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A Modern Instance

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"I thought it was Tecumseh!" She shuddered. "We can go back; oh, yes, we
can still go back!"

They alighted from the train in the chilly midnight air, and found their
way through the crowd to the eating-room of the station. The little girl
cried with broken sleep and the strangeness, and Olive tried to quiet her.
Marcia clung to Halleck's arm, and shivered convulsively. Squire Gaylord
stalked beside them with a demoniac vigor. "A few more hours, a few more
hours, sir!" he said. He made a hearty supper, while the rest scalded their
mouths with hot tea, which they forced with loathing to their lips.

Some women who were washing the floor of the ladies' waiting-room told them
they must go into the men's room, and wait there for their train, which was
due at one o'clock. They obeyed, and found the room full of emigrants, and
the air thick with their tobacco smoke. There was no choice; Olive went in
first and took the child on her lap, where it straightway fell asleep;
the Squire found a seat beside them, and sat erect, looking round on the
emigrants with the air of being amused at their outlandish speech, into
which they burst clamorously from their silence at intervals. Marcia
stopped Halleck at the threshold. "Stay out here with me," she whispered.
"I want to tell you something," she added, as he turned mechanically and
walked away with her up the vast lamp-shot darkness of the depot. "_I am
not going on_! I am going back. We will take the train that goes to the
East; father will never know till it is too late. We needn't speak to him
about it--"

Halleck set himself against this delirious folly: he consented to her
return; she could do what she would; but he would not consent to cheat
her father. "We must go and tell him," he said, for all answer to all her
entreaties. He dragged her back to the waiting-room; but at the door she
started at the figure of a man who was bending over a group of emigrant
children asleep in the nearest corner,--poor, uncouth, stubbed little
creatures, in old-mannish clothes, looking like children roughly blocked
out of wood, and stiffly stretched on the floor, or resting woodenly
against their mother.

"There!" said the man, pressing a mug of coffee on the woman. "You drink
that! It'll do you good,--every drop of it! I've seen the time," he said,
turning round with the mug, when she had drained it, in his hand, and
addressing Marcia and Halleck as the most accessible portion of the
English-speaking public, "when I used to be down on coffee; I thought it
was bad for the nerves; but I tell you, when you're travelling it's a
brain-food, if ever there was a brain--" He dropped the mug, and stumbled
back into the heap of sleeping children, fixing a ghastly stare on Marcia.

She ran toward him. "Mr. Kinney!"

"No, you don't!--no, you don't!"

"Why, don't you know me? Mrs. Hubbard?"

"He--he--told me you--was dead!" roared Kinney.

"He told you I was dead?"

"More'n a year ago! The last time I seen him! Before I went out to
Leadville!"

"He told you I was dead," repeated Marcia huskily. "He must have wished
it!" she whispered. "Oh, mercy, mercy, mercy!" She stopped, and then she
broke into a wild laugh: "Well, you see he was wrong. I'm on my way to him
now to show him that I'm alive!"




XL.


Halleck woke at daybreak from the drowse into which he had fallen. The
train was creeping slowly over the track, feeling its way, and he heard
fragments of talk among the passengers about a broken rail that the
conductor had been warned of. He turned to ask some question, when the pull
of rising speed came from the locomotive, and at the same moment the car
stopped with a jolting pitch. It settled upon the track again; but the two
cars in front were overturned, and the passengers were still climbing
from their windows, when Halleck got his bewildered party to the ground.
Children were crying, and a woman was led by with her face cut and bleeding
from the broken glass; but it was reported that no one else was hurt,
and the trainmen gave their helplessness to the inspection of the rotten
cross-tie that had caused the accident. One of the passengers kicked the
decayed wood with his boot. "Well," he said, "I always like a little
accident like this, early; it makes us safe the rest of the day." The
sentiment apparently commended itself to popular acceptance; Halleck
went forward with part of the crowd to see what was the matter with the
locomotive: it had kept the track, but seemed to be injured somehow;
the engineer was working at it, hammer in hand; he exchanged some dry
pleasantries with a passenger who asked him if there was any chance of
hiring a real fast ox-team in that neighborhood, in case a man was in a
hurry to get on to Tecumseh.

They were in the midst of a level prairie that stretched all round to the
horizon, where it was broken by patches of timber; the rising sun slanted
across the green expanse, and turned its distance to gold; the grass at
their feet was full of wild-flowers, upon which Flavia flung herself as
soon as they got out of the car. By the time Halleck returned to them,
she was running with cries of joy and wonder toward a windmill that rose
beautiful above the roofs of a group of commonplace houses, at a little
distance from the track; it stirred its mighty vans in the thin, sweet
inland breeze, and took the sun gayly on the light gallery that encircled
it.

A vision of Belgian plains swept before Halleck's eyes. "There ought to be
storks on its roof," he said, absently.

"How strange that it should be here, away out in the West!" said Olive.

"If it were less strange than we are, here, I couldn't stand it," he
answered.

A brakeman came up with a flag in his hand, and nodded toward Flavia.
"She's on the right track for breakfast," he said. "There's an old Dutchman
at that mill, and his wife knows how to make coffee like a fellow's mother.
You'll have plenty of time. This train has come here to _stay_--till
somebody can walk back five miles and telegraph for help."

"How far are we from Tecumseh?" asked Halleck.

"Fifty miles," the brakeman called back over his shoulder.

"Don't you worry any, Marcia," said her father, moving off in pursuit of
Flavia. "This accident makes it all right for us, if we don't get there for
a week."

Marcia answered nothing. Halleck began to talk to her of that Belgian
landscape in which he had first seen a windmill, and he laughed at the
blank unintelligence with which she received his reminiscences of travel.
For the moment, the torturing stress was lifted from his soul; he wished
that the breakfast in the miller's house might never come to an end; he
explored the mill with Flavia; he bantered the Squire on his saturnine
preference for steam power in the milling business; he made the others
share his mood; he pushed far from him the series of tragic or squalid
facts which had continually brought the end to him in reveries in which
he found himself holding his breath, as if he might hold it till the end
really came.

But this respite could not last. A puff of white steam showed on the
horizon, and after an interval the sound of the locomotive whistle reached
them, as it came backing down a train of empty cars towards them. They were
quickly on their journey again, and a scanty hour before noon they arrived
at Tecumseh.

The pretty town, which in prospect had worn to Olive Halleck's imagination
the blended hideousness of Sodom and Gomorrah, was certainly very much
more like a New England village in fact. After the brick farmsteads and
coal-smoked towns of Central Ohio, its wooden houses, set back from the
street with an ample depth of door-yard, were appealingly familiar, and
she exchanged some homesick whispers with Marcia about them, as they drove
along under the full-leaved maples which shadowed the way. The grass was
denser and darker than in New England, and, pretty as the town was, it wore
a more careless and unscrupulous air than the true New England village; the
South had touched it, and here and there it showed a wavering line of fence
and a faltering conscientiousness in its paint. Presently all aspects of
village quiet and seclusion ceased, and a section of conventional American
city, with flab-roofed brick blocks, showy hotel, stores, paved street, and
stone sidewalks expressed the readiness of Tecumseh to fulfil the destiny
of every Western town, and become a metropolis at a day's notice, if need
be. The second-hand omnibus, which reflected the actuality of Tecumseh,
set them down at the broad steps of the court-house, fronting on an avenue
which for a city street was not very crowded or busy. Such passers as there
were had leisure and inclination, as they loitered by, to turn and stare
at the strangers; and the voice of the sheriff, as he called from an upper
window of the court-house the names of absentee litigants or witnesses
required to come into court, easily made itself heard above all the other
noises.

It seemed to Halleck as if the sheriff were calling them; he lifted his
head and looked at Olive, but she would not meet his eye; she led by the
hand the little girl, who kept asking, "Is this the house where papa
lives?" with the merciless iteration of a child. Halleck dragged lamely
after the Squire, who had mounted the steps with unnatural vigor; he
promptly found his way to the clerk's office, where he examined the docket,
and then returned to his party triumphant. "We are in time," he said, and
he led them on up into the court-room.

A few spectators, scattered about on the rows of benching, turned to look
at them as they walked up the aisle, where the cocoa matting, soaked
and dried, and soaked again, with perpetual libations of tobacco-juice,
mercifully silenced their footsteps; most of the faces turned upon them
showed a slow and thoughtful movement of the jaws, and, as they were
dropped or averted, a general discharge of tobacco-juice seemed to express
the general adoption of the new-comers, whoever they were, as a necessary
element of the scene, which it was useless to oppose, and about which it
was idle to speculate. Before the Squire had found his party seats on one
of the benches next the bar, the spectators had again given their languid
attention to the administration of justice, which is everywhere informal
with us, and is only a little more informal in the West than in the East.
An effect of serene disoccupation pervaded the place, such as comes at the
termination of an interesting affair; and no one seemed to care for what
the clerk was reading aloud in a set, mechanical tone. The judge was busy
with his docket; the lawyers, at their several little tables within the
bar, lounged in their chairs, or stalked about laughing and whispering
to each other; the prosecuting attorney leaned upon the shoulder of a
jolly-looking man, who lifted his face to joke up at him, as he tilted his
chair back; a very stout, youngish person, who sat next him, kept his face
dropped while the clerk proceeded:--

"And now, on motion of plaintiff, it is ordered by the Court that said
defendant be now here three times called, which is done in open court,
and she comes not; but wholly makes default herein. And this cause is now
submitted to the Court for trial, and the Court having heard the evidence,
and being fully advised, find for the plaintiff,--that the allegations
of his complaint are true, and that he is entitled to a divorce. It is
therefore considered by the Court, that said plaintiff be and he is hereby
divorced, and the bonds of matrimony heretofore existing between said
parties are dissolved and held for naught."

As the clerk closed the large volume before him, the jolly lawyer, as if
the record had been read at his request, nodded to the Court, and said,
"The record of the decree seems correct, your honor." He leaned forward,
and struck the fat man's expanse of back with the flat of his hand.
"Congratulate you, my dear boy!" he said in a stage whisper that was heard
through the room. "Many happy returns of the day!"

A laugh went round, and the judge said severely, "Mr. Sheriff, see that
order is kept in the courtroom."

The fat man rose to shake hands with another friend, and at the same moment
Squire Gaylord stretched himself to his full height before stooping over
to touch the shoulder of one of the lawyers within the bar, and his eyes
encountered those of Bartley Hubbard in mutual recognition.

It was not the fat on Bartley's ribs only that had increased: his broad
cheeks stood out and hung down with it, and his chin descended by the three
successive steps to his breast. His complexion was of a tender pink, on
which his blonde moustache showed white; it almost vanished in the tallowy
pallor to which the pink turned as he saw his father-in-law, and then the
whole group which the intervening spectators had hitherto hidden from him.
He dropped back into his chair, and intimated to his lawyer, with a wave of
his hand and a twist of his head, that some hopeless turn in his fortunes
had taken place. That jolly soul turned to him for explanation, and at
the same time the lawyer whom Squire Gaylord had touched on the shoulder
responded to a few whispered words from him by beckoning to the prosecuting
attorney, who stepped briskly across to where they stood. A brief dumb-show
ensued, and the prosecutor ended by taking the Squire's hand, and inviting
him within the bar; the other attorney politely made room for him at his
table, and the prosecutor returned to his place near the jury-box, where he
remained standing for a moment.

"If it please the Court," he began, in a voice breaking heavily upon the
silence that had somehow fallen upon the whole room, "I wish to state that
the defendant in the case of Hubbard _vs_. Hubbard is now and here present,
having been prevented by an accident on the road between this place and
Indianapolis from arriving in time to make defence. She desires to move the
Court to set aside the default."

The prosecutor retired a few paces, and nodded triumphantly at Bartley's
lawyer, who could not wholly suppress his enjoyment of the joke, though it
told so heavily against him and his client. But he was instantly on his
feet with a technical objection.

The judge heard him through, and then opened his docket, at the case of
Hubbard vs. Hubbard. "What name shall I enter for the defence?" he inquired
formally.

Squire Gaylord turned with an old-fashioned state and deliberation which
had their effect, and cast a glance of professional satisfaction in the
situation at the attorneys and the spectators. "I ask to be allowed to
appear for the defence in this case, if the Court please. My friend, Mr.
Hathaway, will move my admission to this bar."

The attorney to whom the Squire had first introduced himself promptly
complied: "Your honor, I move the admission of Mr. F. J. Gaylord, of
Equity, Equity County, Maine, to practise at this bar."

The judge bowed to the Squire, and directed the clerk to administer the
usual oath. "I have entered your name for the defence, Mr. Gaylord. Do you
desire to make any motion in the case?" he pursued, the natural courtesy of
his manner further qualified by a feeling which something pathetic in the
old Squire's bearing inspired.

"Yes, your honor, I move to set aside the default, and I shall offer in
support of this motion my affidavit, setting forth the reasons for the
non-appearance of the defendant at the calling of the cause."

"Shall I note your motion as filed?" asked the Judge.

"Yes, your honor," replied the old man. He made a futile attempt to prepare
the paper; the pen flew out of his trembling hand. "_I_ can't write," he
said in despair that made other hands quick to aid him. A young lawyer at
the next desk rapidly drew up the paper, and the Squire duly offered it
to the clerk of the Court. The clerk stamped it with the file-mark of
the Court, and returned it to the Squire, who read aloud the motion and
affidavit, setting forth the facts of the defendant's failure to receive
the notice in time to prepare for her defence, and of the accident which
had contributed to delay her appearance, declaring that she had a just
defence to the plaintiff's bill, and asking to be heard upon the facts.

Bartley's attorney was prompt to interpose again. He protested that the
printed advertisement was sufficient notice to the defendant, whenever it
came to her knowledge, or even if it never came to her knowledge, and that
her plea of failure to receive it in time was not a competent excuse. This
might be alleged in any case, and any delay of travel might be brought
forward to account for non-appearance as plausibly as this trumped-up
accident in which nobody was hurt. He did his best, which was also his
worst, and the judge once more addressed the Squire, who stood waiting for
Bartley's counsel to close. "I was about to adjourn the Court," said the
judge, in that accent which is the gift of the South to some parts of the
West; it is curiously soft and gentle, and expressive, when the speaker
will, of a caressing deference. "But we have still some minutes before noon
in which we can hear you in support of your motion, if you are ready."

"I am m-ready, your honor!" The old man's nasals cut across the judge's
rounded tones, almost before they had ceased. His lips compressed
themselves to a waving line, and his high hawk-beak came down over them;
the fierce light burned in his cavernous eyes, and his grizzled hair
erected itself like a crest. He swayed slightly back and forth at the
table, behind which he stood, and paused as if waiting for his hate to
gather head.

In this interval it struck several of the spectators, who had appreciative
friends outside, that it was a pity they should miss the coming music, and
they risked the loss of some strains themselves that they might step out
and inform these _dilettanti_. One of them was stopped by a man at the
door. "What's up, now?" The other impatiently explained; but the inquirer,
instead of hurrying in to enjoy the fun, turned quickly about, and ran down
the stairs. He crossed the street, and, by a system of alleys and byways,
modestly made his way to the outlying fields of Tecumseh, which he
traversed at heightened speed, plunging at last into the belt of timber
beyond. This excursion, which had so much the appearance of a chase, was
an exigency of the witness who had corroborated on oath the testimony of
Bartley in regard to his wife's desertion. Such an establishment of facts,
purely imaginary with the witness, was simple enough in the absence of
rebutting testimony; but confronted with this, it became another affair; it
had its embarrassments, its risks.

"M-ready," repeated Squire Gay lord, "m-ready with facts and _witnesses!"_
The word, in which he exulted till it rang and echoed through the room,
drew the eyes of all to the little group on the bench next the bar, where
Marcia, heavily veiled in the black which she had worn ever since Bartley's
disappearance, sat with Halleck and Olive. The little girl, spent with her
long journey, rested her head on her mother's lap, and the mother's hand
tremulously smoothed her hair, and tried to hush the grieving whisper in
which she incessantly repeated, "Where is papa? I want to see papa!"

Olive looked straight before her, and Halleck's eyes were fixed upon the
floor. After the first glance at them Bartley did not lift his head, but
held it bent forward where he sat, and showed only a fold of fat red neck
above his coat-collar. Marcia might have seen his face in that moment
before it blanched and he sank into his chair; she did not look toward him
again.

"Mr. Sheriff, keep silence in the Court!" ordered the judge, in reprimand
of the stir that ensued upon the general effort to catch sight of the
witnesses.

"Silence in the Court! Keep your seats, gentlemen!" cried the sheriff.

"And I thank the Court," resumed the Squire, "for this immediate
opportunity to redress an atrocious wrong, and to vindicate an innocent and
injured woman. Sir, I think it will prejudice our cause with no one, when I
say that we are here not only in the relation of attorney and client, but
in that of father and daughter, and that I stand in this place singularly
and sacredly privileged to demand justice for my own child!"

"Order, order!" shouted the sheriff. But he could not quell the sensation
that followed; the point had been effectively made, and it was some moments
before the noise of the people beginning to arrive from the outside
permitted the Squire to continue. He waited, with one lean hand hanging
at his side, and the other resting in a loosely folded fist on the table
before him. He took this fist up as if it were some implement he had laid
hold of, and swung it in the air.

"By a chance which _I_ shall not be the last to describe as
providential,"--he paused, and looked round the room as if defying any one
there to challenge the sincerity of his assertion,--"the notice, which your
law requires to be given by newspaper advertisement to the non-resident
defendant in such a case as this, came, by one chance in millions, to her
hand. By one chance more or less, it would not have reached her, and a
monstrous crime against justice would have been irrevocably accomplished.
For she had mourned this man as dead,--dead to the universal frame of
things, when he was only dead to honor, dead to duty, and dead to her;
and it was that newspaper, sent almost at random through the mail, and
wandering from hand to hand, and everywhere rejected, for weeks, before it
reached her at last, which convinced her that he was still in such life
as a man may live who has survived his own soul. We are therefore _here_,
standing upon our right, and prepared to prove it God's right, and
the everlasting truth. Two days ago, a thousand miles and a thousand
uncertainties intervened between us and this right, but _now_ we are here
to show that the defendant, basely defamed by the plea of abandonment,
returned to her home within an hour after she had parted there with the
plaintiff, and has remained there day and night ever since." He stopped.
"Did I say she had never absented herself during all this time? I was
wrong. I spoke hastily. I forgot." He dropped his voice. "She did absent
herself at one time,--for three days,--while she could come home to close
her mother's dying eyes, and help me to lay her in the grave!" He tried
to close his lips firmly again, but the sinuous line was broken by a
convulsive twitching. "Perhaps," he resumed with the utmost gentleness,
"the plaintiff returned in this interval, and, finding her gone, was
confirmed in his belief that she had abandoned him."

He felt blindly about on the table with his trembling hands, and his whole
figure had a pathos that gave the old dress-coat statuesque dignity. The
spectators quietly changed their places, and occupied the benches near him,
till Bartley was left sitting alone with his counsel. We are beginning to
talk here at the East of the decline of oratory; but it is still a passion
in the West, and his listeners now clustered about the Squire in keen
appreciation of his power; it seemed to summon even the loiterers in the
street, whose ascending tramp on the stairs continually made itself heard;
the lawyers, the officers of the court, the judge, forgot their dinner, and
posed themselves anew in their chairs to listen.

No doubt the electrical sphere of sympathy and admiration penetrated to
the old man's consciousness. When he pulled off his black satin stock--the
relic of ancient fashion which the piety of his daughter kept in
repair--and laid it on the table, there was a deep inarticulate murmur of
satisfaction which he could not have mistaken. His voice rose again:--

"If the plaintiff indeed came at that time, the walls of those empty rooms,
into which he peered like a thief in the night, might have told him--if
walls had tongues to speak as they have ears to hear--a tale that would
have melted even _his_ heart with remorse and shame. They might have told
him of a woman waiting in hunger and cold for his return, and willing to
starve and freeze, rather than own herself forsaken,--waiting till she was
hunted from her door by the creditors whom he had defrauded, and forced to
confess her disgrace and her despair, in order to save herself from the
unknown terrors of the law, invoked upon her innocent head by his villany.
This is the history of the first two weeks of those two years, during
which, as his perjured lips have sworn, he was using every effort to secure
her return to him. I will not enlarge now upon this history, nor upon that
of the days and weeks and months that followed, wringing the heart and all
but crazing the brain of the wife who would not, in the darkest hours of
her desolation, believe herself wilfully abandoned. But we have the record,
unbroken and irrefragable, which shall not only right his victim, but shall
bring yonder perjurer to justice."

The words had an iron weight; they fell like blows. Bartley did not stir;
but Marcia moved uneasily in her chair, and a low pitiful murmur broke from
behind her veil. Her father stopped again, panting, and his dry lips closed
and parted several times before he could find his voice again. But at that
sound of grief he partially recovered himself, and went on brokenly.

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