A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

For two days he was plunged in gloom, and Barclay, observing his depression and worming out of the colonel the cause, persuaded General Hendricks to put the overdraft and the second mortgage note into one note for a thousand dollars plus the interest for sixty days until the colonel could make a turn, and after that the colonel was happy again. He forgot for a moment the responsibility of wealth and engaged himself in the task of making the Memorial Day celebration in Sycamore Ridge the greatest event in the history of the town. Though there were only five soldiers' graves to decorate, the longest procession Garrison County had ever known wound up the hill to the cemetery, and Colonel Martin Culpepper in his red sash, with his Knights Templar hat on, riding up and down the line on an iron-gray stallion, was easily the most notable figure in the spectacle. Even General Hendricks, revived by the pomp of the occasion, heading the troop of ten veterans of the Mexican War, and General Ward, in his regimentals, were inconsequential compared with the colonel. And his oration at the graves, after the bugles had blown taps, kept the multitude in tears for half an hour. John Barclay's address at the Opera House that afternoon—the address on "The Soldier and the Scholar"—was so completely overshadowed by the colonel's oratorical flight that Jane teased her husband about the eclipse for a month, and never could make him laugh. Moreover, the Banner that week printed the colonel's oration in full and referred to John's address as "a few sensible remarks by Hon. John Barclay on the duty of scholarship in times of peace." But here is the strange thing about it—those who read the colonel's oration were not moved by it; the charm of the voice and the spell of the tall, handsome, vigorous man and the emotion of the occasion were needed to make the colonel's oratory move one. Still, opinions differ even about so palpable a proposition as the ephemeral nature of the colonel's oratory. For the Banner that week pronounced it one of the classic oratorical gems of American eloquence, and the editor thereof brought a dozen copies of the paper under his arm when he climbed the hill to Lincoln Avenue the following Sunday night, and presented them to the women of the Culpepper household, whom he was punctilious to call "the ladies," and he assured Miss Molly and Mistress Culpepper—he was nice about those titles also—that their father and husband had a great future before him in the forum.

It may be well to pause here and present so punctilious a gentleman as Adrian Pericles Brownwell to the reader somewhat more formally than he has been introduced. For he will appear in this story many times. In the first place he wore mustaches—chestnut-coloured mustaches—that drooped rather gracefully from his lip to his jaw, and thence over his coat lapels; in the second place he always wore gloves, and never was without a flower in his long frock-coat; and thirdly he clicked his cane on the sidewalk so regularly that his approach was heralded, and the company was prepared for the coming of a serious, rather nervous, fiery man, a stickler for his social dues; and finally in those days, those sombre days of Sycamore Ridge after the panic of '73, when men had to go to the post-office to get their ten-dollar bills changed, Brownwell had the money to support the character he assumed. He had come to the Ridge from the South,—from that part of the South that carried its pistol in its hip pocket and made a large and serious matter of its honour,—that was obvious; he had paid Ezra Lane two thousand dollars for the Banner, that was a matter of record; and he had marched with some grandeur into General Hendricks' bank one Saturday and had clinked out five thousand dollars in gold on the marble slab at the teller's window, and that was a matter attested to by a crowd of witnesses. Watts McHurdie used to say that more people saw that deposit than could be packed into the front room of the bank with a collar stuffer.

But why Adrian Brownwell had come to the Ridge, and where he had made his money—there myth and fable enter into the composition of the narrative, and one man's opinion is as good as another's. Curiously enough, all who testify claim that they speak by the authority of Mr. Brownwell himself. But he was a versatile and obliging gentleman withal, so it is not unlikely that all those who assembled him from the uttermost parts of the earth into Sycamore Ridge for all the reasons in the longer catechism, were telling the simple truth as they have reason to believe it. What men know of a certainty is that he came, that he hired the bridal chamber of the Thayer House for a year, and that he contested John Barclay's right to be known as the glass of fashion and the mould of form in Garrison County for thirty long years, and then—but that is looking in the back of the book, which is manifestly unfair.

It is enough to know now that on that Sunday evening after Memorial Day, in 1874, Adrian P. Brownwell sat on the veranda of the Culpepper home slapping his lavender gloves on his knee by way of emphasis, and told the company what he told General Beauregard and what General Beauregard told him, at the battle of Shiloh; also what his maternal grandfather, Governor Papin, had said to General Jackson, when his grandmother, then Mademoiselle Dulangpré, youngest daughter of the refugee duke of that house, had volunteered to nurse the American soldiers in Jackson's hospital after the battle of New Orleans; also, and with detail, what his father, Congressman Brownwell, had said on the capitol steps in December, 1860, before leaving for Washington to resign his seat in Congress; and also with much greater detail he recounted the size of his ancestral domain, the number of the ancestral slaves and the royal state of the ancestral household, and then with a grand wave of his gloves, and a shrug of which Madam Papin might well have been proud, "But 'tis all over; and we are brothers—one country, one flag, one God, one very kind but very busy God!" And he smiled so graciously through his great mustaches, showing his fine even teeth, that Mrs. Culpepper, Methodist to the heart, smiled back and was not so badly shocked as she knew she should have been.

"Is it not so?" he asked with his voice and his hands at once. "Ah," he exclaimed, addressing Mrs. Culpepper dramatically, "what better proof would you have of our brotherhood than our common bondage to you? However dark the night of our national discord—to-day, North, South, East, West, we bask in the sunrise of some woman's eyes." He fluttered his gloves gayly toward Molly and continued:—

"'O when did morning ever break,
And find such beaming eyes awake.'"

And so he rattled on, and the colonel had to poke his words into the conversation in wedge-shaped queries, and Mrs. Culpepper, being in due and proper awe of so much family and such apparent consequence, spoke little and smiled many times. And if it was "Miss Molly" this and "Miss Molly" that, when the colonel went into the house to lock the back doors, and "Miss Molly" the other when Mrs. Culpepper went in to open the west bedroom windows; and even if it was "Miss Molly, shall we go down town and refresh ourselves with a dish of ice-cream?" and even if still further a full-grown man standing at the gate under the May moon deftly nips a rose from Miss Molly's hair and holds the rose in both hands to his lips as he bows a good night—what then? What were roses made for and brown eyes and long lashes and moons and May winds heavy with the odour of flowers and laden with the faint sounds of distant herd bells tinkling upon the hills? For men are bold at thirty-five, and maidens, the best and sweetest, truest, gentlest maidens in all the world, are shy at twenty-one, and polite to their elders and betters of thirty-five—even when those elders and betters forget their years!

As for Adrian P. Brownwell, he went about his daily task, editing the Banner, making it as luscious and effulgent as a seed catalogue, with rhetorical pictures about as florid and unconvincing. To him the town was a veritable Troy—full of heroes and demigods, and honourables and persons of nobility and quality. He used no adjective of praise milder than superb, and on the other hand, Lige Bemis once complained that the least offensive epithet he saw in the Banner tacked after his name for two years was miscreant. As for John Barclay, he once told General Ward that a man could take five dollars in to Brownwell and come out a statesman, a Crœsus or a scholar, as the exigencies of the case demanded, and for ten dollars he could combine the three.

Yet for all that Brownwell ever remained a man apart. No one thought of calling him "Ade." Sooner would one nickname a gargoyle on a tin cornice. So the editor of the Banner never came close to the real heart of Sycamore Ridge, and often for months at a time he did not know what the people were thinking. And that summer when General Hendricks was walking out of the bank every hour and looking from under his thin, blue-veined hand at the strange cloud of insects covering the sky, and when Martin Culpepper was predicting that the plague of grasshoppers would leave the next day, and when John Barclay was getting that deep vertical crease between his eyes that made him look forty while he was still in his twenties, Adrian P. Brownwell was chirping cheerfully in the Banner about the "salubrious climate of Garrison County," and writing articles about "our phenomenal prospects for a bumper crop." And when in the middle of July the grasshoppers had eaten the wheat to the ground and had left the corn stalks stripped like beanpoles, and had devoured every green thing in their path, the Banner contained only a five-line item referring to the plague and calling it a "most curious and unusual visitation." But that summer the Banner was filled with Brownwell's editorials on "The Tonic Effect of the Prairie Ozone," "Turn the Rascals Out," "Our Duty to the South," and "The Kingdom of Corn." As a writer Brownwell was what is called "fluent" and "genial." And he was fond of copying articles from the Topeka and Kansas City papers about himself, in which he was referred to as "the gallant and urbane editor of the Banner."

But then we all have our weaknesses, and be it said to the everlasting credit of Adrian Brownwell that he understood and appreciated Watts McHurdie and Colonel Culpepper better than any other man in town, and that he printed Watts' poems on all occasions, and never referred to him as anything less than "our honoured townsman," or as "our talented and distinguished fellow-citizen," and he never laughed at General Ward. But the best he could do for John Barclay—even after John had become one of the world's great captains—was to wave his gloves resignedly and exclaim, "Industry, thy name is Barclay." And Barclay in return seemed never to warm up to Brownwell. "Colonel," replied John to some encomium of his old friend's upon the new editor, "I'll say this much. Certainly your friend is a prosperous talker!"