Roxy

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31. An Attempt To Foreclose



The little teapot of Luzerne society had been agitated during the two weeks of preparation for the marriage by surmises in regard to the ulterior purpose of Colonel Bonamy in consenting to Mark's wedding Poxy, and even offering him help conditioned on his marriage. To pious people it seemed a special interference of Providence in favor of Texas. But not so to the sage and sagacious Lathers. He knew nothing about Providence he felt distinctly his moral inability to understand God's way of doing things, though if he thought about God at all it was doubtless as one who was a good deal shrewder in carrying his selfish ends than men were in achieving theirs. To him God and the devil were playing a series of games, and though the former might now and then let the latter gain a few points, it was only fcr the sake of making the play interesting, and of finally beating the devil into utter oankruptcy and locking him up in perdition for a thousand years. But if Lathers could not see through the ways of Providence so well as some of his townsmen, he thought he did know something about Colonel Bonamy.

"I say, watch out fer the devil when he is play in' possum," said Lathers. " But what the dickens Colonel Bonamy's doin' now, I can't see. Him help the missionary work ? Not him. That aint his side of the question. Wait till you see this game out. Wait till he begins to play the aces he's got up his sleeve. Now, liker'n not the old man's goin' to git married to some young wife, er run fer Congress, and he wants Mark away off among the Egyptians in the land of Babylon, an' the like. I'm purty good at gnessin', now, I've kuowed Colonel Bonamy nigh onto twenty-four year, an' lie's powerful deep. Now you just watch out fer him, will you, and see ef he don't do somethin' like I say."

But Lathers was far out of the way. Colonel Bonamy began to urge first on Mark and then on Roxy that they should postpone their journey.

"Better put it off till New Year's. It isn't safe going to that climate so early," he said.

But the enthusiastic Roxy was hard to manage. Mark was impatient to be away, as any active-minded young man is impatient to set out upon the achievement of his purposes. He would have yielded readily enough, however, notwithstanding his impatience ; for, since his father's management of Nancy, he felt a certain confidence in the friendliness of his purposes. But the dire danger of souls without a shepherd oppressed the spirit of Roxy. It was pleasant to her to enjoy, here in her own town, the devotion of Mark, the fine-looking young husband of her heart ; but, because it was pleasant, the austere girl was eager to surrender it. Perhaps, too, there was in her mind some latent dread lest an easy temper like Mark's might not hold firmly fixed a severe resolution not immediately put into execution. So she resisted energetically, and with success, the influence of Colonel Bonamy's persuasions on the mind of Mark. If he did not go at the time appointed, Roxy urged, the bishop would not want him at all. Indeed, this uncertainty and complexity of motive drove the straightforward Roxy into an irritable energy of temper which was a surprise to herself. She longed to be where she could act again directly toward a definite aim.

All the time that this discussion was being waged, and Colonel Bonamy was seeking some means of detaining Mark without a point-blank refusal to keep his agreement in the matter of furnishing money, Mark was supposed to be engaged in studies preparatory to his ministrations among the Texans. Wesley's " Sermons," and Watson's " Institutes of Theology " were especially prescribed ; but to a man of Mark's animal spirits and glowing feelings, the clear-cut and severely unrhetorical sentences of Wesley seemed uninteresting, while the long-linked reasoning of Watson, by which it was clearly demonstrated that fore-knowledge was not fore-ordination, even where God himself was the foreknower, was decidedly dry. He liked better a copy of Maffit's ' Sermons," then fresh from the press, and full of far-resounding bombast about the stage-fixings of the day of judgment. But he managed to get on in the arduous task of reading Wesley and Watson, by dint of reclining laboriously on the bed, while Roxy sat by the window and read to him, putting something of the fire of her own enthusiasm into Wesley's grave and simple diction and changing Watson's abstruse speculations almost into poetry by the illumination of her imagination.

On Sundays, Mark exercised himself in preaching in the country school-houses. The young missionary was quite the lion, and the crowds of listening people that came to hear him, and, above all, the eyes of his young wife, stimulated him to addresses of much warmth. They seemed to Mark far better than Wesley's.

Meantime Colonel Bonamy drew the reins tighter on his son. Now that Mark was married, he could not go to Texas on the pittance the church would pay, and the father had some difficulty in remembering that he had made any definite promise in the matter. At most, he tould not raise the money before midwinter, and as he did not believe in their going to the South until January, he was not going to hurry himself. People who were going to be dependent should not be too domineering about it.

Slowly, as the old colonel began to hint that preaching in Indiana would do just as well, Mark perceived his duplicity ; and, by degrees, he came to understand that his father had not intended to have him go to Texas at all. No man of Mark's spirit likes to be managed, and when once the scheme by which he had been encouraged to marry for the sake of keeping him at home dawned upon him, all his pride and combativeness were carried over to Roxy's side of the question.

" I am going to start to Texas by the ' Duke of Orleans,' " he said one day, with great positiveness. " She will leave Cincinnati about the middle of October."

" Well," said the old man in a whining drawl, under which he always covered any expression of defiance " Well, if you go in the middle of October, instead of waiting until the time I have set, you must not expect me to keep you from starving. You'll have too look out for yourselves."

"That's just what we've made up our minds to," rejoined the son. " If we can't live on what missionary money we are to have, we will scratch for a living, like other poor emigrants."

" You can't pay your traveling expenses out there," said the old man.

"By so. ling my horse, and some other things, I can get there."

" And ride afoot when you get there, eh ? "

" Well, I'm going. That's the long and short of it."

" Well, you can go to the devil, for all of me," said tho old man, turning sharply away.

'Mark was resolved not to be the dupe of his father, and Roxy, for her part, was rather pleased witli the prospect of extreme poverty in the mission work. It filled her ideal. Indeed Colonel Bonamy was in every way disappointed in Roxy. She did not seem at all afraid of him, nor in the least conscious that she had married above her station, and she showed a resistance to his domineering will that was beyond anything he had imagined possible. His interviews in private with his daughter-in-law were a succession of defeats. She even showed, on occasion, a temper that seemed to him quite inconsistent with her general saintliness.

But Colonel Bonamy had not yet " played out his game," as he phrased it.

" Mark," he began, as they two sat together in the office one day, " you never asked me how I came out with your Rocky Fork girl."

" She's none of mine," said Mark.

" She shows rather strong proofs of your liking for her. You don't give your watch-seals and Testaments to every young convert, do you ? Now, if Nancy were to bring a suit for breach of promise of marriage, these things might play the deuce with you. And she would have done it if it hadn't been for me. I kept the facts out of Lathers's hands, and I had hard work to keep her from coming in and making a row at the infare. If you and Mrs. Roxy are too stubborn, I don't know but that I'd better just let things take their course. I think you'd hardly set out on a mission to Texas with such charges against you." The old man emphasized this with a sinister laugh, very provoking to the other.

''You'd look well, setting such charges a-going againsl your own son," retorted Mark, reflecting that his father's family pride was protection enough from the execution of that threat.

But he was not at ease. Secretly he feared Nancy. Since his wedding, he had twice seen her at a distance in Luzerne, and had turned out of his way to keep from meeting her. This fear of Nancy was alone enough to determine him to get away to Texas by the next New Orleans boat. But at the same time, he dreaded an open break with his father: He knew the old man's love of mastery, and he did not know how far it might carry him. He no longer insisted that he was going, whether or no. The senior was lulled into security by his silence, believing that the enemy wavered, and that he should yet carry the day. And as days went by, with no visible preparations for his son's departure, the colonel thought that he was gaining time ; and, since the others did not speak of it, he treated the matter as thongh it were tacitly settled as he wished.

But Mark had secretly sold his horse, had sent word by a friend to the captain of the steamboat " Duke of Orleans," then lying at Cincinnati, asking him to stop at Luzerne to take him and his wife aboard. Roxy's preparations were all made, but she did not like the secrecy which Mark enjoined. She could not bear to do right as though she were doing wrong.

As the time approached for him to depart, Mark felt that the storm would be all the more severe when it did burst upon him, and that he could not much longer keep the matter a secret, for all the brethren in the church wanted to know about it, and they would wish to hold a farewell meeting on the coming Sunday. But he was relieved of all debate on the way in which he should com municate the matter to his father, by the accident that Lathers heard of the sale of his horse, and forthwith sauntered into Colonel Bonamy's office.

" Is Mark reelly goin', Colonel ? " he began.

" Do you think he is, yourself ? " retorted the old man, with a sudden suspicion that Lathers knew more than he did.

" I don' know what to think," said the sheriff. " Sometimes it seems like as ef he wuz, and then ag'in more like as ef he wuzn't."

" I'd a little rather he'd stay, Major, but I suppose he'll go," said Bonamy, affecting indifference.

" Did you know he'd sold his hoss and saddle ? "

This was a thunder-clap to the colonel, but he did not let Lathers see the inward start it gave him.

" I believe he has sold several things. He didn't consuit me, and I haven't asked who bought it."

" Done kind o' on the sly, wuzn't it ? "

" He's a fool if he does things on the sly from me. He'll have to depend on me when he gets out there."

" Well, I heerd Ben Plunkett sayin' that he'd bought, but wuzn't to say anything about it tell the time come. An' I thought a father ought to know what's going on in his own family."

' Oh, well, I know pretty well, Major, how the land lies. If they will be fools, let 'em. It's no lookout of mine."

Lathers left the office, but he was gratified to observe from the next street-corner, on which He had taken up a Btand of observation, that the colonel went home soon afterward.

" Mark 'll ketch it now," he chuckled, all his innate love of mischief being tickled by the consciousness of having exploded a mine at a safe distance from himself.

Colonel Bonamy was bitterly disappointed at having all his ambitious hopes of Mark overturned, and doubly chagrined that the whole village had now guessed out his motive in consenting to Mark's wedding Tom Adams's daughter. In conceding so much, and in employing all his art to defeat Nancy Kirtley, he had only rendered his own humiliation the more complete.

He found Mark and Roxy in their own room, in the midst of preparations for going, and poured upon them, for half an hour, the fiercest and most sarcastic things he could say, all uttered in his irritating, whining drawl. Mark was a coward, the colonel snarled. He had meant, if they must go, to keep his promise. But a man guilty of sneaking disobedience and ingratitude toward his father, wasn't fit to be a missionary. He would corrupt the people of Texas. It was in vain that Roxy tried to take the blame upon herself ; the colonel's aristocratic gallantry did not forsake him for a moment. He gently waved her aside, and continued to berate Mark ; for indeed he knew well that a wife would rather be scolded than have her husband denounced. Mark did not receive this lecture in the meekest way. Even Roxy could not restrain him, and he replied with a vehemence that brought both the sisters into the room.

Seeing that he prevailed nothing, and having wrought himself into a passion that put diplomacy out-of-doors, Colonel Bonamy, who gave himself credit for his dignified forbearance in not speaking a rude word to his daughter-in-law, did not mind saying words sometimes with keener edge for her than a personal insult would have had.



" It was of much use that I interfered to keep that Kirtley girl from giving you trouble," he said to Mark " She would have stopped your wedding if I had let her. Didn't she stand out behind the garden and storm at you and Roxy by the hour on the night of the infare, and didn't it take both Whittaker and myself to quiet her ? "

Mark turned pale at this, but extreme anger generally puts on an appearance of calmness.

" You know there is no truth in what she says, and yet you throw out innuendoes here in the presence of my wife and my sisters. We will leave your house right off, sir, and never sleep here again."

But here Janet caught hold of Mark, and then of her father, and then of Roxy, and begged them not to part in that way. She carried her tears and sobs round, and they were effectual. For, if a man will not listen to a crying woman's entreaty out of pity, he may yet yield because he hates a scene. See, for example, the story of the unjust judge.

"Mark's going away forever," pleaded the tender-hearted Janet. " Now, don't send him off this way. Don't go tonight, Mark. Please, Roxy, don't you let him go." And then she stopped and sobbed on Roxy's neck, and Roxy began to feel that her burden was mere than she could bear. She had strengthened herself against poverty and barbarism ; but what are poverty and barbarism to scolding men and crying women ?

'' I didn't send him," said the old man. " It's only his way of treating his father." Then, softening a little, he said: "Come, Mark, don't let's quarrel any more. Of course I know the Kirtley story is all a lie. I oughtn't to have mentioned it, but you are so stubborn. Don't leave the house ; it'll make trouble."

Without waiting for a reply, Colonel Bonamy went out, reflecting, with considerable satisfaction, that, go where she would, Roxy would be nettled by thoughts of Nancy Kirtley, and that the knowledge that Whittaker had heard Nancy's story, would multiply the trouble. The more he meditated on it, the more did he think his allusion to the Kirtley matter a master-stroke. " She'll be sorry she ever crossed me," he said.

Still, he could not but see that he had lost ground by his passion. He had set all his son's pride and anger in favor of going, and he had given the stubborn Roxy licw motives for seeking a mission in Texas without delay.