"WHICH SHOULD HAVE THE GIFT OF LIFE?"
There was a chorus of admiration and praise from all over the country
when Felix Brand's design for the capitol building was published. It
was everywhere recognized as a signal achievement, far in advance of
anything he had previously done, and he himself was acclaimed as one
of the most promising architects of the time and the most gifted that
America had yet produced. Other reproductions of his recent work,
business buildings, country houses, a church and a memorial structure,
were made public at about the same time and these and the capitol
building aroused so much interest that newspapers and magazines
published articles about him, with many illustrations of his work and
criticisms of his art that praised his present accomplishment in
glowing terms and prophesied he would do still greater things. In him,
it was declared, had come at last a great American architect, a man
of such originality, such skill and such sense of beauty and fitness
that, if he continued to give such rich fulfillment of his early
promise, he would soon create a distinctly American style of
architecture, infused with the national spirit and expressive of the
national ideals, worthy to take its place among the great
architectures of the world.
His secretary collected these articles and kept them for him to see
when he should return. For early in May, just before this round of
praise began, when she went one morning to the office she found a
letter from him saying that it had suddenly become necessary for him
to go abroad at once and that, as he would be sailing in the early
morning, he would have to leave affairs once more in her charge. There
were some words of praise for her astuteness in the management of his
business when he had been away at other times, a few directions
concerning things he would like her to do or to leave undone, a brief
regret that he should have to leave just now when it was most
important for him to be on hand, and the hope that he would not be
gone more than three or four weeks at most. But there was neither
indication of where, in that large section of the world covered by
"abroad," he might be reached by letter or cable, nor mention of which
one of the several steamers sailing that day would bear him to his
unnamed destination.
Henrietta put the letter down with a sigh of dismay. "It is too bad,
too bad!" she exclaimed. "Just when everything is going nicely and he
is doing wonderful work! Now things will begin to tangle up again and
people will get impatient, and he will lose a lot of money. Well, I'll
have to do the best I can until he comes back."
But notwithstanding her devotion to her employer's interests and the
deep and genuine pleasure she felt in seeing them advance and in
knowing that she was helping to put them forward--the delight of any
honest worker in doing well and successfully the thing that he
undertakes to do--she soon began to be conscious of a sense of relief
at being rid for even a little while of Brand's physical presence.
After his violent outburst against Mrs. Fenlow, Henrietta had felt
her repugnance increase until it amounted to positive aversion. She
did not know how great had been the nervous strain of trying
constantly to suppress and ignore this feeling until she was relieved
of it by his absence.
"I wonder," she said to herself on her way home a few days later, "if
I can endure it long enough after he returns to get entirely rid of
that mortgage. Well, I'll have to wait until he does return, anyway,
and then I ought to give him, I suppose, two or three weeks' notice.
Perhaps, when he comes home this time, he'll be more as he used to be
and it won't be so difficult. I'll wait until then before I decide."
As she came to this conclusion she was entering the ticket gate of the
ferry waiting room and, lifting her eyes from the dropping of her
ticket in the box, she saw a young man of goodly figure, dressed in a
loose fitting suit of gray, advancing toward her and lifting his soft
felt hat. Even in the surprise of the moment she was conscious of a
quick effort to keep out of her countenance the full measure of the
joy she felt at this unexpected meeting with Hugh Gordon. But she was
not successful enough to hide all signs of the pleasure that swept
through her and shone in her smile of welcome.
"Will you let me cross the ferry with you?" he said as he guided her
through the crowd to a vantage point near the gate. "I did not go to
the office, and I shall not go there again, because I know what orders
Felix gave concerning me and I will not subject you to any unpleasant
experience with his violent temper."
Henrietta looked at him in surprise, wondering how, since there was
evidently bitter enmity between the two men, this one should have such
intimate knowledge of the characteristics that had but lately appeared
in the other.
"But the ferry boat," he was saying, with one of the smiles that so
rarely lighted his serious countenance, "is nobody's private property
and you are the only one who can forbid me to ride across the bay in
it at just the time when you are going home."
He must have read encouragement rather than objection in her manner,
for the next evening he was waiting for her again, and by the end of
the week it had become a tacit understanding between them that they
should meet thus and take together the ride across the shining evening
water. Golden red it glowed and sparkled all about them and spread a
radiant path toward the red and gold of the May sunset. Behind them
Manhattan reared its mighty, tawny-yellow walls and towers through the
golden haze--Mammon rising from the waves, with feet lapped in the
rose-gold waters and front ablaze with the diamond dazzle of a
thousand sunset-lighted windows.
It was the month of May, nature's month of marvels, when with her
magic wand she strikes upon earth, and tree, and plant, and human
heart, and the indwelling, everlasting life and youth gush forth in
countless streams of leaf and bloom and song and leaping spirit. All
through the marvelous month these two rode back and forth every day
across the enchanted waters. For it was not long until she began to
find him waiting for her in the morning also, at the door of the
ferry-house in St. George.
All the world was robed in the young beauty of the spring, but
Henrietta Marne soon discovered that for her companion it had but
slight appeal. If she, thrilled by the pageant of sunset colors,
glowing in the sky and reflected in the waters of the bay, voiced her
delight in it Gordon's response would be polite but perfunctory. He
would look and make comment, but she knew that it left him cold. If
she wore a flower at her belt or her throat, chosen with utmost care
to make a tender little harmony of color with her waist or her tie or
the faint pink of her cheeks, it nettled her a little that he did not
even seem to see it.
"If I do that at the office when Mr. Brand is there," she said to
herself, "it's the first thing he sees and he always speaks about it
and looks at it with pleasure and he--doesn't care anything about me!"
"I know, it is a defect of my nature," he said one day in response to
a little gentle rallying on her part because of his lack of interest
in an evening panorama of unusual beauty. "I know I lose a great deal
of the pleasure of living because of it, but I can't help it.
Something seems to have been left out of my make-up. But I hope that
some time I shall recover it. You are so sensitive to these things,
perhaps you can teach me how to feel them, too."
Their talk verged soon into the more or less confidential themes of
personal viewpoints, experiences and ambitions. Henrietta noticed that
Gordon said nothing about his past life, about his relatives or
friends or where he had grown up, or gone to school, or what he had
done in his youth. But he was full of hopes and plans for the future.
His brain was busy working out ideas for large industrial schemes that
should prove the possibility of combining reasonable profit for their
creators and managers with ample wages, comfortable homes and
expanding lives for their workers. In his mind projects were taking
form, though vague as yet, for renovating those noisome places of the
city where human nature, undiluted by space, stews corrosion and
corruption for its souls and bodies. Every day he would give her a
glimpse of one or another of a multitude of half formed ideas, perhaps
but just conceived, perhaps taking tentative form, which he was eager
to work out and put to practical test. For the most part they seemed
to her to be an unusual combination of business shrewdness, just
feeling, and altruistic intent. Apparently his aim in them was to
attain the end of social betterment by means of the co-operative and
mutually profitable effort of all concerned in them.
He talked much and with enthusiasm of these things and Henrietta soon
found that they and kindred hopes and plans were the purpose and the
inspiration of his life.
"I have the business instinct," he told her one day. "It is easy to
make money. It is a pleasure, too, to busy one's mind with large
schemes and see them coming your way. But that is nothing to the
pleasure it will be to set to work, as I shall soon be able to do,
upon some of these schemes and see them coming out as I want them to."
"Your pleasure then will be a double one," she said, "the pleasure of
creating something and that of doing good as well. Mr. Brand must have
that double pleasure, too, when he feels all his faculties at work and
knows that he is creating something that is beautiful, as you will
feel that you are doing something good."
His face darkened and his eyes flashed at the sound of Brand's name.
She felt that he stiffened, mind and body, into hostility.
"Pardon me," he said curtly, "if I am not pleased with the comparison.
I consider Felix Brand, his ideas and principles and his mode of life,
to be so thoroughly detestable that even the mention of his name
rouses my contempt and disgust. I consider him," Gordon went on, his
tones lower and more tense, "a plague spot, a source of evil that
would be a menace to any community."
"Oh, Mr. Gordon!" she protested. "Aren't you exaggerating dreadfully?
Aren't you prejudiced against him? Think of the beautiful buildings he
creates and of the elevating and refining influence of such noble and
beautiful architecture!"
"I know," he assented, "the man has genius, great genius. He has
proved that already, and he might have gone farther in his line and
done much finer and greater things, if he had lived a different life.
But he is bringing his fate upon himself." He paused for an instant,
and she, wondering what he meant by that last dark sentence, which he
had spoken in a tone of the most serious significance, was about to
ask him for an explanation when he turned upon her abruptly.
"Tell me," he demanded, "do you think that a man is to be pardoned for
being a source of evil, for leading or forcing others into wrong-doing
and misfortune, while he keeps himself prosperous and honored, just
because he can create beautiful things in art, or architecture, or
music, or literature? Is the world in greater need of being made more
beautiful and more pleasurable for the few than it is of being made
better for the many? Would you condone a man for deliberately making
it worse because he was adding to its beauty?"
Gordon's intent gaze and the solemn, eager earnestness with which he
spoke appalled his listener ever so little. It was as if he were
asking these questions from his inmost, deepest heart.
"I--I don't know just what to say," she faltered. "I never thought of
the matter in that way before. One doesn't like to answer so serious a
question offhand. But--" she hesitated and felt herself being swept
into agreement by his very forcefulness of character and intensity of
feeling. "Why, yes--I suppose you are right. If the world were
entirely wicked it would be a failure, no matter how beautiful it
might be."
"I was sure you would agree with me," he responded with a look of
pleased satisfaction. "But now I want you to tell me something else,"
he pursued in a gentler tone and with a humbler, softer manner. "I
want to suppose the case of two possible men and I want you to tell me
which of the two you think would be the more deserving of life."
He moved closer to her and, leaning against the deck rail, was looking
into her face with an expression so different from any she had ever
seen in his brown eyes before, wistful and beseeching instead of
confident, alert and dauntless, that it set her heart a-flutter with a
sudden, tantalizing half-memory. Where, when, had she seen brown eyes
with that look in them?
She groped after the answer in the back of her mind while she listened
to his voice, still with its impetuous tones unsubdued, though he
seemed to be trying to state his hypothetical case in cool, bare
terms.
"Suppose there were two men," he was saying, "and suppose that one of
them possessed a genius for the creation of noble and beautiful works
of art of any sort, which would afford great pleasure to many people
and would refine and elevate their tastes. But suppose that at the
same time he was living such a private, even secret, life as made him
a source of wickedness and corruption, an endless influence for evil.
Then would such a man, do you think--" his voice sank lower and
thrilled with solemn earnestness--"deserve to live rather than the
other one, who, though he had no genius for the creation of beauty,
was using all his powers to make the world a better place for all men
to live in? If both men could not have the gift of life, Miss Marne,
which do you think ought to have it?"
She looked at him, glanced away, and hesitated, her mind still bent on
that teasing memory. "You are putting strange riddles to me this
morning, Mr. Gordon," she demurred.
Had she ever seen a wild creature expecting destruction at human
hands? No, surely not, she told herself, and yet this wistful pleading
expression might be just the look in the eyes of an animal facing
death but dumbly begging for life.
Then, in a flash, it all came back--her own little parlor, Billikins
whining and hiding in her skirts in mysterious terror, and Felix Brand
gazing at her with all the usual soft, caressing look of his brown
eyes curtained behind some absorbing anxiety and fear. But in these
eyes into which she was looking now there was no fear, only a
longing that her answer should be what he wished. She shivered as
a half-sensed intuition of impending tragedy shot through her.
"You--you make me feel as if I were a judge and called upon to
pronounce sentence upon some one," she said and tried to pass the
situation off with a little laugh as she added, "Really, it isn't
fair!"
But he would not have it so and with even greater earnestness and
solemnity pressed his question farther: "Then we'll put it another
way. Suppose a mother about to bear a man-child could choose its soul
and the life it was to live. Which of those two men would a good,
noble woman wish her son to be? Imagine yourself in such a woman's
place, Miss Marne, and tell me, which would be your choice."
She felt the compelling force of his earnestness and she was moved by
the intense feeling evident in his voice, look and manner. Her face
blanched with the sudden conviction that some high consequence hung
upon her answer. But she took counsel bravely with herself for a
little space as her gaze wandered across the water.
"I think," she replied slowly, "yes, I'm quite sure, any good woman
would wish her son to be good rather than great. I don't believe any
good woman would hesitate at all, if it were possible for her to make
such a choice."
He straightened up and a solemn joy overspread his eyes and face. "I
thank you, Miss Marne," he said, barely resting for an instant one
hand upon hers that lay on the rail. "I had little doubt what your
answer would be, because you are a good woman. But I wanted to know
for a certainty. It is my final warrant that I am right."
He said no more, and Henrietta, a little awed by the rapt, triumphant
look with which, sitting upright with head thrown back, he gazed into
the distance, kept silence also. And in a few moments their ship
bumped into its berth and they joined silently the crowd that pressed
forward.
After that she was conscious in his manner toward her of an increased
air of guardianship. It gave her a warm sense of comfort and security
and she found herself gradually confiding in it more and more. She
even sought his advice, finally, upon the intimate personal problems
that were troubling her so deeply. Did he think she ought to permit
her sister to motor with Mr. Brand? Was it likely that she herself
could find another situation that would carry her safely out of her
financial difficulties if she should continue to find her work under
Mr. Brand so disagreeable?
"I hesitate to say anything to you about these things, because I know
how much you dislike him," she apologized, "but I feel so uncertain
and so much worried about them, and there is nobody else to whom I can
go who knows him as well as you do. His whole character has changed so
much in the last few months that he hardly seems to be the same man. I
have an uneasy feeling that it isn't wise for my sister to go with
him, although it does seem the most innocent thing in the world, and
the kindest, for him to stop at our house, when he has some business
farther down the island, and take Isabella for a spin. She enjoys it
so much and she has so few pleasures. And she and mother have such
confidence in Mr. Brand that they feel sure he would never ask her to
do anything that wasn't perfectly all right. I felt that way, too, at
first, but I don't now."
"I am glad you have spoken of it," he replied with interest, "for I
have been thinking I ought to give you some warning before Felix
returns. He is simply serving a purpose of his own, an utterly selfish
purpose, and he is using her to help him gain his end without the
least compunction. Don't let her go again, Miss Marne, if you can
help it. I know Felix Brand through and through, and he is not to be
trusted."
Henrietta could only look at him speechless, her eyes wide with
apprehension.
"Don't be alarmed," he hastened to assure her. "I don't think there is
anything for you to be uneasy about, except that his influence is
always evil--" he paused on a raised inflection and looked at her
admiringly. "One of the reasons," he went on regardless of the abrupt
change, "why I like you and feel so sure that you are sound and good
and strong clear through is because you have not yielded in the least
to the subtle influence he has over most people. You have held to your
own ideas of what is right and wrong."
She blushed under his eyes and his words. "I'm afraid I don't deserve
all that credit. I remember a time when I did have some ugly feelings
and some tempestuous desires for pleasures that were out of my reach.
But I had too many other things to do and to think about, and so I
guess I outgrew them."
"And I guess, too, that they didn't find congenial soil in your heart
to take root in," he added. "But you needn't be much worried about
your sister, for I am sure it will not last much longer. At the
best--or worst--there will not be many more opportunities--" again he
straightened up and sent that triumphant glance of his alert,
confident eyes out across the water--"in which it will be possible for
him to work any evil. But he is so thoroughly base that if I were you
I would not trust her with him again."
Henrietta wondered what he meant by that "not many more
opportunities," but forebore to ask him lest she might unintentionally
pry into some matter of which he did not wish to speak. Another
enigmatical fragment from his secret thought came out when she asked
his advice about her own relations with Brand. She told him how
repugnant she was beginning to find her work because--and here she
skipped lightly and diplomatically over her reasons, so that she might
not do violence to her own sense of loyalty to her employer--she did
not now feel in harmony with his methods of doing business and his
ways of looking at a good many things.
"You don't need to put it in so roundabout a way," he told her
impulsively. "I know all about that change in the man's character and
how nearly he has lost all sense of truth and honesty. Luckily, he
still controls his temper with you and treats you with respect----"
He stopped and his whole manner suddenly bristled with aggressiveness.
In his voice as he spoke the next words there was a significant ring:
"And I don't think he'll do otherwise. But of course you can't put up
much longer with these developments in him. I would advise you to look
for another position at once. In fact, I am sure you'd better, because
it won't be long until Felix will not need you."
She gazed at him with such question and alarm in her eyes, that he
returned her look with surprise. "Oh," he exclaimed, "I see. You are
puzzled by what I said. I forgot for the moment,--perhaps I have
before, too--that you do not know all that I do about Felix. But don't
be troubled about it now. Some day you shall know--I shall tell
you--the whole story. I dare say it will seem marvelous to you at
first. But you will soon see how inevitable it has all been. Felix
will return soon, I suppose."
"Oh, I hope so," Henrietta broke in. "He has been gone five weeks and
his affairs are in an awful condition!"
Gordon nodded. "Yes, they must be. It is quite time for him to come
back and put them in order. But I warn you, Miss Marne, that it will
be wise for you not to mention my name to him when he does return. He
hates me so furiously and he has so little control over that violent
temper he has developed, that there is no telling what he will say or
do if any one so much as speaks of me in his presence. You remember
his outrageous conduct to Mrs. Fenlow?"
"Oh, did Mrs. Fenlow tell you about that?" Henrietta asked with a
quick look of surprise that was reminiscent, too, of the shock the
incident had given her. "I thought she mentioned your name. Was that
what made him so angry?"
"That was what caused his final brutality. The trouble was about Mark
Fenlow. You know how fond and proud of him his mother has been and
what high expectations she has always had for him. Felix had got him
into the way of gambling and the boy had developed a passion for it
which he could not restrain. Ever since Felix has had money he has
played a good deal, and for pretty high stakes, because of the
pleasure he got out of it. But he knew when to stop, just as he did
with all his vicious indulgences."
Gordon's eyes were flashing and his voice growing tense with hostile
feeling. But Henrietta saw that he was making a strong effort to keep
himself under control and to speak calmly about his enemy.
"That is," he went on, "he used to be able to stop before doing
himself injury. He didn't care what happened to others. But he can't
now. The gambler's mania has got hold of him in just the same way that
he's lost control of his temper, and he's likely, if he keeps on, to
gamble away everything he's got. He liked Mark Fenlow and led him into
more evil than just the gambling. But it was that that proved the
boy's ruin. It was the old story--playing, losing, borrowing,
financial difficulties, the temptation of money in sight, the belief
that he could pay it back the next day. His last filchings, which
brought about discovery and confession of the whole business to his
mother and father, were due to the fact that Felix was ruthlessly
pressing him to pay back some borrowed money. That was why Mrs. Fenlow
went up to Felix's office and told him what she thought of him. Weeks
ago I went to the boy and tried to reason with him about the way he
was going and persuade him to quit, short off. He told his mother
about that, too, and that was how she happened to mention my name in
their controversy."
"Poor Mrs. Fenlow!" said Henrietta. "I knew she must be in some great
trouble that morning. But what has become of Mark?"
"His father made good his peculations and hushed the matter all up,
and then they sent him out west to a cattle ranch."