CHAPTER III
MRS. WHITNEY INTERVENES
As Hiram had always been silent and seemingly abstracted, no one but Ellen noted the radical change in him. She had brought up her children in the old-fashioned way—her thoughts, and usually her eyes, upon them all day, and one ear open all night. When she no longer had them to guard, she turned all this energy of solicitude to her husband; thus the passionate love of her youth was having a healthy, beautiful old age. The years of circumventing the easily roused restiveness of her spirited boy and girl had taught her craft; without seeming to be watching Hiram, no detail of his appearance or actions escaped her.
"There's mighty little your pa don't see," had been one of her stock observations to the children from their earliest days. "And you needn't flatter yourselves he don't care because he don't speak." Now she noted that from under his heavy brows his eyes were looking stealthily out, more minutely observant than ever before, and that what he saw either added to his sadness or took a color of sadness from his mood. She guessed that the actions of Adelaide and Arthur, so utterly different from the actions of the children of her and Hiram's young days—except those regarded by all worth-while people as "trifling and trashy"—had something to do with Hiram's gloom. She decided that Arthur's failure and his lightness of manner in face of it were the chief trouble—this until Hiram's shoulders began to stoop and hollows to appear in his cheeks and under his ears, and a waxlike pallor to overspread his face. Then she knew that he was not well physically; and, being a practical woman, she dismissed the mental causes of the change. "People talk a lot about their mental troubles," she said to herself, "but it's usually three-fourths stomach and liver."
As Hiram and illness, real illness, could not be associated in her mind, she gave the matter no importance until she heard him sigh heavily one night, after they had been in bed several hours. "What is it, father?" she asked.
There was no answer, but a return to an imitation of the regular breathing of a sleeper.
"Hiram," she insisted, "what is it?"
"Nothing, Ellen, nothing," he answered; "I must have ate something that don't sit quite right."
"You didn't take no supper at all," said she.
This reminded him how useless it was to try to deceive her. "I ain't been feeling well of late," he confessed, "but it'll soon be over." He did not see the double meaning of his words until he had uttered them; he stirred uneasily in his dread that she would suspect. "I went to the doctor."
"What did he say?—though I don't know why I should ask what such a fool as Milbury said about anything."
"I got some medicine," replied he, evading telling her what doctor.
Instantly she sat up in bed. "I haven't seen you take no drugs!" she exclaimed. Drugs were her especial abhorrence. She let no one in the family take any until she had passed upon them.
"I didn't want to make a fuss," he explained.
"Where is it?" she demanded, on the edge of the bed now, ready to rise.
"I'll show it to you in the morning, mother. Lie down and go to sleep.
I've been awake long enough."
"Where is it?" she repeated, and he heard her moving across the room toward the gas fixture.
"In my vest pocket. It's a box of pills. You can't tell nothin' about it."
She lit the gas and went to his waistcoat, hanging where it always hung at night—on a hook beside the closet door. He watched her fumble through the pockets, watched her take her spectacles from the corner of the mantel and put them on, the bridge well down toward the end of her nose. A not at all romantic figure she made, standing beside the sputtering gas jet, her spectacles balanced on her nose, her thin neck and forearms exposed, and her old face studying the lid of the pill box held in her toil- and age-worn hands. The box dropped from her fingers and rolled along the floor. He saw an awful look slowly creep over her features as the terrible thought crept over her mind. As she began to turn her face toward him, with a motion of the head like that of a machine on unoiled bearings, he closed his eyes; but he felt her looking at him.
"Dr. Schulze!" she said, an almost soundless breathing of the name that always meant the last resort in mortal illness.
He was trying to think of lies to tell her, but he could think of nothing. The sense of light upon his eyelids ceased. He presently felt her slowly getting into bed. A pall-like silence; then upon his cheek, in long discontinued caress, a hand whose touch was as light and soft as the fall of a rose leaf—the hand of love that toil and age cannot make harsh, and her fingers were wet with her tears. Thus they lay in the darkness and silence, facing together the tragedy of the eternal separation.
"What did he say, dearest?" she asked. She had not used that word to him since the first baby came and they began to call each other "father" and "mother." All these years the children had been between them, and each had held the other important chiefly as related to them. Now it was as in their youth—just he and she, so close that only death could come between them.
"It's a long way off," said Hiram. He would not set ringing in her ears that knell which was clanging to him its solemn, incessant, menacing "Put your house in order!"
"Tell me what he said," she urged gently.
"He couldn't make out exactly. The medicine'll patch me up."
She did not insist—why fret him to confess what she knew the instant she read "Schulze" on the box? After an hour she heard him breathing as only a sleeper can breathe; but she watched on until morning. When they were dressing, each looked at the other furtively from time to time, a great tenderness in his eyes, and in hers the anguish of a dread that might not be spoken.
On the day after Mrs. Whitney's arrival for the summer, she descended in state from the hills to call upon the Rangers.
When the front bell rang Mrs. Ranger was in the kitchen—and was dressed for the kitchen. As the "girl" still had not been replaced she answered the door herself. In a gingham wrapper, with her glasses thrust up into her gray hair, she was facing a footman in livery.
"Are Mrs. Ranger and Miss Ranger at home?" asked he, mistaking her for a servant and eying her dishevelment with an expression which was not lost on her.
She smiled with heartiest good nature. "Yes, I'm here—I'm Mrs. Ranger," said she; and she looked beyond him to the victoria in which sat Mrs. Whitney. "How d'ye do, Matilda?" she called. "Come right in. As usual when the canneries are running, I'm my own upstairs girl. I reckon your young man here thinks I ought to discharge her and get one that's tidier."
"Your young man here" was stiffly touching the brim of his top hat and saying: "Beg parding, ma'am."
"Oh, that's all right," replied Mrs. Ranger; "I am what I look to be!"
Behind her now appeared Adelaide, her cheeks burning in mortification she was ashamed of feeling and still more ashamed of being unable to conceal. "Go and put on something else, mother," she urged in an undertone; "I'll look after Mrs. Whitney till you come down."
"Ain't got time," replied her mother, conscious of what was in her daughter's mind and a little contemptuous and a little resentful of it. "I guess Tilly Whitney will understand. If she don't, why, I guess we can bear up under it."
Mrs. Whitney had left her carriage and was advancing up the steps. She was a year older than Ellen Ranger; but so skillfully was she got together that, had she confessed to forty or even thirty-eight, one who didn't know would have accepted her statement as too cautious by hardly more than a year or so. The indisputably artificial detail in her elegant appearance was her hair; its tinting, which had to be made stronger year by year as the gray grew more resolute, was reaching the stage of hard, rough-looking red. "Another year or two," thought Adelaide, "and it'll make her face older than she really is. Even now she's getting a tough look."
Matilda kissed Mrs. Ranger and Adelaide affectedly on both cheeks. "I'm so glad to find you in!" said she. "And you, poor dear"—this to Mrs. Ranger—"are in agony over the servant question." She glanced behind her to make sure the carriage had driven away. "I don't know what we're coming to. I can't keep a man longer than six months. Servants don't appreciate a good home and good wages. As soon as a man makes acquaintances here he becomes independent and leaves. If something isn't done, the better class of people will have to move out of the country."
"Or go back to doing their own work," said Mrs. Ranger.
Mrs. Whitney smiled vaguely—a smile which said, "I'm too polite to answer that remark as it deserves."
"Why didn't you bring Jenny along?" inquired Mrs. Ranger, when they were in the "front parlor," the two older women seated, Adelaide moving restlessly about.
"Janet and Ross haven't come yet," answered Mrs. Whitney. "They'll be on next week, but only for a little while. They both like it better in the East. All their friends are there and there's so much more to do." Mrs. Whitney sighed; before her rose the fascination of all there was to "do" in the East—the pleasures she was denying herself.
"I don't see why you don't live in New York," said Mrs. Ranger. "You're always talking about it."
"Oh, I can't leave Charles!" was Mrs. Whitney's answer. "Or, rather he'd not hear of my doing it. But I think he'll let us take an apartment at Sherry's next winter—for the season, just—unless Janet and I go abroad."
Mrs. Ranger had not been listening. She now started up. "If you'll excuse me, Mattie, I must see what that cook's about. I'm afraid to let her out of my sight for five minutes for fear she'll up and leave."
"What a time your poor mother has!" said Mrs. Whitney, when she and
Adelaide were alone.
Del had recovered from her attack of what she had been denouncing to herself as snobbishness. For all the gingham wrapper and spectacles anchored in the hair and general air of hard work and no "culture," she was thinking, as she looked at Mrs. Whitney's artificiality and listened to those affected accents, that she was glad her mother was Ellen Ranger and not Matilda Whitney. "But mother doesn't believe she has a hard time," she answered, "and everything depends on what one believes oneself; don't you think so? I often envy her. She's always busy and interested. And she's so useful, such a happiness-maker."
"I often feel that way, too," responded Mrs. Whitney, in her most profusely ornate "grande dame" manner. "I get so bored with leading an artificial life. I often wish fate had been more kind to me. I was reading, the other day, that the Queen of England said she had the tastes of a dairy maid. Wasn't that charming? Many of us whom fate has condemned to the routine of high station feel the same way."
It was by such deliverances that Mrs. Whitney posed, not without success, as an intellectual woman who despised the frivolities of a fashionable existence—this in face of the obvious fact that she led a fashionable existence, or, rather, it led her, from the moment her masseuse awakened her in the morning until her maid undressed her at night. But, although Adelaide was far too young, too inexperienced to know that judgment must always be formed from actions, never from words, she was not, in this instance, deceived. "It takes more courage than most of us have," said she, "to do what we'd like instead of what vanity suggests."
Mrs. Whitney did not understand this beyond getting from it a vague sense that she had somehow been thrust at. "You must be careful of that skin of yours, Adele," she thrust back. "I've been looking at it. You can't have been home long, yet the exposure to the sun is beginning to show. You have one of those difficult, thin skins, and one's skin is more than half one's beauty. You ought never to go out without a veil. The last thing Ross said to me was, 'Do tell Adelaide to keep her color down.' You know he admires the patrician style."
Adelaide could not conceal the effect of the shot. Her skin was a great trial to her, it burned so easily; and she hated wrapping herself in under broad brims and thick veils when the feeling of bareheadedness was so delightful. "At any rate," said she sweetly, "it's easier to keep color down than to keep it up."
Mrs. Whitney pretended not to hear. She was now at the window which gave on the garden by way of a small balcony. "There's your father!" she exclaimed; "let's go to him."
There, indeed, was Hiram, pacing the walk along the end of the garden with a ponderousness in the movements of his big form that bespoke age and effort. It irritated Mrs. Whitney to look at him, as it had irritated her to look at Ellen; very painful were the reminders of the ravages of time from these people of about her own age, these whom she as a child had known as children. Crow's-feet and breaking contour and thin hair in those we have known only as grown people, do not affect us; but the same signs in lifelong acquaintances make it impossible to ignore Decay holding up the mirror to us and pointing to aging mouth and throat, as he wags his hideous head and says, "Soon—you, too!"
Hiram saw Matilda and his daughter the instant they appeared on the balcony, but he gave no hint of it until they were in the path of his monotonous march. He was nerving himself for Mrs. Whitney as one nerves himself in a dentist's chair for the descent of the grinder upon a sensitive tooth. Usually she got no further than her first sentence before irritating him. To-day the very sight of her filled him with seemingly causeless anger. There was a time when he, watching Matilda improve away from her beginnings as the ignorant and awkward daughter of the keeper of a small hotel, had approved of her and had wished that Ellen would give more time to the matter of looks. But latterly he had come to the conclusion that a woman has to choose between improving her exterior and improving her interior, and that it is impossible or all but impossible for her to do both; he therefore found in Ellen's very indifference to exteriors another reason why she seemed to him so splendidly the opposite of Charles's wife.
"You certainly look the same as ever, Hiram," Matilda said, advancing with extended, beautifully gloved hand. The expression of his eyes as he turned them upon her gave her a shock, but she forced the smile back into her face and went on, "Ross says you always make him think of a tower on top of a high hill, one that has always stood there and always will."
The gray shadow over Hiram's face grew grayer. "But you ought to rest," Mrs. Whitney went on. "You and Charles both ought to rest. It's ridiculous, the way American men act. Now, Charles has never taken a real vacation. When he does go away he has a secretary with him and works all day. But at least he gets change of scene, while you—you rarely miss a day at the mills."
"I haven't missed a whole day in forty-three years," replied Hiram, "except the day I got married, and I never expect to. I'll drop in the harness. I'd be lost without it."
"Don't you think that's a narrow view of life?" asked Mrs. Whitney. "Don't you think we ought all to take time to cultivate our higher natures?"
"What do you mean by higher natures?"
Mrs. Whitney scented sarcasm and insult. To interrogate a glittering generality is to slur its projector; she wished her hearers to be dazzled, not moved to the impertinence of cross-examination. "I think you understand me," she said loftily.
"I don't," replied Hiram. "I'm only a cooper and miller. I haven't had the advantages of a higher education"—this last with a steady look toward his son, approaching from the direction of the stables. The young man was in a riding suit that was too correct at every point for good taste, except in a college youth, and would have made upon anyone who had been born, or initiated into, the real mysteries of "good form" an impression similar to that of Mrs. Whitney's costume and accent and manner. There was the note of the fashion plate, the evidence of pains, of correctness not instinctive but studied—the marks our new-sprung obstreperous aristocracy has made familiar to us all. It would have struck upon a sense of humor like a trivial twitter from the oboe trickling through a lull in the swell of brasses and strings; but Hiram Ranger had no sense of humor in that direction, had only his instinct for the right and the wrong. The falseness, the absence of the quality called "the real thing," made him bitter and sad. And, when his son joined them and walked up and down with them, he listened with heavier droop of face and form to the affected chatter of the young "man of the world" and the old "grande dame" of Chicago society. They talked the language and the affairs of a world he had never explored and had no wish to explore; its code and conduct, his training, his reason and his instinct all joined in condemning as dishonorable shirking of a man's and woman's part in a universe so ordered that, to keep alive in it, everyone must either work or steal.
But his boy was delighted with the conversation, with Mrs. Whitney, and, finally, with himself. A long, hard ride had scattered his depression of many weeks into a mere haze over the natural sunshine of youth and health; this haze now vanished. When Mrs. Whitney referred to Harvard, he said lightly, "You know I was plucked."
"Ross told me," said she, in an amused tone; "but you'll get back all right next fall."
"I don't know that I care to go," said Arthur. "I've been thinking it over. I believe I've got about all the good a university can do a man. It seems to me a year or so abroad—traveling about, seeing the world—would be the best thing for me. I'm going to talk it over with father—as soon as he gets through being out of humor with me."
Hiram did not look at his son, who glanced a little uneasily at him as he unfolded this new scheme for perfecting his education as "man of the world."
"Surely your father's not angry" cried Mrs. Whitney, in a tone intended to make Hiram ashamed of taking so narrow, so rural, a view of his son's fashionable mischance.
"No," replied Hiram, and his voice sounded curt. He added, in an undertone: "I wish I were."
"You're wrong there, Hiram," said Mrs. Whitney, catching the words not intended for her, and misunderstanding them. "It's not a case for severity."
Arthur smiled, and the look he gave his father was a bright indication of the soundness of his heart. Severity! The idea was absurd in connection with the most generous and indulgent of fathers. "You don't get his meaning, Mrs. Whitney," said he. "I, too, wish he were angry. I'm afraid I've made him sad. You know he's got old-fashioned views of many things, and he can't believe I've not really disgraced him and myself."
"Do you believe it?" inquired Hiram, with a look at him as sudden and sharp as the ray of a search light.
"I know it, father," replied Arthur earnestly. "Am I not right,
Mrs. Whitney?"
"Don't be such an old fogy, Hiram," said Mrs. Whitney. "You ought to be thankful you've got a son like Arthur, who makes a splendid impression everywhere. He's the only western man that's got into exclusive societies at Harvard in years simply on his own merits, and he's a great favorite in Boston and in New York."
"My children need no one to defend them to me," said Hiram, in what might be called his quiet tone—the tone he had never in his life used without drying up utterly the discussion that had provoked it. Many people had noted the curious effect of that tone and had resolved to defy it at the next opportunity, "just to see what the consequences would be." But when the opportunity had come, their courage had always withered.
"You can't expect me to be like you, father. You wouldn't, want it," said Arthur, after the pause. "I must be myself, must develop my own individuality."
Ranger stopped and that stopped the others. Without looking at his son, he said slowly: "I ain't disputing that, boy. It ain't the question." There was tremendousness in his restrained energy and intensity as he went on: "What I'm thinking about is whether I ought to keep on helping you to 'develop' yourself, as you call it. That's what won't let me rest." And he abruptly walked away.
Mrs. Whitney and Arthur stared after him. "I don't think he's quite well,
Artie," she said reassuringly. "Don't worry. He'll come round all right.
But you ought to be a little more diplomatic."
Arthur was silent. Diplomacy meant deceit, and he hadn't yet reached the stage of polite and comfortable compromise where deceit figures merely as an amiable convenience for promoting smoothness in human intercourse. But he believed that his father would "come round all right," as Mrs. Whitney had so comfortingly said. How could it be otherwise when he had done nothing discreditable, but, on the contrary, had been developing himself in a way that reflected the highest credit upon his family, as it marched up toward the lofty goal of "cultured" ambition, toward high and secure social station.
Mrs. Whitney, however, did not believe her own statement. In large part her reputation of being a "good, kind sort," like many such reputations, rested on her habit of cheering on those who were going the wrong way and were disturbed by some suspicion of the truth. She had known Hiram Ranger long, had had many a trying experience of his character, gentle as a trade wind—and as steady and unchangeable. Also, beneath her surface of desperate striving after the things which common sense denounces, or affects to denounce, as foolishness, there was a shrewd, practical person. "He means some kind of mischief," she thought—an unreasoned, instinctive conclusion, and, therefore, all-powerful with a woman.
That evening she wrote her daughter not to cut short her visit to get to Saint X. "Wait until Ross is ready. Then you can join him at Chicago and let him bring you."
Just about the hour she was setting down this first result of her instinct's warning against the danger signal she had seen in Hiram Ranger's manner, he was delivering a bombshell. He had led in the family prayers as usual and had just laid the Bible on the center-table in the back parlor after they rose from their knees. With his hands resting on the cover of the huge volume he looked at his son. There was a sacrificial expression in his eyes. "I have decided to withdraw Arthur's allowance," he said, and his voice sounded hollow and distant, as unfamiliar to his own ears as to theirs. "He must earn his own living. If he wants a place at the mills, there's one waiting for him. If he'd rather work at something else, I'll do what I can to get him a job."
Silence; and Hiram left the room.
Adelaide was first to recover sufficiently to speak. "O mother," cried she, "you're not going to allow this!"
To Adelaide's and Arthur's consternation, Ellen replied quietly: "It ain't no use to talk to him. I ain't lived all these years with your father without finding out when he means what he says."
"It's so unjust!" exclaimed Adelaide.
There came into Ellen's face a look she had never seen there before. It made her say: "O mother, I didn't mean that; only, it does seem hard."
Mrs. Ranger thought so, too; but she would have died rather than have made the thought treason by uttering it. She followed her husband upstairs, saying: "You and Arthur can close up, and put out the lights."
Adelaide, almost in tears over her brother's catastrophe, was thrilled with admiration of his silent, courageous bearing. "What are you going to do, Artie?"
This incautious question drew his inward ferment boiling to the surface. "He has me down and I've got to take his medicine," said the young man, teeth together and eyes dark with fury.
This she did not admire. Her first indignation abated, as she sat on there thinking it out. "Maybe father is nearer right than we know," she said to herself finally. "After all, Arthur will merely be doing as father does. There's something wrong with him, and with me, too, or we shouldn't think that so terrible." But to Arthur she said nothing. Encourage him in his present mood she must not; and to try to dissuade him would simply goad him on.
CHAPTER IV
THE SHATTERED COLOSSUS
That night there was sleep under Hiram Ranger's roof for Mary the cook only. Of the four wakeful ones the most unhappy was Hiram himself, the precipitator of it all. Arthur had the consolation of his conviction that his calamity was unjust; Adelaide and her mother, of their conviction that in the end it could not but be well with Arthur. For Hiram there was no consolation. He reviewed and re-reviewed the facts, and each time he reached again his original conclusion; the one course in repairing the mistakes of the boy's bringing up was a sharp rightabout. "Don't waste no time gettin' off the wrong road, once you're sure it's wrong," had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced to do right in the wrong way—to hide himself from them behind a manner of cold and silent finality, and, so, to prevent them from forming an alliance and a junction of forces with the traitor softness within him. Besides, gentle, roundabout, gradual measures would require time—delay; and he must "put his house in order" forthwith.
Thus, even the consolation that he was at least doing right was denied him. As he lay there he could see himself harshly forcing the bitter medicine upon his son, the cure for a disease for which he was himself responsible; he could see his son's look and could not deny its justice. "I reckon he hates me," thought Hiram, pouring vitriol into his own wounds, "and I reckon he's got good cause to."
But there was in the old miller a Covenanter fiber tough as ironwood. The idea of yielding did not enter his head. He accepted his sufferings as part of his punishment for past indulgence and weakness; he would endure, and go forward. His wife understood him by a kind of intuition which, like most of our insight into the true natures of those close about us, was a gradual permeation from the one to the other rather than clear, deliberate reasoning. But the next morning her sore and anxious mother's heart misread the gloom of his strong face into sternness toward her only son.
"When did you allow to put the boy to work, father?" she finally said, and her tone unintentionally made Hiram feel more than ever as if he had sentenced "the boy" to hard labor in the degradation and disgrace of a chain gang.
As he waited some time for self-control before answering, she thought her inquiry had deepened his resentment. "Not that I don't think you're right, maybe," she hastened to add, "though"—this wistfully, in a feminine and maternal subtlety of laying the first lines for sapping and mining his position—"I often think about our life, all work and no play, and wonder if we oughtn't to give the children the chance we never had."
"No good never came of idleness," said Hiram, uncompromisingly, "and to be busy about foolishness is still worse. Work or rot—that's life."
"That's so; that's so," she conceded. And she was sincere; for that was her real belief, and what she had hinted was a mere unthinking repetition of the shallow, comfortable philosophy of most people—those "go easys" and "do nothings" and "get nowheres" wherewith Saint X and the surrounding country were burdened. "Still," she went on, aloud, "Arthur hasn't got any bad habits, like most of the young men round here with more money than's good for them."
"Drink ain't the only bad habit," replied Hiram. "It ain't the worst, though it looks the worst. The boy's got brains. It ain't right to allow him to choke 'em up with nonsense."
Ellen's expression was assent.
"Tell him to come down to the mill next Monday," said Hiram, after another silence, "and tell him to get some clothes that won't look ridiculous." He paused, then added; "A man that ain't ready to do anything, no matter what so long as it's useful and honest, is good for nothing."
The night had bred in Arthur brave and bold resolves. He would not tamely submit; he would cast his father off, would go forth and speedily carve a brilliant career. He would show his father that, even if the training of a gentleman develops tastes above the coarseness of commerce, it also develops the mental superiority that makes fleeing chaff of the obstacles to fame and wealth. He did not go far into details; but, as his essays at Harvard had been praised, he thought of giving literature's road to distinction the preference over the several others that must be smooth before him. Daylight put these imaginings into silly countenance, and he felt silly for having lingered in their company, even in the dark. As he dressed he had much less than his wonted content with himself. He did not take the same satisfaction in his clothes, as evidence of his good taste, or in his admired variations of the fashion of wearing the hair and tying the scarf. Midway in the process of arranging his hair he put down his military brushes; leaning against the dressing table, he fixed his mind upon the first serious thoughts he had ever had in his whole irresponsible, sheltered life. "Well," he said, half-aloud, "there is something wrong! If there isn't, why do I feel as if my spine had collapsed?" After a long pause, he added: "And it has! All that held it steady was father's hand."
The whole lofty and beautiful structure of self-complacence upon which he had lounged, preening his feathers and receiving social triumphs and the adulation of his "less fortunate fellows" as the due of his own personal superiority, suddenly slipped from under him. With a rueful smile at his plight, he said: "The governor has called me down." Then, resentfully, and with a return of his mood of dignity outraged and pride trampled upon: "But he had no right to put me up there—or let me climb up there." Once a wrong becomes "vested," it is a "vested right," sacred, taboo. Arthur felt that his father was committing a crime against him.
When he saw Adelaide and his mother their anxious looks made him furious. So! They knew how helpless he was; they were pitying him. Pitying him! Pitying him! He just tasted his coffee; with scowling brow he hastened to the stables for his saddle horse and rode away alone. "Wait a few minutes and I'll come with you," called Adelaide from the porch as he galloped by. He pretended not to hear. When clear of the town he "took it out" on his horse, using whip and spur until it gripped the bit and ran away. He fought savagely with it; at a turn in the road it slipped and fell, all but carrying him under. He was in such a frenzy that if he had had a pistol he would have shot it. The chemical action of his crisis precipitated in a black mass all the poison his nature had been absorbing in those selfish, supercilious years. So long as that poison was held in suspense it was imperceptible to himself as well as to others. But now, there it was, unmistakably a poison. At the sight his anger vanished. "I'm a beast!" he ejaculated, astonished. "And here I've been imagining I was a fairly decent sort of fellow. What the devil have I been up to, to make me like this?"
He walked along the road, leading his horse by the bridle slipped over his arm. He resumed his reverie of the earlier morning, and began a little less dimly to see his situation from the new viewpoint. "I deserve what I'm getting," he said to himself. Then, at a twinge from the resentment that had gone too deep to be ejected in an instant, he added: "But that doesn't excuse him." His father was to blame for the whole ugly business—for his plight within and without. Still, fixing the blame was obviously unimportant beside the problem of the way out. And for that problem he, in saner mood, began to feel that the right solution was to do something and so become in his own person a somebody, instead of being mere son of a somebody. "I haven't got this shock a minute too soon," he reflected. "I must take myself in hand. I—"
"Why, it's you, Arthur, isn't it?" startled him.
He looked up, saw Mrs. Whitney coming toward him. She was in a winter walking suit, though the day was warm. She was engaged in the pursuit that was the chief reason for her three months' retirement to the bluffs overlooking Saint X—the preservation of her figure. She hated exercise, being by nature as lazy, luxurious, and self-indulgent physically as she was alert and industrious mentally. From October to July she ate and drank about what she pleased, never set foot upon the ground if she could help it, and held her tendency to hips in check by daily massage. From July to October she walked two or three hours a day, heavily dressed, and had a woman especially to attend to her hair and complexion, in addition to the masseuse toiling to keep her cheeks and throat firm for the fight against wrinkles and loss of contour.
Arthur frowned at the interruption, then smoothed his features into a cordial smile; and at once that ugly mass of precipitated poison began to redistribute itself and hide itself from him.
"You've had a fall, haven't you?"
He flushed. She, judging with the supersensitive vanity of all her self-conscious "set," thought the flush was at the implied criticism of his skill; but he was far too good a rider to care about his misadventure, and it was her unconscious double meaning that stung him. She turned; they walked together. After a brief debate as to the time for confessing his "fall," which, at best, could remain a secret no longer than Monday, he chose the present. "Father's begun to cut up rough," said he, and his manner was excellent. "He's taken away my allowance, and I'm to go to work at the mill." He was yielding to the insidious influence of her presence, was dropping rapidly back toward the attitude as well as the accent of "our set."
At his frank disclosure Mrs. Whitney congratulated herself on her shrewdness so heartily that she betrayed it in her face; but Arthur did not see. "I suppose your mother can do nothing with him." This was spoken in a tone of conviction. She always felt that, if she had had Hiram to deal with, she would have been fully as successful with him as she thought she had been with Charles Whitney. She did not appreciate the fundamental difference in the characters of the two men. Both were iron of will; but there was in Whitney—and not in Hiram—a selfishness that took the form of absolute indifference to anything and everything which did not directly concern himself—his business or his physical comfort. Thus his wife had had her way in all matters of the social career, and he would have forced upon her the whole responsibility for the children if she had not spared him the necessity by assuming it. He cheerfully paid the bills, no matter what they were, because he thought his money's power to buy him immunity from family annoyances one of its chief values. She, and everyone else, thought she ruled him; in fact, she not only did not rule him, but had not even influence with him in the smallest trifle of the matters he regarded as important.
The last time he had looked carefully at her—many, many years before—he had thought her beautiful; he assumed thenceforth that she was still beautiful, and was therefore proud of her. In like manner he had made up his mind favorably to his children. As the bills grew heavier and heavier, from year to year, with the wife and two children assiduously expanding them, he paid none the less cheerfully. "There is some satisfaction in paying up for them," reflected he. "At least a man can feel that he's getting his money's worth." And he contrasted his luck with the bad luck of so many men who had to "pay up" for "homely frumps, that look worse the more they spend."
But Arthur was replying to Mrs. Whitney's remark with a bitter "Nobody can do anything with father; he's narrow and obstinate. If you argue with him, he's silent. He cares for nothing but his business."
Arthur did not hesitate to speak thus frankly to Mrs. Whitney. She seemed a member of the family, like a sister of his mother or father who had lived with them always; also he accepted her at the valuation she and all her friends set upon her—he, like herself and them, thought her generous and unselfish because she was lavish with sympathetic words and with alms—the familiar means by which the heartless cheat themselves into a reputation for heart. She always left the objects of her benevolence the poorer for her ministrations, though they did not realize it. She adopted as the guiding principle of her life the cynical philosophy—"Give people what they want, never what they need." By sympathizing effusively with those in trouble, she encouraged them in low-spiritedness; by lavishing alms, she weakened struggling poverty into pauperism. But she took away and left behind enthusiasm for her own moral superiority and humanity. Also she deceived herself and others with such fluid outpourings of fine phrases about "higher life" and "spiritual thinking" as so exasperated Hiram Ranger.
Now, instead of showing Arthur what her substratum of shrewd sense enabled her to see, she ministered soothingly unto his vanity. His father was altogether wrong, tyrannical, cruel; he himself was altogether right, a victim of his father's ignorance of the world.
"I decided not to submit," said Arthur, as if the decision were one which had come to him the instant his father had shown the teeth and claws of tyranny, instead of being an impulse of just that moment, inspired by Mrs. Whitney's encouragement to the weakest and worst in his nature.
"I shouldn't be too hasty about that," she cautioned. "He is old and sick. You ought to be more than considerate. And, also, you should be careful not to make him do anything that would cut you out of your rights."
It was the first time the thought of his "rights"—of the share of his father's estate that would be his when his father was no more—had definitely entered his head. That he would some day be a rich man he had accepted just as he accepted the other conditions of his environment—all to which he was born and in which consisted his title to be regarded as of the "upper classes," like his associates at Harvard. Thinking now on the insinuated proposition that his father might disinherit him, he promptly rejected it. "No danger of his doing that," he assured her, with the utmost confidence. "Father is an honest man, and he wouldn't think of anything so dishonest, so dishonorable."
This view of a child's rights in the estate of its parents amused Mrs. Whitney. She knew how quickly she would herself cut off a child of hers who was obstinately disobedient, and, while she felt that it would be an outrage for Hiram Ranger to cut off his son for making what she regarded as the beginning of the highest career, the career of "gentleman," still she could not dispute his right to do so. "Your father may not see your rights in the same light that you do, Arthur," said she mildly. "If I were you, I'd be careful."
Arthur reflected. "I don't think it's possible," said he, "but I guess you're right. I must not forget that I've got others to think of besides myself."
This patently meant Janet; Mrs. Whitney held her discreet tongue.
"It will do no harm to go to the office," she presently continued. "You ought to get some knowledge of business, anyhow. You will be a man of property some day, and you will need to know enough about business to be able to supervise the managers of your estate. You know, I had Janet take a course at a business college, last winter, and Ross is in with his father and will be active for several years."
* * * * *
Thus it came about that on Monday morning at nine Arthur sauntered into the offices of the mills. He was in much such a tumult of anger, curiosity, stubbornness, and nervousness as agitates a child on its first appearance at school; but in his struggle not to show his feelings he exaggerated his pose into a seeming of bored indifference. The door of his father's private room was open; there sat Hiram, absorbed in dictating to a stenographer. When his son appeared in the doorway, he apparently did not realize it, though in fact the agitation the young man was concealing under that unfortunate manner was calmness itself in comparison with the state of mind behind Hiram's mask of somber stolidity.
"He's trying to humiliate me to the depths," thought the son, as he stood and waited, not daring either to advance or to retreat. How could he know that his father was shrinking as a criminal from the branding iron, that every nerve in that huge, powerful, seemingly impassive body was in torture from this ordeal of accepting the hatred of his son in order that he might do what he considered to be his duty? At length the young man said: "I'm here, father."
"Be seated—just a minute," said the father, turning his face toward his boy but unable to look even in that direction.
The letter was finished, and the stenographer gathered up her notes and withdrew. Hiram sat nerving himself, his distress accentuating the stern strength of his features. Presently he said: "I see you haven't come dressed for work."
"Oh, I think these clothes will do for the office," said Arthur, with apparent carelessness.
"But this business isn't run from the office," replied Hiram, with a gentle smile that to the young man looked like the sneer of a tyrant. "It's run from the mill. It prospers—it always has prospered—because I work with the men. I know what they ought to do and what they are doing. We all work together here. There ain't a Sunday clothes job about the place."
Arthur's fingers were trembling as he pulled at his small mustache. What did this tyrant expect of him? He had assumed that a place was to be made for him in the office, a dignified place. There he would master the business, would gather such knowledge as might be necessary successfully to direct it, and would bestow that knowledge in the humble, out-of-the-way corner of his mind befitting matters of that kind. And here was his father, believing that the same coarse and toilsome methods which had been necessary for himself were necessary for a trained and cultured understanding!
"What do you want me to do?" asked Arthur.
Hiram drew a breath of relief. The boy was going to show good sense and willingness after all. "I guess you'd better learn barrel-making first," said he. He rose. "I'll take you to the foreman of the cooperage, and to-morrow you can go to work in the stave department. The first thing is to learn to make a first-class barrel."
Arthur slowly rose to follow. He was weak with helpless rage. If his father had taken him into the office and had invited him to help in directing the intellectual part of that great enterprise, the part that in a way was not without appeal to the imagination, he felt that he might gradually have accustomed himself to it; but to be put into the mindless routine of the workingman, to be set about menial tasks which a mere muscular machine could perform better than he—what waste, what degradation, what insult!
He followed his father to the cooperage, the uproar of its machinery jarring fiercely upon him, but not so fiercely as did the common-looking men slaving in torn and patched and stained clothing. He did not look at the foreman as his father was introducing them and ignored his proffered hand. "Begin him at the bottom, Patrick," explained Hiram, "and show him no favors. We must give him a good education."
"That's right, Mr. Ranger," said Patrick, eying his new pupil dubiously. He was not skilled in analysis of manner and character, so Arthur's superciliousness missed him entirely and he was attributing the cold and vacant stare to stupidity. "A regular damn dude," he was saying to himself. "As soon as the old man's gone, some fellow with brains'll do him out of the business. If the old man's wise, he'll buy him an annuity, something safe and sure. Why do so many rich people have sons like that? If I had one of his breed I'd shake his brains up with a stave."
Arthur mechanically followed his father back to the office. At the door Hiram, eager to be rid of him, said: "I reckon that's about all we can do to-day. You'd better go to Black and Peters's and get you some clothes. Then you can show up at the cooperage at seven to-morrow morning, ready to put in a good day's work."
He laid his hand on his son's shoulder, and that gesture and the accompanying look, such as a surgeon might give his own child upon whom he was performing a cruelly painful operation, must have caused some part of what he felt to penetrate to the young man; for, instead of bursting out at his father, he said appealingly: "Would it be a very great disappointment to you if I were to go into—into some—some other line?"
"What line?" asked Hiram.
"I haven't settled—definitely. But I'm sure I'm not fitted for this." He checked himself from going on to explain that he thought it would mean a waste of all the refinements and elegancies he had been at so much pains to acquire.
"Who's to look after the business when I'm gone?" asked Hiram. "Most of what we've got is invested here. Who's to look after your mother's and sister's interests, not to speak of your own?"
"I'd be willing to devote enough time to it to learn the management," said Arthur, "but I don't care to know all the details."
It was proof of Hiram's great love for the boy that he had no impulse of anger at this display of what seemed to him the most priggish ignorance. "There's only one way to learn," said he quietly. "That's the way I've marked out for you. Don't forget—we start up at seven. You can breakfast with me at a quarter past six, and we'll come down together."
As Arthur walked homeward he pictured himself in jumper and overalls on his way from work of an evening—meeting the Whitneys—meeting Janet Whitney! Like all Americans, who become inoculated with "grand ideas," he had the super-sensitiveness to appearances that makes foreigners call us the most snobbishly conventional people on earth. What would it avail to be in character the refined person in the community and in position the admired person, if he spent his days at menial toil and wore the livery of labor? He knew Janet Whitney would blush as she bowed to him, and that she wouldn't bow to him unless she were compelled to do so because she had not seen him in time to escape; and he felt that she would be justified. The whole business seemed to him a hideous dream, a sardonic practical joke upon him. Surely, surely, he would presently wake from this nightmare to find himself once more an unimperiled gentleman.
In the back parlor at home he found Adelaide about to set out for the Whitneys. As she expected to walk with Mrs. Whitney for an hour before lunch she was in walking costume—hat, dress, gloves, shoes, stockings, sunshade, all the simplest, most expensive-looking, most unpractical-looking white. From hat to heels she was the embodiment of luxurious, "ladylike" idleness, the kind that not only is idle itself, but also, being beautiful, attractive, and compelling, is the cause of idleness in others. She breathed upon Arthur the delicious perfume of the elegant life from which he was being thrust by the coarse hand of his father—and Arthur felt as if he were already in sweaty overalls.
"Well?" she asked.
"He's going to make a common workman of me," said Arthur, sullen, mentally contrasting his lot with hers. "And he's got me on the hip. I don't dare treat him as he deserves. If I did, he's got just devil enough in him to cheat me out of my share of the property. A sweet revenge he could take on me in his will."
Adelaide drew back—was rudely thrust back by the barrier between her and her brother which had sprung up as if by magic. Across it she studied him with a pain in her heart that showed in her face. "O Arthur, how can you think such a thing!" she exclaimed.
"Isn't it so?" he demanded.
"He has a right to do what he pleases with his own." Then she softened this by adding, "But he'd never do anything unjust."
"It isn't his own," retorted her brother. "It belongs to us all."
"We didn't make it," she insisted. "We haven't any right to it, except to what he gives us."
"Then you think we're living on his charity?"
"No—not just that," she answered hesitatingly. "I've never thought it out—never have thought about it at all."
"He brought us into the world," Arthur pursued. "He has accustomed us to a certain station—to a certain way of living. It's his duty in honesty and in honor to do everything in his power to keep us there."
Del admitted to herself that this was plausible, but she somehow felt that it was not true. "It seems to me that if parents bring their children up to be the right sort—useful and decent and a credit," said she, "they've done the biggest part of their duty. The money isn't so important, is it? At least, it oughtn't to be."
Arthur looked at her with angry suspicion. "Suppose he made a will giving it all to you, Del," he said, affecting the manner of impartial, disinterested argument, "what would you do?"
"Share with you, of course," she answered, hurt that he should raise the question at a time when raising it seemed an accusation of her, or at least a doubt of her.
He laughed satirically. "That's what you think now," said he. "But, when the time came, you'd be married to Ross Whitney, and he'd show you how just father's judgment of me was, how wicked it would be to break his last solemn wish and will, and how unfit I was to take care of money. And you'd see it; and the will would stand. Oh, you'd see it! I know human nature. If it was a small estate—in those cases brothers and sisters always act generously—no, not always. Some of 'em, lots of 'em, quarrel and fight over a few pieces of furniture and crockery. But in a case of a big estate, who ever heard of the one that was favored giving up his advantage unless he was afraid of a scandal, or his lawyers advised him he might as well play the generous, because he'd surely lose the suit?"
"Of course, Arthur, I can't be sure what I'd do," she replied gently; "but I hope I'd not be made altogether contemptible by inheriting a little money."
"But it wouldn't seem contemptible," he retorted. "It'd be legal and sensible, and it'd seem just. You'd only be obeying a dead father's last wishes and guarding the interests of your husband and your children. They come before brothers."
"But not before self-respect," she said very quietly. She put her arm around his neck and pressed her cheek against his. "Arthur—dear—dear—" she murmured, "please don't talk or think about this any more. It—it—hurts." And there were hot tears in her eyes, and at her heart a sense of sickness and of fright; for his presentation of the other side of the case made her afraid of what she might do, or be tempted to do, in the circumstances he pictured. She knew she wouldn't—at least, not so long as she remained the person she then was. But how long would that be? How many years of association with her new sort of friends—with the sort Ross had long been—with the sort she was becoming more and more like—how many, or, rather, how few years would it take to complete the process of making her over into a person who would do precisely what Arthur had pictured?
Arthur had said a great deal more than he intended—more, even, than he believed true. For a moment he felt ashamed of himself; then he reminded himself that he wasn't really to blame; that, but for his father's harshness toward him, he would never have had such sinister thoughts about him or Adelaide. Thus his apology took the form of an outburst against Hiram. "Father has brought out the worst there is in me!" he exclaimed. "He is goading me on to—"
He looked up; Hiram was in the doorway. He sprang to his feet. "Yes, I mean it!" he cried, his brain confused, his blood on fire. "I don't care what you do. Cut me off! Make me go to work like any common laborer! Crush out all the decency there is in me!"
The figure of the huge old man was like a storm-scarred statue. The tragedy of his countenance filled his son and daughter with awe and terror. Then, slowly, like a statue falling, he stiffly tilted forward, crashed at full length face downward on the floor. He lay as he had fallen, breathing heavily, hoarsely. And they, each tightly holding the other's hand like two little children, stood pale and shuddering, unable to move toward the stricken colossus.
CHAPTER V
THE WILL
When Hiram had so far improved that his period of isolation was obviously within a few days of its end, Adelaide suggested to Arthur, somewhat timidly, "Don't you think you ought to go to work at the mills?"
He frowned. It was bad enough to have the inward instinct to this, and to
fight it down anew each day as a temptation to weakness and cowardice.
That the traitor should get an ally in his sister—it was intolerable.
The frown deepened into a scowl.
But Del had been doing real thinking since she saw her father stricken down, and she was beginning clearly to see his point of view as to Arthur. That angry frown was discouraging, but she felt too strongly to be quite daunted. "It might help father toward getting well," she urged, "and make such a difference—in every way."
"No more hypocrisy. I was right; he was wrong," replied her brother. He had questioned Dr. Schulze anxiously about his father's seizure; and Schulze, who had taken a strong fancy to him and had wished to put him at ease, declared that the attack must have begun at the mills, and would probably have brought Hiram down before he could have reached home, had he not been so powerful of body and of will. And Arthur, easily reassured where he must be assured if he was to have peace of mind, now believed that his outburst had had no part whatever in causing his father's stroke. So he was all for firm stand against slavery. "If I yield an inch now," he went on to Adelaide, "he'll never stop until he has made me his slave. He has lorded it over those workingmen so long that the least opposition puts him in a frenzy."
Adelaide gave over, for the time, the combat against a stubbornness which was an inheritance from his father. "I've only made him more set by what I've said," thought she. "Now, he has committed himself. I ought not to have been so tactless."
Long after Hiram got back in part the power of speech, he spoke only when directly addressed, and then after a wait in which he seemed to have cast about for the fewest possible words. After a full week of this emphasized reticence, he said, "Where is Arthur?"
Arthur had kept away because—so he told himself and believed—while he was not in the least responsible for his father's illness, still seeing him and being thus reminded of their difference could not but have a bad effect. That particular day, as luck would have it, he for the first time since his father was stricken had left the grounds. "He's out driving," said his mother.
"In the tandem?" asked Hiram.
"Yes," replied Ellen, knowing nothing of the last development of the strained relations between her husband and her "boy."
"Then he hasn't gone to work?"
"He's stayed close to the house ever since you were taken sick, Hiram," said she, with gentle reproach. "He's been helping me nurse you."
Hiram did not need to inquire how little that meant. He knew that, when anyone Ellen Ranger loved was ill, she would permit no help in the nursing, neither by day nor by night. He relapsed into his brooding over the problem which was his sad companion each conscious moment, now that the warning "Put your house in order" had been so sternly emphasized.
The day Dr. Schulze let them bring him down to the first floor, Mrs. Hastings—"Mrs. Fred," to distinguish her from "Mrs. Val"—happened to call. Mrs. Ranger did not like her for two reasons—first, she had married her favorite cousin, Alfred Hastings, and had been the "ruination" of him; second, she had a way of running on and on to everyone and anyone about the most intimate family affairs, and close-mouthed Ellen Ranger thought this the quintessence of indiscretion and vulgarity. But Hiram liked her, was amused by her always interesting and at times witty thrusts at the various members of her family, including herself. So, Mrs. Ranger, clutching at anything that might lighten the gloom thick and black upon him, let her in and left them alone together. With so much to do, she took advantage of every moment which she could conscientiously spend out of his presence.
At sight of Henrietta, Hiram's face brightened; and well it might. In old-fashioned Saint X it was the custom for a married woman to "settle down" as soon as she returned from her honeymoon—to abandon all thoughts, pretensions, efforts toward an attractive exterior, and to become a "settled" woman, "settled" meaning purified of the last grain of the vanity of trying to please the eye or ear of the male. And conversation with any man, other than her husband—and even with him, if a woman were soundly virtuous, through and through—must be as clean shorn of allurement as a Quaker meetinghouse. Mrs. Fred had defied this ancient and sacred tradition of the "settled" woman. She had kept her looks; she frankly delighted in the admiration of men. And the fact that the most captious old maid in Saint X could not find a flaw in her character as a faithful wife, aggravated the offending. For, did not her devotion to her husband make dangerous her example of frivolity retained and flaunted, as a pure private life in an infidel made his heresies plausible and insidious? At "almost" forty, Mrs. Hastings looked "about" thirty and acted as if she were a girl or a widow. Each group of gods seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it. Saint X's set of gods of conventionality doubtless seems ridiculous to those who knock the dust before some other set; but Saint X cannot be blamed for having a sober face before its own altars, and reserving its jeers and pitying smiles for deities of conventionality in high dread and awe elsewhere. And if Mrs. Fred had not been "one of the Fuller heirs," Saint X would have made her feel its displeasure, instead of merely gossiping and threatening.
"I'm going the round of the invalids to-day," began Henrietta, after she had got through the formula of sick-room conversation. "I've just come from old John Skeffington. I found all the family in the depths. He fooled 'em again last night."
Hiram smiled. All Saint X knew what it meant for old Skeffington to "fool 'em again." He had been dying for three years. At the first news that he was seized of a mortal illness his near relations, who had been driven from him by his temper and his parsimony, gathered under his roof from far and near, each group hoping to induce him to make a will in its favor. He lingered on, and so did they—watching each other, trying to outdo each other in complaisance to the humors of the old miser. And he got a new grip on life through his pleasure in tyrannizing over them and in putting them to great expense in keeping up his house. He favored first one group, then another, taking fagots from fires of hope burning too high to rekindle fires about to expire.
"How is he?" asked Hiram.
"They say he can't last till fall," replied Henrietta; "but he'll last another winter, maybe ten. He's having more and more fun all the time. He has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he happens to be sleeping badly—and that's pretty often—he bangs on the anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then, maybe he'll set 'em all to work mending his fishing tackle—right in the dead of night."
"Are they all there still?" asked Hiram. "The Thomases, the Wilsons, the
Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?"
"Everyone—except Miss Frisbie. She's gone back home to Rushville, but she's sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow. I saw Dory Hargrave in the street a while ago. You know his mother was a first cousin of old John's. I told him he ought not to let strangers get the old man's money, that he ought to shy his castor into the ring."
"And what did Dory say?" asked Hiram.
"He came back at me good and hard," said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored laugh. "He said there'd been enough people in Saint X ruined by inheritances and by expecting inheritances. You know the creek that flows through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the reservoir. Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any graveyard creek, yet nobody talked of stopping it."
The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over the other—a certain sign that he was thinking intently.
"There's a good deal of truth in what he said," she went on. "Look at our family, for instance. We've been living on an allowance from Grandfather Fuller in Chicago for forty years. None of us has ever done a stroke of work; we've simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his millions. Look at us! Bill and Tom drunkards, Dick a loafer without even the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep alive. Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our family they began to loaf and wait. We've been waiting in decent, or I should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we're still waiting. We're a lot of paupers. We're on a level with the Wilmots."
"Yes—there are the Wilmots, too," said Hiram absently.
"That's another form of the same disease," Henrietta went on. "Did you know General Wilmot?"
"He was a fine man," said Hiram, "one of the founders of this town, and he made a fortune out of it. He got overbearing, and what he thought was proud, toward the end of his life. But he had a good heart and worked for all he had—honest work."
"And he brought his family up to be real down-East gentlemen and ladies," resumed Henrietta. "And look at 'em. They lost the money, because they were too gentlemanly and too ladylike to work to hold on to it. And there they live in the big house, half-starved. Why, really, Mr. Ranger, they don't have enough to eat. And they dress in clothes that have been in the family for a generation. They make their underclothes out of old bed linen. And the grass on their front lawns is three feet high, and the moss and weeds cover and pry up the bricks of their walks. They're too 'proud' to work and too poor to hire. How much have they borrowed from you?"
"I don't know," said Hiram. "Not much."
"I know better—and you oughtn't to have lent them a cent. Yesterday old
Wilmot was hawking two of his grandfather's watches about. And all the
Wilmots have got brains, just as our family has. Nothing wrong with
either of us, but that stream Dory Hargrave was talking about."
"There's John Dumont," mused Ranger.
"Yes—he is an exception. But what's he doing with what his father left him? I don't let them throw dust in my eyes with his philanthropy as they call it. The plain truth is he's a gambler and a thief, and he uses what his father left him to be gambler and thief on the big scale, and so keep out of the penitentiary—'finance,' they call it. If he'd been poor, he'd have been in jail long ago—no, he wouldn't—he'd have done differently. It was the money that started him wrong."
"A great deal of good can be done with money," said Hiram.
"Can it?" demanded Mrs. Fred. "It don't look that way to me. I'm full of this, for I was hauling my Alfred over the coals this very morning"—she laughed—"for being what I've made him, for doing what I'd do in his place—for being like my father and my brothers. It seems to me, precious little of the alleged good that's done with wealth is really good; and what little isn't downright bad hides the truth from people. Talk about the good money does! What does it amount to—the good that's good, and the good that's rotten bad? What does it all amount to beside the good that having to work does? People that have to work hard are usually honest and have sympathy and affection and try to amount to something. And if they are bad, why at least they can't hurt anybody but themselves very much, where a John Dumont or a Skeffington can injure hundreds—thousands. Take your own case, Mr. Ranger. Your money has never done you any good. It was your hard work. All your money has ever done has been—Do you think your boy and girl will be as good a man and woman, as useful and creditable to the community, as you and Cousin Ellen?"
Hiram said nothing; he continued to slide his great, strong, useful-looking hands one over the other.
"A fortune makes a man stumble along if he's in the right road, makes him race along if he's in the wrong road," concluded Henrietta.
"You must have been talking a great deal to young Hargrave lately," said
Hiram shrewdly.
She blushed. "That's true," she admitted, with a laugh. "But I'm not altogether parroting what he said. I do my own thinking." She rose. "I'm afraid I haven't cheered you up much."
"I'm glad you came," replied Hiram earnestly; then, with an admiring look, "It's a pity some of the men of your family haven't got your energy."
She laughed. "They have," said she. "Every one of us is a first-rate talker—and that's all the energy I've got—energy to wag my tongue. Still—You didn't know I'd gone into business?"
"Business?"
"That is, I'm backing Stella Wilmot in opening a little shop—to sell millinery."
"A Wilmot at work!" exclaimed Hiram.
"A Wilmot at work," affirmed Henrietta. "She's more like her great grandfather; you know how a bad trait will skip several generations and then show again. The Wilmots have been cultivating the commonness of work out of their blood for three generations, but it has burst in again. She made a declaration of independence last week. She told the family she was tired of being a pauper and beggar. And when I heard she wanted to do something I offered to go in with her in a business. She's got a lot of taste in trimming hats. She certainly has had experience enough."
"She always looks well," said Hiram.
"And you'd wonder at it, if you were a woman and knew what she's had to work on. So I took four hundred dollars grandfather sent me as a birthday present, and we're going to open up in a small way. She's to put her name out—my family won't let me put mine out, too. 'Wilmot & Hastings' would sound well, don't you think? But it's got to be 'Wilmot & Co.' We've hired a store—No. 263 Monroe Street. We have our opening in August."
"Do you need any—" began Hiram.
"No, thank you," she cut in, with a laugh. "This is a close corporation.
No stock for sale. We want to hold on to every cent of the profits."
"Well," said Hiram, "if you ever do need to borrow, you know where to come."
"Where the whole town comes when it's hard up," said Henrietta; and she astonished the old man by giving him a shy, darting kiss on the brow. "Now, don't you tell your wife!" she exclaimed, laughing and blushing furiously and making for the door.
When Adelaide, sent by her mother, came to sit with him, he said: "Draw the blinds, child, and leave me alone. I want to rest." She obeyed him. At intervals of half an hour she opened the door softly, looked in at him, thought he was asleep, and went softly away. But he had never been further from sleep in his life. Henrietta Hastings's harum-scarum gossiping and philosophizing happened to be just what his troubled mind needed to precipitate its clouds into a solid mass that could be clearly seen and carefully examined. Heretofore he had accepted the conventional explanations of all the ultimate problems, had regarded philosophers as time wasters, own brothers to the debaters who whittled on dry-goods boxes at the sidewalk's edge in summer and about the stoves in the rear of stores in winter, settling all affairs save their own. But now, sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, half of his mind.
Even as Henrietta was talking, he began to see what seemed to him the hidden meaning in the mysterious "Put your house in order" that would give him no rest. But he was not the man to make an important decision in haste, was the last man in the world to inflict discomfort, much less pain, upon anyone, unless the command to do it came unmistakably in the one voice he dared not disobey. Day after day he brooded; night after night he fought to escape. But, slowly, inexorably, his iron inheritance from Covenanter on one side and Puritan on the other asserted itself. Heartsick, and all but crying out in anguish, he advanced toward the stern task which he could no longer deny or doubt that the Most High God had set for him.