The Bread-winners: A Social Study

by John Hay

A few days later, Mr. Farnham attended a meeting of the library board, and presented the name of Miss Matchin as a candidate for a subordinate place in the library. There were several such positions, requiring no special education or training, the duties of which could be as well filled by Miss Maud as by any one else. She had sent several strong letters of recommendation to the board, from prominent citizens who knew and respected her father, for when Maud informed him of her new ambition, Matchin entered heartily into the affair, and bestirred himself to use what credit he had in the ward to assist her.
Maud had not exaggerated the effect of her blandishments upon Dr. Buchlieber. The old gentleman spoke in her favor with great fluency; "she was young, healthy, active, intelligent, a graduate of the high school."
"And very pretty, is she not?" asked a member of the board, maliciously.
The Doctor colored, but was not abashed. He gazed steadily at the interrupter through his round glasses, and said:
"Yes, she is very fine looking—but I do not see that that should stand in her way."
Not another word was said against her, and a ballot was taken to decide the question. There were five members of the board, three besides Farnham and Buchlieber. Maud had two votes, and a young woman whose name had not been mentioned received the other three. Buchlieber counted the ballots, and announced the vote. Farnham flushed with anger. Not only had no attention been paid to his recommendation, but he had not even been informed that there was another candidate. In a few sarcastic words he referred to the furtive understanding existing among the majority, and apologized for having made such a mistake as to suppose they cared to hear the merits of appointees discussed.
The three colleagues sat silent. At last, one of them crossed his legs anew and said:
"I'm sure nobody meant any offence. We agreed on this lady several days ago. I know nothing about her, but her father used to be one of our best workers in the seventh ward. He is in the penitentiary now, and the family is about down to bedrock. The reason we didn't take part in the discussion was we wanted to avoid hard feelings."
The other two crossed their legs the other way, and said they "concurred."
Their immovable phlegm, their long, expressionless faces, the dull, monotonous twang of their voices, the oscillation of the three large feet hung over the bony knees had now, as often before, a singular effect upon Farnham's irritation. He felt he could not irritate them in return; they could not appreciate his motives, and thought too little of his opinion to be angry at his contempt. He was thrown back upon himself now as before. It was purely a matter of conscience whether he should stay and do what good he could, or resign and shake the dust of the city hall from his feet. Whatever he recommended in regard to the administration of the library was always adopted without comment; but, whenever a question of the sort which the three politicians called "practical" arose, involving personal patronage in any form, they always arranged it for themselves, without even pretending to ask his or Buchlieber's opinion.
The very fact of his holding the position of chairman of the board was wounding to his self-love, as soon as he began to appreciate the purpose with which the place had been given him. He and some of his friends had attempted a movement the year before, to rescue the city from the control of what they considered a corrupt combination of politicians. They had begun, as such men always do, too late, and without any adequate organization, and the regular workers had beaten them with ridiculous ease. In Farnham's own ward, where he possessed two thirds of the real estate, the candidates favored by him and his friends received not quite one tenth of the votes cast. The loader of the opposing forces was a butcher, one Jacob Metzger, who had managed the politics of the ward for years. He was not a bad man so far as his lights extended. He sold meat on business principles, so as to get the most out of a carcass; and he conducted his political operations in the same way. He made his bargains with aspirants and office-holders, and kept them religiously. He had been a little alarmed at the sudden irruption of such men as Farnham and his associates into the field of ward politics; he dreaded the combined effect of their money and their influence. But he soon found he had nothing to fear—they would not use their money, and they did not know how to use their influence. They hired halls, opened committee-rooms, made speeches, and thundered against municipal iniquities in the daily press; but Jacob Metzger, when he discovered that this was all, possessed his soul in peace, and even got a good deal of quiet fun out of the canvass. He did not take the trouble to be angry at the men who were denouncing him, and supplied Farnham with beefsteaks unusually tender and juicy, while the young reformer was seeking his political life.
"Lord love you," he said to Budsey, as he handed him a delicious rib-roast the day before election. "There's nothing I like so much as to see young men o' property go into politics. We need 'em. Of course, I wisht the Cap'n was on my side; but anyhow, I'm glad to see him takin' an interest."
He knew well enough the way the votes would run; that every grog-shop in the ward was his recruiting station; that all Farnham's tenants would vote against their landlord; that even the respectable Budsey and the prim Scotch gardener were sure for him against their employer. Farnham's conscience which had roused him to this effort against Metzger's corrupt rule, would not permit him to ask for the votes of his own servants and tenants, and he would have regarded it as simply infamous to spend money to secure the floating crowd of publicans and sinners who formed the strength of Jacob.
His failure was so complete and unexpected that there seemed to him something of degradation in it, and in a fit of uncontrollable disgust he sailed for Europe the week afterward. Metzger took his victory good-naturedly as a matter of course, and gave his explanation of it to a reporter of the "Bale-Fire" who called to interview him.
"Mr. Farnham, who led the opposition to our organize-ation, is a young gen'l'man of fine talents and high character. I ain't got a word to say against him. The only trouble is, he lacks practical experience, and he ain't got no pers'nal magn'tism. Now I'm one of the people, I know what they want, and on that line I carried the ward against a combine-ation of all the wealth and aristocracy of Algonkin Av'noo."
Jacob's magnanimity did not rest with merely a verbal acknowledgment of Farnham's merits. While he was abroad some of the city departments were reorganized, and Farnham on his return found himself, through Metzger's intervention, chairman of the library board. With characteristic sagacity the butcher kept himself in the background, and the committee who waited upon Farnham to ask him to accept the appointment placed it entirely upon considerations of the public good. His sensitive conscience would not permit him to refuse a duty thus imposed, and so with many inward qualms he assumed a chair in the vile municipal government he had so signally failed to overthrow. He had not long occupied it, when he saw to what his selection was attributable. He was a figure-head and he knew it, but he saw no decent escape from the position. As long as they allowed him and the librarian (who was also a member of the board) to regulate the library to their liking, he could not inquire into their motives or decline association with them. He was perfectly free to furnish what mental food he chose to two hundred thousand people, and he felt it would be cowardice to surrender that important duty on any pitiful question of patronage or personal susceptibility.
So once more he stifled the impulse to resign his post, and the meeting adjourned without further incident. As he walked home, he was conscious of a disagreeable foreboding of something in the future which he would like to avoid. Bringing his mind to bear upon it, it resolved itself into nothing more formidable than the coming interview with Miss Matchin. It would certainly be unpleasant to tell her that her hopes were frustrated, when she had seemed so confident. At this thought, he felt the awakening of a sense of protectorship; she had trusted in him; he ought to do something for her, if for nothing else, to show that he was not dependent upon those ostrogoths. But what could be done for such a girl, so pretty, so uncultivated, so vulgarly fantastic? Above all, what could be done for her by a young and unmarried man? Providence and society have made it very hard for single men to show kindness to single women in any way but one.
At his door he found Sam Sleeny with a kit of tools; he had just rung the bell. He turned, as Farnham mounted the steps, and said:
"I come from Matchin's—something about the greenhouse."
"Yes," answered Farnham. "The gardener is over yonder at the corner of the lawn. He will tell you what is to be done."
Sam walked away in the direction indicated, and Farnham went into the house. Some letters were lying on the table in the library. He had just begun to read them when Budsey entered and announced:
"That young person."
Maud came in flushed with the fresh air and rapid walking. Farnham saw that she wore no glasses, and she gained more by that fact in his good-will than even by the brilliancy of her fine eyes which seemed to exult in their liberation. She began with nervous haste:
"I knew you had a meeting to-day, and I could not wait. I might as well own up that I followed you home."
Farnham handed her a chair and took her hand with a kindly earnestness, saying,
"I am very glad to see you."
"Yes, yes," she continued; "but have you any good news for me?"
The anxious eagerness which spoke in her sparkling eyes and open lips touched Farnham to the heart. "I am sorry I have not. The board appointed another person."
The tears sprang to her eyes.
"I really expected it. I hoped you would interest yourself."
"I did all I possibly could," said Farnham. "I have never tried so hard for anybody before, but a majority were already pledged to the other applicant."
She seemed so dejected and hopeless that Farnham, forgetting for a moment how hard it is for a young man to assist a young woman, said two or three fatal words, "We must try something else."
The pronoun sounded ominous to him as soon as he had uttered it. But it acted like magic upon Maud. She lifted a bright glance through her tears and said, like a happy child to whom a new game has been proposed, "What shall we try?"
Simple as the words were, both of them seemed to feel that a certain relation—a certain responsibility—had been established between them. The thought exhilarated Maud; it seemed the beginning of her long-expected romance; while the glow of kind feeling about the heart of Farnham could not keep him from suspecting that he was taking a very imprudent step. But they sat a good while, discussing various plans for Maud's advantage, and arriving at nothing definite; for her own ideas were based upon a dime-novel theory of the world, and Farnham at last concluded that he would be forced finally to choose some way of life for his protégée, and then persuade her to accept it.
He grew silent and thoughtful with this reflection, and the conversation languished. He was trying to think how he could help her without these continued interviews at his house, when she disposed of the difficulty by rising briskly and saying, "Well, I will call again in a day or two, about this hour?"
"Yes, if it suits you best," he answered, with a troubled brow. He followed her to the door. As she went out, she said, "May I pick a flower as I go?"
He seized his hat, and said, "Come with me to the rose-house in the garden, and you shall have something better."
They walked together down the gravel paths, through the neat and well-kept garden, where the warm spring sunshine was calling life out of the tender turf, and the air was full of delicate odors. She seemed as gay and happy as a child on a holiday. Her disappointment of an hour ago was all gone in the feeling that Arthur was interested in her, was caring for her future. Without any definite hopes or dreams, she felt as if the world was suddenly grown richer and wider. Something good was coming to her certainly, something good had come; for was she not walking in this lovely garden with its handsome proprietor, who was, she even began to think, her friend? The turf was as soft, the air as mild, the sun as bright as in any of her romances, and the figure of Farnham's wealth which she had heard from her father rang musically in her mind.
They went into the rose-house, and he gave her two or three splendid satiny Maréchal Niels, and then a Jacqueminot, so big, so rich and lustrous in its dark beauty, that she could not help crying out with delight. He was pleased with her joy, and gave her another, "for your hair," he said. She colored with pleasure till her cheek was like the royal flower. "Hallo!" thought Farnham to himself, "she does not take these things as a matter of course." When they came into the garden again, he made the suggestion which had been in his mind for the last half hour.
"If you are going home, the nearest way will be by the garden gate into Bishop's Lane. It is only a minute from there to Dean Street."
"Why, that would be perfectly lovely. But where is the gate?"
"I will show you. They walked together to the lower end of the lawn, where a long line of glass houses built against the high wall which separated the garden from the street called Bishop's Lane, sheltered the grapes and the pine-apples. At the end of this conservatory, in the wall, was a little door of thin but strong steel plates, concealed from sight by a row of pear trees. Farnham opened it, and said, "If you like, you can come in by this way. It is never locked in the daytime. It will save you a long walk."
"Thanks," she replied. "That will be perfectly lovely."
Her resources of expression were not copious, but her eyes and her mouth spoke volumes of joy and gratitude. Her hands were full of roses, and as she raised her beautiful face to him with pleasure flashing from her warm cheeks and lips and eyes, she seemed to exhale something of the vigorous life and impulse of the spring sunshine. Farnham felt that he had nothing to do but stoop and kiss the blooming flower-like face, and in her exalted condition she would have thought little more of it than a blush-rose thinks of the same treatment.
But he refrained, and said "Good morning," because she seemed in no mood to say it first.
"Good-by, for a day or two," she said, gayly, as she bent her head to pass under the low lintel of the gate.
Farnham walked back to the house not at all satisfied with himself. "I wonder whether I have mended matters? She is certainly too pretty a girl to be running in and out of my front door in the sight of all the avenue. How much better will it be for her to use the private entrance, and come and go by a sort of stealth! But then she does not regard it that way. She is so ignorant of this wicked world that it seems to her merely a saving of ten minutes' walk around the block. Well! all there is of it, I must find a place for her before she domesticates herself here."
The thought of what should be done with her remained persistently with him and kept him irritated by the vision of her provoking and useless beauty. "If she were a princess," he thought, "all the poets would be twanging their lyres about her, all the artists would be dying to paint her; she would have songs made to her, and sacred oratorios given under her patronage. She would preside at church fairs and open the dance at charity balls. If I could start her in life as a princess, the thing would go on wheels. But to earn her own living—that is a trade of another complexion. She has not breeding or education enough for a governess: she is not clever enough to write or paint; she is not steady enough, to keep accounts,—by the Great Jornada! I have a grievous contract on my hands."
He heard the sound of hoofs outside his window, and, looking out, saw his groom holding a young brown horse by the bridle, the well-groomed coat of the animal shining in the warm sunlight. In a few moments Farnham was in the saddle and away. For awhile he left his perplexities behind, in the pleasure of rapid motion and fresh air. But he drew rein half an hour afterward at Acland Falls, and the care that had sat on the crupper came to the front again. "As a last resort," he said, "I can persuade her she has a voice, and send her to Italy, and keep her the rest of her life cultivating it in Milan."
All unconscious of the anxiety she was occasioning, Maud walked home with her feet scarcely aware of the pavement. She felt happy through and through. There was little thought, and we may say little selfishness in the vague joy that filled her. The flowers she held in her hands recalled the faint odors she had inhaled in Farnham's house; they seemed to her a concrete idea of luxury. Her mind was crowded and warmed with every detail of her visit: the dim, wide hall; the white cravat of Budsey; the glimpse she caught of the dining-room through the open door; the shimmer of cut glass and porcelain; the rich softness of the carpets and rugs, the firelight dancing on the polished brass, the tender glow of light and repose of shadow on the painted walls and ceilings; the walk in the trim garden, amid the light and fragrance of the spring; the hot air of the rose-house, which held her close, and made her feel faint and flushed, like a warm embrace; and through all the ever-present image of the young man, with his pleasant, unembarrassed smile, the white teeth shining under the dark mustache; the eyes that seemed to see through her, and yet told her nothing; and more than all this to poor Maud, the perfect fit and fashion of his clothes, filled her with a joyous trouble. She could not dwell upon her plans for employment. She felt as if she had found her mission, her true trade,—which was to walk in gardens and smell hot-house roses. The perplexities which filled Farnham's head as to what he should do with her found no counterpart in hers. She had stopped thinking and planning; things were going very well with her as it was. She had lost the place she had wished and expected, and yet this was the pleasantest day of her life. Her responsibility seemed shifted to stronger hands. It had become Farnham's business to find something nice for her: this would be easy for him; he belonged to the class to whom everything is easy. She did not even trouble herself to think what it would be as she loitered home in the sunshine. She saw her father and informed him in a few words of her failure; then went to her room and sat down by her window, and looked for hours at the sparkling lake.
She was called to supper in the midst of her reverie. She was just saying to herself, "If there was just one man and one woman in the world, and I had the picking out of the man and the woman, this world would suit me pretty well." She resented being called into other society than that of her idle thoughts, and sat silent through supper, trying to keep the thread of her fancies from breaking. But she was not allowed to go back undisturbed to her fool's paradise.
Sleeny, who had scarcely removed his eyes from her during the meal, rose with a start as she walked into the little sitting-room of the family, and followed her. She went to the window with a novel to make use of the last moments of daylight. He stood before her without speaking, until she raised her eyes, and said sharply:
"Well, Sam, what's the matter?"
He was not quick either of thought or speech. He answered:
"Oh! nothin'. Only——"
"Only what?" she snapped.
"Won't you go and take a walk by the Bluff?"
She threw down her book at once. She liked exercise and fresh air, and always walked with pleasure by the lake. Sam was to her such a nullity that she enjoyed his company almost as much as being alone. She was ready in a moment, and a short walk brought them to the little open place reserved for public use, overlooking the great fresh-water sea. There were a few lines of shade trees and a few seats, and nothing more; yet the plantation was called Bluff Park, and it was much frequented on holidays and Sundays by nurses and their charges. It was in no sense a fashionable resort, or Maud would never have ventured there in company with her humble adorer. But among the jovial puddlers and brake-men that took the air there, it was well enough to have an escort so devoted and so muscular. So pretty a woman could scarcely have walked alone in Bluff Park without insulting approaches. Maud would hardly have nodded to Sleeny on Algonquin Avenue, for fear some millionaire might see it casually, and scorn them both. But on the Bluff she was safe from such accidents, and she sometimes even took his arm, and made him too happy to talk. They would walk together for an hour, he dumb with audacious hopes that paralyzed his speech, and she dreaming of things thousands of miles away.
This evening he was even more than usually silent. Maud, after she had worn her reverie threadbare, noticed his speechlessness, and, fearing he was about to renew the subject which was so tiresome, suddenly stopped and said:
"What a splendid sunset! Did you ever see anything like it?"
"Yes," he said, with his gentle drawl. "Less set here, and look at it."
He took his seat on one of the iron benches painted green, and decorated with castings of grapes and vine leaves. She sat down beside him and gazed out over the placid water, on which the crimson clouds cast a mellow glory. The sky seemed like another sea, stretching off into infinite distance, and strewn with continents of fiery splendor. Maud looked straight forward to the clear horizon line, marking the flight of ships whose white sails were dark against the warm brightness of the illumined water. But no woman ever looked so straight before her as not to observe the man beside her, and she knew, without moving her eyes from the spectacle of the sunset, that Sam was gazing fixedly at her, with pain and trouble in his face. At last, he said, in a timid, choking voice,
"Mattie!"
She did not turn her face, but answered:
"If it ain't too much trouble, I'd like to have you call me Miss when we're alone. You'll be forgetting yourself, and calling me Mattie before other people, before you know it."
"Hold on," he burst out. "Don't talk to me that way to-night—I can't stand it."
She glanced at him in surprise. His face was pale and disordered; he was twisting his fingers as if he would break them.
"Your temper seems to be on the move, Mr. Sleeny. We'd better go home," she said quietly, drawing her shawl about her.
"Don't go till I tell you something," he stammered hastily.
"I have no curiosity to hear what you have to say," she said, rising from her seat.
"It ain't what you think—it ain't about me!"
Her curiosity awoke, and she sat down again. Sleeny sat twisting his fingers, growing pale and red by turns. At last, in a tremulous voice, he said:
"I was there to-day."
She stared at him an instant and said:
"Where?"
"Oh, I was there, and I seen you. I was at work at the end of the greenhouse there by the gate when you come out of the rose-house. I was watchin' for you. I was on the lawn talkin' with the gardener when you went in the house. About an hour afterward I seen you comin' down the garden with him to the rose-house. If you had stayed there a minute more, I would ha' went in there. But out you come with your hands full o' roses, and him and you come to the gate. I stopped workin' and kep' still behind them pear trees, and I heard everything."
He uttered each word slowly, like a judge delivering sentence. His face had grown very red and hot, and as he finished his indictment he drew a yellow handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the sweat from his forehead, his chin, and the back of his neck.
"Oh!" answered Maud, negligently, "you heard everything, did you? Well, you didn't hear much."
"I tell you," he continued, with a sullen rage, "I heard every word. Do you hear me? I heard every word."
The savage roughness of his voice made her tremble, but her spirits rose to meet his anger, and she laughed as she replied:
"Well, you heard 'Thank you, sir,' and 'Good-morning.' It wasn't much, unless you took it as a lesson in manners, and goodness knows you need it."
"Now, look'ye here. It's no use foolin' with me. You know what I heard. If you don't, I'll tell you!"
"Very well, Mr. Paul Pry, what was it?" said the angry girl, who had quite forgotten that any words were spoken at the gate.
"I heard him tell you you could come in any time the back way," Sam hoarsely whispered, watching her face with eyes of fire. She turned crimson as the sunset she was gazing at, and she felt as if she could have torn her cheeks with her fingernails for blushing. She was aware of having done nothing wrong, nothing to be ashamed of. She had been all day cherishing the recollection of her visit to Farnham as something too pleasant and delicate to talk about. No evil thought had mingled with it in her own mind. She had hardly looked beyond the mere pleasure of the day. She had not given a name or a form to the hopes and fancies that were fluttering at her heart. And now to have this sweet and secret pleasure handled and mauled by such a one as Sam Sleeny filled her with a speechless shame. Even yet she hardly comprehended the full extent of his insinuation. He did not leave her long in doubt. Taking her silence and her confusion as an acknowledgment, he went on, in the same low, savage tone:
"I had my hammer in my hand. I looked through the pear trees to see if he kissed you. If he had 'a' done it, I would have killed him as sure as death."
At this brutal speech she turned pale a moment, as if suddenly struck a stunning blow. Then she cried out:
"Hold your vile tongue, you——"
But she felt her voice faltering and the tears of rage gushing from her eyes. She buried her face in her hands and sat a little while in silence, while Sam was dumb beside her, feeling like an awkward murderer. She was not so overcome that she did not think very rapidly during this moment's pause. If she could have slain the poor fellow on the spot, she would not have scrupled to do so; but she required only an instant to reflect that she had better appease him for the present, and reserve her vengeance for a more convenient season.
She dried her eyes and turned them on him with an air of gentle, almost forgiving reproach.
"Sam! I could not have believed you had such a bad, wicked heart. I thought you knew me better. I won't make myself so cheap as to explain all that to you. But I'll ask yon to do one thing for me. When we go home this evening, if you see my father alone, you tell him what you saw—and if you've got any shame in you you'll be ashamed of yourself."
He had been irritated by her anger, but he was completely abashed by the coolness and gentleness which followed her burst of tears. He was sorely confused and bewildered by her command, but did not dream of anything but obeying it, and as they walked silently home, he was all the time wondering what mysterious motive she could have in wishing him to denounce her to her father. They found Saul Matchin sitting by the door, smoking a cob-pipe. Maud went in and Sam seated himself beside the old man.
"How'd you get along at Farnham's?" said Saul.
Sam started, as if "the boss" had read his uneasy conscience. But he answered in his drawling monotone:
"All right, I guess. That doggoned Scotchman thinks he knows it all; but it'll take nigh on to a week to do what I could ha' done in a day or two, if I worked my way."
"Well," said Saul, "that ain't none o' your lookout. Do what Scotchee tells you, and I'll keep the time on 'em. We kin stand it, ef they kin," and the old carpenter laughed with the foolish pleasure of a small mind aware of an advantage. "Ef Art. Farnham wants to keep a high-steppin' Scotchman to run his flowers, may be he kin afford it. I ain't his gardeen."
Now was Sleeny's chance to make his disclosure; but his voice trembled in spite of him, as he said:
"I seen Mattie up there."
"Yes," said the old man, tranquilly. "She went up to see about a place in the library. He said there wasn't none, but he'd try to think o' somethin' else that 'ud suit her. He was mighty polite to Mat—give her some roses, and telled her to run in and out when she liked, till he got somethin' fixed. Fact is, Mat is a first-rate scholar, and takes with them high-steppers, like fallin' off a log." Saul had begun to feel a certain pride in his daughter's accomplishments which had so long been an affliction to him. The moment he saw a possibility of a money return, he even began to plume himself upon his liberality and sagacity in having educated her. "I've spared nothin'—Sam—in giving her a——" he searched an instant for a suitable adjective, "a commodious education." The phrase pleased him so well that he smoked for awhile contemplatively, so as not to mar the effect of his point.
Sam had listened with, a whirling brain to the old man's quiet story, which anticipated his own in every point. He could not tell whether he felt more relieved or disquieted by it. It all seemed clear and innocent enough; but he felt, with a sinking heart, that his own hopes were fading fast, in the flourishing prospects of his beloved. He hated Farnham not less in his attitude of friendly protection than in that which he had falsely attributed to him. His jealousy, deprived of its specific occasion, nourished itself on vague and torturing possibilities. He could not trust himself to talk further with Matchin, but went away with a growing fire in his breast. He hated himself for having prematurely spoken. He hated Maud for the beauty that she would not give him, and which, he feared, she was ready to give to another. He hated Saul, for his stolid ignorance of his daughter's danger. He hated most of all Farnham, for his handsome face, his easy smile, his shapely hands, his fine clothes, his unknown and occult gifts of pleasing.
"'Tain't in natur," he growled. "She's the prettiest woman in the world. If he's got eyes, he knows it. But I spoke first, and he shan't have her, if I die for it."

[V.]

A PROFESSIONAL REFORMER.

Sleeny walked moodily down the street, engaged in that self-torture which is the chief recreation of unhappy lovers. He steeped his heart in gall by imagining Maud in love with another. His passion stimulated his slow wits into unwonted action, until his mind began to form exasperating pictures of intimacies which drove him half mad. His face grew pale, and his fists were tightly clinched as he walked. He hardly saw the familiar street before him; he had a far clearer vision of Maud and Farnham by the garden gate: her beautiful face was turned up to the young man's with the winning sweetness of a flower, and Sam's irritated fancy supplied the kisses he had watched for in the shadow of the pear-trees. "I 'most wish't he'd 'a' done it," he growled to himself. "I had my hammer in my hand, and I could 'a' finished him then and had no more bother."
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning, saw a face grinning a friendly recognition. It was a face whose whole expression was oleaginous. It was surmounted by a low and shining forehead covered by reeking black hair, worn rather long, the ends being turned under by the brush. The mustache was long and drooping, dyed black and profusely oiled, the dye and the grease forming an inharmonious compound. The parted lips, which were coarse and thin, displayed an imperfect set of teeth, much discolored with tobacco. The eyes were light green, with the space which should have been white suffused with yellow and red. It was one of those gifted countenances which could change in a moment from a dog-like fawning to a snaky venomousness.
The man wore a black hat of soft felt; his clothes were black and glistening with use and grease. He was of medium height, not especially stout, but still strong and well knit; he moved too briskly for a tramp, and his eyes were too sly and furtive to belong to an honest man.
"Well, Samivel!" he began, with a jolly facetiousness, "what's your noble game this evenin'? You look like you was down on your luck. Is the fair one unkind?"
Sam turned upon him with an angry gesture.
"Hold your jaw, or I'll break it for you! Ever since I was fool enough to mention that thing to you, you've been cacklin' about it. I've had enough of it."
"Go slow, Quaker!" the man rejoined. "If you can't take a joke, I'll stop jokin'—that settles it. Come along and get a glass of beer, and you'll feel better."
They soon came to a garden near the lake, and sat down by a little table at their beer. The consumers were few and silent. The garden was dimly lighted, for the spring came slowly up that way, and the air was not yet conducive to out-door idling. The greasy young man laid a dirty hand on the arm of Sleeny, and said:
"Honor bright, now, old fellow, I didn't mean to rough, you when I said that. I don't want to hurt your feelings or lose your confidence. I want you to tell me how you are gettin' along. You ain't got no better friend than me nowhere."
"Oh," said Sam, sulkily, "I got nothin' to say. She don't no more care for me than that there mug."
The expression that came over his friend's face at these discouraged words was not one of sympathetic sorrow. But he put some sympathy into his voice as he said:
"Jest think of that! Such a fine young fellow as you are, too. Where can her eyes be? And I seen you walking this evenin' by the lake just like two robins. And yet you don't get ahead any!"
"Not a step," said Sam.
"Anybody in your light, you think? Hullo there, Dutchy, swei glass. Any other fellow takin' your wind?" and his furtive eyes darted a keen interrogation. Sam did not answer at once, and his friend went on: "Why, she don't hardly know anybody but me and you, and, he-he! I wouldn't stand no chance at all against you—hum?"
"Of course you wouldn't," said Sam, with slow contempt, which brought the muddy blood into the sallow cheek in front of him. "She wouldn't look at you. I'm not afraid of no man, Andy Offitt,—I'm afraid of money."
He flattered his jealous heart by these words. It was too intolerable to think that any mere man should take his sweetheart away from him; and though he felt how hopeless was any comparison between himself and Farnham, he tried to soothe himself by the lie that they were equal in all but money.
His words startled his friend Offitt. He exclaimed, "Why, who does she know that's got money?"
But Sleeny felt a momentary revolt against delivering to even his closest confidant the name of the woman he loved coupled with the degrading suspicions by which he had been tormented all day. He gruffly answered: "That's none of your business; you can't help me in this thing, and I ain't agoin' to chin about it any more."
They sat for awhile in silence, drank their beer, and ordered more. Offitt at last spoke again:
"Well, I'll be hanged if you ain't the best grit of any fellow I know. If you don't want to talk, a team of Morgan horses couldn't make you. I like a man that can hold his tongue."
"Then I'm your huckleberry," said Sleeny, whose vanity was soothed by the compliment.
"That's so," said Offitt, with an admiring smile. "If I wanted a secret kept, I'd know where to come." Then changing his manner and tone to an expression of profound solemnity, and glancing about to guard against surprise, he said: "My dear boy, I've wanted to talk to you a long time,—to talk serious. You're not one of the common kind of cattle that think of nothin' but their fodder and stall—are you?"
Now, Sam was precisely of the breed described by his friend, but what man ever lived who knew he was altogether ordinary? He grinned uneasily and answered:
"I guess not."
"Exactly!" said Offitt. "There are some of us laboring men that don't propose to go on all our lives working our fingers off to please a lot of vampires; we propose to have a little fairer divide than heretofore; and if there is any advantage to be gained, we propose to have it on the side of the men who do the work. What do you think of that?"
"That's all solid," said Sleeny, who was indifferently interested in these abstractions. "But what you goin' to do about it?"
"Do!" cried Offitt. "We are goin' to make war on capital. We are goin' to scare the blood-suckers into terms. We are goin' to get our rights—peaceably, if we can't get them any other way. We are goin' to prove that a man is better than a moneybag." He rattled off these words as a listless child says its alphabet without thinking of a letter. But he was closely watching Sam to see if any of these stereotyped phrases attracted his attention. Sleeny smoked his cigar with the air of polite fatigue with which one listens to abstract statements of moral obligations.
"What are we, anyhow?" continued the greasy apostle of labor. "We are slaves; we are Roosian scurfs. We work as many hours as our owners like; we take what pay they choose to give us; we ask their permission to live and breathe."
"Oh, that's a lie!" Sleeny interrupted, with unbroken calmness. "Old Saul Matchin and me come to an agreement about time and pay, and both of us was suited. Ef he's got his heel onto me, I don't feel it"
Offitt darted a glance of scorn upon the ignoble soul who was content with his bondage; but the mention of Matchin reminded him that he had a final shot in reserve, and he let it off at once.
"Yes, Saul Matchin is a laborin' man himself; but look at his daughter. She would die before she would marry a workman. Why?" and his green eyes darted livid fire as they looked into the troubled ones of Sleeny.
"Well, why?" he asked, slowly.
"Because she loves money more than manhood. Because she puts up her beauty for a higher bidder than any———"
"Now, shet up, will you?" cried Sam, thoroughly aroused. "I won't set here and hear her abused by you or any other man. What business is it of yours, anyway?"
Offitt felt that his shot had gone home, and pursued his advantage.
"It's my business, Sam, because I'm your friend; because I hate to see a good fellow wronged; because I know that a man is better than a moneybag. Why, that girl would marry you in a minute if you was rich. But because you're not she will strike for one of them rose-water snobs on Algonquin Avenue." Sam writhed, and his wheedling tormentor continued, watching him like a ferret. "Perhaps she has struck for one of them already—perhaps—oh, I can't say what may have happened. I hate the world when I see such doin's. I hate the heartless shams that give labor and shame to the toilers and beauty and luxury to the drones. Who is the best man," he asked, with honest frankness, "you, or some high-steppin' snob whose daddy has left him the means to be a loafer all his days? And who would the prettiest girl in Buffland prefer, you or the loafer? And you intend to let Mr. Loafer have it all his own way?"
"No, I don't!" Sam roared, like a baited bull. "Ef any man crosses my path, he can find out which is the best man."
"There, that's more like you. But what can you do alone? That's where they get us foul. The erristocrats, the money power, all hang together. The laborin' men fight singly, and alwuz get whipped. Now, we are goin' to change that. We are goin' to organize. Look here, Sam, I am riskin' my head in tellin' you this—but I trust you, and I like you, and I'll tell you. We have organized. We've got a society in this town pledged to the cause of honest labor and against capital—for life or death. We want you. We want men of sand and men of sense, and you've got both. You must join."
Sam Sleeny was by this time pretty well filled with beer and wrath. He felt himself in a certain sense bound by the weighty secret which Offitt had imparted to him and flattered by his invitation. A few touches more of adroit flattery, and the agitator's victory was complete. Sleeny felt sore and tired to the very heart. He had behaved like a brute to the girl he loved; he had been put clearly in the wrong in his quarrel with her, and yet he was certain that all was not well with either of them. The tormenting syllogism ran continually through his head: "She is the prettiest woman in the world—rich fellows like pretty women,—therefore—death and curses on him!" Or sometimes the form of it would change to this: "He is rich and handsome—girls like men who are rich and handsome,—therefore———," the same rage and imprecations, and the same sense of powerless fury. He knew and cared nothing about Offitt's Labor Reform. He could earn a good living by his trade no matter who went to Congress, and he hated these "chinny bummers," as he called them, who talked about "State help and self-help" over their beer. But to-night he was tormented and badgered to such a point that he was ready for anything which his tempter might suggest. The words of Offitt, alternately wheedling and excoriating, had turned his foolish head. His hatred of Farnham was easily extended to the class to which he belonged, and even to the money which made him formidable.
He walked away from the garden with Offitt, and turned down a filthy alley to a squalid tenement house,—called by its proprietor Perry Place, and by the neighbors Rook's Ranch,—to the lodge-room of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners, which proved to be Offitt's lodging. They found there a half dozen men lounging about the entrance, who scowled and swore at Offitt for being late, and then followed him sulkily up two flights of ill-smelling stairs to his room. He turned away their wrath by soft answers, and hastily lighting a pair of coal-oil lamps, which gave forth odor more liberally than illumination, said briskly:
"Gentlemen, I have brought you a recruit this evenin' that you will all be glad to welcome to our brotherhood."
The brothers, who had taken seats where they could find them, on a dirty bed, a wooden trunk, and two or three chairs of doubtful integrity, grunted a questionable welcome to the new-comer. As he looked about him, he was not particularly proud of the company in which he found himself. The faces he recognized were those of the laziest and most incapable workmen in the town—men whose weekly wages were habitually docked for drunkenness, late hours, and botchy work. As the room gradually filled, it seemed like a roll-call of shirks. Among them came also a spiritual medium named Bott, as yet imperfectly developed, whose efforts at making a living by dark séances too frequently resulted in the laughter of skeptics and the confusion of his friends. His forehead and cheek were even then purple with an aniline dye, which some cold-blooded investigator had squirted in his face a few nights before while he was gliding through a twilight room impersonating the troubled shade of Pocahontas. This occurrence gave, for the moment, a peculiarly sanguinary and sinister character to his features, and filled his heart with a thirst for vengeance against an unbelieving world.
After the meeting had been called to order, and Sam had taken an oath of a hot and lurid nature, in which he renounced a good many things he had never possessed, and promised to do a lot of things of which he had no idea, Mr. Offitt asked "if any brother had anything to offer for the good of the order." This called Mr. Bott to his feet, and he made a speech, on which he had been brooding all day, against the pride of so-called science, the arrogance of unrighteous wealth, and the grovelling superstition of Christianity. The light of the kerosene lamp shone full on the decorated side of his visage, and touched it to a ferocious purpose. But the brotherhood soon wearied of his oratory, in which the blasphemy of thought and phrase was strangely contrasted with the ecclesiastical whine which he had caught from the exhorters who were the terror of his youth. The brothers began to guy him without mercy. They requested him to "cheese it"; they assisted him with uncalled-for and inappropriate applause, and one of the party got behind him and went through the motion of turning a hurdy-gurdy. But he persevered. He had joined the club to practise public speaking, and he got a good half hour out of the brothers before they coughed him down.
When he had brought his speech to a close, and sat down to wipe his streaming face, a brother rose and said, in a harsh, rasping voice, "I want to ask a question."
"That's in order, Brother Bowersox," said Offitt.
The man was a powerful fellow, six feet high. His head was not large, but it was as round as an apple, with heavy cheek-bones, little eyes, close-cut hair, and a mustache like the bristles of a blacking-brush. He had been a driver on a streetcar, but had recently been dismissed for insolence to passengers and brutality to his horses.
"What I want to ask is this: I want to know if we have joined this order to listen to chin-music the rest of our lives, or to do somethin'. There is some kind of men that kin talk tell day of jedgment, lettin' Gabrel toot and then beginnin' ag'in. I ain't that kind; I j'ined to do somethin';—what's to be done?"
He sat down with his hand on his hip, squarely facing the luckless Bott, whose face grew as purple as the illuminated side of it. But he opened not his mouth. Offitt answered the question:
"I would state," he said glibly, "the objects we propose to accomplish: the downfall of the money power, the rehabitation of labor, the——"
"Oh, yes!" Bowersox interrupted, "I know all about that,—but what are we goin' to do?"
Offitt paled a little, but did not flinch at the savage tone of the surly brute. He began again in his smoothest manner:
"I am of the opinion that the discussion of sound principles, such as we have listened to to-night, is among the objects of our order. After that, organization for mutual profit and protection against the minions of the money power,—for makin' our influence felt in elections,—for extendin' a helpin' hand to honest toil,—for rousin' our bretheren from their lethargy, which, like a leaden pall——"
"I want to know," growled Bowersox, with sullen obstinacy, "what's to be done."
"Put your views in the form of a motion, that they may be properly considered by the meetin'," said the imperturbable president.
"Well, I motion that we stop talkin' and commence doin'——"
"Do you suggest that a committee be appointed for that purpose?"
"Yes, anything." And the chairman appointed Bowersox, Bott, and Folgum such a committee.
All breathed more freely and felt as if something practical and energetic had been accomplished. The committee would, of course, never meet nor report, but the colloquy and the prompt action taken upon it made every one feel that the evening had been interesting and profitable. Before they broke up, Sleeny was asked for his initiation fee of two dollars, and all the brethren were dunned for their monthly dues.
"What becomes of this money?" the neophyte bluntly inquired of the hierophant.
"It pays room rent and lights," said Offitt, with unabashed front, as he returned his greasy wallet to his pocket. "The rest goes for propagatin' our ideas, and especially for influencin' the press."
Sleeny was a dull man, but he made up his mind on the way home that the question which had so long puzzled him—how Offitt made his living—was partly solved.

[VI.]

TWO MEN SHAKE HANDS.

Sleeny, though a Bread-winner in full standing, was not yet sufficiently impressed with the wrongs of labor to throw down his hammer and saw. He continued his work upon Farnham's conservatory, under the direction of Fergus Ferguson, the gardener, with the same instinctive fidelity which had always characterized him. He had his intervals of right feeling and common sense, when he reflected that Farnham had done him no wrong, and probably intended no wrong to Maud, and that he was not answerable for the ill luck that met him in his wooing, for Maud had refused him before she ever saw Farnham. But, once in a while, and especially when he was in company with Offitt, an access of jealous fury would come upon him, which found vent in imprecations which were none the less fervid for being slowly and haltingly uttered. The dark-skinned, unwholesome-looking Bread-winner found a singular delight in tormenting the powerful young fellow. He felt a spontaneous hatred for him, for many reasons. His shapely build, his curly blond hair and beard, his frank blue eye, first attracted his envious notice; his steady, contented industry excited in him a desire to pervert a workman whose daily life was a practical argument against the doctrines of socialism, by which Offitt made a part of his precarious living; and after he had met Maud Matchin and had felt, as such natures will, the force of her beauty, his instinctive hate became an active, though secret, hostility. She had come one evening with Sleeny to a spiritualist conference frequented by Offitt, and he had at once inferred that Sleeny and she were either engaged to be married or on the straight road toward it. It would be a profanation of the word to say that he loved her at first sight. But his scoundrel heart was completely captivated so far as was possible to a man of his sort. He was filled and fired with a keen cupidity of desire to possess and own such beauty and grace. He railed against marriage, as he did against religion and order, as an invention of priests and tyrants to enslave and degrade mankind; but he would gladly have gone to any altar whatever in company with Maud Matchin. He could hardly have said whether he loved or hated her the more. He loved her much as the hunter loves the fox he is chasing to its death. He wanted to destroy anything which kept her away from him: her lover, if she had one; her pride, her modesty, her honor, if she were fancy-free. Aware of Sleeny's good looks, if not of his own ugliness, he hated them both for the comeliness that seemed to make them natural mates for each other. But it was not in his methods to proceed rashly with either. He treated Maud with distant respect, and increased his intimacy with Sleeny until he found, to his delight, that he was not the prosperous lover that he feared. But he still had apprehensions that Sleeny's assiduity might at last prevail, and lost no opportunity to tighten the relations between them, to poison and pervert the man who was still a possible rival. By remaining his most intimate friend, he could best be informed of all that occurred in the Matchin family.
One evening, as Sam was about leaving his work, Fergus Ferguson said:
"You'll not come here the morn. You're wanted till the house—a bit o' work in the library. They'll be tellin' you there."
This was faithfully reported by Sam to his confessor that same night.
"Well, you are in luck. I wish I had your chance," said Offitt.
Sam opened his blue eyes in mute wonder.
"Well, what's the chance, and what would you do with it, ef you had it?"
Offitt hesitated a moment before replying.
"Oh, I was just a jokin'. I meant it was such an honor for common folks like us to git inside of the palace of a high-toned cuss like Farnham; and the fact is, Sammy," he continued, more seriously, "I would like to see the inside of some of these swell places. I am a student of human nature, you know, in its various forms. I consider the lab'rin' man as the normal healthy human—that is, if he don't work too hard. I consider wealth as a kind of disease; wealth and erristocracy is a kind of dropsy. Now, the true reformer is like a doctor,—he wants to know all about diseases, by sight and handlin'! I would like to study the symptoms of erristocracy in Farnham's house—right in the wards of the hospital."
"Well, that beats me," said Sam. "I've been in a lot of fine houses on Algonquin Avenue, and I never seen anything yet that favored a hospital."
This dense stupidity was almost more than Offitt could bear. But a ready lie came to his aid.
"Looky here!" he continued, "I'll tell you a secret. I'm writin' a story for the 'Irish Harp,' and I want to describe the residence of jess such a vampire as this here Farnham. Now, writin', as I do, in the cause of humanity, I naturally want to git my facts pretty near right. You kin help me in this. I'll call to-morrow to see you while you're there, and I'll get some p'ints that'll make Rome howl when they come out."
Sam was hardly educated up to the point his friend imagined. His zeal for humanity and the "rehabitation" of labor was not so great as to make him think it a fine thing to be a spy and a sneak in the houses of his employers. He was embarrassed by the suggestion, and made no reply, but sat smoking his pipe in silence. He had not the diplomatist's art of putting a question by with a smile. Offitt had tact enough to forbear insisting upon a reply.
He was, in fact, possessed of very considerable natural aptitude for political life. He had a quick smile and a ready tongue; he liked to talk and shake hands; he never had an opinion he was not willing to sell; he was always prepared to sacrifice a friend, if required, and to ask favors from his worst enemies. He called himself Andrew Jackson Offitt—a name which, in the West, is an unconscious brand. It generally shows that the person bearing it is the son of illiterate parents, with no family pride or affections, but filled with a bitter and savage partisanship which found its expression in a servile worship of the most injurious personality in American history. But Offitt's real name was worse than Andrew Jackson—it was Ananias, and it was bestowed in this way: When he was about six years old, his father, a small farmer in Indiana, who had been a sodden, swearing, fighting drunkard, became converted by a combined attack of delirium tremens and camp-meeting, and resolved to join the church, he and his household. The morning they were going to the town of Salem for that purpose, he discovered that his pocket had been picked, and the money it contained was found on due perquisition in the blue jeans trousers of his son Andrew Jackson. The boy, on being caught, was so nimble and fertile in his lies that the father, in a gust of rage, declared that he was not worthy the name of the great President, but that he should be called Ananias; and he was accordingly christened Ananias that morning in the meeting-house at Salem. As long as the old man lived, he called him by that dreadful name; but when a final attack of the trembling madness had borne him away from earth, the widow called the boy Andrew again, whenever she felt careless about her spiritual condition, and the youth behaved himself, but used the name of Sapphira's husband when the lad vexed her, or the obligations of the christening came strongly back to her superstitious mind. The two names became equally familiar to young Offitt, and always afterward he was liable to lapses of memory when called on suddenly to give his prenomen; and he frequently caused hateful merriment among his associates by signing himself Ananias.
When Sam presented himself at Captain Farnham's house the next morning, he was admitted by Budsey, who took him to the library and showed him the work he was to do. The heat of the room had shrunk the wood of the heavy doors of carved oak so that the locks were all out of position. Farnham was seated by his desk, reading and writing letters. He did not look up as Sam entered, and paid no attention to the instructions Budsey was giving him. For the first time in his life, Sleeny found that this neglect of his presence was vaguely offensive to him. A week before, he would no more have thought of speaking to Farnham, or being spoken to by him, than of entering into conversation with one of the busts on the book-cases. Even now he had no desire to talk with the proprietor of the house. He had come there to do certain work which he was capable of doing well, and he preferred to do it and not be bothered by irrelevant gossip. But, in spite of himself, he felt a rising of revolt in his heart, as he laid out his tools, against the quiet gentleman who sat with his back to him, engaged in his own work and apparently unconscious of Sleeny's presence. A week before, they had been nothing to each other, but now a woman had come between them, and there is no such powerful conductor in nature. The quiet in which Farnham sat seemed full of insolent triumph to the luckless lover, and scraps of Offitt's sounding nonsense went through his mind: "A man is more than a money-bag"; "the laborer is the true gentleman"; but they did not give him much comfort. Not until he became interested in his work did he recover the even beat of his pulse and the genuine workmanlike play of his faculties. Then he forgot Farnham's presence in his turn, and enjoyed himself in a rational way with his files and chisels and screwdrivers.
He had been at work for an hour at one door, and had finished it to his satisfaction, and sat down before another, when he heard the bell ring, and Budsey immediately afterward ushered a lady through the hall and into the drawing-room. His heart stood still at the rustle of the dress,—it sounded so like Maud's; he looked over his shoulder through the open door of the library and saw, to his great relief, that there were two female figures taking their seats in the softly lighted room beyond. One sat with her back to the light, and her features were not distinctly visible; the other was where he could see three-quarters of her face clearly relieved against the tapestry portiére. There is a kind of beauty which makes glad every human heart that gazes on it, if not utterly corrupt and vile, and it was such a face as this that Sam Sleeny now looked at with a heart that grew happier as he gazed. It was a morning face, full of the calm joy of the dawn, of the sweet dreams of youth untroubled by love, the face of Aurora before she met Tithonus. From the little curls of gold on the low brow to the smile that hovered forever, half formed, on the softly curving lips and over the rounded chin, there was a light of sweetness, and goodness, and beauty, to be read of all men, and perhaps in God's good time to be worshipped by one.
Budsey announced "Mrs. Belding and Miss Halice," and Farnham hastened to greet them.
If Sam Sleeny had few happy hours to enjoy, he could at least boast himself that one was beginning now. The lovely face bore to his heart not only the blessing of its own beauty, but also a new and infinitely consoling thought. He had imagined till this moment, in all seriousness, that Maud Matchin was the prettiest woman in the world, and that therefore all men who saw her were his rivals, the chief of whom was Farnham. But now he reflected, with a joyful surprise, that in this world of rich people there were others equally beautiful, and that here, under Farnham's roof, on terms of familiar acquaintance with him, was a girl as faultless as an angel,—one of his own kind. "Why, of course," he said to himself, with a candid and happy self-contempt, "that's his girl—you dunderheaded fool—what are you botherin' about?"
He took a delight which he could not express in listening to the conversation of these friends and neighbors. The ladies had come over, in pursuance of an invitation of Farnham's, to see the additions which had recently arrived from Europe to his collection of bronzes and pottery, and some little pictures he had bought at the English water-color exhibition. As they walked about the rooms, expressing their admiration of the profusion of pretty things which filled the cabinets and encumbered the tables, in words equally pretty and profuse, Sleeny listened to their voices as if it were music played to cheer him at his work. He knew nothing of the things they were talking about, but their tones were gentle and playful; the young lady's voice was especially sweet and friendly. He had never heard such voices before; they are exceptional everywhere in America, and particularly in our lake country, where the late springs develop fine high sopranos, but leave much to be desired in the talking tones of women. Alice Belding had been taught to use her fine voice as it deserved and Cordelia's intonations could not have been more "soft, gentle, and low,—an excellent thing in woman."
After awhile, the voices came nearer, and he heard Farnham say:
"Come in here a moment, please, and see my new netsukes; I got them at a funny little shop in Ostend. It was on a Sunday afternoon, and the man of the house was keeping the shop, and I should have got a great bargain out of him, but his wife came in before we were through, and scolded him for an imbecile and sent him into the back room to tend the baby, and made me pay twice what he had asked for my little monsters."
By this time they were all in the library, and the young lady was laughing, not loudly, but musically, and Mrs. Belding was saying:
"Served you right for shopping on Sunday. But they are adorable little images, for all that."
"Yes," said Farnham, "so the woman told me, and she added that they were authentic of the twelfth century. I asked her if she could not throw off a century or two in consideration of the hard, times, and she laughed, and said I blagued, and honestly she didn't know how old they were, but it was drôle, tout de même, qu'on pût adorer un petit bon Dieu d'une laideur pareille."
"Really, I don't see how they can do it," said Mrs. Belden, solemnly; at which both the others laughed, and Miss Alice said, "Why, mamma, you have just called them adorable yourself."
They went about the room, admiring, and touching, and wondering, with the dainty grace of ladies accustomed to rare and beautiful things, until the novelties were exhausted and they turned to go. But Budsey at that moment announced luncheon, and they yielded to Farnham's eager importunity, and remained to share his repast.
They went to the dining-room, leaving Sleeny more than content. He still heard their voices, too distant to distinguish words; but he pleased himself by believing that there was a tender understanding in the tones of Farnham and Miss Belding when they addressed each other, and that it was altogether a family party. He had no longer any feeling of slight or neglect because none of them seemed aware of his presence while they were in the room with him. There was, on the contrary, a sort of comfort in the thought that he belonged to a different world from them; that he and Maud were shut out—shut out together—from the society and the interests which claimed the Beldings and the Farnhams. "You was a dunderheaded fool," he said, cheerfully apostrophizing himself again, "to think everybody was crazy after your girl."
He was brought down to a lower level by hearing the door open, and the voice of Offitt asking if Mr. Sleeny was in.
"No one of that name here," said Budsey.
"I was told at Matchin's he was here."
"Oh! the yonng man from Matchin's. He is in the library," and Offitt came in, looking more disreputable than usual, as he had greased his hair inordinately for the occasion. Budsey evidently regarded him with no favorable eye; he said to Sleeny, "This person says he comes from Matchin's; do you know him?"
"Yes, it's all right," said Sam, who could say nothing less; but when Budsey had left them, he turned to Offitt with anything but welcome in his eye.
"Well, you've come, after all."
"Yes," Offitt answered, with an uneasy laugh. "Curiosity gets us all, from Eve down. What a lay-out this is, anyhow," and his small eyes darted rapidly around the room. "Say, Sam, you know Christy Fore, that hauls for the Safe Company? He was telling me about the safe he put into this room—said nobody'd ever guess it was a safe. Where the devil is it?"
"I don't know. It's none of my business, nor yours either."
"I guess you got up wrong foot foremost, Sam, you're so cranky. Where can the —— thing be? Three doors and two winders and a fire-place, and all the rest book-cases. By Jinx! there it is, I'll swear." He stepped over to one of the cases where a pair of oaken doors, rich with arabesque carving, veiled a sort of cabinet. He was fingering at them when Sam seized him by the shoulder, and said:
"Look here, Andy, what is your game, anyhow? I'm here on business, and I ain't no fence, and I'll just trouble you to leave."
Offitt's face turned livid. He growled:
"Of all Andylusian jacks, you're the beat. I ain't agoin' to hurt you nor your friend Farnham. I've got all the p'ints I want for my story, and devilish little thanks to you, neither. And say, tell me, ain't there a back way out? I don't want to go by the dinin'-room door. There's ladies there, and I ain't dressed to see company. Why, yes, this fits me like my sins," and he opened the French window, and stepped lightly to the gravel walk below, and was gone.
Sleeny resumed his work, ill content with himself and his friend. "Andy is a smart fellow," he thought; "but he had no right to come snoopin' around where I was at work, jist to get points to worry Mr. Farnham with."
The little party in the drawing-room was breaking up. He heard their pleasant last words, as the ladies resumed their wraps and Farnham accompanied them to the door. Mrs. Belding asked him to dinner, "with nobody but ourselves," and he accepted with a pleased eagerness. Sleeny got one more glimpse of the beautiful face under the gray hat and feather, and blessed it as it vanished out of the door. As Farnham came back to the library, he stood for a moment by Sam, and examined what he had done.
"That's a good job. I like your work on the green-house, too. I know good work when I see it. I worked one winter as a boss carpenter myself."
It seemed to Sleeny like the voice of a brother speaking to him. He thought the presence of the young lady had made everything in the house soft and gentle.
"Where was you ever in that business?" he asked.
"In the Black Hills. I sawed a million feet of lumber and built houses for two hundred soldiers. I had no carpenters; so I had to make some. I knew more about it when I got through than when I began."
Sleeny laughed—a cordial laugh that wagged his golden beard and made his white teeth glisten.
"I'll bet you did!" he replied.
The two men talked a few minutes like old acquaintances; then Sleeny gathered up his tools and slung them over his shoulder, and as he turned to go both put out their hands at the same instant, with an impulse that surprised each of them, and said "Good-morning."

[VII.]

GHOSTLY COUNSEL.

A man whose intelligence is so limited as that of Sam Sleeny is always too rapid and rash in his inferences. Because he had seen Farnham give Maud a handful of roses, he was ready to believe things about their relations that had filled him with fury; and now, because he had seen the same man talking with a beautiful girl and her mother, the conviction was fixed in his mind that Farnham's affections were placed in that direction, and that he was therefore no longer to be dreaded as a rival. He went home happier, in this belief, than he had been for many a day; and so prompt was his progress in the work of deceiving himself, that he at once came to the conclusion that little or nothing now stood between him and the crowning of his hopes. His happiness made him unusually loquacious, and at the supper-table he excited the admiration of Matchin and the surprise of Maud by his voluble history of the events of the day. He passed over Offitt's visit in silence, knowing that the Matchins detested him; but he spoke with energetic emphasis of the beauty of the house, the handsome face and kindly manners of Farnham, and the wonderful beauty and sweetness of Alice Belding.
"Did that bold thing go to call on him alone?" cried Miss Maud, thoroughly aroused by this supposed offence against the proprieties of life.
"Why, no, Mattie," said Sam, a little disconcerted. "Her ma was along."
"Why didn't you say so, then?" asked the unappeased beauty.
"I forgot all about the old lady, though she was more chinny than the young one. She just seemed like she was a-practisin' the mother-in-law, so as to do it without stumblin' when the time come."
"Hullo! Do you think they are strikin' a match?" cried Saul, in high glee. "That would be first-rate. Keep the money and the property all together. There's too many of our rich girls marryin' out of the State lately—keeps buildin' dull."
"I don't believe a word of it," Maud interposed. "He ain't a man to be caught by a simperin' schoolgirl. And as to money, He's got a plenty for two. He can please himself when he marries."
"Yes, but may be he won't please you, Mattie, and that would be a pity," said the ironical Saul.
The old man laughed loudly at his own sarcasm, and pushed his chair back from the table, and Maud betook herself to her own room, where she sat down, as her custom was, by the window, looking over the glowing lake, and striving to read her destiny as she gazed into the crimson and golden skies. She did not feel at all so sure as she pretended that there was no danger of the result that Sleeny had predicted; and now that she was brought face to face with it, she was confounded at discovering how much it meant to her. She was carrying a dream in her heart which would make or ruin her, according as it should prove true or false. She had not thought of herself as the future wife of Farnham with any clearness of hope, but she found she could not endure the thought of his marrying any one else and passing forever out of her reach. She sat there, bitterly ruminating, until the evening glow had died away from the lake and the night breeze spread its viewless wings and flapped heavily in over the dark ridge and the silent shore. Her thoughts had given her no light of consolation; her chin rested on her hands, her elbows on her knees; her large eyes, growing more luminous in the darkness, stared out at the gathering night, scarcely noting that the sky she gazed at had changed from a pompous scene of red and yellow splendor to an infinite field of tender and dark violet, fretted with intense small stars.
"What shall I do?" she thought. "I am a woman. My father is poor. I have got no chance. Jurildy is happier to-day than I am, and got more sense."
She heard a timid rap at her door, and asked, sharply:
"Who's there?"
"It's me," said Sleeny's submissive voice.
"What do you want?" she asked again, without moving.
"Mr. Bott give me two tickets to his séance tonight,"—Sam called it "seeuns,"—"and I thought mebbe you'd like to go."
There was silence for a moment. Maud was thinking: "At any rate it will be better than to sit here alone and cry all the evening." So she said: "I'll come down in a minute." She heard Sam's heavy step descending the stairs, and thought what a different tread another person had; and she wondered whether she would ever "do better" than take Sam Sleeny; but she at once dismissed the thought. "I can't do that; I can't put my hand in a hand that smells so strong of sawdust as Sam's. But he is a good soul, and I am sorry for him, every time I look in the glass."
Looking in the glass, as usual, restored her good humor, and she started off to the ghostly rendezvous with her faithful attendant. They never talked very much when they were alone together, and this evening both were thoughtful. Maud had never taken this commerce with ghosts much to heart. She had a feeling, which she could hardly have defined, that it was a common and plebeian thing to believe in it, and if she ever heard it ridiculed she joined in the cry without mercy. But it was an excitement and an interest in a life so barren of both that she could not afford to throw it away. She had not intelligence enough to be disgusted or shocked by it. If pressed to explain the amount of her faith in the whole business, she would probably have said she thought "there was something in it," and stopped at that. In minds like hers, there is no clearly drawn line between the unusual and the supernatural. An apparent miracle pleased her as it would please a child, without setting her to find out how it was done. She would consult a wizard, taking the chances of his having occult sources of information, with the same irregular faith in the unlikely with which some ladies call in homoeopathic practitioners.
All the way to the rooms of Bott, she was revolving this thought in her mind: "Perhaps he could tell me something about Mr. Farnham. I don't think much of Bott; he has too many knuckles on his hands. I never saw a man with so many knuckles. I wouldn't mention Mr. Farnham to him to save his life, but I might get something out of him without telling him anything. He is certainly a very smart man, and whether it's spirits or not, he knows lots of things."
It was in this mood that she entered the little apartment where Bott held what he called his "Intermundane Séances." The room was small and stuffy. A simulacrum of a chest of drawers in one corner was really Bott's bed, where the seer reposed at night, and which, tilted up against the wall during the day, contained the rank bedclothes, long innocent of the wash-tub. There were a dozen or so of cane-bottom chairs, a little table for a lamp, but no other furniture. At one side of the room was a small closet without a door, but with a dark and dirty curtain hung before its aperture. Around it was a wooden railing, breast high.
A boy with a high forehead, and hair combed behind ears large and flaring like those of a rabbit, sat by the door, and took the tickets of invited guests and the half-dollars of the casuals. The seer received everybody with a nerveless shake of a clammy hand, showed them to seats, and exchanged a word or two about the weather, and the "conditions," favorable or otherwise, to spiritual activity. When he saw Maud and Sam his tallowy face flushed, in spots, with delight. He took them to the best places the room afforded, and stammered his pleasure that they had come.
"Oh! the pleasure is all ours," said Maud, who was always self-possessed when she saw men stammering. "It's a great privilege to get so near to the truth as you bring us, Mr. Bott."
The prophet had no answer ready; he merely flushed again in spots, and some new arrivals called him away.
The room was now pretty well filled with the unmistakable crowd which always attend such meetings. They were mostly artisans, of more intellectual ambition than their fellows, whose love of the marvellous was not held in control by any educated judgment. They had long, serious faces, and every man of them wore long hair and a soft hat. Their women were generally sad, broken-spirited drudges, to whom this kind of show was like an opera or a ball. There were two or three shame-faced believers of the better class, who scoffed a little but trembled in secret, and a few avowed skeptics, young clerks on a mild spree, ready for fun if any should present itself.
Bott stepped inside the railing by the closet, and placing his hands upon it, addressed the assembly. He did not know what peculiar shape the manifestations of the evening might take. They were in search of truth; all truth was good. They hoped for visitors from the unseen speers; he could promise nothing. In this very room the spirits of the departed had walked and talked with their friends; perhaps they might do it again; he knew not. How they mingled in the earth-life, he did not pretend to say; perhaps they materialized through the mejum; perhaps they dematerialized material from the audience which they rematerialized in visible forms; as to that, the opinion of another—he said with a spacious magnanimity—was as good as his. He would now request two of the audience to step up and tie him. One of the long-haired ruminant men stood up, and a young fellow, amid much nudging and giggling among the scorners, was also forced from his chair. They came forward, the believer with a business-like air, which showed practice, and the young skeptic blushing and ill at ease. Bott took a chair inside the curtain, and showed them how to tie him. They bound him hand and foot, the believer testified that the binding was solid, and the skeptic went to his seat, playfully stepping upon the toes of his scoffing friends. The curtain was lowered, and the lamp was turned down.
In a few moments, a scuffling sound was heard in the closet, and Bott's coat came flying out into the room. The believer pulled back the curtain, and Botts sat in his chair, his shirt sleeves gleaming white in the dust. His coat was laid over his shoulders, and almost as soon as the curtain was lowered he yelled for light, and was disclosed sitting tied as before, clothed in his right coat.
Again the curtain went down amid a sigh of satisfaction from the admiring audience, and a choking voice, which tried hard not to sound like Bott's, cried out from the closet: "Turn down the light; we want more power." The kerosene lamp was screwed down till hardly a spark illumined the visible darkness, and suddenly a fiery hand appeared at the aperture of the closet, slowly opening and shutting its long fingers.
A half dozen voices murmured: "A spirit hand"; but Sam Sleeny whispered to Maud: "Them are Bott's knuckles, for coin." The hand was withdrawn and a horrible face took its place—a pallid corpse-like mask, with lambent fire sporting on the narrow forehead and the high cheek-bones. It stayed only an instant, but Sam said, "That's the way Bott will look in——"
"Hush!" said Maud, who was growing too nervous to smile, for fear of laughing or crying.
A sound of sobbing came from a seat to the right of them. A poor woman had recognized the face as that of her husband, who had died in the army, and she was drawing the most baleful inferences from its fiery adjuncts.
A moment later, Bott came out of the closet, crouching so low that his head was hardly two feet from the ground. He had a sheet around his neck, covering his whole person, and a white cap over his head, concealing most of his face. In this constrained attitude he hopped about the clear space in front of the audience with a good deal of dexterity, talking baby-talk in a shrill falsetto. "Howdy, pappa! Howdy, mamma! Itty Tudie tum adin!"
A rough man and woman, between joy and grief, were half hysterical. They talked to the toad-like mountebank in the most endearing tones, evidently believing it was their dead baby toddling before them. Two or three times the same horrible imposture was repeated. Bott never made his appearance without somebody recognizing him as a dear departed friend. The glimmering light, the unwholesome excitement, the servile credulity fixed by long habit, seemed to produce a sort of passing dementia upon the regular habitués.
With these performances the first part came to an end. The light was turned on again, and the tying committee was requested to come forward and examine the cords with which Bott still seemed tightly bound. The skeptic remained scornfully in his seat, and so it was left for the believer to announce that not a cord had been touched. He then untied Bott, who came out from the closet, stretching his limbs as if glad to be free, and announced that there would be a short intermission for an interchange of views.
As he came toward Maud, Sam rose and said:
"Whew! he smells like a damp match. I'll go out and smoke a minute, and come back."
Bott dropped into the seat which Sleeny had left.
To one who has never attended one of these queer cenacula, it would be hard to comprehend the unhealthy and even nauseous character of the feeling and the conversation there prevalent. The usual decent restraints upon social intercourse seem removed. Subjects which the common consent of civilized creatures has banished from mixed society are freely opened and discussed. To people like the ordinary run of the believers in spiritism, the opera, the ballet, and the annual Zola are unknown, and they must take their excitements where they can find them. The dim light, the unhealthy commerce of fictitious ghosts, the unreality of act and sentiment, the unwonted abandon, form an atmosphere in which these second-hand mystics float away into a sphere where the morals and the manners are altogether different from those of their working days.
Miss Matchin had not usually joined in these morbid discussions. She was of too healthy an organization to be tempted by so rank a mental feast as that, and she had a sort of fierce maidenhood about her which revolted at such exposures of her own thought. But to-night she was sorely perplexed. She had been tormented by many fancies as she looked out of her window into the deepening shadows that covered the lake. The wonders she had seen in that room, though she did not receive them with entire faith, had somewhat shaken her nerves; and now the seer sat beside her, his pale eyes shining with his own audacity, his lank hair dripping with sweat, his hands uneasily rubbing together, his whole attitude expressive of perfect subjection to her will.
"Why isn't this a good chance?" she thought. "He is certainly a smart man. Horrid as he looks, he knows lots. May be he could tell me how to find out."
She began in her airiest manner: "Oh, Mr. Bott, what a wonderful gift you have got! How you must look down on us poor mortals!"
Bott grew spotted, and stammered:
"Far from it, Miss Matchin. I couldn't look down on you."
"Oh, you are flattering. That's not right, because I believe every word you say—and that ain't true."
She rattled recklessly on in the same light tone.
"I'm going to ask you something very particular. I don't know who can tell me, if you can't. How can a young lady find out whether a young gentleman is in love with her or not? Now, tell me the truth this time," she said with a nervous titter, "for it's very important."
This question from any one else would not have disconcerted Bott in the least. Queries as absurd had frequently been put to him in perfect good faith, and answered with ready and impudent ignorance. But, at those giggling words of Maud Matchin, he turned livid and purple, and his breath came heavily. There was room for but one thought in that narrow heart and brain. He had long cherished a rather cowardly fondness for Maud, and now that this question was put to him by the agitated girl, his vanity would not suffer him to imagine that any one but himself was the subject of her dreams. There was, to him, nothing especially out of the way in this sort of indirect proposal on the part of a young woman. It was entirely in keeping with the general tone of sentiment among the people of his circle, which aimed at nothing less than the emancipation of the world from its old-fashioned decencies.
But he would not answer hastily; he had a coward's caution. He looked a moment at the girl's brilliant color, her quick, high breathing, her eager eyes, with a gloating sense of his good luck. But he wanted her thoroughly committed. So he said, with an air in which there was already something offensively protecting:
"Well, Miss Matchin, that depends on the speer. If the affection be unilateral, it is one thing; if it be recippercal, it is another. The currents of soul works in different ways."
"But what I mean is, if a young lady likes a young gentleman pretty well, how is she going to find out for sure whether he likes her?" She went intrepidly through these words, though her cheeks were burning, and her eyes would fall in spite of her, and her head was singing.
There was no longer any doubt in Bott's mind. He was filled with an insolent triumph, and thought only of delaying as long as possible the love chase of which he imagined himself the object. He said, slowly and severely:
"The question is too imperious to be answered in haste. I will put myself in the hands of the sperruts, and answer it as they choose after the intermission."
He rose and bowed, and went to speak a word or two to his other visitors. Sam came back and took his seat by Maud, and said:
"I think the fun is about over. Less go home."
"Go home yourself, if you want to," was the petulant reply. "I am going to stay for the inspirational discourse."
"Oh, my!" said Sam. "That's a beautiful word. You don't know how pretty your mouth looks when you say that." Sam had had his beer, and was brave and good-natured.
Bott retired once more behind the railing, but took his seat in a chair outside the curtain, in full view of the audience. He sat for some minutes motionless, staring at vacancy. He then slowly closed his eyes, and a convulsive shudder ran through his frame. This was repeated at rapid intervals, with more or less violence. He next passed his hands alternately over his forehead, as if he were wiping it, and throwing some invisible, sticky substance, with a vicious snap, to right and left. At last, after a final shudder, which stiffened him into the image of death for a moment, he rose to his feet and, leaning on the railing, began to intone, in a dismal whine, a speech of which we need give only the opening words.
"Dear brothers and sisters of the earth-life! On pearly wings of gossamer-down we float down from our shining speers to bring you messages of the higher life. Let your earth-soul be lifted to meet our sperrut-soul; let your earth-heart blend in sweet accordion with our heaven-heart; that the beautiful and the true in this weary earth-life may receive the bammy influence of the Eden flowrets, and rise, through speers of disclosure, to the plane where all is beautiful and all is true."
He continued in this strain for some time, to the evident edification of his audience, who listened with the same conventional tolerance, the same trust that it is doing your neighbor good, with which the ordinary audience sits under an ordinary sermon. Maud, having a special reason for being alert, listened with a real interest. But during his speech proper he made no allusion to the subject on which she had asked for light. It was after he had finished his harangue, and had gone through an entr'acte of sighs and shudders, that he announced himself once more in the hands of the higher intelligences, and ready to answer questions. "It does not need," he whined, "the word of the month or the speech of the tongue to tell the sperruts what your souls desire. The burden of your soul is open to the sperrut-eye. There sits in this room a pure and lovely soul in quest of light. Its query is, How does heart meet heart in mutual knowledge?"
Maud's cheek grew pale and then red, and her heart beat violently. But no one noticed her, and the seer went on. "If a true heart longs for another, there is no rest but in knowledge, there is no knowledge but in trewth, there is no trewth but in trust. Oh, my brother, if you love a female, tell your love. Oh, my sister, if you love—hum—if you love—hum—an individual of the opposite sex—oh, tell your love!—Down with the shams of a false-hearted society; down with the chains of silence that crushes your soul to the dust! If the object of your hearts' throbs is noble, he will respond. Love claims love. Love has a right to love. If he is base, go to a worthier one. But from your brave and fiery heart a light will kindle his, and dual flames will wrap two chosen natures in high-menial melodies, when once the revelating word is spoke."
With these words he subsided into a deep trance, which lasted till the faithful grew tired of waiting, and shuffled slowly out of the door. When the last guest had gone, he rose from his chair, with no pretence of spiritual dignity, and counted his money and his tickets. He stretched himself in two chairs, drew his fingers admiringly through his lank locks, while a fatuous grin of perfect content spread over his face, as he said aloud to himself, "She has got it bad. I wonder whether she will have the nerve to ask me. I'll wait awhile, anyhow. I'll lose nothing by waiting."
Meanwhile, Maud was walking rapidly home with Sam. She was excited and perplexed, and did not care to answer Sam's rather heavy pleasantries over the evening's performance. He ridiculed the spirit-lights, the voices, and the jugglery, without provoking a reply, and at last he said:
"Well, what do you think of his advising the girls to pop? This ain't leap year!"
"What of that?" she answered, hastily. "I don't see why a girl hasn't as good a right to speak her mind as a man."
"Why, Mattie," said Sam, with slow surprise, "no decent girl would do that."
They had come to Matchin's gate. She slipped in, then turned and said:
"Well, don't be frightened, Mr. Sleeny; I'm not going to propose to you," and she was gone from his sight.
She went directly to her room, and walked up and down a few moments without taking off her hat, moving with the easy grace and the suppressed passion of an imprisoned panther. Then she lighted her lamp and placed it on her bureau at one side of her glass. She searched in her closet and found a candle, which she lighted and placed on the other side of the glass. She undressed with reckless haste, throwing her clothes about on the floor, and sat down before her mirror with bare arms and shoulders, and nervously loosened her hair, watching every movement with blazing eyes. The thick masses of her blue-black curls fell down her back and over her sloping shoulders, which glowed with the creamy light of old ivory. The unequal rays of the lamp and candle made singular effects of shadow on the handsome face, the floating hair, and the strong and wholesome color of her neck and arms. She gazed at herself with eager eyes and parted lips, in an anxiety too great to be assuaged by her girlish pride in her own beauty. "This is all very well," she said, "but he will not see me this way. Oh! if I only dared to speak first. I wonder if it would be as the spirits said. 'If he is noble he will respond!' He is noble, that's sure. 'Love claims love,' they said. But I don't know as I love him. I would, if that would fetch him, quick enough;" and the hot blood came surging up, covering neck and brow with crimson.