Before we left it was past midnight and we drove home, almost silent, in the darkness.
"Doctor McAlway," I said, "if Old Toombs could know the history of this night it might change his point of view."
"I doot it," said the Scotch Preacher. "I doot it."
The night passed serenely; the morning saw Old Toombs's hedge standing as gorgeous as ever. The community had again stepped aside and let Old Toombs have his way: they had let him alone, with all his great barns, his wide acres and his wonderful hedge.
He probably never even knew what had threatened him that night, nor how the forces of religion, of social order, of neighbourliness in the community which he despised had, after all, held him safe. There is a supreme faith among common people--it is, indeed, the very taproot of democracy--that although the unfriendly one may persist long in his power and arrogance, there is a moving Force which commands events.
I suppose if I were writing a mere story I should tell how Old Toombs was miraculously softened at the age of sixty-eight years, and came into new relationships with his neighbours, or else I should relate how the mills of God, grinding slowly, had crushed the recalcitrant human atom into dust.
Either of these results conceivably might have happened--all things are possible--and being ingeniously related would somehow have answered a need in the human soul that the logic of events be constantly and conclusively demonstrated in the lives of individual men and women.
But as a matter of fact, neither of these things did happen in this quiet community of ours. There exists, assuredly, a logic of events, oh, a terrible, irresistible logic of events, but it is careless of the span of any one man's life. We would like to have each man enjoy the sweets of his own virtues and suffer the lash of his own misdeeds--but it rarely so happens in life. No, it is the community which lives or dies, is regenerated or marred by the deeds of men.
So Old Toombs continued to live. So he continued to buy more land, raise more cattle, collect more interest, and the wonderful hedge continued to flaunt its marvels still more notably upon the country road. To what end? Who knows? Who knows?
I saw him afterward from time to time, tried to maintain some sort of friendly relations with him; but it seemed as the years passed that he grew ever lonelier and more bitter, and not only more friendless, but seemingly more incapable of friendliness. In times past I have seen what men call tragedies--I saw once a perfect young man die in his strength--but it seems to me I never knew anything more tragic than the life and death of Old Toombs.
If it cannot be said of a man when he dies that either his nation, his state, his neighborhood, his family, or at least his wife or child, is better for his having lived, what CAN be said for him?
Old Toombs is dead. Like Jehoram, King of Judah, of whom it is terribly said in the Book of Chronicles, "he departed without being desired."
Of this story of Nathan Toombs we talked much and long there in the Ransome home. I was with them, as I said, about two days--kept inside most of the time by a driving spring rain which filled the valley with a pale gray mist and turned all the country roads into running streams. One morning, the weather having cleared, I swung my bag to my shoulder, and with much warmth of parting I set my face again to the free road and the open country.
