Dominie Dean: A Novel

“Yes, I’ll admit that,” said David. “Is that why we made the fight to close the saloons! So they could buy their own shoes! There are not so many poor in this town, Hardcome. You don’t see many suffering for shoes. I thought our campaign had something to do with saving a few souls – a few bodies that were going down into the gutter.”

“So it did!” said Hardcome promptly. “I didn’t start saying how many shoes the campaign money would buy, did I! I seem to remember you said it first.”

He smiled again, the pleased smile of a man who has got a dominie in a corner in argument. David smiled too.

“I believe I did first mention the campaign in terms of shoes,” he admitted. “I stand corrected. It should be mentioned in terms of souls – human souls, not shoe soles. And, looking at it that way, was it worth the price! Was it worth four thousand dollars!”

“My stars!” exclaimed Hardcome, and stared at David in genuine surprise.

“I mean just that,” insisted David; “was it worth four thousand dollars! How many souls will the campaign actually save! One! Ten! A thousand! Not a thousand. We can’t say, offhand, that every man who stepped into a saloon lost his soul, can we! He might be saved later, and in some other way, at less cost. How many in Riverbank have died in the gutter in the last year? How many have killed themselves because of drink?”

“But – ” Hardcome began. David raised his hand.

“Because,” he said, “next year we may have this all to do over again. Next year we may need another four thousand dollars, and the next year, and the next year. How many men in Riverbank actually die in the gutter each year!”

Now, there are not many. Riverbank men do not often die in the gutter, and but few of them kill themselves on account of drink. They live on for years, a handful of sodden, stupid, blear-eyed creatures.

“One!” asked David. “Is the average one a year? I don’t believe it, but let us say it is one. Is it worth four thousand dollars to save one drunkard from death! To save one drunkard’s soul! There is a plain business proposition: Is it worth that much cash! That’s what I’m getting at.”

“To save a man!” exclaimed Hardcome, his hard face as near showing horror as it had for many long years. “To save a man and his eternal soul! What do you mean! We don’t set prices on souls, that way, do we! My stars! I never heard of such a thing! And from a dominie! You can’t count a soul in cash dollars. What if it is but one soul we drag back from hell-fire! What’s four thousand, or five thousand, or ten thousand dollars when it comes to a soul!”

“I don’t mean your soul, or mine,” said David. “I mean a drunkard’s soul, or some soul like that. Is it worth while to spend four thousand dollars to save one soul!”

“Of course it is!” snapped Hardcome. “Couldn’t we,” urged David, “save more souls, at a lower cost per soul, if we sent the money to foreign missions!”

“I don’t know whether we could or we couldn’t,” cried Hardcome. “That’s got nothing to do with it. We got to take care of the souls right at home first. I don’t care if it costs ten thousand dollars a soul, it’s our duty to do it!” David arose and turned and faced the shoe merchant. His face was white. His eyes were like gray steel. He had no smile now.

“Then, if you think souls are worth so much,” he asked tensely, “why are you sending Marty Ware to eternal death for a miserable two thousand dollars! Two thousand! For a miserable fifteen hundred, for here are five hundred a benighted gambler dug up to save the boy!” Hardcome was on his feet too. He had turned as white as David, or whiter.

“Are drunkards’ souls the only souls you prize, Seth Hardcome!” asked David. “Don’t you know that boy will kill himself if he is exposed and ruined! A fool! Of course he is a fool! You knew he was a gambler – you must have known it – and you let him run his course when you might have brought him up short, threatening to get off his bond. You talk about ten-thousanddollar souls, and you will not turn over your hand to save Marty Ware’s soul when it will not cost you a cent!”

“It’ll cost me two thousand dollars,” said Hardcome. “That’s what it’ll cost me!”

“And you call yourself a business man!” laughed David. “A business man! Look!”

He picked up the roll of bank notes he had thrown on the shoe merchant’s desk.

“This is what a gambler gave to save Marty,” he exclaimed. “Five hundred dollars! And you talk about it costing you two thousand to save Marty from suicide! Why, man, your two thousand is gone! You are his bondsman, the only responsible one, and you’ll have to pay whether he is dead and in eternal fire, or alive and to be saved! Your two thousand is gone, spent, vanished already and it will not cost you a cent more to save Marty Ware’s soul. Here, take this five hundred dollars; you can save five hundred dollars by saving Marty Ware’s eternal soul!”

Hardcome was dazed. He put out his hand and took the money and looked at it unseeingly, turning it over and over in his fingers. Then he looked up at David, and in David’s eyes was a twinkle. The dominie put his hand on the shoe man’s arm, and laughed.

“Did I do that well?” he asked.

Hardcome did not smile. He turned his head and peered through the glass of the door into the store room, doubtless to see where his clerk was and whether he had heard, and then he looked back at David.

“Sit down,” he said, still unsmilingly.

David seated himself. Hardcome stood, half leaning against the desk, turning the roll of bills in his hand.

“You don’t know why I went on that boy’s bond,” he said. “His mother slammed a door in my wife’s face, or what amounted to that, or worse. His mother was queen of Riverbank when you came, and for a long while after, so I needn’t tell you how high and mighty she was before Ware died. You know, I guess. They came here in ‘Fifty-three, and my wife and I came in ‘Fifty-one, and I started this shoe business that year. That was on Water Street, in a frame shack where the Riverbank Hotel stands now. I didn’t move the store up here until ‘Fifty-nine. My wife and I lived at the old Morton House until the bugs drove us out – bugs and roaches, and we couldn’t stand them – and there were no houses to be had, so for a while we lived back of the store in the shack, getting along the best we could, waiting for houses to be built.

“The Wares had some money when they came, and Tarvole, who was building the house we hoped to rent, sold it to Ware and they moved in. You know how things are in a new town. Anyway, my wife took her calling cards and called on Mrs. Ware. She didn’t find the lady at home, and that evening a boy brought my wife’s card back to her. He said Mrs. Ware told him to say she wasn’t at home, and wouldn’t be, to a cobbler.

“My wife laughed at it, but it made me mad enough. I said I would get even with the Wares, and I meant it. I kept it in mind for years, waiting a chance, but you don’t always have a chance. There are some men and women you can’t seem to hurt, and the Wares were two of them. He seemed to make plenty of money and keep out of things where I could have done him a bad turn. I got to be a director in the Riverbank National, but he never needed to borrow, so I couldn’t hurt him there. His wife was always at the top of things, too. I couldn’t hit her.

“Well, Ware died and everything went. The widow was as poor as a church mouse; I don’t know how she got along. She was so poor she couldn’t be hurt; she was like the dust you walk on – it’s dust, and that’s an end of it: it can’t be anything less. She shut herself up, and was nothing. My wife was dead, anyway, and I couldn’t hurt the widow by flaunting my wife and the position she had in the widow’s face.

“Then this boy grew up – this Marty. I got him the place in the bank.”

“You did!” David exclaimed.

“It was the only way I could hit at the widow,” said Hardcome. “I thought maybe it would annoy her, to know I was the one that was helping her boy. Maybe it did. I never knew. When the cashier said it wasn’t safe to keep him any longer I told Marty to tell his mother not to worry; that I would try to fix it so he could stay. I did manage to get them to keep him a few months longer; then they outvoted me.

“Then I got him the place in the freight office, but he couldn’t hold it. A couple of times, when he lost his jobs, I took him in the store here. I knew that would annoy the old dame, and I guess it did. Then some of the Democrats picked him up and ran him for this job he has now. It made me mad that I couldn’t say I had been back of that, but when it came to getting a couple of bondsmen I saw another chance to bother the old lady. I went on his bond.”

Hardcome unrolled the money in his hand and smoothed it out.

“You knew my wife, dominie;” he continued slowly. “Some people did not like her, but I did. I never had any complaint to make about her; she was a good wife. So it sort of seemed to me – when Turrill came to me and told me what Marty had done – and I remembered how that woman had slammed her door in my wife’s face, so to say – that this was my chance – my chance to get even once for all.”

He stopped, folded the bills, and slipped them into his pocket.

“You see,” he said, “you didn’t know the whole story. It would have been something of a windup to send the boy to the penitentiary. I guess that would have taken the old lady off her high horse. But I don’t know. I don’t want to kill the boy’s soul, or anybody’s soul. I guess I’ll make good what he is short, and take him into the store here again.”

David was ont of his chair and his hand clasped Hardcome’s hand. The old man laughed then, a little sheepishly.

“Sort of tickles me!” he said. “Wouldn’t the old dame be hopping mad if she knew the cobbler was going to save the Riverbank queen’s boy, and his life, and his soul, and the whole caboodle!”

“It would be coals of fire on her head,” smiled David.

“‘Twould so!” said Seth Hardcome; “and I reckon the hair is getting pretty thin on the top of her head now, too!”

Then he laughed. And David laughed.

He was still smiling when he stepped out into the street and was told by the first man he met that old Sam Wiggett had just dropped dead in his office.

XII. MONEY MATTERS

LOOKING back, in later years, the death of old Sam Wiggett seemed to David Dean to mark the close of one epoch and the beginning of another, and the day he heard of the engagement of his daughter Alice marked a third.

It was Monday and well past noon and the heat was intense. Although he was late for dinner – noon dinners being the rule in Riverbank – David paused now and then as he climbed the Third Street hill, resting a few moments in the shade and fanning himself with the palm-leaf fan he carried. Where the walk was not shaded by overarching maple trees the heat beat up from the plank sidewalks in appreciable gusts. All spring he had been feeling unaccountably weary, and these hot days seemed to take the sap out of him. He had had a hard morning.

His Sunday had held a disappointment. In one way or another Lucille Hardcome had induced John Gorst, whose fame as a pulpit orator was country-wide, to spend the day at Riverbank and preach morning and evening – in the morning at David’s church and in the evening at the union meeting in the court square – and David had looked forward to the day as one that would give him the uplift of communion with one of the great minds of his church. He had dined at Lucille’s with John Gorst and had had the afternoon with him, and it had been all a sad disappointment. Instead of finding Gorst a big mind he had found him somewhat shallow and theatrical. Instead of a day of intellectual growth David had suffered a day of shattered ideals. While he disliked to admit it he had to confess that the great John Gorst was tiresome.

He did admit, however, that the two sermons John Gorst preached were masterpieces of pulpit oratory. What he said was not so much, nor did he leave in David’s mind so much as a mustard seed of original thought, but the great preacher had held his congregations breathless. He had made them weep and gasp, and he had thrilled them. Hearing him David understood why John Gorst had leaped from a third-rate church in a country village to one of the best churches in a large town, and then to a famous and wealthy church in a metropolis.

David’s first duty this Monday morning had been to see John Gorst off on the morning train. Lucille Hardcome and four or five others had been at the station, and John Gorst had glowed under their words of adulation. Well-fed, well-groomed, he had nodded to them from the car window as the train pulled out, and David had turned away to tramp through the hot streets to the East End where, Rose Hinch had sent word, old Mrs. Grelling was close to death. John Gorst, in his parlor car, was on his way to complete his two months’ vacation at the camp of a millionaire parishioner in the Wisconsin woods.

Old Mrs. Grelling, senile and maundering, had been weeping weakly, oppressed by a hallucination that she had lost her grasp on Heaven. Her little room was insufferably hot and close, and Rose Hinch sat by the bed fanning the emaciated old woman, turning her pillow now and then, trying to make her comfortable. Her patient had no bodily pain; in an hour, or a day, or a week, she would fall asleep forever and without discomfort, but now she was in dire distress of mind. Grown childish she could not remember that she was at peace with God, and she mourned and would not let Rose Hinch comfort her.

In twelve words David brought peace to the old woman in the bed. It was not logic she wanted, nor oratory such as John Gorst could have given, but the few words of comfort from the man of God in whom she had faith. David knelt by the bed and prayed, and read “The Lord is My Shepherd,” and her doubts no longer troubled her. If David Dean, the dominie she had trusted these many years, assured her she was safe, she could put aside worry and die peacefully. David saw a Book of Psalms on her bedside table, less bulky than the large-typed Bible, and he put it in her hands.

“Hold fast to this,” he said, “it is the sign of your salvation. You will not be afraid again. I must go now, but I will come back again.”

He left her clasping the book in both her hands. She died before he saw her again, but Rose Hinch told him she held the book until she died, and that she had no return of the childish fear. She slept into eternity peacefully content.

From Mrs. Grelling’s bedside David walked to Herwig’s to give his daily order for groceries. The old grocer entered the small order and hesitated.

“Dominie – ” he said.

David knew what was coming, or imagined he did, and felt sick at heart.

“Yes?” he queried.

“I guess you know as well as I do how I hate to say anything about money,” said Herwig, “and you know I wouldn’t if I wasn’t so hard put to it I don’t know which way to turn. I don’t want you to worry about it. If it ain’t convenient just you forget I ever said anything. Fact is I’m so pressed for money I’m worried to death. The wholesalers I get my goods of – ”

“My bill is much larger than it should be,” said David. “I have let it run longer than I have any right to. Just at this moment – ”

“I wouldn’t even speak of it if I wasn’t so put to it to satisfy those I owe,” said Herwig apologetically. “I thought maybe you might be able to help me out somehow, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

He was evidently sincere.

“My wholesalers are threatening to close me out,” he said, “and I’ve just got to try every way I can to raise some cash. If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t dun a good customer, let alone you, Mr. Dean.”

“I know it, Brother Herwig,” David said. “You have been most lenient. I am ashamed. I will see what I can do.”

The old grocer followed him to the door, still protesting his regret, and David turned up the street to do the thing he disliked most of anything in the world – ask his trustees for a further advance on his salary.

Already he was overdrawn by several hundred dollars, and he was as deeply ashamed of this as he was of his debts to the merchants of Riverbank. It had always been his pride to be “even with the world”; he felt that no man had a right to live beyond his means – “spending to-morrow to pay for to-day,” he called it – and he had worried much over his accumulating debts. That very morning, before he had left his manse, he had made out a new schedule of his indebtedness, and had been shocked to see how it had grown since his trustees had made the last advance he had asked. With the advance the trustees had allowed him, the total was something over a thousand dollars. He still owed something on last winter’s coal; he owed a goodly drug bill; his grocery bill was unpaid since the first of the year; he owed the butcher; the milkman had a bill against him; there were a dozen small accounts for shoes, drygoods, one thing and another.

In Riverbank, at that time, business was nearly all credit business. Bills were rendered twice a year, or even once a year, and, when rendered, often remained unpaid for another six months or so. As accounts went David’s accounts were satisfactory to the merchants; he was counted a “good” customer. His indebtedness had grown slowly, beginning with his wife’s illness, and he had run in debt beyond his means almost without being aware of it. A semiyearly settling period had come around, and he had found himself without sufficient funds to pay in full, as he usually did. He paid what he could, and let the balance remain, hoping to pay in full at the next settling period. Instead of this he found himself still further behind, and each half year had increased his load of unpaid bills.

David worried. He questioned his right to think the church did not pay him enough, for he received as much as any other minister in Riverbank, and more than most, and his remuneration came promptly on the day it was due, and was never in arrears, as was the case with at least one other. As a matter of fact, his trustees had several times advanced him money, and had advanced him three hundred dollars on the current quarter year.

The dominie felt no resentment against the church or the trustees. More remunerative pulpits had been offered him, and he had refused them because he believed his work lay in Riverbank. Despite all this he could not accuse himself of extravagance. He had raised two children, and they were an expense, but he did not for a moment question his right to have children. He would have liked a half dozen; certainly two – in a town where larger families were the rule – could not be called extravagant. Neither were they extravagant children. Roger had been given as much college training as he seemed able to bear, and had been economical enough; Alice had wished for college but had been compelled to be satisfied with graduation from the Riverbank High School, and was at home taking the place of the maid David felt he could no longer afford.

In the final analysis, David’s inability to make his salary meet his needs resolved itself into a matter of his wife’s illness. ‘Thusia, once the liveliest of girls, was now practically bedridden, although she could be brought downstairs now and then to rest on a divan in the sitting room. She was a permanent invalid now, but a cheerful one. In many ways she was more helpful to David than in their earlier married years; her advice was good, and, with Rose Hinch and Mary Derling, she made the council of three that upheld David’s hands in his works of charity and helpfulness. But an invalid is, however helpful her brain may be, an expense, and one not contemplated by trustees when they set a minister’s salary. Certainly ‘Thusia’s illness was not the fault of the church, but it was the cause of David’s debts. He could not and did not blame the church for his financial condition, nor could he blame ‘Thusia. Alice was doing her full share in the house, taking the maid’s place, but Roger – alas, Roger! Roger, the well-beloved son, was a disappointment. He now had a “job,” but after David’s high hopes for the lad the place Roger occupied was almost humiliating. David felt that Roger probably hardly earned the four dollars a week he was paid by his grandfather, old Mr. Fragg. He no longer called on his father good-naturedly for funds, but he still lived at home, and probably would as long as the home existed.

So this was our dominie as he walked through the hot Main Street on his way to see Banker Burton, now his most influential trustee. Our David was but slightly round-shouldered; his eyes still clear and gray; hair still curled gold; mouth refined and quick to smile; brow broad, and but little creased. His entire air was one of quick and kindly intelligence; a little weary after twenty-nine years of ministry, a little worn by care, but our Davy still.

I remember him telling me how the passing of the old and staunch friends and (occasional) enemies affected him – men like old Sam Wiggett – and how he felt less like a child of the patriarchs, and more like something bargained and contracted for. This was said without bitterness; he was trying to let me know what an important part in his younger years those old elders and trustees had played. They never quite stopped thinking of David as the boy minister, and to David they remained something stern and authoritative, like the ancient Biblical patriarchs.

They had seemed the God-appointed rulers of the church; somehow the newer trustees and elders, the reason for the choosing of each of whom was known to David, seemed to lack something of the old awesome divine right. They seemed more ordinarily human.

“They let Lucille Hardcome walk on them,” I told David, but of course David would not admit that.

“Lucille is very kind to ‘Thusia,” he said.

Mary Derling, having put up with Derling’s infidelities long enough, divorced him. Her son Ben was now a young man. Mary herself was well along in the forties, and her abiding love for David Dean glowed in good works year after year, and in the affection of Mary, ‘Thusia and Rose Hinch David felt himself blessed above most men. Rose was the best nurse in Riverbank, and those who could secure her services felt that the efficiency of their physician was doubled. She asked an honest wage from those who could afford it, but she gave much of her time to David’s sick poor, and many hours to investigating poverty and distress. In this latter work Mary Derling aided, and it was at ‘Thusia’s bedside the consultations were held; for ‘Thusia was no longer able to leave her bed, except on days when she sat in an easy-chair, or could be carried to a downstair couch. In a long, thin book ‘Thusia kept a record of needs and deeds. David called it his “laundry list.” In this were entered the souls and bodies that needed “doing over” – souls to be scrubbed and bodies to be starched and creases to be ironed out of both.

‘Thusia was a secretary of charities always to be found at home. Charity work soon grows wearisome, but ‘Thusia could make the least interesting cases attractive as she told of them. Each page of her “laundry list” was a romance. ‘Thusia not only interested herself but she kept interest alive in others.

And Lucille! Lucille tried honestly enough to be useful in the way Rose and Mary were useful. As the years passed she kept up all her numberless activities, glowing as a social queen, pushing forward as a political factor, driving the church trustees, ordering the music and cowing the choir – she was in everything and leading everything, and yet she was discontented. More and more, each year, she came to believe that David Dean was the man of all men whose good opinion she desired, and it annoyed her to think that he valued the quiet services of Mary Derling and Rose Hinch more than anything Lucille had done or, perhaps, could do. She was like a child in her desire for words of commendation from David.

As David Dean mounted the three steps that led up to the bank where B. C. Burton spent his time as president, Lucille was awaiting him in his study in the little white manse on the hill.

XIII. A SURPRISE

B C. BURTON, the president of the Riverside National Bank, was a widower, and led an existence that can be described as calmly and good-naturedly detached. He was a younger son of a father long since dead, who had established the Burton, Corley & Co. bank, which had prospered, and finally taken a national banking charter. Corley had furnished the capital for the original bank, and the Burton family had run the business. B. C. – he was usually called by his initials – had married Corley’s only daughter, and had thus acquired the Corley money. After his wife’s death his wealth was estimated as a hundred thousand dollars; the truth was that old Corley had invested badly, and left his daughter no more than twenty-five thousand. At the time of his marriage B. C. owned nothing but his share of the bank stock, worth about twenty thousand.