A Woman Named Smith. Marie Conway Oemler
for a couple of chromos I should probably loathe.—I don't like pictures of cardinal virtues, anyhow. It altogether depends on who possesses them as to whether I can stand for the cardinal virtues themselves."
"Faith looking up, and Charity looking down, and Hope hanging to an anchor, something like Britannia-Rules-the-Waves. Make the church keep them, please, Sophy!" begged Alicia.
Judge Gatchell made an odd noise in his throat.
"One of my little granddaughters, taken to Saint Polycarp's by her mother, asked, 'Mamma, who is that big woman up there with the pick-axe?' And they told her," said the Judge, scathingly, "they told her it was Hope!
"When the vestry came to me about the case, I reminded them that Aholah and Aholibah were damned for doting upon paintings on the wall, painted in vermilion, which in plain English is Scarlett!" A covenanting gleam shot into his frosty eyes, and the old fighting Scotch blood showed for a second in his lank cheek. He was a godly man, and when he saw confusion in the ranks of the Philistines, he rejoiced.
"I can't help who was damned," said I. "My job is to live in peace with my neighbors. St. Polycarp's people may hang their Virtues wherever they please, for all of me."
Did a faint, faint shade of regret flit over the parchment-like face? It seemed so to me. But he said, composedly:
"You must act according to your best judgment. And now, please, let us go back to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik."
We rather prided ourselves upon the possession of so pleasant a neighbor, and we said so. He had helped us with our garden, and it was he who selected the spot upon which the resurrected Love should be set up.
"Ah, yes, the statue, brought from Italy by Richard Hynds, a great grandfather of his. Did he tell you anything about Richard?" asked the judge.
"Nothing."
"I shall have to go a long way back, more than a hundred years, to make you understand," said the judge. "When I was a boy some of the oldest folk here in Hyndsville used to say that Hynds House never should have come to Freeman Hynds, Mrs. Scarlett's father; but to Richard Hynds, his elder brother—that same Richard whose initials are cut in the base of the statue he brought in his pagan godlessness from Italy, and which his brother afterward buried, wishing to remove all trace of him and his follies.
"You are to understand that it was the unwritten law of the Hyndses' that this house should come to the eldest son. Primogeniture is of course foreign to American ideas, but this is an old house, Miss Smith. When it was built, American ideas hadn't been born. And the Hyndses were a law to themselves.
"The then head of the house was James Hampden Hynds, a man of an immense pride, a rigid sense of duty, and the nicest notions of honor. He had two sons, Richard, and the younger brother, Freeman. The daughters do not count: it is with these two sons we are concerned.
"From every account Freeman Hynds was a good man, a quiet, God-fearing, methodical man, attentive to his affairs, and meticulously exact in all his dealings; not warm-hearted, perhaps, but just. But as if the bad blood of the entire family had come to a head in one man, Richard was born a roisterer and a spendthrift.
"He grew up a magnificent young scapegrace, reckless to the point of madness, and with that inherent love of risk that is the very breath of life to such men. Despite these defects there is no doubt that his was one of those personalities that win love without effort. So of course it was a foregone conclusion that he should win the girl that his younger brother, among others, adored to distraction.
"His family hoped that his love for his young wife would change him for the better. But there was something tamelessly wild in Richard Hynds. He would have done very well, very well indeed, in the Golden Hind with Drake, or in the Jesus with Morgan. He did not fit in a gentler generation, and a mild life had no charm for him. Gossip buzzed with his name, even in a day when gentlemen were permitted to behave pretty much as they pleased.
"Up to this time there had never been anything altogether unpardonable charged against him. But one fine morning the Hynds jewels were missing. Remember that the Hyndses had always been a wealthy and powerful family. The theft of those jewels was no trumpery affair. For generations they had been adding to that collection—sometimes a lustrous pearl, sometimes a flawless emerald; once it was a sapphire that had belonged to a French queen, once a pair of rubies that had hung in the ears of a duchess beloved of King Charles.
"Richard's mother happened to be a meek and quiet body, deeply religious, something of a Quakeress, so she wore them but seldom. It was upon the occasion of a ball to be given in honor of Freeman's twenty-first birthday that the question of what jewels his mother should wear came up, and the strong-box in which they were kept was opened. Only the settings remained.
"When the clamor quieted and sane questions began to be asked, suspicion fastened upon Richard Hynds. His affairs were chaotic, his needs imperative and desperate. He had been heard to ask his mother if she intended wearing what he called 'the Hynds fortune' at Freeman's ball. He knew, of course, where they were kept—in the anteroom of his mother's apartment. It was not only possible but easy for him to gain access to them.
"Let us consider the case without prejudice: Here is a young man—a gambler, a wastrel—with pressing debts, and clamoring creditors threatening what might be considered dishonor. Within reach of this young man's hand are certain very valuable properties which he might even consider his own, since they would in time descend to him. His mother's resources are exhausted, his father's heart steeled against further advancements. Cause and effect, you see—debts: missing jewels.
"The case not only formed two factions in public opinion; it split the Hynds family itself. His two sisters, and his cousin Jessamine, raised in this house, believed him guilty. His mother and his wife believed in his innocence and refused to hear a word against him. These two things only did Richard Hynds salvage in that utter wreck and catastrophe—his mother's faith and his wife's love.
"He lost his father's. This was a man, who, under his pleasant exterior of a landed gentleman, was rigid and inflexible. He had already borne a great deal, remember; but this was disgrace, an indelible stain upon a stainless name. Therefore this father, who was at the same time a just and good man, disinherited his favorite child and eldest son. House, slaves, lands, money, the great position of the head of a powerful family, came to Freeman Hynds, my late client's father, born five years later than his brother, on the twentieth day of September, 1785—a long time ago! a long time ago!
"Richard was disgraced, and a beggar. And it seemed that the rod that had lain in pickle for the Hyndses for their pride, was brought forth to scourge them all. For Richard, desperate, distracted, careless of what happened to him, rode out one day through a pelting rain. Result, congested lungs; the poor wastrel, who had no wish to live, was soon satisfactorily dead.
"When James Hampden got that news, he rose up from his chair, laid the book he had been reading—it was Baxter's 'Saint's Rest'—down on the library table and fell as if lightning had struck him. Apoplexy, it was said; a thrust through the heart, I should call it. Richard the sinner was none the less Richard his first-born.
"Hard upon the heels of these two disasters came a third, the case of Jessamine Hynds. This Jessamine—a highly gifted, imperious creature, proud as Lucifer, after the manner of the Hyndses—was an orphan, reared in Hynds House. She was some several years older than her cousins, to whom she was greatly attached. The trouble so preyed upon her that she became melancholy, and one fine day disappeared and was never afterward found. There was great hue and cry made for her, and men riding hither and yon, for this was a Hynds woman, and her story touched popular imagination, so that she is supposed," said the lawyer dryly, "to wander around Hynds House o' nights, crying for Richard and searching for the lost jewels.
"After the death of James Hampden Hynds, it was discovered that he had added a singular enough codicil to his will. This codicil provided that in the event the jewels were found intact, and Richard Hynds's innocence thereby incontrovertibly established, Hynds House as it stood should revert to him as eldest son, after the custom of the family. But until the jewels were recovered, Richard and