me as suddenly cut off and broken, like a road the making of which has stopped short halfway up a hill. Did she discern this restlessness in me, I wondered, this ceaseless ache which resembled the ache of muscles that have been long unused?

After this the months slipped quietly by, one placid week succeeding another in a serene and cloudless monotony. Sally had few friends, there were no women of her own social position in the place; yet she was never lonely, never bored, never in search of distraction.

"I love it here, Ben," she said once, "it is so peaceful, just you and I."

"You'd tire of it before long, and you'll be glad enough to go back to Richmond when next spring comes."

At the time she did not protest, but when the following spring began to unfold, and we prepared to return to Virginia in May, there was something pensive and wistful in her parting from the little village and from the people who had been kind to her in the year she had spent there. We had taken several rooms in the house of Dr. Theophilus, who was supported in his prodigality in roses only by the strenuous pickling and preserving of Mrs. Clay; and as we drove, on a warm May afternoon, up the familiar street from the station, I tried in vain to arouse in her some of the interest, the animation, that she had lost.

"You'll be glad to see the doctor and Bonny and George," I said.

"Yes, I'll be glad to see the doctor and Bonny and George. There is the house now, and look, the doctor is in his garden."

He had seen us before she spoke, for glancing up meditatively from working a bed of bleeding hearts near the gate, his dim old eyes, over their lowered spectacles, had been attracted to the approaching carriage. Rising to his feet, he came rapidly to the pavement, his trowel still in hand, his outstretched arms trembling with pleasure.

"Well, well, so here you are. It's good to see you. Tina, they have come sooner than we expected them. Moses" (to a little negro, who appeared from behind the currant bushes, where he had been digging), "take the bags upstairs to the front rooms and tell your Miss Tina that they have come sooner than we expected them."

As Moses darted off on his errand, in which he was assisted by the negro coachman, Dr. Theophilus led us back into the garden, and placed Sally in a low canvas chair, which he had brought from the porch to a shady spot between a gorgeous giant of battle rose-bush and a bed of bleeding hearts in full bloom.

"Come and sit down, my dear, come and sit down," he repeated, fussing about her. "Tina will give you a cup of tea out here before you go to your rooms, and Ben and I will take our juleps before supper. I've been working in my garden, you see; there's nothing so satisfying in old age as a taste for flowers. It's more absorbing than chess, as I tell George – old George, I mean – and it's more soothing than children. Were you far enough South, my dear, to see the yellow jessamine grow wild? They tell me, too, that the Marshal Niel rose runs there up to the roofs of the houses. With us it is a very delicate rose. I have never been able to do anything with it, – but I have had a great success this year with my bleeding hearts, you will notice. Ah, there's Tina! So you see, Tina, here they are. They came sooner than we expected."

From the low white porch, under a bower of honeysuckle, Mrs. Clay appeared, with a cup of tea and a silver basket of sponge snowballs which she placed before Sally on a small green table; and immediately a troop of slate-coloured pigeons fluttered from the mimosa tree and the clipped yew at the end of the garden, and began pecking greedily in the gravelled walk.

"I'm glad you've come, my dears," remarked the old lady in her brusque, honest manner, "and I hope to heaven that you will be able to take Theophilus's mind off his flowers. I declare he has grown so besotted about them that I believe he'd sell the very clothes off his back to buy a new variety of rose or lily. Only a week ago he took back a dozen socks I had given him because he said he'd rather have the money to spend in a strange kind of iris he'd just heard of."

"A most remarkable plant," observed the doctor, with enthusiasm, "the peculiarity of which is that it is smaller and less attractive to the vulgar eye than the common iris, of which I have a great number growing at the end of the garden. Don't listen to Tina, my children, she's a cynic, and no cynic can understand the philosophy of gardening. It was one of the wisest of men, though a trifle unorthodox, I admit, who advised us to cultivate our garden. A pessimist he may have been before he took up the trowel, but a cynic – never."

"I am not complaining of the trowel, Theophilus," observed Mrs. Clay, "though when it comes to that I don't see why a trowel and a bed of roses is any more philosophic than a ladle and a kettle of pickles."

"Perhaps not, Tina, perhaps not," chuckled the doctor, "but yours is a practical mind, and there's nothing, I've always said, like a practical mind for seeing things crooked. It suits a crooked world, I suppose, and that's why it usually manages to get on so well in it."

"And I'd like to know how you see things, Theophilus," sniffed Mrs. Clay, whose temper was rising.

"I see them as they are, Tina, which isn't in the very least as they appear," rejoined the good man, unruffled.

He bent forward, made a lunge with his trowel at a solitary blade of grass growing in the bed of bleeding hearts, and after uprooting it, returned with a tranquil face to his garden chair.

But Mrs. Clay, having, as he had said, a practical mind, merely sniffed while she wiped off the small green table with a red-bordered napkin and scattered the crumbs of sponge-cake to the greedy slate-coloured pigeons.

"If I judged you by what you appear, Theophilus," she retorted, crushingly, "I should have judged you for a fool on the day you were born."

This sally, which was delivered with spirit, afforded the doctor an evident relish.

"If you knew your Juvenal, my dear," he responded, with perfect good humour, "you would remember: Fronti nulla fides."

Rising from his seat, he stooped fondly over the bed of bleeding hearts, and gathering a few blossoms, presented them to Sally, with a courtly bow.

"A favourite flower of mine. My poor mother was always very partial to it," he remarked.

CHAPTER XXXII

I COME TO THE SURFACE

It was a bright June day, I remember, when I came to the surface again, and saw clear sky for the first time for more than two years. I had entered the office a little late, and the General had greeted me with an outstretched hand in which I felt the grip of the bones through the flabby flesh.

"Look here, Ben, have you kept control of the West Virginia and Wyanoke?" he enquired, and I saw the pupils of his eyes contract to fine points of steel, as they did when he meant business.

"Nobody wanted it, General. I still own control – or rather I still practically own the road."

"Well, take my advice and don't sell to the first man that asks you, even if he comes from the South Midland. I've just heard that they've been tapping those undeveloped coal fields at Wyanoke, and I shouldn't be surprised if they turned out, after all, to be the richest in West Virginia."

It was then that I saw clear sky.

"I'll hold on, General, as long as you say," I replied. "Meanwhile, I'll run out there and have a look."

"Oh, have a look by all means. I say, Ben," he added after a minute, with a worried expression in his face, "have you heard about the trouble that old fool Theophilus has been getting into? Mark my words, before he dies, he'll land his sister in the poorhouse, as sure as I sit here. Garden needed moisture, he said, couldn't raise some of those scraggy, new-fangled things that nobody can pronounce the names of except himself, so he went to work and had pipes laid from one end to the other. When the bill came in there was no way to pay it except by mortgaging his house, so he's gone and mortgaged it. Mrs. Clay, poor lady, came to me on the point of tears – she'll be in the poorhouse yet, I was obliged to tell her so – and entreated me to make an effort to restrain Theophilus. 'I try to keep the catalogues from reaching him,' she said, 'but sometimes the postman slips in without my seeing him, and then he's sure to deliver one. Whenever Theophilus reads about any strange specimen, or any hybridising nonsense that nobody heard of when I was young, he seems to go completely out of his head, and the worst of 'em is,' she added," concluded the General, chuckling under his breath, "'there isn't a single pretty, sweet-smelling flower in the lot.'"

"I'm awfully sorry about the house, General. Isn't there some way of curbing him?"

"I never saw the bit yet that could curb an old fool," replied the great man, indignantly; "the next thing his roof will be sold over his head, and they'll go to the poorhouse, that's what I told Mrs. Clay. Poor lady, she was really in a terrible state of mind."

"Surely you won't let it come to that. Wait till these dreamed-of coal fields materialise and I'll take over that mortgage."

The General's lower lip shot out with a sulky and forbidding expression.

"The best thing that could happen to the old fool would be to have his house sold above him, and by Jove, if he doesn't cease his extravagance, I'll stand off and let them do it as sure as my name is George Bolingbroke. What Theophilus needs," he concluded angrily, "is discipline."

"It's too late to begin to discipline a man of over eighty."

"No, it ain't," retorted the General; "it's never too late. If it doesn't do him any good in this world, it will be sure to benefit him in the next. He's entirely too opinionated, that's the trouble with him. Do you remember the way he sat up over there on Church Hill, and tried to beat me down that Robert Carrington lived in Bushrod's house, and that he'd attended him there in his last illness? As if I didn't know Bushrod Carrington as well as my own brother. Got all his clothes in Paris. Can see him now as he used to come to church in one of his waistcoats of peaehblow brocade. Yet you heard Theophilus stick out against me. Wouldn't give in even when I offered to take him straight to Bushrod's grave in Saint John's Churchyard, where I had helped to lay him. That's at the back of the whole thing, I tell you. If Theophilus had had a little discipline, this would never have happened."

"All the same I hope you won't let it come to a sale," I responded, as a bunch of telegrams was brought to him, and we settled down to our morning's work.

In the afternoon when I went back to the doctor's, I found Sally in the low canvas chair between the giant-of-battle rose-bush and the bleeding hearts, with George Bolingbroke on the ground at her feet, reading to her, I noticed at a glance, out of a book of poems. George hated poetry – I had never forgotten his contemptuous boyish attitude toward Latin – and the sight of him stretched there, his handsome figure at full length, his impassive face flushed with a fine colour, produced in me a curious irritation, which sounded in my voice when I spoke.

"I thought you scorned literature, George. Are you acting the part of a gay deceiver?"

"Oh, it goes well on a day like this," he rejoined in his amiable drawling manner; "the doctor has been quoting his favourite verse of Horace to us. He has had trouble with his hybridising or something, so he tells us – what is it, doctor? I'm no good at Latin."

Dr. Theophilus, who was planting oysters at the roots of a calla lily, having discovered, as he repeatedly informed us, that such treatment increased the number and size of the blossoms, raised his fine old head, and stood up after wiping his trowel on the trimly mown grass in the border.

"Æquam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem," he replied, rolling the Latin words luxuriously on his tongue, as if he relished the flavour. "That verse of the poet has sustained me in many and varied afflictions. Not to know it is to dispense with an unfailing source of consolation in trouble. When using it at a patient's bedside, I have found that it invariably acted as a sedative to an excited mind. I sometimes think," he added gently, "that if Tina had not been ignorant of Latin, she would have had a – a less practical temper."

Picking up the trowel, which he had laid on the grass, he returned with a calm soul to his difficulties, while Sally, looking up at me with anxious eyes, said: —

"Something has happened, Ben. What is it?"

I broke into a laugh. "Only that that little dead-beat road in West Virginia may restore my fortune, after all," I replied.

The next day I went to Wyanoke and reorganised the affairs of the little road. Shortly afterwards orders for freight cars came in faster than we were able to supply them, and we called at once on the cars of the Great South Midland and Atlantic.

"If you weren't a friend, this would be a mighty good chance to squeeze you," remarked the General; "we could keep your cars back until we'd clean squelched your traffic, and then buy the little road up for a song. It's business, but it isn't fair, and I'll be blamed if I'm going to squelch a friend."

He did not squelch us, being as good as his word; the undeveloped coal fields developed amazingly and the result was that before the year was over, I had sold the little road at my own price to the big one. Then I stood up and drew breath, like a man released from the weight of irons.

"We can go into our own home," I said joyfully to Sally. "In a year or two, if all goes well, and I work hard, we'll be back again where we were."