John March, Southerner

XXVII.

TO SUSIE – FROM PUSSIE

ON the return trip Garnet sat on the arm of almost every seat except Fannie's.

"No, sir; no, keep your seat!" He wouldn't let anybody be "disfurnished" for him! Proudfit had got the place next his wife and thought best to keep it.

"Mr. Fair," said Garnet, "I'd like you to notice how all this region was made in ages past. You see how the rocks have been broken and tossed," – etc.

"Mr. Fair" – the same speaker – "I wish you'd change your mind and stay a week with us. Come, spend it at Rosemont. It's vacation, you know, and Barb and I shan't have a thing to do but give you a good time; shall we, Barb?"

"It will give us a good time," said Barb. Her slow, cadenced voice, steady eye, and unchallenging smile charmed the young Northerner. He had talked about her to Fannie at luncheon and pronounced her "unusual."

"Why, really" – he began, looked up at Garnet and back again to Barbara. Garnet bent over him confidentially.

"Just between us I'd like to advise with you about something I've never mentioned to a soul. That is about sending Barb to some place North to sort o' round out her education and character in a way that – it's no use denying it, though it would never do for me to say so – a way that's just impossible in Dixie, sir."

The young man remembered Barbara's mother and was silent.

"Well, Barb, Mr. Fair will go home with us for a day or two, anyhow," Garnet was presently authorized to say. "I must go into the next car a moment – "

John March, meditating on this very speaker with growing anger, saw him approach. Garnet entered, beaming.

"Howdy, John, my son; I couldn't let you and Sister March – "

March had stepped before his mother: He spoke in a deep murmur.

"I'm not your son, sir. My mother's not your sister."

"Why, what in thun – why, John, I don't know whether to be angry or to laugh."

"Don't you dare to do either. Go back to that other man's – "

"Speak more softly for heaven's sake, Mr. March, and don't look so, or you'll do me a wrong that may cost us both our lives!"

"Cheap enough," said the youth, with a smile.

"You've made a ridiculous mistake, John. Before God I'm as innocent of any – "

"Before God, Major Garnet, you lie. If you deny it again I'll accuse you publicly. Go back and fondle the hand of that other man's wife; but don't ever speak to my mother again. If you do, I – I'll shoot you on sight."

"I'll call you to account for this, sir," said Garnet, moving to go.

"You're lying again," was John's bland reply, and he turned to his seat.

"Why, John," came the mother's sweet complaint, "I wanted to see Brother Garnet."

"Oh, I'm sorry," said the complaisant son.

Garnet paused on the coach's platform to get rid of his tremors. "He'll not tell," he said aloud, the uproar of wheels drowning his voice. "He's too good a Rosemonter to tattle. At first I thought he'd got on the same scent as Cornelius.

"Thank God, that's one thing there's no woman in, anyhow. O me, O me! If that tipsy nigger would only fall off this train and break his neck!

"And now here's this calf to live in daily dread of. O dear, O dear, I ought to a-had more sense. It's all her fault; she's pure brass. They call youth the time of temptation – Good Lord! Why youth's armored from head to heel in its invincible ignorance. O me! Well – I'll pay him for it if it takes me ten years."

John's complacency had faded with the white heat of his anger, and he sat chafing in spirit while his elbow neighbor slept in the shape of an N. Across the car he heard Parson Tombs explaining to the Graves brethren and Sister March that Satan – though sometimes corporeal – and in that case he might be either unicorporeal or multicorporeal – and at other times unicorporeal – as he might choose and providence permit – and, mark you, he might be both at once on occasion – was by no means omnipresent, but only ubiquitous.

Lazarus supposed a case: "He might be in both these cahs at once an' yet not on the platfawm between 'em."

"It's mo' than likely!" said the aged pastor, no one meaning anything sly. Yet to some people a parson's smiling mention of the devil is always a good joke, and the Graves laughed, as we may say. Not so, Sister March; she never laughed at the prince of darkness, nor took his name in vain. She spoke, now, of his "darts."

"No, Sister March, I reckon his darts, fifty times to one, ah turned aside fum us by the providence that's round us, not by the po' little patchin' o' grace that's in us."

John's heart jumped. Garnet looked in and beckoned him out. He went.

"John " – the voice was tearful – "I offer my hand in penitent gratitude." John took it. "Yes, my dear boy, my feet had well-nigh slipped."

"I oughtn't to have spoken as I did, Major Garnet."

"It was the word of the Lord, John. It saved me and my spotless name! The mistake had just begun, in mere play, but it might have grown into actual sin – of impulse, I mean, of course – not of action; my lifelong correctness of – "

"Oh, I'm sure of that sir! I only wish I– "

"God bless you! I've a good notion to tell your mother this whole thing, John, just to make her still prouder of you." He squeezed the young man's hand. "But I reckon for others' sakes we'd better not breathe it."

"O, I think so, sir! I promise – "

"You needn't have promised, John. Your think-so was promise enough. And a mighty good thing for us all it's so. For, John March, you're the hope of Suez!

"You've got the key of all our fates in your pocket, John – you and your mother now, and you when you come into full charge of the estate next year. That's why Jeff-Jack's always been so willing to help me to help you on. But never mind that, only – beware of new friends. When they come fawning on you with offers to help you develop the resources of Widewood, you tell 'em – "

"That I'm going to develop them myself, alone."

"N-n-no – not quite that. O, you couldn't! You've no idea what a – why, I couldn't do it with you, without Jeff-Jack's help, nor he without mine! Why, just see what a failure the effort to build this road was, until" – the locomotive bellowed.

"Half-an-hour late, and slowing up again!" exclaimed John. He knew the parson's wife was pressing his mother to spend the night with them, and he was afraid of having his soul asked after. "Why do we stop here, hardly a mile from town?"

"It's to let my folks off. They're going to walk over to the pike while I go on for the carriage and drive out; they and Jeff-Jack and the Hallidays."

The train stopped where a beautiful lane crossed the track between two fenced fields. Fair and Barbara alighted and stood on a flowery bank with the sun glowing in some distant tree-tops behind them. Fannie leaned from the train, took both Jeff-Jack's uplifted hands and fluttered down upon rebounding tiptoes; the bell sounded, the scene changed, and John murmured to himself in heavy agony,

"He's going to ask her! O, Fannie, Fannie, if you'd only refuse to say yes, and give me three years to show what I can do! But he's going to ask her before that sun goes down, and what's she going to say?"

XXVIII.

INFORMATION FOR SALE

"Hope of Suez!" Garnet felt he had spoken just these three words too many. "Overtalked myself again," he said to himself while chatting with others; "a liar always does. But he shall pay for this. Ah me!"

He was right. The young man would have sucked down all his flattery but for those three words. Yet on one side they were true, and March guiltily felt them so as, looking at his mother, he thought again of that deep store of the earth's largess lying under their unfruitful custody. Suez and her three counties would have jeered the gaudy name from Lover's Leap to Libertyville though had they guessed better the meaning of the change into which a world's progress was irresistibly pushing them, whoever owned Widewood must have stood for some of their largest wishes and hopes, and they would have ceased to deride the blessed mutation and to hobble it with that root of so many world-wide evils – the calling still private what the common need has made public. The ghost of this thought flitted in John's mind, but would not be grasped or beckoned to the light.

"I wish I could think," he sighed, but he could only think of Fannie. The train stopped. The excursionists swarmed forth. The cannon belched out its thunderous good-byes, and John went for his horse and buggy, promising to give word for Garnet's equipage to be sent to him.

"I must mind Johanna and her plunder," said the Major; "but I'll look after your mother, too." And he did so, though he found time to part fondly with the Proudfits.

"He won't do," thought John, as he glanced back from a rise of ground. "Fannie's right. And she's right about me, too; the only way to get her is to keep away till I've shown myself fit for her; that's what she means; of course she can't say so; but I'm satisfied that's what she means!"

He passed two drunken men. Here in town at the end of Suez's wedding so many had toasted it so often, it was as if Susie's own eyes were blood-shot and her steps uncertain. "It's my wedding, too," he soliloquized. "This Widewood business and I are married this day; it alone, to me alone, till it's finished. Garnet shall see whether – humph! – Jake, my horse and buggy!" And soon he was rattling back down the stony slopes toward his mother.

"Hope of Suez!" he grimly laughed. "We'll be its despair if we don't get something done. And I've got to do it alone. Why shouldn't I? Yes, it's true, times have changed; and yet if this was ever rightly a private matter in my father's hands, I can't see why it has or why it should become a public matter in mine!"

He said this to himself the more emphatically because he felt, somehow, very uncertain about it. He wished his problem was as simple as a railroad question. A railroad can ask for public aid; but fancy him asking public aid to open and settle up his private lands! He could almost hear Susie's horse-laugh in reply. Why should she not laugh? He recalled with what sweet unboastful tone his father had always condemned every scheme and symptom of riding on public shoulders into private fortune. In the dear old Dixie there had been virtually no public, and every gentleman was by choice his own and only public aid, no matter what – "Look out!"

He hauled up his horse. A man pressed close to the side of the halted buggy, to avoid a huge telegraph pole that came by quivering between two timber wheels. He offered John a freckled, yellow hand, and a smile of maudlin fondness.

"Mr. Mahch, I admiah to salute you ag'in, seh. Hasn't we had a glo'ious day? It's the mos' obtainable day Susie eveh see, seh!"

"Well, 'pon my soul!" said John, ignoring the proffered hand. "If I'd seen who it was, I'd 'a' driven straight over you." Both laughed. "Cornelius, did you see my mother waiting for me down by the tracks?"

"I did, seh. Thah she a-set'n' on a pile o' ceda'-tree poles, lookin' like the las' o' pea-time – p-he-he-he!

"Majo' Gyarnit? O yass, seh, he thah, too. Thass how come I lingud thah, seh, yass, seh, in espiration o' Johanna. Mr. Mahch, I loves that creatu' yit, seh! – I means Johanna."

"Oh! – not Major Garnet," laughed John, gathering the reins.

Cornelius sputtered with delight, and kept between the wheels. "Mr. Mahch," – he straightened, solemnly, and held himself sober – "I was jess about to tell you what I jess evise Majo' Gyarnit espressin' to yo' maw – jess accidental as I was earwhilin' aroun' Johanna, you know."

"What was it? What did he say?"

"O, it wan't much, what he say. He say, 'Sis' Mahch, you e'zac'ly right. Don't you on no accounts paht with so much's a' acre o' them lan's lessn – "

"Lord! – the lands – take care for the wheel."

But Mr. Leggett leaned heavily on the buggy. "Mr. Mahch, I evince an' repose you in confidence to wit: that long as you do like Gyarnit say – "

John gave a stare of menace. "Major Garnet, if you please."

"Yass, seh, o' co'se; Majo' Gyarnit. I say, long as you do like he say, Widewood stay jess like it is, an' which it suit him like grapes suit a coon!" The informant's booziness had returned. One foot kept slipping from a spoke of the fore-wheel. With pretence of perplexity he examined the wheel. "Mr. Mahch, this wheel sick; she mighty sick; got to see blacksmiff befo' she can eveh see Widewood."

John looked. The word was true. He swore. The mulatto snickered, sagged against it and cocked his face importantly.

"Mr. Mahch, if you an' me was on'y in cahoots! En we kin be, seh, we kin – why, hafe o' yo' lan's 'u'd be public lan's in no time, an' the res' 'u'd belong to a stawk comp'ny, an' me'n' you 'u'd be a-cuttin' off kewponds an' a-drivin' fas' hawses an' a-drinkin' champagne suppuz, an' champagne faw ow real frien's an' real pain faw ow sham frien's, an' plenty o' both kine – thah goes Majo' Gyarnit's kerrige to him." It passed.

"But, why, Cornelius, should it suit Major Garnet for my lands to lie idle?"

"Mr. Mahch, has you neveh inspec' the absence o' green in my eye? It suit him faw a reason known on'y to yo's truly, yit which the said yo's truly would accede to transfawm to you, seh; yass, seh; in considerations o' us goin' in cahoots, aw else a call loan, an' yit mo' stric'ly a call-ag'in loan, a sawt o' continial fee, yass, seh; an' the on'y question, now much kin you make it?"

John looked into the upturned face for some seconds before he said, slowly and pleasantly, "Why, you dirty dog!" He gave the horse a cut of the whip. Leggett smiling and staggering, called after him, to the delight of all the street,

"Mr. Mahch, thass confidential, you know! An' Mr. Mahch! Woe! Mr. Mahch." John glanced fiercely back – "You betteh 'zamine that hine wheel! caze it jess now pa-ass oveh my foot!"

XXIX.

RAVENEL ASKS

The Garnet carriage, Johanna on the back seat, came smartly up through the town, past Parson Tombs's, the Halliday cottage, and silent Montrose Academy, and was soon parted from the Marches' buggy, which followed with slower dignity and a growing limp.

"Well, Johanna," said Garnet, driving, "had a good time?"

"Yass, seh."

"What's made Miss Barb so quiet all day; doesn't she like our friend?"

The answer was a bashful drawl – "I reckon she like him tol'able, seh."

"If you think Miss Barb would be pleased you can change to this seat beside me, Johanna." The master drew rein and she made the change. He spoke again. "You saw me, just now, talking with Cornelius, didn't you?"

"Yass, seh."

"His wife's dead, at last."

No answer.

"Johanna," he turned a playful eye, "what makes you so hard on Cornelius!"

She replied with a white glance of alarm and turned away. He would have pressed the subject but she murmured,

"Dah Miss Barb."

Barbara sat on a bare ledge of rock above the road-side, platting clovers. Fair stood close below, watching her fingers. She sprang to her feet.

"What did keep you so?" She moved to where Fair had stopped to hand her down, but laughed, turned away, waved good-by to Fannie and Ravenel out in a field full of flowers and western sunlight, and ran around by an easier descent to the carriage. Fair helped her in.

"Homeward bound," she said, and they spun away. As they turned a bend in the pike she glanced back with a carefully careless air, but saw only their own dust.

John, driving beside his mother, with eyes on the infirm wheel, was very silent, and she was very limp. The buggy top was up for privacy. By and by he heard a half-spoken sound at his side, and turning saw her eyes full of tears.

"O thunder!" he thought, but only said, "Why, mother, what's the matter?"

"Ah! my son, that's what I wonder. Why have you shunned me all day? Am I – "

"There are the Tombses waiting at their gate," interrupted the son. The aged pair had hurried away from the train on foot to have their house open for Sister March.

"Yes," said Daphne, sweetly yielding herself to their charge, "John's fierce driving has damaged a wheel, and we wont – "

"Go home till morning," said the delighted pastor with a tickled laugh that drew from his wife a glance of fond disapproval.

John drove alone to a blacksmith shop and left his buggy there and his horse at a stable. For the blacksmith lay across his doorsill "sick." He had been mending rigs and shoeing critters since dawn, and had drunk from a jug something he had thought was water and found – "it wusn't."

March sauntered off lazily to a corner where the lane led westward like the pike, turned into it and ran at full speed.

With a warm face he came again into the main avenue at a point nearly opposite the Halliday's cottage gate. General Halliday and the Englishman were just going through it.

John turned toward the sun-setting at a dignified walk. "I'm a fool to come out here," he thought. "But I must see at once what Jeff-Jack thinks of my plan. Will he tell me the truth, or will he trick me as they say he did Cornelius? O I must ask him, too, if he did that! I can't help it if he is with her; I must see him. I don't want to see her; at least that's not what I'm out here for. I'm done with her – for a while; Heaven bless her! – but I must see him, so's to know what to propose to mother."

The day was dying in exquisite beauty. Long bands of pale green light widened up from the west. Along the hither slope of a ridge someone was burning off his sedge-grass. The slender red lines of fire, beautiful after passion's sort, but dimming the field's fine gold, were just reaching the crest to die by a road-side. The objects of his search were nowhere to be seen.

A short way off, on the left, lay a dense line of young cedars and pines, nearly parallel with the turnpike. A footpath, much haunted in term-time by Montrose girls, and leading ultimately to the rear of the Academy grounds, lay in the clover-field beyond this thicket. John mounted a fence and gazed far and near. Opposite him in the narrow belt of evergreens was a scarcely noticeable opening, so deeply curved that one would get almost through it before the view opened on the opposite side. He leaped into the field, ran to this gap, burst into the open beyond, and stopped, hat in hand – speechless. His quest was ended.

Not ten steps away stood two lovers who had just said that fearfully sweet "mine" and "thine" that keeps the world a-turning. Ravenel's right arm was curved over Fannie's shoulder and about her waist. His left hand smoothed the hair from her uplifted brow, and his kiss was just lighting upon it.

The blood leaped to his face, but the next instant he sunk his free hand into his pocket and smiled. John's face was half-anger, half-anguish.

"Pleasant evening," said Ravenel.

"For you, sir." John bowed austerely. "I will not mar it. My business can wait." He gave Fannie a grief-stricken look and was hurrying off.

"John March," cried Ravenel, in a voice breaking with laughter, "come right back here, sir." But the youth only threw up an arm in tragic disdain and kept on.

"John," called a gentler voice, and he turned. "Don't leave us so," said Fannie. "You'll make me unhappy if you do." She had drawn away from her lover's arm. She put out a hand.

"Come, tell me I haven't lost my best friend."

John ran to her, caught her hand in both his and covered it with kisses, Ravenel stood smiling and breaking a twig slowly into bits.

"There, there, that's extravagant," said Fannie; but she let the youth keep her hand while he looked into her eyes and smiled fondly through his distress. Then she withdrew it, saying:

"There's Mr. Ravenel's hand, hold it. If I didn't know how men hate to be put through forms, I'd insist on your taking it."

"I reckon John thinks we haven't been quite candid," said Ravenel.

"I'm not sure we have," responded Fannie. "And yet I do think we've been real friends. You know John" – she smiled at her hardihood – "this is the only way it could ever be, don't you?" But John turned half away and shook his head bitterly. She spoke again. "Look at me, John." But plainly he could not.

"Are you going to throw us overboard?" she asked. There was a silence; and then – "You mustn't; not even if you feel like it. Don't you know we hadn't ever ought to consult our feelings till we've consulted everything else?"

John looked up with a start, and Fannie, by a grimace, bade him give his hand to his rival. He turned sharply and offered it. Ravenel took it with an air of drollery and John spoke low, Fannie loitering a step aside.

"I offer you my hand with this warning – I love her. I'm going on to love her after she's yours by law. I'll not make love to her; I may be a fool, but I'm not a hound; I love her too well to do that. But she's bound to know it right along. You'll see it. Everybody'll know it. That'll be all of it, I swear. But any man who wants to stop me from it will have to kill me. I believe I have the right, before God, to do it; but I'm going to do it anyhow. I prize your friendship. If I can keep it while you know, and while everybody else knows, that I'm simply hanging round waiting for you to die, I'll do it. If I can't – I can't." The hands parted.

"That's all right, John. That's what I'd do in your place."

March gazed a moment in astonishment. Then Fannie, still drifting away, felt Ravenel at her side and glanced up and around.

"O, you haven't let him go, have you? Why, I wanted to give him this four-leaf clover – as a sort o' pleasant hint. Don't you see?"

"I reckon he'll try what luck there is in odd numbers," said Ravenel, and they quickened their homeward step.

John went to tea at the Tombses in no mood to do himself credit as a guest. His mother was still reminding him of it next day when they alighted at home. "I little thought my son would give me so much trouble."

But his reply struck her dumb. "I've got lots left, mother, and will always have plenty. I make it myself."

XXX.

ANOTHER ODD NUMBER

Fannie expressed to Barbara one day her annoyance at that kind of men – without implying that she meant any certain one – who will never take no for an answer.

"A lover, Barb, if he's not of the humble sort, is the most self-conceited thing alive. He can no more take in the idea that your objection to him is he than a board can draw a nail into itself. You've got to hammer it in."

"With a brickbat," quoth Barbara, whose notions of carpentry were feminine, and who did not care to discuss the matter. But John March, it seemed, would not take no from fate itself.

"I don't believe yet," he mused, as he rode about his small farm, "that Jeff-Jack will get her. She's playing with him. Why not? She's played with a dozen. And yet, naturally, somebody'll get her, and he'll not be worthy of her. There's hope yet! She loves me far more than she realizes right now. That's a woman's way; they'll go along loving for years and find it out by accident – You, Hector! What the devil are you and Israel over in that melon-patch for instead of the corn-field?

"I've been too young for her. No, not too young for her, but too young to show what I can do and be. She waited to see, for years. The intention may not have been conscious, but I believe it was there! And then she got tired of waiting. Why, it began to look as though I would never do anything or be anybody! Great Cæsar! You can't expect a girl to marry an egg in hopes o' what it'll hatch. O let me make haste and show what I am! what I can – 'Evermind, Israel, I see you. Just wait till we get this crop gathered; if I don't kick you two idle, blundering, wasting, pilfering black renters off this farm – as shore's a gun's iron!