Part 4 (1/2)
”Ouch! Turn loose! I take it back! The devil! It wasn't intended for any mortal man to marry you--Sally Ruth, I wouldn't marry you now for forty billion dollars and a mule! Turn loose, you hussy! Turn loose!”
screeched the major.
Unheeding his anguished protests, which brought Judge Hammond Mayne on the run, thinking somebody was being murdered, Miss Sally Ruth marched her suitor out of her house and led him to her front gate. Here she paused, jaws firmly set, eyes glittering, and, as with hooks of steel, took firm hold upon the gallant major's other ear. Then she shook him; his big crimson countenance, resembling a huge overripe tomato, waggled deliriously to and fro.
”I was born”--_shake_--”an old maid,”--_shake, shake, shake_--”I have lived--by the grace of G.o.d”--_shake, shake, shake_--”an old maid, and I expect”--_shake_--”to die an old maid! I don't propose to have”--_shake_--”an old windbag offering _me_ his blubbery old bosom”--_shake, shake, SHAKE_--”at this time of my life!--and don't you forget it, Appleby Cartwright! _THERE!_ You go back home”--_shake, shake, shake_--”and sober up, you old gander, you!”
Major Appleby Cartwright stood not upon the order of his going, but went at once, galloping as if a company of those Yankees with whom he had once fought were upon his hindquarters with fixed bayonets.
However, they being next-door neighbors and friends of a lifetime's standing, peace was finally patched up. In Appleboro we do not mention this historic meeting when either of the partic.i.p.ants can hear us, though it is one of our cla.s.sics and no home is complete without it.
The Major ever afterward eschewed Artillery Punch.
This morning, over the fence, Miss Sally Ruth addressed our invalid directly and without prelude, after her wont. She doesn't believe in beating about the bush:
”The wages of walking up and down the earth and going to and fro in it, tramping like Satan, is a lost leg. Not that it wasn't intended you should lose yours--and I hope and pray it will be a lesson to you.”
”Well, take it from me,” he said grimly, ”there's n.o.body but me collecting my wages.”
A quick approval of this plain truth showed in Miss Sally Ruth's snapping eyes.
”Come!” said she, briskly. ”If you've got sense enough to see _that_, you're not so far away from the truth as you might be. Collecting your wages is the good and the bad thing about life, I reckon. But everything's intended, so you don't need to be too sorry for yourself, any way you look at it. And you could just as well have lost _both_ legs while you were at it, you know.” She paused reflectively. ”Let's see: I've got chicken-broth and fresh rolls to-day--I'll send you over some, after awhile.” She nodded, and went back to her housework.
Laurence went on to High School, Madame had her house to oversee, I had many overdue calls; so we left Pitache and John Flint together, out in the birdhaunted, sweet-scented, sun-dappled garden, in the golden morning hours. No one can be quite heartless in a green garden, quite hopeless in the spring, or quite desolate when there's a dog's friendly nose to be thrust into one's hand.
I am afraid that at first he missed all this; for he could think of nothing but himself and that which had befallen him, coming upon him as a bolt from the blue. He had had, heretofore, nothing but his body--and now his body had betrayed him! It had become, not the splendid engine which obeyed his slightest wish, but a drag upon him.
Realizing this acutely, untrained, undisciplined, he was savagely sullen, impenetrably morose. He tired of Laurence's reading--I think the boy's free quickness of movement, his well-knit, handsome body, the fact that he could run and jump as pleased him, irked and chafed the man new and unused to his own physical infirmity.
He seemed to want none of us; I have seen him savagely repulse the dog, who, shocked and outraged at this exhibition of depravity, withdrew, casting backward glances of horrified and indignant reproach.
But as the lovely, peaceful, healing days pa.s.sed, that bitter and contracted heart had to expand somewhat. Gradually the ferocity faded, leaving in its room an anxious and brooding wonder. G.o.d knows what thoughts pa.s.sed through that somber mind in those long hours, when, concentrated upon himself, he must have faced the problem of his future and, like one before an impa.s.sable stone wall, had to fall back, baffled. He could be sure of only one thing: that never again could he be what he had been once--”the slickest cracksman in America.” This in itself tortured him. Heretofore, life had been exactly what he chose to make it: he had put himself to the test, and he had proven himself the most daring, the coolest, shrewdest, most cunning, in that sinister world in which he had shone with so evil a light. _He had been Slippy McGee_. Sure of himself, his had been that curious inverted pride which is the stigmata of the criminal.
More than once I saw him writhe in his chair, tormented, shaken, spent with futile curses, impotently lamenting his lost kingdom. He still had the skill, the cold calculating brain, the wit, the will; and now, by a cruel chance and a stupid accident, he had lost out! The end had come for him, and he in his heyday! There were moments when, watching him, I had the sensation as of witnessing almost visibly, here in our calm sunny garden, the Dark Powers fighting openly for a soul.
_”For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against princ.i.p.alities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”_
CHAPTER IV
UNDERWINGS
If I have not heretofore spoken of Mary Virginia, it is because all that winter she and Mrs. Eustis had been away; and in consequence Appleboro was dull enough. For the Eustises are our wealthiest and most important family, just as the Eustis house, with its pillared, Greek-temple-effect front, is by far the handsomest house in town.
When we have important folks to entertain, we look to the Eustises to save our faces for us by putting them up at their house.
One afternoon, shortly after we had gotten settled in Appleboro, I came home to find my mother entertaining no less a personage than Mrs.
Eustis; she wasn't calling on the Catholic priest and his mother, you understand; far from it! She was recognizing Armand De Rance and Adele de Marsignan!
Mrs. Eustis was a fair, plump little partridge of a woman, so perfectly satisfied with herself that brains, in her case, would have amounted to a positive calamity. She is an instance of the fascination a fool seems to have for men of undoubted powers of mind and heart, for Eustis, who had both to an unusual degree, loved her devotedly, even while he smiled at her. She had, after some years of childlessness, laid him under an everlasting obligation by presenting him with a daughter, an obligation deepened by the fact that the child was in every sense her father's child, not her mother's.