The Romance of a Plain Man

She said nothing more, but the next morning as I was getting into my overcoat, she sent me word that she wished to speak to me again before I went out.

"I'll be up in a minute," I answered, and I had turned to follow the maid up the staircase, when a sharp ring at the telephone distracted my attention.

"Come down in five minutes if you can," said a voice. "You're wanted badly about the B. and R. deal."

"Is your mistress ill?" I enquired, turning from the telephone to take up my overcoat.

"I think not, sir," replied the woman, "she is dressing."

"Then tell her I'm called away, but I will see her at luncheon," I answered hurriedly, as I rushed out.

Upon reaching my office, I found that my presence was required in Washington before two o'clock, and as I had not time to return home, I telephoned Sally for my bag, which she sent down to the station by Micah, the coachman.

"I hope to return early to-morrow," I said to the negro from the platform, as the train pulled out.

In my anxiety over the possible collapse of the important B. and R. deal, the message that Sally had sent me that morning was crowded for several hours out of my thoughts. When I remembered it later in the afternoon, I sent her a telegram explaining my absence; and my conscience, which had troubled me for a moment, was appeased by this attention that would prove to her that even in the midst of my business worries I had not forgotten her. There was, indeed, I assured myself, no cause for the sudden throb of anxiety, almost of apprehension, I had felt at the recollection of the message that I had disregarded. She had looked stronger yesterday; I had commented at dinner on the fine flush in her cheeks; and the pain, which had caused me such sharp distress while it lasted, had vanished entirely for the last thirty-six hours. Then the sound of her voice, with its note of appeal, of helplessness, of terror, when she had called upon George at the reception, returned to me as if it were spoken audibly somewhere in my brain. I saw her eyes, wide and bright, as they had been when they looked straight beyond me in search of help, and her slender, swaying figure in its gown of a pale sea-foam shade that was stained from bosom to hem with the red streak of the wine. "Yet there is nothing to worry about," I thought, annoyed because I could not put this anxiety, this apprehension, out of my mind. "She is not ill. She is better. Only last night I heard her laughing as she has not done for weeks."

The afternoon was crowded with meetings, and it was three o'clock the next day when I reached home and asked eagerly for Sally as I went up the staircase. She had gone out, her maid informed me, but I would find a note she had left on my desk in the library. Turning hastily back, I took up the note from the silver blotter beneath which it was lying, and as I opened it, I saw that the address looked tremulous and uncertain, as if it had been written in haste or excitement.

"Dear Ben (it read), I have been in trouble, and as I do not wish to disturb you at this time, I am going away for a few days to think it over. I shall be at Riverview, the old place on James River where mamma and I used to stay – but go ahead with the South Midland, and don't worry about me, it is all right.

"Sally."

"I have been in trouble," I repeated slowly. "What trouble, and why should she keep it from me? Oh, because of the presidency of the South Midland! Damn the South Midland!" I said suddenly aloud. A time-table was on my desk, and looking into it, I found that a train left for Riverview in half an hour. I rang the bell and old Esdras appeared to announce luncheon.

"I want nothing to eat. Bring me a cup of coffee. I must catch a train in a few minutes."

"Fur de Lawd's sake, Marse Ben," exclaimed the old negro, "you ain' never gwineter res' at home agin."

Still grumbling he brought the coffee, and I was standing by the desk with the cup raised to my lips, when the front door opened and shut sharply, and the General came into the room, leaning upon two gold-headed walking-sticks. He looked old and tired, and more than ever, in his fur-lined overcoat, like a wounded eagle.

"Ben," he said, "what's this Hatty tells me about George taking Sally out motoring with him yesterday, and not bringing her back? Has there been an accident?"

My arteries drummed in my ears, and for a minute the noise shut out all other sounds. Then I heard a carriage roll by in the street, and the faint regular ticking of the small clock on the mantel.

"Sally is at Riverview," I answered, "I am going down to her on the next train."

"Then where in the devil is George? He went off with her."

"George may be there, too. I hope he is. She needs somebody with her."

A purple flush rose to the General's face, and the expression in his small, watery grey eyes held me speechless.

"Confound you, Ben!" he exclaimed, in a burst of temper, "do you mean to tell me you don't know that George's blamed foolishness is the talk of the town? Why, he hasn't let Sally out of his sight for the last two years."

"No, I didn't know it," I replied.

"Great Scott! Where are your wits?"

"In the stock market," I answered bitterly. Then something in me, out of the chaos and the darkness, rose suddenly, as if with wings, into the light. "Of course Sally is an angel, General, we both know that – but how she could have helped seeing that George is the better man of us, I don't for a minute pretend to understand."

"Well, I never had much opinion of George," responded the General. "It always seemed to me that he ought to have made a great deal more of himself than he has done."

"What he has made of himself," I answered, and my voice sounded harsh in my ears, "is the man that Sally ought to have married."

I went out hurriedly, forgetting to assist him, and limping painfully, he followed me to the porch, and called after me as I ran down into the street. Looking back, as I turned the corner, I saw him getting with difficulty into his buggy, which waited beside the curbing, and it seemed to me that his great bulky figure, in his fur-lined overcoat, was unreal and intangible like the images that one sees in sleep.

The train was about to pull out as I entered the station, and swinging on to the rear coach, I settled myself into the first chair I came to, which happened to be directly behind the shining bald head and red neck of a man I knew. As I shrank back, he turned, caught sight of me, and held out his hand with an easy air of good-fellowship.

"So General Bolingbroke has retired from the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, I hear," he remarked. "Well, there's a big job waiting for somebody, but he'll have to be a big man to fit it."

A sudden ridiculous annoyance took possession of me; the General, the South Midland Railroad, and the bald-headed man before me, all appeared to enter my consciousness like small, stinging gnats that swarmed about larger bodies. What was the railroad to me, if I had lost Sally? Had I lost her? Was it possible to win her again? "I am in trouble," the words whirled in my thoughts, "and as I do not wish to disturb you at this time, I have gone off for a few days to think it over." Was the trouble associated with George Bolingbroke? Did she mind the gossip? Did she think I should mind it? Whatever it was, why didn't she come to me and weep it out on my breast? "I didn't want to disturb you at this time." At this time? That was because of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. "Damn the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad!" I said again under my breath.

The red neck of the bald-headed man in front of me suddenly turned.

"Going down for a little hunting?" he enquired genially, "there isn't much else, I reckon, to take a man like you down into this half-baked country. I hear the partridges are getting scarce, and they are going to bring a bill into the Legislature forbidding the sending of them outside of the state. Now, that's a direct slap, I say, at the small farmer. A bird is a bird, ain't it, even if it's a Virginia partridge?"

I rose and took up my overcoat. "I'll go into the smoking-car. They keep it too hot here."

He nodded cheerfully. "I was in there myself, but it's like an oven, too, so I came out." Then he unfolded his newspaper, and I passed hurriedly down the aisle of the coach.

In the smoking-car the air was like the fumes in the stemming room of a tobacco factory, but lighting a cigar, I leaned back on one of the hard, plush-covered seats, and stared out at the low, pale landscape beyond the window. It was late November, and the sombre colours of the fields and of the leafless trees showed through a fine autumnal mist, which lent an atmosphere of melancholy to the stretches of fallow land, to the harvested corn-fields, in which the stubble stood in rows, like a headless army, and to the long red-clay road winding, deep in mud, to the distant horizon.

"I am in trouble – I am in trouble," I heard always above the roar of the train, above the shrill whistle of the engine, as it rounded a curve, above the thin, drawling voices of my fellow-passengers, disputing a question in politics. "I am in trouble," ran the words. "What trouble? What trouble? What trouble?" I repeated passionately, while my teeth bit into my cigar, and the flame went out. "So George hasn't let her out of his sight for two years, and I did not know it. For two years! And in these two years how much have I seen of her – of Sally, my wife? We have been living separate lives under the same roof, and when she asked me for bread, I have given her – pearls!" A passion of remorse gripped me at the throat like the spring of a beast. Pearls for bread, and that to Sally – to my wife, whom I loved! The melancholy landscape at which I looked appeared to divide and dissolve, and she came back to me, not as I had last seen her, weighed down by the furs which were too heavy, but in her blue gingham apron with the jagged burn on her wrist, and the patient, divine smile hovering about her lips. If she went from me now, it would be always the Sally of that year of poverty, of suffering, that I had lost. In the future she would haunt me, not in her sea-green gown, with the jewels on her bosom, but in her gingham apron with the sleeves rolled back from her reddened arms and the jagged scar from the burn disfiguring her flesh.

"I'll see him in hell, before I'll vote for him!" called out a voice at my back, in a rage.

The train pulled into the little wayside station of Riverview, and getting out, I started on the walk of two miles through the flat, brown fields to the house. The road was heavy with mud, and it was like ploughing to keep straight on in the single red-clay furrow which the wheels of passing wagons had left. All was desolate, all was deserted, and the only living things I saw between the station and the house were a few lonely sheep browsing beside a stream, and the brown-winged birds that flew, with wet plumage, across the road.

When I reached the ruined gateway of Riverview, the old estate of the Blands', I quickened my pace, and went rapidly up the long drive to the front of the house, where I saw the glimmer of red firelight on the ivied window-panes in the west wing. As I ascended the steps, there was a sound on the gravel, and George Bolingbroke came around the corner of the house, in hunting clothes, with a setter dog at his heels.

"Hello, Ben!" he remarked, half angrily. "So you've turned up, have you? Has there been another panic in the market?"

"Is Sally here?" I asked. "I'm anxious about her."

"Well, it's time you were," he answered. "Yes, she's inside."

He stopped in the centre of the walk, and turning from the door, I came back and faced him in a silence that seemed alive with the beating of innumerable wings in the air.

"Something's wrong, George," I said at last, breaking through my restraint.

He looked at me with a calm, enquiring gaze while I was speaking, and by that look I understood, in an inspiration, he had condemned me.

"Yes, something's wrong," he answered quietly, "but have you just found it out?"

"I haven't found it out yet. What is it? What is the matter?"

At the question his calmness deserted him and the dark flush of anger broke suddenly in his face.