Margret Howth, a Story of To-Day, Rebecca Harding Davis [best novels for students TXT] 📗

of view. They were talking low, out of hearing from the clerks.
"It's a good thing for Holmes," said one, a burly, farmer-like man, who was choosing specimens of wool.
"Cheap. And long credit. Just half the concern he takes."
"There is a lady in the case?" suggested a young doctor, who, by virtue of having spent six months in the South, dropped his r-s, and talked of "niggahs" in a way to make a Georgian's hair stand on end.
"A lady in the case?"
"Of course. Only child of Herne's. HE comes down with the dust as dowry. Good thing for Holmes. 'Stonishin' how he's made his way up. If money 's what he wants in this world, he's making a long stride now to 't."
The young doctor lighted his cigar, asserting that--
"Ba George, some low people did get on, re-markably! Mary Herne, now, was best catch in town."
"Do you think money is what he wants?" said a quiet little man, sitting lazily on a barrel,--a clergyman, Vandyke; whom his clerical brothers shook their heads when they named, but never argued with, and bowed to with uncommon deference.
The wool-buyer hesitated with a puzzled look.
"No," he said, slowly; "Stephen Holmes is not miserly. I've knowed him since a boy. To buy place, power, perhaps, eh? Yet not that, neither," he added, hastily. "We think a sight of him out our way, (self-made, you see,) and would have had him the best office in the State before this, only he was so cursedly indifferent."
"Indifferent, yes. No man cares much for stepping-stones in themselves," said Vandyke, half to himself.
"Great fault of American society, especially in the West," said the young aristocrat. "Stepping-stones lie low, as my reverend friend suggests; impudence ascends; merit and refinement scorn such dirty paths,"--with a mournful remembrance of the last dime in his waistcoat-pocket.
"But do you," exclaimed the farmer, with sudden solemnity, "do you understand this scheme of Knowles's? Every dollar he owns is in this mill, and every dollar of it is going into some castle in the air that no sane man can comprehend."
"Mad as a March hare," contemptuously muttered the doctor.
His reverend friend gave him a look,--after which he was silent.
"I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it," persisted the wool-man, earnestly looking at the attentive face of his listener. "We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart while he ruins himself. It's something of a Communist fraternity: I don't know the name, but I know the thing."
Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors.
"There's two ways for 'em to end. If they're made out of the top of society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every particle flies off on its own special path to the sun, and the Community 's broke; and if they're made of the lower mud, they keep going down, down together,--they live to drink and eat, and make themselves as near the brutes as they can. It isn't easy to believe, Sir, but it's true. I have seen it. I've seen every one of them the United States can produce. It's FACTS, Sir; and facts, as Lord Bacon says, 'are the basis of every sound speculation.'"
The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,--"You see, that nailed the parson."
The parson nodded gravely.
"You'll find no such experiment in the Bible," threw in the young doctor, alluding to "serious things" as a peace-offering to his reverend friend.
"One, I believe," dryly.
"Well," broke in the farmer, folding up his wool, "that's neither here nor there. This experiment of Knowles's is like nothing known since the Creation. Plan of his own. He spends his days now hunting out the gallows-birds out of the dens in town here, and they're all to be transported into the country to start a new Arcadia. A few men and women like himself, but the bulk is from the dens, I tell you. All start fair, level ground, perpetual celibacy, mutual trust, honour, rise according to the stuff that's in them,--pah! it makes me sick!"
"Knowles's inclination to that sort of people is easily explained," spitefully lisped the doctor. "Blood, Sir. His mother was a half-breed Creek, with all the propensities of the redskins to fire-water and 'itching palms.' Blood will out."
"Here he is," maliciously whispered the woolman. "No, it's Holmes," he added, after the doctor had started into a more respectful posture, and glanced around frightened.
He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes's coming footstep,--"a low fellah, but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin' to marry the best catch," etc., etc. The others, on the contrary, put on their hats and sauntered away into the street.
The day broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars curdling up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along the dry gutters. The old school-master in the shade of the great horse-chestnuts (brought from the homestead in the Piedmont country, every one) husked corn for his wife, composing, meanwhile, a page of his essay on the "Sirventes de Bertrand de Born." Joel, up in the barn by himself, worked through the long day in the old fashion,--pondering gravely (being of a religious turn) upon a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Clinche, reported in the "Gazette;" wherein that disciple of the meek Teacher invoked, as he did once a week, the curses of the law upon slaveholders, praying the Lord to sweep them immediately from the face of the earth. Which rendering of Christian doctrine was so much relished by Joel, and the other leading members of Mr. Clinche's church, that they hinted to him it might be as well to continue choosing his texts from Moses and the Prophets until the excitement of the day was over. The New Testament was,--well,--hardly suited for the--emergency; did not, somehow, chime in with the lesson of the hour. I may remark, in passing, that this course of conduct so disgusted the High Church rector of the parish, that he not only ignored all new devils, (as Mr. Carlyle might have called them,) but talked as if the millennium were un fait accompli, and he had leisure to go and hammer at the poor dead old troubles of Luther's time. One thing, though, about Joel: while he was joining in Mr. Clinche's petition for the "wiping out" of some few thousands, he was using up all the fragments of the hot day in fixing a stall for a half-dead old horse he had found by the road-side.
Perhaps, even if the listening angel did not grant the prayer, he marked down the stall at least, as a something done for eternity.
Margret, through the stifling air, worked steadily alone in the dusty office, her face bent over the books, never changing but once. It was a trifle then; yet, when she looked back afterwards, the trifle was all that gave the day a name. The room shook, as I said, with the thunderous, incessant sound of the engines and the looms; she scarcely heard it, being used to it. Once, however, another sound came between,--an iron tread, passing through the long wooden corridor,--so firm and measured that it sounded like the monotonous beatings of a clock. She heard it through the noise in the far distance; it came slowly nearer, up to the door without,--passed it, going down the echoing plank walk. The girl sat quietly, looking out at the dead brick wall. The slow step fell on her brain like the sceptre of her master; if Knowles had looked in her face then, he would have seen bared the secret of her life. Holmes had gone by, unconscious of who was within the door. She had not seen him; it was nothing but a step she heard. Yet a power, the power of the girl's life, shook off all outward masks, all surface cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a terrible passion at the sound; her blood burned fiercely; her soul looked out, her soul as it was, as God knew it,--God and this man. No longer a cold, clear face; you would have thought, looking at it, what a strong spirit the soul of this woman would be, if set free in heaven or in hell. The man who held it in his grasp went on carelessly, not knowing that the mere sound of his step had raised it as from the dead. She, and her right, and her pain, were nothing to him now, she remembered, staring out at the taunting hot sky. Yet so vacant was the sudden life opened before her when he was gone, that, in the desperation of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again, she would have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step crush her life out,--as he would have done, she thought, choking down the icy smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose, though it cost his own heart's life to do it. He would trample her down, if she kept him back from his end; but be false to her, false to himself, that he would never be!
The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken peering out, grew sharper and more real. Life was no morbid nightmare now; her weak woman's heart found it near, cruel. There was not a pain nor a want, from the dumb question in the dog's eyes that passed her on the street, to her father's hopeless fancies, that did not touch her sharply through her own loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to do something to save others with this poor life left in her hands.
So the day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,--baking the hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up the bits of grass that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling off the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses. He looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these where you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going day by day through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, passing through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I might read, if our eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be, you think? A commonplace crowd like this in the street without: women with cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize-fighters, negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds, philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,--where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.
Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before. People called him a fanatic. It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man, sick in soul from some pain that I dare not tell you of; in his own life,