Mose Evans: Part Ii

VI.

SINCE that night when our landlord flung Odd Archer from the supper-room, he had passed as completely out of my mind also as he then had out of the door. When my wife and myself came from Evans’ room, after our conversation just recorded, the door of the apartment immediately across the hall, and from which we had rescued our poor friend, happened to stand open, and I caught passing sight of some one in the same bed from whose slough Evans had been plucked; and at the same moment a well-known voice exclaimed,—

“ I say, Anderson! Colonel Anderson! ” for I had every grade of title out West, according to my standing with the person speaking. So, letting Helen pass on, I halted a moment in the doorway. Merely the tip of his dissipated nose appearing among the disordered bed-clothing,—Odd Archer, of course!

“ You here?” I demanded.

“Had a fall. Arm broken. As if you did not do it! ” the lawyer remarks.

“ I do it? ”

“ So the landlord tells me. You might have known I was not responsible. Threw me out of the room. The landlord tells me he was too late to stop you. What was it? ”

Without replying, I went below in search of said master of the house. It was of no use. He was but beginning to sober with view to supper money from the coming stage. Besides, I passed his pallid wife on the stairs, and had neither heart nor revolver for any “difficulty” with the man. And the landlord was, in a sense, but telling the truth; he had been but the tongs, so to speak, with which I had disposed of the obnoxious individual. I had no intention at all, when I left his room, of seeing Archer again, but, on second thought, it does not do for a man in business to cut himself utterly off from any other man about him whatsoever. There is no telling, in reference even to the most despicable or insignificant person living, but that, and at any moment, he may become, in the rapid and unexpected complications of business, a dangerous enemy or a powerful friend. Much, too, as I detested the miserable scamp, for my soul I could not help liking him.

“You did perfectly right,” he said that same night, when I had told him the facts of his Conduct. “A woman! And in the presence of your wife! I deserved all you did, sir, and more, though I would rather you had done what you did with your own hands. They put so much strychnine in the whisky, General Anderson! A woman! And unprotected! I was deranged. No, sir, you eould not have done otherwise. I knew the landlord lied, or I would not have called you, — would have shot you as soon as my arm had healed. Very strange, how pervasive you Northern people are! You were present when Mose Evans had that difficulty with me, you remember. Permeating! Pervasive! Now the bars of slavery are down, I suppose you Yankees will New Englandize the continent! ”

“ Certainly! We landed at Plymouth to do that. And we intend to hammer and shape America according to our notion, that we may revolutionize, with this republic, the whole world!” I replied, for the vivacity of the man was infectious. Are the springs of his unwearying, inexhaustible happiness in his body or mind? I asked myself. It was phenomenal that this wretch, who should be the most miserable of men, was always as radiant, to outer appearance at least, as an angel! There he lay, battered, bruised, burned out by alcohol, undermined in his very marrow by debauchery; possessing hardly a penny in the world, certainly not a friend who would give a copper to have him live; blasted in every memory of the past, with no gleam of hope for the future; yet his rat-like eyes were glittering with joy as well as life! I know no more, at last, of human nature than I do of Sanskrit! it takes the Being who made the heart, the most wonderful of all his worlds, to understand it!

How the man rattled on! He did not care in the least which way the conversation turned. “ Yes,” he said, after speaking upon almost every other topic, falling back at last, as he invariably did, in the end, upon himself and his own experiences, " I was a remarkable child. I told you so before. You know the children of distinguished ministers always are more bright, petted, accustomed to society, than average children. The trouble with me was that my father, being so very distinguished as the pastor for thirty years of a leading city church, was too much a great divine to be a father at all. A purer hearted, more unselfish, more affectionate, more perfectly exemplary man, even in his securest privacy, never lived. But what time did he get, do you suppose, Anderson, to be a parent? The tinkle of his door-bell was almost as unceasing as that of a sleigh in mid-winter. What a Noah’s Ark our house was! Book agents; people in the pressing interest of a hundred societies; persons coming to be married, and, at least by the proxy of their friends, to be buried; husbands requiring a ten minutes’ conversation, lasting an hour, to the effect that if their pastor did not see and talk to their wives, they could stand it no longer and there must be a separation; and wives, staying twice as long, to urge the same, with floods of tears, about their husbands. Young men in reference to young ladies — stop! I hear in mind perfectly a young lady who laid before my father, never noticing me playing dominoes under the parlor table, this case in regard to her betrothed: ' John wanted me last night to lay my hand on our parlor Bible, and solemnly make oath that I loved him. Now, my dear pastor ’ (I remember, Anderson, what a modest, beautiful, lady-like girl she was, and how eagerly she looked at my father through her tears, her veil on one side), ' dear Dr. Archer, my mother is dead, and pa don’t care; ought John to ask me that? He knows I love him with all my heart, but he says he cannot marry me unless I will swear I do! I never swore in my life! ’ Child as I was, the embryo lawyer in me was aware it was only a trick of the scoundrel to get off from his engagement because her father had lost money, or he had found a richer girl! ” and here Mr. Archer paused, only to begin again. " When a man has a household, Anderson, of two thousand souls, —souls, mind, —and has to fit them for eternity as well as for time, how can he devote himself to his two or three children? When the children of such a man turn out well, as they very often do, the most effective piety of the distinguished father lies in accomplishing that! I don’t want to bore you to death, Anderson,” he paused again at this point to remark.

“ Oh, go on, I am quite interested,” I said, for I had no desire to talk; the velocity, so to speak, of the man wearied me from trying to say anything. And I am satisfied the acquaintance of General Throop and myself had unloosed in him thoughts which had been repressed for years in his Brown County burial. " Even leave out all my father’s engagements,” he continued; " take his choir, for instance! The bellows-blower out of sight is not the only person of whom no one knows or cares, by whom, really, all the music is produced. It is the pastor, sir. Musical people are so sensitive; only by unceasing and most delicate tact did my father prevent harshest discord around the organ. And religious people, sir, are the most tensely strung of all people; only by the perpetual power of a deeper piety did my father control and impel them, controlling to impel. I must and will say, as an entire outsider, Anderson, that piety is a force! We have enough of science among the politics, and receipts for making best butter in our papers out there, for me to have read something upon the subject. Not having a particle myself, I know religion to be an actual force; a something which hurls that old New Hampshire, for instance, — my father, too, during all my knowledge of him, — as I hurl a brick! The unscientific thing about it is, you cannot correlate it with—I mean, it never runs into greed, ambition; physical energy, apart from and dead against these. The philosophers trace all known force, don’t they, to the sun? Here is an acknowledged force, seems to me, traceable to, and demonstrating the unknown and the unknowable God. See, Anderson?”

I merely assented by a nod, and he was off again.

“Because, you know, life, vegetable and animal, the highest force with which we are acquainted, is precisely that force which science fails to track and comprehend. Now religion is but a sort of stronger life from God. There is gravity, too, which contradicts all laws of correlation and conservation. Scientists say gravity, holding and hurling all worlds from a central sun, in virtue of its attraction, — attraction, mind,—is at once the strongest, broadest, most incomprehensible force known. They had better class the direct power of the Deity upon the soul with gravity, say, and let it alone! But I am talking about myself, a subject which I understand, however, far less than I do science even.

“ The trouble is, I was lost among my father’s crowd — two thousand — of children. The patriarch Jacob was not a circumstance to him. He would have me in his study, at my book or blocks, while he was at his sermon for Sunday. As he warmed to it, I was out of existence to him. He was very eloquent, and I have watched him write, how often! All cool and concordance at the beginning of a sermon, tearing up sheet after sheet and starting again, then the pen would begin to fly, the light would come to his eyes, he would repeat aloud while writing. Sometimes I have stopped from my play to wonder at him writing like lightning, with the tears rolling down his cheeks and dropping upon the paper as he wrote. Often he would straighten himself up in his chair, both hands stretched out in earnest argument, the pen in one of them, and say to me building houses across the floor, ‘ O undying soul! how can you resist the logic of love omnipotent as that! ’ or something of the kind, his face aglow like that of an angel. Suddenly a tap at, his door, and our black Corrilla would peep in and say, ‘ Oh, Mass Austin, I ’so so sorry, but gen’l’man in parlor, say he must see you, on’y five minits!’ When I add that, arrested in mid career, my father, the tears still wetting his cheeks or the light of victorious argument sparkling in his eyes, would say, ' Oh, bother!’ it was not in anger, but in pure sorrow; and it was beautiful, — for I was glad to run down with him, — yes, beautiful, his courtesy, even cordiality, to a perfect stranger, demanding, very often, that he should subscribe for one of those gorgeously gilded, wood-illustrated good books, for which a minister has as much use as a skilled carpenter has for a toy saw! Even when my father would lie on the lounge in the sitting-room, on the rare evenings he did not go out, in the brief intervals between visits, while he played with his children, his mind was on some pressing case in his church, or he would keep saying to us seated on his knees, ‘ Yes, darling, oh yes,’ while he jotted down a memorandum or so for his next sermon. His church prospered, but his children perished! ”

“ Eli, as of old! ” I interjected here.

“And I Hophni and Phineas rolled into one, yes!” and the lawyer turned himself a little in his rat-like burrow among the dirty bedclothes to continue, “ only it was an over-occupied Samuel, in this case, not Eli at all. Samuel ’s scoundrel sons were judges, you remember, that is, lawyers fully developed, overturning by their rascality the theocracy of the Hebrews and bringing about a monarchy instead!

“ The other guilty party,” he added, “ was my equally innocent mother. All along she had her hands full, if merely to keep our heavy expenses in such bounds as not to worry her husband, for, like all eloquent men, he had an insufficient idea of the immortal value of a dollar, a soul being, instead, his standard. She was an invalid, too. Besides, she died when I was ten,—absorbed herself then among the church in heaven as my father was in that on earth! Well for church, well for parents, but what about me! Look at the influence of Miss Throop upon Mose Evans! I tell you, Anderson, I never had the firm white hand of a pure woman upon me, since my mother died; and God in heaven knows the sort of influence the other kind of women exert, as powerful in another direction! ”

There was so long a pause here that I supposed the man had exhausted himself. He winced a little as he raised his arm; encumbered by splints and bandages, with his other hand, and added after awhile, —

“ Oh, never mind the dirty details. Paul said, By the grace of God I am what I am; and I was just about saying, By lack of the grace of God, I too am what I am! But I am as under oath to speak actual fact, and, jack-leg lawyer, disreputable, intemperate, and everything else that I am to-day, I know as well as a man can know anything that, with all my capacity and opportunity, I could and should have been very different from what I am. I do not understand why Heaven left me to the grip of evil influence when I was such a mere child, ardent, ignorant, wax to the handling,— all I am to-day the growth of that! Sparks which should have slept in the soul for ten years longer, blown by the lips of our negroes into consuming fires — poor, miserable, utterly helpless child! ” The man was weeping, pathos in his tones and manner such as I fail to be able to describe. Some moments passed before he continued more gravely, “Mind, sir, I am speaking solely of myself; mine may be an exceptional case. Nor would you have ever heard me say all this if I bad not been trapped so in this sickbed " —strong profanity — “and nothing to do but talk. Yet I know, as well as you, sir, that the unmitigated scoundrel I am to-day is, at last, of my own making! Any jury, any God, would hold me personally responsible and punish me, and justly, as all my conscience agrees! I do not understand beyond this why, while I take an interest in every other client,—the greater the scamp the deeper the interest, — of myself, Anderson, as my worst client, I am tired to death and throw up the case! Why, sir, I am as thoroughly disgusted with myself as you can be.”

“ And yet,” I remarked after a long silence, “you are so strangely happy, Mr. Archer, generally, at least ” —

“Temperament, sir! Talent,—if I dared say it, —genius, sir! and, did you know it? the highest genius is merely spinal disease: Robert Hall, for instance. Dare say, sir,” he added, “ Satan himself, by very force of character, has a certain sort of joy! People fling me off from them with a shudder, as they would a clot of filth from their hand! I am so mired through that it is impossible the hand of my mother can ever touch me again. I dare not kill myself; I was taught to believe about the after life, that I shall be forever and ever myself still, you observe! Drunk? What is left me but to get the drunkest drunk possible? With all that, you say true, I am always happy, very happy even while miserable. Genius, sir, is joy! an infernal sort, I acknowledge, in my instance!”

And yet, when I hailed the opportunity and was about to enter upon conversation which might possibly benefit him —

“ Bah! ” he suddenly exclaimed with total and inconceivable change of manner, “what a fool I am! you a land agent and brought to tears, and that by a jack-leg lawyer! How do you know I have n’t been merely lying to you to kill time. But, as a gentleman, I haven’t. The man is dead, let us talk of something else!

“Now, Anderson,” he continued, every trace of seriousness gone, happy as a lark, the facile face overflowing with vivacity, “ you have been in Carolina so long, I wonder you have not asked the Brown County news. I am just from there, you know.”

“ General Throop and family are well,” I replied; “ I have had a letter today from him; ” for I saw, as even his own father would have seen, that it was useless to try to talk seriously to him then, and bided my time.

“Magnificent man! Reminds one, with his portly person and white head, of a magnolia! Mrs. Throop,”the lawyer continued, “is a lady. I am surprised she does not leave religious fanaticism to Northerners — ah, excuse me. Our Southern ministers, at least, are as orthodox as they are eloquent! Miss Throop I respect and admire too much to approach. Have you any such ladies North, sir? Ah, excuse me, Mrs. Anderson " —

“ Is a Southern lady, Mr. Archer; but you speak,” I continued with heat, “ without, the slightest knowledge of the North. I decline to converse upon the subject! ”

“ Pardon me,” my companion replied with his indescribable air of good breeding, although swathed to the chin in the bedclothing, “ it is impossible for me to offend upon that theme. I may not have told you, but I studied law at Cambridge. Besides, many of my friends in Carolina are married to ladies from the North. Ladies more beautiful, intelligent, charming in every sense, I never met. I am compelled, however, to add, neither I, nor you, sir, ever met a lady of the remarkable magnetism, if I dare so speak, of Miss Throop, South or North. My only objection to the Northern ladies married South, whom I met during the war, was the excess, I almost said exceeding violence of feeling against their former section; invariably so, and surely they are not to blame for that! But, pardon me. Did General Throop say anything,” he continued, “about Mose Evans?” And, as he says it, the speaker reverts from the man of breeding and society to the “ low-down ” lawyer in the cross-examination manner of the question.

“ Merely that he had made himself very useful, so useful that he regretted he had so suddenly left, because, the General supposed, of his mother’s death, though taking place some time before. Harry Peters rents the place,” I added, and desired to change the subject. I had no intention this slippery person should be mixed up in Mose Evans’ matters if I could help it. “ How is Mr. Parkinson ? ” I asked.

“ Terribly in love with Miss Throop. He had better make up his mind to one of the fat Miss Robinsons. All he has to do is to marry her part of the plantation and be comfortable for life. Do you know how Mose Evans was taken sick?” the lawyer asked eagerly.

“ Some form of typhoid ” —I began.

“ Shows the difference between us. You look at men only with reference to land. Well you came when you did. Drugged, sir. It was well known the man had money when he left Brownstown. Has n’t he told you how he was waylaid along the road? Narrow escape, I tell you. That is why I came down. No one can help liking the man. If, after that matter with his mother, I could ” —

“ Drugged ? ”

“ By a Methodist preacher. Of course he wasn’t a preacher of any sort; a brother of Dob Butler. Oh, I know him; have defended him, too, you see; dressed up in a long coat and longer face for the purpose. They found out Mose Evans was a religious man. That rascal actually read Scripture, sang hymns, and prayed with him! There is an organized gang of them,” the lawyer lowered his voice as he said it.

“ But the landlord never told me,” I began.

“ Why, sir, that is one reason,” Mr. Archer explained, with a smile at my simplicity, “he was so very willing to pitch me out at your suggestion. So far a sa fool can be a villain, he is one of them. This house is one of their head-quarters. They did their level best to banter Evans into cards; they would have cleaned him out in one night. Then the mock preacher slipped some drug into Evans’ coffee, while waiting upon him so kindly. If they had not overdone the matter in their eagerness, by putting in too much, and he had not had the constitution he has, it would have killed him; fortunately it drove him only into fever. We lawyers know everything and everybody. If you have money, Anderson, don’t be brash about it. I know your wife is a great protection,—they always respect a lady, — but be careful. If they rob and murder you, no hope in your last moments anybody will be hung. They will employ me, and I am sure to get them off! ” I saw nothing at all witty, however, in the lawyer’s fun, “ the crackling of thorns under a pot,” which wearied me, and so I rose to go. I had wakened the man’s memory of early days into a flood which cared nothing as to the way it ran, so that it could be allowed to flow on. Besides, it was getting late, and Helen would be uneasy.

“ Hold on, Major Anderson,” he begged, as I got up from beside his bed.

“ You must excuse me, Mr. Archer, it is nearly eleven " —

“ Stop a moment. It is about Mose Evans I want to speak. Things have happened on the Throop place. He will never tell you. You know Job Peters ? ”

“As General Throop’s overseer, I think I know all you can tell me,” I said, for I hated to have him speak upon matters which I was coming to regard as sacred beyond the handling of even Helen, my wife.

“ Be a sensible man, Anderson, and stop,” the man said without a particle of merriment. “Lift a fellow up; I want to talk to you! ”

I had tended in hospitals during the war,—about half a century ago, it seemed to me, — so that I did not shrink while the man clasped his unbroken arm around my neck and I lifted him as well as I could out of the hole of his bulging bed, propped him up with the bolster doubled over behind his back, and laid his splintered arm upon the dirty pillow before him. Unrequested I wet the end

of a towel and wiped his face, brushing back from his fine forehead the hair with, I am compelled to say, a clothes brush, which I found on the washstand.

“Thank you. Slight-built men, like you and myself, make splendid nurses. I once knew a doctor, red-headed, feminine, not longer than your little finger ” —

“But about Mose Evans, Mr. Archer.”

“ Yes, Job Peters was hired, as you are aware, by the General, to manage the freedmen. You know Job, Anderson, Harry Peters’ brother? He could n’t rule the freed blacks with the cowhide as of old, so he tried sarcasm! ”

“ Sarcasm ? ”

“ His bitter fun, you see. One would n’t suppose the negroes would care for that, but,” added the lawyer, “ I declare I honor them for it, they did. It was worse—his words — than persimmons before frost; bitter, stinging, never ceasing. ‘ How many lumps of dirt in your cotton basket to-day, Mr. Samuel?’ ' All, Mrs. Julia Jones, a lady of color, and have to work, heh? ’ ' You coming to me for pay, Mr. Walter? I thought you had concluded to be governor of the State! ’ Nonsense like that to the hands, and always at it! Not in fun, no laugh about it, bitterly; and things worse than that; they can't help having been made free, poor wretches! It was not fair in Job. They got worn out with it at last — his fun. First thing you know, General Throop,—of course he had only Job Peters’ story, — was out one afternoon among the blacks at the gin, in a passion. The General can’t reconcile himself to the change, it is the world upside down to him; he is getting suddenly infirm, too, and tremulous. Broke his gold headed cane over the head of the foreman of the crop before he knew it. If the negroes had not respected the old General so, there would have been trouble right then. I suppose one of the ladies must have been frightened and sent over to him as the nearest person; but Mose Evans came in after supper. Mr. Parkinson told me about it. The General was in a bad humor, and Job Peters was the same, as he always is. In the presence of the ladies, too. The hands had struck work, you see, — gone!

“ ' You ought never to strike a negro on the head, General,’ Job Peters was saying. ' It breaks your cane and does n’t hurt him. I always strike for the shins instead! ’ But Job lied; he is a coward — can hardly walk under the revolvers he wears in the cotton patch, since the blacks were freed.

“ ' What do you say, Mr. Evans? ’ the General asked.

“ ‘ I would try and strike between,’ Evans said, smiling.

“ ‘ What do you mean by that? ’ Job roars out, for he had had one or two difficulties with Evans before. I suppose Mr. Parkinson put it into better words than Evans could use; but he told me Evans said he would try to handle them by their heart, better feelings, nonsense of that sort. I suppose Peters saw it was all over with himself, so far as overseeing those negroes was concerned, and pitched in, as the boys say. In the very supper-room with the old General and the ladies! The ladies told Mr. Parkinson next day and he told me. By the bye, Anderson, I do believe that Mr. Parkinson is trying to convert me, he stops to talk with me so often,” the lawyer pauses to explain; “ but the parson said it was beautiful. You see, Evans is very strong, as cool as he is strong. He took Peters in his grasp, — you remember my case, Anderson,— one hand over his foul mouth, like a little baby, and walked him quietly as he could out of the house, out of the front yard, out of hearing. I do not know, paddled him well, I suppose, when he had him out of hearing. There has been no Job Peters on the place since!”

“ But who is overseer? ” I inquire of the lawyer, doubting, for the first time, if I had not had more reference to my own interest than that of General Throop, when I effected our exchange of Charleston and Brown County property; at last, I may know myself less than I do any other acquaintance!

“ Overseer? Mose Evans! It was not his seeking. He got me to draw up the lease with Harry Peters for his mother’s place, now his, of course; and,” Mr. Archer added, " I knew what he meant by employing me. He knows it was not so much my fault, at last, that about his mother. The lease is for years. He intended leaving as soon as he could settle up his mother’s estate; for, I tell you, sir, she held him and everything else, those strayed cattle, for instance, in her grip, while she lived! General Throop was left so helpless, you observe. The ladies, too. He took a room at his old home, with Harry. Harry thinks the world of him, especially since his trouble with Job. The old gentleman is so feeble. Whatever he may have been when they were slaves, so bewildered about the negroes now they are free, that he turned the whole plantation over to Evans. This made it necessary Mose should be at the house a great deal, reporting the day’s cotton picking, ginning, pressing, contract kept, contract broken, and the like. I only know he got in the General’s crop. Saw it to the mouth, — mouth of the river, our port, you know. Sold it and bought the General’s supplies.”

I rose to my feet with deeper sympathy for poor Evans! It was not his fault — so closely associated with the family — even if he knew all the time of Mr. Clammeigh’s engagement. Apart from that, how could he hope to be considered in any other light than as an exceedingly ignorant although very useful Brown County boor, by the young lady in question ? I did not mention the fact to the lawyer, but it all came back upon me at the moment, and I will state it here, even if Helen sees it and I die. I refer to the last day I was in Brown County before returning to Charleston. I had called at General Throop’s to bid them good-by. The General was asleep somewhere, my visit being in the afternoon. Mrs. Throop, if she was not superior to such weakness, sleeping too, I suppose. Agnes Throop saw me as I alighted from my horse; she seemed always watching for rescue. Clammeigh, I’m afraid. But she dropped her sewing and came out in her morning dress to meet me! The live-oaks with their swinging moss were so sepulchral; the house was so silent and utterly lonely; she had no brother; her parents were wholly unable to sympathize with her, by reason of age and peculiarity! All that poor, frail girl had on earth was — Clammeigh, a thousand miles away in Charleston, a million of miles away in the depths of his intense selfishness, if she knew it. That man was, after her parents, all she had on earth to love, her entire soul flowing to that cold individual as the Gulf Stream, they say, flows to the Polar Sea! How she hurried out to meet me on that occasion, her dark hair parted simply upon her pure forehead, all her soul in her eyes, the perfect grace and culture of the accomplished woman with the simplicity of a child, holding both her hands out to me as I ascended the steps! I have before recorded something of her greeting when I first saw her after she arrived at her new home; it was her way to every one she imagined had done her a kindness. I speak of it again because of her utter loneliness in the world, which, I suppose, made her all the more eager, unconscious to herself, for sympathy! I had no time to enter the house, could only leave my regards for her parents, take both of her hands once more in mine, to say good by. O beauty, grace, purity, sweetness! O magnetism, mesmerism, witchcraft! O friendship with lines not more exactly defined between itself and love, than are the stripes of a rainbow from each other. And, O Helen, Helen! Heaven knows how thoroughly I prefer and love you, my own wife, in comparison with every other woman I ever knew. You understand the singular, yet wholly unconscious power of Agnes Throop! Hence the depth of our interest in poor Evans. Nothing more absurd, and perfectly naturel too, than his infatuation!

I know I am as cool a man of the world as any in Boston or Wall Street; but, you observe, people do not generally think and feel aloud, as I am doing here. The only way I can interest

anybody in this bald narrative of mine is to write out, as nearly as I dare, according to the actual facts; having no art, I can merely give nature!

“Do you know why Evans left? ” the lawyer halted me again as I was leaving.

“Not fully; why do you ask? ” I replied.

“They are a frail class of persons, the Throops; physically, I mean,” he replied. “ The father and mother by age; all of them by reason of long suffering. I think they could not but respect, ignorant as Evans was, his sturdy strength of body. They have lived in our artificial society there in Charleston, — do I not know Charleston ? — are bewildered by the change, and they came to esteem the strong common-sense of the man. He is so silent, too; he does not make himself more ridiculous than he can help by blunders in grammar and the like! Handsome, now, is n’t he? Mr. Parkinson is jealous of him; ever know anything so preposterous? Of course, Parkinson is out of the question, to say nothing of that Mr. Clammeigh from Charleston — but, Mose Evans! One thing, Mr. Anderson, I know, as a lawyer,” the man continued ; “it is partly land, speculation in land, sir, not wholly Miss Throop, which brought Clammeigh to Brown County when he came. I happen to know. I 'm sorry they are to marry.”

“ So am I; but why did Evans leave ? " I demand as I open the door to depart.

“We legal men are on the watch in regard to everything, by force of habit, even where no fee is in question,” Mr. Archer replied. “ It was ungentlemanly, I confess, but I learned from the negroes about their place that Evans left suddenly one day. He had brought out their mail matter to the Throops, and their people think he brought them a letter that day which made trouble. I have racked my brain to conjecture whom that document could be from. I mean, to produce any such effect upon Evans. I cannot imagine; and have given it up! He employed me about that lease, but has had no intercourse with me apart from the silent eloquence, if I may so speak, of that. Do you suppose I would have come here, learning of his peril, but, for my regard for the man ? Brown County never understood him; less of late than ever before. Mr. Parkinson suddenly called upon him, a few Sundays before he left, sir, to lead in prayer. It was at a sort of conference meeting in the church, General Throop and his daughter present. Mr. Parkinson dare not ask himself his full motive in requesting him to do so, old New Hampshire having been the only member of his church he had called upon previously. The eyes of every person present were upon Mose Evans on the instant; they could not help it. Strange as it may be, I was there; my eyes could detect no confusion in his face! A slight suffusion of surprise, and he quietly arose; and a better prayer, although brief,” — and the lawyer consigned himself to perdition in default of truth upon his part, — “I never heard!”

“ Well, I must say good night,” I began.

“ I was at the fence of General Throop’s place,” Odd Archer continued, “ about the time Mr. Clammeigh, then on a visit to them, was leaving for Charleston. I sat on my horse, merely asking to see the General at his gate. It was about a tax claim, and the General had never invited me to visit them. Evans was buckling his saddle-girth to ride somewhere when the General came out to us, bare-headed, Clammeigh and Miss Throop with him, to tell him goodby. 'I thought,’ Clammeigh said to Evans, drawing on his gloves as he spoke, his saddle-bags over his arm, ‘ that I had told you to have my horse ready! ’ Oh, it was nothing worth telling,” Mr. Archer added; “merely that, and the amused expression upon the face of Evans as he lifted his hand to his hat in salutation to the General and his daughter, and rode silently away, was beautiful! The sudden glance of the lady, too, from the one man to the other! ”

“ And now, I will say good night.”

“ Good night, sir,” the lawyer said, slipping himself down into his bed and more into a posture for sleep. “ I said Mose Evans left suddenly. It was not suddenly. He made his preparations to leave silently but deliberately. He has some grave purpose. I wish I knew what. I chanced to be going into town that day and passed him on the road, He had the aspect to me as he rode away, of a lawyer going to the capital to take his seat upon the bench! Good night! ’ ’

VII.

It was on Wednesday that my wife and myself had our interview with Mr. Evans, as already narrated. Certain matters of my own prevented our entering his room again until the afternoon of the Sabbath following. During the interval he had improved greatly, and, although still confined to his room, received us dressed and seated in an enormous chair used for shaving purposes, which I had secured from the shop of a negro barber across the street, less by money than by saying it was for a sick man. It is impossible not to appreciate the warm-hearted sympathy with suffering on the part of people of color, and the hearty satisfaction of the barber, as he shaved his dissatisfied customers, seated uncomfortably in an ordinary hide-bottom chair, was to me half the pleasure of my toilette when I dropped in for that purpose.

“ Mustn’t cuss so, massa; s’pose you was sick! ” was the emollient the smiling barber applied, with his lather, to each remonstrant. “ Chair good enough; sit still, massa, or you mought get cut! ”

When we first entered his room, I confess I could not help laughing aloud as I saw our invalid, still very feeble and hollow about the eyes and cheek, seated in his stately chair, his head resting upon the support behind. My wife looked indignantly at me, for she knew I was thinking of the poor fellow as awaiting at her hands worse surgery than any that chair had ever held victim for before. By way, I suppose, of chloroform before operation, my wife, after I had read, at Mr. Evans’ request, a certain passage of Scripture, sang us a number of the hymns common among the blacks; sung in a low voice, they were that Sunday afternoon, the sweetest music I ever heard!

“I ought to know them,” she said, after she had sung " Swing low, sweet chariot; ” “ I don’t feel no ways tired; ” winding up in triumph with “Mary an’ Martha have just gone along.” “My mammy rocked me to sleep singing them when I was a baby in her arms, there on the plantation. I have heard them all my life, as our people sang them in their meetings and over their wash-tubs. Except at church, they never sing them, or anything else, now. I’ll sing one more. We have all heard it often. It is the hymn Henry says he will have sung to him when he is dying. Listen, Mr. Evans, to ' Roll, Jordan, roll; ’ for I want to have a good talk with you when I am through.” Helen was seated upon one side of the sick man and I upon the other, and there was a long silence after she had ceased singing. I think even her heart was softened.

“ I was wishing to speak to you,” she began at last.

“ Yes, ma’am.” Mose Evans turns his eyes upon her respectfully.

“It is in reference to Miss Agnes Throop.” The eyes remain fixed upon hers, but the respectful interest has singularly changed into a species of indifference.

“ If you please ” — he requests.

“I have none with me,” Helen replies with some severity, divining his meaning; “here is lavender;” and Mr. Evans submits to a sprinkling of the same upon hair and beard, no more to him than so much water.

“ I think I can save you from a ruined life, from great unhappiness, at least,” Helen proceeds. “ What I say may hurt you very much. Are you strong enough? ”

“Yes, ma’am,” with the smiling indifference as of a grown man when being treated like an infant. My wife’s pride is touched. She grasps her knife, so to speak, with positive pleasure. Plunges it in!

“I have known Agnes Throop all my life. She is a good girl, a sweet girl. But that is all! She is not an angel of God. You are mistaken entirely,— nothing unusual in her at all. There are many women more beautiful, as you would know if you had seen more of the world. I could tell you even of many serious defects in her character! ”

Now, it may be right for doctors, female ones too, to fib. But I was surprised at this! I studied, from the other side, the broad, open face of her patient as she spoke.

“ Yes, ma’am! ” Because of his lack of culture, everything the man thought or felt came to his face, and now there was nothing there but entire indifference. If my wife had stated that the afternoon sun he saw out of the window was a turnip, instead, which a boy had thrown into the air, he would have believed it as much. Mose was a grand object, invalid though he was; that about shoulders and face which reminded one of the bust of a Roman Emperor. And marble he certainly was to her statement.

“ Yes, ma'am.”

“ And I must tell you this, also; ” my wife is more quiet as she becomes more cruel. " Miss Agnes Throop is engaged to be married to a Mr. Archibald Clammeigh of Charleston, South Carolina. He is a lawyer, a gentleman of education. He has traveled over the world. He is handsome, very rich. And she loves him. I know her well, she loves him with all her heart! So, you see ” —

“Yes, ma’am.” Marble. With merely this difference, one simple question, that asked as if the reply made no difference. “Does he love her?” The man put such a meaning in that word “ love! ” I could have laughed at the way it hit Helen. She colored with confusion. Knowing that detestable Clammeigh as she did.

“ Apart from that, Evans,” I add, “ as I happen to know from the person himself, Mr. Parkinson, too, is ardently in love with Miss Throop. Do you not see how foolish you are? Even leaving Mr. Clammeigh out of the question, do you suppose you are a match for a gentleman of education like that minister? Besides, he will see her every day, man, while you are far away and entirely forgotten.”

And, yet, in reply to all this I had from Mr. Evans merely a composed “Yes, sir.”

“ I have merely to add this,” Helen continued after a while, with dignity; “ my husband esteems you as an honest man, sincere, well-meaning” —

“ Yes, ma’am.”

“ But you are more ignorant than yon know. General Throop is of one of the first families of Charleston, and very proud. Now, you see how impossible it is. You might as well fall in love with the moon. You can never marry Miss Agnes Throop; be a sensible man, Mr. Evans. Never! ”

“ Yes, ma’am.” And not a shadow upon the marble of his face. If Helen had been imparting to him the most uninteresting, or the most delightful news in the world, you could not have told which it was, from his countenance, at least: and a more expressive one in telling of or hearing about a bear fight, for instance, I never saw.

“And now,” very soothingly on the part of my wife, “ you know we are your friends, we wish to save you from misery. I tell you only the truth. What,” after some considerable pause, “do you think of it? ”

It would have been better if Helen had not asked, but, owing to her sex, she was curious. Mose Evans sat with his eyes respectfully in hers. At the question, with the simplicity of a child, he quietly replied, “ You have never loved, ma’am.”

I was angry with the fellow, but I could have laughed — did laugh, I believe— outright. It smote Helen full in the face. She positively crimsoned.

“You forget, sir,” she said at last, with entire dignity, “that I am married— that this is my husband.”

“Yes, ma'am. Beg pardon.” But it was evident that the man had nothing to take back. He was so very ignorant, you see.

It was Sunday afternoon, as I have said. It occurs to me as I write, that the day, our having read the Bible together, Helen’s songs of worship, our intending soon to part, all these were not without their influence, in addition to his terrible illness and near escape from death, upon our friend. We had enjoyed a quiet time all these days in our upper rooms of the “hotel.” The lumbering old stage, driven by profanity, —the motive power, it seemed to me, of all the ox, horse, mule machinery out West; they added its pressure to mill sluice, and steam, even! — rolled up to and away from the front porch every evening about six, disgorging its passengers for supper and reëngorging them thereafter, replete with coffee, pork, and hot biscuit; exceedingly hilarious, in consequence thereof, generally at the expense of hotel and landlord, for the next ten miles; deeply depressed, also, in consequence of supper, all night and until after breakfast next day. I had ridden — how often? — in the same. In and out of the front porch flowed and ebbed, at periods as defined as the tide, the population of Bucksnort. The landlord set drunk and got sober as by a law of nature. His miserable wife showed her heart-broken face once or twice a day in our rooms, to see “ how you all are getting along, and if there is anything I can do.” The flaunting concubines of his seraglio, black, yellow, ash-colored, were in and out of the rooms and halls with that peculiar impudence of manner which we would think a woman would shrink, in virtue of her very sex, from showing toward a wife, and a heart-broken and helpless wife, at that! I could not help observing how the women of whom I am speaking sent scorn and defiance to her ears, even when out of sight, in their shrill songs from the wash-tubs and clotheslines in the back yard, —songs offensively religious. And so we lived in our world, and all the rest of the hotel in theirs, meeting only at the table for meals; my appetite holding out longer than Helen’s, but getting so very tired at last of the monotonous sameness of an indigestibility of fare, the one law of which was — fry!

I say it was, I suppose, all the peculiar influences upon Mose Evans combined, possibly the feeling of some explanation as due my wife, that caused him to say what he did before we parted that Sunday night. We had risen to leave.

“ I am,” he remarked, “ as you say, ma’am, an ignorant man; not a more ignorant man alive, I suppose,” he said, as if stating the time of day, “but there are some things I do know! ”

I am no stenographer, and can but report his ideas as nearly in his words as I recall them. He continued slowly, steadily, “ What you say about her not being so much at last is only this. I don’t know what she is to others. I know what she is to me. I never thought God Almighty could make such a person as she is — never mind! I can’t tell why, but I can’t talk about that at all. What I look at is the hand He who makes us has had in it. It is like a camp-fire you see a-making on a cold, rainy, pitch-dark night in the woods: there’s the blaze, and there’s the face it lights up so of the man building the fire! I mean Him!” as with a gesture of the eyes upward, “ and it was n’t my doing, that trouble with Job Peters, and having to be in their house so much. I might have gone off, outlived it all, but for that! As to the gentleman from Charleston. Well, I’ve seen him. He is all you say. Maybe so! But what I look at is this, he is n’t fit; not for her! The hardest thing you said, ma’am,” looking full at my wife with serious eyes, “ was that she loves that man. Maybe so! But people change when they come to know She is all the same to me, whether she ever changes or not. I can no more help it than I can help living, no, nor than I can keep from dying when that comes. I ’ll tell you what I am going to do about it,” he went on to say, after withdrawing his eyes from those of my wife and reflecting for some time, then raising them again to hers, “and then I’ll tell you why. I was on my way when I was taken down. I have fixed with old New Hampshire about my property, how he is to send me money. For I ’m going off to try and learn something. Then I 'm going to travel about, for years, perhaps. New Hampshire has given me letters and directions. If any law comes up about the property, he has my power of attorney. He ’ll have you to help him, sir. But don’t fuss with that Odd Archer. You are certain to kill him, if you do, and I would n't, if I was you. While I am gone, who can tell but matters may change? I’ve never spoken to her, about myself, hardly, in my life; never dared to. I mean, nothing of all I feel. But she may hear, somehow. Anyway I can do nothing but what I am doing! And now, I’ll tell you why I’m going to do what I said.” It was after some silence, and in lowered tones, that he continued, “I’ve never said a word of what I’m telling you to a soul before. I hope I never will have to again as long as I live. I think about little else, but it is the hardest thing to say out I ever knew. If it was n’t my sickness, your talk with me, the Sabbath, the singing, and all, I would n’t have opened my lips about it. But, it all happens so!

“ You see,” he continued, at last, with the frank eyes as of a child in mine, not my wife’s, “ I ’ve lived, as I’ve found out for the last year, among people almost as ignorant as the brutes, to say nothing of those among them that are wicked. You know, Mr. Anderson, how Brown County people talk about their Maker, ‘the good man,’ ‘old Marster,’ and the like. I always knew we had a Maker, but I never knew God was such a man, too, as Jesus Christ! I have come to know He is ; and how amazing it is to me to know it, I can’t tell you. And I never knew such a woman could be as she is. But I know now there is such a woman. It may not be right for me to put even her beside God, but she is so to me; I can’t help it.” A long silence after this.

“ What I want to say is even harder to say,” he added at last. “ Because people always talk about a man loving a woman as if it was a joke, nothing except to laugh at, to make fun over. With me it is nothing in that way, nothing at all! It is the most solemn, most sacred thing I know, and what I am trying so hard to get to say is this. If such a person as God can love me as I’ve come to find out He does, then she may too, some day. I can’t tell how all this sounds to you, but it is what I mean.”

It was so much in the manner of the man! “I have fixed matters, as I said, with old New Hampshire,” our friend concluded, “ although you two are the only ones I’ve spoken to about all this. I’m going far away, to try and see what I can make of myself. All along I’ve known almost as little about myself as I knew about the One that made me. Who can tell what I may not make of myself yet? I don’t know, but I can try and see.”

“I saw a picture last summer in Boston,” I remarked to Helen that night in our own room, for she seemed to have nothing to say, “ of a missionary preaching to the natives of some newly discovered continent or other. The painter had placed a savage chief in the foreground, listening to the missionary. It was admirably done — the wide-eyed wonder of the savage, at what was being said! This religion of ours is as old and as familiar to us as the sun. Suppose you had seen the sun to-day for the first time? We are a sort of Chinese, my dear; things have always been, we think, as they are to-day, will go on in the same old round forever and ever. The gospel is as new, really, to Evans, as it would be to any other of the aborigines. How was it that night to the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks? ”

But my wife has no remark to offer, and I add, after a little, “ This religion of ours has lifted some of the race from a very low estate. We know it will elevate the noblest of us to a far higher level yet. If it can lift the race, I do not see why it cannot lift a man. Heh ? ”

“I am quite tired to-night, Henry,” was all my wife replied, “ let us go to sleep.”

William M. Baker.