Dominie Dean: A Novel

by Ellis Parker Butler

“Yes, I understand,” 'Thusia said. “'Something not too bright and good for human nature's daily food.' Is Marty's trouble serious!”

David placed his hand on his wife's shoulder. “I can't tell you how serious, 'Thusia,” he said. “I don't want you to know. You'll not let his mother guess we know anything about it!”

“Let me think!” said 'Thusia. “Didn't she give a lemon cake for our last church dinner! I'm sure she did! It will be about that I happen to run in. You'll be back in time for supper, David! Hot rolls, you know!”

“Oh, if it is hot rolls you can depend on me!” David smiled.

Mrs. Ware was a peculiar woman. She was an old woman and alone in the world except for Marty, her only son, who had come late in her life. She was a proud woman. During her husband's life she had rather lorded it (or ladied it) over our mixed “good society” in Riverbank. Ware had been a commission man, now and then plunging on his own hook, as we say, buying heavily and selling when prices went up. He always had abundant money, and Mrs. Ware spent it for him. They built the big house overlooking the river—a palace for Riverbank of those days—and Mrs. Ware held her head very high, with four horses in the stable and a coachman and gardener and two maids and a grand piano and four oil paintings “done by hand” in Europe! And then, when Ware died, there was hardly enough money in the bank to pay for his funeral, no life insurance, and everything mortgaged. Marty was about fourteen then, a bright boy.

For a year or so Mrs. Ware tried to keep the big house, and then it had to go. Instead of the social queen, spending the largest income in Riverbank, she was almost the poorest of women. She moved out of the big house into a little three-room white box of a place on a back street that was then a mere track through the weeds. Her white hands had to do all the housework that was done; she had no maid at all, and hardly enough for herself and Marty to eat. No doubt it was a crushing blow, but she could not bare herself in her poverty to those who had known her in her flaunting prosperity. She shut her door, and became a proud, hard recluse.

Somehow she managed to get Marty through the high school, and then he went to work. He found some minor position in one of our banks and might have held it and have worked up into a better position, for he proved to be a natural accountant, but the “fast set” caught him, and, after it was learned that he spent his nights with the cards, the bank let him go. Until he was twenty-one he skipped from one temporary job to another. Sometimes he was in the freight office, then with a mill, then behind a counter for a few weeks. He had wonderful adaptability and seemed able to step into a position and take up the work of another man in an instant. He seemed destined to become a permanent “temporary assistant,” but he was making more friends all the while and he had hardly passed his majority when he was elected city treasurer. He seemed to have found his proper niche at last.

The salary attached to the treasurership was not large but it was enough, or would have been if Marty had not gambled. One good black winter suit and one good black summer suit will last many years in Riverbank, and Marty always seemed properly dressed in black. He was slender and what we called “natty.” His hair was as black as night. During his second term he began to show the effects of his nights. His face became paler than it should have been, and some mornings he was so tremulous he took a glass of whisky to steady his hands. With all this he was immensely popular, and when the chances of the campaign in which he was finally beaten were discussed Mart Ware was the one man no one believed could be beaten. He lost by twenty votes.

As David walked down the hill toward Main Street and Seth Hardcome's shoe store he thought of these things. Mart Ware was one man, if there were any, who had been thrown out of office through David's part in the campaign. To that extent he was specifically responsible; in the broader sense that he was his “brother's keeper” it was his duty to do all he could to save any man or woman in such trouble as Marty was in.

A year or two earlier Seth Hardcome, his tough old body beginning to feel the draughts and changes of temperature of his long, narrow store, had had Belden, the contractor, partition off an office across the rear, and here David found the old man. He was standing at his tall desk, making out half-yearly bills against the coming of the first of January, and he pushed his spectacles up into his hair and turned to David with the air of a busy man interrupted.