University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.
TROUBLE IN QUIET ARBOR.

Not many days afterwards, Richard might have been
seen, at mid-evening, in close conference with Nefon at the
store of the latter. They seemed to have some private
scheme in hand. What it was will better appear in the
history of its execution. Only this we are prepared to say,
— that Nefon was a great friend of Temperance, and so
was Richard; and they had often spoken together of the
increase of drunkenness, and the means of quenching that
evil.

They left the store, and proceeded to a building in which
was a Hall of the Sons of Temperance, where this fraternity
were then in session. While Richard waited on the
walk, Nefon ascended to the Hall, and in a few minutes
returned with a half-dozen sturdy Brothers, in their white
collars, including also a W. P., with his scarlet ensigns.

Richard led them forthwith to the Pebbles, on the shore
of which Quiet Arbor was snugly located. Leaving
his accomplices at the door, he entered this sanctuary alone.
Waving ceremony, he abruptly accosted the obliging but
modest head of the establishment in these words: — “You
are the Friend of the People?” said he, interrogatively.
“I am,” responded the Timid Man, hacking. “You are
willing they should be befriended, and that their best friends
should exert themselves for them, and that their liberties
should be achieved?” “I am,” he hacked.

Richard opened the door, and the six Brothers approached.

“These are the Friends of the People,” he said. If
another flood had made a sudden onslaught on his bottles,
Helskill could not have been more alarmed; but he
was more than alarmed, — he was incensed; he set his
teeth, and he set his eyes, so that they did not play up and
down, but looked straight forwards. But there the white-robed
phalanx was, and he had to see them, and receive
them, and behave as mannerly as he could under them;
and when he tried to hack, he could n't; and when he had
got a little hack half way up, it slipped back, in spite of him.

There were the customary tarriers in this abode of
leisure; in a sort of mirage of smoke and dim lamp-light,
loomed up a motley group of shabby beards, slouched hats,
blub-cheeks and blistered noses; men, who looked like an
old sheet-iron stove that has been burnt out and dented in;
men, who lay coiled up in their repose, as a grub lies in the
earth; men, some of whom retained the power of capering
about in that soothing atmosphere, like a hog in a snow-drift.

Richard proceeded with his plot. He addressed those
men: “Ye are slaves,” said he; “slaves to your appetites
and habits, — slaves to this spot and this hour, — slaves to
sin and shame! You have no liberty of thought or of feeling,—
none of money or of time. You know not the freedom
of health or of strength, — you have no independency of
hope or of happiness. You propagate the evils you
suffer. You, Weasand, have enslaved your wife; you,
Fuzzle, have broken the spirit of your mother; you, Horn,
have sent your family to the Alms-house. We come
to-night to give you liberty. We proclaim your freedom.
We have brought the Temperance Pledge. Sign this;
it is the covenant of your Redemption, — it is the Constitution
of your Independence.” “Make out the papers,”
cried one. “Mr. Nefon,” said Richard, “pass the pen and

ink.” “One more bouse, and I 'll sign,” exclaimed another;
“a stiff one, Helskill; I must wet both eyes, for
I want to see sharp into what I am about.” The Tapster
could not so far overcome his friendly feelings as not to
favor the man in this his last request. Emptying the glass
to the dregs, and sweeping his lips with his hand, this man
advanced to the table and wrote his name.

“Worthy Patriarch,” said Nefon, addressing the scarlet-robed
Brother, “witness the signatures.”

“I am so infernally drunk, I can't sign,” swore a third.
“Drunk or sober, it makes no difference,” replied Richard.
“All sign that will sign.”

“If I could get up there, I would sign,” jargled one from
the floor. “Brothers Bisbee and Sloan,” said the Patriarch,
“lift up Mr. Fuzzle, while he signs.”

“I can't write,” said a fourth. “The Worthy Patriarch
will witness his mark,” responded Nefon.

In this way they canvassed the entire room. “Here is
one too stiff to stir,” some one said. “Four Brothers carry
him to the Division Room,” enjoined the Chief, “and
thither let us all proceed.” These Liberators, with their
captives to freedom, departed, and Richard and Nefon were
left alone with the Keeper of the Arbor. If this man was
surprised, he was also stunned. That his guests had taken
their well-being into their own hands, or even committed it
in trust to the Sons of Temperance, was a fact which he
could not gainsay, and a virtue that he dare not revile;
and he stood behind the bar, looking like one who had just
seen his grandmother's ghost.

Now Nefon was tart — tarter than Richard; and he longed
to rub the dram-monger's ears a bit, just in an easy way;
and he could not forbear a little pleasantry, even if there
was a needle at the point of it. So he said, “Your Arbor

will be very quiet now,—still as a nether mill-stone; and
you will have nothing to do but whirl round on it, and grind
out your meditations at your leisure.”

He had better not have said this, for it made Helskill
mad, very mad; and it did no good. Besides, it came
near frustrating part of their plan, which embraced the
Grotto. Richard tried the door that led to that apartment,
but Helskill sprang forward and locked it; and Chuk-like,
he would see them, and himself, and the whole premises, in
the ashes of perdition, before they should go in.

They retreated to the street. “There is a private entrance,”
said Richard, “and we will find it.” They did
find it, and went in, and were hazed in a labyrinth of passages
and darkness. The little Bookseller might have been
frightened, but he was not. “We are in for a job,” said he,
“and for a broken head, for all I know. I could not have
done this yesterday. I am warm, very warm; and we
must strike while the iron is hot.”

They felt their way onwards, and at length came to the
door of the wizard-room. They entered quite abruptly;
and their arrival seemed to betoken unusual pertinence.
The occupants of the room,—Captain Creamer, Chassford,
Glendar, Tunny and the Sailmaker,—felt this. The Captain
glavered, the Sailmaker blustered; Glendar, leaning
over the table, shuffled cards very vacantly. Tunny,—
what did he do, what could he do, when there was so little
left of him the night before? If he could have vanished, he
would; but he had to be there, or let his shadow be there, and
take what might befall.

“I am indebted to you, Sir,” Richard said, addressing
the Captain; “you gave me occupation when I was a
stranger in the place. As your servant, I might hesitate
in what I am now upon. But there is a higher relation

between us than that of employer and employed,—the
relation of humanity, of Christian fidelity. And this obliges
me to say that you are in a bad way. These practices are
destructive of all that you value in life, or that you would
have me value. I shall not take advantage of what has
come to my knowledge; but I must affectionately, and very
positively, admonish you.”

The Captain, for once in his life, lost his self-possession,
his gay ease, his oily grace; and he seemed in an instant
to sink into his proper age, and reäppear in the furrows
and the palsy of an old man. He stammered, and tripped;
and, with Glendar and Chassford, hastily left the room.

The Sailmaker was not to be interrupted; he had got
too valuable a prey in his clutches to admit a rival. He
declaimed against interference,—he snuffed at this meddling
with other folks' business,—he fanfaronaded on sentimental
benevolence. “I do not mind that,” replied Richard;
“but you must give up Tunny.”

“Any man that comes between me and Tunny is a dead
man!”

“I am between you and Tunny; and I am alive, and tolerably
well,” rejoined Richard. “Tunny,” he added, “go
home.” There was so slender a remnant of the Grocer on
hand that it did not seem to hear,—it lay passively in the
chair. The Sailmaker stooped to seize it. Richard elbowed
him off. “Go home, Tunny,” he repeated, in a still louder
voice. Nefon took the relic by the arm, and led it to the
door. “I will have it out of you, body and soul, for this!”
added the Sailmaker. Richard and Nefon supported Tunny
to his house.

The Sailmaker sought to be as good as his word. He
came to the Mill and detained Richard one noon after the
bell had rung the others to dinner.

“I demand satisfaction for what you have done!” he said.
“I will give it,” replied Richard; “what shall it be?”
“One of us must die!” he answered, with an emphasis of
pathos and frenzy. “Not so bad as that, I hope,” rejoined
Richard. “Just as bad,” said the other. “Choose your
weapons, and your own way.” “Very well,” answered
Richard, “and prepare yourself to meet an antagonism that
comes with weapons not carnal, but spiritual.” “You canting
hypocrite, you!” sneered the Sailmaker; “sliverly coward!
you mean to avoid me,—you mean to hush away!
You won't do it,—you are too late for it!” He drew a dirk,
which he might have done mischief with; but Richard took
it from him, and breaking the blade, threw the fragments
into the wheel-pit.

The Sailmaker, slackening in physical rage, calmed down
to argument. “You do not know,” said he, “what I have
endured. It is not Tunny's money I want; it is revenge.
I scorn him and his dust. But his family have insulted
me, — his wife has planted her flat-footed pride on me,
his son has lost all recollection of me, because I am a Sail-maker,
— because I am what my father was before me.
Who are they but mangy skip-jacks, half-baked upper
crusts? Did n't Tunny drive a fish-cart? Has n't he tooted
his carrion by our own door?”

Richard replied, “My friend, I think I understand you,—
I believe I know to what you refer, and I may be deeper in
the secret of your affairs than you are yourself.”

“How is that?” eagerly asked the other.

“You allude to a disruption of intimacy between yourself
and their daughter, Faustina.” “I do,” answered the
other. “Well, let me tell you,” continued Richard, “that
was not owing to your birth or vocation, but to your habits.”

“'T is false!” answered the Sailmaker. “Mrs. Tunny

forbade my visiting her daughter. She said my hands
soiled the door when I entered. I heard her say so.”

“That may be,” responded Richard; “but Faustina
never said so, did she?”

“Is there any hope for me with her? If there be, I do
not mind a farthing that soap-bubble of a mother.”

“There may be,” said Richard, “for all that I know.
But, in my opinion, all depends on one thing.”

“What is that?”

“That you repent of your sins, — that you reform your
manner of life, and by God's grace renovate your spirit.
Avoid the haunts of vice; consort with what is good and
pure, and come to appear, and to be, a new man.”

“I will think of what you say,” replied the young man.