CHAPTER XIX
Back in the days when John Barclay had become powerful enough to increase the price of his door strips to the railroad companies from five dollars to seven and a half, he had transferred the business of the factory that made the strips from Hendricks' Exchange National to the new Merchants' State Bank which Gabriel Carnine was establishing. For Carnine and Barclay were more of a mind than were Barclay and Hendricks; Carnine was bent on getting rich, and he had come to regard Barclay as the most remarkable man in the world. Hendricks, on the other hand, knew Barclay to the core, and since the quarrel of the seventies, while they had maintained business relations, they were merely getting along together. There were times when Barclay felt uncomfortable, knowing that Hendricks knew much about his business, but the more Carnine knew, the more praise Barclay had of him; and so, even though Jane kept her own account with Hendricks, and though John himself kept a personal account with Hendricks, the Economy Door Strip Company and the Golden Belt Wheat Company did business with Carnine, and Barclay became a director of the Merchants' State Bank, and greatly increased its prestige thereby. And Bob Hendricks sighed a sigh of relief, for he knew that he would never become John Barclay's fence and be called upon to dispose of stolen goods. So Hendricks went his way with his eyes on a level and his jaw squared with the world. And when he knew that Jane knew the secret of his soul, about the only comfort he had in those black days was the exultation in his heart that John—whatever he might know—could not turn it into cash at the Exchange National Bank.
As he walked alone under the stars that first night after Molly Brownwell's note came to him, he saw his life as it was, with things squarely in their relations. Of course this light did not stay with him always; at times in his loneliness the old cloud of wild yearning would come over him, and he would rattle the bars of his madhouse until he could fight his way out to the clean air of Heaven under the stars. And at such times he would elude Dolan, and walk far away from the town in fields and meadows and woods struggling back to sanity—sometimes through a long night. But as the years passed, this truth came to be a part of his consciousness—that in some measure the thing we call custom, or law, or civilization, or society, with all its faults, is the best that man, endowed as he is to-day, can establish, and that the highest service one can pay to man or to God is found in conforming to the social compact, at whatever cost of physical pain, or mental anguish, if the conformation does not require a moral breach. That was the faith he lived by, that by service to his fellows and by sacrifice to whatever was worthy in the social compact, he would find a growth of soul that would pay him, either here or hereafter. So he lent money, and sold light, and traded in merchandise, and did a man's work in politics—playing each game according to the rules.
But whatever came to him, whatever of honour or of influence, or of public respect, in his own heart there was the cloud—he knew that he was a forger, and that once he had offered to throw everything he had aside and take in return—But he was not candid enough even in his own heart to finish the indictment. It made him flush with shame, and perhaps that was why on his face there was often a curious self-deprecating smile—not of modesty, not of charity, but the smile of the man who is looking at a passing show and knows that it is not real. As he went into his forties, and the flux of his life hardened, he became a man of reserves—a kind, quiet, strong man, charitable to a fault for the weaknesses of others, but a man who rarely reflected his impulses, a listener in conversation, a dreamer amid the tumult of business, whose success lay in his industry and caution, and who drew men to him not by what he promised, but by the faith we chattering daws have in the man who looks on and smiles while we prattle.
His lank bones began to take on flesh, and his face rounded at the corners, and the eagerness of youth passed from him. He always looked more of a man than John Barclay. For Barclay was a man of enthusiasms, who occasionally liked to mouth a hard jaw-breaking "damn," and who followed his instincts with womanly faith in them—so that he became known as a man of impulse. But Hendricks' power was in repression, and in Sycamore Ridge they used to say that the only reason why Bob Hendricks grew a mustache was to chew it when people expected him to talk. It wasn't much of a mustache—a little blond fuzz about as heavy as his yellow eyebrows over his big inquiring blue eyes, and he once told Dolan that he kept it for a danger signal. When he found himself pulling at it, he knew he was nervous and should get out into the open. They tell a story in the Ridge to the effect that Hendricks started to run to a fire, and caught himself pulling at his mustache, and turned around and went out to the power-house instead.
It was the only anecdote ever told of Hendricks after he was forty—for he was not a man about whom anecdotes would hang well, though the town is full of them about John Barclay. So Hendricks lived a strong reticent man, who succeeded in business though he was honest, and who won in politics by choosing his enemies from the kind of noisy men who make many mistakes, and let every one know it. The time came when he did not avoid Molly Brownwell; she felt that he was not afraid to see her in any circumstances, and that made her happy. Sometimes she went to him in behalf of one of her father's charges,—some poor devil who could not pay his note at the bank and keep the children in school, or some clerk or workman at the power-house who had been discharged. At such times they talked the matter in hand over frankly, and it ended by the man giving way to the woman, or showing her simply that she was wrong.
Only once in nearly a score of years did a personal word pass between them. She had come to him for his signature to a petition for a pardon for a man whose family suffered while he was in the penitentiary. Hendricks signed the paper and handed it back to her, and his blue eyes were fixed impersonally upon her, and he smiled his curious, self-deprecatory smile and sighed, "As we forgive our debtors." Then he reached for a paper in his desk and seemed oblivious to her presence. No one else was near them, and the woman hesitated a moment before turning to go and repeated, "Yes, Bob—as we forgive our debtors." She tried to show him the radiance in her soul, but he did not look up and she went away. When she had gone, he pushed aside his work and sat for a moment looking into the street; he began biting his mustache, and rose, and went out of the bank and found some other work.
That night as Hendricks and Dolan walked over the town together, Dolan said: "Did you ever know, Robert"—that was as near familiarity as the elder man came with Hendricks—"that Mart Culpepper owed his son-in-law a lot of money?"