CHAPTER XXIII.—HORACE’S PATH BECOMES TORTUOUS.
“Tracy has found out that I’m doing the Minster business, and he’s cut up rough about it. I shouldn’t be surprised if the firm came a cropper over the thing.”
Horace Boyce confided this information to Mr. Schuyler Tenney on the forenoon following his scene with Reuben, and though the language in which it was couched was in part unfamiliar, the hardware merchant had no difficulty in grasping its meaning. He stopped his task of going through the morning’s batch of business letters, and looked up keenly at the young man.
“Found out—how do you mean? I told you to tell him—told you the day you came here to talk about the General’s affairs.”
“Well, I didn’t tell him.”
“And why?” Tenney demanded, sharply. “I should like to know why?”
“Because it didn’t suit me to do so,” replied the young man; “just as it doesn’t suit me now to be bullied about it.”
Mr. Tenney looked for just a fleeting instant as if he were going to respond in kind. Then he thought better of it, and began toying with one of the envelopes before him.
“You must have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning,” he said, smilingly. “Why, man alive, nobody dreamed of bullying you. Only, of course, it would have been better if you’d told Tracy. And you say he is mad about it?”
“Yes, he was deucedly offensive. I daresay it will come to an open row. I haven’t seen him yet to-day, but things looked very dickey indeed for the partnership last night.”
“Then the firm hasn’t got any specified term to run?”
“No, it is terminable at pleasure of both parties, which of course means either party.”
“Well, there, you can tell him to go to the old Harry, if you like.”
“Precisely what I mean to do—if—”
“If what?”
“If there is going to be enough in this Minster business to keep me going in the mean while. I don’t think I could take much of his regular office business away. I haven’t been there long enough, you know.”
“Enough? I Should think there would be enough! You will have five thousand dollars as her representative in the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. I daresay you might charge something for acting as her agent in the pig-iron trust, too, though I’d draw it pretty mild if I were you. Women get scared at bills for that sort of thing. A young fellow like you ought to save money on half of five thousand dollars. It never cost me fifteen hundred dollars yet to live, and live well, too.”
Horace smiled in turn, and the smile was felt by both to suffice, without words. There was no need to express in terms the fact that in matters of necessary expense a Boyce and a Tenney, were two widely differentiated persons. Only perhaps. Horace had more satisfaction out of the thought than did his companion.
“Oh, by the way,” he added, “I ought to tell you, Tracy knows in some way that you are mixed up with me in the thing. He mentioned your name—in that slow, ox-like way of his so that I couldn’t tell how much he knew or suspected.”
Mr. Tenney was interested in this; and showed his concern by separating the letters on his desk into little piles, as if he were preparing to perform a card tricks:
“I guess it won’t matter, much,” he said at last. “Everybody’s going to know it pretty soon, now.” He thought again for a little, and then added: “Only, on second thought, you’d better stick in with him a while longer, if you can. Make some sort of apology to him, if he needs one, and keep in the firm. It will be better so.”
“Why should I, pray?” demanded the young man, curtly.
Mr. Tenney again looked momentarily as if he were tempted to reply with acerbity, and again the look vanished as swiftly as it came. He answered in all mildness:
“Because I don’t want Tracy to be sniffing around, inquiring into things, until we are fairly in the saddle. He might spoil everything.”
“But how will my remaining with him prevent that?”
“You don’t know your man,” replied Tenney. “He’s one of those fellows who would feel in honor bound to keep his hands off, simply because you were with him. That’s the beauty of that kind of chap.”
This tribute to the moral value of his partner impressed Horace but faintly. “Well, I’ll see how he talks to-day,” he said, doubtfully. “Perhaps we can manage to hit it off together a while longer.” Then a thought crossed his mind, and he asked with abruptness:
“What are you afraid of his finding out, if he does ‘sniff around’ as you call it? What is there to find out? Everything is above board, isn’t it?”
“Why, you know it is. Who should know it better than you?” Mr. Tenney responded.
Horace reasoned to himself as he walked away that there really was no cause for apprehension. Tenney was smart, and evidently Wendover was smart too, but if they tried to pull the wool over his eyes they would find that he himself had not been born yesterday. He had done everything they had suggested to him, but he felt that the independent and even captious manner in which he had done it all must have shown the schemers that he was not a man to be trifled with. Thus far he could see no dishonesty in their plans. He had been very nervous about the first steps, but his mind was almost easy now. He was in a position where he could protect the Minsters if any harm threatened them. And very soon now, he said confidently to himself, he would be in an even more enviable position—that of a member of the family council, a prospective son-in-law. It was clear to his perceptions that Kate liked him, and that he had no rivals.
It happened that Reuben did not refer again to the subject of yesterday’s dispute, and while Horace acquiesced in the silence, he was conscious of some disappointment over it. It annoyed him to even look at his partner this morning, and he was sick and tired of the partnership. It required an effort to be passing civil with Reuben, and he said to himself a hundred times during the day that he should be heartily glad when the Thessaly Manufacturing Company got its new machinery in, and began real operations, so that he could take up his position there as the visible agent of the millions, and pitch his partner and the pettifogging law business overboard altogether.
In the course of the afternoon he went to the residence of the Minsters. The day was not Tuesday, but Horace regarded himself as emancipated from formal conditions, and at the door asked for the ladies, and then made his own way into the drawing-room, with entire self-possession.
When Mrs. Minster came down, he had some trivial matter of business ready as a pretext for his visit, but her manner was so gracious that he felt pleasantly conscious of the futility of pretexts. He was on such a footing in the Minster household that he would never need excuses any more.
The lady herself mentioned the plan of his attending the forthcoming meeting of the directors of the pig-iron trust at Pittsburg, and told him that she had instructed her bankers to deposit with his bankers a lump sum for expenses chargeable against the estate, which he could use at discretion. “You mustn’t be asked to use your own money on our business,” she said, smilingly.
It is only natural to warm toward people who have such nice things as this to say, and Horace found himself assuming a very confidential, almost filial, attitude toward Mrs. Minster. Her kindness to him was so marked that he felt really moved by it, and in a gracefully indirect way said so. He managed this by alluding to his own mother, who had died when he was a little boy, and then dwelling, with a tender inflection in his voice, upon the painful loneliness which young men feel who are brought up in motherless homes. “It seems as if I had never known a home at all,” he said, and sighed.
“She was one of the Beekmans from Tyre, wasn’t she? I’ve heard Tabitha speak of her often,” said Mrs. Minster. The words were not important, but the look which accompanied them was distinctly sympathetic.
Perhaps it was this glance that affected Horace. He made a little gulping sound in his throat, clinched his hands together, and looked fixedly down upon the pattern of the carpet.
“We should both have been better men if she had lived’,” he murmured, in a low voice.
As no answer came, he was forced to look up after a time, and then upon the instant he realized that his pathos had been wasted, for Mrs. Minster’s face did not betray the emotion he had anticipated. She seemed to have been thinking of something else.
“Have you seen any Bermuda potatoes in the market yet?” she asked. “It’s about time for them, isn’t it?”
“I’ll ask my father,” Horace replied, determined not to be thrown off the trail. “He has been in the West Indies a good deal, and he knows all about their vegetables, and the seasons, and so on. It is about him that I wish to speak, Mrs. Minster.”
The lady nodded her head, and drew down the comers of her mouth a little.
“I feel the homeless condition of the General very much,” Horace went on. “The death of my mother was a terrible blow to him, one he has never recovered from.”
Mrs. Minster had heard differently, but she nodded her head again in sympathy with this new view. Horace had not been mistaken in believing that filial affection was good in her eyes.
“So he has lived all these years almost alone in the big house,” the son proceeded, “and the solitary life has affected his spirits, weakened his ambition, relaxed his regard for the part he ought to play in the community. Since I have been back, he has brightened up a good deal. He has been a most loving father to me always, and I would do anything in the world to contribute to his happiness. It is borne in upon me more and more that if I had a cheerful home to which he could turn for warmth and sunshine, if I had a wife whom he could reverence and be fond of, if there were grandchildren to greet him when he came and to play upon his knee—he would feel once more as if there was something in life worth living for.”
Horace awaited with deep anxiety the answer to this. The General was the worst card in his hand, one which he was glad to be rid of at any risk. If it should turn out that it had actually taken a trick in the game, then he would indeed be lucky.
“If it is no offence, how old are you, Mr. Boyce?” the lady asked.
“I shall be twenty-eight in April.”
Mrs. Minster seemed to approve the figures. “I never have believed in early marriages,” she said. “They make more than half the trouble there is. The Mauverensens were never great hands for marrying early. My grandfather, Major Douw, was almost thirty, and my father was past that age. And, of course, people married then much earlier than they do nowadays.”
“I hope you do not think twenty-eight too young,” Horace pleaded, with alert eyes resting on her face. He paused only for an instant, and then, just as the tremor arising in his heart had reached his tongue, added earnestly, “For it is a Mauverensen I wish to marry.”
Mrs. Minster looked at him with no light of comprehension in her glance. “It can’t be our people,” she said, composedly, “for Anthony has no daughters. It must be some of the Schenectady lot. We’re not related at all. They try to make out that they are, but they’re not.”
“You are very closely and tenderly related to the young lady I have learned to adore,” the young man said, leaning forward on his low chair until one knee almost touched the carpet. “I called her a Mauverensen because she is worthy of that historic blood, but it was her mother’s, not her father’s name. Mrs. Minster, I love your daughter Kate!”
“Goodness me!” was the astonished lady’s comment.
She stared at the young man in suppliant attitude before her, in very considerable confusion of thought, and for what seemed to him an intolerable time.
“I am afraid it wouldn’t do at all,” she said first, doubtingly. Then she added, as if thinking aloud: “I might have known Kate was keeping something from me. She hasn’t been herself at all these last few weeks.”
“But she has not been keeping this from you, Mrs. Minster,” urged the young man, in his softest voice. “It is my own secret—all my own—kept locked in the inner tabernacle of my heart until this very moment, when I revealed it to you.”
“You mean that Kate—my daughter—does not know of this?”
“She must know that I worship the ground she treads on—she would be blind not to realize that—but I have never said a word to her about it. No, not a word!”
Mrs. Minster uttered the little monosyllable “oh!” with a hesitating, long-drawn-out sound. It was evident that this revelation altered matters in her mind, and Horace hurried on:
“No,” he said; “the relation between mother and child has always seemed to pie the most sacred thing on earth—perhaps because my own mother died so many, many years ago. I would rather stifle my own feelings than let an act of mine desecrate or imperil that relation. It may be that I am old-fashioned, Mrs. Minster,” the young man continued, with a deprecatory smile, “but I like the old habit of the good families—that of deferring to the parents. I say that to them the chief courtesy and deference are due. I know it is out of date, but I have always felt that way. So I speak to you first. I say to you with profound respect that you have reared the loveliest and best of all the daughters of the sons of men, and that if you will only entertain the idea of permitting me to strive to win her love, I shall be the proudest and happiest mortal on earth.”
Whatever might betide with the daughter, the conquest of the mother was easy and complete.
“I like your sentiments very much indeed,” she said, with evident sincerity. “And I like you too. I may as well tell you so. Of course I haven’t the least idea what Kate will say.”
“Oh, leave that to me!” said Horace, with ardent confidence. Then, after this rapturous outburst, he went on more quietly: “I would beg of you not to mention the subject to her. I think that would be best. Your favor has allowed me to come and go here on pleasant terms of friendship. Let these terms not be altered. I will not ask your daughter to commit herself until she has had time and chance to know me through and through. It would not be fair to her otherwise. To pick a husband is the one grand, irrevocable step in a young girl’s life. Its success means bliss, content, sunshine; its failure means all that is the reverse. Therefore, I say, she cannot have too much information, too many advantages, to help her in her choice.”
Thus it came to be understood that Mrs. Minster was to say nothing, and was not to seem to make more of Horace than she had previously done.
Then he bowed over her hand and lightly kissed it, in a fashion which the good lady fondly assumed to be European, and was gone.
Mrs. Minster spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in a semi-dazed abstraction of mental power, from time to time fitfully remembering some wealthy young man whom she had vaguely considered as a possible son-in-law, and sighing impartially over each mustached and shirt-fronted figure as she pushed it out into the limbo of the might-have-been. She almost groaned once when she recalled that this secret must be kept even from her friend Tabitha.
As for Horace, he walked on air. The marvel of his great success surrounded and lifted him, as angels bear the souls of the blessed fleeting from earth in the artist’s dream. The young Bonaparte, home from Italy and the reproduction of Hannibal’s storied feat, with Paris on its knees before him and France resounding with his name, could not have swung his shoulders more proudly, or gazed upon unfolding destiny with a more exultant confidence.
On his way homeward an instinctive desire to be alone with his joy led him to choose unfrequented streets, and on one of these he passed a milliner’s shop which he had never seen before. He would not have noted it now, save that his eye was unconsciously caught by some stray freak of color in the window where bonnets were displayed. Then, still unconsciously, his vision embraced the glass door beside this window, and there suddenly it was arrested and turned to a bewildered stare.
In the dusk of the little shop nothing could be distinguished but two figures which stood close by the door. The dying light from the western sky, ruddily brilliant and penetrating in its final glow, fell full upon the faces of these two as they were framed in profile by the door.
One was the face of Kate Minster, the woman he was to wed. The other was the face of Jessica Law-ton, the woman whose life he had despoiled.
Horace realized nothing else so swiftly as that he had not been seen, and, with an instinctive lowering of the head and a quickened step, he passed on. It was not until he had got out of the street altogether that he breathed a long breath and was able to think. Then he found himself trembling with excitement, as if he had been through a battle or a burning house.
Reflection soon helped his nerves to quietude again. Evidently the girl had opened a millinery shop, and evidently Miss Minster was buying a bonnet of her. That was all there was of it, and surely there was no earthly cause for perturbation in that. The young man had thought so lightly of the Law-ton incident at Thanksgiving time that it had never since occurred to him to ask Tracy about its sequel.
It came to his mind now that Tracy had probably helped her to start the shop. “Damn Tracy!” he said to himself.
No, there was nothing to be uneasy about in the casual, commercial meeting of these two women. He became quite clear on this point as he strode along toward home. At his next meeting with Kate it might do no harm to mention having seen her there in passing, and to drop a hint as to the character of the girl whom she was dealing with. He would see how the talk shaped itself, after the Law-ton woman’s name had been mentioned. It was a great nuisance, her coming to Thessaly, anyway. He didn’t wish her any special harm, but if she got in his way here she should be crushed like an insect. But, pshaw! it was silly to conceive injury or embarrassment coming from her.
So with a laugh he dismissed the subject from his thoughts, and went home to dine with his father, and gladdened the General’s heart by a more or less elaborated account of the day’s momentous event, in complete forgetfulness of the shock he had had.
In the dead of the night, however, he did think of it again with a vengeance. He awoke screaming, and cold with frightened quakings, under the spell of some hideous nightmare. When he thought upon them, the terrors of his dream were purely fantastic and could not be shaped into any kind of coherent form. But the profile of the Lawton girl seemed to be a part of all these terrors, a twisted and elongated side-face, with staring, empty eyes and lips down-drawn like those of the Medusa’s head, and yet, strangely enough, with a certain shifting effect of beauty upon it all under the warm light of a winter sunset.
Horace lay a long time awake, deliberately striving to exorcise this repellent countenance by fixing his thoughts upon the other face—the strong, beautiful, queenly face of the girl who was to be his wife. But he could not bring up before his mind’s eye this picture that he wanted, and he could not drive the other away.
Sleep came again somehow, and there were no more bad dreams to be remembered. In the morning Horace did not even recall very distinctly the episode of the nightmare, but he discovered some novel threads of gray at his temple as he brushed his hair, and for the first time in his life, too, he took a drink of spirits before breakfast.
CHAPTER XXIV.—A VEHEMENT RESOLVE.
The sloppy snow went away at last, and the reluctant frost was forced to follow, yet not before it had wreaked its spite by softening all the country roads into dismal swamps of mud, and heaving into painful confusion of holes and hummocks the pavements on Thessaly’s main streets. But in compensation the birds came back, and the crocus and hyacinth showed themselves, and buds warmed to life again along the tender silk-brown boughs and melted into the pale bright green of a springs new foliage. Overcoats disappeared, and bare-legged boys with poles and strings of fish dawned upon the vision. The air was laden with the perfume of lilacs and talk about baseball.
From this to midsummer seemed but a step. The factory workmen walked more wearily up the hill in the heat to their noonday dinners; lager-beer kegs advanced all at once to be the chief staple of freight traffic at the railway dépôt. People who could afford to take travelling vacations began to make their plans or to fulfil them, and those who could not began musing pleasantly upon the charms of hop-picking in September. And then, lo! it was autumn, and young men added with pride another unit to the sum of their age, and their mothers and sisters secretly subtracted such groups or fractions of units as were needful, and felt no more compunction at thus hoodwinking Time than if he had been a customs-officer.
The village of Thessaly, which like a horizon encompassed most of the individuals whom we know, could tell little more than this of the months that had passed since Thanksgiving Day, now once again the holiday closest at hand. The seasons of rest and open-air amusement lay behind it, and in front was a vista made of toil. There had been many deaths, and still more numerous births, and none in either class mattered much save under the roof-tree actually blessed or afflicted. The year had been fairly prosperous, and the legislature had passed the bill which at New Year’s would enable the village to call itself a city.
Of the people with whom this story is concerned, there is scarcely more to record during this lapse of time.
Jessica Lawton was perhaps the one most conscious of change. At the very beginning of spring, indeed on the very day when Horace had his momentary fright in passing the shop, Miss Minster had visited her, had brought a reasonably comprehensive plan for the Girls’ Resting House, as she wanted it called, and had given her a considerable sum of money to carry out this plan. For a long time it puzzled Jessica a good deal that Miss Minster never came again. The scheme took on tangible form; some score of work-girls availed themselves of its privileges, and the result thus far involved less friction and more substantial success than Jessica had dared to expect. It seemed passing strange that Miss Minster, who had been so deeply enthusiastic at first, should never have cared to come and see the enterprise, now that it was in working order. Once or twice Miss Tabitha had dropped in, and professed to be greatly pleased with everything, but even in her manner there was an indefinable alteration which forbade questions about the younger lady.
There were rumors about in the town which might have helped Jessica to an explanation had they reached her. The village gossips did not fail to note that the Minster family made a much longer sojourn this year at Newport, and then at Brick Church, New Jersey, than they had ever done before; and gradually the intelligence sifted about that young Horace Boyce had spent a considerable portion of his summer vacation with them. Thessaly could put two and two together as well as any other community. The understanding little by little spread its way that Horace was going to marry into the Minster millions.
If there were repinings over this foreseen event, they were carefully dissembled. People who knew the young man liked him well enough. His professional record was good, and he had made a speech on the Fourth of July which pleased everybody except ’Squire Gedney; but then, the spiteful old “Cal” never liked anybody’s speeches save his own. Even more satisfaction was felt, however, on the score of the General. His son was a showy young fellow, smart and well-dressed, no doubt, but perhaps a trifle too much given to patronizing folks who had not been to Europe, and did not scrub themselves all over with cold water, and put on a clean shirt with both collar and cuffs attached, every morning. But for the General there was a genuine affection. It pleased Thessaly to note that, since he had begun to visit at the home of the Minsters, other signs of social rehabilitation had followed, and that he himself drank less and led a more orderly life than of yore. When his intimates jokingly congratulated him on the rumors of his son’s good fortune, the General tacitly gave them confirmation by his smile.
If Jessica had heard these reports, she might have traced at once to its source Miss Minster’s sudden and inexplicable coolness. Not hearing them, she felt grieved and perplexed for a time, and then schooled herself into resignation as she recalled Reuben Tracy’s warning about the way rich people took up whims and dropped them again, just as fancy dictated.
It was on the first day of November that the popular rumor as to Horace’s prospects reached her, and this was a day memorable for vastly more important occurrences in the history of industrial Thessaly.
The return of cold weather had been marked, among other signs of the season, by a renewed disposition on the part of Ben Lawton to drop in to the millinery shop, and sit around by the fire in the inner room. Ben came this day somewhat earlier than usual—the midday meal was in its preliminary stages of preparation under Lucinda’s red hands—and it was immediately evident that he was more excited over something that had happened outside than by his expectation of getting a dinner.
“There’s the very old Nick to pay down in the village!” he said, as he put his feet on the stove-hearth. “Heard about it, any of you?”
Ben had scarcely ascended in the social scale during the scant year that had passed, though the general average of whiteness in his paper collars had somewhat risen, and his hair and straggling dry-mud-colored beard were kept more duly under the subjection of shears. His clothes, too, were whole and unworn, but they hung upon his slouching and round-shouldered figure with “poor white” written in every misfitting fold and on every bagging projection. Jessica had resigned all hope that he would ever be anything but a canal boatman in mien or ambition, but her affection for him had grown rather than diminished; and she was glad that Lucinda, in whom there had been more marked personal improvements, seemed also to like him better.
No, Jessica said, she had heard nothing.
“Well, the Minster furnaces was all shut down this morning, and so was the work out at the ore-beds at Juno, and the men, boys, and girls in the Thessaly Company’s mills all got word that wages was going to be cut down. You can bet there’s a buzz around town, with them three things coming all together, smack!”
“I suppose so,” answered Jessica, still bending over her work of cleaning and picking out some plumes. “That looks bad for business this winter, doesn’t it?”
Ben’s relations with business, or with industry generally, were of the most remote and casual sort, but he had a lively objective interest in the topic.
“Why, it’s the worst thing that ever happened,” he said, with conviction. “There’s seven hundred men thrown out already” (the figure was really two hundred and twelve), “and more than a thousand more got to git unless they’ll work for starvation wages.”
“It seems very hard,” the girl made reply. The idea came to her that very possibly this would put an extra strain upon the facilities and financial strength of the Resting House.
“Hard!” her father exclaimed, stretching his hands over the stove-top; “them rich people are harder than Pharaoh’s heart. What do them Minsters care about poor folks, whether they starve or freeze to death, or anything?”
“Oh, it is the Minsters, you say!” Jessica looked up now, with a new interest. “Sure enough, they own the furnaces. How could they have done such a thing, with winter right ahead of us?”
“It’s all to make more money,” put in Lucinda. “Them that don’t need it’ll do anything to get it. What do they care? That Kate Minster of yours, for instance, she’ll wear her sealskin and eat pie just the same. What does it matter to her?”
“No; she has a good heart. I know she has,” said Jessica. “She wouldn’t willingly do harm to any one. But perhaps she has nothing to do with managing such things. Yes, that must be it.”
“I guess Schuyler Tenney and Hod Boyce about run the thing, from what I hear,” commented the father. “Tenney’s been bossing around since summer begun, and Boyce is the lawyer, so they say.”
Ben suddenly stopped, and looked first at Jessica, then at Lucinda. Catching the latter’s eye, he made furtive motions to her to leave the room; but she either did not or would not understand them, and continued stolidly at her work.
“That Kate you spoke about,” he went on stum-blingly, nodding hints at Lucinda to go away as he spoke, “she’s the tall girl, with the black eyes and her chin up in the air, ain’t she?”
“Yes,” the two sisters answered, speaking together.
“Well, as I was saying about Hod Boyce,” Ben said, and then stopped in evident embarrassment. Finally he added, confusedly avoiding Jessica’s glance, “‘Cindy, won’t you jest step outside for a minute? I want to tell your sister something—something you don’t know about.”
“She knows about Horace Boyce, father,” said Jessica, flushing, but speaking calmly. “There is no need of her going.”
Lucinda, however, wiped her hands on her apron, and went out into the store, shutting the door behind her. Then Ben, ostentatiously regarding the hands he held out over the stove, and turning them as if they had been fowls on a spit, sought hesitatingly for words with which to unbosom himself.
“You see,” he began, “as I was a-saying, Hod Boyce is the lawyer, and he’s pretty thick with Schuyler Tenney, his father’s partner, which, of course, is only natural; and Tenney he kind of runs the whole thing—and—and that’s it, don’t you see!”
“You didn’t send Lucinda out in order to tell me that, surely?”
“Well, no. But Hod being the lawyer, as I said, why, don’t you see, he has a good deal to say for himself with the women-folks, and he’s been off with them down to the sea-side, and so it’s come about that they say—”
“They say what?” The girl had laid down her work altogether.
“They say he’s going to marry the girl you call Kate—the big one with the black eyes.”
The story was out. Jessica sat still under the revelation for a moment, and held up a restraining hand when her father offered to speak further. Then she rose and walked to and fro across the little room, in front of the stove where Ben sat, her hands hanging at her side and her brows bent with thought. At last she stopped before him and said:
“Tell me all over again about the stopping of the works—all you know about it.”
Ben Lawton complied, and re-stated, with as much detail as he could command, the facts already exposed.
The girl listened carefully, but with growing disappointment.
Somehow the notion had arisen in her mind that there would be something important in this story—something which it would be of use to understand. But her brain could make nothing significant out of this commonplace narrative of a lockout and a threatened dispute about wages. Gradually, as she thought, two things rose as certainties upon the surface of her reflections.
“That scoundrel is to blame for both things. He advised her to avoid me, and he advised her to do this other mischief.”
“I thought you’d like to know,” Ben put in, deferentially. He felt a very humble individual indeed when his eldest daughter paced up and down and spoke in that tone.
“Yes, I’m glad I know,” she said, swiftly. She eyed her father in an abstracted way for an instant, and then added, as if thinking aloud: “Well, then, my fine gentleman, you—simply—shall—not—marry Miss Minster!”
Ben moved uneasily in his seat, as if this warning had been personally addressed to him. “It would be pretty rough, for a fact, wouldn’t it?” he said.
“Well, it won’t be at all!” she made emphatic answer.
“I don’t know as you can do much to pervent it, Jess,” he ventured to say.
“Can’t I? Cant I!” she exclaimed, with grim earnestness. “Wait and see.”
Ben had waited all his life, and he proceeded now to take her at her word, sitting very still, and fixing a ruminative gaze on the side of the little stove. “All right,” he said, wrapped in silence and the placidity of contented suspense.
But Jessica was now all eagerness and energy. She opened the store door, and called out to Lucinda with business-like decision of tone: “Come in now, and hurry dinner up as fast as you can. I want to catch the 1.20 train for Tecumseh.”
The other two made no comment on this hasty resolve, but during the brief and not over-inviting meal which followed, watched their kinswoman with side-glances of uneasy surprise. The girl herself hastened through her dinner without a word of conversation, and then disappeared within the little chamber where she and Lucinda slept together.
It was only when she came out again, with her hat and cloak on and a little travelling-bag in her hand, that she felt impelled to throw some light on her intention. She took from her purse a bank-note and gave it to her sister.
“Shut up the store at half-past four or five today,” she said; “and there are two things I want you to do for me outside. Go around the furniture stores, and get some kind of small sofa that will turn into a bed at night, and whatever extra bed-clothes we need for it—as cheap as you can. We’ve got a pillow to spare, haven’t we? You can put those two chairs out in the Resting House; that will make a place for the bed in this room. You must have it all ready when I get back to-morrow night. You needn’t say anything to the girls, except that I am away for a day. And then—or no: you can do it better, father.”
The girl had spoken swiftly, but with ready precision. As she turned now to the wondering Ben, she lost something of her collected demeanor, and hesitated for a moment.
“I want you—I want you to see Reuben Tracy, and ask him to come here at six to-morrow,” she said. She deliberated upon this for an instant, and held out her hand as if she had changed her mind. Then she nodded, and said: “Or no: tell him I will come to his office, and at six sharp. It will be better that way.”
When she had perfunctorily kissed them both, and gone, silence fell upon the room. Ben took his pipe out of his pocket and looked at it with tentative longing, and then at the stove.
“You can go out in the yard and smoke, if you want to, but not in here,” said Lucinda, promptly. “You wouldn’t dare think of such a thing if she were here,” she added, with reproach.
Ben put back his pipe and seated himself again by the fire. “Mighty queer girl, that, eh?” he said. “When she gets stirred up, she’s a hustler, eh?”
“It must be she takes it from you,” said Lucinda, with a modified grin of irony.
The sarcasm fell short of its mark. “No,” said Ben, with quiet candor, “she gets it from my father. He used to count on licking a lock-tender somewhere along the canal every time he made a trip. I remember there was one particular fellow on the Montezuma Ma’ash that he used to whale for choice, but any of ’em would do on a pinch. He was jest blue-mouldy for a fight all the while, your grandfather was. He was Benjamin Franklin Lawton, the same as me, but somehow I never took much to rassling round or fighting. It’s more in my line to take things easy.”
Lucinda bore an armful of dishes out into the kitchen, without making any reply, and Ben, presently wearying of solitude, followed to where she bent over the sink, enveloped in soap-suds and steam.
“I suppose you’ve got an idea what she’s gone for?” he propounded, with caution.
“It’s a ‘who’ she’s gone for,” said Lucinda.
Pronouns were not Ben’s strong point, and he said, “Yes, I suppose it is,” rather helplessly. He waited in patience for more information, and by and by it came.
“If I was her, I wouldn’t do it,” said Lucinda, slapping a plate impatiently with the wet cloth.
“No, I don’t suppose you would. In some ways you always had more sense than people give you credit for, ‘Cindy,” remarked the father, with guarded flattery. “Jess, now, she’s one of your hoity-toity kind—flare up and whirl around like a wheel on a tree in the Fourth of July fireworks.”
“She’s head and shoulders above all the other Lawtons there ever was or ever will be, and don’t you forget it!” declared the loyal Lucinda, with fervor.
“That’s what I say always,” assented Ben. “Only—I thought you said you didn’t think she was quite right in doing what she’s going to do.”
“It’s right enough; only she was happy here, and this’ll make her miserable again—though, of course, she was always letting her mind run on it, and perhaps she’ll enjoy having it with her—only the girls may talk—and—”
Lucinda let her sentence die off unfinished in a rattle of knives and spoons in the dish-pan. Her mind was sorely perplexed.
“Well, Cindy,” said Ben, in the frankness of despair, “I’m dot-rotted if I know what you are talking about.” He grew pathetic as he went on: “I’m your father and I’m her father, and there ain’t neither of you got a better friend on earth than I be; but you never tell me anything, any more’n as if I was a last year’s bird’s-nest.”
Lucinda’s reserve yielded to this appeal. “Well, dad,” she said, with unwonted graciousness of tone, “Jess has gone to Tecumseh to bring back—to bring her little boy. She hasn’t told me so, but I know it.”
The father nodded his head in comprehension, and said nothing. He had vaguely known of the existence of the child, and he saw more or less clearly the reason for this present step. The shame and sorrow which were fastened upon his family through this grandson whom he had never seen, and never spoken of above a whisper, seemed to rankle in his heart with a new pain of mingled bitterness and compassion.
He mechanically took out his pipe, filled it from loose tobacco in his pocket, and struck a match to light it. Then he recalled that the absent daughter! objected to his smoking in the house, on account of the wares in her shop, and let the flame burn itself out in the coal-scuttle. A whimsical query as to whether this calamitous boy had also been named Benjamin Franklin crossed his confused mind, and then it perversely raised the question whether the child, if so named, would be a “hustler” or not. Ben leaned heavily against the door-sill, and surrendered himself to humiliation.
“What I don’t understand,” he heard Lucinda saying after a time, “is why she took this spurt all of a sudden.”
“It’s all on account of that Gawd-damned Hod Boyce!” groaned Ben.
“Yes; you told her something about him. What was it?”
“Only that they all say that he’s going to marry that big Minster girl—the black-eyed one.”
Lucinda turned away from the sink, threw down her dish-cloth with a thud, and put her arms akimbo and her shoulders well back. Watching her, Ben felt that somehow this girl, too, took after her grandfather rather than him.
“Oh, is he!” she said, her voice high-pitched and vehement. “I guess we’ll have something to say about that!”