To the Highest Bidder. Florence Morse Kingsley
younger Hewett informed her. “I’ll call him, if you say so.—Pa!”
“No; don’t, please,” objected Barbara hastily. “I’ll go and speak to him there.”
But Mr. Abram Hewett had already appeared in answer to the summons and was advancing briskly behind a counter gay with new prints and ginghams. His face stiffened at sight of Barbara, and he darted an impatient look at his son.
“Could I speak with you—just a moment, Mr. Hewett?” asked Barbara, in a low, determined voice, “on business?”
The man coldly scrutinized the flushed face the girl lifted to his.
“If it was ’bout the balance o’ that account o’ yours——” he began, “I was just lookin’ it over, ’long with some others like it. You c’n come in here.”
Barbara followed his short, bent figure, her heart beating heavily. But she had found a remnant of her vanished self-possession by the time Mr. Hewett had climbed to the high stool behind the long-legged desk, which represented the financial centre of the establishment. “Well?” he said interrogatively, fixing his lowering regard upon her.
Barbara glanced at the two fly-specked legends which flanked the desk on either side, reading respectively, “My time is money; don’t steal it,” and “This is my busy day.”
“I didn’t come to finish paying that bill to-day,” she said, a flush of shame mounting to her forehead. “But the hens are beginning to lay now, and——”
“Eggs is cheap an’ plentiful,” demurred Mr. Hewett, with unconcealed impatience. “I couldn’t agree t’ allow ye much on eggs.”
“It wasn’t the bill I came to see you about,” said Barbara, with a proud look at him. “I shall pay it in money as soon as I possibly can.”
“Oh!” interjected Mr. Hewett. Then he added sharply “Humph!” drumming meanwhile on the lid of his desk to denote the lapse of unfruitful minutes.
Barbara still hesitated, while she strove to find words to introduce the difficult business she had in mind.
Mr. Hewett cleared his throat suggestively.
“There’s a mortgage on the farm,” she said slowly, “and we’re going to lose it, unless——”
“Unless you pay up,” suggested Mr. Hewett briskly. “Yes; jes’ so. I’ve been wonderin’ how you managed to hang on to it s’ long’s you have.”
“I’ve worked,” said Barbara, in a low, tense voice. “I’ve worked early and late, ever since father died, and before that. But—there was unpaid interest, and interest on that; and last year the apples failed, and so——”
“He’s goin’ to foreclose on ye. Yes, yes; exac’ly. I s’pose likely Jarvis holds the mortgage?”
“Yes,” said Barbara breathlessly. “But if I only had a little more time I could manage it—somehow. I must keep the farm for Jimmy. I promised father he should have it.”
Mr. Hewett was silent, his plump face drawn into the semblance of a dubious smile.
“I’ve come to ask you to take up the mortgage for me, and give me more time to pay it. Will you do it?” asked Barbara, avoiding the man’s look.
Mr. Hewett shifted his gaze to the ink-well, around the edge of which a lean black fly was crawling dispiritedly.
“W’y, no,” he said decidedly. “I shouldn’t like to interfere; I couldn’t do it.”
“Why couldn’t you?” demanded Barbara. “If we have a good apple year, I could pay the mortgage in two years. It doesn’t cost us much to live.”
“If it’s a good apple year, apples’ll be a drug on the market,” Mr. Hewett prophesied gloomily. “Nope! I’m sorry; but I guess you’ll have to let Jarvis foreclose on ye. I shouldn’t like to run up against Jarvis, y’ know.”
“But—there’s Jimmy!” The girl’s voice rang out in a sharp cry.
“Put the boy in an institootion, or bind him out,” advised Mr. Hewett, drumming impatiently on the lid of his desk. “The’s folk a-plenty that wouldn’t mind raisin’ a healthy boy to work.”
Barbara turned swiftly.
“Say!” called Mr. Hewett; “hold on a minute!” Then, as Barbara paused, “This ’ere account’s been standin’ since long before your pa died. I’ve been pretty easy on you to date, but I guess I’ll have to attach somethin’ before Jarvis gits his hold onto things. You’ve got some stock, I b’lieve, an’——”
But Barbara was already out of hearing, hurrying as if pursued. Two or three women, looking over dress goods at the counter, turned to look after the slim figure in its black dress.
“She don’t ’pear to see common folks any better’n her father did,” said one, with a spiteful laugh.
“Well, I don’t see’s she’s got much to be stuck up about,” put in another. “What with her father drinkin’ himself to death, an’——”
“Was that what ailed him?” inquired a newcomer in the neighborhood. “I remember he was buried a year ago last winter, just after we moved here. But I never heard he was a drinking man.”
“None of us suspicioned it for quite a spell,” explained the first speaker volubly. “Donald Preston was too awful stylish and uppity to go to the tavern an’ get drunk like common folks; he used to sen’ for his liquor f’om out of town. The best of brandy, so they say; then he’d drink, an’ drink till he was dead to the world, shut up in his room. He kind of lost his mind ’long toward the last, they say. He lived more’n two years that way ’fore he finally died.”
“She didn’t take care of him like that, did she?”
“Yes, she did. Her an’ the hired man; an’ I guess they had their hands full part the time. He used to cry an’ holler nights like a baby towards the last. Me an’ Mr. Robinson heard him once when we was comin’ home f’om a revival meetin’ over to the Corners. Seth, he was for stoppin’ an’ seein’ if there was anythin’ we could do, but I says, ‘No, I don’t want to mix up in it,’ I says. Afterwards I was kind of sorry; I’d like to have seen the upstairs rooms in that house.”
The subject of these manifold revelations and censures was walking rapidly down the village street, her mind a maze of unhappy reflections. She stopped short at the end of the sidewalk, as Jimmy had done the day before.
“I don’t suppose there’s any use,” she thought, her eyes fixed on the imposing front which the Jarvis residence presented to the public gaze. “But I’ll try, anyway. If he’d give me a year—or even six months longer, I’m sure I could get the interest paid up.”
Without waiting for her elusive courage to vanish into thin air the girl pushed open the front gate, which clanged decisively shut behind her. The harsh metallic sound appeared to pursue her relentlessly up the long gravelled walk, past the stiff figures of the cast-iron deer, past the blossoming shrubs and the glittering blue glass globes—quite up to the pillared entrance. A sour-faced woman opened the door.
Mr. Jarvis was at home, she informed Barbara. “But he’s busy,” she added importantly. “The’ can’t nobody see him this mornin’, an’ he’s goin’ away to-morrow.”
“Then I must see him,” Barbara said firmly. “Tell Mr. Jarvis that Miss Preston would like to see him—on—on business.”
Stephen Jarvis had spent several hours shut up in his library that morning, during which period he had opened and examined his mail, read the morning papers, published in a neighboring city, and the county papers, one of which he owned, and whose editorial utterances he controlled.
The