# The Steadfast Heart/Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Angus paused inside the door of the composing room. It was unchanged: he could remember every article of furniture, every ray of light which penetrated through dim windows, the position of every article, even the size and shape of stains upon the wall. It was home, the one spot upon earth for which he had known affection. He hesitated, overcome by the flood of recollections which swelled up within him, recollections which had to do with shelter and kindness, with friendships and with loyalty. These things had been born into Angus Burke’s life in this dingy room…. To him it seemed the fountain head of all virtues.
At a case stood Bishwhang, older, larger, but unmistakably Bishwhang; bending over a stone was Jake Schwartz—unaltered, it seemed, by the shading of a hair. He looked up, eying Angus truculently.
“Wa-al, what you want?” he growled.
Angus did not answer, could not answer. Something within him cried out to these friends ​to remember him, to recognize him, to take him again into their hearts, but he could not ask it—the boon must come from them…. Bishwhang looked up from his work, stared, caught some familiar gesture or expression, and his chin dropped, his mouth opened wide…. Then, suddenly, he dropped his stick and bellowed, “It’s Angus!… Jake, it’s Angus!”
Whereat he rushed forward, grimy face working, eyelids blinking back tears of welcome. Blubbering he snatched at Angus’s hand, shook it, squeezed it, mumbling incoherent words of gladness.
“It’s Angus…. Angus hisself…. It’s Angus come back again. Jake, Jake, it’s Angus!”
Jake laid down his mallet and walked forward, rubbing his cracked and grimy hands on his trousers, scowling horribly, forbiddingly the while. Roughly he shouldered Bishwhang aside and, thrusting his face close to Angus’s, stared at him with terrifying belligerence. Then, of a sudden, he put a great paw on each of the boy’s shoulders and shook him, shook him until his teeth rattled, then releasing him, whirled him half around and smote him resoundingly on the back. “Hell’s bells!…” he said, “Hell’s bells!” Speech had all but forsaken him. Again he scrutinized Angus’s face.
“I knowed it,” he roared. “Didn’t I see it in ​him, eh?” He threatened Bishwhang, dared him to disagree with this question. “He’s growed into what Dave wanted, like I knew he would?” Then he cleared his throat and dared Bishwhang with a look to differ with this statement.
Angus had not spoken, but, fumbling in his vest pocket with trembling hand, he brought out a huge silver watch and extended it.
“Look,” he said…. “See…. Every day—I’ve had it on me every day.”
“Hell’s bells!” said Jake again, and once more he cleared his throat of its chronic hoarseness. Bishwhang devoured Angus with his eyes, blubbering the while…. It was a welcome genuine past doubting.
“I’ve come back,” Angus said. “I got to help.”
“Thank Gawd for that,” rumbled Jake.
“He hain’t forgot us, Jake,” said Bishwhang, as though discovering some marvelous fact of nature, “and he kep’ the watch. I wouldn’t ’a’ b’lieved it, no, sir, not if it had been told me in church…. And to think that wunst I knowed more’n him!”
Angus unfolded before them as he could have unfolded before no other created beings. With Dave Wilkins he would have been more repressed, worshiping, for he was not without a certain awe of his benefactor—but Jake and Bishwhang walked with their feet upon his earth, ​were creatures in his mould, sympathetic to him and capable of being understood.
He became businesslike, efficient, and they gloried in the exhibition. “We’ve got to get out the paper for Thursday,” he said. “He wouldn’t want it to be late.”
“Kin we? Be you sure you kin do it?” asked Jake.
“Why,” said Bishwhang, astonished at such lack of faith, “he’s educated, he is. I bet he knows most as much as Dave Wilkins does.”
“We’ll get it out Thursday,” said Angus stolidly.
The paper came out Thursday and Rainbow was waiting for it. Never had an issue been expected with such keen anticipation…. If the townsfolk hoped to find some reference to Angus Burke himself, or some obtrusion of his personality, they were disappointed. There was no editorial, as is customary in such cases, praying the forbearance of the public until the authentic editor returns to his chair. There were no apologies, no announcements…. Angus never thought of it. He had but one idea—to get out a paper and to get out a paper which would not shame Dave.
On the day of issue Craig Browning went to the office expecting to find Angus anxious, apprehensive. He was neither. He had gone ​ahead with his task just as steadily, as stolidly, as he would have gone about sweeping out the office as he used to do. It was his task—to be done. There was no difference in degree. He had to do the thing, so he did it. There was no more than that to be said about it.
It had been no easy task, particularly the gathering of local news, but Angus mastered that—by a stroke of genius, Craig said…. But, queerly enough, such strokes came frequently from Angus, unexpectedly. When some expedient was necessary, he found that expedient, found it stolidly, quickly, effectively. It was not easy to tell if keen intelligence were at work, or only kind chance. This particular stroke consisted in promoting Nellie Ramsay, long in charge of the books of the concern, to a reportorial position. It was not necessary to send Nellie out to gather personals; Angus mined her. She washed out items of news as a rich placer washes out pay dirt. All that was necessary was to set her going, for she was the town’s chief repository of gossip and fact. Angus merely allowed her to talk to him, and then sorted out from the mass what it was safe to print in his column of “Notes and Personals.” Craig Browning had been unable to preserve a straight face when Angus told him the secret of it. As for Angus, it was impossible to say whether or ​no he had any appreciation of the humor of the device.
“It’s a triumph,” Browning told his wife.
“It’ll tickle Dave half to death when he hears of it.”
“If he gets well enough to hear,” said Mary, who sometimes despaired of Wilkins’s recovery. “I do wish we could get Angus to stay here, or even come to meals once in a while.”
“I’ll make him come to dinner Sunday. We mustn’t try to force him. Give him his head. Friends have to grow on Angus slowly—and he’s not having the loveliest imaginable time just now…. Sometimes I could tear this town up by the roots and throw it in the river.”
“Um…. I wonder how Lydia will react to him,” said Mary dubiously. “She’s hard to understand at times—and she’s so uppity about family and pedigrees and such things. I hope she doesn’t turn up her nose at him.”
“If she does,” said Craig shortly, “I’ll turn it down again for her…. But for Heaven’s sake, don’t mention him to her, or warn her how to treat him…. You know Lydia:—tell her not to put pot-black on her nose, and she’d make up like the end man in a minstrel show just to show her independence.”
Mary lifted her shoulders and sighed. Sometimes Lydia was a trial to her. There was no ​predicting what she would say or do in any circumstances. At times, under the greatest provocation, she would remain sweet and smiling and gentle; again, without discoverable cause, she would produce what Mary called a “tantrum.” If you expected her to be haughty, she would be complaisant; if you hoped she would be deferential, she was likely to flout…. The trouble with Lydia was that she was honest with every minute, looking neither to the one which had just sped nor the one which was about to arrive…. What the immediate present demanded of her impulse—that it received.
“She ought to be home from school,” said Mary, with maternal anxiety.
“She is,” said Craig. “She can be viewed in the act of perusing the paper on the front porch—and I take it for a bad sign.”
“That’s queer. Usually she never looks at the paper.”
“That,” said Craig, “is the bad sign. If she has taken it into her head to interest herself in Angus, Heaven help him…. But maybe, like the rest of Rainbow, she merely regards this issue as a side show.”
“She hasn’t evidenced the slightest interest in Angus.”
“Then you’d better take it she is very interested,” said Craig, and went out on to the ​porch to enjoy his daily pastime of baiting his ward.
“Which one of the moon calves walked home with you to-day?” he demanded.
She only wrinkled her nose at him over the paper.
“Was it young Crane? Seems like he’s trying to set up a monopoly.”
“He’s a beast! Mal Crane needn’t think he can say anything he wants to about anybody…. And it is a good issue of the paper. If you ask me, I say it’s better than Uncle Dave ever got out…. And Mal Crane’s a beast.”
“Delightfully definite. Why?”
“And he’s a coward, and his father’s a coward.”
“Um….” said Dave. He fancied he understood. So the Cranes were taking up their old role again; Malcolm Crane, now circuit judge, retained his old vindictiveness, and passed it on to his son. He frowned thoughtfully. The thing spelled trouble. Then, experimentally, he said, “Reading the paper, eh?… Looks like Angus bit off more than he can chew.”
Lydia jumped to her feet, color rising to her cheeks, sparks flashing from her eyes. “I think it’s fine—fine! I’ve read every word of it—and it’s wonderful…. Uncle Dave never made a better paper, and you ought to be ashamed of ​yourself…. I won’t have people saying mean things about him—and throwing up that—that old thing…. I won’t…. I won’t!” She clutched the paper in her arms and rushed upstairs to her room.
“Well….” said Craig to himself, “if Lydia’s decided to be his champion, he’s in for stirring times. If there isn’t trouble, she’ll make it so she’ll have something to champion about.”
It was that evening that Angus made his first voluntary appearance on the streets. Hitherto he had concealed himself, dreading the public eye, and the manifestations likely to ensue of the public’s opinion of his home-coming. He had kept to the shop and to his little room, and the town had seen nothing of him, which whetted its curiosity the more. To-night, with spurious impassivity, he walked the entire length of Main Street on his way to visit Dave Wilkins…. He did not pass unobserved, and he was conscious of observation and of whisperings. If he seemed tranquil to the onlooker, it was due to the set phlegmatic expression which had become a part of him;… if, as in the old days, some urchin had set up the cry of “Murderer!” he would have taken to his heels in panic.
He turned in at Browning’s gate, his eyes upon the walk.
​“Good evening,” said Lydia Canfield, a little stiffly, a trifle artificially, perhaps, for she had selected a part to play and was enacting it zealously. “I—I’ve been hoping you would call… because I want to talk about things with you.”
“I—I came to see Uncle Dave—”
“I know. Doc Knipe says he’s better. You can go up in a few minutes.”
“Does he—know anybody?”
“No. But Doctor says he may be conscious for a little while at a time from now on—and with good nursing—which he is getting, though I’m not allowed. He’s so weak….”
“Yes,” said Angus hopelessly.
“Please sit down a moment,” she said, with the voice of one who has chosen a high mission and who proposes to engage upon its prosecution, come what may. He obeyed apprehensively, embarrassed, at a loss how to conduct himself.
“I read the paper,” she said with kind, matronly encouragement, “every word of it. And I thought it was—remarkable.” This, she considered to be exactly the proper word, expressing encouragement to such as Angus from one like herself. Angus looked at her for a brief instant, and she had an uneasy sensation that his look had something to do with the word “remarkable.” But he did not smile. Heaven ​knows what the suppression of that smile saved him from—nor what it brought him to.
“I’m glad,” she said, “that I had the courage to send for you—and the good judgment…. It required resolution, you know—because—well, because nobody who ought to have done it did it.”
Angus nodded.
“After I’d done it,” she went on, “I was sort of worried. About the wisdom of it, you know…. Because when I saw you last—you—well, to tell the truth, you weren’t the kind of person one expects a great deal from, you know.”
Angus shrank back in his chair, and Lydia, seeing how her words hurt and troubled him, was so sorry that she hastened to make matters right. “But,” she said hurriedly, “as soon as I saw you, I knew it was all right.”
Then Lydia came to the real object of her lying in ambush for Angus—came to it before she was quite ready, for she found the boy more difficult than she had imagined, almost, if not quite incomprehensible to her. He almost nonplussed her. At any rate he made her pause and reflect…. He was so quiet and so—so strange.
“People are talking about you,” she said.
He nodded dumbly.
“It—it isn’t fair,” she said and paused. “Do you remember when you fought Malcolm Crane?”
​He remembered. Yes, he remembered that, and why he had fought; remembered that it was this girl before him who had made it necessary for him to fight that fight…. Somehow the thing established a bond between them, though she chose elaborately to ignore it. As for Angus, he might be trusted never to make reference to that important step in his life. He nodded again.
“I told him to-day you’d do it again if he didn’t behave himself,” she said sharply.
Angus was conscious of a new, more personal sort of anger than he had ever before experienced. He had seldom been angry. It was his nature to be restrained, to know inhibitions which others without his history could never know. He was deliberate, slow, not subject to sudden emotions…. But now he was angry—singularly enough not because young Crane had abused him—but because the abuse had been uttered to Lydia Canfield…. It was a thing for him to ponder over, and to reflect upon.
“I s’pose he was egged on by his father,” she said with precocious insight.
Angus rested his chin on his palm and thought the matter over; he was always thinking matters over, and Lydia for once possessed the judgment and self-restraint to leave him to himself. Finally he spoke:
“I mustn’t fight again… unless I have to. ​The people here don’t like me…. They don’t want me here. They think I am—you know what they think…. I mustn’t do anything to make it worse. It would be harder for Uncle Dave.”
“You’ve got to stand up for yourself. You can’t let folks trample all over you. But, of course, it isn’t gentlemanly to fight, and folks would say you were rough and rowdy, and they’d complain about you, and maybe you’d get into trouble…. No, I s’pose you better not, unless you can’t help it… but what if Mal should yell at you on the street like he did once?”
“Then,” said Angus, and his chin gave emphasis to his words, “I’d lick him.”
During the silence which ensued both watched the approach of a young man, his face indistinct in the darkness. He paused a moment at the gate as though undecided whether to enter, and Lydia recognized him. It was Malcolm Crane…. It was a minor shock, a thrill. Here was a situation and she proceeded to dramatize it—the meeting of the enemies! It was exciting.
Young Crane mounted the porch to encounter a Lydia stiff and forbidding.
“Lydia,” he said awkwardly, “I thought I’d come in. I, well, I thought maybe you’d got over—”
“Got over what?” she asked shortly.
​“You were mad at me this morning,” he said, using the boyish formula. She made no reply, cruelly leaving him to flounder in his own difficulty. “I don’t see why we should quarrel about that—”
She stamped her foot. “Malcolm Crane,” she said passionately, “Angus Burke is right here on this porch, and you don’t dare finish what you were going to say…. You can sneak behind folks’ backs…. I told you this morning you were afraid to say those things to him.”
Young Crane stepped back a pace, peering into the darkness, and words were startled from him, words of real surprise, almost of horror. “You don’t mean to say you—you actually sit on the porch with him! Why, Lydia—he’s a—a—”
“I’d rather have him than you,” Lydia interrupted furiously. “I can sit on my porch with who I please, and it isn’t any of your business, nor anybody else’s business—not if I want to sit and talk with the garbage man!”
Crane plucked up his courage and made an effort to save his face. “Huh…. You that’s done so much talking about family and ancestors,” he sneered. “But you don’t live up to it… I don’t care about staying around where you’re—entertaining an ex-convict.”
Then Angus spoke, for the first time; he spoke ​rather slowly, and his voice was singularly without embarrassment for a boy who heard himself discussed in such a manner. His voice was not loud and Lydia recalled the steadiness of it afterward when she reviewed the scene.
“You’d better go,” he said to Crane. “I’m not going to lick you now… but don’t ever say that again. Don‘’t call me names to anybody….” That was all. No more was necessary. It stated his position clearly and unalterably. Angus Burke was never given to uttering unnecessary words.
Lydia kept silence, but she drew a long breath. She was impressed, became conscious of a strength in this boy, saw that it was Angus and not herself who dominated the situation. She stole a look at his face, visible in the half light which glowed from the open door. Its apathy was gone, its dullness had vanished—to be replaced by an intentness, a grimness of determination which almost frightened her.
Young Crane backed down the steps ignominiously, reached the walk, and without a word turned and walked down the street, slowly, slowly, as one walks who is afraid but who is more afraid of showing that he is afraid…. Angus moved his feet uneasily, and his hands passed up and down the seams of his trousers ​as if in vain search for pockets to hide in. He avoided Lydia’s eyes.
“I—I must ask after Uncle Dave,” he said in a low voice.
“Angus—” Lydia began, then abruptly said “Good night,” and hastily turned from him and disappeared into the house. Angus had awed her, impressed her. Never again would she be able to feel that his weakness might lean upon her strength, and she resented it. She was losing the stellar rôle…. Something within Lydia arose in that moment and spoke truly to her. It told her, and she knew it for fact, that Angus Burke was the stronger of the two.