第72章

NORBERT WAITS FOR JOE:

There was meat for gossip a plenty in Canaan that afternoon and evening;there were rumors that ran from kitchen to parlor, and rumors that ran from parlor to kitchen; speculations that detained housewives in talk across front gates; wonderings that held cooks in converse over shadeless back fences in spite of the heat;and canards that brought Main Street clerks running to the shop doors to stare up and down the sidewalks.Out of the confusion of report, the judicious were able by evenfall to extract a fair history of this day of revolution.There remained no doubt that Joe Louden was in attendance at the death-bed of Eskew Arp, and somehow it came to be known that Colonel Flitcroft, Squire Buckalew, and Peter Bradbury had shaken hands with Joe and declared themselves his friends.

There were those (particularly among the relatives of the hoary trio) who expressed the opinion that the Colonel and his comrades were too old to be responsible and a commission ought to sit on them;nevertheless, some echoes of Eskew's last "argument"to the conclave had sounded in the town and were not wholly without effect.

Everywhere there was a nipping curiosity to learn how Judge Pike had "taken" the strange performance of his daughter, and the eager were much disappointed when it was truthfully reported that he had done and said very little.He had merely discharged both Sam Warden and Sam's wife from his service, the mild manner of the dismissal almost unnerving Mr.Warden, although he was fully prepared for bird-shot; and the couple had found immediate employment in the service of Ariel Tabor.

Those who humanly felt the Judge's behavior to be a trifle flat and unsensational were recompensed late in the afternoon when it became known that Eugene Bantry had resigned his position on the Tocsin.His reason for severing his connection was dumfounding; he had written a formal letter to the Judge and repeated the gist of it to his associates in the office and acquaintances upon the street.He declared that he no longer sympathized with the attitude of the Tocsin toward his step-brother, and regretted that he had previously assisted in emphasizing the paper's hostility to Joe, particularly in the matter of the approaching murder trial.This being the case, he felt that his effectiveness in the service of the paper had ceased, and he must, in justice to the owner, resign.

"Well, I'm damned!" was the simple comment of the elder Louden when his step-son sought him out at the factory and repeated this statement to him.

"So am I, I think," said Eugene, wanly."Good-bye.I'm going now to see mother, but I'll be gone before you come home.""Gone where?""Just away.I don't know where," Eugene answered from the door."I couldn't live here any longer.I--""You've been drinking," said Mr.Louden, inspired."You'd better not let Mamie Pike see you."Eugene laughed desolately."I don't mean to.

I shall write to her.Good-bye," he said, and was gone before Mr.Louden could restore enough order out of the chaos in his mind to stop him.

Thus Mrs.Louden's long wait at the window was tragically rewarded, and she became an unhappy actor in Canaan's drama of that day.Other ladies attended at other windows, or near their front doors, throughout the afternoon: the families of the three patriarchs awaiting their return, as the time drew on, with something akin to frenzy.

Mrs.Flitcroft (a lady of temper), whose rheumatism confined her to a chair, had her grandson wheel her out upon the porch, and, as the dusk fell and she finally saw her husband coming at a laggard pace, leaning upon his cane, his chin sunk on his breast, she frankly told Norbert that although she had lived with that man more than fifty-seven years, she would never be able to understand him.She repeated this with genuine symptoms of hysteria when she discovered that the Colonel had not come straight from the Tabor house, but had stopped two hours at Peter Bradbury's to "talk it over."One item of his recital, while sufficiently startling to his wife, had a remarkable effect upon his grandson.This was the information that Ariel Tabor's fortune no longer existed.