A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

So at the end of the evening here stand Neal, and Jeanette, even as Adam and Eve stood in the garden, talking of nothing in particular as they slowly move toward the door. "Yes, I suppose so," she says, as Eve said and as Eve's daughters have said through all the centuries, looking intently at the floor. And then Neal, suddenly finding the language of his line back to Adam, looks up to say, "Oh, yes, I forgot—but have you read 'Monsieur Beaucaire'?" Now Adam said, "Have you heard the new song that the morning stars are singing together?" and Priam asked Helen if she would like to hear that new thing of Solomon's just out, and so as the ages have rolled by, young gentlemen standing beside their adored but not declared ones have mixed literature with love, and have tied wisdom up in a package of candy or wild honey, and have taken it to the trysting place since the beginning of time. It is thus the poets thrive. And when she was asked about the new song of the morning stars, Eve, though she knew it as she knew her litany, answered no; and so did Eve's daughter, standing in the dimly lighted hallway of the Barclay home in Sycamore Ridge; and so then and there being, these two made their next meeting sure.

In those last years of the last century John Barclay became a powerful man in this world—one of the few hundred men who divided the material kingdoms of this earth among them. He was a rich man who was turning his money into great political power. Senates listened to him, many courts were his in fee simple, because he had bought and paid for the men who named the judges; Presidents were glad to know what he thought, and when he came to the White House, reporters speculated about the talk that went on behind the doors of the President's room, and the stock market fluttered. If he desired a law, he paid for it and got it—not in a coarse illegal way, to be sure, but through the regular conventional channels of politics, and if he desired to step on a law, he stepped on it, and a court came running up behind him, and legalized his transaction. He sneered at reformers, and mocked God, did John Barclay in those days. He grew arrogant and boastful, and strutted in his power like a man in liquor with the vain knowledge that he could increase the population of a state or a group of states, or he could shrivel the prosperity of a section of the country by his whim. For by changing a freight rate he could make wheat grow, where grass had nourished. By changing the rate again, he could beckon back the wilderness. And yet, how small was his power; here beside him, cherished as the apple of his eye, was his daughter, a slip of a girl, with blue eyes and fair hair, whose heart was growing toward the light, as the hearts of young things grow, and he, with all of his power, could only watch the mystery, and wonder at it. He was not displeased at what he saw. But it was one of the few things in his consciousness over which he could find no way to assume control. He stood in the presence of something that came from outside of his realm and ignored him as the sun and the rain and the simple processes of nature ignored him.

"Jane," he said one night, when he was in the Ridge for the first time in many weeks,—a night near the end of the summer when Jeanette and Neal Ward were vaguely feeling their way together, "Jane, mother says that while we've been away Neal Ward has been here pretty often. You don't suppose that—"

"Well, I've rather wondered about it myself a little," responded Jane. "Neal is such a fine handsome young fellow."

"But, Jane," exclaimed Barclay, impatiently, as he rose to walk the rug, "Jennie is only a child. Why, she's only—"

"Nineteen, John—she's a big girl now."

"I know, dear," he protested, "but that's absurdly young. Why—"

"Yes," she answered, "I was nearly twenty when I was engaged to you, and Jennie's not engaged yet, nor probably even thinking seriously of it."

"Don't you think," cried Barclay, as he limped down the diagonal of the rug, "that you should do something? Isn't it a little unusual? Why—"

"Well, John," smiled the wife, "I might do what mother did: turn the young man over to father!" Barclay laughed, and she went on patiently: "It's not at all unusual, John, even if they do—that is, if they are—you know; but they aren't, and Jennie is too much in love with her work at school to quit that. But after all it's the American way; it was the way we did, dear, and the way our mothers and fathers did, and unless you wish to change it—to Europeanize it, and pick—"