FORTUNATELY Jessica Lawton’s humble little business enterprise began to bring in returns before her slender store of money was quite exhausted. Even more fortunate, at least in her estimation, was the fact that the lion’s share of this welcome patronage came from the poor working-girls of the village. When the venture was a month old, there was nearly enough work to occupy all her time, and, taking into account the season, this warranted her in believing that she had succeeded.
The result had not come without many anxious days, made bitter alike by despairing tremors for the future and burning indignation at the insults and injuries of the present. Now that these had in a measure abated, she felt, in looking back upon them, that the fear of failure was always the least of her troubles. At the worst, the stock which, through Mrs. Fairchild’s practical kindness, she had been able to bring from Tecumseh, could be sold for something like its cost. Her father’s help had sufficed for nearly all the changes needed in the small tenement, and she had money enough to pay the rent until May.
The taking over of Lucinda was a more serious matter, for the girl had been a wage-earner, and would be entitled to complain if it turned out that she had been decoyed away from the factory on an empty promise. But Lucinda, so far from complaining, seemed exceptionally contented. It was true that she gave no promise of ever acquiring skill as a milliner, and she was not infrequently restless under the discipline which Jessica, with perhaps exaggerated caution, strove to impose, but she worked with great diligence in their tiny kitchen, and served customers in the store with enthusiasm if not finesse. The task of drilling her into that habit of mind which considers finger-nails and is mindful of soap was distinctly onerous, and even now had reached only a stage in which progress might be reported; but much could be forgiven a girl who was so cheerful and who really tried so hard to do her share.
As for the disagreeable experiences, which had once or twice been literally terrifying, the girl still grew sick at heart with rage and shame and fear that they might jeopardize her plans, when she thought of them. In their ruder aspects they were divisible into two classes. A number of young men, sometimes in groups of twos or threes, but more often furtively and alone, had offensively sought to make themselves at home in the store, and had even pounded on the door in the evening after it was shut and bolted; a somewhat larger number of rough factory-girls, or idlers of the factory-girl class, had come from time to time with the obvious intention of insulting her. These latter always appeared in gangs, and supported one another in cruel giggling and in coarse inquiries and remarks.
After a few painfully futile attempts to meet and rebuff these hostile waves, Jessica gave up the effort, and arranged matters so that she could work in the living-room beyond, within call if she were needed, but out of the visual range of her persecutors. Lucinda encountered them instead, and gave homely but vigorous Rolands for their Olivers. It was in the interchange of these remarks that the chief danger, to the struggling little business lay, for if genuine customers heard them, why, there was an end to everything. It is not easy to portray the girl’s relief as week after week went by, and time brought not only no open scandal, but a marked diminution of annoyance. When Jessica was no longer visible, interest in the sport lagged. To come merely for the sake of baiting Lucinda was not worth the while. And when these unfriendly visits slackened, and then fell off almost altogether, Jessica hugged to her breast the notion that it was because these rough young people had softened toward and begun to understand and sympathize with her.
It was the easier to credit this kindly hypothesis in that she had already won the suffrages of a considerable circle of working-girls. To explain how this came about would be to analyze many curious and apparently contradictory phases of untutored human nature, and to recount many harmless little stratagems and well-meant devices, and many other frankly generous words and actions which came from hearts not the less warm because they beat amid the busy whir of the looms, or throbbed to the time of the seamstress’s needle.
Jessica’s own heart was uplifted with exultation, sometimes, when she thought upon the friendliness of these girls. So far as she knew and believed, every one of them was informed as to her past, and there was no reason beyond their own inclination why they should take stock in her intentions for the future. To a slender few, originally suggested by Lucinda, and then confirmed by her own careful scrutiny, she had confided the crude outlines of her scheme—that is, to build up a following among the toilers of her own sex, to ask from this following no more than a decent living for work done, and to make this work include not merely the details of millinery and hints about dress, but a general mental and material helpfulness, to take practical form step by step as the means came to hand and the girls themselves were ready for the development. Whenever she had tried to put this into words, its melancholy vagueness had been freshly apparent to her, but the girls had believed in her! That was the great thing.
And they had brought others, and spread the favorable report about, until even now, in the dead season, lying half way between Christmas and the beginning of Lent, she was kept quite busy. To be sure, her patrons were not governed much by these holiday dates at any time, and she was undoubtedly doing their work better and more cheaply than it could ever have been done for them before, but their good spirit in bringing it was none the less evident for that.
And out of the contact with this good spirit, Jessica began to be dimly conscious of getting great stores of strength for herself. If it could be all like this, she felt that her life would be ideally happy. She had not the skill of mind to separate her feelings, and contrast and weigh them one against the other, but she knew clearly enough that she was doing what afforded her keen enjoyment, and it began to be apparent that merely by doing it she would come to see more clearly, day by day, how to expand and ennoble her work. The mission which Annie Fairchild had urged upon her and labored to fit her for, and which she had embraced and embarked upon with only the vaguest ideas as to means or details or specific aims, was unfolding itself inspiringly before her.
During this period she wrote daily to the good woman who had sent her upon this work—short letters setting forth tersely the events and outcome of the day—and the answers which came twice a week helped greatly to strengthen her.
And do not doubt that often she stood in grave need of strength! The mere matter of regular employment itself was still more or less of a novelty to her; regular hours still found her physically rebellious. The restraints of a shop, of studied demeanor, of frugal meals, of no intimate society save that of one dull girl,—these still wore gratingly upon her nerves, and produced periodical spasms of depression and gloom, in which she was much tortured by doubts about herself and the utility of what she was doing.
Sometimes, too, these doubts took the positive form of temptation—of a wild kind of longing to get back again into the atmosphere where bright lights shone on beautiful dresses, and the hours went swiftly, gayly by with jest, and song, and the sparkle of the amber air-beads rising in the tall wine-glasses. There came always afterward the memory of those other hours which dragged most gruesomely, when the daylight made all tawdry and hateful once more, and heartaches ruled where smiles had been. Yet still these unbidden yearnings would come, and then the girl would set her teeth tight together, and thrust her needle through the mutinous tears till they were exorcised.
It had been in her unshaped original plan to do a good deal for her father, but this proved to be more easily contemplated than done. Once the little rooms had been made habitable for her and Lucinda, there remained next to nothing for him to do. He came around every morning, when some extraordinary event, such as a job of work or a fire, did not interfere, and offered his services, but he knew as well as they did that this was a mere amiable formality. He developed a great fondness for sitting by the stove in Jessica’s small working room, and either watching her industrious fingers or sleeping calmly in his chair. Perhaps the filial instinct was not strong in Lucinda’s composition; perhaps it had been satiated by over-close contact during those five years of Jessica’s absence. At any rate, the younger girl did not enjoy Ben’s presence as much as her sister seemed to, and almost daily detracted from his comfort by suggestions that the apartments were very small, and that a man hanging around all day took up a deplorable amount of room.
It had been Jessica’s notion, too, that she and her sister would walk out in the evenings under the escort of their father, and thus secure themselves from misapprehension. But Lucinda rebelled flatly against this, at least until Ben had some new clothes, and the money for these was not forthcoming. Jessica did find it possible to spare a dollar or so to her father weekly, and there had been a nebulous understanding that this was to be applied to raiment; but the only change in his appearance effected by this so far had been a sporadic accession of startlingly white paper collars.
There were other minor disappointments—portions of her plan, so to speak, which had failed to materialize—but the net result of a month’s trial was distinctly hopeful. Although most of such work as had come to her was from the factory-girls, not a few ladies had visited the little store, and made purchases or given orders. Among these she liked best of all the one who owned the house; a very friendly old person, with corkscrew curls and an endless tongue—Miss Tabitha Wilcox. She had already made two bonnets for her, and the elderly lady had been so pleasant and talkative that she had half resolved, when next she came in, to unfold to her the scheme which now lay nearest to her heart.
This was nothing less than securing permission to use a long-deserted and roomy building which stood in the yard, at the back of the one she occupied, as a sort of evening club for the working-girls of the town. Jessica had never been in this building, but so far as she could see through the stained and dismantled windows, where the drifts did not render approach impossible, it had formerly been a dwelling-house, and later had been used in part as a carpenter’s shop.
To get this, and to fit it up simply but comfortably as a place where the tired factory and sewing girls could come in the evening, to read or talk or play games if they liked, to merely sit still and rest if they chose, but in either case to be warm and contented and sheltered from the streets and the deadly boredom of squalid lodgings, became little by little her abiding ambition. She had spoken tentatively to some of the girls about it, and they were all profoundly enthusiastic over the plan.
It remained to enlist the more fortunate women whose assistance could alone make the plan feasible. Jessica had essayed to get at the parson’s wife, Mrs. Turner; but that lady, after having been extremely cordial, had unaccountably all at once turned icy cold, and cut the girl dead in the street. I said “unaccountably,” but Jessica was not at all at a loss to comprehend the change, and the bitterness of the revelation had thrown her into an unusually deep fit of depression. For a time it had seemed to her hopeless to try to find another confidante in that class which despised and shrank from her. Then Miss Tabitha’s pleasant words and transparent good-heartedness had lifted her out of her despondency, and she was almost resolved now to approach her on the subject of the house iii the back yard.
The opportunity which Jessica sought came with unlooked-for promptness—in fact, before she had quite resolved what to ask for, and how best to prefer her request.
It was a warm, sunny winter morning, with an atmosphere which suggested the languor of May rather than the eagerness of early spring, and which was already in these few matutinal hours playing havoc with the snowbanks. The effects of the thaw were unpleasantly visible on the sidewalks, where deep puddles were forming as the drifts melted away, and the back yard was one large expanse of treacherous slush. Jessica had hoped that her father would come, in order that he might cut away the ice and snow in front, and thus drain the walk for passers-by. But as the mild morning air rendered it unnecessary to seek the comfort of a seat by the stove, Ben preferred to lounge about on the outskirts of the hay-market, exchanging indolent jokes with kindred idlers, and vaguely enjoying the sunshine.
Samantha, however, chose this forenoon for her first visit to the milliner’s shop, and showed a disposition to make herself very much at home. The fact that encouragement was plainly wanting did not in any way abash her. Lucinda told her flatly that she had only come to see what she could pick up, and charged her to her face with having instigated her friends to offer them annoyance and affront. Samantha denied both imputations with fervor, the while she tried on before the mirror a bronze-velvet toque with sage-green feathers.
“I don’t know that I ever quite believed that of you, Samantha,” said Jessica, turning from her dismayed contemplation of the water on the sidewalk. “And if you really want to be friendly, why, you are welcome to come here. But I have heard of things you have said that were not at all nice.”
“All lies!” remarked Samantha, studying the effect of the hat as nearly in a profile view as she could manage with a single glass. “You can’t believe a word you hear here in Thessaly. Wouldn’t this go better if there was some yellow put in there, close by the feathers?”
“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Jessica. “I’ve never done you any harm, and never wished anything but well by you, and I couldn’t see why you should want to injure me.”
“Don’t I tell you they lied?” responded Samantha, affably. “‘Cindy, here, is always blackguarding me. You know you always did,” she added, in passing comment upon Lucinda’s indignant snort, “but I don’t bear no malice. It ain’t my nature to. I suppose a hat like this comes pretty high, don’t it?”
As she spoke, a sleigh was driven up with some difficulty through the yielding snowbanks, and stopped close to the sidewalk in front of the shop. It was by far the most distinguished-looking sleigh Jessica had seen in Thessaly. The driver on the front seat bore a cockade proudly in his high hat, and the horses he controlled were superbly matched creatures, with glossy silver-mounted harness, and with tails neatly braided and tied up in ribbons for protection from the slush. A costly silver-fox wrap depended over the back of the cutter, and a robe of some darker but equally sumptuous fur enfolded the two ladies who sat in the second seat.
Jessica was glad that so splendid an equipage should have drawn up at her door, with a new-born commercial instinct, even before she recognized either occupant of the sleigh.
“That’s Kate Minster,” said Samantha, still with the hat of her dreams on her head, “the handsomest girl in Thessaly, and the richest, and the stuck-up-edest. Cracky! but you’re in luck!”
Jessica did not know much about the Minsters, but she now saw that the other lady, who was already preparing to descend, and stood poised on the rail of the cutter looking timorously at the water on the walk, was no other than Miss Tabitha Wilcox.
She turned with quick decision to Samantha.
“I will give you that hat you’ve got on,” she said in a hurried tone, “if you’ll go with Lucinda clear back into the kitchen and shut both doors tight after you, and stay there till I call you.”
At this considerable sacrifice the store was cleared for the reception of these visitors—the most important who had as yet crossed its threshold.
Miss Tabitha did not offer to introduce her companion—whom Jessica noted furtively as a tall, stately, dark girl, with a wonderfully handsome face, who stood silently by the little showcase and was wrapped in furs worth the whole stock of millinery she confronted—but bustled about the store, while she plunged into the middle of an explanation about hats she had had, hats she thought of having, and hats she might have had, of which the milliner understood not a word. It was not, indeed, essential that she should, for presently Tabitha stopped short, looked about her triumphantly, and asked:
“Now, wasn’t I right? Aren’t they the nicest in town?”
The tall girl smiled, and inclined her dignified head.
“They are very pretty, indeed,” she answered, and Jessica remarked to herself what a soft, rich voice it was, that made even those commonplace words so delightful to the ear.
“I don’t know that we wanted to look at anything in particular,” rattled on Miss Tabitha. “We were driving by” (O Tabitha! as if Miss Kate had not commanded this excursion for no other purpose than this visit!) “and I just thought we’d drop in, for I’ve been telling Miss Minster about what excellent taste you had.”
A momentary pause ensued, and then Jessica, conscious of blushes and confusion, made bold to unburden her mind of its plan.
“I wanted to speak to you,” she said, falteringly at first, but with a resolution to have it all out, “about that vacant house in the back yard here. It looks as if it had been a carpenter’s shop last, and it seems in very bad repair.”
“I suppose it might as well come down,” broke in Miss Wilcox. “Still, I—”
“Oh, no! that wasn’t what I meant!” protested Jessica. “I—I wanted to propose something about it to you. If—if you will be seated, I can explain what I meant.”
The two ladies took chairs, but with a palpable accession of reserve on their countenances. The girl went on to explain:
“To begin with, the factory-girls and sewing-girls here spend too much time on the streets—I suppose it is so everywhere—the girls who were thrown out when the match factory shut down, particularly. What else can they do? There is no other place. Then they get into trouble, or at any rate they learn slangy talk and coarse ways. But you can’t blame them, for their homes, when they have any, are not pleasant places, and where they hire rooms it is almost worse still. Now, I’ve been thinking of something—or, rather, it isn’t my own idea, but I’ll speak about that later on. This is the idea: I have come to know a good many of the best of these girls—perhaps you would think they were the worst, too, but they’re not—and I know they would be glad of some good place where they could spend their evenings, especially in the winter, where it would be cosey and warm, and they could read or talk, or bring their own sewing for themselves, and amuse themselves as they liked. And I had thought that perhaps that old house could be fixed up so as to serve, and they could come through the shop here after tea, and so I could keep track of them, don’t you see?”
“I don’t quite think I do,” said Miss Tabitha, with distinct disapprobation. The other lady said nothing.
Jessica felt her heart sink. The plan had seemed so excellent to her, and yet it was to be frowned down.
“Perhaps I haven’t made it clear to you,” she ventured to say.
“Oh, yes, you have,” replied Miss Tabitha. “I don’t mind pulling the house down, but to make it a rendezvous for all the tag-rag and bob-tail in town—I simply couldn’t think of it! These houses along here have seen their best days, perhaps, but they’ve all been respectable, always!”
“I don’t think myself that you have quite grasped Miss Lawton’s meaning.”
It was the low, full, quiet voice of the beautiful fur-clad lady that spoke, and Jessica looked at her with tears of anxious gratitude in her eyes.
Miss Minster seemed to avoid returning the glance, but went on in the same even, musical tone:
“It appears to me that there might be a great deal of much-needed good done in just that way, Tabitha. The young lady says—I think I understood her to say—that she had talked with some of these girls, and that that is what they would like. It seems to me only common-sense, if you want to help people, to help them in their own way, and not insist, instead, that it shall be in your way—which really is no help at all!”
“Nobody can say, I hope, that I have ever declined to extend a helping hand to anybody who showed a proper spirit,” said Miss Wilcox, with dignity, putting up her chin.
“I know that, ma’am,” pleaded Jessica. “That is why I felt sure you would like my plan. I ought to tell you—it isn’t quite my plan. It was Mrs. Fairchild, at Tecumseh, who used to teach the Burfield school, who suggested it. She is a very, very good woman.”
“And I think it is a very, very good idea,” said Miss Kate, speaking for the first time directly to Jessica. “Of course, there would have to be safeguards.”
“You have no conception what a rough lot they are,” said Miss Tabitha, in more subdued protest. “There is no telling who they would bring here, or what they wouldn’t do.”
“Indeed, I am sure all that could be taken care of,” urged Jessica, taking fresh courage, and speaking now to both her visitors. “Only those whom I knew to mean well by the undertaking should be made members, and they would agree to very strict rules, I feel certain.”
“Why, child alive! where would you get the money for it, even if it could be done otherwise?” Miss Tabitha wagged her curls conclusively, but her smile was not unkind.
It would not be exact to say that Jessica had not considered this, but, as it was now presented, it seemed like a new proposition. She was not ready to answer it.
Miss Wilcox did not wait over long for a reply, but proceeded to point out, in a large and exhaustive way, the financial impossibilities of the plan. Jessica had neither heart nor words for an interruption, and Miss Kate listened in an absent-minded manner, her eyes on the plumes and velvets in the showcase.
The interruption did come in a curiously unexpected fashion. A loud stamping of wet feet was heard on the step outside; then the door from the street was opened. The vehemence of the call-bell’s clamor seemed to dismay the visitor, or perhaps it was the presence of the ladies. At all events, he took off his hat, as if it had been a parlor instead of a shop, and made an awkward inclusive bow, reaching one hand back for the latch, as if minded to beat a retreat.
“Why, Mr. Tracy!” exclaimed Tabitha, rising from her chair.
Reuben advanced now and shook hands with both her and Jessica. For an instant the silence threatened to be embarrassing, and it was not wholly relieved when Tabitha presented him to Miss Minster, and that young lady bowed formally without moving in her chair. But the lawyer could not suspect the disagreeable thoughts which were chasing one another behind these two unruffled and ladylike fronts, and it was evident enough that his coming was welcome to the mistress of the little shop.
“I have wanted to look in upon you before,” he said to Jessica, “and I am ashamed to think that I haven’t done so. I have been very much occupied with other matters. It doesn’t excuse me to myself, but it may to you.”
“Oh, certainly, Mr. Tracy,” Jessica answered, and then realized how miserably inadequate the words were. “It’s very kind of you to come at all,” she added.
Tabitha shot a swift glance at her companion, and the two ladies rose, as by some automatic mechanical device, absolutely together.
“We must be going, Miss Lawton,” said the old maid, primly.
A woman’s intuition told Jessica that something had gone wrong. If she did not entirely guess the nature of the trouble, it became clear enough on the instant to her that these ladies misinterpreted Reuben’s visit. Perhaps they did not like him—or perhaps—She stepped toward them and spoke eagerly, before she had followed out this second hypothesis in her mind.
“If you have a moment’s time to spare,” she pleaded, “I wish you would let me explain to Mr. Tracy the plan I have talked over with you. He was my school-teacher; he is my oldest friend—the only friend I had when I was—a—a girl, and I haven’t seen him before since the day I arrived home here. I should so much like to have you hear his opinion. The lady I spoke of—Mrs. Fairchild—wrote to him about me. Perhaps he knows of the plan already from her.”
Reuben did not know of the plan, and the two ladies consented to take seats again while it should be explained to him. Tabitha assumed a distant and uneasy expression of countenance, and looked straight ahead of her out through the glass door until the necessity for relief by conversation swelled up within her to bursting point; for Kate had rather flippantly deserted her, and so far from listening with haughty reserve under protest, had actually joined in the talk, and taken up the thread of Jessica’s stumbling explanation.
The three young people seemed to get on extremely well together. Reuben fired up with enthusiasm at the first mention of the plan, and showed so plainly the sincerity of his liking for it that Miss Minster felt herself, too, all aglow with zeal. Thus taken up by friendly hands, the project grew apace, and took on form and shape like Aladdin’s palace.
Tabitha listened with a swiftly mounting impatience of her speechless condition, and a great sickening of the task of watching the cockade of the coachman outside, which she had imposed upon herself, as the talk went on. She heard Reuben say that he would gladly raise a subscription for the work; she heard Kate ask to be allowed to head the list with whatever sum he thought best, and then to close the list with whatever additional sum was needed to make good the total amount required; she heard Jessica, overcome with delight, stammer out thanks for this unlooked-for adoption and endowment of her poor little plan, and then she could stand it no longer.
“Have you quite settled what you will do with my house?” she asked, still keeping her face toward the door. “There are some other places along here belonging to me—that is, they always have up to now—but of course if you have plans about them, too, just tell me, and—”
“Don’t be absurd, Tabitha,” said Miss Minster, rising from her chair as she spoke. “Of course we took your assent for granted from the start. I believe, candidly, that you are more enthusiastic about it this moment than even we are.”
Reuben thought that the old lady dissembled her enthusiasm skilfully, but at least she offered no dissent. A few words more were exchanged, the lawyer promising again his aid, and Miss Minster insisting that she herself wanted the task of drawing up, in all its details, the working plan for the new institution, and, on second thoughts, would prefer to pay for it all herself.
“I have been simply famishing for something to do all these years,” she said, in smiling confidence, to Tracy, “and here it is at last. You can’t guess how happy I shall be in mapping out the whole thing—rules and amusements and the arrangements of the rooms and the furnishing, and—everything.”
Perhaps Jessicas face expressed too plainly the thought that this bantling of hers, which had been so munificently adopted, bade fair to be taken away from her altogether, for Miss Minster added: “Of course, when the sketch is fairly well completed, I will show it to you, and we will advise together,” and Jessica smiled again.
When the two ladies were seated again in the sleigh, and the horses had pranced their way through the wet snow up to the beaten track once more, Miss Tabitha said:
“I never knew a girl to run on so in all my born days. Here you are, seeing these two people for the very first time half an hour ago, and you’ve tied yourself up to goodness only knows what. One would think you’d known them all your life, the way you said ditto to every random thing that popped into their heads. And a pretty penny they’ll make it cost you, too! And what will your mother say?” Miss Minster smiled good-naturedly, and patted her companion’s gloved hand with her own. “Never you worry, Tabitha,” she said, softly. “Don’t talk, please, for a minute. I want to think.”
It was a very long minute. The young heiress spent it in gazing abstractedly at the buttons on the coachman’s back, and the rapt expression on her face seemed to tell more of a pleasant day-dream than of serious mental travail. Miss Wilcox was accustomed to these moods which called for silence, and offered no protest.
At last Kate spoke, with a tone of affectionate command. “When we get to the house I will give you a book to read, and I want you to finish every word of it before you begin anything else. It is called ‘All Sorts and Conditions of Men,’ and it tells how a lovely girl with whole millions of pounds did good in England, and I was thinking of it all the while we sat there in the shop. Only the mortification of it is, that in the book the rich girl originated the idea herself, whereas I had to have it hammered into my head by—by others. But you must read the book, and hurry with it, because—or no: I will get another copy to read again myself. And I will buy other copies; one for her and one for him, and one—”
She lapsed suddenly into silence again. The disparity between the stupendous dream out of which the People’s Palace for East London’s mighty hive of millions has been evolved, and the humble project of a sitting-room or two for the factory-girls of a village, rose before her vision, and had the effect of making her momentarily ridiculous in her own eyes. The familiarity, too, with which she had labelled these two strangers, this lawyer and this milliner, in her own thoughts, as “him” and “her,” jarred just a little upon her maidenly consciousness. Perhaps she had rushed to embrace their scheme with too much avidity. It was generally her fault to be over-impetuous. Had she been so in this case?
“Of course, what we can do here”—she began with less eagerness of tone, thinking aloud rather than addressing Tabitha—“must at best be on a very small scale. You must not be frightened by the book, where everything is done with fairy prodigality, and the lowest figures dealt with are hundreds of thousands. I only want you to read it that you may catch the spirit of it, and so understand how I feel. And you needn’t worry about my wasting money, or doing anything foolish, you dear, timid old soul!”
Miss Wilcox, in her revolving mental processes, had somehow veered around to an attitude of moderate sympathy with the project, the while she listened to these words. “I’m sure you won’t, my dear,” she replied, quite sweetly. “And I daresay there can really be a great deal of good done, only, of course, it will have to be gone at cautiously and by degrees. And we must let old Runkle do the papering and whitewashing; don’t forget that. He’s had ever so much sickness in his family all the winter, and work is so slack.”
“Do you know, I like your Mr. Tracy!” was Kate’s irrelevant reply. She made it musingly, as if the idea were new to her mind.
“You can see for yourself there couldn’t have been anything at all in that spiteful Sarah Cheese-borough’s talk about him and her,” said Tabitha, who now felt herself to have been all along the champion of this injured couple. “How on earth a respectable woman can invent such slanders beats my comprehension.”
Kate Minster laughed merrily aloud. “It’s lucky you weren’t made of pancake batter, Tabitha,” she said with mock gravity; “for, if you had been, you never could have stood this being stirred both ways. You would have turned heavy and been spoiled.”
“Instead of which I live to spoil other people, eh?” purred the gratified old lady, shaking her curls with affectionate pride.
“If we weren’t out in the street, I believe I should kiss you, Tabitha,” said the girl. “You can’t begin to imagine how delightfully you have behaved today!”
REUBEN’S first impulse, when he found himself alone in the little shop with his former pupil, was to say good-by and get out as soon as he could. To the best of his recollection, he had never before been in a store consecrated entirely to the fashions and finery of the opposite sex, and he was oppressed by a sense of being an intruder upon an exclusively feminine domain. The young girl, too, whom he had been thinking of all this while as an unfortunate child whom he must watch over and be good to, stood revealed before him as a self-controlled and sophisticated woman, only a few years younger than himself in actual age, and much wiser than himself in the matters of head-gear and textures and colors which belonged to this place. He could have talked freely to her in his law-office, with his familiar accessories of papers and books about him. A background of bonnets was disconcerting.
“How beautiful she is!” were Jessica’s first words, and they pleasurably startled the lawyer from his embarrassed revery.
“She is, indeed,” he answered, and somehow found himself hoping that the conversation would cling to this subject a good while. “I had never met her before, as you saw, but of course I have known her by sight a long time.”
“I don’t think I ever saw her before to-day,” said Jessica. “How wonderful it seems that she should have come, and then that you came, too, and that you both should like the plan, and take it up so, and make a success of it right at the start.”
Reuben smiled. “In your eagerness to keep up with the procession I fear you are getting ahead of the band,” he said. “I wouldn’t quite call it a success, at present. But, no doubt, it’s a great thing to have her enlisted in it. I’m glad she likes you; her friendship will make all the difference in the world to you, here in Thessaly.”
The girl did not immediately answer, and Tracy, looking at her as she walked across to the showcase, was surprised to catch the glisten of tears on her eyelashes. He had no idea what to say, but waited in pained puzzlement for her to speak.
“‘Friendship’ is not quite the word,” she said at last, looking up at him and smiling with mournful softness through her tears. “I shall be glad if she likes me—as you say, it will be a great thing if she helps me—but we shall hardly be ‘friends,’ you know. She would never call it that. Oh, no! oh, no!”
Her voice trembled audibly over these last words, and she began hurriedly to re-arrange some of the articles in the showcase, with the obvious design of masking her emotion.
“You can do yourself no greater harm than by exaggerating that kind of notion, my girl,” said Reuben Tracy, in his old gravely kind voice. “You would put thoughts into her head that way which she had never dreamt of otherwise; that is, if she weren’t a good and sensible person. Why, she is a woman like yourself—”
“Oh, no, no! Not like me!”
Tracy was infinitely touched by the pathos of this deprecating wail, but he went on as if he had not heard it: “A woman like yourself, with a heart turned in mercy and charity toward other women who are not so strong to help themselves. Why on earth should you vex your soul with fears that she will be unkind to you, when she showed you as plain as the noonday sun her desire to be kind? You mustn’t yield to such fancies.”
“Kind, yes! But you don’t understand—you can’t understand. I shouldn’t have spoken as I did. It was a mere question of a word, anyway.”
Jessica smiled again, to show that, though the tears were still there, the grief behind them was to be regarded as gone, and added, “Yes, she was kindness itself.”
“She is very rich in her own right, I believe, and if her interest in your project is genuine—that is, of the kind that lasts—you will hardly need any other assistance. Of course you must allow for the chance of her dropping the idea as suddenly as she picked it up. Rich women—rich people generally, for that matter—are often flighty about such things. ‘Put not your trust in princes,’ serves as a warning about millionnaires as well as monarchs. The rest of us are forced to be more or less continuous in what we think and do. We have to keep at the things we’ve started, because a waste of time would be serious to us. We have to keep the friends and associates we’ve got, because others are not to be had for the asking. But these favored people are more free—their time doesn’t matter, and they can find new sets of friends ready made whenever they weary of the others. Still, let us hope she will be steadfast. She has a strong face, at all events.”
The girl had listened to this substantial dissertation with more or less comprehension, but with unbounded respect. Anything that Reuben Tracy said she felt must be good. Besides, his conclusion jumped with her hopes.
“I’m not afraid of her losing interest in the thing itself,” she answered. “What worries me is—or, no—” She stopped herself with a smile, and made haste to add, “I forgot. I mustn’t be worried. But who is our Miss Minster? Does she own the ironworks? Tell me about her.”
“She owns a share of the works, I think. I don’t know how big a share, or, in fact, much else about her. I’ve heard my partner, Horace Boyce, talk lately a good deal—”
Tracy did not finish his sentence, for Jessica had sunk suddenly into the chair behind the case, and was staring at him over the glass-bound row of bonnets with wide-open, startled eyes.
“Your partner! Yours, did you say? That man?”
Her tone and manner very much surprised Reuben. “Why, yes, he’s my partner,” he said, slowly and in wonderment. “Didn’t you know that? We’ve been together since December.”
She shook her head, and murmured something hastily about having been very busy, and being cooped up on a back street.
This did not explain her agitation, which more and more puzzled Reuben as he thought upon it. He stood looking down upon her where she sat, and noted that her face, though it was turned away from him now, was both pale and excited.
“Do you know him?” he asked finally.
She shook her head again, and the lawyer fancied she was biting her lips. He did not know well what else to say, and was speculating whether it would not be best to say nothing, when all at once she burst forth vehemently.
“I won’t lie to you!” she exclaimed. “I did know him, very much to my cost. And, oh! don’t you trust him! Don’t you trust him, I say! He’s not fit to be with you. Oh, my God!—don’t I know Horace Boyce!”
Reuben stood silent, still looking down gravely into the girl’s flashing eyes. What she had said annoyed and disturbed him, but what he thought chiefly about was how to avoid bringing on an explanation which must wound and humiliate her feelings. It was clear enough what she meant, and he compassionately hoped she would not feel it necessary to add anything. Above all things he felt that he wanted to spare her pain.
“I understand,” he said at last, as the frankest way out of the dilemma. “Don’t say any more.” He pondered for a minute or so upon the propriety of not saying anything more himself, and then with decision offered her his hand across the showcase, and held hers in his expansive clasp with what he took to be fatherly sympathy, as he said:
“I must go now. Good-by. And I shall hear from you soon about the project?” He smiled to reassure her, and added, still holding her hand, “Now, don’t you let worry come inside these doors at all. You have made a famous start, and everything will go well, believe me.”
Then he went out, and the shrill clamor of the bell hung to jangle when the door was opened woke Jessica from her day-dream, just as the sunbeams had begun to drive away the night.
She rose with a start, and walked to the door to follow his retiring figure through the glass. She stood there, lost in another revery—vague, languorous, half-bright, half-hideous—until the door from the back room was opened, and Samantha’s sharp voice fell on the silence of the little shop.
“I ain’t going to set in that poky old kitchen any longer for all the bonnets in your whole place,” she remarked, with determination, advancing to the mirror with the toque on her truculently poised head.
“Besides, you said you’d call us when they were all gone.”
Lucinda stole up to her sister-employer, and murmured in a side-long whisper: “I couldn’t keep her from listening a little. You talked too loud. She heard what you said about that Boyce chap.”
The tidings angered Jessica even more than they alarmed her. With an impulse equally illogical and natural, she frowned at Samantha, and stiffened her fingers claw-wise, with a distinct itching to tear that arrangement of bronze velvet and sage-green feathers from her perfidious sister’s head.
Curiously enough, it was the usually aggressive Lucinda who counselled prudence. “If I was you, I’d ask her to stay to dinner,” she said, in the same furtive undertone. “I’ve been talking to her, and I guess she’ll be all right if we make it kind o’ pleasant for her when she comes. But if you rub her the wrong way, she’ll scratch.”
Samantha was asked to dinner, and stayed, and later, being offered her choice of three hat-pins with heads of ornamented jet, took two.
Reuben walked slowly back to the office, and then sat through a solitary meal at a side-table in the Dearborn House dining-room, although his customary seat was at the long table down the centre, in order that he might think over what he had heard.
It is not clear that the isolated fact disclosed to him in the milliner’s shop would, in itself, have been sufficient to awaken in his mind any serious distrust of his partner. As the sexes have different trainings and different spheres, so they have different standards. Men set up the bars, for instance, against a brother who cheats at cards, or divulges what he has heard in his club, or borrows money which he cannot repay, or pockets cigars at feasts when he does not himself smoke. But their courts of ethics do not exercise jurisdiction over sentimental or sexual offences, as a rule. These the male instinct vaguely refers to some other tribunal, which may or may not be in session somewhere else. And this male instinct is not necessarily co-existent with immoral tendencies, or blunted sensibilities, or even indifference: it is the man’s way of looking at it—just as it is his way to cross a muddy street on his toes, while his sisters perform the same feat on their heels.
Reuben Tracy was a good man, and one with keen aspirations toward honorable and ennobling things; but still he was a man, and it may be that this discovery, standing by itself, would not seriously have affected his opinion of Horace. But it did not stand by itself.
In an indefinite kind of way, he was conscious of being less attracted by the wit and sparkling smalltalk of Horace than he had been at first. Somehow, the young man seemed to have exhausted his store; he began to repeat himself, as if he had already made the circuit of the small ring around which his mind travelled. Reuben confronted a suspicion that the Boyce soil was shallow.
This might not be necessarily an evil thing, he said to himself. Lawyers quite often achieved notable successes before juries, who were not deep or well-grounded men. Horace was versatile, and versatility was a quality which Reuben distinctly lacked. From that point of view the combination ought, therefore, to be of value.
But, then, Horace told lies. Versatility of that variety was not so admirable. There could be no doubt on this point. Reuben could count on his fingers now six separate falsehoods that his partner had already told him. They happened not to be upon vital or even important subjects, but that did not render them the more palatable.
And then there was the Minster business. He knew from other sources that Horace had been intrusted with the papers left to Mr. Clarke’s executors. The young man had taken them to his father’s house, and had never mentioned so much as a syllable about them to his partner. No doubt, Horace felt that he ought to have this as his personal business, and upon the precedent Reuben himself had set with the railroad work, this was fair enough. But there was something underhanded in his secrecy about the matter. He should have spoken of it.
Reuben’s thoughts from this drifted to the Minsters themselves, and centred reverently upon the luminous figure of that elder daughter whom he had met an hour before. He did not dwell much upon her beauty—perhaps he was a trifle dull about such things—but her graciousness, her sweet interest in the charity, her womanly commingling of softness and enthusiasm, seemed to shine about him as he mused. Thessaly unconsciously assumed a brighter and more wholesome aspect, with much less need of reform than before, in his mind’s eye, now that he thought of it as her home.
Her home! The prosperous and respected lawyer was still a country boy in his unformed speculations as to what that home might be like. The Minster house was the most splendid mansion in Dearborn County, it was said, but his experience with mansions was small. A hundred times it had been said to him that he could go anywhere if he liked, and he gave the statement credence enough. But somehow it happened that he had not gone. To “be in society,” as the phrase went, had not seemed important to him. Now, almost for the first time, he found himself regretting this. Then he smiled somewhat scowlingly at his plate as the vagrant reflection came up that his partner contributed social status as well as versatility and mendacity to the outfit of the firm. Horace Boyce had a swallowtail coat, and visited at the Minsters’. The reflection was not altogether grateful to him.
Reuben rose from the table, and stood for a few moments by the window overlooking the veranda and the side street. The sunny warmth of the thawing noon-day had made it possible to have the window open, and the sound of voices close at hand showed that there were people already anticipating pneumonia and the springtime by sitting on the porch outside.
These voices conveyed no distinct impression at first to Reuben’s mind, busy as he was with his own reflections. But all at once there was a scraping of feet and chair-legs on the floor, signifying that the party had risen, and then he heard two remarks which made a sharp appeal to his attention and interest.
The first voice said: “Mind, I’m not going to let you put me into a hole. What I do, I do only when it has been proved to me to be to my own interest, and not at all because I’m afraid of you. Understand that clearly!”
The other voice replied: “All that you need be afraid of is that you will kick over your own bucket of milk. You’ve got the whole game in your hands, if you only listen to me and don’t play it like a fool. What do you say? Shall we go up to your house and put the thing into shape? We can be alone there.”
The voices ceased, and there was a sound of footsteps descending from the porch to the sidewalk. The two men passed before the window, ducking their heads for protection against the water dripping from the overflowed eaves on the roof of the veranda, and thus missing sight of the man who had overheard them.
Reuben had known at once by the sound of the voice that the first speaker was Horace Boyce. He recognized his companion now as Schuyler Tenney, and the sight startled him.
Just why it should have done so, he could not have explained. He had seen this Schuyler Tenney almost every day for a good many years, putting them all together, and had never before been troubled, much less alarmed, by the spectacle. But coming now upon what Jessica had told him, and what his own thoughts had evolved, and what he had inadvertently overheard, the figure of the rising hardware merchant loomed darkly in his perturbed fancy as an evil and threatening thing.
A rustic client with a grievance sought Tracy out in the seclusion of the dining-room, and dragged him back to his office and into the intricacies of the law of trespass; but though he did his best to listen and understand, the farmer went away feeling that his lawyer was a considerably overrated man.
For, strive as he might, Reuben could not get the sound of those words, “you’ve got the whole game in your hands,” out of his ears, or restrain his mind from wearying itself with the anxious puzzle of guessing what that game could be.