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Dominie Dean: A Novel

by Ellis Parker Butler · English · Gutenberg #44220 · 417,183 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Dominie Dean: A Novel

Author: Ellis Parker Butler

Illustrator: Victor Semon Pérard


        
Release date: November 18, 2013 [eBook #44220]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44220

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOMINIE DEAN: A NOVEL ***

DOMINIE DEAN

A Novel

By Ellis Parker Butler


1917

Fleming And Revell Company



My Dear Mr. Dare:

That day when you came to my home and suggested that I write the book to
which I now gratefully prefix this brief dedication, I little imagined
how real David Dean would become to me. I have just written the
last page of his story and I feel less that he is a creature of my
imagination than that he is someone I have known and loved all my life.

It was because there are many such men as David Dean, big of heart
and great in spirit, that you suggested the writing and helped me with
incident and inspiration. Your hope was that the story might aid those
who regret that such men as David Dean can be neglected and cast aside
after lives spent in faithful service, and who are working to prevent
such tragedies; my desire was to tell as truthfully as possible the
story of one such man.

While I have had a free hand in developing the character of David Dean,
I most gratefully acknowledge that the suggestion of the idea, and the
inspiration, were yours, and I hope I have not misused them.

Most sincerely,

Ellis Parker Butler

Flushing, N. Y.





I. 'THUSIA

[Illustration: 'Thusia  018]

DAVID DEAN caught his first glimpse of 'Thusia Fragg from the deck of
the “Mary K” steamboat at the moment when--a fledgling minister--he
ended his long voyage down the Ohio and up the Mississippi and was ready
to step on Riverbank soil for the first time.

From mid-river, as the steamer approached, the town had seemed but a
fringe of buildings at the foot of densely foliaged hills with here
and there a house showing through the green and with one or two church
spires rising above the trees. Then the warehouse shut off the view
while the “Mary K” made an unsensational landing, bumping against the
projecting piles, bells jingling in her interior, paddle wheels noisily
reversing and revolving again and the mate swearing at the top of
his voice. As the bow of the steamer pushed beyond the warehouse, the
sordidly ugly riverfront of the town came into view again--mud, sand,
weather-beaten frame buildings--while on the sandy levee at the side
of the warehouse lounged the twenty or thirty male citizens in shirt
sleeves who had come down to see the arrival of the steamer. From the
saloon deck they watched the steamer push her nose beyond the blank red
wall of the warehouse. Against the rail stood all the boat's passengers
and at David's side the friend he had made on the voyage up the river,
a rough, tobacco-chewing itinerant preacher, uncouth enough but wise in
his day and generation.

“Well, this is your Riverbank,” he said. “Here ye are. Now, hold on!
Don't be in a hurry. There's your reception committee, I'll warrant
ye,--them three with their coats on. Don't get excited. Let 'em wait
and worry a minute for fear you've not come. Keep an even mind under
all circumstances, as your motter says--that's the idee. Let 'em wait.
They'll think all the better of ye, brother. Keep an even mind, hey?
You'll need one with that mastiff-jowled old elder yonder. He's going to
be your trouble-man.”

David put down the carpetbag he had taken up. Of the three men warranted
to be his reception committee he recognized but one, Lawyer Hoskins, the
man who while East had heard David preach and had extended to him the
church's call. Now Hoskins recognized David and raised his hand in
greeting. It was at this moment that 'Thusia Fragg issued from the side
door of the warehouse, two girl companions with her, and faced toward
the steamboat. In the general gray of the day she was like a splash of
sunshine and her companions were hardly less vivid. 'Thusia Fragg was
arrayed in a dress that echoed the boldest style set forth by “Godey's
Ladies' Book” for that year of grace, 1860---a summer silk of gray and
gold stripes, flounced and frilled and raffled and fringed--and on her
head perched a hat that was sauciness incarnate. She was overdressed by
any rule you chose. She was overdressed for Riverbank and overdressed
for her father's income and for her own position, but she was a
beautiful picture as she stood leaning on her parasol, letting her eyes
range over the passengers grouped at the steamer's saloon deck rail.

As she stood there David raised his hand in answer to Lawyer Hoskins'
greeting and 'Thusia Fragg, smiling, raised a black-mitted hand and
waved at him in frank flirtation. Undoubtedly she had thought David had
meant his salutation for her. David turned from the rail, grasped his
companion's hand in hearty farewell, and, with his carpetbag in hand,
descended to the lower deck, and 'Thusia, preening like a peacock,
hurried with her girl companions to the foot of the gangplank to meet
her new conquest.

This was not the first time 'Thusia had flirted with the male passengers
of the packets. Few boats arrived without one or more young dandies
aboard, glad to vary the monotony of a long trip and ready to take part
in a brief flirtation with any 'Thusia and to stretch their legs ashore
while the sweating negroes loaded and unloaded the cargo. When the stop
was long enough there was usually time for a brisk walk to the main
street and for hurried ice cream treats. The warning whistle of the
steamer gave ample time for these temporary beaux to reach the boat. The
'Thusias who could be found all up and down the river knew just the safe
distance to carry their cavaliers in order to bring them back to the
departing steamer in the nick of time, sometimes running the last
hundred yards at a dog trot, the girls stopping short with little cries
of laughter and shrill farewells, but reaching the boat landing in time
to wave parasols or handkerchiefs.

Most of these gayly garbed girls were innocent enough, although these
steamer flirtations were evidence that they were not sufficiently
controlled by home influences. Such actually bad girls as the town had,
did however, indulge in these touch-and-go-flirtations often enough
to cause the sober-minded to look askance at all the young persons who
flirted thus. While the more innocent, like 'Thusia, made use of these
opportunities only for their momentary flare of adventure, and while
the young men were seldom seen again, even on the return trip, the town
quite naturally classed all these girls as “gay”--whatever that meant.

As David stepped on the gangplank to leave the steamer he saw the three
girls, 'Thusia a little in advance, standing at the foot of the plank.
'Thusia herself, saucy in her defiance of the eyes she knew were upon
her, smiled up at him, her eyes beaming a greeting, her feet ready to
fall into step with his, and her lips ready to begin a rapid chattering
to carry the incident over the first awkward moment in case her “catch”
 proved mutely bashful. She put out her hand, either in greeting or to
take David's arm, but David, his head held high, let his clear gray eyes
rest on her for an instant only and then glanced beyond her and passed
by. The girl colored with rage or shame and drew back her hand as if
she had unwittingly touched something hot with unprepared fingers. Her
companions giggled.

The incident was over in less time than is needed to tell of it. Henry
Fragg, 'Thusia's widowed father and agent for the steamers, seeing the
committee awaiting David, came from his office and walked toward them.
David strode up the plank dock to where Mr. Hoskins was holding out a
welcoming hand and was greeted and introduced to Sam Wiggett, Ned Long
and Mr. Fragg.

The greeting of Mr. Hoskins had a flourishing orational flavor; Sam
Wiggett--a heavy-set man--went so far as to exceed his usual gruff grunt
of recognition; and Ned Long, as usual, copied as closely as possible
Sam Wiggett's words and manner. Mr. Fragg's welcome was hearty and, of
the four, the only natural man-to-man greeting.

“New dominie, hey? Well, you'll like this town when you get to know it,”
 he assured David. “Plenty of real folks here; good town and good people.
All right, Mack!” he broke off to shout to the mate of the “Mary K”;
“yes, all those casks go aboard. Well, I'm glad to have met you, Mr.
Dean--”

'Thusia was still standing where David had passed her, her back toward
the town. Usually saucy enough, she was ashamed to turn and face those
clean gray eyes again. Her father saw her. “'Thusia!” he called.

She turned and came.

“'Thusia, this is our new dominie,” Fragg said, placing his hand on her
arm. “This is my daughter, Mr. Dean. Aren't the women having some sort
of welcome hurrah up at the manse? Why don't you go up there and take a
hand in it, 'Thusia? Well, Mr. Dean, I'll see you many times, I hope.”

'Thusia, all her sauciness gone, stood abashed, and David tried vainly
to find a word to ease the embarrassing situation. Mr. Wiggett relieved
it by ignoring 'Thusia utterly.

“Fragg will send your baggage up,” he growled. “We'll walk. The women
will be impatient; they've heard the boat whistle. You come with me,
Dean, I want to talk to you.”

He turned his back on 'Thusia and led David away.

“The less you have to do with that girl the better,” were his first
words. “That's for your own good. Hey, Long?”

“My opinion, my opinion exactly!” echoed Mr. Long. “The less the better.
Yes, yes!”

“She's got in with a crowd of fast young fools,” agreed Mr. Hoskins.
“Crazy after the men. Fragg ought to take her into the woodshed and use
a good stiff shingle on her about once every so often. He lets her run
too wild. No sense in it!”

What 'Thusia needed was a mother to see that her vivacity found a more
conventional outlet. There was nothing really wrong with 'Thusia. She
was young and fun-loving and possessed of more spirit than most of the
young women of the town. She was amazingly efficient. Had she been
a slower girl the housework of her father's home would have kept her
close, but she had the knack of speed. She sped through her housework
like a well-oiled machine and, once through with it, she fled from the
gloomy, motherless place to find what lively companionship she could.
It would have been better for her reputation had she been a sloven,
dawdling over her work and then moping away the short leisure at home.

Every small town has girls like 'Thusia Fragg. You may see them arm in
arm at the railway station as the trains pause for a few minutes, ready
to chaffer with any “nice-looking” young fellow in a car window. You see
them strolling past the local hotel, two or three in a group, ready to
fall into step with any young drummer who is willing to leave his chair
for a stroll. Some are bad girls, some are on the verge of the precipice
of evil, and some, like 'Thusia, are merely lovers of excitement and not
yet aware of the real dangers with which they play.

'Thusia, running the streets, was in danger of becoming too daring. She
knew the town talked about her and she laughed at its gossip. In such a
contest the rebel usually loses; in conspiring against smugness she ends
by falling into the ranks of immorality. In Riverbank before the Civil
War the danger to reputation was even greater than it is now; morality
was marked by stricter conventions.

'Thusia, despite her new dress and hat, did not linger downtown after
her meeting with David. She took the teasing of her two girl friends,
who made a great joke of her attempt to flirt with the new dominie,
good-naturedly, but she left them as soon as she could and walked home.
Her face burned with shame as she thought of the surprised glance David
had given her at the foot of the gangplank and, as she entered her
motherless home, she jerked her hat from her head and angrily threw
it the length of the hall. She stood a moment, opening and closing her
fists, like an angry animal, and then, characteristically, she giggled.
She retrieved her hat, put it on her head and studied herself in the
hall mirror. She tried several smiles and satisfied herself that they
were charming and then, unhooking her dress as she went, she mounted the
stairs. When she was in her room she threw herself on her bed and wept.
Her emotions were in a chaos; and out of this came gradually the feeling
that all she cared for now was to have those cool gray eyes of David's
look upon her approvingly. Everything she had done in her life seemed to
have been deliberately planned to make them disapprove of her. Weighing
her handicap calmly but urged by wounded pride, or desire, or love--she
did not know which--she set about her pitiful attempt to fascinate David
Dean.

The first Sunday that David preached in Riverbank 'Thusia bedecked
herself glowingly and sat in a pew where he could not fail to see her.
Since the death of his wife Mr. Fragg had taken to churchgoing, sitting
in a pew near the door so that he might slip out in case he heard the
whistle of an arriving steamboat, but 'Thusia chose a pew close under
the pulpit. After the service there was the usual informal hand-shaking
reception for the new dominie and 'Thusia waited until the aisles were
well cleared. Mr. Wiggett, Mr. Hoskins and one or two other elders and
trustees acted as a self-appointed committee to introduce David and, as
if intentionally, they built a barrier of their bodies to keep 'Thusia
from him. She waited, leaning against the end of a pew, but the half
circle of black coats did not open. As the congregation thinned and
David moved toward the door his protectors moved with him. The sexton
began closing the windows. The black coats herded David into the
vestibule and out upon the broad top step and still 'Thusia leaned
against the pew, but her eyes followed David.

“Come, come! We'll have to be moving along, dominie,” growled Mr.
Wiggett impatiently, as David stopped to receive the congratulations of
one of the tireless-tongued old ladies. “Dinner at one, you know.”

“Yes, coming!” said David cheerfully, and he gave the old lady a last
shake of the hand. “Now!” he said, and turned.

'Thusia, pushing between Mr. Wiggett and Mr. Hoskins, came with her hand
extended and her face glowing.

“I waited until they were all gone,” she said eagerly. “I wanted to tell
you how splendid your sermon was. It was wonderful, Mr. Dean. I'm coming
every Sunday--”

David took her hand. He was glowing with the kindly greetings and
praises that had been showered upon him, and his happiness showed in his
eyes. He would have beamed on anyone at that moment, and he beamed on
'Thusia. He said something pleasantly conventional and 'Thusia chattered
on, still holding his hand, although in his general elation he was
hardly aware of this and not at all aware that the girl was clinging to
his hand so firmly that he could not have drawn it away had he tried.
She knew they made a striking picture as they stood on the top step and
she stood as dose to him as she could, so that she had to look up and
David had to look down. The departing congregation, looking back for
a last satisfactory glimpse of their fine new dominie, carried away a
picture of David holding 'Thusia's hand and looking down into her face.

“Come, come! Dinner's waiting!” Mr. Wiggett growled impatiently.

“Well, good-by, Mr. Dean,” 'Thusia exclaimed. “My dinner is waiting,
too, and you must not keep me forever, you know. I suppose we'll see a
great deal of each other, anyway. Now--will you please let me have my
hand?”

She laughed and David dropped her hand. He blushed. 'Thusia ran down
the steps and David turned to see Mary Wiggett standing in the vestibule
door in an attitude best described as insultedly aloof.

Mr. Wiggett's face was red.

“_Her_ dinner waiting!” he cried. “She's got to go home and get it
before it waits. She's a forward, street-gadding hussy!”

“Father!” exclaimed his daughter.

“Well, she shan't come it over the dominie,” he growled. “I'll speak to
Fragg about it.”

David walked ahead with Mary Wiggett. He was no fool. He knew well
enough the troubles a young, unmarried minister has in store if he
happens to be presentable, and he knew he was not ill-favored. It is
not always--except in books--that the leading pillar of the church has a
daughter whose last chance of matrimony is the dominie. Mary Wiggett
had by no means reached her last chance. She was hardly eighteen--only
a year older than 'Thusia Fragg--and forty young men of Riverbank
would have been glad to have married her. She was a little heavier than
'Thusia, both in mind and body, and a little taller, almost matronly in
her development, but she was a splendid girl for all that, and more than
good-looking in a satisfying blond way. David was so far from being her
last chance, that she had not yet thought of David as a possible mate at
all, but it was a fact that David was to take dinner with the Wiggetts
and another fact that 'Thusia was not considered a proper person, and
Mary had resented having to stand back against the church door while
David held 'Thusia's hand. If Mary had one fault it was a certain
feeling that a daughter of Samuel Wiggett, who was the richest man in
the church, was the equal of any girl on earth. To be made to stand back
for 'Thusia Fragg was altogether unbearable.

Neither had Mr. Wiggett, at that time, any thought of David as a husband
for Mary. He hoped Mary would not marry for ten years more and that
when she did she would marry someone “with money.” The only interest the
stubborn, rough-grained old money-lover had in David was the interest of
an upright pillar of the church who, sharing the duty of choosing a new
dominie, had delegated his share to Mr. Hoskins and was still fearful
lest Mr. Hoskins had made a mistake. He was bound it should not be
a mistake if he could help it. Having in his youth had a dozen love
affairs and having married a stolid, cow-like woman for safety's sake,
he believed the natural fate of a young man was to behave foolishly and
he considered a young minister more than normally unable to take care
of himself. If David incurred censure Mr. Wiggett would be blamed for
letting Mr. Hoskins bring David to Riverbank.




II. MARY WIGGETT

[Illustration: Mary  030]


NEITHER Mr. Wiggett nor Mary understood David then. I doubt if Riverbank
ever quite understood him. When he was ten--a thin-faced, large-eyed
child, sitting on the edge of an uncushioned pew in a small, bleak
church, his hands clasped on his knees and his body tense as he hung on
the words of the old dominie in the pulpit above him--he had received
the Call. From that moment his destiny had been fixed. There had been no
splendid Sign--no blaze of glory-light illuminating the dusky interior
of the church, no sun ray turning his golden curls into a halo. His
clasped hands had tightened a little; he had leaned a little further
forward; a long breath, ending in a deep sigh, had raised his thin chest
and David Dean had given himself to his Lord and Master to do His
work while his life should last. Never was a life more absolutely
consecrated.

That the lad Davy should hear the Call was not strange. Religion had
been an all-important part of his parents' lives. The rupture that
wrenched American Presbyterianism into antagonistic parts in the year of
David's birth had been of more vital importance than bread and meat to
David's father.

He never forgave the seceders. To David's mother the rupture had been a
sorrow, as if she had lost a child. In this atmosphere--his father was
an elder--David grew and his faith was fed to him from his birth; it was
part of him, but until the Call came he had not thought of being worthy
to preach. After the Call came he thought of nothing but making himself
worthy.

The eleven following years had been years of preparation. During the
first of these years he spent much time with the old dominie and when
he left school he came under the care of the presbytery of which the
dominie was a member. It was David's father's pride that he was able
to pay David's way through the college and seminary courses. It was his
share in giving Davy to the Lord.

At twenty-one David was a tall youth, slender, thoughtful and delicate.
His hair was almost golden, fine and soft, with a curly forelock. He had
never had a religious doubt. He preached his trial sermon, received his
license and almost immediately his call to Riverbank. This was David,
clean and sure, honest and unafraid, broad-browed and dear-eyed, his
favorite motto: “Keep an even mind under all circumstances.” It was to
protect this young David, clear as crystal and strong as steel, that
the members of the First Presbyterian Church of Riverbank, during those
first weeks, tacitly conspired, and it was against 'Thusia Fragg, the
fluttering, eager and love-incited little butterfly, with a few of
the golden scales already brushed from her wings, that they sought to
protect him.

To her own enormous surprise Mary Wiggett almost immediately fell in
love with David. She was not an emotional girl, and she had long since
decided that when the time came she would marry someone from Derlingport
or St. Louis. She had not thought of falling in love as a necessary
preliminary to marriage. In a vague way she had decided that a husband
from Derlingport or St. Louis would be more desirable because he would
take her to a place where there was more “society” and where certain of
the richer trimmings of life were accepted as reasonable and not frowned
on as extravagances. She had a rather definite idea that her husband
would be someone in the pork or lumber industries, as they were then
the best income producers. She meant to refuse all comers for about five
years, and then begin to consider any who might apply, taking proper
stock of them and proceeding in a sensible, orderly manner. A month
after David came to Riverbank she would have given every man in the pork
and lumber industries for one of David's gentle smiles. She thrilled
with pleasure when he happened to touch her hand. She was thoroughly in
love.

'Thusia, for her part, pursued David unremittingly. She stopped running
the streets, and tried to force her way into the activities of the
church until she was so cruelly snubbed and cold-shouldered that she
wept for anger and gave up the attempt. Then she lay in wait for David.
She sailed down upon him whenever he went upon the streets, seemingly
coming upon him unexpectedly, and falling into step with him. She
ambuscaded him on the main street when he went to the post office for
his mail. She was quite open in her forced attentions, and, of course,
she was talked about. 'Thusia did not care. She had no way of courting
him but by being bold. She fluttered her wings before his eyes whenever
she could. She was a butterfly teasing to be caught.

And David? In spite of Wiggett's warnings and his own he grew fond
of her. You will have to imagine Riverbank as it was then to fully
understand David and 'Thusia: the mean little business street with its
ugly buildings and dust, or mud, ankle deep; the commercial life out
of all proportion to the social life, so that few men thought of aught
beside business; the fair, shady streets of homes with maples already
overarching the streets and the houses of white or brick-red, all with
ample lawns around them. You can see David leave the little white manse
beside the brick church and walk the shady streets, making a pastoral
call or going to the post office. Those pastoral calls! Serious matters
for a young dominie in those days! The dominie was expected to come
like a plumber, with his kit of tools, ready to set to work on a leaky
conscience or a frost-bit soul and his visits were for little else but
soul mending. We saved up our little leaks for him just as we saved up
our little ills for the doctor, and we gave him his fill. We felt we
were remiss if we did not have on hand some real or imaginary reason to
make the dominie kneel beside a chair and pray with us. We expected our
dominie to be a little sad when he visited us, a little gloomy about
things in general; probably to give our otherwise cheerful homes a
churchly gloom.

It was when David came from the main street, where the men could talk
nothing but business, or from a pastoral call, and found himself young
and not at all gloomy at heart under the arching trees, that 'Thusia
would waylay him. She laughed and chattered inconsequently and flirted
with all her little might and joked about herself and everyone else and
even about David--and who else dared joke about the dominie!--until he
smiled in spite of himself. His flock seemed to fall naturally into two
classes--those who felt they had a sort of proprietary interest in him
and those who were a little afraid of him. 'Thusia was not like either.
She was a gleam of unadulterated youth. David began to look forward to
their chance meetings with uneasy but pleasant anticipation. She was
like a bit of merry music brightening but not interrupting his work. He
hardly knew how eagerly he looked forward to his meetings with 'Thusia
until after half his congregation was talking about them.

The autumn saw a great outbreak of moneymaking affairs in the church.
There was a mortgage, of course, and church fairs and festivals and
dinners followed one after another under David's eager guidance and it
was impossible to keep 'Thusia from these. She fluttered about David.
One or two of the young women of the church finally ventured to make
use of 'Thusia, setting her to work as a waitress at one of the dinners
where they were short-handed, but Mary Wiggett soon let them know they
had made a mistake. With a woman's intuition she felt in 'Thusia a
dangerous rival. Even before 'Thusia or David suspected the truth she
saw how great an attraction 'Thusia had for the young dominie. Her own
efforts to attract David were necessarily slower and more conventional.
There was no question that Mary would make an excellent wife for a
minister and Mary did not doubt her ability to win David if given time,
but she feared some sudden flare-up of love that might blind David to
the dignity of his position and throw him into 'Thusia's arms, even if
it threw him out of Riverbank. David, she imagined, would be fearless in
any loyalty.

Had there been no 'Thusia Fragg Mary Wiggett would have been well
satisfied with David's progress toward love. He liked Mary immensely
and let her see it. He made her his lieutenant in all the money-raising
affairs and she rightly believed his affection for her was growing, but
she needed time. 'Thusia, on the other hand, would win in a flash or not
at all. Mary spoke to her father; her mother she felt could give her no
aid. Her mother was a dull woman.

The stern-faced Wiggett listened to her grimly.

He was not surprised to hear she loved David; he was surprised that Mary
should come to him for aid. The actual word “love” was not mentioned; we
avoid it in Riverbank except when speaking of others.

“Father, I like David well enough to marry him, if he asked me,” was
what she said.

Further than this she told him nothing but the truth--that the
respectable members of the church were shocked by the attention David
was paying 'Thusia and that they were talking about it. It was a shame,
she said, that he should lose everyone's respect in that way when the
only trouble was that he did not understand.

“You men can't see it, of course, father,” she said. “You don't
understand what it means, as we do. And we can't speak to Mr. Dean. I
can't speak to him.”

“I'll tell that young man a thing or two!” growled Mr. Wiggett angrily.

“No, not you, father,” Mary begged, and when he looked at her with
surprise she blushed. “Huh!” he said, “why not?”

“I--listen, father! I couldn't bear it if he thought I had sent you. I
should die of shame. If you went to him, he might guess.”

“Well, you want to marry him, don't you!”

“If he wants me. But--yes, I do like him, father.”

“Well, you won't be a starved parson's wife, anyway. You'll have money.”
 It was equivalent to another man's hearty good wishes. “Benedict will
talk to him,” he said, and went out to find Benedict.

David had found in old Doctor Benedict a companion and friend. An
old-style family physician, the town's medical man-of-all-work, with a
heart as big as the world and a brain stored with book-lore and native
philosophy, the doctor and David made a strange pair of friends and
loved each other the better for their differences. Once every so often
the doctor had his “periodical,” when he drank until he was stupid.
Once already David, knowing of this weakness and seeing the “period”
 approaching, had kept old Benedict talking philosophy until midnight
and, when he grew restless for brandy, had walked the streets with him
until the older man tottered for weariness and had to be fairly lifted
into his bed. When, the next day, Benedict began the postponed spree
David had dragged him to the manse, and had kept him there that
night, locked in the dominie's own bedroom. Benedict took all this
good-naturedly.

He looked on his “periodicals” as something quite apart from himself. He
did not like them, and he did not dislike them. They came, and when they
came he was helpless. They took charge of him and he could not prevent
them, and he refused to mourn over them or let them spoil his good
nature. The greater part of the year he was himself, but when the
“periodical” came he was like a helpless baby tossed by a pair of
all-powerful arms. He could not defend himself; he did not wish to be
carried away, but it was useless to contend. If David wanted to wrestle
with the thing he was welcome. In the meantime David and Benedict
recognized each in the other an intellectual equal and they became fast
friends. Old Sam Wiggett, holding the mortgages on Benedict's house and
on his horse, and on all that was his, did not hesitate to order him to
talk to David.

“Davy,” said the doctor quizzically as he sat in an easy-chair in
David's study, “they tell me you are paying too much attention to 'Thusy
Fragg.”

David turned.

“Arethusia Fragg?” he said. “You're mistaken, Benedict. I'm paying her
no attention.”

“It's the scandal of the church,” drawled Benedict. “Great commotion.
Everybody whispering about it. You walk abroad with her, Davy; you laugh
with her at oyster suppers.” He became serious. “It's being held against
you. A dominie has to walk carefully, Davy. Small minds are staggered by
small faults--by others' small faults.”

“I meet her occasionally,” said David. “I have seen no wrong in that.”

“That's not for me to say,” said Benedict. “Others do. She's a giddy
youngster; a flyaway; a gay young flibbertygibbet. I don't judge her.
I'm telling you what is said, Davy.”

David sat with his long legs crossed, his chin resting in his hand
and his eyes on the spatter-work motto--“Keep an even mind under all
circumstances”--above his desk. He thought of 'Thusia Fragg and her
attraction and of his duty to himself and to his church, considering
everything calmly. He had felt a growing antagonism without
understanding it. As he thought he forgot Benedict. His hand slid
upward, and his fingers entangled themselves in his curly hair. He sat
so for many minutes.

“Thank you, Benedict,” he said at length. “I understand. I am through
with 'Thusia!”

“Mind you,” drawled Benedict, “I say nothing against the girl. I helped
her into the world, Davy. I've helped a lot of them into the world. It
is not for me to help them through it. When I put them in their mothers'
arms my work is done.”

“I know what you mean,” said David. “If her mother had lived 'Thusia
might have been different. But does that concern me, Benedict?”

“It does not,” grinned the old doctor. “How long have you been calling
her 'Thusia, Davy?”

“My first duty is to my church,” said David. “A minister should be above
reproach in the eyes of his people.”

“That hits the nail on the head, fair and square,” said Benedict.
“You're right every time, Davy. How long have you been calling her
'Thusia?”

“I am not right every time, Benedict,” said David, arising and walking
slowly up and down the floor, his hands clasped behind him, “but I am
right in this. You are wrong when you allow yourself, even for a day, to
fall into a state in which you cannot be of use to your sick when they
call for you, and I would be wrong if I let anything turn my people from
me, for they need me continually. My ministry is more important than I
am. If my right hand offended my people I would cut it off. I have been
careless, I have been thoughtless. I have not paused to consider how my
harmless chance meetings with Miss Fragg might affect my work. Benedict,
a young minister's work is hard enough--with his youthfulness as a
handicap--without--”

“Without 'Thusy,” said Benedict.

“Without the added difficulties that come to an unmarried man,” David
substituted. “The sooner I marry the better for me and for my work and
for my people.”

“And the sooner I'll be chased out of this easy-chair for good and all
by your wife,” said Benedict, rising, “so, if that's the way you feel
about it--and I dare say you are right--I'll try a sample of absence
and go around and see how Mrs. Merkle's rheumatism is amusing her. Well,
Davy, invite me to the wedding!”

This was late November and the ice was running heavy in the river
although the channel was not yet frozen over, and for some days there
had been skating on the shore ice where the inward sweep of the shore
left a half moon of quiet water above the levee. When Benedict left him
David dropped into his chair. Ten minutes later his mind was made up and
he drew on his outer coat, put on his hat and gloves and went ont. He
walked briskly up the hill to the Wiggett home, and went in. Mary was
not there; she had gone to the river with her skates. David followed
her.

No doubt you know how the shore ice behaves, freezing at night and
softening again if the day is warm; cracking if the river rises or
falls; leaving, sometimes, a strip of honeycombed ice or a strip of bare
water along the shore until colder weather congeals it. This day was
warm and the sun had power. Here and there, to reach the firmer ice
across the mushy shore ice, planks had been thrown. David stood on
the railroad track that ran along the river edge and looked for Mary
Wiggett. There were a hundred or more skaters, widely scattered, and
David saw Mary Wiggett and 'Thusia almost simultaneously. 'Thusia saw
David.

She was skating arm in arm with some young fellow, and as she saw David
she pulled away from her companion. “Catch me!” she cried and darted
away with her companion darting after her. She was the most graceful
skater Riverbank boasted, and perhaps her first idea was merely to show
David how well she could skate. Suddenly, however, as if she had just
seen David, she waved her muff at him and skated toward him. The young
fellow turned in pursuit, but almost instantly shouted a warning and dug
the edges of his skates into the ice. 'Thusia skated on. Straight toward
the thin, decayed ice she sped, one hand still waving her muff aloft in
signal to David. He started down the bank almost before she reached
the bad ice, for he saw what was going to happen. He heard the ice give
under her skates, saw her throw up her hands, heard her scream, and he
plunged through the mud and into the water. Before anyone could reach
them he had drawn her to the shore and 'Thusia was clinging to him, her
arms dose around him. She was laughing hysterically, but her teeth were
already beginning to chatter. Her skates raised her nearer David's face
than ordinarily, and as the skaters gathered she put up her mouth and
kissed him. Then she fell limp in his arms.

She had not fainted and David knew it was all mere pretense. He knew she
had been in no danger, for his legs were wet only to the knees, and
if 'Thusia was drenched from head to foot it was because she had
deliberately thrown herself into the water. He felt it was all a trick
and he shook her violently as he tried to push her away.

“Stop it!” he cried. “Stop this nonsense!” but even as a dozen men
crowded around them he lifted her in his arms and carried her up the
railway embankment. Below them Mary Wiggett stood, safely back from the
dangerous edge of the ice.

“Get a rig as quickly as you can,” David commanded. “She's not hurt, but
she'll take cold in these wet clothes. Mary Wiggett,” he called, seeing
her in the group on the ice, “I want you to come with us.”

He carried 'Thusia to the street and rested her on a handcar that stood
beside the railway and wrapped her in his greatcoat. The crowd, of
course, followed. David sent a boy to tell Mr. Fragg to hurry home. And
all this while, and while they were waiting for the rig that soon came,
'Thusia continued her pretended faint, and David knew she was shamming.
He lifted her into the buggy. It was then she opened her eyes with a
faint “Where am I?”

“You know well enough,” David answered and turned to Mary Wiggett.
“Come! Get in!” he ordered. “She has been pretending a faint.” David,
who tried to keep an even mind under all circumstances, never quite
understood the reasoning that led him to drag Mary Wiggett into the
affair in this way. He felt vaguely that she was protection; it had
seemed the thing he must do. He was angry with 'Thusia, so angry that he
felt like beating her and he was afraid of himself because even while he
hated her for the trick she had played the clasp of her arms had filled
him with joy. He was afraid of 'Thusia.

Without hesitation or demur Mary clambered into the buggy, and David
helped 'Thusia in and drove the heavy vehicle through the muddy streets
to 'Thusia's door. He lifted her out and carried her into the house and
helped her up the stairs to her room, and there he left her with Mary.
From the sitting room below he could hear Mary moving about. He heard
her come down and put the sadirons on the stove to heat and heard her
mixing some hot drink. When Mr. Fragg reached the house 'Thusia was
tucked between blankets with hot irons at her feet, and Mary came down
as David ended his explanation of the affair.

“I think she'll be all right now,” Mary said. “She has stopped shivering
and is nice and warm. We'll stop for Dr. Benedict, Mr. Fragg, just to
make sure.”

On the way home David asked Mary to marry him. She did not pretend
unwillingness. She was surprised to be asked just then, but she was
happy and she tucked her arm under his affectionately and David clasped
her hand. He was happy, quite happy. They stopped to send Dr. Benedict
to the Fraggs and then David drove Mary home. She held his hand a moment
or two as she stood beside the buggy at her gate.

“You'll come up this evening, David, won't you?” she asked. “Wait,
David, I'll have our man drive you home and take this rig back wherever
it came from,” she added with a pleasing air of new proprietorship; “you
must go straight home and change into something dry. And be sure to come
up this evening.”

“I will,” said David, and she turned away. She turned back again
immediately.

“David,” she said hesitatingly; “about 'Thusia--I feel so sorry for her.
She has no mother and I think lately she has been trying to be good. I
feel as if--”

“Yes,” said David, “I feel that too.”

“Well, then, it will be all right!” said Mary happily. “And remember,
change your clothes as soon as you get home, David Dean!”

When David opened the door of the manse he stood for a minute letting
his happiness have its own way with him. He imagined the little house as
it would be with Mary in it as the mistress and, in addition to the glow
of heart natural to an accepted lover, he felt he had chosen wisely. His
wife would be a help and a refuge; she would be peace and sympathy at
the end of every weary day.

Then he climbed the stairs to change his wet garments as Mary had wisely
ordered.




III. THE COPPERHEAD

[Illustration: Copperhead   046]


WHEN Sumter was fired upon David Dean had been in Riverbank not quite
a year, but he had passed through the first difficult test of the young
minister, and Mary Wiggett's smile seemed to have driven from the minds
of his people the opposition they had felt when it seemed he was,
or might become, too fond of 'Thusia Fragg. Poor little 'Thusia! The
bright, flirting, reckless butterfly of a girl, captured soul, mind and
body by her first glimpse of David's cool gray eyes, knew--as soon
as Mary Wiggett announced that David had proposed and had been
accepted--that David was not for her. Mary Wiggett, inheriting much of
hard-headed old Samuel Wiggett's common sense, was not apt to let David
escape and David had no desire to escape from the quite satisfactory
position of future husband of Mary Wiggett. As the months of the
engagement lengthened he liked Mary more and more.

The announcement of the dominie's engagement settled many things. It
settled the uneasiness that is bound to exist while a young, unmarried
minister is still free to make a choice, and it settled the fear
that David might make a fool of himself over 'Thusia Fragg. While his
congregation did not realize what an attraction 'Thusia had had for
David, they had feared her general effect on him. With David engaged to
the leading elder's daughter, and that daughter such a fine, efficient
blond young woman as Mary was, there was peace and David was happy. He
had no trouble in stifling the feeling for 'Thusia that he felt had come
dangerously near being love.

Until Riverbank was thrown into a rage by the news from Fort Sumter
David, with due regard for his motto, “Keep an even mind under all
circumstances,” had prepared to settle down into a state of gentle
usefulness and to become the affectionate husband of the town's richest
man's daughter. The wedding was to be when Mary decided she was quite
ready. She was in no great haste, and in the flame of patriotism
that swept all Iowa with the first call for troops and the subsequent
excitement as the town and county responded and the streets were filled
with volunteers Mary postponed setting a day. David and Mary were both
busy during those early war days. Almost too soon for belief lists of
dead and wounded came back to Riverbank, followed by the pale cripples
and convalescents. Loyal entertainments and “sanitary fairs” kept every
young woman busy, and there is no doubt that David did more to aid the
cause by staying at home than by going to the front. He was willing
enough to go, but all Iowa was afire and there were more volunteers than
could be accepted. No one expected the war to last over ninety days.
More said sixty days.

Little 'Thusia Fragg, forgiven by Mary and become her protégée, was
taken into the councils of the women of David's church in all the loyal
charitable efforts. She was still the butterfly 'Thusia; she still
danced and appeared in gay raiment and giggled and chattered; but she
was a forgiven 'Thusia and did her best to be “good.” Like all the young
women of the town she was intensely loyal to the North, but her loyalty
was more like the fiery spirit of the Southern women than the calmer
Northern loyalty of her friends.

As the lists of dead grew and the war, at the end of ninety days,
seemed hardly begun, loyalty and hatred and bitterness became almost
synonymous. Riverbank, on the Mississippi, held not a few families of
Southern sympathizers, and the position of any who ventured to doubt
the right of the North to coerce the South became most unpleasant. Wise
“Copperheads” kept low and said nothing, but they were generally
known from their antebellum utterances, and they were looked upon with
distrust and hatred. The title “Copperhead” was the worst one man
could give another in those days. As the war lengthened one or two hot
outspoken Democrats were ridden out of the town on rails and the rest,
for the most part, found their sympathies change naturally into tacit
agreement with those of their neighbors. It was early in the second year
of the war that old Merlin Hinch came to Riverbank County. It was a
time when public feeling against Copperheads was reaching the point of
exasperation.

Merlin Hinch, with his few earthly goods and his wife and daughter,
crossed the Mississippi on the ferry in a weather-beaten prairie
schooner a few weeks before plowing time. He came from the East but he
volunteered nothing about his past. He was a misshapen, pain-racked man,
hard-handed and close-mouthed. He rested one day in Riverbank, got from
some real estate man information about the farms in the back townships
of the county, and drove on. There were plenty of farms to be
had--rented on shares or bought with a mortgage--and he passed on his
way, a silent, forbidding old man.

In the days that followed he sometimes drove into town to make such
purchases as necessity required. Sometimes his wife--a faded, work-worn
woman--came with him, and sometimes his daughter, but more often he came
alone.

Old Hinch--“Copperhead Hinch,” he came to be called--was not beautiful.
He seldom wore a hat, coming to town with his iron-gray hair matted
on his head and his iron-gray beard tangled and tobacco-stained. Some
long-past accident had left him with a scar above the left eyebrow,
lowering it, and his eyebrows were like long, down-curving gray
bristles, so that his left eye looked out through a bristly covert,
giving him a leering scowl. The same accident had wrenched his left
shoulder so that his left arm seemed to drag behind him and he walked
bent forward with an ugly sidewise gait. At times he rested his left
hand on his hip. He looked like a hard character, but, as David came
to know, he was neither hard nor soft but a man like other men. Sun and
rain and hard weather seemed to have turned his flesh to leather.

In those days the post office was in the Wiggett Building, some sixty
feet off the main street, and it was there those who liked to talk of
the war met, for on a bulletin board just outside the door the lists of
dead and wounded were posted as they arrived, and there head-lined pages
of the newspapers were pasted. To the post office old Hinch came on
each trip to town, stopping there last before driving back to Griggs
Township. Old Hinch issued from the post office one afternoon just as
the postmaster was pasting the news of a Union victory on the board, and
some jubilant reader, dancing and waving his cap, grasped old Hinch and
shouted the news in his ear. The old man uttered an oath and with his
elbow knocked his tormentor aside. He shouldered his way roughly through
the crowd and clambered into his wagon.

“Yeh! you Copperhead!” the old man's tormentor shouted after him.

The crowd turned and saw the old man and jeered at him. Hinch muttered
and mumbled as he arranged the scrap of old blanket on his wagon seat.
He gathered up his reins and, without looking back, drove down the
street, around the corner into the main street and out of the town.
After that old Hinch was “that Copperhead from Griggs Township.” Silent
and surly always, he was left more completely alone than ever. When he
came to town the storekeepers paid him scant courtesy; the manner in
which they received him indicated that they did not want his trade, and
would be better satisfied if he stayed away. The children on the street
sometimes shouted at him.

Old Sam Wiggett, Mary's father, was by that time known as the most
bitter hater of the South in Riverbank. Later there were some who said
he assumed the greater part of his virulent fanaticism to cover his
speculations in the Union paper currency and his tax sale purchases of
the property of dead or impoverished Union soldiers, but this was not
so. Heavy-bodied and heavy-jowled, he was also heavy-minded. That which
he was against he hated with all the bitterness his soul could command,
and he was sincere in his desire that every captured Confederate be
hanged. He considered Lincoln a soft-hearted namby-pamby and would
have had every Confederate home burned to the ground and the women
and children driven into Mexico. In business he had the same harsh but
honest single-mindedness. Money was something to get and any honest way
of getting it was right. There were but two or three men in Riverbank
County who would bid in the property of the unfortunate soldiers at tax
sale, but Sam Wiggett had no scruples. The South, and not he, killed and
ruined the soldiers, and the county, not he, forced the property to
tax sale. He bought with depreciated currency that he had bought at a
discount. That was business.

It was not unnatural that Mary Wiggett should have absorbed some share
of this ultraloyalism from her father. The women of Riverbank were not,
as a rule, bitterly angry. They were staunch and true to their cause;
they worked eagerly with their hands, scraping lint, making “housewives”
 and doing what they could for their soldiers; they were cheered by
victories and depressed by defeats, and they wept over their slain
and wounded, but their attitude was one of pity and love for their
own rather than of hard hatred against the South. With Mary Wiggett
patriotism was more militant. Could she have arranged it the lint she
scraped would never have been used to dress the wounds of a captured
Confederate soldier boy. 'Thusia, even more intense, hated the South as
a personal enemy.

David felt this without, at first, taking much notice of it. He was
happy in his engagement and he liked Mary better each day. There was a
wholesome, full-blooded womanliness in all she did and a frankness in
her affection that satisfied him. The first shock to his evenly balanced
mind came one day when he was walking through the main street with her.

The young dominie was swinging down the street at her side, his head
high and his clear gray eyes looking straight ahead, when something
whizzed past his face. They were near the corner of a street. Along the
edge of the walk a half dozen farm wagons stood and in the nearest sat
Mrs. Hinch, her sunbonnet thrown back and her Paisley shawl--her finest
possession--over her shoulders. Old Hinch was clambering into the wagon
and had his best foot on the hub of a wheel. The missile that whizzed
past David's face was an egg. It struck old Hinch on the temple and
broke, scattering the yolk upon the waist of Mrs. Hinch's calico dress
and upon her shawl and her face. Some boy had grasped an egg from a box
before a grocer's window and had thrown it. The lad darted around the
corner and old Hinch turned, grasping his whip and scowling through his
bristly eyebrows. The corner loafers laughed.

What David did was not much. He drew his handkerchief from his pocket
and gave it to the faded woman in the wagon, that she might remove the
stain of egg. She wiped her face and began removing the egg from her
garments and David and Mary moved on.

“Why did you do that!” Mary asked. “Don't you know them! They're
Copperheads.”

“She was badly spattered. She seemed at a loss what to do.”

“Didn't you _know_ they were Copperheads!”

“I did not know. That would have made no difference. She was
distressed.”

“Well, please, David, do not help any more distressed Copperheads when I
am with you,” Mary said. “Everyone in front of the store saw you. Oh! I
wouldn't raise my little finger to help a Copperhead if she was dying! I
hate them! They ought to be egged out of town, all of them.”

Some two weeks later old Hinch drove up to the little manse and knocked
on David's door. He had the handkerchief, washed, ironed and folded in a
bit of white paper, and a dozen fresh-laid eggs in a small basket.

“Ma sent me 'round with these,” old Hinch said. “Sort of a 'thank you.'
She 'minded me particular not to throw the eggs at you.”

There was almost a twinkle in his eyes as he repeated his wife's little
joke. He would not enter the manse but sidled himself back to his wagon
and drove away.

It was from 'Thusia Fragg that David had the next word of old Hinch.
Even in those days David had acquired a great taste for a certain
sugared bun made by Keller, the baker. Long years after the buns were
still made by Riverbank bakers and known as “Keller buns” and the last
sight many had of David was as an old man with a paper bag in his hand,
trudging up the hill to his home for a little feast on “Keller buns.” He
used to stop and offer his favorite pastry to little children. Sometimes
the paper bag was quite empty by the time he reached home.

It was no great disgrace, in those days, to carry parcels, for many of
the Riverbankers had come from St. Louis or Cincinnati, where the best
housewives went to market with basket on arm, but David would have
thought nothing of his paper parcel of buns in any event. The buns were
at the baker's and he liked them and wanted some at home, so he went to
the baker's and bought them and carried them home. He was coming out of
Keller's doorway when 'Thusia, as gayly dressed as ever, hurrying by,
saw him and stopped. She was frightened and agitated and she grasped
David's arm.

“Oh, Mr. Dean!” she cried. “Can't you do something! They're beating an
old man! There!” she almost wept, pointing down the street toward the
post office. David stood a moment, tense and breathing deeply.

“Who is it!” he asked.

“That Copperhead farmer,” said 'Thusia.

David forgot the motto over his desk in his study. He saw the small mob
massed in front of the post office and men running toward it from across
the street, and he too ran. He saw the crowd sway back and forth and
a fist raised in the air, and then he was on the edge of the group,
pushing his way into it.

“Stop this! Stop this!” he cried.

His voice had the ring of authority and those who turned knew him to be
the dominie. They had done old Hinch no great harm. A few blows had been
struck, but the old man had received them with his arm thrown over his
head. He was tough and a few blows could not harm him. He carried a
stout hickory club, and as the crowd hesitated old Hinch sidled his way
to the edge of the walk and scrambled into his wagon.

Someone laughed. Old Hinch did not drive away.

“My letter,” he growled, and David stooped and picked up the letter that
lay on the walk and handed it to him. Then Hinch struck his horses a
blow with the club and the wagon bumped over the loose stones and away.
The letter had been trampled upon by dusty feet and David's coat had
received a smear of dust from the wagon wheel. He brushed his hands
together, and someone began knocking the dust from the skirt of his
coat. It eased the tension. Someone explained.

“We told the Copperhead to take off his hat to the flag,” they told
David, “and he damned the war. Somebody hit him.”

“He is an old man,” said David. “You can show your patriotism better
than by striking an old man.”

It was not a diplomatic thing to say and it was still less diplomatic
for David to preach, the next Sunday, on the prodigal son. Many shook
their heads over the sermon, saying David went too far in asking them
to prepare their hearts for the day when the war would be ended and
it would be necessary to take the South back into the brotherhood of
States, and to look upon the Confederates as returning prodigals. Old
Wiggett was furiously angry. Forty years were to elapse before some of
David's hearers were ready to forgive the South, and many went to
their graves unforgiving. The feeling after the sermon was that David
sympathized entirely too strongly with the South. Those who heard his
following sermons knew David was still staunchly loyal, but through the
byways of the town the word passed that Dominie Dean was “about as bad
as any Copperhead in the county.”




IV. ROSE HINCH

[Illustration: Rose   058]

IT was during that week that Benedict, the medical man-of-all-work of
the county, David's closest friend, carried David out to Griggs Township
to see old Hinch. Doctor Benedict had his faults, medical and otherwise.
Calomel in tooth-destroying quantities was one and his periodical sprees
were all the rest. His list of professional calls and undemanded bills
qualified him for a saintship, for his heart was right and it hurt him
to take money from a poor man even when it was willingly proffered.

“Davy,” he said, putting his beaver hat on David's desk and sinking into
David's easy-chair with a yawn (people would not let him have a good
night's rest once a week), “one of my patients gave you a dozen eggs.
Remember her?”

“Yes. The Copperhead's wife. She's not sick, I hope.”

“Malaria, backache, pain in the joints, headache, touch of sciatica. No,
she's well. She don't complain. It's her husband, David. He's in a bad
way.”

“What ails him!” David asked.

“He's blaspheming his God and Maker, Davy,” said Benedict. “He's
blaspheming himself into his grave. He has hardened his heart and he
curses the God that made him. Davy, he's dying of a breaking heart. He
is breaking his heart against the pillars of Heaven.”

David turned in his chair.

“And you came for me? You were right, Benedict. You want me to go to
him!”

“I want to take you to him,” said Benedict. “Get on your duds, Davy; the
horse is outside.” It is a long drive to Griggs Township and Benedict
had ample time to tell all he knew of Hinch. For five days the man had
refused to eat. He sat in his chair and cursed his God for bringing the
war upon the country; sat in his chair with a letter crumpled in his
hand, with his eyes glassy hard and his face in a hideous scowl.

“I heard from the wife of what you did the other day when those loafers
would have beaten the old man. He hates all mankind, Davy, but if there
is one of the kind can soften his heart you are the one. Hates?” The
doctor shook his head. “No, he thinks he hates man and God. It is
grief, Davy. He's killing himself with grief.” David was silent. He knew
Benedict would continue.

“The day you mixed up in his affair he got a letter at the post office.
It's the letter he keeps crushed in his hand.”

“I remember. I picked it up and gave it to him.”

“He read it before he came out of the post office, I dare say,” said the
doctor. He flicked his whip over the haunches of his horse. “You don't
know why he came West? He was burned out where he came from. He spent
his life and his wife's life, too, building up a farm and Fate made it a
battlefield. Raiders took his stock first, then one army, and after that
the other, made his farm a camp and between them they made it a desert,
burning his buildings. He had a boy of fourteen, and they were trying to
keep alive in the cellar hole where the house had been. A chance bullet
killed the lad. I think the boy was running to the well for a pail of
water. It has made, the old man bitter, Davy. It has made him hate the
war.”

“It might well make him hate the war,” said David.

“There was another son,” said Benedict. “I take it he was a fine lad,
from what the mother tells me. He was nineteen. The letter that came the
other day said the lad had been killed in battle. Yes, the old man hates
the war. He does not love the war, Davy.”

“He may well hate it,” said David.

They found old Hinch as Benedict had left him, bent down in his chair
with his eyes set in a hard glare. He was very weak--much weaker than
when Dr. Benedict had left him--but his lips still moved in ceaseless
blasphemy. The wife let David and the doctor in. No doubt she felt the
loss of her son as deeply as old Hinch himself felt it, but Fate had
taken vigor out of her soul before this blow fell. Her nervous hands
clasped and unclasped, and she looked at Benedict with the pitiful
pleading of a dumb animal. When the two men went up to Hinch she seated
herself at the far side of the room, still clasping and unclasping her
hands. The tragedy that had occurred seemed lost in the tragedy that
impended.

David fell on his knees beside the old man's chair and, with his hand
on old Hinch's arm and his forehead on the chair arm, prayed. He prayed
aloud and as he prayed he tightened his grasp on the old man's arm. It
was more than a prayer; it was a stream of comfort flowing straight
from his heart. He prayed long. The wife ceased her nervous clasping and
unclasping of her hands and knelt beside her own chair. Benedict stole
to the far corner of the room and dropped noiselessly into a seat. An
hour passed and still David prayed.

The room was poverty-stricken in the extreme. There was no carpet on the
floor and no drapery at the windows. The table was of pine, and a squat
lamp of glass stood on it, the lamp chimney broken and patched with
scorched paper. The afternoon waned and old Hinch ceased his muttering,
but David prayed on. He was fighting for the man's soul and life. Dusk
fell, and with a sudden great sob old Hinch buried his face between his
knees. Then David clasped his hand.

The wife silently lighted the lamp and went to the kitchen, and, as if
the light had been a signal, the door opened and Rose Hinch came in. She
stood a moment in the doorway, her sunbonnet pushed back, taking in the
scene, and then she came and stood beside her father and put her hand on
his head. Then David looked up and saw her.

She had been all day in the field, doing the work her father had left
undone, and her shoes were covered with loam and her hands burned to a
brown-red. Her garments were rough and patched, but her face, protected
by the sunbonnet, was untouched by tan. It was a face like that of a
madonna, sweet and calm. Her hair, parted in the middle, had been drawn
back smoothly, but now it fell rather loosely over her forehead, and was
brown, as were her eyes. She let her hand rest a moment on her father's
head, and then passed on into the kitchen.

Benedict left immediately after the supper, but David remained for the
night. Old Hinch drank a bowl of broth and permitted himself to be led
to bed. He was very weak but he blasphemed no more; his mood was one of
saner sorrow. The wife sat with him, and David, seeing that Rose--after
a day of man's work in the field--must care for the scanty stock,
insisted on aiding her. When Benedict arrived the next morning old Hinch
was much better physically and quite himself mentally, and David drove
back to town with the doctor.

Three times in the next two weeks David drove out to Griggs Township
with Benedict. Things had returned to their miserable normal state when
he made his last visit, but when David arrived Samuel Wiggett was there.
No doubt the farm was to be put up at tax sale and Wiggett had come out
to see whether it was worth bidding in. It would have pleased him to be
able to put old Hinch, a Copperhead, off the place.

Wiggett, like many sober and respectable men, had little respect for men
like Benedict, and he was never any too well pleased to see David in the
doctor's company. To see David and Benedict together at the home of the
Copperhead was bad indeed, and to see the evident friendship existing
between David and the Copperhead and the Copperhead's wife and daughter
was worse. Wiggett climbed into his buggy after a gruff greeting and
drove away.

For several days after David's meeting with Wiggett at the farm the
young dominie did not see Mary Wiggett. War times were busy times for
the ministers as well as for the men at the front, and David's pastoral
duties seemed to crowd upon him. Three of the “boys,” sent home to die,
lay in their beds and longed for David's visits. He tried to grasp a few
minutes to see Mary, but it was often long past midnight when he fell
exhausted on his bed.

Gossip, once started in a small town, does not travel--it leaps, growing
with each leap. It builds itself up like conglomerate, that mass of
pebbles of every sort, shells and mud. In no two heads did the stories
that were told about David during those days agree. The tales were a
conglomerate of unpleasant lies in which disloyalty, infatuation for
the Copperhead's daughter, hypocrisy, unhallowed love and much else were
illogically combined. Of all this David suspected nothing. What Mary
Wiggett heard can only be guessed, but it set her burning with jealousy
of Rose Hinch and weeping with hurt pride.

It was not a week after his last visit to the Hinches that Sam Wiggett's
man-of-all-work stopped at the manse, leaving a small parcel and a note
for David. The parcel held the cheap little ring David had given Mary as
a token of their engagement and the letter broke their engagement.

David was horrified. Again and again he read the letter, seeking to find
in it some clew to Mary's act, but in vain. He hastened to her home,
but she would not see him. He wrote, and she replied. It was a calmly
sensible letter, but it left him more bewildered than ever. She begged
him not to be persistent, and said her mind was made up and she could
never marry him. She said he could see that if he forced his attentions
or even insisted on making a quarrel of what was not one it would be
harder for both, since she was a member of his church and, if he became
annoying, one of them must leave.

Before giving up all hope David persuaded Dr. Benedict to see Mary. The
good doctor returned somewhat dazed.

“She sat on me, Davy; she sat on me hard,” he said. “My general
impression is that she meant to convey the idea that what Samuel
Wiggett's daughter chooses to do is none of a drunken doctor's infernal
business.”

“But would she give you no reason?” asked David.

“Now as to that,” said Benedict, “she implied quite plainly that if you
don't know the reason it is none of your business either. She knows the
reason and that's enough for the three of us.” David wrote again, and
finally Mary consented to see him and set the day and hour; but, as if
Fate meant to make everything as bad as possible for David, Benedict
came that very afternoon to carry him out to Griggs Township to minister
to Mrs. Hinch, who had broken down and was near her end. It was not
strange that she should ask for David, but the town found in the two or
three visits he made the dying woman additional cause for umbrage,
and Mary, receiving David's message telling why he could not keep his
appointment, refused to make another.

Through all this David went his way, head high and with an even mind.
He felt the change in his people toward him and he felt the changed
attitude of the town in general, but until the news reached him through
little 'Thusia Fragg he did not know there was talk in some of the
barrooms of riding him out of town on a rail.

He was sitting in his study trying to work on his sermon for the next
Sunday morning, but thinking as much of Mary as of his sermon, when
'Thusia came to the door of the manse. Mary Ann, the old housekeeper,
admitted her, leaving her sitting in the shaded parlor while she went to
call David. He came immediately, raising one of the window shades that
he might better see the face of his visitor, and when he saw it was
'Thusia he held out his hand. It was the first time 'Thusia had been
inside the manse.

“Well, 'Thusia!” he queried.

She was greatly agitated. As she talked she began to cry, wringing her
hands as she poured out what she had heard. David was in danger; in
danger of disgrace and perhaps of bodily harm or even worse. From her
father she had heard of the threats; Mr. Fragg had heard the word passed
among the loafers who hung out among the saloons on the street facing
the river. David was to be ridden out of town on a rail; perhaps tarred
and feathered before the ride.

David listened quietly. When 'Thusia had ended, he sat looking out of
the window, thinking.

He knew the men of the town were irritated. For a time all the news from
the Union armies had been news of reverses. The war had lasted long and
bad news increased the irritation. Riots and lawlessness always occur
in the face of adverse reports; news of a defeat embitters the
non-combatants and brings their hatred to the surface. At such a time
the innocent, if suspected, suffered along with the known enemy.

“And they think I am a Copperhead!” said David at length.

“Because you are friendly with Mr. Hinch,” 'Thusia repeated. “They don't
know you as I do. It is because you are kind to the Hinches when no one
else is. And they say--” she said, her voice falling and her fingers
twisting the fringe of her jacket--“they say you are in love with--with
the daughter.”

“It is all because they do not understand,” said David, rising. “I can
tell them. When I explain they will understand.”

He had, as yet, no definite plan. A letter to the editor of the daily
newspaper occurred to him; he might also make a plain statement in the
pulpit before his next Sunday sermon, setting himself right with his
congregation. In the meanwhile he must show himself on the street; by
word of mouth he could explain what the townspeople did not know. He
blamed himself for not having explained before. He stood at the window,
looking out, and saw Dr. Benedict drive up. The doctor came toward the
house.

David met him at the door.

“Davy,” the doctor said, clasping his hand, “she is dead,” and David
knew; he meant Mrs. Hinch.

“And Hinch?”

“He's taking it hard, Davy. He is in town. He is in that mood of sullen
hate again. He will need you--you are the only man that can soften him,
Davy. It is hard--we left the girl alone with her dead mother. Some
woman is needed there.” 'Thusia had come to the parlor door.

“Will I do! Can I go!” she asked.

“Yes, and bless you for it!” the doctor exclaimed. “Get in my buggy.
You'll come, David!”

“Of course! But Hinch--he came to town! Why?”

“He had to get the coffin, Davy.”

David hurried into his coat.

“We must find him at once and get him out of town,” he said. “They're
threatening to tar and feather him if he shows his face in town again.
We may stop them if we are in time; please God we may stop them!”

They found old Hinch's wagon tied opposite the post office. They knew it
by the coarse pine coffin that lay in the wagon bed. A crowd--a dozen or
more men--stood before the bulletin board watching the postmaster post
a new bulletin and, as David leaped from the buggy, the men cheered, for
the tide had turned and the news was news of victory. As they cheered,
old Hinch came out of the post office. He had in his right hand the
hickory club he always carried and in the left a letter, doubled over
and crushed in his gnarled fingers. He leaned his weight on the club.
All the strength seemed gone out of his bent body. Someone saw him and
shouted “Here's the Copperhead!” and before David could reach his side
the crowd had gathered around old Hinch.

The old man stood in the doorway, under the flag that hung limply from
its pole. His fingers twitched as they grasped the letter in his hand.
He glared through his long eyebrows like an angry animal.

“Kill the Copperhead!” someone shouted and an arm shot out to grasp the
old man.

“Stop!” David cried. He struggled to fight his way to Hinch, but the
old man, maddened out of all reason, raised his club above his head.
It caught in the edge of the flag above his head and he uttered a
curse--not at the flag, not at his tormentors, but at war and all war
had done to him. The knotted end of the club caught the margin of the
flag and tore the weather-rotten fabric.

Those in front had stepped back before the menace of the raised club,
but one man stood his ground. He held a pistol in his hand and as the
flag parted he leveled the weapon at the old man's head and calmly and
in cold blood pulled the trigger.

“That's how we treat a Copperhead!” he cried, and the old man, a bullet
hole in his forehead, fell forward at his feet.

You will not find a word regarding the murder in the _Riverbank Eagle_
of that period. They hustled the murderer out of town until it was safe
for him to return; indeed, he was never in any danger. The matter was
hushed up; but few knew old Hinch. It was an “incident of the war.” But
David, breaking through the crowd one moment too late, dropped to his
knees beside the old man's dead body and raised his head while Benedict
made the hurried examination. Some members of the crowd stole away, but
other men came running, from all directions and, standing beside the
dead man, David told them why old Hinch had damned the war and why he
hated it--not because he was a Copperhead but because one son and
then another had been taken from life by it--one son killed by a stray
Confederate bullet and the other shot while serving in the Union army.
He made no plea for himself; it was enough that he told them that old
Hinch was not a Copperhead but a grief-maddened father. As he ended
Benedict handed him the letter that had slipped from the old man's
hand as he fell. It bore the army frank and was from the colonel of a
Kentucky regiment. There was only a few lines, but they told that old
Hinch's oldest son, the last of his three boys, had fallen bravely in
battle. It was with this new grief in his mind that the old man had
stepped out to confront his tormentors.

David read the letter, his clear voice carrying beyond the edges of the
crowd, and when he finished he said, “We will pray for one who died in
anger,” and on the step of the post office and face to face with those
who but a few minutes before would have driven him from the town in
disgrace, he prayed the prayer that made him the best-loved man in
Riverbank.

Some of our old men still talk of that prayer and liken it to the
address Lincoln made at Gettysburg. It was never written down and we can
never know David's words, but those who heard knew they were listening
to a real man speaking to a real God, and they never doubted David
again.

As David raised his head at the close he saw Mary Wiggett and her father
in their carriage at the far edge of the crowd, that filled the street.
Mary half arose and turned her face toward David, but old Wiggett drove
on, and, while hands now willing raised the body of old Hinch, David
crossed the street to where 'Thusia Fragg was waiting for him.

When old Sam Wiggett drove away from in front of the post office, little
imagining David had just counteracted all the baseless gossip that had
threatened him, Mary placed her hand on his arm and urged him to turn
back, but cold common sense urged him to drive on. He did not want to be
known as having seen any of the tragedy, for he did not relish having to
enter a witness chair. Had he turned back as Mary wished David's whole
life might have been different, and certainly his end would have been.

Once safely home Mary did not hesitate to write to David. Whatever else
she may have been, and however old Sam's wealth had affected her mode
of thought, Mary was sincere, and she now wrote David she was sorry and
asked him to come to her. It was too late. With 'Thusia David walked
up the hill. At the gate of the manse they paused. They had spoken of
nothing but the tragedy.

“Rose Hinch will be all alone now,” 'Thusia said.

“Yes,” David said.

'Thusia looked down.

“Do you--will she get work,” she asked, “or is she going to marry
someone.”

“I know she is not going to marry,” David said promptly. “She knows no
one--no young men.”

“Except you,” 'Thusia suggested, looking up. As she met David's dear
eyes her face reddened as it had on that first day at the wharf. The
hand that lay on the gate trembled visibly; she withdrew it and hid it
at her side.

“I like Rose, but I am not a candidate for her hand, if that is what you
mean,” said David.

'Thusia suddenly felt infinitely silly and childish.

“I mean--I don't mean--” she stammered. “I must not keep you standing
here. Good-by.”

“Good-by,” David said, and turned away.

He took a dozen steps up the path toward the manse. He stopped short and
turned.

“'Thusia!” he called.

“Yes?” she replied, and turned back.

David walked to the gate and leaned upon it.

“What is it,” 'Thusia asked.

“You asked about Rose Hinch. I think we should try to do something for
her--”

'Thusia's eyes were on David's hands. Now David's hands and not
'Thusia's were trembling. She watched them as if fascinated. She looked
up and the light in his eyes thrilled her.

“'Thusia, I know now!” David said. “I love you and I have always loved
you and I shall love you forever.”

Her heart stood still.

“David! but we had better wait. We had better think it over,” she
managed to say. “You had better--you're the dominie--I--”

“Don't you care for met” he asked.

She put her hand on his and David clasped it. Kisses 'and embraces
usually help carry off a moment that can hardly be anything but awkward,
but kisses and embraces are distinctly impossible across a dominie's
manse gate in full day, with the Mannings on their porch across the
street. 'Thusia laughed a mischievous little laugh.

“What!” David asked.

“I'll be the funniest wife for a dominie!” she said. “Oh, David, do you
think I'll do!”

And so, as the fairy tales say, they were married. Fairy tales properly
end so, with a brief “and lived happily ever after,” and so may most
tales of real life end, but, however the minister's life may run,
a minister's wife is apt to find the married years sufficiently
interesting. She marries not only a husband but an official position,
and the latter is quite apt to lead to plentiful situations.

Mary Wiggett, calling David back too late, did not fall into a decline
or die for love. Not until she lost David finally did she realize how
deeply she had loved him, but she did not sulk or repine. She even
served as a bridesmaid for 'Thusia, and with 'Thusia planned the wedding
gown. She almost took the place of a mother, and advised and worked to
make 'Thusia's trousseau beautiful. She seemed to wish David's bride to
be all she herself would have been had she been David's bride. 'Thusia
was too happy to think or care why Mary showed such interest, and David,
who could not avoid hearing of it, was pleased and grateful.

The crowning act of Mary's kindness was asking 'Thusia to call Rose
Hinch from her poverty to help with the plainer sewing. The three
girls spent many days together at the Fraggs' and, although David was
mentioned as seldom as ever a bridegroom was mentioned, all three felt
they were laboring for him in making his bride fine. Mary, with her
calm efficiency, seemed years older than 'Thusia, and thus the three
worked--and were to work together for many years--for love of David.




V. CHURCH TROUBLES

[Illustration:  075]


THE leaves of the maples before the small white manse were red with
their October hue, and the sun rays were slanting low across the little
front yard at a late afternoon angle, when David, his hat in his hand
and his long black coat thrown open, paused a few moments at his gate to
greet Rose Hinch, who was approaching from up the hill.

David had changed little. He was still straight and slender, his yellow
hair still curled over his broad forehead, and his gray eyes were
still clear and bright. His motto, “Keep an even mind under all
circumstances,” still hung above his desk in his study. For nearly six
years, happy years, 'Thusia had been David's wife.

The old rivalry between 'Thusia and Mary seemed forgotten. For one year
old Wiggett, refusing Mary's pleadings, had sat under a Congregational
preacher, but the Congregational Church--being already supplied with
leaders--offered him small opportunity to exert his stubborn and
somewhat surly desire for dictatorship, and he returned to sit under and
glare at David, and resumed his position of most powerful elder.

During the first year of 'Thusia's married life

Mary was often at the manse. 'Thusia's love was still in the frantically
eager stage; she would have liked to have lived with one arm around
David's neck, and she was unwittingly in constant danger of showing
herself all a dominie's wife should not be. Her taste for bright clothes
and her carelessness of conventionality threatened a harsh awakening for
David. During that dangerous first year Mary made herself almost one of
the household.

'Thusia, strange to say, did not resent it. Mary kept, then and always,
her love for David, as a good woman can. But little older than 'Thusia,
she was far wiser and immeasurably less volatile and, having lost David
as a lover, she transmuted her love into service.

Probably she never thought her feelings into a conscious formula. At the
most she realized that she was still very fond of David and that she was
happier when helping him than at any other time.

'Thusia's gay companions of the days before David's coming were
quite impossible now that 'Thusia was a dominie's bride, and 'Thusia
recognized this and was grateful for Mary's companionship during the
months following the honeymoon. A young bride craves a friend of her
own age, and Mary was doubly welcome. Her advice was always sound,
and 'Thusia was quick to take it. Mary's friendship also made the
congregation's acceptance of 'Thusia far easier, for anyone so promptly
taken up by the daughter of the church's richest member and most
prominent elder had her way well prepared in advance. Mary, fearing
perhaps that 'Thusia might be annoyed by what might seem unwarranted
interest in her affairs, was wise enough to have herself elected head of
the women's organization that had the care and betterment of the manse
and its furnishings. To make the house fit for a bride she suggested and
carried through changes and purchases. She opened her own purse freely,
and what 'Thusia did not suggest she herself suggested.

“Mary is lovely!” 'Thusia told David.

A year or two after Mary had thus made herself almost indispensable to
'Thusia she married.

“Oh, I knew it long ago!” 'Thusia said in answer to David's expression
of surprise at the announcement of the impending wedding. She had known
it a month, which was just one day less than Mary herself had known it.
Mary's husband, one of the Derlings of Derlingport, was due to inherit
wealth some day, but in the meanwhile old Sash-and-Door Derling was glad
to shift the nattily dressed, inconsequential young loafer on to Mr.
Wiggett's shoulders. Wiggett found him some sort of position in the
Riverbank bank and young Derling gradually developed into a cheerful,
pattering little business man, accumulating girth and losing hair.
'Thusia rather cruelly but exactly expressed him when she told Rose
Hinch he was something soft and blond with a gold toothpick. If Mary was
ever dissatisfied with him she gave no sign.

Those who had wondered what kind of a minister's wife flighty, flirty,
little 'Thusia Fragg would make soon decided she made a good one. She
can hardly be better described than by saying she sang at her work.
David's meager stipend did not permit the employment of a maid, and
'Thusia had little enough leisure between meals for anything but
cheerful singing at her tasks. She cooked, swept, baked and washed.
There were ministers' wives in Riverbank who were almost as important in
church work as their husbands, and this was supposed to be part of their
duties. They were expected to lead in all social money-getting affairs,
and, in general, to be not merely wives but assistant ministers. If
'Thusia had attempted this there might have been, even with Mary's
backing, trouble, for every woman in the church remembered that only
a short while before 'Thusia had been an irresponsible, dancing,
street-gadding, young harum-scarum of a girl. Her interference would
have been resented. With good sense, or good luck, she left this quasi
assistant ministry to Mary, who gladly assumed it, and 'Thusia gave all
her time to the pleasanter task of being David's happy little wife and
housekeeper.

David, at the manse gate, was waiting for Rose Hinch. Rose, when she saw
David, came on with a brisker step. Rose had become David's protégée,
the first and closest of many that--during his long life--gathered about
him, leaning on him for help and sympathy. In return Rose Hinch was
always eager to help David in any way she could. She was Riverbank's
first precursor of the trained nurse. David and old Benedict had worried
about her future, until David suggested that the old doctor give her
what training he could and put her in charge of such of his cases as
needed especial care. Rose took up the work eagerly. She lived in a
tiny room above a store on the main street. To many in Riverbank she
represented all that a trained nurse and a lay Sister of Charity might.

“Well, Rose,” David said, “you seem happy. Is this fine October air
getting into your blood too?”

“I suppose that helps,” said Rose, “but the Long boy is so far past the
crisis that I'm not needed any longer. I'm so glad he's getting well; he
is such a dear, patient little fellow. That's why I'm happy, David. And
you seem fairly well content with the world, I should judge.”

“I am, Rose!” he answered. “Have you time to see 'Thusia for a minute or
two. I know she wants to see you.”

He held the gate open and Rose entered. David put his hat on one of the
gateposts and stood with his arms on the top of the gate, “bathing in
beauty,” as he told 'Thusia later. The sun, where it touched the maple
leaves, turned them to flame. Through a gap in the trees he could catch
a glimpse of the Mississippi and the varicolored foliage on the Illinois
shore, the reds softened to purple by the October haze. For a few
minutes he let himself forget his sick and his soul-sore people and his
duties, and stood in happy thoughtlessness, breathing October.

Rose came out.

“It's all settled. I'm coming,” she said, “and, oh, David! I am so
glad!”

“We are all glad,” said David.

Thus it happened that no wife ever approached motherhood more happily
than motherless little 'Thusia. With David and kind old Doctor Benedict
and gentle, efficient Rose Hinch at hand, and Mary as delighted as if
the child was to be her own, and all of them loving her, 'Thusia did
not give a moment to fear. The baby, when it came, was a boy, and Doctor
Benedict said it was the finest in the world, and immediately nominated
himself the baby's uncle. He bought the finest solid silver, gold-lined
cup to be had in Riverbank and had it engraved, “Davy, Junior, from
Uncle Benedict,” with the date. This was more than he did for Mary
Derling's baby, which came a month later. He gave a silver spoon there,
one of about forty that lucky infant received from near and far.

'Thusia was up and about, singing as before, in due time. Rose Hinch
remained for the better part of a. month and departed absolutely
refusing any compensation. The winter was as happy as any David ever
knew. Davy Junior was a strong and fairly well-behaved baby; 'Thusia was
in a state of ecstatic bliss, and in the town all the former opposition
to David had been long since forgotten. With the calmness of an older
man but with a young man's energy he went up and down the streets of
the town on his comforting errands. He was fitting into his niche in the
world with no rough edges, all of them having been worn smooth, and it
seemed that it was his lot to remain for the rest of his life dominie
of the Presbyterian Church of Riverbank, each year better loved and more
helpful.

April and May passed blissfully, but by the end of June an unexpected
storm had gathered, and David did not know whether he could remain in
Riverbank another month.

Late in May an epidemic of diphtheria appeared in Riverbank, several
cases being in David's Sunday school and the school was closed. Mary, in
a panic, fled to Derlingport with her child. She remained nearly a month
with her husband's parents, but by that, time Derlingport was as overrun
by the disease as Riverbank had been and conditions were reported better
at home; so she came back, bringing the child. She returned to find the
church in the throes of one of those violent quarrels that come with
all the violence and suddenness of a tropical storm. Her short absence
threatened to result in David's expulsion from the church.

On the last Saturday of June old Sam Wiggett sat at the black mahogany
desk in his office studying the columns of a New York commercial
journal--it was the year when the lumber situation induced him to
let who wished think him a fool and to make his first big purchase of
Wisconsin timberlands--when his daughter, Mary Derling, entered. She
came sweeping into the office dressed in all the fuss and furbelow of
the fashionable young matron of that day, and with her was her cousin,
Ellen Hardcome. Sam Wiggett turned.

“Huh! what are you down here for!” he asked. He was never pleased when
interrupted at his office. “Where's the baby!”

“I left him with nurse in the carriage,” said Mary. “Can't you say
good-day to Ellen, father!”

“How are you!” said Mr. Wiggett briefly. Mrs. Hardcome acknowledged the
greeting and waited for Mary to proceed.

“Well, father,” said Mary, “this thing simply cannot go on any longer.
Something will have to be done. This quarrel is absolutely breaking up
the church.”

“Huh!” growled Mr. Wiggett. “What's happening now!”

“David is going to preach to-morrow,” said Mary dropping into a vacant
chair and motioning Ellen to be seated. “After all the trouble we took
to get Dr. Hotchkiss to come from Derling-port, and after the ladies
offering to pay for a vacation for David out of the fund--”

“What!” shouted Wiggett, striking the desk a mighty blow with his fist.
“Didn't I tell you you women have no right to use that fund for any such
nonsense! That's money raised to pay on the mortgage. You've no right to
spend it for vacations for your star-gazing, whipper-snapper preacher.
No! Nor for anything else!”

“But, father!” Mary insisted.

“I don't care anything about your 'but, father.' That's mortgage money.
You women ought to have turned it over to the bank long ago. You have no
right to keep it. Pay for a vacation! You act like a lot of babies!”

“Father--”

“Pay for a vacation! Much he needs a vacation! Strong as an ox and
healthy as a bull; doesn't have anything to do the whole year 'round but
potter around town and preach a couple of sermons. It's you women get
these notions into your preachers' heads. You turn them into a lot of
babies.”

“Father, _will_ you let me say one word before you quite tear me to
pieces! A great many people in our church _like_ David Dean. It is all
right to bark 'Woof! woof! Throw him out neck and crop!' but you know as
well as I do that would split the church.”

“Well, let it split! If we can't have peace--”

“Exactly, father!” Mary said quietly. “If we cannot have peace in the
church it will be better for David Dean to go elsewhere, but before that
happens--for I think many of our people would leave our church if David
goes--shouldn't we do all we can to bring peace? Ellen agrees with me.”

“In a measure I do; yes,” said Ellen Hard-come.

“Ellen and Mr. Hardcome,” Mary continued, “are willing to promise to do
nothing immediately if David will go away for a month or two. If we can
send him away for a couple of months until some of the bitterest feeling
dies everything may be all right. We women will be glad enough to make
up and pay back anything we have to borrow from the fund. I think,
father, if you spoke to David he might go.”

“Better get rid of him now,” Wiggett growled. Ellen Hardcome smiled.
This was what she wanted. Mary looked at the heavy-faced old dictator.
She knew her father well enough to feel the hopelessness of her mission.
Old Wiggett had never forgiven David for marrying 'Thusia instead of
Mary, and because he would a thousand times have preferred David to
Derling as a son-in-law he hated David the more.

“It isn't only that David would go, father,” Mary said. “If he is sent
away we will lose the Hodges and the Martins and the Ollendorfs and old
Peter Grimby. I don't mind those old maid Curlews going, or people like
the Hansoms or the Browns, but you know what the Hodges and old Peter
Grimby do for the church every year. We thought that if you could get
David to take a vacation, explaining to him that it would be a good
thing to let everything quiet down--”

Old Sam Wiggett chuckled.

“Who thought! Ellen never thought of that,” he said.

“I thought of it,” said Mary.

“And he won't go!” chuckled Wiggett. “I give him credit--he's a fighter.
You women have stirred up the fight in him. I told you to shut up and
keep out of this, didn't I! Why--that Dean has more sense than all of
you. You must have thought he was a fool, asking him to go on a vacation
while Ellen and all stayed here to stir things up against him. He has
brains and that wife of his has spunk--do you know what she told me when
I met her on the street this morning!”

Mary did not ask him.

“Told me I wasn't fit to clean her husband's shoes!” said Wiggett.

“I hope--” said Mary.

“Well, you needn't, because I didn't,” said her father. “I didn't say
anything. Turned my back on her and walked away.”

“And I suppose you haven't heard the latest thing she has said!” said
Ellen Hardcome bitterly. “She says I have no voice, and that I would not
be in the choir if my husband did not have charge of the music.”

“Said that, did she!” chuckled Wiggett.

“She said my upper register was squeaky, if you please!”

'Thusia had indeed said this. She had said it years before and to a
certain Miss Carrol who was then her friend. What Miss Carrol had said
about the same voice, she being in the choir with Mrs. Hardcome, does
not matter. Miss Carrol had not thought it necessary to tell that to
Ellen. With the taking of sides in the present church quarrel all those
who were against David racked their brains to recall things 'Thusia had
said that could be used to set anyone against the dominie. There were
plenty of such harmless, little confidences to recall. 'Thusia, during
her first married years--and for long after--was still 'Thusia; she
tingled with life and she loved companionship and liked to talk and
listen. Every woman expresses her harmless opinions to her friends,
but it is easy for the friend, when she becomes an enemy and wishes for
recruits, to use this contraband ammunition. It is a woman's privilege,
it seems. The women who, like Rose Hinch, and certain women you know,
are accepted by men on an equality of friendship, make the least use of
it, for even among children there is no term of opprobrium worse than
“tattletale.” It was but natural for yellow-visaged Miss Connerton, for
instance, who had once said to 'Thusia, “Don't you get tired of Mrs.
Hallmeyer's eternal purple dresses,” and who had accepted 'Thusia's
“Yes” as a confidential expression of opinion as between one woman and
another, to run to Mrs. Hall-meyer, when everyone was against 'Thusia,
and say: “And I suppose you know what she said about you, Mrs.
Hallmeyer? That she simply got tired to death of seeing your eternal
purple dresses!”

David was fighting for his life, for his life was his work in Riverbank.
He was not making the fight alone. Seven or more years of faithful
service had won him staunch friends who were glad to fight for him,
but the miserable feature of a church quarrel is that--win or lose--the
minister must suffer. The two months of the quarrel were the unhappiest
of his life, and David made the fight, not because he hoped to remain in
Riverbank after it was ended, but because he felt it his duty to stand
by what he believed was right, until he should be plainly and actually
told to go. The majority of his people, he felt, were with him, but that
would make little difference in the final outcome. Although he tried in
every way to lessen the bitterness of the quarrel, so that his triumph,
if he won, might be the less offensive, he knew his triumph could mean
but one thing. A body, nearly half the church, would prepare to leave,
and his supporters, having won, would suggest that it would be better
for David--who could not keep body and soul together on what the remnant
of a church could afford to pay him--and better for the church, that he
should resign and carry his triumph elsewhere.

Win or lose David was likely to lose, but until the final moment he did
not mean to back down. Had he felt himself in the wrong he would have
acknowledged it at once; had he been in the right, and no one but
himself concerned, he would have preached a farewell sermon and would
have departed. He remained and made the fight because he was loyal to
'Thusia!

It was, indeed, 'Thusia against whom the fight was being made, and it
was Ellen Hardcome to whom the whole miserable affair was due. It was
all brought about by a pair of black prunella gaiters.




VI. THE BLACK PRUNELLA GAITERS


SETH HARDCOME, while not an elder, was one of the most prominent men in
the church, and if anything could be said against him it was that he
was almost too upright. Men are intended, no doubt, to be more or less
miserable sinners, but Seth Hardcome was, to outward view, absolutely
irreproachable. He was in the shoe business on the main street. It is a
nice, clean business and does not call for much sweat of the brow (a boy
can be hired to open the cases) or necessitate rough clothes, and Seth
Hardcome was always clean, neat and suave. He was a gentleman, polite
and courteous. He sold the best shoe he could give for the money.
Among other boots, shoes and slippers he sold gaiters--then quite the
fashion--with prunella uppers and elastic gores at the sides. Most of
the ladies wore them.

'Thusia needed new gaiters. David's stipend was so small in those
days--it was never large--that, with the new baby, he had hard figuring
to avoid running into debt and 'Thusia did her share in the matter of
economy. She had worn her old gaiters until they were hardly fit to
wear. The elastic had rotted and hung in warped folds; the gaiters had
been soled and resoled and the soles were again in holes; finally one of
the gaiters broke through at the side of the foot. 'Thusia could not go
out of the house in such footwear and she asked David to stop at
Hardcome's for a new pair. She wrote the size on a slip of paper.

“The black prunella gaiters, David; the same that I always get. Mr.
Hardcome will know,” she said.

David bought the gaiters. He handed Mr. Hardcome the slip of paper, and
Mr. Hardcome himself went to the shelves and selected the gaiters. He
wrapped them with his own hands. This was a Monday, and not until the
next Sunday did 'Thusia have occasion to wear the gaiters. It was a day
following a rain, and the streets were awash with yellow mud. 'Thusia
came home limping, her poor little toes crimped in the ends of the
gaiters.

“My poor, poor feet!” she cried. “David, I nearly died; I'm sure you
never preached so long in your life. Oh, I'll be glad to get these off!”

She pulled off one of the offending gaiters and looked at the sole. The
size stamped on the sole was a size smaller than 'Thusia wore. The
next day David returned the gaiters to Mr. Hardcome. Mr. Hardcome's
professional smile fled as David explained. He shook his head
sorrowfully as he opened the parcel and looked at the shoes. There
was yellow clay on the heels and a spattering of yellow clay on the
prunella.

“Too bad!” said Mr. Hardcome, still shaking his head. “She's worn them.”

“Yes; to church, yesterday,” David said. “I'm sorry,” said Mr. Hardcome,
and he really was sorry, “I can't take them back. My one invariable
rule; boots or shoes I sometimes exchange, but gaiters never! After they
have been worn I cannot exchange gaiters.”

“But in this case,” said David, “when they were the wrong size? You
remember my wife herself wrote the size on a slip. It doesn't seem, when
it was not her error--”

“That, of course,” said Mr. Hardcome with a sad smile, “we cannot know.
I am not likely to have made a mistake. Mrs. Dean should have tried the
shoes before she wore them.”

David did not argue. He had the average man's reluctance to exchange
goods, particularly when soiled, and he bought and paid for another
pair, and nothing more might have come of it had 'Thusia not happened to
know that old Mrs. Brown wore gaiters a size smaller than herself.

'Thusia did not give the gaiters to Mrs. Brown without first having
tried to get Mr. Hardcome to take them back. She went herself. David's
money must not be wasted if she could prevent it, and it is a fact that
when she left Mr. Hardcome's store she left in something of a huff. She
cared nothing whatever for Mr. Hardcome's rules, but she was angry to
think he should suggest that she had written the wrong size on the slip
of paper. Mr. Hardcome was cold and polite; he bowed her out of the
store as politely as he would have bowed out Mrs. Derling or any other
lady customer, but he was firm. It was natural enough that 'Thusia
should tell the story to old Mrs. Brown when she gave her the gaiters.

From Mrs. Brown the story of the black prunella gaiters circulated from
one lady to another, changing form like a putty ball batted from hand
to hand, until it reached Mrs. Hardcome. One, or it may have been
two, Sundays later David, coming down from his pulpit, found Mr.
Hardcome--white-faced and nervous--waiting for him. Suspecting nothing
David held out his hand. Mr. Hardcome ignored it.

“If you have one minute, Mr. Dean,” he said in the hard voice of a man
who has been put up to something by his wife, “I would like to have a
word with you.”

“Why, certainly,” said David.

“It has come to my ears,” said Mr. Hardcome, “that your wife is
circulating a report that I am untruthful.”

David almost gasped with astonishment. He could not imagine 'Thusia
doing any such thing.

“I do not hold you in any way responsible for what your wife may say
or do, Mr. Dean,” said Mr. Hardcome in the same hard voice. “I do not
believe for one moment that you have sanctioned any such slanderous
remarks. I have the utmost respect and affection for you, but I
tell you, Mr. Dean”--his voice shook with the anger he tried to
control--“that woman--your wife--must apologize! I will not have such
reports circulated about me! That is all. I merely expect you to do your
duty. If your wife will apologize I will do my duty as a Christian and
say no more about it.”

David, standing in amazement, chanced to look past Mr. Hardcome, and he
saw many of his congregation watching him. He had not the slightest idea
of what Mr. Hardcome was speaking, but he felt, with the quick intuition
of a sensitive man, that these others knew and were keen to catch his
attitude as he answered. He put his hand on Mr. Hardcome's arm.

“This must be some mistake, Hardcome,” he said. “I have not a doubt it
can all be satisfactorily explained. My people are waiting for me now.
Can you come to the house to-night? After the sermon! That's good!”

He let his hand slide down Mr. Hardcome's sleeve and stepped forward,
extending his hand for the shaking of hands that always awaited him
after the service. Before he reached the door his brow was troubled.
Not a few seemed to yield their hands reluctantly; some had manifestly
hurried away to avoid him. 'Thusia, always the center of a smiling
group, stood almost alone in the end of her pew. He saw Mrs. Hardcome
sweep past 'Thusia without so much as a glance of recognition.

On the way home he spoke to 'Thusia. She knew at once that the trouble
must be something about the black prunella gaiters.

“But, David,” she said, looking full into his eyes, “he is quite wrong
if he says I said anything about untruthfulness. I have never said
anything like that. I have never said anything about him or the gaiters
except to old Mrs. Brown. I did tell her I was quite sure I had written
the correct size on the slip of paper I gave you. But I never, never
said Mr. Hardcome was untruthful!”

“Then it will be very easily settled,” said David. “We will tell him
that when he comes to-night.”

Mr. Hardcome did not go to David's alone. When David opened the door it
was quite a delegation he faced. Mrs. Hardcome was with her husband, and
old Sam Wiggett, Ned Long and James Cruser filed into the little parlor
behind them. David met them cheerfully. He placed chairs and stood with
his back to the door, his hands clasped behind him. 'Thusia sat at one
side of the room. David smiled.

“I have spoken to my wife,” he said, “and--”

“If you will pardon me for one minute, Mr. Dean,” said Mrs. Hardcome,
interrupting him. “I do not wish to have any false impressions. I do not
want my husband blamed, if there is any blame. I want it understood that
I insisted that he ask for this apology. I am not the woman to have my
husband called a--called untruthful without doing something about it. It
is not for me to say that plenty of us thought you made a mistake when
you chose a wife, that is neither here nor there. A man marries as he
pleases. We don't ask anything unreasonable. If Mrs. Dean will
apologize--”

Little 'Thusia, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, looked up at David
with wistful eagerness. David, stern enough now, shook his head.

“I have spoken to my wife,” he said, “and I have her assurance that
she has never said anything whatever in the least reflecting on Mr.
Hardcome's veracity. Neither she nor I can say more.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Hardcome in a shocked tone, glancing at her husband
as if to say: “So she is lying about this too!” Mr. Hardcome arose and
took up his hat.

“We came in a most forgiving spirit, Brother Dean, feeling sure, from
what you told me, that an apology would be given without quibble. We
wished to avoid all anger and quarreling. If we begin a dispute as to
what Mrs. Dean said or did not say we cannot tell what unpleasantness
may result. I am taking this stand not to protect myself, but to protect
others in our church who may be similarly attacked. We wish Mrs. Dean to
apologize.”

“Mrs. Dean cannot apologize for what she has not done.”

There was no mistaking David's tone. If he was angry he hid his anger;
he was stating an unchangeable fact.

When he and 'Thusia were alone again she cried in his arms; she told him
it would have been better if he had let her apologize--that she did not
care, she would rather apologize a thousand times than make trouble
for him--but David was firm. Old Sam Wiggett, on the way home, told the
Hardcomes they had been fools; that they had been offered all they had
a right to ask. It was not, however, his quarrel. Mrs. Hardcome was the
offended party, and Mrs. Hardcome would hear of nothing less than an
apology.

In a week or less the church was plunged into all the mean pettiness of
a church quarrel. The black prunella gaiters and the slip of paper with
the shoe size were, while not forgotten, almost lost in the slimy mass
of tattle and chatter. James Cruser in a day changed from a partisan of
the Hardcomes to a bitter enemy, because Mrs. MacDorty told Mrs. Cruser
that Mrs. Hardcome had said Mr. Cruser was trying to befriend both sides
and was double-faced. Ned Long, looming as the leader of the Hardcome
faction, told of a peculiar mortgage old James P. Wardop had--he
said--extorted from Widow Wilmot, and Mr. Wardop became the staunchest
supporter of David, although he had always said David was the worst
preacher a man ever sat under. It was--“and she's a nice one to stick up
for the Deans when everybody knows”--and--“but what else can you expect
from a man like him, who was mean enough to”--and so on.

'Thusia wept a great many tears when she was not with David. The quarrel
was like a wasp-like a nest of wasps. From whatever quarter a stinging
bit of maliciousness set out, and whoever it stung in its circling
course, it invariably ended at 'Thusia's door. In a short time the
affair had become a bitter factional quarrel. There were those who
supported Mr. Hardcome and those who supported Mr. Wardop, but the
fight became a battle to drive 'Thusia out of Riverbank and the result
threatened to be the same, whichever side finally considered itself
beaten. Many would leave the church.

During those weeks David's face became thin and drawn. Even the actions
of his closest friend, Dr. Benedict, hurt him, for Benedict refused
to remain neutral and became a raging partisan for David. The old
bachelor--while he never admitted it--adored 'Thusia and since he
had been dubbed “Uncle” he considered her his daughter (a mixing of
relationships) and nothing 'Thusia could do was wrong. He hurt David's
cause by his violence. Even 'Thusia's own father, Mr. Fragg, was less
partisan. David tried to act as peacemaker, but soon the quarrel seemed
to have gone beyond any adjustment.

Mary Wiggett went home from her father's office deeply hurt because her
father was uncompromisingly against David. Ellen Hardcome was delighted.
With old Sam Wiggett on her side she was sure of victory, and when she
left Mary she set about planning a final blow against David. She found
her husband in his shoe store and told him of the manner in which
old Wiggett had refused to help Mary. Together Ellen and her husband
discussed the best method of administering the _coup de grâce_.
Hardcome, being neither an elder nor a trustee, doubted the advisability
of forcing the matter immediately upon the attention of either body, for
he was not yet sure enough of them. The decision finally reached was to
ask for an unofficial meeting at which the opposition to David could
be crystallized--a meeting made up of enough prominent members of the
church to practically overawe any undecided elders and trustees. With
Sam Wiggett at the head of such a meeting no one could doubt the result.
David would have to go.

Hardcome's first step was to see Sam Wiggett, for he desired, above all
else, to have Wiggett call the meeting. The stubborn old man refused.

“I'm with you,” he said. “That wife of Dean's made all this trouble, but
I never sold her a shoe. You started this; call your own meeting.”

“You'll attend!” asked Hardcome.

“Yes.”

“And may we make you chairman!”

“Yes.”

“There may be some there who will try to talk down any motion or
resolution we may want to pass--”

“You leave them to me!” said Wiggett.

Of the proposed meeting Mary knew nothing. She planned to run down to
see David and 'Thusia after supper, although she had but faint hope of
inducing David to leave Riverbank for a “vacation” now that her father
had refused his aid. Wiggett, who still remained the head of his
household, although Mary and her husband were nominally in control,
ate his supper in grim silence and nothing was said about David or the
church affairs. Nor did Mary run down to the manse after supper as she
had planned. When the meal was half finished her nurse called her away
from the supper table to see her child, who was suddenly feverish and
“stopped up.” Mary did not return, and Derling, when he had ended his
meal, found her holding the little one in her arms.

“George,” she said, “I'm worried about baby. I'm afraid he's sick. Touch
his cheek; see how hot he is. Go for Dr. Benedict. I'm frightened.”

“Benedict!” said Derling. “What do you want that fellow for! I won't
have him in the house. I'll get Martin. I won't have Benedict, always
hanging about that dear dominie of yours!”

“He's jealous!” thought Mary with a sudden inward gasp of surprise. She
bent forward and brushed the baby's hair from the hot forehead. That
Derling could be jealous of David Dean had never occurred to Mary. Her
marriage had been so completely an alliance of fortune rather than of
love, and Derling had seemed so indifferent and lacking in affection,
that she had never even considered that jealousy might have a part in
his nature. Derling, she knew, conducted plenty of flirtations on his
own side; some were rather notorious affairs; but Mary was conscious of
never having overstepped the lines set for a good wife. She did not deny
to herself that she felt still a great affection for David, and she felt
that for David to leave Riverbank would be the greatest sorrow of her
life, but she had never imagined that Derling might think he had cause
for jealousy.

Derling was, however, like many men who are willing to flirt with
other women, an extremely jealous man. He was jealous of the time and
attention Mary gave the dominie. Derling had, therefore, thrown himself
into the ranks of the Hardcome adherents, and he had been one of those
who ran afoul of old Dr. Benedict's keen tongue. Some of the advice
Benedict had given him would have done him good had he acted on it, but
it cut deep. The old doctor knew human nature and how to make it squirm.

“Benedict is so much better with children, George,” said Mary, looking
up. “He seems to work miracles, sometimes.”

“If he came in this house, I would throw him out,” said Derling. “I
won't have him. That's flat!”

“Well, get Martin then, but I _don't_ have the faith in him I have in
Benedict,” Mary said.

Martin came. He said it was nothing, that the child had a croupy cold
and he left a powder for the fever and advised Mary what to do in case
the child got worse during the night. When he came the next day he
said the boy was much better. That evening Derling, sent downtown for
medicine, heard at the druggist's that 'Thusia's child had diphtheria
and that there was a fresh outbreak of the disease in town. He drove
his horse home at a gallop and found Martin there, and Mary, white and
panic-stricken, wringing her hands. When the young doctor admitted that
the child had diphtheria Derling, in a rage, almost threw him out of
the house. A slight fever was one thing, the dread disease was quite
another, and he left Mary weeping, and lashed his horse in search of Dr.
Benedict.

The old doctor was not at home; Derling found him at David's and
found him in a tearing rage. Mrs. Hardcome, hoping to force David's
resignation, had just called to warn David that if he wished to protect
himself he must attend the meeting the next evening. Benedict was still
spluttering with anger and tramping up and down David's little study,
when Derling found him.

“You!” he shouted. “Go to your house! I'd let you all rot first, the
whole lot of you. Go get your Martin, you called him quick enough.
I wouldn't go if you got on your knees to me. You and your dog-faced
father-in-law and your Hardcomes, trying to drive this poor girl out of
town! If this was my house I'd throw you out. I will anyway! Get out!”

Poor Derling--harmless enough creature--did all but get on his knees.
He went away haggard, and looking twenty years older, to find some other
physician. He got Wagenheim, a poor substitute. In fact there was no
substitute for Benedict. It may have been that luck favored him, but the
old doctor seemed able to wrest children from the clutches of the awful
disease far oftener than other physicians. Derling felt that the angry
old doctor had condemned his son to death. With the witlessness of
a distracted man he tried to find Rose Hinch at her room on the main
street, thinking Rose might plead for him with Benedict. He might have
known Rose would be with 'Thusia in such an hour of trial. He went home,
dreading to face Mary, and found Wagenheim doing what he could, which
was little enough. Mary was not there.

When Wagenheim came Mary had guessed that Derling had not got Benedict,
and she guessed why. She ran, half dressed and hatless as she was, all
the way to the manse. In her agony she still thought clearly; Benedict
would be there, and if he was not there David would be, and in
David--calm and faithful to all his people even when they turned against
him--she placed her hope. In the dark she could not find the bell and
she was fumbling at the door when it opened and 'Thusia stood before
her, silhouetted against the light. With the impulse of one suffering
mother in the presence of another, Mary grasped 'Thusia's arms.

“'Thusia!” she cried. “My boy is dying and Benedict won't come. Can't
you make him come? He knows, and he won't come!”

'Thusia drew back in horror.

“He knows? And he won't go?” she exclaimed. “But Mary, he must
go! Why--why--but he must go, Mary! I don't understand!
Benedict--won't--go?”

She turned and flew to the study where Benedict had usurped David's
easy-chair. She stood before him, one mother pleading for another. No
one but the three--Benedict and 'Thusia and Mary--will ever know what
she said, but when she had said it old Benedict drew himself out of the
chair and went with Mary.

A week later little Davy, 'Thusia's child, died. Mary was more
fortunate; her boy recovered and although it was long before he was
strong again Mary treasured him all the more. Rose Hinch, her work at
David's ended, went to her and for many weeks was like another mother to
the sick child.

But it was the night following old Benedict's denunciation of Derling
and all the Hardcome clique that David Dean found a new supporter. The
meeting that was to end his stay in Riverbank was to be held in Ned
Long's office and David went early, not to be accused of cowardice. He
left 'Thusia and Rose with the boy, drove old Benedict away, and went
alone. He walked slowly, his head bowed and his hands clasped behind
him, for he had no hope left. It was so he came to the foot of Ned
Long's office stairs and face to face with old Sam Wiggett standing in
the dark of the entry. He stopped short, for the bulky old man did not
move aside.

“Huh!” growled the old lumberman. “So it's you, is it? What are you
doing here?”

“There's a meeting--” David began.

“Meeting? No, by the eternal! there's not going to be any meeting, now
nor ever! I'll throw them out neck and crop; I'll boot them out, but
there'll be no meeting. Go home!” In the dark the heavy-jowled old
man scowled at the slender young dominie. Suddenly he put his hand on
David's shoulder. “Dean--Dean--” he said; “you and that little wife of
yours--” That was all he could say. Mary's boy, at home, was making the
awful struggle for life.

And there was no meeting. A month later Mr. and Mrs. Hardcome went to
the Episcopalians, and a half year later to the Congregationalists,
where they remained. There was a lull in the church quarrel during the
days when little Davy was sickest, and while David and 'Thusia were in
the first cruel days of grief. There were but few bitter enough to wish
to take up the fight again against the sorrowing 'Thusia. The quarrel
was buried with little Davy, for when David entered the pulpit again,
and the congregation waited to learn how their leaders would lead them,
the powerful man of the church decided for them. When David came down
from the pulpit old Sam Wiggett, stolid, heavy-faced and thick-necked,
waited for him at the head of the aisle and placed his arm around
David's shoulders, and Mary Derling crossed the aisle and stood beside
'Thusia Dean.

David had won.




VII. MACK


DAVID had won. Except for the defection of the Hardcomes--who left
behind them a feeling that they were trouble-makers and were not greatly
regretted--the church continued its even tenor. It must always be a
question, however, whether David would not have done better by losing.
Riverbank grew in population, as shown by the census, but the growth was
not one to prosper the Presbyterian Church at Riverbank. The sawmills
brought nearly all the newcomers--immigrants from Germany almost
entirely--and these had their own churches. The increase in population
offered little material with which to build up David's congregation.

At that time but few farmers, grown wealthy, moved into town. The town
hardly realized, until the lumber business died, how contracted was
the circle of its industries. The few men of wealth were all
firmly affiliated with one church or another--as were also all the
well-to-do--and, with no available new blood, it was inevitable that the
numbers in the existing churches should remain almost stationary.

Liberality was not a trait of the wealthy of Riverbank at that day. Like
old Sam Wiggett, those with money had had their hard grubbing at first
and knew almost too well the value of a dollar. The ministers of the
various churches in Riverbank were paid but paltry sums and their
salaries were often in arrears.

Had David lost his fight and been driven from Riverbank he might, and
probably would, have gone far. He preached well and was still young.
It is hardly possible that he would have felt for a new church the
affection he felt for the church at Riverbank, and he might have gone
from church to church until he was in some excellent metropolitan
pulpit. For Riverbank he felt, coming here so young, something of the
affection of a man for his birthplace.

In the years following the church quarrel David began to feel the pinch
of an inadequate remuneration. After little Roger was born 'Thusia was,
for a year, more or less of an invalid, and a maid was a necessity. The
additional drains on David's income, slight as they were, meant real
hardship when he had with difficulty kept out of debt before. Two
years later little Alice was born, and 'Thusia was kept to her bed, an
invalid, longer than before. They were sad days for David. For a month
'Thusia hung between life and death, and Mary Derling and Rose Hinch,
with old Dr. Benedict, spared neither time nor affection.

Rose Hinch put aside all remunerative calls and nursed 'Thusia night
and day. Dr. Benedict was equally faithful, and the women of David's
congregation deluged the manse with jellies, flowers, bowls of “floating
island” and other dainties, but when 'Thusia was up and about again
David faced a debt of nearly three hundred dollars. As soon as 'Thusia
was able to stand the strain the church gave David a donation party.
Pickles and preserves predominated, but a purse made a part of the
donation and left David only some hundred and seventy or eighty dollars
in debt.

This is no great sum nor did any of his creditors press him unduly for
payment. His bills were small and scattered. He tried to pay them, but
in spite of 'Thusia's greatest efforts each salary period saw an
unpaid balance seldom smaller, and sometimes slightly greater, than
the original debt. This debt worried David and 'Thusia far more than it
worried his creditors--who worried not at all--but before long it seemed
to become, as such things do, a part of life. David's bills, paid at one
end and increased at the other, were never over three months in arrears.
In Riverbank at that day this was considered unusually prompt pay.
Accounts were usually rendered once a year. But the debt was always
there.

The year her boy was three Mary Derling divorced her husband. For some
time one of Derling's flirtations had been more serious than Mary had
imagined. When she heard the truth she talked the matter over calmly
with her father and her husband. All three were of one mind. Derling's
father had consistently refused to give the son money and Sam Wiggett
had again and again put his hand in his pocket to make good sums lost
by Derling in ill-considered business ventures. The truth was that
Derling's flirtations were costing too much, and he spent more than he
could afford. Wiggett, to be rid of this constant drain, gave Derling a
good lump sum and Mary kept the child. The divorce was granted quietly,
no one knowing anything about it until it was all over. There was
no scandal whatever. Derling went back to Derlingport and was soon
forgotten, and Mary resumed her maiden name. More than ever, now, she
took part in David's work, and her purse was always at his service for
his works of charity. David, Rose Hinch and Mary were a triumvirate
working together for the good.

At thirty-seven Dominie Dean was as fully a man as he ever would be. He
was fated to cling always to his boyish optimism; never to age into a
heavily authoritative head of a flock, with a smooth paunch over which
to pass a plump hand as if blessing a satisfactory digestive apparatus.
To the last day of his life he remained youthfully slender, and his
clear gray eyes and curly hair, even when the latter turned gray,
suggested something boyish.

It is inevitable that fifteen years of ministry shall either make or mar
the man inside the minister. David Dean had ripened without drying into
a hack of church routine. At thirty he had, without being aware of the
fact, entered a new period of his ministry, and at thirty-seven, like
a pilot who knows his ship, he was no longer prone to excitement over
small difficulties. If he was no longer a flash of fire, he was a
steadier flame.

In fifteen years David had come to love Riverbank, even to having
a half-quizzical and smilingly philosophical love for the Wiggetts,
Grims-bys and others who had once been thorns in his flesh. Their simple
closefistedness, generosity based on ambition and transparent, harmless,
hypocrisy were, after all, human traits, and while not exactly pleasant
neither more nor less than part of the world in which David had his work
to do. Wherever one went, or whatever work one undertook, there were
Wiggetts and Hardcomes and Grimsbys. They were part of life. They
were irritants, but it rested with David whether he should feel their
irritation as a scratch or a tickle. Until he was thirty he had often
smarted; now he smiled.

In the self-centered little town there were good people and bad and, as
is the case everywhere, fewer actively vicious than we are pleased to
assume. David cherished a philosophy of pity for these. If old Wiggett
had so much good in him, and 'Thusia, who was now as faithful a wife
and mother as Riverbank could boast, had once been on the verge of being
cold-shouldered into a life of triviality, if not of shame, no doubt all
these others, if they had been properly guided in the beginning, might
have been as normal as old Mrs. Grelling, or the absolutely colorless
Mr. Prell. With all this willingness to make allowances for the sinner,
David had a hard, uncompromising, Presbyterian hatred for the sin. In
one of his sermons he put it thus: “To sin is human; the sin is of
the devil.” It was in this spirit David began his long fight against
Mac-dougal Graham's personal devil.

When David Dean came to Riverbank Mack Graham had been a bright-eyed,
saucy, curly-haired little fellow of five or six; a “why!” sort of
boy--“Why do you wear a white necktie? Why do you have to stand in the
pulpit! Why did Mr. Wiggett get up and go out! Why's that horse standing
on three legs!” Certain ladies of the church made a great pet of Mack
and helped spoil him, for he was as handsome as he was saucy. An only
son, born late in his parents' lives, they prepared the way for his
disgrace. It may be well enough, as Emerson advises, to “cast the
bantling on the rocks,” but leaving an only son to his own devices on
the theory that he is the finest boy in creation and can do no wrong
does not work out as well. At nineteen Mack was wild, unruly and
drinking himself to ruin.

David's first knowledge of the state into which Mack had fallen came
from 'Thusia. There had been one of those periodical church squabbles
in which the elder members had locked horns with the younger and more
progressive over some unimportant question that had rapidly grown
vital, and David had, for a while, been busy impoverishing the little
conflagration so that it might burn out the more quickly. The church was
subject to these little affairs. In the fifteen years of his ministry
David had seen the church change slowly as a natural result of children
reaching maturity, and the passing of the aged. Some, who liked David's
sermons left other churches and joined the congregation, and there were
a few accretions of newcomers, but from the first the older members had
resented any interference with their management on the part of new and
younger members. A change in the choir, an effort to have the dingy
interior of the church redecorated, any one of a thousand petty matters
would, if suggested by the newer members, throw the older men into a
line of battle.

It was, in a way, a quarrelsome church. It was, indeed, not only in
Riverbank but throughout the country, a quarrelsome time. The first
rills of broader doctrine were beginning to permeate the hot rock of
petrified religion and where they met there was sure to be steam and
boiling water and discomfort for the minister, whether he held with one
side or the other, or tried to be neutral. The Riverbank church, because
of the conservatism of the older members, was particularly prone to
petty quarrels, and this was one of David's greatest distresses. At
heart he was with those who favored the broader view, but he was able to
appreciate the fond jealousy of the older men and women for old thoughts
and ways.

It was after one of these quarrels, when he had found himself unduly
busied healing wounds, that 'Thusia came running across from the
Mannings', opposite the manse, and tapped on David's study door.

“Yes! Come in!” he said.

“David! It's Mack--Mack Graham--he is drunk!”

“Mack drunk!” David cried, for he could not believe he had heard aright.
“Not our Mack!”

David, his lanky form slid down in his great chair so that he was
sitting on the small of his back, had been thinking over his sermon for
the next Sunday. No one could sit in David's great chair without sliding
down and down and down into comfort or into extreme discomfort. It had
taken David a long time to become part of the chair, so that he could
feel the comfort of utter relaxation of body it demanded. In time the
chair grew to be a part of the David we all knew. Those of us who knew
him best can never forget him as he was when he sat in that old chair,
his feet on the floor, his knees almost as high as his chin, his hands
loosely folded over his waist, so that his thin, expressive thumbs could
tap together in, emphasis as he talked, and his head forward so that
his chin rested on the bosom of his shirt. Slumped down like this in
the great chair, he talked to us of things we talked of nowhere else. We
could talk religion with David when he was in his chair quite as if it
were an interesting subject. Many of us can remember his smile as he
listened to our feeble objections to his logic, or how he ran his hand
through his curls and tossed one knee on top of the other when it was
time to bring the full battery of his mind against us. It was while
slumped into his great chair that David had most of his famous word
battles with old Doc Benedict, and there, his fine brow creased, he
listened when Rose Hinch told of someone in need or in trouble. When we
happened in and David was out and we waited for him in his study that
chair was the _emptiest_ chair man ever saw in the world. The hollows
of the threadbare old green rep always seemed to hunger for David as no
other chair ever hungered for any other man. No other man or woman ever
fitted the chair. I always felt like an overturned turtle in it, with my
neck vainly trying to get my head above the engulfing hollow. Only David
and little children felt comfortable in the chair, for in it little
children--David's own or others--could curl up as comfortably as a
kitten in a rug.

It was out of this chair David scrambled, full of fight, when 'Thusia
brought him the news that Mack was drunk.

What 'Thusia had to tell David was clear enough and sad enough. From
his great chair, when David raised his eyes, he could see the Mannings'
house across the way, white with green blinds, cool in the afternoon
shadows. Sometimes Amy Manning and sometimes her mother and sometimes
both sat on the porch, busied with the trifles of needlework women love.
It was always a pleasant picture, the house framed between the trunks
of two great maples, the lawn crisply cut and mottled with sunshine and
shadow, and at one side of the house a spot of geranium glowing red in
the sun with, at the other side, a mass of shrubbery against which a
foliage border of red and green fell, in the afternoons, just within the
shadow and had all the quality of rich Italian brocade.

Sometimes 'Thusia would run across to visit a few minutes with Amy
Manning, and sometimes Amy--her needlework gathered in her apron--would
come running across to sit awhile with 'Thusia. The two were very fond.
'Thusia had reached the age when she was always humorously complaining
about having to let out the seams of her last year's dresses, and
Amy was hardly more than a girl, but propinquity or some contrast or
similarity of disposition had made them the best of friends. Perhaps
'Thusia had never lost all her girlish qualities, and certainly Amy
had been something of a woman even as a child. For all the years that
divided them they were more nearly of an age than many who reckoned from
the same birth year. Such friendships are far from rare and are often
the best and most lasting.

David had seen Amy grow; had seen her fall bumping--a little ball of
white--down the Manning porch steps and had heard (and still heard)
the low-voiced and long lasting farewells she and Mack exchanged at
the Mannings' gate, young love making the most of itself, and making
a twenty-four hour tragedy out of a parting. The girl had been tall at
fourteen and even then had certain womanly gestures and manners. She had
always been a sweet girl, frank, gentle, even-tem-pered, with clear eyes
showing she had a good brain back of their blue. She was always, as
the saying is in Riverbank, “interested in church.” Her religion was
something real and vital. She accepted her faith in full and lived it,
not bothering with the artificial agonies of soul that some youngsters
find necessary. From a girl of this kind she had grown into a young
woman, calm, clean, sterling. She had a healthy love of pleasure in any
of the unforbidden forms, and, before Mack Graham slipped a ring on her
finger, she liked to have half a dozen young whipper-snappers showing
attention, quite like any other girl. She even liked, after that, to see
that two or three of the whipper-snappers were jealous of Mack.

Mack was never jealous and could not be. He was one of the laughing,
conquering hero kind. Amy was his from the moment he decided she was the
finest girl in the world; he never considered any rival worth a worry.
In olden days he would have been a carefree, swashbuckling D'Artagnan
sort of fellow, and this, in nose-to-grindstone Riverbank, made him a
great favorite and it led him to consort with a set of young fellows of
the gayer sort with whom he learned to crook his elbow over a bar and
continue to crook it until the alcohol had tainted his blood and set up
its imperative cry for more. When David took up the fight for Mack this
alcohol yearning had become well intrenched, and the conquering hero
trait in the young fellow's character made the fight doubly hard, for
Mack--more than any man I have ever known--believed in himself and that
he could “stop off short” whenever he really wished.

The thing that, more than all else, kept Mack from rapid ruin was his
engagement. Love has a certain power, and there are some men it will
reform or hold from evil, but it could not hold Mack. The yearning for
alcohol had found its place in his system before Amy had found her place
in his heart. The very night of his engagement was celebrated in Dan
Reilly's; Amy's kiss was hardly dry on his lips before he moistened them
with whisky, and it probably never occurred to him that he was doing
wrong. Before he had received all the congratulations that were pushed
over the bar, however, he was sickeningly intoxicated. Amy's father,
returning home from a late session with a trial balance, ran across Mack
and two of his companions swaying perilously on the curb of Main Street,
each maudlinly insisting that he was sober and should see the other two
safely home. It was ridiculous and laughable, but Mr. Manning did not
laugh; he knew Amy was more than fond of Mack. He told Amy about Mack
before she had a good opportunity to tell him of her engagement. This
was the next morning.

Mack, of course, came to see Amy that evening. In spite of a full day
spent in trying to remove the traces of the night's spree he showed
evidences that he had taken one or two drinks to steady his nerves
before seeing Amy. He was a little too hilarious when he met her at the
door, not offensive, but too talkative. It was a cruel position for the
girl. She loved Mack and loved him tremendously, but she had more than
common sense. She knew she had but one life to live, and she had set her
ideals of happiness long before. A drunken husband was not one of them.

She talked to Mack. She did not have, to help her, an older woman's
experience of the world, and she had against her the love that urged
her to throw herself in Mack's arms and weep away the seriousness of the
affair. She had against her, too--for it was against her with a man like
Mack--her overflowing religious eagerness which would have led another
girl to press the church and prayer upon him as a cure. No doubt it was
a strange conglomeration of love, religion and common sense she gave
him, but the steel frame of it all was that she could not marry a man
who drank. She left no doubt of that.

“Why, that's all right, Amy, that's all right!” Mack said. “I'll quit
the stuff. I can quit whenever I want to. Last night I just happened to
meet the boys and I was feeling happy--say, no fellow ever had a bigger
right to feel happy!--and maybe I took one or two too many. No more for
little Mack!”

They left it that way and went into the dining room, where Mr. and Mrs.
Manning were, to announce the engagement formally. It was two months
before Mack toppled again. This was the first 'Thusia and David knew of
it. 'Thusia and Amy had been sitting on the Mannings' porch when
Mack came up. Anyone would have known he was intoxicated, he was so
intoxicated he swayed. He talked, but his lips refused to fully form the
words he tried to use. He had come up, he said, to convince the little
rascal--meaning Amy--that it was all nonsense not to be married right
away. When he tried to say “nonsense” he said, “nom-nom-nomsemse, all
nomsemse.”

“Mack and I want to have a talk, 'Thusia,” Amy said, and 'Thusia
gathered up her sewing and fled to David.

When 'Thusia had told David all she knew, David walked to the window,
his thin hands clasped behind his back, and looked across toward the
Mannings'. Amy had taken Mack into the house to hide his shame from
chance passers-by. For several minutes David stood at the window while
'Thusia waited. He turned at last.

“It is my fault,” he said. “I should have thought of him.”

That was like David Dean. His shoulders were always overloaded with
others' burdens, and it was like David to blame himself for having
overlooked one burden more.




VIII. THE GREATER GOOD


MACK was not the only weak creature David was trying to help.
Helpfulness was his life. I do not want you to think of David as eager
for overwork, or as eager for greater burdens. He was always loaded down
with others' fights against poverty, passion and sin because something
within him always said: “This is one case in which you can be of actual
help.” Before he was aware he would be enlisted in these individual
battles, with all the close personal details that made them living
sorrows.

Inside the broad fight the church was making to strengthen character and
maintain morality these individual battles were fought. How could David
stand aloof from the battle of old Mrs. Miggs against poverty, with her
penchant for spending the alms she received for flummery dress; or
from the battle of old Wickham Reid against his insane inclination to
suicide; or from the battles of all the backsliders of one kind and
another; or from the battle of the Rathgebers against starvation; the
battle of young Ross Baldwin against the trains of thought that were
urging him to unbelief; or all the battles against alcohol! These were
lame dogs David was helping over stiles. There were battles David won in
an hour; there were other battles that lengthened into sieges, where sin
and sinners “dug in” and struggled for years.

In some of these 'Thusia could help David, and she did help, most
willingly, but 'Thusia had her own battles. Like most ministers' wives
she had a constant battle to make David's inadequate salary meet the
household expenses. When, after one of the usual church quarrels, those
in favor of putting the choir in surplices won, 'Thusia was sorry she
was not in the choir; her worn Sunday gown would not then be a weekly
humiliation. Her hats, poor things! were problems as difficult to
finance as a war. The grocer's bill was a monthly catastrophe; “the
wood is low again, David,” was an announcement 'Thusia felt was almost
unkind. She spent five times as long turning a dress that was no
pleasure after it was turned than she should have had to spend getting
a new one. The lack of a few dollars to “do with” is the greatest waster
of a faithful home-keeper's time.

The hope of a call to a church that will pay enough to supply those few
dollars is one many ministers' wives cherish.

David picked up his hat and waited on his own porch until he saw Mack
come from the Mannings' door; then he crossed the street.

“'Lo, dominie!” Mack said unsteadily. “Little girl's been giving me Hail
Columbia. She's all right, dominie; fine little girl. I'm ashamed of
myself. Told you so, didn't I, little girl?”

David put his hand on Mack's shoulder.

“She _is_ a fine girl, Mack,” he said. “There's no finer girl in America
than Amy. Suppose we take a walk, Mack, a good long walk out into
the country and tell each other just how fine Amy is.” Mack smiled
knowingly. He put a hand on David's shoulder, so that the two men stood
like some living statue of “United we stand.”

“Couldn't tell all about how fine a little girl she is in _one_ walk,”
 he said.

“Come!” said David.

He put his arm through Mack's, and thus he led him away. The assistance
was necessary, for Mack was drunker than he had seemed. David led him to
the country roads by the shortest route, that passing the cemetery, and
when they were beyond the town he walked Mack hard. He let Mack do the
talking and kept him talking of Amy, for of what would a lover, drunk
or sober, rather talk than of his sweetheart! It was dark and long past
David's supper hour when they reached the town again, and David drew
Mack into the manse for a “bite.” After they had eaten he led him into
the study.

Mack was well past the unpleasant stage of his intoxication now, and
with 'Thusia sewing in her little, low rocker and Mack in a comfortable
chair and David slumped down in his own great chair, they talked of Amy
and of a hundred things David knew how to make interesting. It was ten
when 'Thusia bade them good-night and went out of the study.

“The Mannings are still up,” said David, and Mack turned and looked out
of the window.

“God, but I am a beast!” said Mack.

“You are worse than that, Mack, because you are a man,” said David.

“Yes, I'm worse than a beast,” said Mack. He meant it. David, deep in
his chair, his eyes on Mack's face, tapped his thumbs slowly together.

“Mack,” he asked, “just how much of a hold has this drink got on you!”

“Oh, I can stop any time I--”

“Yes, so can Doc Benedict,” said David. “He stops whenever he has had
his periodical and his nerves stop their howling for the alcohol. I
don't mean that, Mack. Just how insistent is the wish for the stuff,
when you haven't had it for a while, if it makes you forget Amy as you
did to-day!”

“Well, it is pretty insistent,” Mack admitted. “I don't mean to get
the way I was this afternoon, dominie. Something starts me and I keep
going.”

David's thumbs tapped more and more slowly.

“You still have the eyes of a man, Mack,” he said, “and you are still
able to look me in the eyes like a man, Mack,” he said. “We ought to be
able to beat this thing. Now go over and say good-night to Amy. She'll
sleep better for seeing you as you are now.”

The next day David learned more, and so did 'Thusia. What David learned
was that the two months that had elapsed between Mack's engagement spree
and his next was the longest period the young fellow had been sober for
some time, and that Mack had already been docketed in the minds of those
who knew him best as a hard and reckless drinker. It meant the fight
would be harder and longer than David had hoped. What 'Thusia learned
was that Amy had had a long talk with Mack after he had left David.

“She did not tell him, David, but she told me, that she could not marry
him if he let this happen. She can't marry a drunkard; no one would want
her to; but if she throws him over he will be gone, David. She'll give
him his chance, and she will help us--or let us help her--but when she
is sure he is beyond help she will send him away. And when she sends him
away--”

“If she sends him away one great influence will be lost,” said David.
“She must not send him away.”

“If he comes to her drunk again,” said 'Thusia, as one who has saved the
worst tidings until last, “she will have no more to do with him.”

In less than a week Mack fell again, and Amy, her heart well-nigh
broken, gave him back his ring, and ended the engagement. Then, indeed,
began the hardest fight David ever made for a man against that man's
self. There were nights when David walked the streets with Mack until
the youth fell asleep as he walked, and days when Mack lay half stupid
in David's great chair while the dominie scribbled his sermon notes at
the desk beneath the spatter-work motto: “Keep an even mind under all
circumstances.” Often David and old Doc Benedict sat in the same study
and discussed Mack. David from the stand of one who wanted to save the
young fellow, and Benedict as one who knew the alcohol because it had
conquered him.

“Now, in my case,” the doctor would say, quite as if he were discussing
another person; and, “but on the other hand I had this gnawing pain in
my stomach, while--” and so on.

There were weeks when David felt he was making great progress and other
weeks when he felt he was not holding his own, and some frightful weeks
when Mack threw everything aside and plunged into unbridled dissipation.
The periods after these sprees were deceptive. During them Mack seemed
to want no liquor and vaunted his strength of will. He boasted he would
never touch another drop.

There were also periods of overwhelming defeat, and periods when Mack
was never drunk but never sober. Little by little, however, David felt
he was making progress. It was slow and there were no “Cures” to work
a sudden change, as there are now, but under the tottering structure of
Mack's will David was slowly building a foundation of serious thought.
Mack was changing. His dangerous and illusive bravado was bit by bit
yielding to a desire to do what David wished.

It was slow work. Rather by instinct than by logic David saw that to
save Mack he must make Mack like him better than he liked anyone in
Riverbank. Our David had none of that burly magnetism that draws men in
a moment; those of us who liked him best were those who had known him
longest, and he was not the man a youth like Mack would instinctively
choose as a dearest friend and most frequent companion. In David's mind
the idea probably formed itself thus: “I must make Mack come to me as
often as possible,” and, “Mack won't come unless he likes me.” He set
about making Mack like him, and making him like 'Thusia and little Roger
and baby Alice, and making him like the manse and all that was in it.
With Amy turning her face from Mack, and Mack's mother varying between
shrewish scolding and maudlin tears, and Mack's father wielding no
weapon but a threat of disinheritance, it became necessary that Mack
should have someone he wished to please, someone he liked and respected
and wished to please more than he wished to please his insistent nerves.
Each touch of eagerness added to Mack's face as he came up the manse
walk David counted a gain.

And 'Thusia, beside what she did for Mack in making Mack love the manse
and all those in it, worked with Amy and kept alive the flame of her
love.

They were dear people, our Dominie Davy and his wife. In time little
Roger became as eager to see Mack as Mack was to see David, and Mack
became “Ungel Mack” to the child. The boy would climb the gate and cry,
“Here cometh Ungel Mack!” with all the eagerness of joyful childhood.
Sometimes when Mack was drunk, but not too drunk, David would lead Roger
into the study, and the boy would say, “Poor Ungel Mack, you thick?” It
all helped.

Together Mack and David made the fight. Amy, according to her light,
did her part, too. She never fled from David's little porch when she
happened to be there and saw Mack coming up the street. She always gave
Mack her hand in frank and friendly manner. She did not let the other
young fellows pay her attentions. It was as if Mack had never courted
her; as if they were bound by a friendship that had never ripened into
anything warmer but that might some day. Mack was fine about it; eager
as he was to have Amy he held himself in check. Eventually it was a
great thing for them both; it was as if they were living the difficult
“getting acquainted” year that follows the honeymoon before the
honeymoon itself. They got to know each other better, perhaps, than any
Riverbank lovers had ever known one another.

It was one Sunday afternoon during this stage of Mack's fight, while
Mack and 'Thusia and Amy were on the porch and David taking his
between-sermon nap in his great chair, that the great opportunity
came to David's door. It came in the form of a man of sixty years,
silk-hatted and frock-coated. He walked slowly up the street from the
direction of the town, and when he reached David's gate he paused and
read the number painted on the riser of the porch step, opened the gate
and entered. He removed his hat and extended his hand to 'Thusia.

“You are Mrs. Dean, I know,” he said, smiling. “My name is Benton, and I
don't think you know me. Mr. Dean is in?”

There were many men of many kinds came to David's door from one end of
a year to the other, but never had a man come whose face so quickened
'Thusia's heart. It was a strongly modeled face and gave an impression
of power. The nose was too large and the lips were too large, so were
the brows, so were all the features. It was a face that was too large
for itself, it left no room for the eyes, which had to peer out as best
they could from between the brows that crowded them from above, and the
cheekbones that crowded them from below, but they were kind, keen, sane
eyes; they were even twinkling eyes. The man was rather too stout and
his skin was coarse-pored, almost as if pitted. 'Thusia had never seen
a homelier man, and yet she liked him from the moment he spoke. It was
partly his voice, full, soft and, in some way, satisfying. She felt he
was a big man and a good man and an honest man.

“Yes, Mr. Dean is in,” she said. “I think he is napping. If you will
just rest a minute until I see--”

David, as was his habit when his visitors were unknown to him, came
to the door. 'Thusia slipped into the kitchen. The day was hot and
Mr. Benton was hot, and there were lemons and ice in the refrigerator,
perhaps a pitcher of lemonade all ready to serve with thin cakes.

“Mr. Benton, my wife said, I think!” asked David. “Shall we sit out here
or go inside!”

“Might go inside,” said the visitor, and David led the way into the
study. Mr. Benton placed his hat on the floor beside the chair David
placed for him, unbuttoned his coat and breathed deeply.

“Quite a hill you are perched on here,” he said. “Fat man's misery on a
day like this. I suppose you saw me in church this morning!”

“Yes. I tried to reach you after the service, but you slipped out.”

“I ran away,” admitted Mr. Benton. “I wanted to think that sermon over
and cool down after it. It was a good sermon.”

David waited.

“I'm a lawyer,” said Mr. Benton, “and I'm cracked up as quite an orator
in one way and another, and I know that some of the things that sound
best hot from the lips don't amount to so much an hour later. That was
a good sermon, then and now! It was a remarkable sermon. I want you
to come to Chicago and preach that same sermon to us in the Boulevard
Church next Sunday, Mr. Dean.”

David, in his great chair, tapped his thumbs together and looked at Mr.
Benton. He was trying to keep an even mind under circumstances that made
his pulse beat almost wildly.

“You know now, as well as you ever will, why I'm here, I think,” said
Mr. Benton. “We are looking for the right man for our church, and I came
here to hear you. I think you are the man we want. I can almost say
that if you preach as well for us next Sunday as you did to-day we will
hardly dare let you come back for your household goods. Matter of fact,
the man I select is the man we want.”

“I know the church,” said David slowly. “It is a splendid church.”

“It _is_ a good church,” said Mr. Benton. “It is a strong church and
a large church. It is a church that needs a young man and a church in
which you will have opportunity for the greater good a man such as you
always desires. I jotted down a few figures and so on--”

Holding the paper in his hand Mr. Benton read the figures; figures of
membership, average attendance morning and evening, stipend, growth,
details even to the number of rooms in the manse and what the rooms
were.

“The church pays the salary of the secretary,” he added.

David's thumbs were pressed close together. His mind passed in rapid
review the patched breeches little Roger wore during the week, the
pitiful hat 'Thusia tried to make respectable, her oft-remodeled gowns.
It was comfort to the verge of luxury Mr. Benton was offering, as
compared with Riverbank. It was more than this: it was a broader field,
a greater chance.

Slumped down in his great chair, his eyes closed, David thought. It
would mean freedom from the petty quarrels that vexed the church at
Riverbank; it would mean freedom from cares of money. Out of the liberal
stipend Mr. Benton had mentioned they might even put aside a goodly bit.
It would mean he could start anew with a clean slate and be rid of the
stupid interference of all the Hardcome and Grimsby tribe. 'Thusia would
be with him, and Rose Hinch--who had become, in a way, a lay sister of
good works, helping him with his charities--could be induced to follow
him. Then he thought of old Mrs. Miggs, and of Wickham Reid, of the
Rathgebers and Ross Baldwin, and all those whose fight he was fighting
in Riverbank. And Mack! What would become of Mack!

Through the window he heard the voices of Mack and Amy.

“It is quite unexpected,” David said, opening his eyes. “I'll have
to--you have no objection to my speaking to my wife?”

The tinkling of ice in a pitcher sounded at the door.

“By all means, speak to her,” said Mr. Benton, and as 'Thusia tapped
David arose and opened the door. 'Thusia entered.

“'Thusia,” David said, “Brother Benton is from the Boulevard Church
in Chicago. He wants me to preach there next Sabbath and, if the
congregation is satisfied, I may be offered the pulpit.” The color
slowly mounted from 'Thusia's throat to her brow. She stood holding the
small tin tray, and the glasses trembled against the pitcher. It did not
need the figures Mr. Benton reread to tell 'Thusia all the opportunity
meant. Mr. Benton ceased, and still 'Thusia stood holding the tray. Her
eyes left Mr. Benton's uncouth face and found David's eyes.

“It--it's wonderful, David,” she said steadily, “but of course there's
Mack--and Amy!”

So Mr. Benton and the great opportunity went back to Chicago, after a
sip or two of 'Thusia's lemonade, and David dropped back into his great
chair and his old life of helpfulness, and 'Thusia went out on the porch
and smiled at Amy, and they all had lemonade.

From the day Mr. Benton entered David's door Mack never touched the
liquor again. It was a year before Amy felt sure enough to let him slip
the ring on her finger again, but it was as if David's sacrifice had
worked the final cure. Perhaps it did. Perhaps Mack, hearing, as all of
us did, of the great chance David had put aside, guessed what none of us
guessed--that it was for him David remained in Riverbank. Perhaps that
was why, when our church wanted to throw David aside in his old age like
a worn-out shoe, Mack Graham fought so hard and successfully to secure
for David the honorary title and the pittance.




IX. LUCILLE HARDCOME


IN spite of all his efforts David could not shake off his pitiful little
burden of debt. After little Alice 'Thusia bore him two more children;
they died before the month, and the last left 'Thusia an invalid, and
even Doctor Benedict lacked the skill to aid her. A maid--hired girl,
we called them in Riverbank--became a necessity. The church did what it
thought it could, gave David a few more dollars yearly, and sympathized
with him.

To David the misfortune of 'Thusia's invalidism came so gradually
that he felt the weight of it bit by bit and not as a single great
catastrophe. She was “not herself” and then “not quite well” and then,
before he was fully aware, he was happy when she had a “good” day.

'Thusia did not complain. With her whole heart she wished she was well
and strong, but she did not allow her troubles to sour her mind or
heart. Mary Derling and Rose Hinch came oftener to see her. 'Thusia,
unable to do her own housework, had more time to use her hands. Once,
when some petty bill worried David, she asked if she could not take
in sewing, but David would not hear of it. There are some things a
dominie's wife cannot be allowed to do to help her husband. About this
time 'Thusia did much sewing for the poor, who probably worried less
over their finances than David worried over his, and who, as likely as
not, criticized the stitches 'Thusia took with such loving good will.

David was then a fine figure of a man in the forties. Always slender, he
reached his greatest weight then; a little later worry and work wore
him down again. If his kindly cheerfulness was at all forced we never
guessed it. He was the same big-hearted, friendly Davy he had always
been, better because more mature. As a preacher he was then at his best.
It was at this time Lucille Hardcome's life first brought her in touch
with David.

Lucille was a widow. Seth Hardcome and his wife, Ellen, had long since
left our church in a huff, going to another congregation and staying
there. Lucille was, in some sort, Seth's cousin-in-law, however that may
be. She came to Riverbank jingling golden bracelets and rustling silken
garments, and for a while attended services with Seth and his wife, but
something did not suit her and she came to us. We counted her a great
acquisition, for she had taken the old Ware house on the hill--one of
the few big “mansions” the town boasted.

In a few weeks after her arrival Lucille Hardcome was well known in
Riverbank. She had money. Her husband--and Riverbank never knew anything
else about him---had been an old man when she married him. He had died
within the year. No doubt, having had that length of time in which to
become acquainted with Lucille's vagaries, he was willing enough to
go his way. Within a month after she had installed herself in the Ware
house Lucille had her “hired man”--they were not called “coachmen”
 until Lucille came to Riverbank--and a fine team of blacks. Her low-hung
carriage was for many years thereafter a common sight in Riverbank. As
Lucille furnished it her house seemed to us palatial in its elegance.
It overpowered those who saw its interior; she certainly managed to get
everything into the rooms that they would hold--even to a grand piano
and a huge gilded harp on which she played with a great show of plump
arms. All this mass of furnishings and bric-à-brac was without taste,
but to Riverbank it was impressive. She had, I remember, a huge cuckoo
clock she had bought in Switzerland, but which, being of unvarnished
wood, did not suit her taste, so she had it gilded, and hung it against
a plaque of maroon velvet. She painted a little, on china, on velvet and
on canvas, and her rooms soon held a hundred examples of her work, all
bad. Unless you were nearsighted, however, you could tell her roses from
her landscapes even from across the room, for she painted large. It was
the day of china plaques, and Lucille had the largest china plaque in
Riverbank. It was three feet across. It was much coveted.

On her body she crowded clothes as she crowded her house with
furnishings. She was permanently overdressed. She was of impressive size
and she made herself larger with ruffles and frills. Her hair was always
overdone--she must have spent hours on it--and if a single hair managed
to exist unwaved, uncurled or untwisted it was not Lucille's fault. Yet
somehow she managed to make all this flummery and curliness impressive;
in her heart she hoped the adjective “queenly” was applied to her,
and it was! That was before the days of women's clubs, but Lucille had
picked up quite a mass of impressive misinformation on books, painting
and like subjects. In Riverbank she was able to make this tell.

With all this she was politely overbearing. She let people know she
wanted to have her way--and then took it! From the first she pushed her
way into prominence in church matters, choosing the Sunday school as
the door. The Sunday school fell entirely under her sway in a very short
time, partly because Mrs. Prell, the wife of the superintendent, had
social ambitions, and urged Mr. Prell to second Lucille's wishes, and
partly through Lucille's mere desire to lead. She began as leader of the
simple Sunday school music, standing just under the pulpit and beating
out the time of

     “Little children, little children,
     Who love their Redeemer--”

with an arm that jingled with bracelets as her horses' bridles jingled
with silver-plated chains.

Her knowledge of music was slight--she could just about pick out a tune
on her harp by note--but she called in Professor Schwerl and made him
pound further knowledge into her head. The hot-tempered old German did
it. He swore at her, got red in the face, perspired. It was like pouring
water on a duck's back, but some drops clung between the feathers, and
Lucille knew how to make a drop do duty as a pailful. She took charge of
the church music, reorganized the choir, and made the church think the
new music was much better, than the old.

And so it was. She added Professor Schwerl and his violin to the organ.
Theoretically this was to increase the volume of sweet sounds; in effect
it made old Schwerl the hidden director of the choir, with Lucille as
the jingling, rustling figurehead. So, step by step, Lucille became a
real power in the church. The trustees and elders had little faith in
her wisdom; they had immense respect for her ability to have her own
way, whether it was right or wrong.

Lucille, having won her place in the church, set about creating a
“salon.” Her first idea was to make her parlor the gathering place of
all the wit and wisdom of Riverbank, as Madame de Staël made her salon
the gathering place of the wit and wisdom of Paris. Perhaps nothing
gives a better insight into the character of Lucille than this:
her attempt to create a salon--of which she should be the star--in
Riverbank. She soon found that the wit and wisdom of our small Iowa town
was not willing to sit in a parlor and talk about Michael Angelo. The
women were abashed before the culture they imagined Lucille to have.
The men simply did not come. Not to be defeated, Lucille organized a
“literary society.” By including only a few of her church acquaintances
she gave the suggestion that the organization was “exclusive.” By
setting as the first topic the poems of Matthew Arnold--then hardly
heard of in Riverbank--she suggested that the society was to be erudite.
The combination did all she had hoped. Admission to Lucille's literary
society became Riverbank's most prized social plum.

Few in Riverbank had any real affection for Lucille, but affection was
not what she sought. She wanted prominence and power, and even the
men who had scorned her salon idea soon found she had become, in some
mysterious way, an “influence.” The State senator, when he came to
Riverbank, always “put up” at Lucille's mansion instead of at a hotel as
formerly. When the men of the town wished signatures to a petition,
or money subscriptions to any promotion scheme--such as the new street
railway--the first thought was: “Get Lucille Hardcome to take it up;
she'll put it through.” In such affairs she did not bother with the
lesser names; some fifteen or twenty of the “big” men she would write on
her list and for a few days her blacks and her low-hung carriage would
be seen standing in front of prominent doors, and Lucille would have
secured all, or nearly all, the signatures she sought.

At first Lucille paid little attention to David. She treated him much as
she treated the colorless Mr. Prell, _our_ Sunday school superintendent:
as if he were a useful but unimportant church attachment, but otherwise
not amounting to much. It was not until the affair of the church
organist showed her that David was a worthy antagonist that Lucille
thought of David as other than a sort of elevated hired man.

Far back in the days when David came to Riverbank, Miss Hurley (Miss
Jane Hurley, not Miss Mary) had volunteered to play the organ when Mrs.
Dougal gave it up because of the coming of the twins. That must have
been before the war; and the organ was a queer little box of a thing
that could be carried about with little trouble. It was hardly better
than a pitch pipe. It served to set the congregation on (or off) the
key, and was immediately lost in the rough bass and shrill treble of
the congregational vocal efforts. Later, when the Hardcomes came to
Riverbank and Ellen Hardcome's really excellent soprano suggested a
quartet choir, the “new” organ had been bought. It was thought to be a
splendid instrument. In appearance it was a sublimated parlor organ,
a black walnut affair that had Gothic aspirations and arose in
unaccountable spires and points. We Presbyterians were properly proud of
it. With our choir of four, our new organ and Miss Hurley learning a
new voluntary or offertory every month or so, we felt we had reached the
acme in music. We used to gather around Miss Hurley after one of her
new “pieces” and congratulate her, quite as we gathered around David and
congratulated him when he gave us a sermon we liked especially well.

The Episcopalians gave us our first shock when they built their little
church--spireless, indeed, so that their bell had to be set on a
scaffold in the back yard--but with a pipe organ actually built into the
church. We figured that seven, at least, of our congregation went over
to the Episcopalians on account of the pipe organ. The Methodists
were but a year or two later. I do not remember whether the
Congregationalists were a year before or a year after the Methodists,
but the net result was that we Presbyterians and the United Brethren
were the last to lag along, and the United Brethren had neither our size
nor wealth. Not that our wealth was much to brag of.

After her typhoid Ellen Hardcome's voice broke--the disease “settled in
her throat,” as we said then--and she stepped out of the choir to
make way for little Mollie Mitchell, who sang like a bird and had a
disposition like one of Satan's imps. Hardly had Lucille Hardcome taken
charge of our church music than she began her campaign for a pipe organ.
By that time the “new” organ was the “old” organ and actually worse
than the old “old” organ had ever been. It was in the habit of emitting
occasional uncalled-for groans and squeaks and at times all its efforts
were accompanied by a growl like the drone of a bagpipe. The blind piano
tuner had long since refused to have anything more to do with it, and
Merkle, the local gun and lock smith, tinkered it nearly every week. It
was comical to see old Schwerl roll his eyes in agony as he played his
violin beside it.

As Merkle said, repairing musical instruments was not his business, and
he had to “study her up from the ground.” He did his best, but probably
the logic of his repair work was based on a wrong premise. We never
knew, when Merkle entered the church on a Saturday to correct the
trouble that evolved during Friday night's choir practice, what the old
black walnut monstrosity would do on Sunday.

All through this period, as through her struggles with the old “old”
 organ, Miss Hurley labored patiently. “I couldn't do so and so,” old
Merkle used to tell her, “so you want to look out and not do so and so.”
 Perhaps it meant she must pump with one foot, or not touch some three or
four of the “stops.” She did her best and, but for the rankling thought
that the other churches were listening to glorious pipe organ strains, I
dare say we would have been satisfied well enough. I always loved to
see the gentle little lady seat herself on the narrow bench, arrange her
skirts, place her music on the rack and then look up to catch the back
of Dominie Dean's curly-haired head in her little mirror.

When Lucille Hardcome announced that she just couldn't stand the squeaky
old organ any longer and that the church must have a pipe organ if she
had to work night and day for it, we knew the church would have a pipe
organ, for Lucille--as a rule--got whatever she set her heart on.

Lucille's announcement threw little Miss Jane into a flutter of
excitement. It was as if someone gave a gray wren a thimbleful of
champagne. Miss Jane was all chirps of joy and tremblings of the hand.
She hardly knew whether to be jauntily joyous or crushed with fear. Her
eyes were unwontedly bright, and her cheeks, which had not glowed for
years, burned red. The very Friday night that Lucille condemned the
old organ and proclaimed a new one Miss Jane, walking beside David Dean
(although she felt more like skipping for joy), asked David a daring
question.

“Won't it be wonderful to have a real organ--a pipe organ!” she
exclaimed. “It means so much in the musical service, Mr. Dean. I try to
make the old organ praise the Lord but--of course I don't mean anything
I shouldn't--but sometimes I think there is no praise left in the old
thing! I can do so much more if we have a pipe organ!”

“I imagine you sometimes think the Old Harry is in the old walnut case,
Miss Jane,” said David.

“Oh, I would never think that!” cried Miss Jane, and then she laughed
a shamed little laugh. “That is just what sister Mary said last Sunday
when the bass growled so!”

She walked a few yards in silence, nerving herself to ask the question.

“Mr. Dean,” she said, “do you think it would be all right--do you think
it would be proper--if I asked Mademoiselle Moran to give me a few
lessons?”

She almost held her breath waiting for David's answer. It seemed to her,
after the question had left her mouth, that it had been a bold, almost
brazen, thing to ask David. It seemed almost shameful to ask the dominie
such a question, for, you understand, Mademoiselle Moran was a Catholic,
and not only a Catholic but the niece of Father Moran, the priest, and
his housekeeper, and the organist of St. Bridget's. The lessons would
mean that Miss Jane must go to St. Bridget's; they would be given on the
great organ there, with the image of the Virgin, and of St. Bridget,
and the gaunt crucifix, and the pictures portraying the Stations of the
Cross, and the confessionals, and all else, close at hand. To ask the
dominie if one might voluntarily venture into the midst of all that!

“Have you spoken to her yet?” asked David, surprisingly unshocked.

“No! Oh, no! I would not until I had asked you, of course!” gasped Miss
Jane. “Why, I haven't had time! I only knew we were going to have a pipe
organ this evening!”

“Perhaps you had better let me arrange it,” said David. “I think perhaps
Doctor Benedict can manage it, although Mademoiselle is giving up
her pupils, Benedict says. Father Moran is worried about her health;
Benedict says Mademoiselle is trying to do too much. She is giving
up all but her two or three most promising pupils. But in a case like
this--Shall I speak to Benedict?”

“Oh, will you? Will you?” cried little Miss Jane ecstatically. “Oh, if
you will!”

David smiled in the darkness. But a day or two before, when Doc Benedict
had dropped into the manse to sit awhile in David's study under the
motto “Keep an even mind under all circumstances,” David had scolded him
whimsically for unfaithfulness.

“I don't see you once in a blue moon any more, Benedict,” he had said.
“I grow stale for someone to wrangle with. You're a false and fickle
friend. Who is your latest passion? Father Moran?”

“Don't you say anything against Father Moran!” Benedict threatened.
“It's a pity you're not both Presbyterians, or both Catholics, Davy.
You'd love each other. You'd have some beautiful fights. I can't hold
my own against him; he's too much for me. He's a fine old man, Davy,” he
added, and then, smiling, “and he knows good sherry and good cigars.”

“What do you talk about, over your good sherry and good cigars?” asked
David.

“Last night,” said Benedict, “it was music. He had me there, Davy. No
man has a right to know as much about as many things as Father Moran
knows. Of course, if I had a niece like Mademoiselle I might know about
Beethoven and Chopin and all those fellows. He scolded me about our
church music. I went for him, of course, on that; bragged about our
choir. 'Ah, yes I' he smiled through that thick, brown beard of his;
'and I 'ave heard of your organ!' He gave me an imitation of it through
his nose. Then he called Mademoiselle and took me into the church and
made her play a thing or two--an 'Elevation' and an 'Ave Maria.' He had
me, all right, Davy. It was holy music, Davy!”

So David, remembering, spoke to Benedict about Miss Jane's desire, and
Benedict spoke to Father Moran. The old doctor knew just how to handle
the good-natured priest, whose eyes were deep in crow's-feet from
countless quizzical smiles.

“Why, Father, you yourself were howling and complaining about our church
music the other night! Scolding me, you were. And now I give you a
chance to better the thing you scolded me about, and you hesitate! Oh,
tut! about Mademoiselle's health! Let her give up another of her fancy,
arts-and-graces pupils. I prescribe Miss Hurley for Mademoiselle's
health. And don't you dare go against her physician's orders!”

Father Moran chuckled in his black beard and his eyes twinkled. He loved
to have anyone pretend to bulldoze him; he was a beloved autocrat among
his own people.

“You're afraid!” declared Benedict. “You're afraid that when we get our
new organ and Miss Hurley learns to play it your Mademoiselle will be
overshadowed. We'll show you!”

“Afraid!” chuckled Father Moran. “You heard Mademoiselle play, and
you say I am afraid! _Bon!_ Ex-cellent! Come, we will interview
Mademoiselle!”

So it was arranged. Mademoiselle would take no remuneration. She patted
little Miss Hurley on the thin shoulder and smiled, but she would not
hear of payment.

“N', no!” she declared. “I teach you because I like you, because I like
all praise music shall be good music. N', no! We will not think about
money; we will think about great, grand music. You will be my leetle St.
Cecilia; yes?” Not until she had consulted David, and had been assured
that accepting such a favor from the niece of the priest was not at
all wrong, would Miss Hurley agree. Then the lessons began, Miss Hurley
always “my leetle St. Cecilia” to Mademoiselle. They were a strongly
contrasted pair: Mademoiselle Moran stout, black-haired, with powerful
arms and fingers; Miss Hurley a mere wisp of humanity, hair already
gray, and with scarce strength to handle the stops and keys.

When first she entered the huge St. Bridget's Miss Hurley cringed, as if
she entered a forbidden place. The great stained windows permitted but
little light to enter; here and there some woman knelt low on the floor,
crossing herself. Mademoiselle walked to the organ loft with a brisk,
businesslike tread and Miss Hurley followed her timidly. From somewhere
Father Moran appeared, smiling, and patted Miss Hurley's shoulder. No
man had patted Miss Hurley's shoulder for many years, but she was far
from resenting it. It was like a good wish. Then Mademoiselle reached up
and drew the soft green curtains across the front of the organ loft and
lo! they were alone. The lesson began.

It needed but that one first lesson to tell Mademoiselle that her
“leetle St. Cecilia” would never play “great, grand music” on a
large pipe organ. It was as if you were to undertake to teach a child
trigonometry and discovered he did not know the multiplication table
beyond seven times five. Miss Hurley hardly knew the rudiments of music;
harmony, thoroughbass and all the deeper things, that Mademoiselle had
learned so long ago that they were part of her nature now, were absolute
Greek to Miss Hurley. But, worse than all this, Miss Hurley had not the
physique of an organist. She was physically inadequate.

Such news invariably leaks out. Long before Lucille Hardcome had managed
to coax the pipe organ out of Sam Wiggett's purse it was known that
Miss Hurley was “taking lessons” from Mademoiselle and that she was
not strong enough to play a pipe organ properly. For her part, had Miss
Hurley been any other person, Mademoiselle would have thrown up her
hands and turned her back on the impossible task, but she liked Miss
Jane sincerely. I think she loved the little old maid. It must be
remembered that St. Bridget's was Irish and in those days many of the
Irish in Riverbank were fresh from the peat bogs and potato fields, and
Mademoiselle, before coming to care for her uncle's house, had lived in
the midst of France's best. It is no wonder she craved even such crambs
of culture as Miss Hurley had gathered or that she loved the little
woman. In return she gave Miss Jane all she could.

There were intricacies of stops and keys, foot pedaling and fingering,
that must be explained and practiced, but Mademoiselle early told Miss
Hurley:

“St. Cecilia, you are not, remembair, the grand organist; you are
the sweet organist. For me”--she made the organ boom with a tumult of
sound--“for me, yes! I am beeg and strong. But, for you”--she played
some deliciously dainty bit--“because you are gentle and sweet!”

And all the while Miss Jane and Mademoiselle were having their little
love affair and their struggles with stops and pedals and keys, behind
the green curtain of St. Bridget's organ loft, Lucille Hardcome was
bringing all her diplomacy to bear against old Sam Wiggett's pocket. For
her own part she made a direct assault: “Mr. Wiggett, you're going to
give us a pipe organ!” She kept this up day in and day out: “Have you
decided to give us that pipe organ?” and, “I haven't seen the pipe organ
you are going to give us. Where is it?” Old Wiggett, who liked Lucille,
chuckled. Perhaps he knew from the first that he would give the
organ. Lucille set his daughter, Mary Derling, to coaxing, and primed
unsuspecting old ladies to speak to Mr. Wiggett as if the organ was a
certainty. She had Mort Walsh, the architect, prepare a plan for taking
out a portion of the rear wall of the church without disturbing the
regular services. She took a group of ladies to Derlingport to hear the
pipe organ in the Presbyterian Church there. They returned enthusiastic
advocates of an organ for our church, and Lucille, knowing Sam Wiggett,
and sure the old fellow would love to have his name attached forever to
some one big thing in the church, set the ladies to raising money for a
pipe organ. This was a hopeless task and Lucille knew it. It was done to
frighten Mr. Wiggett and make him hurry with his gift, lest he lose the
opportunity.

One result of the trip to Derlingport can be stated in the words of
Mrs. Peter Minch, uttered as she came down the steps of the Derlingport
church:

“Well, Lucille, if we have an organ like that we will have to have more
of an organist than Jane Hurley!”

“Of course!” Lucille had said. “Jane Hurley and a pipe organ would be
ridiculous!”

So this was added to David's worries. The choir of four and Lucille--as
musical dictator of the church--spoke to David almost immediately about
the retirement of Miss Hurley. It would be better to say perhaps, that
they spoke to him about the manner in which money could be raised to
pay a satisfactory organist. They did not consider Miss Hurley as a
possibility at all. She had done well enough with the old organ, and it
had been pleasant for her, and well for the church, that she had been
permitted to play the squeaky old instrument without pay, but she simply
would not do when it came to the new organ. David listened, his head
resting in his hand and one long finger touching his temple. He saw at
once that a quarrel was in the air.

“You did not know,” he asked, “that Miss Hurley has been taking lessons
from Mademoiselle Moran for a month or more!”

“Oh, that!” said Lucille. “That's nonsense! If she wants to play
'Onward, Christian Soldiers' for the Sunday school, I don't object; but
church music! We have heard the organist at Derlingport!”

“I think,” said David, “that for a while at least, if we get a pipe
organ, Miss Hurley should be our organist. She is looking forward to it.
She is taking lessons with that in view!”

Lucille said nothing, but in her eyes David saw the resolve to be rid of
Miss Hurley.

“Miss Jane understands, I think,” David said, “that she is to continue
as our organist. At no advance in salary,” he smiled.

Lucille closed her mouth firmly. As clearly as if she had spoken, David
read in her face: “Well, if that's who is to play the pipe organ, I
shan't try to get one!” He did not wait for her to speak.

“I feel,” he said, “that if Miss Hurley is to be thrown out after
so many years of patient and faithful struggling with the miserable
instruments she has had to do with, it would be better to let the whole
idea of having a pipe organ drop. At any rate, the chance of getting one
seems small.”

“Oh, we're going to have one!” exclaimed Lucille, caught in the trap he
had prepared for her spirit of opposition. “I get what I go after, Mr.
Dean.”




X. LUCILLE DISCOVERS DAVID


IT was no new thing for David to feel the opposition of his choir;
indeed, is not the attitude of minister and choir in many churches
usually that of armed neutrality? How many ministers would drop dead
if all the bitterness that is put into some anthems could kill! To the
minister the choir is often a body of unruly artistic temperaments
bent on mere secular display of its musical talents; to the choir the
minister is a crass utilitarian, ignorant in all that relates to good
music, and stubbornly insisting that the musical program for each
day shall be twisted to illustrate some point in his sermon. To some
ministers it has seemed that eternal vigilance alone prevented the choir
from singing the latest “Gem from Comic Opera”; some choirs have felt
that unless they battled strenuously they would be tied down to “Old
Hundred” and “Blest Be the Tie that Binds,” by a minister who did not
know one note from another. How many ministers have, early in November,
begun to dread the inevitable quarrel over the choice of Christmas
music!

Lucille Hardcome was a large woman and much given to violent colors,
but, to do her justice, she managed them with a _chic_ that put them
above any question of mere good taste. She clashed a green and purple
together, and evolved something that was “style” and that had to be
recognized as “style.” In a day when women were wearing gray and
black striped silks, as they were then, Lucille would concoct with
her dressmaker something in orange and black, throw in a bow or two of
cerulean blue, and appear well dressed. She could wear a dozen jangling
bracelets on her plump arm and leave the impression that she was not
overornamented, but ultrafashionable. You would have said, to see her
among the less violently garbed women of the church, that she was one
who would win only by bold thrusts. On the contrary, she could be a wily
diplomatist.

Just as old Sam Wiggett received from unexpected quarters questions
regarding the pipe organ, so David began to hear questions regarding the
organist. Some asked him eagerly if it were true an organist was to be
brought from Chicago; some asked if it were true that Miss Hurley had
refused to play the big new organ. Presently he heard the name of the
young man who was to be brought from Chicago to supplant Miss Hurley;
then that the young man was to have a position in Sam Wiggett's office
if he couldn't get into Schultz' music store.

It was soon after the arrangements for the purchase of the pipe organ
had been made (Sam Wiggett giving in at last) that Miss Jane herself
came to David. She had been ill two days, confined to her bed, although
she did not tell David so. Partly, no doubt, her little breakdown had
come because of the overhard work she was doing with Mademoiselle,
but mainly it had been the shock of the word that she was to be pushed
aside. Her disappointment had been overwhelming, for little Miss Jane
had coveted with all her heart the joy of playing the great, new organ.
The news that another was to be organist came like the blow of a brutal
fist between her eyes, and she went down. For two days she fought
against what she felt must be her great selfishness and then, still weak
but ready to do what she felt was her duty, she went to David. 'Thusia,
herself weak, led her to David's study door and left her there. David
let her enter and closed the door after her. He placed a chair for her.
The light fell on her face, and as he saw the marks her struggle had
left there he threw up his head and drew a deep breath. All the fight
there was in him surged up, and he cast his eyes at the spatter-work
motto above his desk before he dared speak. His gray eyes glowed cold
fire.

“Not on your own account, but on mine,” he said, “you will go on just
as you have been going, Miss Jane Hurley! You are making some progress
under Mademoiselle Moran!”

“Why--yes--yes--” Miss Jane stammered, twisting her handkerchief,
“but--”

“Then you are all the organist the church wants or needs or shall have,
unless it wants and needs and has a new dominie! I dare say we can
manage to praise the Lord with your fingers and soul quite as well as
with Samuel Wiggett's money and Lucille Hardcome's ambition.”

“But I can't!” said Miss Jane. “I can't, when they all want a new
organist; they'll hate me. You don't know, Mr. Dean, what it would be to
sit there and feel their hate against my back. You'll think I'm foolish,
but if I could face them it would be different; but to sit there and try
to play when everyone in the church doesn't want me, and to feel every
eye behind me hostile! I can't, Mr. Dean!”

David opened the study door.

“'Thusia!” he called, and his wife answered. “Who do you want as your
organist!” he called. “Why, Miss Jane, of course!” 'Thusia replied.
“There's one who will not look hatred at your back,” said David. “And
I'm two. And I can take little Roger to church, and that will be three.
And I dare say we can find others. 'Thusia should know. Who does Mrs.
Merriwether want, Thusia!” he called.

“She wants Miss Jane,” said 'Thusia promptly. They joined 'Thusia where
she lay on her couch. “Are you worried about what Lucille has been
suggesting, Miss Hurley! Dear me! you mustn't let anything like that
worry you! Why, someone always wants something else. If David and I
worried about what everyone wants we would do nothing but worry!”

“But Mr. Wiggett is giving the organ, and Lucille really got it for the
church--” Miss Hurley faltered.

“I know,” said 'Thusia, “but David wants you to be the organist. That is
both sides and the middle of the matter for me. David always knows what
is best!”

“So, you see,” said David smiling, “we've had our little tempest in a
teapot for nothing. 'Thusia, have you a teapot with something other than
tempests in it? A cup might refresh Miss Jane.”

Her talk with 'Thusia did more than anything David could have said,
perhaps, to convince Miss Jane that she need not bury her fond desire,
for 'Thusia could talk as one woman talks to another. As she talked Miss
Jane saw things as they were, the great majority of the congregation
wishing to retain Miss Jane, with but a few of the richer and
display-loving wanting anything else. 'Thusia was able to convey this
without saying it. She made it felt, as a woman can when she chooses. A
name here, a name there, an incidental mention of Lucille's unfortunate
attempt to put her coachman in livery, and Miss Jane saw the church
as it was--a few moneyed “pushers” and the body of silent, sincere
worshipers. More than all else 'Thusia herself seemed to embody the
spirit of the congregation. It suddenly occurred to Miss Jane that,
after all, the quiet people who were her friends were the real church.
And this was true. She left quite at peace with the idea that she was to
play the new organ when it was installed.

And then David began his fight for Miss Jane, which became a fight
against Lucille Hardcome. Lucille fought her battle well, but the odds
were against her. As against the few who wanted a hired organist at
any price there were an equal few who still questioned the propriety of
having a new organ at all. Against her were still others who would have
been with her had she and her warmest supporters not so often tried
to “run” everything connected with the church, but the overwhelming
sentiment was that as Miss Jane was “taking lessons” from the best
organist in Riverbank, and as Miss Jane had always been organist, and as
hiring one would be an added expense, Miss Jane ought to stay, at least
until it was quite evident that she would not do at all. Even Professor
Schwerl told David, albeit secretly, that he was for Miss Jane, his
theory being that it was better to hear a canary bird pipe prettily than
to listen to any half-baked virtuoso Lucille was likely to secure.

Thus it came to the night before the day when Professor Hedden, coming
from a great city, was to introduce the congregation to its new organ.
That afternoon Mademoiselle had given Miss Jane a final lesson--final
with the promise of more later--and had kissed her cheek. Father Moran
had patted her shoulder, too, wishing her, in his quaint English, good
success, offering her a glass of sherry, which of course she declined,
making him laugh joyously as he always did at “these Peelgrims Fathers,”
 as he good-naturedly called those he considered puritanical. Miss Jane,
coming straight from St. Bridget's, had entered the church and had
tried the great, new, splendid organ. She was a little afraid of it; she
trembled when she pulled out the first stops and heard the first notes
answer her fingers on the keys. Then she grew bolder; she tried a simple
hymn and forgot herself, and by the time twilight came she was not
afraid at all. She left the church uplifted and happy of heart. She told
Miss Mary, when she reached home, that she believed she would do quite
well.

The evening trial left her in trembling fear again. It was well enough
to assure herself that no one in America could play as Professor Hedden
played; that he was our one great master; but she feared what would
be thought of her playing after the congregation had had such music as
Professor Hedden's as a first taste.

A dozen or more fortunate hearers made up the little audience at the
impromptu trial. They were Sam Wiggett and Mary Derling (who had had
a little dinner for Professor Hedden), the four members of the choir,
Lucille Hardcome, Miss Hurley, David and 'Thusia, two friends Lucille
had invited and Schwerl.

The new organ was a magnificent instrument. Behind the pulpit and the
choir stall the great pipes arose in a convex semicircle as typical of
aspiring praise as any Gothic cathedral, and when, Saturday evening,
Professor Hedden seated himself on the player's bench and, after resting
his hands for a moment on the keyboard, plunged into some tremendous
“voluntary” of his own composition, the mountains and the ocean and all
the wild winds of Heaven seemed to join in one great burst of gigantic
harmony. It seemed then to David Dean that the organ pipes should
have been painted in glorious gold and all the triumphant hues of a
magnificent sunrise instead of the fiat terra cotta and moss green that
had been chosen as harmonizing with the church interior.

Presently the wild tumult of sound softened to the sighing of a breeze
through the pine trees, to the rippling of a brook, to the croon of a
mother over a babe. David held his breath as the crooning died, softer
and softer, until he saw the mother place the sleeping child in its
crib, and when the last faint note died into silence there were tears in
his eyes. This was music! It was such music as Riverbank had never heard
before!

“This is another of my own,” said Professor Hedden and the organ began
to laugh like nymphs at play in a green, sunny field--tricksy laughter
that made the heart glad--and that changed into a happy hands-all-around
romp, interrupted by the thin note of a shepherd's flute. Out from the
trees bordering the field David could see the shepherd come, swaying
the upper part of his body in time to his thin note, and behind him came
dancing nymphs and dryads and fauns. He touched 'Thusia's hand, and she
nodded and smiled without taking her eyes from the organ. Then the
dash of cymbals and the blare of trumpets and the martial tread of the
warriors shook the green field--thousands of armed men--and all the
while, faint but insistent, the piping of the shepherd and the laughter
of the dancing nymphs. And then came priests bearing an altar, chanting.
The cymbals and the flute and the trumpets ceased and the dancers were
still. David could see the altar carried to the center of the green
field. There was a moment of pause and then arose, faint at first but
growing stronger each instant, the hymn of praise, of praise triumphant
and all-overpowering. Mightier and mightier it grew until the whole
universe seemed to join in the glorification of deity. David half arose
from his seat, his hands grasping the back of the pew in front of him.
Praise! this was praise indeed; praise worthy of the God worshiped in
this church; worthy of any God!

As the music ceased David's eye fell on Miss Hurley at the far end of
his pew. The thin little woman in her cheap garments was wiping her eyes
with her handkerchief. Her hands trembled with emotion. Suddenly she
dropped her forehead to the back of the pew before her and with one
silk-gloved hand on either side of her cheek, remained so.

Professor Hedden, half turning on his seat, said:

“While this next is hardly what I would call a complete composition, it
may give you an idea of the capabilities of the organ.”

When he ceased playing he said:

“It is merely an exercise in technique, but I think it shows fairly well
what can be done with a good organ.”

It may have been merely an exercise, but it had made the organ perform
as no one in that church, aside from Professor Hedden himself, had
ever heard an organ perform. The full majesty and beauty of the great
instrument, unguessed by those who had gathered to hear this first test,
stood revealed. David Dean's heart was full. It seemed to him as if the
organ, capable of speaking in such a manner, must be a mighty force to
aid him in his ministerial work; as if the organ were a living thing.
Such music must grasp souls and raise them far toward Heaven.

Professor Hedden arose and approached the steps leading down from the
organ. In the pew in front of David old Sam Wiggett, donor of the organ,
sat in his greatcoat, his iron gray hair mussed as always. David could
imagine the firm-set mouth, the heavy jowls, the bushy eyebrows, the
scowl that seldom left the old man's face. Lucille Hardcome whispered to
him and he nodded.

“Now let's hear Miss Hurley play something,” said Lucille in her
sweetest voice.

“Oh!” exclaimed Miss Hurley, cowering into her corner. “Not now, please!
Not after that!”

Lucille laughed. Old Sam Wiggett sat as before, his head half hidden by
his coat collar, but David knew the grim look that was on the old man's
face. Wiggett's word would settle the organist matter when that grim old
man chose to speak. David turned toward Miss Hurley, and she shook
her head. He did his best to smother her refusal by advancing to the
professor with congratulatory hand extended. In a moment the dozen
fortunate listeners were crowded around Professor Hedden, and Miss
Hurley, in her pew end, was forgotten.

As 'Thusia, David and Miss Jane were leaving the church Lucille,
jingling with jewelry, swooped down upon them.

“Oh, Miss Hurley!” she called. “Just one minute, please!”

Miss Jane stopped and turned.

“Professor Hedden thinks,” Lucille cooed, “or, really, I'm not sure
which of us thought of it, but we quite agree, that you must play at
least once to-morrow morning! To christen _your_ organ with you taking
no part would be quite too shameful. So”--she hesitated and her smile
was wicked--“so we want you to play the congregation out after the
professor is through. You know they will never leave while he is
playing.”

The taunt was cruel and plain enough--that the congregation _would_
leave if Miss Jane played--and Miss Jane reddened. Professor Hedden,
with Sam Wiggett, came up to them.

“Of course you must play!” he said through his beard, in his gruff,
kindly voice.

“But, I--I--” stammered Miss Jane.

“Good-night! Good-night, all!” said Lucille. “It's all arranged, Miss
Hurley,” and she bore the professor away.

“I shall not dare!” Miss Jane said to David. “After such music as the
professor will give! Even the biggest thing I know--”

“But you'll not play the biggest thing you know,” said David.

The church was crowded the next morning. Even before the Sunday school
was dismissed the seats began to fill. Sam Wiggett was on hand early,
grim but proud of his great gift; his daughter came later with Lucille
and Professor Hedden. When David came to take his seat behind his pulpit
the church was filled as it had never been filled before, and many were
standing. The two ladies of the choir had new hats. Professor Hedden
took his place on the organist's bench and little Miss Jane cowered
behind the rail curtain of terra-cotta wool. From the body of the church
nothing could be seen but the top of the quaint little rooster wing on
her hat. The praise service began.

I cannot remember now what Professor Hedden played, but it was wonderful
music, as we all knew it would be. There were moments when the whole
church edifice seemed to tremble, and others when we held our breath
lest we fail to hear the delicate whispering of the organ. From my
seat in the diagonal pews at the side of the church I could see old Sam
Wiggett's face, grim and set, and Lucille Hardcome's triumphant glances
and David's thin, clean-cut features, his whole spirit uplifted by the
music, and I could see Miss Jane's rooster wing sinking lower and lower
behind the terra-cotta curtain.

David's sermon was short, almost a rhapsody in praise of the music of
praise, and then an anthem, and Professor Hedden's final offering. As
the magnificent music rolled through the church, poor little Miss Jane's
rooster 

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