11 Bucks, of the Mountains
The situation became truly embarrassing to me in Many respects. Grey, friendly before the arrival of Alicia, now chose to regard me, as I have said, with hostile eyes, while daily falling further under the influence of Harrison. His self-styled lieutenant Connor also began to be disagreeable, and to make rather personal remarks to me, which I considered beneath my dignity to resent openly. Patrick Henry Connor, born in a western ward of Louisville, was a city politician of the minor type. He had been unfortunate perhaps in his surroundings and associations as he looked at few things openly and directly. He was fond of petty intrigue and made mysteries where there was no mystery. In person he was a tall, loud-voiced young man, and he was fond of vivid ties and gorgeous vests.
But Grey dropped his air of hostility once, when we met in a hotel hall and instinctively I divined his purpose.
“Clarke,” he said, putting his hand upon my shoulder, a thing that I did not like except from a most intimate friend, “you know what I’m doing here, that is, what I’m after; now you’re a quiet, observant kind of fellow, tell me what you think of it.”
“I don’t just catch your meaning,” I replied, although I knew well enough what he meant.
“Haven’t I got the nomination cinched as all my friends say? I’d like to hear from you too. Now speak up old man, and say they’re right!”
He slapped me on the shoulder in a manner intended to be jovial, but his touch was thoroughly repellent now and I moved away a little. He did not seem to notice it, but repeated his query in the tone of one who wants and expects to be flattered. I was sorry that he had asked me the question at this time, but being asked it I made up my mind not to beat around the bush.
“You wish my real opinion?” I said.
“Of course. Why should I ask you otherwise?”
“Political campaigns are always doubtful. I don’t think your nomination is a certainty. On the contrary I should say that the chances are very much against you.”
His face fell, and then flushed with an angry red. I could see that he was incredulous and that he thought I meant to offend him.
“Oh, you’re against me,” he said with an impudent swagger, “and, of course, you see the way you want to see.”
“You do me an injustice,” I replied gravely, “I try to see things as they are, and while I am not for you—I don’t think you’ve had experience enough, Mr. Grey, to be Governor of this State—I believe I can look ahead far enough to know you will not be nominated.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and giving me a malignant look, he turned on his heel and went away.
I was disturbed somewhat over the interview, chiefly on Alicia’s account. Grey now and then regarded me with a green eye and his anger might choose to find a vent at present on Alicia. How completely a woman is in the hands of her husband! I asked Jimmy Warfield to come to my room, and I told him of the manner in which Grey had questioned me, although I did not refer to the subject of Alicia which had led up to it.
“I’ve committed myself very early against Grey,” I said. “I hope everybody knew it already—but I did not like to be forced into a declaration by the man himself.”
“It’s just as well,” said Jimmy Warfield, “just as well all around.”
“All around,” he repeated, looking keenly at me and then smiling a little.
I felt my face flush when he repeated the phrase, “All around.” I thought I understood him perfectly. Jimmy Warfield knew of my love for Alicia and now I was glad that I had spoken so plainly.
But Alicia had to pay. That I soon saw. He was cruel to her in the thousand little ways in which a husband can mistreat his wife, without causing some able-bodied man to knock him down. He insisted upon her going about with him a great deal. He slurred and cheapened her by small, nasty remarks and acts, and she bore it all with a patience and resignation that were little short of sublime. I was compelled often to witness his conduct, he seemed to take a special joy in it, when I was present, knowing then that he was torturing us both.
Harrison, keen observer that he was, did not fail to notice Grey’s new line, and after a week he spoke of it to me.
“I think, Clarke,” he said in his cool, cutting tones, like the edge of a knife, “that ultimately you’ll have to kill Grey. I’m sorry these are not the old times when you could challenge him for some imaginary insult and put him out of the way.”
“For God’s sake, don’t jest about it Harrison,” I burst out, “you remember you said once that either you or I would have to rescue her. Well, I wish that either you or I could. I can’t stand the sight of that man.”
“He has the law, religion and the prophets on his side,” said Harrison gravely.
“I know it! I wish he could die! Drink himself to death! Anything!” I exclaimed.
“He is a very healthy looking man. He has an unusually robust frame. He is likely to last many years yet.”
Harrison came close to me and like Grey put his hand upon my shoulder. But unlike Grey his touch was not repellent.
“Mr. Clarke,” he said, “you and I have something in common, besides our love for Alicia Grey. I understand you thoroughly, and while you and I can never be friends I wish that we could.”
“Yes,” I said, “I would rather be your friend than your enemy.”
But I knew that we must remain arrayed against each other. While I was attracted to him at times there was something peculiar and caustic in the temperament of Harrison that repelled. The man did not make warm friends, nor seem to wish them. Moreover, Alicia stood between us, an insuperable bar.
It became known to the general public that I had declared myself against Grey, and the report received much vivid embroidery. I soon perceived also that I must expect continual attack from Grey’s lieutenants, and presently a very serious one came, in a way altogether unexpected.
We have, as all the world knows, in Eastern Kentucky some lingering spirit that favors avenging your own quarrel. I think it is inherited in a direct line from the Highlands of Scotland, but, be that as it may, it still exists and gives us trouble, besides creating in the world for the majority of us a reputation that is earned only by the minority.
Now one of the mountain counties had sent to our Legislature a man whom hitherto I had noticed but slightly, Mr. John Bucks, a huge, swarthy fellow of about thirty, truculent in manner and used to a rough life, in which rapid fire rifles and self-action revolvers were important articles of furniture. Bucks had taken but little vocal part in the affairs of the House, but I heard that Frankfort, a great city to one used only to the mountains and the wilderness, had proved rather heady wine for him. Rumors of his exploits in doubtful quarters floated about, but I had not paid any attention to them.
Now, Bucks suddenly began to cut a figure on the floor of the House, and I seemed to be his chief target. Nothing that I said or did pleased him. I was rather amused at first by Bucks’ attacks, crediting them to the virus which so often sets the poorer section of a State against the richer, and I did not take the trouble to reply. But my course seemed to infuriate him still further, and bye and bye he became personal. More than once the Speaker was forced to call him to order with the heavy beating of his gavel, and at last Peden came to me, pulling his long beard dubiously.
“Clarke,” he said, “that mountain fellow has got it in for you. Have you ever had any quarrel with him?”
“No, I never spoke a half dozen words to him in my life.”
“I think you’ll have to answer him sooner or later. He’s making a dead set at you, and there’s only one way with fellows of that kind.”
Peden looked quite serious, and with his long fingers he combed his long beard very thoughtfully, but his words nevertheless made no deep impression upon me at the time—I suppose my mind was so nearly filled with other subjects that there was no room in it for Bucks.
Mrs. Warren, Alicia’s mother, arrived suddenly in Frankfort, and for some reasons I was not sorry to know of her presence. Although I could never overcome my repugnance to the woman who had sold her daughter, yet Alicia needed her mother near her. Friends of her own sex she had in plenty in Frankfort, but there was none upon whom she could lean.
Despite the feeling of repellence that she created in me I sought to ingratiate myself with Mrs. Warren, and I talked to her of common topics in Louisville that should interest us both. But I made little progress. She still regarded me with the yellow eye of suspicion. But she never showed the same aversion toward Harrison, whose mind she must have read as easily as my own and who she must also have known would resort to measures at which I stopped. I have already commented on the fact that Grey, too, seemed to trust Harrison while always regarding me with unworthy suspicion. I suppose that his manner blinded them both and softened the facts, or made them look like something else.
In the course of the day after her mother’s arrival, I saw Alicia alone. When the session of the House closed I went to my room to work upon some bills and about twilight I decided to take a walk as usual. On my way out I passed by the small parlor. The door was open and the sound of as sad music as I have ever heard came from it. I am peculiarly susceptible to the melancholy note in music. I like sad music and cheerful books, an aesthetic or intellectual contrast, for which I do not undertake to account.
I stopped a moment at the door to listen to the wailing chords and then, as I caught the outline of a woman’s arm, the arm of the woman who sat at the piano, I went in.
It was Alicia playing in the dim light and expressing what was in her heart. I knew it, I felt it instinctively and it did not need the sight of her sad face to confirm me. Her eyes as she bent a little over the piano seemed to me to be heavy with tears. Her face was a dead white, like ivory, and her hands blended with the keys.
I think that she heard my footsteps, and I think that she knew them, but she went on with the slow, wailing music. What the piece was I do not know—Russian perhaps, as the Russians seem to me to be a sad people—and the room was full of shadows and ghosts and reproaches from the past. Rosemary is for remembrance, but remembrance here filled me with bitterness. Not only had I destroyed my own youth, but hers as well and her whole life. I do not claim to be a good man, the years behind me contained many things that I wished to forget, but whatever I was and whatever I had been, I knew that I should have made a far better husband for Alicia than George Grey ever was or could be or wished to be. I should have loved her and cherished and protected her and never in my basest moments could I have neglected her as George Grey so often did, or have been cruel to her as George Grey so often was.
The music finished, it died away in one last melancholy, wailing note that was like the echo of despair, and then a terrible thing happened. Alicia suddenly put her face in her hands and burst into a fit of hysterical weeping, not vociferous crying like the grief of the cheap and the common, but low sobs drawn from the very bottom of her chest that shook her from head to foot.
“Oh, Harry!” she said, “I am so unhappy, and I feel so—so degraded!”
The circumstances of my life have forced upon me the habit of self-control, but I was deeply shaken, and the very fact that I could not soothe her in her grief, that I could not take any part of it upon myself was further agony. Only one man had the right, but he had not a shred of that power.
“Alicia! Alicia! Don’t give way like that!” I cried for lack of something else to say.
But she could not stop. The flood had burst down the bars, created by the years of self restraint, and for the time it swept over them as it would. Never before had I so longed for the right to protect and comfort her, never before had I felt so deeply that this right should be mine, but I rejoice even now to remember that I took no advantage of her emotion and unguarded moments. Though I would have given worlds to have put my arms about her, and to tell her what she was to me I did not even touch her, my hand did not even reach the falling lace of her sleeve, but I stood looking down at her with death in my heart.
I could not stand it, and I walked over to the window—we were both forgetful or careless whether any others came through the door that stood open to all. I turned my eyes away and gazed out of the window, because it is too terrible a thing to look on when the woman you love is crying her heart out and you are helpless. I stood there motionless and seeing nothing, while I still heard her low sobs. Then they ceased as suddenly as they had begun, and she called me. I turned around and she was standing before me, with the ghost of a pitiful little smile, that she had forced upon her face.
“I’ve been weak and foolish,” she said, “but you will forget about it won’t you, Harry?”
She put her hands together like a little child and the sight of Alicia appealing to me as a favor for what belonged to her as a right, touched new chords of sympathy.
“I have forgotten it already,” I replied.
“You are strong, Harry,” she said. “Then why not forget me too! I have brought nothing but misery into your life and I am poisoning it for you now. You are reestablished, you are young, you are at the beginning of a great and brilliant career, you are to have a life full of happy work and—and there can be some other woman. Why waste another thought on me!”.
“Alicia,” I said gravely, “I may be strong, but I could never be strong enough to forget you. I do not know what, my career is to be, but nothing in it could displace you—though I have not the right to say that to you—and though it is unlawful for me to love you, I am and shall always be powerless to love any other woman.”
The look she gave me sent a thrill of delight through me. I suppose that every man in love is egotistical, looking upon himself as a sort of sun, but I believed that she was glad when I refused to separate my life from hers. Poor Alicia! how often have I used that expression and how much she needed support and sympathy!
Woman alone can effect sudden and complete transformations, that is in the appearances. Now she turned away from me, and sitting down at the piano again began to play a reckless, defiant little air, something from the French I suppose, because it had that gay lilt which I always associate with the French nation when it is in its cheerful mood.
“You see,” she said with a little smile, “that I am not the coward you take me to be.”
I was glad to see her again in her usual command of herself, but the assumption of gayety moved me almost as much as her tears. Fate was certainly in her most freakish mood when she gave such a woman to George Grey.
“You were never a coward,” I said.
The little air finished in a shower of notes like the high-throated trilling of a bird. Then as her hands rested quietly a moment on the keys she leaned over and said to me:
“Be careful with yourself. I do not know what it is or how it will show itself, but there is some movement against you. I have heard fragments only.”
Anxiety showed in her tone, anxiety for me, I was again foolish enough to believe, but the warning, even from Alicia, made no great impression upon me, and I received it with a lightness that was not affected.
“I’m not afraid,” I said, “in this struggle here over measures we give and take.”
“That is not all,” she said earnestly, “watch over yourself.”
“I will,” I said to reassure her, and then I left her at the piano, where she glided away again into one of those plaintive airs. I heard its wailing note as I passed down the hall, and I feared that it was an omen of evil.