distrustful of himself-- except, of course, as regarded his work. He was surefooted enough there. He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women even more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was determined, indeed, to believe the best, but he seemed afraid to investigate.'
'A burnt dog dreads the fire,' said the lawyer grimly, and closed his eyes.
Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood. All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose tastes were refined beyond the limits of the reasonable--whose mind was an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions, and so sensitive that the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall would be etched and held there forever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic word in his fingertips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed its holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored it to its pristine loveliness, like the Arabian prince who fought the enchantress spell for spell. Upon whatever he had come in contact with, he had left a beautiful record of the experience--a sort of ethereal signature; a scent, a sound, a color that was his own.
Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's life; neither love nor wine, as many had conjectured, but a blow which had fallen earlier and cut deeper than these could have done--a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very boyhood. And without--the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened and old, and noble with traditions.
At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black crepe entered, announced that the watchers were arriving, and asked them 'to step into the dining room.' As Steavens rose the lawyer said dryly: 'You go on--it'll be a good experience for you, doubtless; as for me, I'm not equal to that crowd tonight; I've had twenty years of them.'
As Steavens closed the door after him be glanced back at the lawyer, sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his hand.
The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express car shuffled into the dining room. In the light of the kerosene lamp they separated and became individuals.
The minister, a pale, feeble-looking man with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a small side table and placed his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat down behind the stove and tilted his chair back comfortably against the wall, fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers, Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner table, where they could finish their discussion of the new usury law and its effect on chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal-and-lumber dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet on the nickelwork.
Steavens took a book from his pocket and began to read. The talk around him ranged through various topics of local interest while the house was quieting down. When it was clear that the members of the family were in bed the Grand Army man hitched his shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the rounds of his chair.
'S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?' he queried in his weak falsetto.
The banker laughed disagreeably and began trimming his nails with a pearl-handled pocketknife.
'There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?' he queried in his turn.
The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his knees still nearer his chin. 'Why, the ole man says Harve's done right well lately,' he chirped.
The other banker spoke up. 'I reckon he means by that Harve ain't asked him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his education.'
'Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve wasn't bein' edycated,'
tittered the Grand Army man.
There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief and blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap. 'It's too bad the old man's sons didn't turn out better,' he remarked with reflective authority. 'They never hung together.
He spent money enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle farms and he might as well have poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom farm, they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust everything to tenants and was cheated right and left.'
'Harve never could have handled stock none,' interposed the cattleman. 'He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought Sander's mules for eight-year-olds, when everybody in town knew that Sander's father- in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present eighteen years before, an' they was full-grown mules then.'
Everyone chuckled, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees with a spasm of childish delight.
'Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was never fond of work,' began the coal- and-lumber dealer. 'I mind the last time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn helpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was patchin' up the fence, Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in his ladylike voice: 'Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.''
'That's Harve for you,' approved the Grand Army man gleefully. 'I kin hear him howlin'
yet when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin' the cows git foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin'
'em home from pasture. He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onc't--a pure Jersey and the best milker I had, an' the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was watchin' the sun set acros't the marshes when the anamile got away; he argued that sunset was oncommon fine.'
'Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to school,' said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate, judicial tone. 'There was where he got his head full of traipsing to Paris and all such folly. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas City business college.'
The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it possible that these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing to them? The very name of their town would have remained forever buried in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world in connection with Harvey Merrick's. He remembered what his master had said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his pupil to send his body home. 'It's not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering,' he had said with a feeble smile, 'but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and after they have had their say I shan't have much to fear from the judgment of God. The wings of the Victory, in there'--with a weak gesture toward his studio-- will not shelter me.'
