A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

"Now, John, be sensible—" Lycurgus insisted one night in 1903 when the two were eating supper in Barclay's private car on a side-track in Arizona; "don't be like my wife—she always drools over that chapter, too. But you know my wife—" Lycurgus always referred to Mrs. Mason with a grand gesture as to his dog or his horse, which were especially desirable chattels. "My wife,—it's just like a woman,—she sits and reads that, and laughs and weeps, and giggles and sniffs, and I say, 'What's the matter with you, anyway?'"

John Barclay pushed a button. To the porter he said, "Bring me that little red book in my satchel." The book had been published but a few weeks, and John always carried a copy around with him in those days to give to a friend. When the porter brought the book, Barclay read aloud, "Ah, truly hath the poet said, 'Marriages are made in heaven.'"

But Lycurgus Mason pulled his napkin from under his chin and moved back from the table, dusting the crumbs from his obviously Sunday clothes. "There you go—that's it; 'as the poet says.' John, if you heard that 'as the poet says' as often as I do—" He could not finish the figure. But he sniffed out his disgust with "as the poet says." "It wasn't so bad when we were in the hotel, and she was busy with something else. But now—but now—" he repeated it the third time, "but now—honest, every time that woman goes to get up a paper for the Hypatia Club, she gets me in the parlour, and rehearses it to me, and the dad-binged thing is simply packed full of 'as the poet sayses.' And about that marriages being made in heaven, I tell my wife this: I say, 'Maybe so, but if they are, I know one that was made on a busy day when the angels were thinking of something else.'"

And John Barclay, who knew Mrs. Mason and knew Lycurgus, knew that he would as soon think of throwing a bomb at the President as to say such a thing to her; so John asked credulously: "You did? Well, well! Say, what did she say to that?"

"That's it—" responded Lycurgus. "That's it. What could she say? I had her." He walked the length of the room proudly, with his hands thrust into his pockets.

Barclay moved his chair to the rear of the car, where he sat smoking and looking into the clear star-lit heavens above the desert. And his mind went back thirty years to the twilight in June after he had set off the powder keg in the culvert under Main Street in Sycamore Ridge, and he tried to remember how Jane Mason got over from Minneola—did he bring her over the day before, or was she visiting at the Culpeppers', or did she come over that day? It puzzled him, but he remembered well that in the Congregational choir he and Jane sang a duet in an anthem, "He giveth his beloved sleep." And he hummed the old aria, a rather melancholy tune, as he sat on the car platform in Arizona that night, and her voice came back—a deep sweet contralto that took "G" below middle "C" as clearly as a tenor, and in her lower register there was a passion and a fire that did not blaze in the higher notes. For those notes were merely girlish and untrained. That June night in '73 was the first night that he and Jane Mason ever had lagged behind as they walked up the hill with Bob and Molly. And what curious things stick in the memory! The man on the rear of the car remembered that as they left the business part of Main Street behind and walked up the hill, they came to a narrow cross-walk, a single stone in width, and that they tried to walk upon it together, and that his limp made him jostle her, and she said, "We mustn't do that."

"What?" he inquired.

"Oh—you know—walk on one stone. You know what it's a sign of."

"Do you believe in signs?" he asked. She kept hold of his arm, and kept him from leaving the stone. She was taller than he by a head, and he hated himself for it. They managed to keep together until they crossed the street and came into the broader walk. Then she drew a relieved breath and answered: "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I do." They were lagging far behind their friends, and the girl hummed a tune, then she said, "You know I've always believed in my 'Star light—star bright—first star I've seen to-night,' just as I believe in my prayers." And she looked up and said, "Oh, I haven't said it yet." She picked out her star and said the rhyme, closing with, "I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish to-night."

And sitting on the car end in Arizona thirty years after, he tried to find her star in the firmament above him. He was a man in his fifties then, and the night she showed him her star was more than thirty years gone by. But he remembered. We are curious creatures, we men, and we remember much more than we pretend to. For our mothers in many cases were women, and we take after them.