Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic
be any remedy."
It all came, thought I, as Jim and I sat silent after Cornish and the
Captain went out, from the fact that Bill's present condition in life
gave those tendencies to which he had always been prone to yield, a
chance for unrestricted growth. He ought to have staid with his steers.
Cattle and corn were the only things in which he could take an interest
sufficiently keen to keep him from drink. These habits of his were
enacting the old story of the lop-eared rabbits in
Australia--overrunning the country. Bill had been as sober a citizen as
one could desire, as long as his house-building occupied his time; and
he and Josie had worked together as companionably as they used to do in
the hay and wheat. But now he was drifting away from her. Her father
should have staid on the farm.
"Do you know," said I, "that Giddings is making about as great a fool of
himself as Bill?"
"Yes," said Jim, "but that's because he's in a terrible state of mind
about his marriage. If we can keep him from delirium tremens until after
the wedding, he'll be all right. Some Italian brain-sharp has written up
cases like his, and he'll be all right. But with Bill it's different....
Do you remember our old Shep?"
"No," I returned wonderingly, almost impatiently. "What about him?"
"Well," he mused, "I've been picking up knowledge of men for a while
along back; and I've come to prize more highly the personal history of
dogs; and Shep was worth a biography for its own sake, to say nothing of
the value of a typical case. He was a woolly collie, who would
cheerfully have given up his life for the cows and sheep. Anything in
his line, that a dog could grasp, Shep knew, and he was busier than a
cranberry-merchant the year around, and the happiest thing on the farm.
Then our folks moved to Mayville, and took him along. He wasn't fitted
for town life at all. He'd lie on the front piazza, and search the
street for cows and sheep, and when one came along he'd stick his sharp
nose through the fence, and whine as if some one was whipping him. In
less than six weeks he bit a baby; in two months he was the most
depraved dog in Mayville, and in three ... he died."
I had no answer for the apologue--not even for the self-condemnatory
tone in which he told it. Presently he rose to go, and said that he
would not be back.
"Don't forget our date at the club this evening," said he, as he passed
out. "Your style of diplomacy always seems to win with these down-East
bankers. Your experience as rob-ee gives you the right handshake and the
subscribed-and-sworn-to look that does their business for 'em every
time. Good-by until then."
Our club was the terminal bud of our growth, and was housed in a
building of which we were enormously proud. It was managed by a steward
imported from New York, whose salary was made large to harmonize with
his manners--that being the only way in which the majority of our
members felt equal to living up to them. So far as money could make a
club, ours was of high rank. There were meat-cooks and pastry-cooks in
incredible numbers, under the command of a French chef, who ruled the
house committee with a rod of iron. We were all members as a matter of
public duty. I have often wondered what the servants, brought from
Eastern cities, thought of it all. To see Bill Trescott and Aleck
Macdonald going in through the great door, noiselessly swung open for
them by an attendant in livery, was a sight to be remembered. The chief
ornament of the club was Cornish, who lived there.
"I want to see Mr. Cornish," said I to the servant who took my overcoat,
that evening.
"Right this way, sir," said he. "Mr. Giddings is with him. He gave
orders for you to be shown up."
Cornish sat at a little round table on which there were some bottles and
glasses. The tipple was evidently ale, and Mr. Giddings was standing
opposite, lifting a glass in one hand and pointing at it with the other,
in evident imitation of the attitude in which the late Mr. Gough loved
to have himself pictured; but the sentiments of the two speakers were
quite different.
"'Turn out more ale; turn up the light!'"
Giddings glanced at the electric light-fixtures, and then looked about
as if for a servant to turn them up.
"'I will not go to bed to-night!
For, of all foes that man should dread,
The first and worst one is a bed!
Friends I have had, both old and young;
Ale have we drunk, and songs we've sung.
Enough you know when this is said,
That, one and all, they died in bed!'"
Here Giddings's voice broke with grief, and he stopped to drink the rest
of the glassful, and went on:
"'In bed they died, and I'll not go
Where all my friends have perished so!
Go, ye who fain would buried be;
But not to-night a bed for me!'"
"Do you often have these Horatian fits?" I inquired.
"Base groveler!" said he, "if you can't rise to the level of the
occasion, don't butt in."
"'For me to-night no bed prepare,
But set me out my oaken chair,
And bid me other guests beside
The ghosts that shall around me glide!'"
"You will, of course," said Cornish, "permit us to withdraw for the
purpose of having our conference with our Eastern friends? If I take
your meaning, you'll not be alone."
"Not by a jugful, I'll not be alone!" said Giddings, tossing off another
glass:
"'In curling smoke-wreaths I shall see
A fair and gentle company.
Though silent all, fair revelers they,
Who leave you not till break of day!
Go, ye who would not daylight see;
But not to-night a bed for me!
For I've been born, and I've been wed,
And all man's troubles come of bed!'"
Here Giddings sank down in his chair and began weeping.
"The divinest attribute of poetry," said he, "is that of bringing tears.
Let me weep awhile, fellows, and then I'll give you the last stanza.
Last stanza's the best--"
And in the midst of his critique he went to sleep, thereby breaking his
rule adopted in "_Dum Vivemus Vigilemus_."
"Is he this way often?" said I to Cornish, as we went down to meet Jim
and the bankers.
"Pretty often," said Cornish. "I don't know how I'd amuse my evenings if
it weren't for Giddings. He's too far gone to-night, though, to be
entertaining. Gets worse, I think, as the wedding-day approaches. Trying
to drown his apprehensions, I suspect. Funny fellow, Giddings. But he's
all right from noon to nine P.M."
"I think we'll have to organize a dipsomaniacs' hospital for our crowd,"
said I, "if things keep going on as they are tending now! I didn't think
Giddings was so many kinds of an ass!"
My complainings were cut short by our entrance into the presence of Mr.
Elkins and the New England bankers. I asked to be excused from partaking
of the refreshments which were served. I had seen and heard enough to
spoil my appetite. I was agreeably surprised to find that their
independent investigations of conditions in Lattimore had convinced them
of the safety of their investments. Really, they said, were it not for
the pleasure of meeting us here at our home, they should feel that the
time and expense of looking us up were wasted. But, handling, as they
did, the moneys of estates and numerous savings accounts, their
customers were of a class in whom timidity and nervousness reach their
maximum, and they were obliged to keep themselves in position to give
assurances as to the safety of their investments from their personal
investigations.
Mr. Hinckley, who was with us, assured them that his life as a banker
enabled him fully to realize the necessity of their carefulness, which
we, for our own parts, were pleased to know existed. We were only too
glad to exhibit our books to them, make a complete showing as to our
condition generally, and even take them to see each individual piece of
property covered by our paper. Mr. Hinckley went with them to their
hotel, having proposed enough work in the way of investigation to keep
them with us for several months. They were to leave on the evening of
the next day.
"But," said Jim, as we put on our overcoats to go home, "it shows our
good will, you see."
At that moment the steward, with an anxious look, asked Mr. Elkins for a
word in private.
"Ask Mr. Barslow if he will kindly step over here," I heard Jim say; and
I joined them at once.
"I was just saying, sir, to Mr. Elkins," said the steward, "that
ordinarily I'd not think of mentioning such a thing as a gentleman's
being indisposed but should see that he was cared for here. But Mr.
Trescott being in such a state, I felt it was a case for his friends or
the hospital. He's been--a--seeing things this afternoon; and while
he's better now in that regard, his--"
"Have a closed carriage brought at once," said Mr. Elkins. "Al, you'd
better go up to the house, and let them know we're coming. I'll take him
home!"
I shrank from the meeting with Mrs. Trescott and Josie, more, I think,
than if it had been Bill's death which I was to announce. As I
approached the house, I got from it, somehow, the impression that it was
a place of night-long watchfulness; and I was not surprised by the fact
that before I had time to ring or knock at the door Mrs. Trescott
herself opened it, with an expression on her face which spoke of long
vigils, and of fear passing on to certainty. She peered past me for an
expected Something on the street. Her leisure and its new habits had
assimilated her in dress and make-up to the women of the wealthier sort
in the city; but there was an immensity of trouble in the agonized eye
and the pitiful droop of her mouth, which I should have rejoiced to see
exchanged again for the ill-groomed exterior and the old fret of the
farm. Her first question ignored all reference to the things leading to
my being there, "in the dead vast and middle of the night," but went
past me to the core of her trouble, as her eye had gone on from me to
the street, in the search for the thing she dreaded.
"Where is he, Mr. Barslow?" said she, in a hushing whisper; "where is
he?"
"He is a little sick," said I, "and Mr. Elkins is bringing him home. I
came on to tell you." "Then he is not--" she went on, still in that
hushed voice, and searching me with her gaze.
"No, I assure you!" I answered. "He is in no immediate danger, even."
Josie came quietly forward from the dusk of the room beyond, where I saw
she had been listening, reminding me, in spite of the incongruity of the
idea, of that time when she emerged from the obscurity of her garden,
and stood at the foot of the windmill tower, leaning on her father's
arm, her hands filled with petunias, the night we first visited the
Trescott farm. And then my mind ran back to that other night when she
had thrown herself into his arms and begged him to take her away; and he
had said, "W'y, yes, little gal, of course I'll take yeh away, if yeh
don't like it here!" I think that I, perhaps, was more nearly able than
any one else in the world beside herself to gauge her grief at this long
death in which she was losing him, and he himself.
She took my hand, pressed it silently, and began caressing her mother
and whispering to her things which I could not hear. Mrs. Trescott sat
upon a sort of divan, shaking with terrible, soundless sobs, and
clasping and unclasping her hands, but making no other gesture. I stood
helpless at the hidden abyss of woe so suddenly uncovered before me and
until this very moment screened by the conventions which keep our souls
apart like prisoners in the cells in some great prison. These two women
had been bearing this for a long time, and we, their nearest friends,
had stood aloof from them. As I stood thinking of this, the
carriage-wheels ground upon the pavement in the _porte cochere_; and a