Colonel Starbottle's Client. Bret Harte
father into her confidence,—a dreadful contingency.
She was dressed for the evening party, which was provincially early; indeed, it was scarcely past nine o’clock when she had finished her toilet, when there came a rap at her door. It was one of Mammy Judy’s children.
“Dey is a gemplum, Miss Sally.”
“Yes, yes,” said Miss Sally, impatiently, thinking only of her escort. “I’ll be there in a minute. Run away. He can wait.”
“And he said I was to guv yo’ dis yer,” continued the little negro with portentous gravity, presenting a card.
Miss Sally took it with a smile. It was a plain card on which was written with a pencil in a hand she hurriedly recognized, “Joseph Corbin.”
Miss Sally’s smile became hysterically rigid, and pushing the boy aside with a little cry, she darted along the veranda and entered the parlor from a side door and vestibule. To her momentary relief she saw that her friends had not yet arrived: a single figure—a stranger’s—rose as she entered.
Even in her consternation she had time to feel the added shock of disappointment. She had always present in her mind an ideal picture of this man whom she had never seen or even heard described. Joseph Corbin had been tall, dark, with flowing hair and long mustache. He had flashing fiery eyes which were capable of being subdued by a single glance of gentleness—her own. He was tempestuous, quick, and passionate, but in quarrel would be led by a smile. He was a combination of an Italian brigand and a poker player whom she had once met on a Mississippi steamboat. He would wear a broad-brimmed soft hat, a red shirt, showing his massive throat and neck—and high boots! Alas! the man before her was of medium height, with light close-cut hair, hollow cheeks that seemed to have been lately scraped with a razor, and light gray troubled eyes. A suit of cheap black, ill fitting, hastily acquired, and provincial even for Pineville, painfully set off these imperfections, to which a white cravat in a hopelessly tied bow was superadded. A terrible idea that this combination of a country undertaker and an ill-paid circuit preacher on probation was his best holiday tribute to her, and not a funeral offering to Mr. Jeffcourt, took possession of her. And when, with feminine quickness, she saw his eyes wander over her own fine clothes and festal figure, and sink again upon the floor in a kind of hopeless disappointment equal to her own, she felt ready to cry. But the more terrible sound of laughter approaching the house from the garden recalled her. Her friends were coming.
“For Heaven’s sake,” she broke out desperately, “didn’t you get my note at the station telling you not to come?”
His face grew darker, and then took up its look of hopeless resignation, as if this last misfortune was only an accepted part of his greater trouble, as he sat down again, and to Miss Sally’s horror, listlessly swung his hat to and fro under his chair.
“No,” he said, gloomily, “I didn’t go to no station. I walked here all the way from Shelbyville. I thought it might seem more like the square thing to her for me to do. I sent HIM by express ahead in the box. It’s been at the stage office all day.”
With a sickening conviction that she had been sitting on her cousin’s body while she wrote that ill-fated card, the young girl managed to gasp out impatiently: “But you must go—yes—go now, at once! Don’t talk now, but go.”
“I didn’t come here,” he said, rising with a kind of slow dignity, “to interfere with things I didn’t kalkilate to see,” glancing again at her dress, as the voices came nearer, “and that I ain’t in touch with,—but to know if you think I’d better bring him—or”—
He did not finish the sentence, for the door had opened suddenly, and a half-dozen laughing girls and their escorts burst into the room. But among them, a little haughty and still irritated from her last interview, was her cousin Julia Jeffcourt, erect and beautiful in a sombre silk.
“Go,” repeated Miss Sally, in an agonized whisper. “You must not be known here.”
But the attention of Julia had been arrested by her cousin’s agitation, and her eye fell on Corbin, where it was fixed with some fatal fascination that seemed in turn to enthrall and possess him also. To Miss Sally’s infinite dismay the others fell back and allowed these two black figures to stand out, then to move towards each other with the same terrible magnetism. They were so near she could not repeat her warning to him without the others hearing it. And all hope died when Corbin, turning deliberately towards her with a grave gesture in the direction of Julia, said quietly:—
“Interduce me.”
Miss Sally hesitated, and then gasped hastily, “Miss Jeffcourt.”
“Yer don’t say MY name. Tell her I’m Joseph Corbin of ‘Frisco, California, who killed her brother.” He stopped and turned towards her. “I came here to try and fix things again—and I’ve brought HIM.”
In the wondering silence that ensued the others smiled vacantly, breathlessly, and expectantly, until Corbin advanced and held out his hand, when Julia Jeffcourt, drawing hers back to her bosom with the palms outward, uttered an inarticulate cry and—and spat in his face!
With that act she found tongue—reviling him, the house that harbored him, the insolence that presented him, the insult that had been put upon her! “Are you men!” she added passionately, “who stand here with the man before you that killed my brother, and see him offer me his filthy villainous hand—and dare not strike him down!”
And they dared not. Violently, blindly, stupidly moved though all their instincts, though they gathered hysterically around him, there was something in his dull self-containment that was unassailable and awful. For he wiped his face and breast with his handkerchief without a tremor, and turned to them with even a suggestion of relief.
“She’s right, gentlemen,” he said gravely. “She’s right. It might have been otherwise. I might have allowed that it might be otherwise,—but she’s right. I’m a Soth’n man myself, gentlemen, and I reckon to understand what she has done. I killed the only man that had a right to stand up for her, and she has now to stand up for herself. But if she wants—and you see she allows she wants—to pass that on to some of you, or all of you, I’m willing. As many as you like, and in what way you like—I waive any chyce of weapon—I’m ready, gentlemen. I came here—with HIM—for that purpose.”
Perhaps it may have been his fateful resignation; perhaps it may have been his exceeding readiness,—but there was no response. He sat down again, and again swung his hat slowly and gloomily to and fro under his chair.
“I’ve got him in a box at the stage office,” he went on, apparently to the carpet. “I had him dug up that I might bring him here, and mebbe bury some of the trouble and difference along with his friends. It might be,” he added, with a slightly glowering upward glance, as to an overruling, but occasionally misdirecting Providence,—“it might be from the way things are piling up on me that some one might have rung in another corpse instead o’ HIM, but so far as I can judge, allowin’ for the space of time and nat’ral wear and tear—it’s HIM!”
He rose slowly and moved towards the door in a silence that was as much the result of some conviction that any violent demonstration against him would be as grotesque and monstrous as the situation, as of anything he had said. Even the flashing indignation of Julia Jeffcourt seemed to become suddenly as unnatural and incongruous as her brother’s chief mourner himself, and although she shrank from his passing figure she uttered no word. Chester Brooks’s youthful emotions, following the expression of Miss Sally’s face, lost themselves in a vague hysteric smile, and the other gentlemen looked sheepish. Joseph Corbin halted at the door.
“Whatever,” he said, turning to the company, “ye make up your mind to do about me, I reckon ye’d better do it AFTER the funeral. I’M always ready. But HE, what with being in a box and changing climate, had better go FIRST.” He paused, and with a suggestion of delicacy in the momentary dropping of his eyelids, added,—“for REASONS.”
He passed out through the door, on to the portico and thence into the garden. It was noticed at the time that the half-dozen hounds lingering there rushed after him with their usual noisy demonstrations,