Colonel Starbottle's Client

CHAPTER IV.

Before a month had passed, Mr. Twing's success was secure and established. So were a few of the changes he had quietly instituted. The devotional singing and Scripture reading which had excited the discontent of the Pike County children and their parents was not discontinued, but half an hour before recess was given up to some secular choruses, patriotic or topical, in which the little ones under Twing's really wonderful practical tuition exhibited such quick and pleasing proficiency, that a certain negro minstrel camp-meeting song attained sufficient popularity to be lifted by general accord to promotion to the devotional exercises, where it eventually ousted the objectionable “Hebrew children” on the question of melody alone. Grammar was still taught at Pine Clearing School in spite of the Hardees and Mackinnons, but Twing had managed to import into the cognate exercises of recitation a wonderful degree of enthusiasm and excellence. Dialectical Pike County, that had refused to recognize the governing powers of the nominative case, nevertheless came out strong in classical elocution, and Tom Hardee, who had delivered his ungrammatical protest on behalf of Pike County, was no less strong, if more elegant, in his impeachment of Warren Hastings as Edmund Burke, with the equal sanction of his parents. The trustees, Sperry and Jackson, had marveled, but were glad enough to accept the popular verdict—only Mr. Peaseley still retained an attitude of martyr-like forbearance and fatigued toleration towards the new assistant and his changes. As to Mrs. Martin, she seemed to accept the work of Mr. Twing after his own definition of it—as of a masculine quality ill-suited to a lady's tastes and inclinations; but it was noticeable that while she had at first repelled any criticism of him whatever, she had lately been given to explaining his position to her friends, and had spoken of him with somewhat labored and ostentatious patronage. Yet when they were alone together she frankly found him very amusing, and his presumption and vulgarity so clearly unintentional that it no longer offended her. They were good friends without having any confidences beyond the duties of the school; she had asked no further explanation of the fact that he had been selected by Mr. Barstow without reference to any special antecedent training. What his actual antecedents were she had never cared to know, nor he apparently to reveal; that he had been engaged in some other occupations of superior or inferior quality would not have been remarkable in a community where the principal lawyer had been a soldier, and the miller a doctor. The fact that he admired her was plain enough to HER; that it pleased her, but carried with it no ulterior thought or responsibility, might have been equally clear to others. Perhaps it was so to HIM.

Howbeit, this easy mutual intercourse was one day interrupted by what seemed a trifling incident. The piano, which Mr. Barstow had promised, duly made its appearance in the schoolhouse, to the delight of the scholars and the gentle satisfaction of Mrs. Martin, who, in addition to the rudimentary musical instruction of the younger girls, occasionally played upon it herself in a prim, refined, and conscientious fashion. To this, when she was alone after school hours, she sometimes added a faint, colorless voice of limited range and gentlewomanly expression. It was on one of these occasions that Twing, becoming an accidental auditor of this chaste, sad piping, was not only permitted to remain to hear the end of a love song of strictly guarded passion in the subjunctive mood, but at the close was invited to try his hand—a quick, if not a cultivated one—at the instrument. He did so. Like her, he added his voice. Like hers, it was a love song. But there the similitude ended. Negro in dialect, illiterate in construction, idiotic in passion, and presumably addressed to the “Rose of Alabama,” in the very extravagance of its childish infatuation it might have been a mockery of the schoolmistress's song but for one tremendous fact! In unrestrained feeling, pathetic yearning, and exquisite tenderness of expression, it was unmistakably and appallingly personal and sincere. It was true the lips spoken of were “lubly,” the eyes alluded to were like “lightenin' bugs,” but from the voice and gestures of the singer Mrs. Martin confusedly felt that they were intended for HERS, and even the refrain that “she dressed so neat and looked so sweet” was glaringly allusive to her own modish mourning. Alternately flushing and paling, with a hysteric smile hovering round her small reserved mouth, the unfortunate gentlewoman was fain to turn to the window to keep her countenance until it was concluded. She did not ask him to repeat it, nor did she again subject herself to this palpable serenade, but a few days afterwards, as she was idly striking the keys in the interval of a music lesson, one of her little pupils broke out, “Why, Mrs. Martin, if yo ain't a pickin' out that pow'ful pretty tune that Mr. Twing sings!”

Nevertheless, when Twing, a week or two later, suggested that he might sing the same song as a solo at a certain performance to be given by the school children in aid of a local charity, she drily intimated that it was hardly of a character to suit the entertainment. “But,” she added, more gently, “you recite so well; why not give a recitation?”

He looked at her with questioning and troubled eyes,—the one expression he seemed to have lately acquired. “But that would be IN PUBLIC! There'll be a lot of people there,” he said doubtfully.

A little amused at this first apparent sign of a want of confidence in himself, she said, with a reassuring smile, “So much the better,—you do it really too well to have it thrown away entirely on children.”

“Do YOU wish it?” he said suddenly.

Somewhat confused, but more irritated by his abruptness, she replied, “Why not?” But when the day came, and before a crowded audience, in which there was a fair sprinkling of strangers, she regretted her rash suggestion. For when the pupils had gone through certain calisthenic exercises—admirably taught and arranged by him—and “spoken their pieces,” he arose, and, fixing his eyes on her, began Othello's defense before the Duke and Council. Here, as on the previous occasion, she felt herself personally alluded to in his account of his wooing. Desdemona, for some occult reason, vicariously appeared for her in the unwarrantable picture of his passion, and to this was added the absurd consciousness which she could not put aside that the audience, following with enthusiasm his really strong declamation, was also following his suggestion and adopting it. Yet she was also conscious, and, as she thought, as inconsistently, of being pleased and even proud of his success. At the conclusion the applause was general, and a voice added with husky admiration and familiarity:—

“Brayvo, Johnny Walker!”

Twing's face became suddenly white as a Pierrot mask. There was a dead silence, in which the voice continued, “Give us 'Sugar in the Gourd,' Johnny.”

A few hisses, and cries of “Hush!” “Put him out!” followed. Mrs. Martin raised her eyes quickly to where her assistant had stood bowing his thanks a moment before. He was gone!

More concerned than she cared to confess, vaguely fearful that she was in some way connected with his abrupt withdrawal, and perhaps a little remorseful that she had allowed her personal feelings to interfere with her frank recognition of his triumph, she turned back to the schoolroom, after the little performers and their audience had departed, in the hope that he might return. It was getting late, the nearly level rays of the sun were lying on the empty benches at the lower end of the room, but the desk where she sat with its lid raised was in deep shadow. Suddenly she heard his voice in a rear hall, but it was accompanied by another's,—the same voice which had interrupted the applause. Before she could either withdraw, or make herself known, the two men had entered the room, and were passing slowly through it. She understood at once that Twing had slipped out into a janitor's room in the rear, where he had evidently forced an interview and explanation from his interrupter, and now had been waiting for the audience to disperse before emerging by the front door. They had evidently overlooked her in the shadow.

“But,” said the stranger, as if following an aggrieved line of apology, “if Barstow knew who you were, and what you'd done, and still thought you good enough to rastle round here and square up them Pike County fellers and them kids—what in thunder do you care if the others DO find you out, as long as Barstow sticks to you?”

“I've told you why, Dick,” returned Twing gloomily.

“Oh, the schoolma'am!”

“Yes, she's a saint, an angel. More than that—she's a lady, Dick, to the tip of her fingers, who knows nothing of the world outside a parson's study. She took me on trust—without a word—when the trustees hung back and stared. She's never asked me about myself, and now when she knows who and what I have been—she'll loathe me!”

“But look here, Jim,” said the stranger anxiously. “I'll say it's all a lie. I'll come here and apologize to you afore HER, and say I took you for somebody else. I'll”—

“It's too late,” said Twing moodily.

“And what'll you do?”

“Leave here.”

They had reached the door together. To Mrs. Martin's terror, as the stranger passed out, Twing, instead of following him as she expected, said “Good-night,” and gloomily re-entered the schoolroom. Here he paused a moment, and then throwing himself on one of the benches, dropped his head upon a desk with his face buried in his hands—like a very schoolboy.

What passed through Mrs. Martin's mind I know not. For a moment she sat erect and rigid at her desk. Then she slipped quietly down, and, softly as one of the last shadows cast by the dying sun, glided across the floor to where he sat.

“Mrs. Martin,” he said, starting to his feet.

“I have heard all,” she said faintly. “I couldn't help it. I was here when you came in. But I want to tell you that I am content to know you only as you seem to be,—as I have always found you here,—strong and loyal to a duty laid upon you by those who had a full knowledge of all you had been.”

“Did you? Do you know what I have been?”

Mrs. Martin looked frightened, trembled a moment, and, recovering herself with an effort, said gently, “I know nothing of your past.”

“Nothing?” he repeated, with a mirthless attempt at laughter, and a quick breath. “Not that I've been a—a—mountebank, a variety actor—a clown, you know, for the amusement of the lowest, at twenty-five cents a ticket. That I'm 'Johnny Walker,' the song and dance man—the all-round man—selected by Mr. Barstow to teach these boors a lesson as to what they wanted!”

She looked at him a moment—timidly, yet thoughtfully. “Then you are an actor—a person who simulates what he does not feel?”

“Yes.”

“And all the time you have been here you have been acting the schoolmaster—playing a part—for—for Mr. Barstow?”

“Yes.”

“Always?”

“Yes.”

The color came softly to her face again, and her voice was very low. “And when you sang to me that day, and when you looked at me—as you did—an hour or two ago—while you were entertaining—you were—only—acting?”

Mr. Twing's answer was not known, but it must have been a full and complete one, for it was quite dark when he left the schoolroom—NOT for the last time—with its mistress on his arm.