“Everybody wrong so far. What! a romance without any orange blossoms! Ho, ho! My money on the lad with the butterfly tie and the certified checks in his trouserings.
“Take ’em as they parted at the gate? All right. ‘You never loved me,’ says Redruth, wildly, ‘or you wouldn’t speak to a man who can buy you the ice-cream.’ ‘I hate him,’ says she. ‘I loathe his side-bar buggy; I despise the elegant cream bonbons he sends me in gilt boxes covered with real lace; I feel that I could stab him to the heart when he presents me with a solid medallion locket with turquoises and pearls running in a vine around the border. Away with him! ’Tis only you I love.’ ‘Back to the cosey corner!’ says Redruth. ‘Was I bound and lettered in East Aurora? Get platonic, if you please. No jackpots for mine. Go and hate your friend some more. For me the Nickerson girl on Avenue B, and gum, and a trolley ride.’
“Around that night comes John W. Croesus. ‘What! tears?’ says he, arranging his pearl pin. ‘You have driven my lover away,’ says little Alice, sobbing: ‘I hate the sight of you.’ ‘Marry me, then,’ says John W., lighting a Henry Clay. ‘What!’ she cries indignantly, ‘marry you! Never,’ she says, ‘until this blows over, and I can do some shopping, and you see about the licence. There’s a telephone next door if you want to call up the county clerk.’”
The narrator paused to give vent to his cynical chuckle.
“Did they marry?” he continued. “Did the duck swallow the June-bug? And then I take up the case of Old Boy Redruth. There’s where you are all wrong again, according to my theory. What turned him into a hermit? One says laziness; one says remorse; one says booze. I say women did it. How old is the old man now?” asked the speaker, turning to Bildad Rose.
“I should say about sixty-five.”
“All right. He conducted his hermit shop here for twenty years. Say he was twenty-five when he took off his hat at the gate. That leaves twenty years for him to account for, or else be docked. Where did he spend that ten and two fives? I’ll give you my idea. Up for bigamy. Say there was the fat blonde in Saint Jo, and the panatela brunette at Skillet Ridge, and the gold tooth down in the Kaw valley. Redruth gets his cases mixed, and they send him up the road. He gets out after they are through with him, and says: ‘Any line for me except the crinoline. The hermit trade is not overdone, and the stenographers never apply to ’em for work. The jolly hermit’s life for me. No more long hairs in the comb or dill pickles lying around in the cigar tray.’ You tell me they pinched old Redruth for the noodle villa just because he said he was King Solomon? Figs! He was Solomon. That’s all of mine. I guess it don’t call for any apples. Enclosed find stamps. It don’t sound much like a prize winner.”
Respecting the stricture laid by Judge Menefee against comments upon the stories, all were silent when the passenger who was nobody in particular had concluded. And then the ingenious originator of the contest cleared his throat to begin the ultimate entry for the prize. Though seated with small comfort upon the floor, you might search in vain for any abatement of dignity in Judge Menefee. The now diminishing firelight played softly upon his face, as clearly chiselled as a Roman emperor’s on some old coin, and upon the thick waves of his honourable grey hair.
“A woman’s heart!” he began, in even but thrilling tones— “who can hope to fathom it? The ways and desires of men are various. I think that the hearts of all women beat with the same rhythm, and to the same old tune of love. Love, to a woman, means sacrifice. If she be worthy of the name, no gold or rank will outweigh with her a genuine devotion.
“Gentlemen of the — er — I should say, my friends, the case of Redruth versus love and affection has been called. Yet, who is on trial? Not Redruth, for he has been punished. Not those immortal passions that clothe our lives with the joy of the angels. Then who? Each man of us here tonight stands at the bar to answer if chivalry or darkness inhabits his bosom. To judge us sits womankind in the form of one of its fairest flowers. In her hand she holds the prize, intrinsically insignificant, but worthy of our noblest efforts to win as a guerdon of approval from so worthy a representative of feminine judgment and taste.
“In taking up the imaginary history of Redruth and the fair being to whom he gave his heart, I must, in the beginning, raise my voice against the unworthy insinuation that the selfishness or perfidy or love of luxury of any woman drove him to renounce the world. I have not found woman to be so unspiritual or venal. We must seek elsewhere, among man’s baser nature and lower motives for the cause.
“There was, in all probability, a lover’s quarrel as they stood at the gate on that memorable day. Tormented by jealousy, young Redruth vanished from his native haunts. But had he just cause to do so? There is no evidence for or against. But there is something higher than evidence; there is the grand, eternal belief in woman’s goodness, in her steadfastness against temptation, in her loyalty even in the face of proffered riches.
“I picture to myself the rash lover, wandering, self-tortured, about the world. I picture his gradual descent, and, finally, his complete despair when he realises that he has lost the most precious gift life had to offer him. Then his withdrawal from the world of sorrow and the subsequent derangement of his faculties becomes intelligible.
“But what do I see on the other hand? A lonely woman fading away as the years roll by; still faithful, still waiting, still watching for a form and listening for a step that will come no more. She is old now. Her hair is white and smoothly banded. Each day she sits at the door and gazes longingly down the dusty road. In spirit she is waiting there at the gate, just as he left her — his forever, but not here below. Yes; my belief in woman paints that picture in my mind. Parted forever on earth, but waiting! She in anticipation of a meeting in Elysium; he in the Slough of Despond.”
“I thought he was in the bughouse,” said the passenger who was nobody in particular.
Judge Menefee stirred, a little impatiently. The men sat, drooping, in grotesque attitudes. The wind had abated its violence; coming now in fitful, virulent puffs. The fire had burned to a mass of red coals which shed but a dim light within the room. The lady passenger in her cosey nook looked to be but a formless dark bulk, crowned by a mass of coiled, sleek hair and showing but a small space of snowy forehead above her clinging boa.
Judge Menefee got stiffly to his feet.
“And now, Miss Garland,” he announced, “we have concluded. It is for you to award the prize to the one of us whose argument — especially, I may say, in regard to his estimate of true womanhood — approaches nearest to your own conception.”
No answer came from the lady passenger. Judge Menefee bent over solicitously. The passenger who was nobody in particular laughed low and harshly. The lady was sleeping sweetly. The Judge essayed to take her hand to awaken her. In doing so he touched a small, cold, round, irregular something in her lap.
“She has eaten the apple,” announced Judge Menefee, in awed tones, as he held up the core for them to see.
The Missing Chord
I stopped overnight at the sheep-ranch of Rush Kinney, on the Sandy Fork of the Nueces. Mr. Kinney and I had been strangers up to the time when I called “Hallo!” at his hitching-rack; but from that moment until my departure on the next morning we were, according to the Texas code, undeniable friends.
After supper the ranchman and I lugged our chairs outside the two-room house, to its floorless gallery roofed with chaparral and sacuista grass. With the rear legs of our chairs sinking deep into the hardpacked loam, each of us reposed against an elm pillar of the structure and smoked El Toro tobacco, while we wrangled amicably concerning the affairs of the rest of the world.
As for conveying adequate conception of the engaging charm of that