A Woman Named Smith by Marie Conway Oemler (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

"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 his heirs were to have exactly—nothing. And nothing is what Richard and his heirs got."

"And was he really guilty?" breathed Alicia. Her sympathy was instantly with Richard. That is exactly like Alicia, who is sorry for the fatted calf, and the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea, and Esau swindled out of his birthright; had she been one of the wise virgins she would have trimmed the lamps of all the foolish ones and waked them up in time.

"In theory," said the judge, "a man is innocent until he is proved guilty. In practice, he is guilty until he can prove his innocence."

"And was nothing, absolutely nothing, ever heard or known further?—nothing that would justify his mother's faith, or comfort his poor young wife's heart?"

"There was but one incident to which even the most credulous could attach the slightest importance. You shall judge for yourself whether it deserved any. Freeman Hynds, riding about the plantation after his habit, was thrown from his horse and died from the injuries sustained. He recovered consciousness for a few minutes before he died; some said he never really regained it. Be that as it may, the dying man cried out, in a voice of great anguish and affliction: 'Richard! Brother Richard! The jewels—the jewels!' He struggled to say more, and failed; looked into the concerned faces around him, with the awful look of the soul about to depart; struggled to raise himself; and fell back upon his pillow a corpse.

"Some—they were in the majority—said, sensibly enough, that the pain and disgrace of his brother's downfall had haunted the poor gentleman's death-bed, and occasioned that last sad cry. Some few said he had wished to confess a thing heavy upon his conscience, who had taken his brother's place as Jacob took Esau's. Richard's wife, of course, was of these latter. She went to her grave a passionate believer in the innocence of her husband, whom she averred to have been a deeply wronged and cruelly used man; and, for heaven's sake, who do you suppose she claimed had wronged him? Freeman! She couldn't prove anything; she hadn't the ghost of a clue to hang the ghost of an accusation upon; yet, womanlike, she clung to her notion, and she taught it to her son as one teaches a holy creed.

"The Hyndses were excellent haters. Freeman's daughter, born into an atmosphere of family disruption, abhorred the very memory of her uncle, and hated her uncle's wife, the woman who doubted and led others to doubt her father's honesty. This hatred she discovered for Richard's son, who, as he grew older, referred to Freeman as 'my Uncle Judas.'

"This second Richard became in time a highly successful physician, a man honored and beloved by this community. There was no wildness in him, nor in his son, the third Richard. His granddaughter Sarah Hynds married Professor Doctor Max Jelnik, the celebrated Viennese alienist, whom she met abroad. Your next-door neighbor is Sarah's son, born somewhere in Hungary, I believe. Both the young man's parents are dead, and I understand he has led a vagrant and irresponsible life, preferring to rove about rather than follow his father's profession, to which he was educated.

"My late client, indeed, held that he had inherited the deplorable characteristics of the first Richard. She asserted—she allowed herself great freedom of speech—that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It displeased her that he should come to Hyndsville. She thought it showed a malignant nature and a peculiar shamelessness that he chose to reside next door to Hynds House, from which his great-great-grandfather had been so ignominously driven. Her first meeting with the young man bred in her an ineradicable dislike."

Now what really happened is this: The fences having been neglected, and in consequence fallen down, and the hedge broken in many places, Mr. Jelnik, just come to Hyndsville, thoughtlessly and perhaps ignorantly crossed the sacred Scarlett boundaries. Up-stairs behind her blind, like an ancient spider in her web, the old lady spied him. She flung open the window and leaned out.

"Who are you that prowl about other peoples' yards like a thievish cat?" she demanded peremptorily.

The young man looked up, uncovering his beautiful head.

"I am Nicholas Jelnik. And I pray your pardon, Madame: I did not mean to intrude," and he made as if to go.

"Jelnik!" said she, in a hoarse and croaking voice. "Jelnik! Aha! I know your breed! I smell the blood in you—bad blood! rotten bad blood! You've a bad face, young man: a scoundrelly face, the face of a fellow whose grandfather robbed his house and shamed his name! And why