The Bondboy Read online

  Morgan was there, and the record of justice in the case of state against Newbolt was about to be made final and complete.

  “You say it’s all over, Judge,” spoke Morgan. “What did they do with Joe?”

  “What happened in court today,” said Judge Maxwell, rising to his feet, “you would have heard if you had been there. But as you were not, it is not for me to relate. That is the privilege of another, as the matter of your condemnation or acquittal is in other hands than mine.”

  “I know I acted like a dog,” admitted Morgan, sincerely contrite, “both to Ollie and to Joe. But I’m here to take my medicine, Judge. I thought a lot of that little woman, and I’d ’a’ made a lady of her, too. That was it. Judge; that was at the bottom of this whole business. Ollie and I planned to skip out together, and Joe put his foot in the mess and upset it. That’s what the fuss between him and old Isom was over, you can put that down in your book, Judge. I’ve got it all lined out, and I can tell you just––”

  “Never mind; I think I understand. You’d have made a lady of her, would you? But that was when she was clean, and unsuspected in the eyes of the world. How far would your heroism go, Morgan, if you met her in the street tonight, bespattered with public scorn, bedraggled with public contempt, crushed by the discovery of your mutual sin against that old man, Isom Chase? Would you take her to your heart then, Morgan? Would you be man enough to step out into the storm of scorn, and shoulder your part of the load like a man?”

  “If I found her in the lowest ditch I’d take her up, Judge, and I’d marry her–if she’d have me then!” said Morgan, earnestly. “When a man’s careless and free, Judge, he sees things one way; when he comes up on a short rope like this, he sees them another.”

  “You are right, Morgan,” said the judge.

  He walked the length of the room, hands clasped behind his back, his head bent in thought. When he came back to the fire he stood a little while before Morgan, looking at him with intent directness, like a physician sounding for a baffling vagary which lies hidden in the brain.

  There was a question in his face which Morgan could not grasp. It gave him a feeling of impending trouble. He shifted uneasily in his chair.

  “Stay here until I return,” commanded the judge. “I shall not be long.”

  “I’m here to take my medicine,” reiterated Morgan, weakly. “I wouldn’t leave if the road was open to me, Judge.”

  Judge Maxwell went to the door, calling for Hiram. Hiram was not far away. His candle was still burning; he came bobbing along the hall with it held high so he could look under it, after the manner of one who had been using candles all his life.

  “My overcoat, Hiram, and my neck shawl,” ordered the judge. He turned to Morgan, who was standing on the hearth.

  “Wait for me, I’ll not be long away.”

  “It’s a blusterin’ and a blowin’ mighty bad, Judge. I’ll get my coat––”

  “No, no, Hiram; there’s something for you to do here. Watch that man; don’t let him leave.”

  “He ain’t gwine a-leave, Judge, sah,” said Hiram with calm significance.

  Hiram held up the great frieze coat, and the judge plunged his arms into it. Then the old negro adjusted the shawl about his master’s shoulders, and tucked the ends of it inside the coat, buttoning that garment over them, to shield the judge’s neck from the driving rain.

  The judge turned back into the room to throw another stick on the fire. The lamp was burning low; he reached over to turn up the wick. The flame jumped, faltered, went out.

  “Hah, I’ve turned it out, Morgan. Well, no matter. You’ll not need more light than the fire throws. Make yourself comfortable, Morgan.”

  With a word to Hiram, the judge opened the door and stepped out into the night.

  On the pavement the wind met him rudely, and the rain drove its cold arrows against his kind old face. Wonderful are the ways of Providence, thought Judge Maxwell, bending his head to bring his broad hat-brim to shield his face, and complete are the accounts of justice when it is given that men may see them down to the final word.

  The wind laid hold of the judge’s coat, and tugged at it like a vicious dog; it raged in the gaunt trees, and split in long sighs upon the gable-ends and eaves. There was nobody abroad. For Shelbyville the hour was late; Judge Maxwell had the street to himself as he held on his way.

  Past the court-house he fought the wind, and a square beyond that. There he turned down a small street, where the force of the blast was broken, looking narrowly about him to right and left at the fronts of houses as he passed.

  Simeon Harrison, Ollie Chase’s father, lately had given over his unprofitable struggle with the soil. He had taken a house near the Methodist church and gone into the business of teaming. He hauled the merchants’ goods up from the railroad station, and moved such inhabitants of Shelbyville as once in a while made a change from one abode to another.

  Sim had come to Shelbyville with a plan for setting up a general livery business, in which ambition he had been encouraged by Ollie’s marriage to Isom Chase, to whom he looked, remotely, for financial backing. But that had turned out a lean and unprofitable dream.

  Since Isom’s death Ollie had returned to live with her parents, and Sim’s prospects had brightened. He had put a big sign in front of his house, upon which he had listed the many services which he stood ready to perform for mankind, in consideration of payment therefor. They ranged from moving trunks to cleaning cisterns, and, by grace of all of them, Sim was doing very well.

  When Sim Harrison heard of his daughter’s public confession of shameful conduct with her book-agent boarder, he was a highly scornful man. He scorned her for her weakness in yielding to what he termed the “dally-faddle” of the book-agent, and he doubly scorned her for repudiating her former testimony. The moral side of the matter was obscure to him; it made no appeal.

  His sense of personal pride and family honor was not touched by his daughter’s confession of shame, any more than his soul was moved to tenderness and warmth for her honest rescue of Joe Newbolt from his overhanging peril. He was voluble in his declarations that they would “put the screws” to Ollie on the charge of perjury. Sim would have kept his own mouth sealed under like circumstances, and it was beyond him to understand why his daughter had less discretion than her parent. So he bore down on the solemn declaration that she stood face to face with a prison term for perjury.

  Sim had made so much of this that Ollie and her mother were watching that night out in fear and trembling, sitting huddled together in a little room with the peak of the roof in the ceiling, a lamp burning between them on the stand. Their arms lay listlessly in their laps, they turned their heads in quick starts at the sound of every footfall on the board walk, or when the wind swung the loose-jointed gate and flung it against its anchorings. They were waiting for the sheriff to come and carry Ollie away to jail.

  In front of Sim Harrison’s house there was a little porch, not much bigger than a hand held slantingly against its weathered side, and in the shadow of it one who had approached unheard by the anxious watchers through the blustering night, stood fumbling for the handle of a bell. But Sim Harrison’s door was bald of a bell handle, as it was bare of paint, and now a summons sounded on its thin panel, and went roaring through the house like a blow on a drum.

  Mrs. Harrison looked meaningly at Ollie; Ollie nodded, understandingly. The summons for which they had waited had come. The older woman rose in resigned determination, went below and opened the door.

  “It is Judge Maxwell,” said the dark figure which stood large and fearful in Mrs. Harrison’s sight. “I have come to see Mrs. Chase.”

  “Yes, sir; I’ll call her,” said the trembling woman.

  Ollie had heard from the top of the stairs. She was descending in the darkness, softly. She spoke as her mother turned from the door.

  “I was expecting you–some of you,” said she.

  “Very well, then,” said Judge Maxwell, won
dering if that mysterious voice had worked another miracle. “Get your wraps and come with me.”

  Mrs. Harrison began to groan and wail. Couldn’t they let the poor child stay there till morning, under her own mother’s roof? It was a wild and terrible night, and Lord knew the poor, beaten, bruised, and weary bird would not fly away!

  “Save your tears, madam, until they are needed,” said the judge, not feeling that he was called upon to explain the purpose of his visit to her.

  “I’m ready to go,” announced Ollie, hooded and cloaked in the door.

  Sim Harrison was stirring about overhead. He came to the top of the stairs with a lamp in his hand, and wanted to know what the rumpus was about.

  “It’s Judge Maxwell–he’s come for Ollie!” said his wife, in a despairing wail.

  “I knowed it, I knowed it!” declared Sim, with fatalistic resignation, above which there was perhaps a slight note of triumph in seeing his own prediction so speedily fulfilled.

  To Harrison and his wife there was no distinction between the executive and judicial branches of the law. Judge or sheriff, it was all one to them, each being equally terrible in their eyes.

  “When can she come home, Judge, when can she come back?” appealed Mrs. Harrison, in anguished pleading.

  “It rests with her,” returned the judge.

  He gave Ollie his arm, and they passed together in silence up the street. They had proceeded a square before the judge spoke.

  “I am calling you on an unusual mission, Mrs. Chase,” he said, “but I did not know a better way than this to go about what I felt it my duty to do.”

  “Yes, sir,” said she. He could feel her tremble as she lightly touched his arm.

  They passed the court-house. There was a light in the sheriff’s office, but they did not turn in there, and a sigh for that temporary respite, at least, escaped her. The judge spoke again.

  “You left the court-room today before I had a chance to speak to you, Mrs. Chase. I wanted to tell you how much I admired your courage in coming forward with the statement that cleared away the doubt and tangles from Joe Newbolt’s case. You deserve a great deal of credit, which I am certain the public will not withhold. You are a brave little woman, Ollie Chase.”

  There it was again! Twice in a day she had heard it, from eminent sources each time. The world was not a bleak desert, as she had thought, but a place of kindness and of gentle hearts.

  “I’m glad you don’t blame me,” she faltered, not knowing what to make of this unexpected turn in the night’s adventure.

  “A brave little woman!” repeated the judge feelingly. “And I want you to know that I respect and admire you for what you have done.”

  Ollie was silent, but her heart was shouting, leaping, and bounding again in light freedom, as it had lifted that morning when Alice Price had spoken to her in her despair. At last, she said, with earnestness:

  “I promise you I’ll be a good woman, too, from now on, Judge Maxwell, and I’m thankful to you for your kind words.”

  “We turn in here–this is my door,” said the judge.

  Mystified, wondering what the next development of this strange excursion into the night would be, but satisfied in her mind that it meant no ill for her now, Ollie waited while the judge found the keyhole, for which he groped in the dark.

  “And the matter of the will was all disposed of by the probate judge today, I hear,” said the judge, his hand on the door.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then your life is all before you, to make of it what you will,” said he, placing his hand on her shoulder, as she stood with him in the dim hall. He opened the study door. The wood on the grate was blazing brightly. Ollie saw someone standing before it, bending slightly forward in the pose of expectation. He was tall and of familiar figure, and the firelight was playing in the tossed curls of his short, fair hair.

  “In there,” said the judge, “if you care to go.”

  Ollie did not stir. Her feet felt rooted to the floor in the wonder and doubt of this strange occurrence.

  “Ollie!” cried the man at the hearthstone, calling her name imploringly. He came forward, holding out pleading hands.

  She stood a moment, as if gathering herself to a resolution. A sob rose in her throat, and broke from her lips transformed into a trembling, sharp, glad cry. It was as if she had cast the clot of sorrow from her heart. Then she passed into the room and met him.

  Judge Maxwell closed the door.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXIII

  LEST I FORGET

  Mrs. Newbolt was cutting splints for her new sun-bonnet out of a pasteboard box. She hitched her chair back a little farther into the shadow of the porch, for the impertinent sun was winking on her bright scissors, dazzling her eyes.

  It was past the turn of the afternoon; a soft wind was moving with indolence among the tender leaves, sleepy from the scents of lilac and apple bloom which it had drunk on its way. And now it loitered under the eaves of the porch to mix honeysuckle with its stream of drowsy sweets, like a chemist of Araby the Blest preparing a perfume for the harem’s pride.

  There was the gleam of fresh paint on the walls of the old house. The steps of the porch had been renewed with strong timber, the rotting siding had been replaced. Mrs. Newbolt’s chair no longer drew squeaks and groans from the floor of the porch as she rocked, swaying gently as her quick shears shaped the board. New flooring had been laid there, and painted a handsome gray; the falling trellis between gate and door had been plumbed and renewed.

  New life was everywhere about the old place, yet its old charm was undisturbed, its old homeliness was unchanged. Comfort had come to dejection, tidiness had been restored to beauty. The windows of the old house now looked upon the highway boldly, owing the world nothing in the way of glass.

  Where the sprawling rail fence had lain for nearly forty years, renewed piecemeal from time to time as it rotted away, its corners full of brambles, its stakes and riders overrun with poison-vine; where this brown, jointed structure had stretched, like a fossil worm, a great transformation had come. The rails were gone, the brambles were cleared away, and a neat white fence of pickets stretched in front of the house. This was flanked on either hand by a high fence of woven wire, new to that country then, at once the wonder of the old inhabitants, the despair of prowling hogs and the bewilderment of hens. There was a gate now where the old gap had been; it swung shut behind one with an eager little spring, which startled agents and strangers with the sharpness of its click.

  The shrubbery had been cleared of dead wood, and the underlying generations of withered honeysuckle vines which had spread under the green upon the old trellis, had been taken away. Freshness was there, the mark of an eager, vigorous hand. The matted blue grass which sodded the yard had been cut and trimmed to lines along the path. A great and happy change had come over the old place, so long under the shadow. People stopped to admire it as they passed.

  “Well, well; it’s the doin’s of that boy, Joe Newbolt!” they said.

  Mrs. Newbolt paused in her clipping of bonnet slats to make a menacing snip at a big white rooster which came picking around the steps. The fowl stretched his long neck and turned his bright eye up to his mistress with a slanting of the head.

  “How did you git out of that pen, you old scalawag?” she demanded.

  The rooster took a long and dignified step away from her, where he stood, with little appearance of alarm, turning his head, questioning her with his shining eye. She made a little lunge with her shears.

  “Yes, I’m goin’ to tell Joe on you, you scamp!” she threatened.

  “Coo-doot-cut!” said the rooster, looking about him with a long stretching of the neck.

  “Yes, you better begin to cackle over it,” said she, speaking in solemn reproof, as if addressing a child, “for Joe he’ll just about cut your sassy old head clean off! If he don’t do that, he’ll trim down that wing of yourn till you can’t bat a skeeter off your nose with it
, you redick-lous old critter!”

  But it was not the threat of Joe that had drawn the cry of alarm from the fowl. The sound of steps was growing along the path from the front gate, and the fowl scampered off to the cover of the gooseberry vines, as Mrs. Newbolt turned to see who the visitor was. The scissors fell from her lap, and her spool trundled off across the porch.

  “Laws, Sol Greening, you give me a start, sneakin’ up like that!”

  Sol laughed out of his whiskers, with a big, loose-rolling sound, and sat on the porch without waiting to be asked.

  “I walked up over the grass,” said he. “It’s as soft under your feet as plowed ground. They say Joe’s got one of them lawn-cutters to mow it with?”

  “Well, what if he has?” she wanted to know. “He’s got a good many things and improvements around here that you folks that’s lived here for seventy years and more never seen before, I reckon.”

  “He sure is a great feller for steppin’ out his own way!” marveled Sol. “I never seen such a change in a place inside of a year as Joe’s made in this one–never in my mortal borned days. It was a lucky day for Joe when Judge Maxwell took a likin’ to him that way.”

  Mrs. Newbolt was looking away toward the hills, a dreamy cast in her placid face.

  “Yes,” said she, “there’s no denyin’ that. But Joe he’d ’a’ got along, Judge Maxwell or no Judge Maxwell. Only it’d ’a’ been slower and harder for him.”

  “He would ’a’,” nodded Sol, without reservation. “No discountin’ on that. That boy beats anything this here country ever perduced, barrin’ none, and I ain’t sayin’ that, either, ma’am, just to please you.”

  “Much thanks I owe you for what you think of Joe!” said she, scornfully. “You was ready enough, not so very long ago, to set the whole world ag’in’ him if you could.”

  “Well, circumstantial evidence–” began Sol.