“There it is, miss,� said the judge and kissed her. “Now go home!�
Kitty laughed. “I can’t,� she said, “I’ve got a dollar more to spend at Eshcol. I’m going into town. Good-bye, and be sure you come, Mr. Trench.�
“He will,� said the judge firmly, “or you’ll refund that dollar.�
“I’ll go, Miss Broughton,� Caleb said, though in his heart he dreaded it; he had a proud man’s aversion to meeting discourtesy from those who despised his poverty, and he had observed the red when it stained Kitty’s cheek. But, after all, it was a small matter, he reflected; to one of Caleb’s habits of thought the social part of life was a small matter. Yet it is the small things which prick until the blood comes.
VII
A WEEK from that day Caleb Trench addressed a crowd of backwoodsmen and some of the Eshcol farmers at the town hall at Cresset’s Corners. Even if a reporter had not been there, it would have passed by word of mouth all over the county, and, later, through the State.
There are moments when the eloquence of man consists in telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The fact that the countrymen had not heard it for nearly fifteen years clothed it with spell-binding powers. For half an hour Caleb Trench talked to them with extraordinary simplicity and directness; when he had finished they knew how they were governed and why. He had the power of making his argument clear to the humblest, and yet convincing to the most learned, which is the power that men call persuasion. In that half-hour they found that they had raised up the Golden Calf themselves, and that it had smitten them. Jacob Eaton suddenly appeared like a huge spider whose golden web had immeshed the entire State, while they themselves were hung in it like wounded flies. Yet, yesterday, Jacob Eaton had been a young man of fine family and immense influence. That night they went home disputing and lay awake, in the agonies of reflection, trying to find a way to withdraw themselves from his investments; that they could not find it involved them in still deeper distress. All this while, the figure of Caleb Trench began to stand out sharply and suddenly, like the silhouette thrown on the sheet by the lamp of the stereopticon.
He made no effort to keep himself before them; having told them the truth, he acted as if he had performed his mission and went about his own business, which was chiefly, just then, keeping shop and reading law only at night. The summer trade was on, the roads were good, and customers more plentiful than clients.
Thursday night was the date of Kitty Broughton’s ball; Wednesday, of the previous week, brought Caleb his first client. The two events afterwards fixed many things in his memory, for at this time he was trying to forget that Miss Royall had ever sat in his old armchair by the stove. The peculiarly haunting qualities of some individuals, who are not spooks, is past explanation. Caleb felt that there was no more pricking misery than to see eternally one face and one figure in his favorite chair, when neither of them could ever possibly belong there, and it was to his interest to forget them. There should be, by the way, a method for exorcising such ghosts and compelling their rightful owners to keep them labeled in a locked cabinet instead of projecting them upon the innocent and the defenseless. Caleb’s method consisted, at present, in turning the old chair upside down in the closet back of the kitchen, which ought to have discouraged any self-respecting ghost, yet Wednesday morning he got it out again and put it reverently in its place, with a sheepish feeling of having committed a crime in trying to dishonor it.
It was after the ceremony of restoration that Juniper arrived with a long face. He had been temporarily reconciled to Aunt Charity and was shouldering her chief responsibility, her son Lysander.