To the Highest Bidder. Florence Morse Kingsley

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      “He’s goin’ to foreclose on ye. Yes, yes; exac’ly. I s’pose likely Jarvis holds the mortgage?”

      “Yes,” said Barbara breathlessly. “But if I only had a little more time I could manage it—somehow. I must keep the farm for Jimmy. I promised father he should have it.”

      Mr. Hewett was silent, his plump face drawn into the semblance of a dubious smile.

      “I’ve come to ask you to take up the mortgage for me, and give me more time to pay it. Will you do it?” asked Barbara, avoiding the man’s look.

      Mr. Hewett shifted his gaze to the ink-well, around the edge of which a lean black fly was crawling dispiritedly.

      “W’y, no,” he said decidedly. “I shouldn’t like to interfere; I couldn’t do it.”

      “Why couldn’t you?” demanded Barbara. “If we have a good apple year, I could pay the mortgage in two years. It doesn’t cost us much to live.”

      “If it’s a good apple year, apples’ll be a drug on the market,” Mr. Hewett prophesied gloomily. “Nope! I’m sorry; but I guess you’ll have to let Jarvis foreclose on ye. I shouldn’t like to run up against Jarvis, y’ know.”

      “But—there’s Jimmy!” The girl’s voice rang out in a sharp cry.

      “Put the boy in an institootion, or bind him out,” advised Mr. Hewett, drumming impatiently on the lid of his desk. “The’s folk a-plenty that wouldn’t mind raisin’ a healthy boy to work.”

      Barbara turned swiftly.

      “Say!” called Mr. Hewett; “hold on a minute!” Then, as Barbara paused, “This ’ere account’s been standin’ since long before your pa died. I’ve been pretty easy on you to date, but I guess I’ll have to attach somethin’ before Jarvis gits his hold onto things. You’ve got some stock, I b’lieve, an’——”

      But Barbara was already out of hearing, hurrying as if pursued. Two or three women, looking over dress goods at the counter, turned to look after the slim figure in its black dress.

      “She don’t ’pear to see common folks any better’n her father did,” said one, with a spiteful laugh.

      “Well, I don’t see’s she’s got much to be stuck up about,” put in another. “What with her father drinkin’ himself to death, an’——”

      “Was that what ailed him?” inquired a newcomer in the neighborhood. “I remember he was buried a year ago last winter, just after we moved here. But I never heard he was a drinking man.”

      “None of us suspicioned it for quite a spell,” explained the first speaker volubly. “Donald Preston was too awful stylish and uppity to go to the tavern an’ get drunk like common folks; he used to sen’ for his liquor f’om out of town. The best of brandy, so they say; then he’d drink, an’ drink till he was dead to the world, shut up in his room. He kind of lost his mind ’long toward the last, they say. He lived more’n two years that way ’fore he finally died.”

      “She didn’t take care of him like that, did she?”

      “Yes, she did. Her an’ the hired man; an’ I guess they had their hands full part the time. He used to cry an’ holler nights like a baby towards the last. Me an’ Mr. Robinson heard him once when we was comin’ home f’om a revival meetin’ over to the Corners. Seth, he was for stoppin’ an’ seein’ if there was anythin’ we could do, but I says, ‘No, I don’t want to mix up in it,’ I says. Afterwards I was kind of sorry; I’d like to have seen the upstairs rooms in that house.”

      The subject of these manifold revelations and censures was walking rapidly down the village street, her mind a maze of unhappy reflections. She stopped short at the end of the sidewalk, as Jimmy had done the day before.

      “I don’t suppose there’s any use,” she thought, her eyes fixed on the imposing front which the Jarvis residence presented to the public gaze. “But I’ll try, anyway. If he’d give me a year—or even six months longer, I’m sure I could get the interest paid up.”

      Without waiting for her elusive courage to vanish into thin air the girl pushed open the front gate, which clanged decisively shut behind her. The harsh metallic sound appeared to pursue her relentlessly up the long gravelled walk, past the stiff figures of the cast-iron deer, past the blossoming shrubs and the glittering blue glass globes—quite up to the pillared entrance. A sour-faced woman opened the door.

      Mr. Jarvis was at home, she informed Barbara. “But he’s busy,” she added importantly. “The’ can’t nobody see him this mornin’, an’ he’s goin’ away to-morrow.”

      “Then I must see him,” Barbara said firmly. “Tell Mr. Jarvis that Miss Preston would like to see him—on—on business.”

      Stephen Jarvis had spent several hours shut up in his library that morning, during which period he had opened and examined his mail, read the morning papers, published in a neighboring city, and the county papers, one of which he owned, and whose editorial utterances he controlled.

      The morning sun, streaming cheerfully through the clear windows, lay across his paper-strewn desk, bringing into prominence its handsome fittings and the large sinewy hand which reached purposefully for a pen. As he sat there in the revealing light Stephen Jarvis appeared very nearly what he had made of himself in the course of some thirty laborious years. Nature had provided him with a big-boned, powerful body, topped by a head in no wise remarkable for its beauty, yet significant as the compact rounded end of a steel projectile; eyes of no particular color, deep-set beneath penthouse brows; a nose, high in its bony structure, curving at the tip, with a suggestion of scorn; a jaw, heavy but clear-cut, well furnished with strong, even teeth. Jarvis was born a farmer’s son, poor with the poverty of sparse acres, sparsely cultivated through successive generations of uncalculating, simple-hearted men, content to live and die as had their forbears. It was far otherwise with Stephen Jarvis. His initial conclusion, derived from keen-eyed observation and comparison, resulted in an active hatred of the grinding poverty his fathers had accepted with settled stoicism as the common lot. He would not, he resolved, remain poor. He would in some way—in any way—acquire houses, lands, money. This single idea, planted, rooted, and grown mighty, brought forth fruit after its kind. In ten years’ time he had climbed out of the walled pit where he had found himself; in the decade which followed, having learned, experimentally, of the compelling power of the fixed idea doggedly adhered to, he had gone on, adding more houses, more lands, more money to what he already possessed; and this process having by now become somewhat monotonously easy, he had reached for and seized political power of the sort most easily grasped by the large hand of wealth. He still continued almost mechanically to loan money at a high rate of interest, to execute and foreclose mortgages, but there was no longer zest or excitement in the game. And there intervened disquieting moments like the present when he perceived that, after all, he was not successful, as the world counted success; nor rich, as the world counted wealth; moments when he realized his loneliness and the coldness of his hearth-stone, where neither friends nor children gathered.

      His wife, dead more than two years, had been a dull, emotionless woman, with a flat, pale, expressionless face and a high-shouldered, angular figure. Jarvis had married her without pretence of passion because she had money, and in his poverty-pinched youth he had thought of little else. He had never been unkind to the woman who bore his name. He had, in fact, paid very little attention to her, and she had СКАЧАТЬ