The words and the intent of the tribute reached beyond the palings. Their effect was magical; for the ruler was in his realm again, back among his loyal, worshipful subjects. The bare head straightened; the wearied legs unkinked; the crushed and bruised spirit revived. [128] And Gashney Tuttle, king of jesters, re-crowned, proceeded jauntily on his homeward way, with the wholesome plaudits of Mr. Philpotts ringing in his gratified ears and the young sun shining, golden, in his face.

[129]
CHAPTER IV
BLACKER THAN SIN

It was the year after the yellow fever that Major Foxmaster moved out from Virginia; that would make it the year 1876. And the next year the woman came. For Major Foxmaster her coming was inopportune. It is possible that she so timed it with that very thing in mind. To order her own plans with a view to the upsetting and the disordering of his plans may have been within the scope of her general scheme. Through intent, perhaps, she waited until he had established himself here in his new environment, five hundred miles from tidewater, before she followed him.

Be this as it may, that was what happened. The Major came out in the spring of the year. He was pushing fifty then, a fine upstanding figure of a man—what women, for lack of a better name, call distinguished looking. He had been a lieutenant in the Mexican War and a major in the Civil War—on the [130] Confederate side, of course, seeing that he came from the seaboard side and not from the mountainous flank of Virginia.

You get some notion of what manner of man he was when I tell you that in all the years he lived in this city, which was a fair-sized city, only one man ever called him by his first name. Behind his back he was to others The Major, sometimes The Old Major, and rarely Major; but to his face people always hailed him, properly, as Major Foxmaster. And, despite the role he was to play in the community, he never acquired a nickname; and that was not so strange, either. You give nicknames to geysers, but not to glaciers.

This man’s manner was icily formal toward those he deemed his inferiors, icily polite toward those whom he acknowledged his equals. He had no code for his intercourse with superiors because he never met anybody whom he regarded as his social superior. He looked upon the world with a bleak, chill eye, and to it he showed a bleak, chill face. It was a mask really—a mask of flesh held in such fine and rigid control that it gave no hint, ever, of what went on in the cool brain behind it. A professional poker player would have traded five years out of his life to be the owner of such a face.

Well, the Major came. He had money, he had family, he had a military record; likewise he had the poise and the pose which, lacking all the other things, still would have given him [131] consideration and a place in town life. His status in the financial world became fixed when he deposited in the largest bank a drawing account of such size as instantly to win the cuddling admiration of the president of the bank. He had established himself in rooms at the Gaunt House—then, and for many years thereafter, the principal hotel. Before fall he was proposed for membership in the exclusive Kenilworth Club, that was the unattainable Mecca toward which many men turned wistful eyes. Judge Sherwan, who was afterward to be his only close friend, sponsored his candidacy and he was elected promptly. Very soon his life fell into the grooves that always thenceforward it was to follow.

The Major did not go into any business. Opportunities to go into this or that were in due season presented to him. He listened with his air of congealed courtesy, but declined them all, explaining that his present investments were entirely satisfactory and yielded him a satisfactory income. Like many men of his breed and generation, he liked a good horse so well that it was more than a liking—with him it was a love. Afternoons he frequently drove one: a ramping bay mare with a fractious temper and a set of gifted heels. He was fond of cards, and in the evenings generally played cards with certain of his fellow club members in a private room at the Kenilworth Club.

These men, though, never became his friends, [132] but were merely the men with whom he played cards. If of a morning after breakfast he went for a walk, as sometimes happened, he went alone, except on those infrequent occasions when Judge Sherwan accompanied him. At the beginning he was asked to affairs at the homes of influential people; but, since he never accepted these invitations—any of them—people presently quit asking him. Among a hundred thousand human beings he became, or rather he remained, so far as interchange of thought, or of affection, or of confidence, or of intimacy was concerned, a social Crusoe upon a desert island set in an empty sea, with no Man Friday to bear him company in his loneliness—unless it might be said that old Sherwan qualified, after a fashion, for the Man-Friday job.