“A Southerner who deserted the South in its desperate struggle for life need not come to Southern gentlemen to ask them to help him to claim the price of his infamy.” That was the Delisleville point of view, and it was difficult to cope with. If Tom had been a rich man and could have journeyed between Delisleville and the Capital, or wheresoever the demands of his case called him, to see and argue with this man or that, the situation would have simplified itself somewhat, though there would still have remained obstacles to be overcome.
“But a man who has hard work to look his room rent in the face, and knows he can’t do that for more than a few months, is in a tight place,” said Tom. “Evidence that will satisfy the Government isn’t easily collected in Dupont Circle. These fellows have heard men talk before. They’ve heard too many men talk. There’s Stamps, now—they’ve heard Stamps talk. Stamps is way ahead of me where lobbying is concerned. He knows the law, and he doesn’t mind having doors shut in his face or being kicked into the street, so long as he sees a chance of getting indemnified for his ‘herds of cattle.’ I’m not a business man, and I mind a lot of things that don’t trouble him. I’m not a good hand at asking favours and sitting down to talk steadily for a solid hour to a man who doesn’t want to hear me and hasn’t five minutes to spare.” But for Rupert and Sheba he would have given up the claim in a week and gone back to Talbot’s Cross-roads content to end his days as he began them when he opened the store—living in the little back rooms on beans and bacon and friend chicken and hominy.
“That suited me well enough,” he used to say to himself, when he thought the thing over. “There were times when I found it a bit lonely—but, good Lord! loneliness is a small thing for a man to complain of in a world like this. It isn’t fits or starvation. When a man’s outlived the habit of expecting happiness, it doesn’t take much to keep him going.”
But at his side was eager youth which had outlived nothing, which believed in a future full of satisfied yearnings and radiant joys.
“I am not alone now,” said Rupert; “I must make a place and a home for Sheba. I must not be only a boy in love with her; I must be a man who can protect her from everything—from everything. She is so sweet—she is so sweet. She makes me feel that I am a man.”
She was sweet. To big Tom they were both sweet in their youth and radiant faith and capabilities for happiness. They seemed like children, and the tender bud of their lovely young passion was a thing to be cherished. He had seen such buds before, but he had never seen the flower.
“I’d like to see the flower,” he used to say to himself. “To see it would pay a man for a good deal he’d missed himself. The pair of them could set up a pretty fair garden of Eden—serpents and apple-trees being excluded.”
They were happy. Even when disappointments befell them and prospects were unpromising they were happy. They could look into each other’s eyes and take comfort. Rupert’s dark moods had melted away. He sometimes forgot they had ever ruled him. His old boyish craving for love and home was fed. The bare little rooms in the poor little house were home. Sheba and Tom were love and affection. When they sat at the table and calculated how much longer their diminishing store would last, even as it grew smaller and smaller, they could laugh over the sums they worked out on slips of paper. So long as the weather was warm enough they strolled about together in the fragrant darkness or sat in the creeper-hung porch, in the light of summer moons; when the cold nights came they sat about the stove or the table and talked, while Sheba sewed buttons on or worked assiduously at the repairing of her small wardrobe. Whatsoever she did, the two men sat and admired, and there was love and laughter.
The strenuous life which went on in the busier part of the town—the politics, the struggles, the plots and schemes, the worldly pleasures—seemed entirely apart from them.
Sometimes, after a day in which Judge Rutherford had been encouraged or Tom had had a talk with a friendly member who had listened to the story of the claim with signs of interest, they felt their star of hope rising; it never sinks far below the horizon when one’s teens are scarcely of the past—and Sheba and Rupert spent a wonderful evening making plans for a future of ease and fortune.