Chapter 9. "Outer Darkness"

________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER IX. "OUTER DARKNESS"

If any echo of doubt concerning his undesirable conspicuousness sounded faintly in Joe's mind, it was silenced eftsoons. Canaan had not forgotten him--far from it!--so far that it began pointing him out to strangers on the street the very day of his return. His course of action, likewise that of his friends, permitted him little obscurity, and when the rumors of his finally obtaining lodging at Beaver Beach, and of the celebration of his installation there, were presently confirmed, he stood in the lime-light indeed, as a Mephistopheles upsprung through the trap-door.

The welcoming festivities had not been so discreetly conducted as to accord with the general policy of Beaver Beach. An unfortunate incident caused the arrest of one of the celebrators and the ambulancing to the hospital of another on the homeward way, the ensuing proceedings in court bringing to the whole affair a publicity devoutly unsought for. Mr. Happy Fear (such was the habitual name of the imprisoned gentleman) had to bear a great amount of harsh criticism for injuring a companion within the city limits after daylight, and for failing to observe that three policemen were not too distant from the scene of operations to engage therein.

"Happy, if ye had it in mind to harm him," said the red-bearded man to Mr. Fear, upon the latter's return to society, "why didn't ye do it out here at the Beach?"

"Because," returned the indiscreet, "he didn't say what he was goin' to say till we got in town."

Extraordinary probing on the part of the prosecutor had developed at the trial that the obnoxious speech had referred to the guest of the evening. The assaulted party, one "Nashville" Cory, was not of Canaan, but a bit of drift-wood haply touching shore for the moment at Beaver Beach; and--strange is this world--he had been introduced to the coterie of Mike's Place by Happy Fear himself, who had enjoyed a brief acquaintance with him on a day when both had chanced to travel incognito by the same freight. Naturally, Happy had felt responsible for the proper behavior of his protege--was, in fact, bound to enforce it; additionally, Happy had once been saved from a term of imprisonment (at a time when it would have been more than ordinarily inconvenient) by help and advice from Joe, and he was not one to forget. Therefore he was grieved to observe that his own guest seemed to be somewhat jealous of the hero of the occasion and disposed to look coldly upon him. The stranger, however, contented himself with innuendo (mere expressions of the face and other manner of things for which one could not squarely lay hands upon him) until such time as he and his sponsor had come to Main Street in the clear dawn on their way to Happy's apartment--a variable abode. It may be that the stranger perceived what Happy did not; the three bluecoats in the perspective; at all events, he now put into words of simple strength the unfavorable conception he had formed of Joe. The result was mediaevally immediate, and the period of Mr. Cory's convalescence in the hospital was almost half that of his sponsor's detention in the county jail.

It needed nothing to finish Joe with the good people of Canaan; had it needed anything, the trial of Happy Fear would have overspilled the necessity. An item of the testimony was that Joseph Louden had helped to carry one of the ladies present--a Miss Le Roy, who had fainted--to the open air, and had jostled the stranger in passing. After this, the oldest woman in Canaan would not have dared to speak to Joe on the street (even if she wanted to), unless she happened to be very poor or very wicked. The Tocsin printed an adequate account (for there was "a large public interest"), recording in conclusion that Mr. Louden paid the culprit's fine which was the largest in the power of the presiding judge in his mercy to bestow. Editorially, the Tocsin leaned to the facetious: "Mr. Louden has but recently 'returned to our midst.' We fervently hope that the distinguished Happy Fear will appreciate his patron's superb generosity. We say 'his patron,' but perhaps we err in this. Were it not better to figure Mr. Louden as the lady in distress, Mr. Fear as the champion in the lists? In the present case, however, contrary to the rules of romance, the champion falls in duress and passes to the dungeon. We merely suggest, en passant, that some of our best citizens might deem it a wonderful and beauteous thing if, in addition to paying the fine, Mr. Louden could serve for the loyal Happy his six months in the Bastile!"

"En passant," if nothing else, would have revealed to Joe, in this imitation of a better trick, the hand of Eugene. And, little doubt, he would have agreed with Squire Buckalew in the Squire's answer to the easily expected comment of Mr. Arp.

"Sometimes," said Eskew, "I think that 'Gene Bantry is jest a leetle bit spiderier than he is lazy. That's the first thing he's written in the Tocsin this month--one of the boys over there told me. He wrote it out of spite against Joe; but he'd ought to of done better. If his spite hadn't run away with what mind he's got, he'd of said that both Joe Louden and that tramp Fear ought to of had ten years!"

"'Gene Bantry didn't write that out of spite," answered Buckalew. "He only thought he saw a chance to be kind of funny and please Judge Pike. The Judge has always thought Joe was a no-account--"

"Ain't he right?" cried Mr. Arp.

"_I_ don't say he ain't." Squire Buckalew cast a glance at Mr. Brown, the clerk, and, perceiving that he was listening, added, "The Judge always IS right!"

"Yes, sir!" said Colonel Flitcroft.

"I can't stand up for Joe Louden to any extent, but I don't think he done wrong," Buckalew went on, recovering, "when he paid this man Fear's fine."

"You don't!" exclaimed Mr. Arp. "Why, haven't you got gumption enough to see--"

"Look here, Eskew," interposed his antagonist. "How many friends have you got that hate to hear folks talk bad about you?"

"Not a one!" For once Eskew's guard was down, and his consistency led him to destruction. "Not a one! It ain't in human nature. They're bound to enjoy it!"

"Got any friends that would FIGHT for you?"

Eskew walked straight into this hideous trap. "No! There ain't a dozen men ever LIVED that had! Caesar was a popular man, but he didn't have a soul to help him when the crowd lit on him, and I'll bet old Mark Antony was mighty glad they got him out in the yard before it happened,--HE wouldn't have lifted a finger without a gang behind him! Why, all Peter himself could do was to cut off an ear that wasn't no use to anybody. What are you tryin' to get AT?"

The Squire had him; and paused, and stroked his chin, to make the ruin complete. "Then I reckon you'll have to admit," he murmured, "that, while I ain't defendin' Joe Louden's character, it was kind of proper for him to stand by a feller that wouldn't hear nothin' against him, and fought for him as soon as he DID hear it!"

Eskew Arp rose from his chair and left the hotel. It was the only morning in all the days of the conclave when he was the first to leave.

Squire Buckalew looked after the retreating figure, total triumph shining brazenly from his spectacles. "I expect," he explained, modestly, to the others,--"I expect I don't think any more of Joe Louden than he does, and I'll be glad when Canaan sees the last of him for good; but sometimes the temptation to argue with Eskew does lead me on to kind of git the better of him."

When Happy Fear had suffered--with a give-and-take simplicity of patience--his allotment of months in durance, and was released and sent into the streets and sunshine once more, he knew that his first duty lay in the direction of a general apology to Joe. But the young man was no longer at Beaver Beach; the red-bearded proprietor dwelt alone there, and, receiving Happy with scorn and pity, directed him to retrace his footsteps to the town.

"Ye must have been in the black hole of incarceration indeed, if ye haven't heard that Mr. Louden has his law-office on the Square, and his livin'-room behind the office. It's in that little brick buildin' straight acrost from the sheriff's door o' the jail--ye've been neighbors this long time! A hard time the boy had, persuadin' any one to rent to him, but by payin' double the price he got a place at last. He's a practisin' lawyer now, praise the Lord! And all the boys and girls of our acquaintance go to him with their troubles. Ye'll see him with a murder case to try before long, as sure as ye're not worth yer salt! But I expect ye can still call him by his name of Joe, all the same!"

It was a bleak and meagre little office into which Mr. Fear ushered himself to offer his amends. The cracked plaster of the walls was bare (save for dust); there were no shelves; the fat brown volumes, most of them fairly new, were piled in regular columns upon a cheap pine table; there was but one window, small-paned and shadeless; an inner door of this sad chamber stood half ajar, permitting the visitor unreserved acquaintance with the domestic economy of the tenant; for it disclosed a second room, smaller than the office, and dependent upon the window of the latter for air and light. Behind a canvas camp-cot, dimly visible in the obscurity of the inner apartment, stood a small gas-stove, surmounted by a stew-pan, from which projected the handle of a big tin spoon, so that it needed no ghost from the dead to whisper that Joseph Louden, attorney-at-law, did his own cooking. Indeed, he looked it!

Upon the threshold of the second room reposed a small, worn, light-brown scrub-brush of a dog, so cosmopolitan in ancestry that his species was almost as undeterminable as the cast-iron dogs of the Pike Mansion. He greeted Mr. Fear hospitably, having been so lately an offcast of the streets himself that his adoption had taught him to lose only his old tremors, not his hopefulness. At the same time Joe rose quickly from the deal table, where he had been working with one hand in his hair, the other splattering ink from a bad pen.

"Good for you, Happy!" he cried, cheerfully. "I hoped you'd come to see me to-day. I've been thinking about a job for you."

"What kind of a job?" asked the visitor, as they shook hands. "I need one bad enough, but you know there ain't nobody in Canaan would gimme one, Joe."

Joe pushed him into one of the two chairs which completed the furniture of his office. "Yes, there is. I've got an idea--"

"First," broke in Mr. Fear, fingering his shapeless hat and fixing his eyes upon it with embarrassment,--"first lemme say what I come here to say. I--well--" His embarrassment increased and he paused, rubbing the hat between his hands.

"About this job," Joe began. "We can fix it so--"

"No," said Happy. "You lemme go on. I didn't mean fer to cause you no trouble when I lit on that loud-mouth, 'Nashville'; I never thought they'd git me, or you'd be dragged in. But I jest couldn't stand him no longer. He had me all wore out--all evening long a-hintin' and sniffin' and wearin' that kind of a high-smile 'cause they made so much fuss over you. And then when we got clear in town he come out with it! Said you was too quiet to suit HIM--said he couldn't see nothin' TO you! 'Well,' I says to myself, 'jest let him go on, jest one more,' I says, 'then he gits it.' And he did. Said you tromped on his foot on purpose, said he knowed it,--when the Lord-a'mightiest fool on earth knows you never tromped on no one! Said you was one of the po'rest young sports he ever see around a place like the Beach. You see, he thought you was jest one of them fool 'Bloods' that come around raisin' a rumpus, and didn't know you was our friend and belonged out there, the same as me or Mike hisself. 'Go on,' I says to myself, 'jest one more!' 'HE better go home to his mamma,' he says; 'he'll git in trouble if he don't. Somebody 'll soak him if he hangs around in MY company. _I_ don't like his WAYS.' Then I HAD to do it. There jest wasn't nothin' LEFT--but I wouldn't of done you no harm by it--"

"You didn't do me any harm, Happy."

"I mean your repitation."

"I didn't have one--so nothing in the world could harm it. About your getting some work, now--"

"I'll listen," said Happy, rather suspiciously.

"You see," Joe went on, growing red, "I need a sort of janitor here--"

"What fer?" Mr. Fear interrupted, with some shortness.

"To look after the place."

"You mean these two rooms?"

"There's a stairway, too," Joe put forth, quickly. "It wouldn't be any sinecure, Happy. You'd earn your money; don't be afraid of that!"

Mr. Fear straightened up, his burden of embarrassment gone from him, transferred to the other's shoulders.

"There always was a yellow streak in you, Joe," he said, firmly. "You're no good as a liar except when you're jokin'. A lot you need a janitor! You had no business to pay my fine; you'd ort of let me worked it out. Do you think my eyes ain't good enough to see how much you needed the money, most of all right now when you're tryin' to git started? If I ever take a cent from you, I hope the hand I hold out fer it 'll rot off."

"Now don't say that, Happy."

"I don't want a job, nohow!" said Mr. Fear, going to the door; "I don't want to work. There's plenty ways fer me to git along without that. But I've said what I come here to say, and I'll say one thing more. Don't you worry about gittin' law practice. Mike says you're goin' to git all you want--and if there ain't no other way, why, a few of us 'll go out and MAKE some fer ye!"

These prophecies and promises, over which Joe chuckled at first, with his head cocked to one side, grew very soon, to his amazement, to wear a supernatural similarity to actual fulfilment. His friends brought him their own friends, such as had sinned against the laws of Canaan, those under the ban of the sheriff, those who had struck in anger, those who had stolen at night, those who owed and could not pay, those who lived by the dice, and to his other titles to notoriety was added that of defender of the poor and wicked. He found his hands full, especially after winning his first important case--on which occasion Canaan thought the jury mad, and was indignant with the puzzled Judge, who could not see just how it had happened.

Joe did not stop at that. He kept on winning cases, clearing the innocent and lightening the burdens of the guilty; he became the most dangerous attorney for the defence in Canaan; his honorable brethren, accepting the popular view of him, held him in personal contempt but feared him professionally; for he proved that he knew more law than they thought existed; nor could any trick him--failing which, many tempers were lost, but never Joe's. His practice was not all criminal, as shown by the peevish outburst of the eminent Buckalew (the Squire's nephew, esteemed the foremost lawyer in Canaan), "Before long, there won't be any use trying to foreclose a mortgage or collect a note--unless this shyster gets himself in jail!"

The wrath of Judge Martin Pike was august--there was a kind of sublimity in its immenseness--on a day when it befell that the shyster stood betwixt him and money.

That was a monstrous task--to stand between these two and separate them, to hold back the hand of Martin Pike from what it had reached out to grasp. It was in the matter of some tax-titles which the magnate had acquired, and, in court, Joe treated the case with such horrifying simplicity that it seemed almost credible that the great man had counted upon the ignorance and besottedness of Joe's client--a hard-drinking, disreputable old farmer--to get his land away from him without paying for it. Now, as every one knew such a thing to be ludicrously impossible, it was at once noised abroad in Canaan that Joe had helped to swindle Judge Pike out of a large sum of money--it was notorious that the shyster could bamboozle court and jury with his tricks; and it was felt that Joe Louden was getting into very deep waters indeed. THIS was serious: if the young man did not LOOK OUT, he might find himself in the penitentiary.

The Tocsin paragraphed him with a fine regularity after this, usually opening with a Walrus-and-the-Carpenter gravity: "The time has come when we must speak of a certain matter frankly," or, "At last the time has arrived when the demoralization of the bar caused by a certain criminal lawyer must be dealt with as it is and without gloves." Once when Joe had saved a half-witted negro from "the extreme penalty" for murder, the Tocsin had declared, with great originality: "This is just the kind of thing that causes mobs and justifies them. If we are to continue to permit the worst class of malefactors to escape the consequences of their crimes through the unwholesome dexterities and the shifty manipulations and technicalities of a certain criminal lawyer, the time will come when an outraged citizenry may take the enforcement of the law in its own hands. Let us call a spade a spade. If Canaan's streets ever echo with the tread of a mob, the fault lies upon the head of Joseph Louden, who has once more brought about a miscarriage of justice...."

Joe did not move into a larger office; he remained in the little room with its one window and its fine view of the jail; his clients were nearly all poor, and many of his fees quite literally nominal. Tatters and rags came up the narrow stairway to his door--tatters and rags and pitiful fineries: the bleared, the sodden, the flaunting and rouged, the furtive and wary, some in rags, some in tags, and some--the sorriest--in velvet gowns. With these, the distressed, the wrong-doers, the drunken, the dirty, and the very poor, his work lay and his days and nights were spent.

Ariel had told Roger Tabor that in time Joe might come to be what the town thought him, if it gave him no other chance. Only its dinginess and evil surrounded him; no respectable house was open to him; the barrooms--except that of the "National House"--welcomed him gratefully and admiringly. Once he went to church, on a pleasant morning when nice girls wear pretty spring dresses; it gave him a thrill of delight to see them, to be near clean, good people once more. Inadvertently, he took a seat by his step-mother, who rose with a slight rustle of silk and moved to another pew; and it happened, additionally, that this was the morning that the minister, fired by the Tocsin's warnings, had chosen to preach on the subject of Joe himself.

The outcast returned to his own kind. No lady spoke to him upon the street. Mamie Pike had passed him with averted eyes since her first meeting with him, but the shunning and snubbing of a young man by a pretty girl have never yet, if done in a certain way, prevented him from continuing to be in love with her. Mamie did it in the certain way. Joe did not wince, therefore it hurt all the more, for blows from which one cringes lose much of their force.

The town dog had been given a bad name, painted solid black from head to heel. He was a storm centre of scandal; the entrance to his dingy stairway was in square view of the "National House," and the result is imaginable. How many of Joe's clients, especially those sorriest of the velvet gowns, were conjectured to ascend his stairs for reasons more convivial than legal! Yes, he lived with his own kind, and, so far as the rest of Canaan was concerned, might as well have worn the scarlet letter on his breast or branded on his forehead.

When he went about the streets he was made to feel his condition by the elaborate avoidance, yet furtive attention, of every respectable person he met; and when he came home to his small rooms and shut the door behind him, he was as one who has been hissed and shamed in public and runs to bury his hot face in his pillow. He petted his mongrel extravagantly (well he might!), and would sit with him in his rooms at night, holding long converse with him, the two alone together. The dog was not his only confidant. There came to be another, a more and more frequent partner to their conversations, at last a familiar spirit. This third came from a brown jug which Joe kept on a shelf in his bedroom, a vessel too frequently replenished. When the day's work was done he shut himself up, drank alone and drank hard. Sometimes when the jug ran low and the night was late he would go out for a walk with his dog, and would awake in his room the next morning not remembering where he had gone or how he had come home. Once, after such a lapse of memory, he woke amazed to find himself at Beaver Beach, whither, he learned from the red-bearded man, Happy Fear had brought him, having found him wandering dazedly in a field near by. These lapses grew more frequent, until there occurred that which was one of the strange things of his life.

It was a June night, a little more than two years after his return to Canaan, and the Tocsin had that day announced the approaching marriage of Eugene Bantry and his employer's daughter. Joe ate nothing during the day, and went through his work clumsily, visiting the bedroom shelf at intervals. At ten in the evening he went out to have the jug refilled, but from the moment he left his door and the fresh air struck his face, he had no clear knowledge of what he did or of what went on about him until he woke in his bed the next morning.

And yet, whatever little part of the soul of him remained, that night, still undulled, not numbed, but alive, was in some strange manner lifted out of its pain towards a strange delight. His body was an automaton, his mind in bondage, yet there was a still, small consciousness in him which knew that in his wandering something incredible and unexpected was happening. What this was he did not know, could not see, though his eyes were open, could not have told himself any more than a baby could tell why it laughs, but it seemed something so beautiful and wonderful that the night became a night of perfume, its breezes bearing the music of harps and violins, while nightingales sang from the maples that bordered the streets of Canaan. _

Read next: Chapter 10. The Tryst

Read previous: Chapter 8. A Bad Penny Turns Up

Table of content of Conquest of Canaan


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book