Dominie Dean: A Novel

XXIV. RESULTS

THE following day was Sunday. Lucille, who had received and read the Declarator, was present at both morning and evening services, as usual, and took her full part in the Sunday school in the afternoon. Welsh’s column had annoyed her, undoubtedly, but in another way than it had annoyed David. To David it had seemed the cruel and unfounded spitefulness of a wicked-minded old man; to Lucille it was as if Welsh had guessed close to the truth, but had carried his imagination too far. It had made her furiously angry, as such a thing would, but she felt that it would do her little harm. Welsh was known to be so vile that she had but to hold her head high, and the town and her friends would think none the less of her for the attack. Those who did believe it, if there were any, would by their belief be offering her a sort of incense she coveted.

Several spoke to David about the column, and all with genuine indignation. The story of Welsh’s attack had spread, of course, but none of us who knew David Dean thought one iota of truth was in it; the thing was preposterous. It came down to this: David Dean was not the kind of man of which such things were possible. We did not believe it then, and we never believed it. The town did not believe it; even his few enemies knew him better than to believe such a thing; Welsh himself did not believe it. But Lucille Hardcome did, conceit-blinded creature that she was! Some day during the week, Wednesday it may have been, she drove her low-hung carriage to the manse. The driver’s seat was a flat affair on X-shaped iron rods, so arranged that it could be turned back out of the way when Lucille wished to drive and dispense with her coachman, and she was driving now. David came to the door, and went in to get his hat. He wished to visit the same broken-legged boy, and the carriage was a grateful assistance. He spread the thin lap robe over his legs, and Lucille touched the horses with the whip.

“Jimmy’s first?” she asked, and David assented.

“You have oranges again, I see,” he said. “How he enjoys them!”

“Doesn’t he?” Lucille replied, and then: “I’m glad you do not mean to let that Declarator article make any difference. I was afraid it might. You are so sensitive, David.”

It was the first time she had called him David. Mary had called him that, and Rose did; he was David to many of us; but the name did not sound right coming from Lucille’s mouth. She was so lordly, so queenly, usually so rather grandly aloof, calling even dear Thusia “Mrs. Dean,” and Rose “Miss Hinch.”

“Sensitive! I have never thought that of myself,” he answered.

“Oh, but you are!” she said. “I know you so well, you see. I almost feared that article would frighten you away; make you afraid of me. As if you and I need be afraid of each other!”

“I’m sure we need not be,” David answered, and she glanced at his face. She did not quite like the tone.

“I thought you might not come with me today,” she said. “If you had suggested that, I meant to rebel, naturally. Now, if ever, that would be a mistake. That would be the very thing to make people talk. Your friendship means too much to me to let it be interrupted by what people say.”

“It need not be interrupted,” said David.

“It means so much more to me than you imagine,” Lucille said. “Often I think you don’t realize how empty my life was when I began to know you. You are so modest, so self-effacing, you do not know your worth. If you knew the full story of my childhood and girlhood, so empty and loveless, and even my short year of married life, so lacking in love, you would know what your friendship has meant. Just to know a man like you meant so much. It gave life a new meaning.”

Unfortunately you cannot see Lucille Hardcome as David saw her when he turned his face toward her, perplexed by her words, not able to believe what her tone implied, until he saw her face. She had grown heavier in the years she had been in Riverbank, and flabbier – or flabby – for she was not that when she came to the town. She wore one of the flamboyant hats she affected, and she was beautifully overdressed. The red of her cheeks was too deep to be natural. She was artificial and the artificiality extended to her mind and her heart, and could not but be apparent to one so sincere as David Dean. Her very words were artificial, as she spoke. The same words coming from another woman would have been the sincere cry of a heart thankful for the friendship David had given; coming from Lucille they sounded false; they sounded, as they were, the love-making of a shallow woman.

David was frightened; he was as frightened as a boy who suddenly finds himself enfolded in the arms of a lovesick cook, half smothered, and only anxious to kick himself out of the sudden embrace. He saw, as if a dozen curtains of gauze had suddenly been withdrawn, the meaning of many of Lucille’s words and actions he had formerly seen through the veils of misunderstanding. There was something comical in his dismay. He wanted to jump from the low-hung carriage and run. He said:

“Yes. I’m quite sure – ”

“So it means so much to me that we are not to let anything make a difference,” Lucille continued. “I think we need each other. In your work a woman’s sympathy – ”

“I think I’ll have to get out,” David said. “I’ll just run in here and – ”

He waved a hand toward a shop at the side of the street. It happened to be a tobacconist’s, but he did not notice that. He threw the lap robe from his knees, and put a foot ont of the carriage. Lucille was surprised. She stopped her horses. She thought David might mean to buy a package of tobacco for some old man he had in mind. He stepped to the walk. Once there he felt safer; his wits returned.

“I think I’ll walk, if you don’t mind,” he said. “I need the exercise. No, really, I’ll walk. Thank you.”

Lucille looked after him.

“Well!” she exclaimed, and then: “I’m through with you, Mr. David Dean!”

She thought she was haughtily indifferent, but at heart she was furiously angry. She turned her horses, and drove home. To prove how indifferent she was she told her coachman, in calm tones, to grease the harness and, entering the house, she told her maid to wash the parlor windows. She went to her room quite calmly and thought: “What impudence! He imagined I was making love to him!” and then, as evidence that she was calm and untroubled, she seated herself at her desk, and wrote a calm and businesslike note to David Dean. It said that, as she was in some need of money, she would have to ask that his note be paid as soon as it fell due. She still believed she was not angry, but how does that line go? Is it “Earth hath no fury like a woman scorned”?

XXV. LUCILLE LOSES

WHEN it was announced that Lucille Hardcome was to marry B. C. Burton, Riverbank was interested, but not surprised. The banker went up and down the hill, from and to his business, quite as usual, but with a little warmer and more ready smile for those he met. He accepted congratulations gracefully. After the wedding, which was quite an event, with a caterer from Chicago, and the big house lighted from top to bottom and every coach the town liverymen owned making half a dozen trips apiece, there was a wedding journey to Cuba. When the bridal couple returned to Riverbank Lucille drove B. C. to and from the bank in the low-hung carriage, and B. C. changed his abode from his own house to Lucille’s. Otherwise the marriage seemed to make little difference. For Dominie Dean it made this difference: the only trustee who had, of late years, shown any independence lost even the little he had shown. Having married Lucille, he became no more than her representative on the board of trustees.

Never a forceful man, Burton became milder and gentler than ever after his marriage. He had not married Lucille under false colors (Lucille had married B. C.; had reached for him and absorbed him), but, without caring much, she had imagined him a wealthy man. When it developed that he had almost nothing but his standing as a suave and respected banker, Lucille, while saying nothing, gently put him in his place, as her wedded pensioner. She had hoped she would be able to put on him the burden of her rather complicated affairs, but when she guessed his inefficiency as a money-manager for himself, she gave up the thought. Lucille continued to manage her own fortune. She financed the house. All this made of B. C. a very meek and gentle husband. He did nothing to annoy Lucille. He was particularly careful to avoid doing anything to annoy Lucille. He became, more than ever, a highly respectable nonentity. Having, for many years, successfully prevented the town from guessing that he was a mere figurehead for the bank, he had little trouble in preventing it from saying too loudly that he was only not henpecked because he never raised his crest in matters concerning Lucille, except at her suggestion.

Lucille did not marry B. C. to salve her self-conceit only; not solely. She felt the undercurrent of comment that followed Welsh’s ugly attack in the Declarator. She feared that people would say if they said anything: “David Dean is not that kind of man” and “Lucille Hardcome probably thought nothing of the sort, but she is that kind of woman.” Marrying B. C. Burton was her way of showing Riverbank she had never cared for David Dean. It also gave her a secure position of prominence in Riverbank. Her house was now a home, and we think very highly of homes in Riverbank. None the less Lucille still burned with resentment against David Dean. The mere sight of him was an accusation; seeing him afflicted her pride.

The dominie went about his duties as usual Then or later we saw no change in David Dean, although we must have known how Lucille was using every effort to turn the trustees and the church against him. He must have had, too, a sense of undeserved but ineradicable defilement, the result of P. K. Welsh’s virulence. You know how such things cling to even the most innocent. If nothing more is said than “It is too bad it happened,” it has its faintly damning effect on us. We won for David at last, but Lucille’s fight to drive him away had its effect. At home David hesitated over every penny spent, cut his expenses to the lowest possible, in an effort to pay Lucille as much as he might when the note came due. He had no hope of paying it in full.

Pay it, however, he did. One afternoon Rose Hinch came into his study and closed the door.

“David,” she said, “you surely know that I know you owe Lucille something – some money?”

“I suppose you do, Rose,” he said sadly. “Everyone knows!”

“‘Thusia told me long ago,” she said. “I asked her about it again to-day. I would rather you owed it to me, David.”

She had the money with her, and she held it toward him questioningly. He took it. That was all; there was no question of a note or of repayment; no spoken thanks. He was not surprised that Rose had saved so much out of her earnings, neither did he hesitate to take the money from her, for he knew she offered it in all the kindness of her heart. He hoped, too, that by scrimping, as he had been, he could repay her in time.

‘Thusia was neither better nor worse in health than she had been. Bright and cheerful, she had learned the great secret of patience.

“If I must go,” David told her when there was no doubt that Lucille had set her heart on driving him from Riverbank, “I will go, of course; but until I know I am not wanted I will do my work as usual,” and ‘Thusia was with him in that.

In the long battle, never above the surface, that Lucille carried on, David never openly fought her. He fought by being David Dean, and by doing, day by day, as he had done for years. He visited his sick, preached his sermons, busied himself as always. The weapons Lucille used were those a woman powerful in a congregation has always at hand if she chooses to try to oust her pastor, and in addition she used her husband.

Here and there she dropped hints that David was not as satisfactory as formerly. His sermons were lacking in something. Was it culture or sincerity! she asked – and she questioned the advisability of long tenure of a pulpit. By hint and question she tried to arouse dissatisfaction. It was the custom for ministers to exchange pulpits; she was loud in praise of whatever minister occupied David’s pulpit for a day.

Slowly she built up the dissatisfaction, until she felt it could be crystallized into a concrete opposition. She was a year or more doing this. With all the wile of a political boss she spread the seed of discontent, trusting it would fall on fertile soil. There were plenty of toadying women who gave her lip agreement when she uttered her disparagements, and at length she felt she could strike openly. She used B. C. for the purpose.

B. C. did not relish the job. Like most of us he admired David, and had high esteem for him, but Lucille’s husband would have been the last man to oppose Lucille. It really seemed an easy task. Lucille was an undisputed ruler in the church; the trustees were nonentities; the older members – those who had loved the young David in his first years in Riverbank – were dead or senile. B. C. spoke of the finances when he broached the matter of getting rid of David, and he had lists and tables to show that the income of the church had been stagnant. He suggested that a younger man, someone livelier, was needed – a money-raiser.

The trustees listened in silence. For some minutes after B. C. had spoken no one answered. Then one man – the last man B. C. would have feared – suggested mildly that Riverbank itself had not grown. He ventured to say that Riverbank, to his notion, had fewer people than five years before, and all the churches were having trouble in keeping their incomes up to their expenses. He said he rather liked David Dean; anyway he didn’t think a change need be made right away. They might, he thought, ask some of the church members and get their opinions. He said he did not believe they could get a man equal to David for the same money.

B. C. was taken aback. If he had spoken at once he might have held his control of the board, but he stopped to think of Lucille and what she would wish him to say, and the daring trustee spoke again.

“Seems to me,” he said, “the trouble is not with the dominie. Seems to me we trustees ought to try to get more money from some of the members who can afford to give more.”

He had not aimed at B. C. and Lucille, but B. C. colored. One shame that lurked in his heart was that Lucille had never kept her promise to give more to the church, and that he did not dare ask her to give more now.

“I can assure you,” he said, “I do not feel like giving more – if you mean me – while Dean remains.”

“Oh! I didn’t mean anyone in particular,” the trustee said. “I wasn’t thinking of you, B. C.” The fact remained imbedded in the brains of the trustees that Lucille and B. C. would give no more unless David was sent away. This leaked, as such things will, and those of us who loved David were properly incensed. Some of us were tired enough of Lucille’s high-handed rulership and we said openly what we thought of her carrying it to the point of making herself dictator of the pulpit, to dismiss and call at her will. There was a vast amount of whisper and low-toned wordiness, subsurface complaint and counter-complaint. There was no open flare-up such as had marked the earlier dissensions in the church, but Lucille and her closest friends could not but feel the resentment and her growing unpopularity. A winter rain brought her a fortunate cold, and she turned the Sunday school singing over to one of the younger women. She never took it up again. The same excuse served to allow her to drop out of the management of the church music. Her cold, actually or from policy, hung on for the greater part of that winter, preventing her from attending church. With the next election of trustees B. C. refused reëlection, pleading an increase of work at the bank, and when next Lucille went to church she sat under the Episcopalian minister. Several of her friends followed her; few as they were, their going made a sad hole in the church income and, with the closing of the mills and Riverbank seemingly about to sink into a sort of deserted village condition, there followed years in which the trustees were hard put to it to keep things going. Before the inevitable reduction in David’s salary came, he was able to pay Rose Hinch, and that, in the later years, was one of the things he was thankful for.

XXVI. “OUR DAVID”

I GET back to Riverbank but seldom. I have just returned from one of my infrequent visits there, the first in many years. First I had my business to attend to; later, at the office of the lawyer and on the street, I met many of those I had known when I lived in Riverbank. The faces of most puzzled me, being not quite remembered. My memory had to struggle to recognize them, as if it saw the faces through a ground glass on which it had to breathe before they became clear. Many seemed glad to see me again and that was a great pleasure to me. It was almost like a game of “hidden faces” but with faces of living men and women to be guessed. This all happened in the first hour or so after I had finished my business, and rapidly, and then I turned from one of these resurrected faces to find a young girl standing waiting to speak to me.

“You don’t remember me,” she said with a smile, because she saw my puzzled face. “I was a baby when you went away. Dora Graham. You wouldn’t remember me. Mack Graham is my father. I dared to speak to you because father has spoken of you so often – of you and Mr. Dean.”

“Oh, I do remember Mack!” I exclaimed. “I must see him if I can before I go.”

“Please,” she said. “It would mean so much to him.”

She was not too well-dressed. She reminded me of Alice Dean in the days when Lanny was courting her, making the bravest show she could with her cheap, neat hat and neat, inexpensive garments. I guessed that Mack Graham was not one of the town’s new rich men.

“I’ll see him if I have to stay over a day,” I told her. “And our dominie, Dominie Dean, you can tell me how to get to his house!”

“I’m just from there,” she said. “Are you going to see him? He will be so pleased; he spoke about you. You know he is very poor? It’s pitiful; it makes my heart ache every time I go there.”

“But I thought – ” I said.

“About his being made pastor emeritus? Yes, they did that for him. Father made them do that, when they were going to drop him out of the church as they always used to drop the old men. Father fought for that. We were so proud of father, mother and I. He was like a rock, like a mountain of rock, about it. They were afraid of him. But the money was nothing, almost nothing.”

“How much?” I asked, but she did not know that. She only knew that it must be very little; the new dominie would not come for what had been paid David; there had not been much to spare for a discarded and worn-out old man.

I walked up the hill and over the hill and down the other side, to where the cheap little cottages stand in a row facing the deserted brickyard which will, some day, be town lots. I found David on the little porch, sitting in the sun, and he arose as I entered the gate, and stood waiting to grasp my hand, although he could not yet see me distinctly enough to recognize me; his eyes were failing, he told me.

He was very feeble, but as gently cheerful as ever, still striving to keep an even mind under all circumstances. Alice came out when she heard us talking; she looked older, in worry, than her father. It was evident they were very poor.

I went up to see ‘Thusia. I did not mind the narrow stairs nor the low-ceiled room in which I found her, for a home and happiness may be anywhere, but I felt a hot, personal shame that anything quite so mean should be the reward of our David.

It was harder to speak cheerfully with ‘Thusia than with David. I would not have known her, so little of her was there left, the blue veins standing out under the skin of her shrunken hands, and her face not at all that of the ‘Thusia I had known when I was a child. I talked of myself and of my family and of my little successes, and all the while I felt that she must see through me, and that she must know I was chattering to hide the pain I felt at seeing these dear friends so changed, and so deep in poverty. In this I was mistaken. Her only thought was gratitude that I had found time to come to them, and pleasure to know all was well with me.

“You’ll come when you come to Riverbank again,” she said when I had to leave her, “It has done me so much good to see you. Now go down and give David the rest of your visit.”

She raised her hand for me to take in farewell.

“God has been very good to us,” she said.

When I went down Alice had brought her sewing to the porch, and had carried out a chair for me – such a shabby chair – and Rose Hinch was there. She hurriedly hid a paper parcel behind her skirt when she arose to greet me, but it toppled over and a raw potato rolled out. I pretended to be unaware of it. I knew then that our David still had one friend, and guessed who reminded the older church members that David and ‘Thusia might some days go hungry, unless they received such alms as were given to the very poor.

I sat for an hour, talking with David and Rose and Alice, and for an hour tried to forget that this poverty was David’s reward for a life spent in serving God and his people, and then Rose and I left, and I walked over the hill with her. We talked of David, and when I told her I was going to see Mack Graham she said she would go with me.

The small real estate office, on a second floor, was not as shabby as I had expected, nor was Mack Graham as shabby.

“Big family, that’s all the matter with me,” he told me cheerfully. “I want you to come up to dinner if you can and meet my brood. So you’ve been up to see our David! How is he to-day!”

“Mack,” I said, “can’t something be done! Can’t someone here start something! I know how a place gets in a rut – how we forget the things we have with us day by day. If you could go away, as I went, and come back to see our David as he is now, poor, discarded, neglected – ”

“Rose, what do you mean, neglecting our David!” Mack asked, almost gayly.

Rose smiled sadly.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Mack said, reaching for an envelope on his desk. “Our church is changed. Most of the old people are gone now. I felt the way you did about it – it was a pity our David wasn’t a horse instead of a man; then we could have shot him when we had worn him out and were through with him. Folks forget things, don’t they! Well – ”

He drew a letter from the envelope and passed it to me.

When I had read the letter I was not quite as ashamed of my kind as I had been a moment before. The letter did not promise much. It seemed there was not a great deal of money available and the calls were many, but, after all, there was a Fund and it could spare something for David, as much, perhaps, as a child could earn picking berries in a season each year. But it would mean all the difference between penury and dread of the poorhouse on the one hand and safety on the other to David. I thought how glad David would be and how grateful. I handed the letter to Rose Hinch.

She read it in silence and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes.

“I am so glad – for ‘Thusia,” she said. “She has worried so for fear David might have to go to the poorhouse – alone! She has been afraid to die; David would have been so lonely in the poor-house.”

“Well, it is great anyway!” said Mack more noisily than necessary. “So come up to the house to dinner. You, too, Rose. We’ll give our dominie the letter. We’ll have him come to dinner, too, and Alice, and we’ll celebrate – ”

Rose smiled, as she used to smile in the days when I first knew her.