Lansdale

“ Another man, or a man with another ailment, might have given the unnerving weakness its true name and place and succumbed to it; but Lansdale's métier had been love-transformed into unflinching hopefulness, and the trivialities of the daily walk had come to be so many blind and desperate sorties against the indrawing lines of the relentless besieger. ”

“ Won't you pull it down and set up another in its place,—a clean-cut pillar of uprightness, which will harmonize with the others?"
Jeffard stops short at the tree-bole, with his hand on Lansdale's shoulder.
"It has taken me five weeks to find out why you consented to come afield with me," he says. "It was to say this, wasn't it?"
"Just that," says Lansdale, and his voice is the voice of one pleading as a mother pleads. "Say you will do it, Henry; if not for your own sake or mine, for the sake of that which has brought us together here." ”

“ The news of Lansdale's death came with the shock of the unexpected to the dwellers in the metamorphosed cabin on the upslope of Topeka Mountain, albeit no one of the three of them had ventured to hope for anything more than a reprieve as the outcome of the jaunt afield. But the manner of his death at the time when the reprieve seemed well assured was responsible for the shock and its sorrowful aftermath; and if Constance grieved more than Bartrow or her cousin, it was only for the reason that the heart of compassion knows best the bitterness of infruition. ”

“ I have always conducted myself in his presence as a gentleman must, with the result that he has never failed to be chatty. He is a trifle condescending, to be sure; he does not forget the difference in our stations, but he does not permit himself to study me with eyes of blank indifference, nor is he reticent to the verge of hostility. Of course he feels indifferent to me,—nothing else could be expected,—but his captors have taught him to be gracious in public. And, really, Miss Lansdale, you seemed strangely tame and broken to-day yourself. ”

“ There were two entrances to the newspaper office, and Jeffard watched beaglewise lest his chance of breaking his fast should vanish while he tarried. Presently Lansdale came out, and Jeffard fell upon him before he could latch the door.
"Salaam! Jeffard, my son," said the outcomer. [47] "I saw you waiting for me. How goes the world-old struggle for existence?"
"Don't remind me of it, Lansdale; do you happen to have the price of a meal about you?"
Lansdale smiled, and gravely tucking Jeffard's arm under his own, steered diagonally across the street toward the open doors of a café. ”

“ This time Lansdale's smile was of incredulity. "Let me prophesy," he suggested. "When your [52] lucky day overtakes you, you will do none of these things. Jeffard the fool may be heard of wherever the Associated Press has a wire or a correspondent; but Jeffard the miser will never exist outside of your own unbalanced imagination. Let's go out and walk. ”

“ It shows the wild man in all his untamed ferocity, in his native jungle, armed with a simple but rather promising club. A dozen intrepid tars from a British man-of-war—to be seen in the offing—are in the act of casting a net over him. It's an exciting picture, I assure you, Miss Lansdale. The net looks flimsy, and the wild person is not only enraged but very muscular—"
"I fail to see," she interrupted, with a slight lapse into what I may call her first, or Lansdale, manner. ”

“ Constance set her cousin right, or tried to.
"It isn't a strike of the men; it's pay-ore—isn't it, Mr. Lansdale?"
"Now how should I know?" protested the amateur apologist. "A strike is a strike, isn't it? But I don't believe it was the good kind. He wasn't at all enthusiastic about it."
"That will do," said Connie. "Poor Dick!" And Miss Van Vetter, who was not of the stony-hearted, rose and went to the piano that she might not advertise her emotion.
Lansdale picked himself up out of the ruins of his attempt to do Bartrow a good turn, and hoped the worst was over. ”

“ Your thoroughbred newspaper man has more or less contempt for a fellow who can't or won't write journalese."
They had attained to the dessert, and the waiter was opening a modest bottle of claret for them. Jeffard turned his wineglass down.
[50]
"What! Is that the way you flout a man's hospitality?" demanded Lansdale, in mock displeasure.
"No; I don't mean to do that. But I'm drunken with feasting now, and if I put wine into me I shall pawn the coat off my back before midnight for a stake to play with."
Lansdale smiled. "I'll see that you don't have to. Turn up your glass." ”

“ Most white folks knows me, dough, thank de Lawd! I carn’t see you good, suh; my sight is failin’ me powerful fast.”
“I’m a stranger in this part of the South,” I told him. “I have heard so much about the Lansdale family that I wanted to see their old home; that’s all. ”

“ Because of the persiflant young people, the fire of query and rejoinder had been the merest shelling of the woods on either side; but with the advent of [252] quiet Bartrow said: "Your winter on the lamb-ranch didn't do you much good, did it?"
"Think not?" Lansdale looked up quickly, with a pathetic plea for heartening in the deep-set eyes of him. "I was hoping you'd say it had. I feel stronger—at times." ”

“ It's ego, pure and unstrained, in most of us; a sluggish river of self, with a quicksand of evil for its bottom."
[317]
Lansdale borrowed a gun of his antagonist, and sighted it accurately.
"What do you know about humanity as a whole? What do you know about any part of it save your own infinitesimal fraction?—which seems to be a rather unfair sample."
Jeffard confessed judgment and paid the costs. "I don't know very much about the sample, Lansdale. One time—it was in the sophomore year, I believe—I thought I knew my own potentialities. ”

“ For what he persuaded himself were good and defensible reasons, he had lived the life of an urban hermit in Denver, arguing that a poverty-smitten crumb-gatherer with one foot in the grave might properly refuse to be other than an onlooker in any scene of the human comedy.
The prompting was not altogether unselfish. In common with other craftsmen of his guild, Lansdale was blessed, or banned, with a moiety of the seer's gift. For him, as for all who can discern the masks and trappings and the sham stage-properties, the world-comedy had become pitifully tragic ”

“ And I have often wondered what happened."
"Then Connie hasn't told you?"
"Miss Elliott? No; I didn't know she knew him."
"She met him a time or two; which is another way of saying that she knows him better than we do. She's a whole assay outfit when it comes to sizing people up."
[253]
"What was her opinion of Jeffard?" Lansdale was curious to know if it confirmed his own.
"Oh, she thinks he is a grand rascal, of course,—as everybody does."
"Naturally," said Lansdale, having in mind the proletary's later reincarnations as vagrant and starveling. ”

“ Lansdale took the cigar Bartrow was proffering and clipped the end of it, reflectively deliberate. He was silent so long that Bartrow said: "Well? you don't believe it, eh?"
"I wouldn't say that," Lansdale rejoined abstractedly; "anyway, not of Jeffard. Perhaps you are right. He has given me the same impression at times, but he was always saying or doing something immediately afterward to obliterate it. But I was [256] wondering why you prophesy so confidently about a man who, for aught we know, took himself out of the world the better part of a year ago." ”

“ They need money."
Lansdale let the appeal simmer in the pot of reflection. His inclination was to refuse to be drawn into any such entanglement; but the opportunity to lessen by ever so little the burdens of the woman he loved was not to be lightly set aside. None the less, the thing seemed impossible.
"I'm afraid it's too big for me, Jeffard; I shouldn't know how to go about it. Don't misunderstand me. I shouldn't stick at the necessary equivocations; but if you know Miss Elliott you must know that Machiavelli himself couldn't be insincere with her. ”

“ She shot a look at Clem, under which he blanched visibly, then her eyes were again upon me and she smiled with a rare art.
"Really, you will overlook an old woman's weakness."
It was the inimical, remote, icy superiority of her tone that nettled me—perhaps her implied assumption that I would not know it for such. But also I felt curiously stricken by that swift withdrawal of her confidence, for Mrs. Caroline Lansdale had won me by her laugh and blush of ancient girlishness. Further, I would not now be hurt by any woman, though she were ten times my years, without a show of defence. ”

“ When the soup and fish had disappeared, Jeffard was ashamed of himself, and said as much.
"You mustn't mind what I said," he began, by [48] way of making amends. "I used to think I was a civilized being, but, God help me, Lansdale, I'm not! When I've gone without food for twenty-four hours on end, I'm nothing more or less than a hungry savage." ”

“ The half-cynical smile lightened upon Lansdale's grave face. "That is one of my criticisms of Western manners," he commented. "When you get hold of a stranger, you welcome him with open arms—and proceed to regale him with a near-hand view of the back yards and cesspools. And then you swear piteously when he goes back East and tells his friends what an abandoned lot you are."
Bartrow took the thrust good-naturedly, as he did most of his chastenings. "That's right; that's just about what we do. ”

“ I pretended always to have been a perfect devil of a fellow among the dogs, and professed loftily not to have divined the secret of my innumerable and unvarying conquests.
"Dogs are so foolishly faithful," remarked Miss Lansdale, with polite acerbity. ”

“ If I'd felt like hanging back, a sight of Lansdale would have done the business for me. It's awful, little woman. I've seen dead men, and men that were going to die, but never a dying one that wanted so hard to live. Of course, he kicked clear over the traces when I proposed it, though I lied like a whitehead, and tried to make him believe it was my scheme to help Jeffard get cured of his case of mental and moral 'jimmies.' When that failed, I dug right down to hard-pan. ”

“ The engine-bell clanged, putting the alternative out of the question.
[264]
"That lets me out," Bartrow said. "You go up there and square it right for me; savez? And say, Lansdale, old man; don't work yourself too hard. In spite of the lamb-ranch, you look thinner than usual, and that's needless. Good-by."
Bartrow wrung his friend's hand from the steps of the Pullman, and Lansdale laughed quite cheerfully.
"Don't you waste any sympathy on me," he said. "I'm going to disappoint you all and get well. Good-night; and success to the Little Myriad." ”

“ Peter Grim."
But Connie was not unmindful of what Bartrow had told them about Lansdale's ill health, and she promptly disapproved.
"No, indeed, you mustn't, Mr. Lansdale; you mustn't think of doing any such thing. You don't know the man. He is a 'hold-over' desperado from the stage-line days. Even Dick admits that he is a person to be feared and avoided. And, besides, you're not strong, you know." ”

“ Little Arcadians of my own sex younger than myself—and, if I may suggest it, less discerning—were not only not menaced, but she invited them with a cordiality in which the keenest eye among them could detect no flaw. Miss Lansdale's mother had also pleased the masculine element of the town at her first progress through its pleasant streets. But Miss Caroline, despite many details of dress and manner that failed interestingly to corroborate the fact, was an old woman, and one whose way of life made her difficult of comprehension to the Little Country. ”

“ He left the sentence incomplete, and Jeffard took it up at the break.
"And if she should acknowledge my obligation—which [322] she would not—she would refuse to be reimbursed out of Garvin's money. That is why I haven't sent her a note with a check in it. Will you have another cup of tea?"
Lansdale took the query as a dismissal of the subject and pushed back his chair. On the way out they passed a late incomer; a florid man, with a nervous step and the eye of preoccupation. He nodded to Lansdale in passing, and Jeffard said, "Do you know him?" ”

“ Lansdale has converted me. It is worth something to be able to rise superior to circumstances,—the circumstances of others, I mean,—and, between us two, it's a virtue to which we new people haven't quite attained. ”

“ It seems that when Margaret was taken sick she was in debt to this man Grim for costumes, or railway fare, or something, and he has taken her sewing-machine to satisfy the claim."
The hectic flush in Lansdale's thin cheek began to define itself, with a little pulse throbbing in the centre of it.
"He is an iniquitous scoundrel, and he ought to be prosecuted," he declared. "Don't you see?—but of course you don't; you are too charitable to suspect his real object, which is to drive the young woman back into the service of his master, the devil. ”

“ Again the struggle was upon her, and for a moment she thought that the sound of Dick's returning footsteps would be the signal of a blessed release. But the heart of sincerity would not be denied.
"Let there be no more misunderstandings," she [416] said, bravely. "We have all wronged you so deeply that you have a right to know the truth. Mr. Lansdale was my friend—as he was yours."
"But he meant to be more," Jeffard persisted—"and if he had come back with the courage of health to help him say it, you would not have denied him." ”