During the next few days, Wray snapped his fingers twice, and on each
occasion Jennie ran to him like a dog, as she had foreseen she would.
The first time was in response to a telegram. The telegram said, simply:
Studio Thursday, 3 P.M.
There was no signature, but Jennie knew what it meant. By one o'clock
she was dressing feverishly; by two, she had said good-by to her mother
and was on her way. She was not thinking of her twenty-five thousand
dollars now, or of any offering up of herself. Her one objective was to
drive that woman from the Byzantine chair so that Hubert shouldn't look
at her again.
But she had not got out of Indiana Avenue on her way to the trolley car
when something happened which had never happened in her life before. She
received another telegram, the second in one day. The messenger boy, who
was a neighbor's son, had hailed her from across the street.
"Hello, Jennie! Are you Miss Jane Scarborough Follett? That's a name and
a half, ain't it?"
Her first thought was that Hubert was wiring to put her off because he
wanted the other woman, after all. Her second, that he had already
addressed her as "Miss Jennie Follett," and she doubted if he knew her
full baptismal name. Only in one connection had it been used of late,
and that recollection made her tremble.
This message, too, was unsigned, and, being so, it puzzled her:
Always close to you in spirit and loving you.
That wasn't like Hubert--and Bob was on the sea.
She walked slowly, reading it again and again, till her eyes caught the
address in a corner--Havana. She remembered then that the _Demerara_ was
to touch at that port, and understood. Crushing the telegraphic slip
into the bottom of her handbag, she made her way to the square and took
her place in the car.
As she jolted down the face of the cliff she wished that this message
hadn't come till after her return from the studio. Then it wouldn't have
mattered. It would have been too late to matter. Not that it mattered
now--only, that the way in which Bob expressed himself made her feel
uneasy. "Always close to you in spirit." She didn't want him to be close
to her in any way, but in spirit least of all. Latterly, she had heard
Mrs. Weatherby, a convert to some school of New Thought, discourse on
the unreality of separations and the bridging power of spirit, and while
these ideas made no appeal to her, they endued Bob's telegram with a
ghostly creepiness. If he was close to her in spirit on an errand like
the present one....
So she turned back from the very studio door. She couldn't go in. She
couldn't so much as put her hand on the knob. Knowing that Hubert was
within a few yards of her, eager to be hers as she was to be his, she
crept guiltily down the stairs.
She cried all night from humiliation and repentance. It was as if Bob
had laid a spell on her. Unless she could break it, her life would be
ruined.
But the opportunity to break it came no later than the very next day.
Chancing to look out into Indiana Avenue, she saw Hubert scanning Number
Eleven from the other side of the street. He must indeed want to see
her, since he had taken this journey into the unknown.
Picking up a sunshade, she went out and spoke to him. He refused to come
in, but begged her to take a little walk.
"Jennie, what's your game?" he asked, roughly, as they sauntered down
the avenue toward the edge of the cliff. "Why don't you come to the
studio when I ask you? What are you afraid of?"
"I did come--the other day--but--"
"Why didn't you stay? I thought you would. Brasshead wouldn't have
minded it, and you could have seen how the thing is done."
"What's the good of seeing how it's done when--when you've got some one
else?"
"But, good Lord! Jennie, this is not the only picture of the kind I
shall ever paint! Even if I go on using Emma for this, I shall want you
for another one--and I'm not sure that I shall go on using Emma. Do you
see?"
She was so perturbed that she launched on a question without knowing
what she meant to ask.
"Isn't she--"
"Oh, she's all right as far as the figure goes. Features coarse. Not a
bit what I'm trying to get. Have to keep toning down and modifying to
give her the spiritual look that you've got, Jennie, to throw away. I
keep thinking of you all the time I'm doing it. Look here, if you'll
come to-morrow, I'll pay Brasshead off and you shall have the job."
By the time they reached Palisade Walk the business was settled on a
business basis. Not once did he depart from the professional side of the
affair, and not once did she allude to the scene in her dressing-room.
But what was understood was understood, not less certainly for its being
by passionate mental vibration, without a word, or a glance, or a
pressure of the hand.
But the next day, as Jennie was leaving the house to keep her
appointment, Josiah, who had gone out as usual to look for work, had
dragged himself home and fainted at the door.
"I'm all in," he mumbled, on his return to consciousness. "I don't
suppose I shall ever get a chance to do a day's work again."
Jennie was so much alarmed that she forgot to telephone her inability to
go to the studio till after her father had been put to bed and the
doctor had come and gone.
"Oh, it's all right," Hubert had said, listlessly. "I didn't expect you.
I knew that if it wasn't one excuse, it would be another--"
"But I _will_ come," Jennie had interrupted, tearfully.
"Do just as you like about that. Emma's here, and, as you're so
uncertain, I've decided to go on and finish the picture without making a
change."
He put up the receiver on saying this, so that Jennie was left all in
the air with her love and her distress.
When Teddy appeared that evening, it was she who told him of their
father's breakdown.
"The doctor says it's worry," she explained, "and lack of nutrition. He
says he must stay in bed a week, and we've got to feed him up and not
let him worry again."
Teddy's face grew longer and longer.
"Then we'll have to have more money."
"You poor Ted, yes; but then you're making money on the side, aren't
you?"
Reminding himself, as he did a hundred times a day, that Nicholson had
had five years in which to get away with it, Teddy passed on upstairs to
his father's bedside.
"It's all right, dad," he tried to smile. "Don't you worry. I'm here.
I'll take care of ma and the girls. You just make your mind easy and
give yourself up to getting well."
Jennie's attendance at the studio was thus put out of the question for
many days, and in the meantime she had a letter posted at Havana.
Fearing that it would come and attract attention in the family, she
watched the postman, getting it one morning before breakfast. Bob wrote:
There is a love so big and strong and sure that separations mean
nothing to it, because it fills the world. That's my kind of
love, Jennie darling. You can't get out of it--I can't get out
of it--even if we would. At this very minute I'm sailing and
sailing; but I'm not being carried farther away from you. The
love in which you and I are now leading our lives is wider than
the great big circle made by the horizon. Don't forget that,
dear. I'm always with you. Love doesn't recognize distance. Love
isn't physical or geographical. It's force, power, influence. I
love you so much that I know I can keep you safe even though I'm
on the other side of the world. I can't fend troubles away from
you, worse luck, but I can carry you through them. I know that
till I come back you'll be having a hard time; but my love will
hang round you like an enchanted cloak, and nothing will really
get at you. You're always wearing that cloak, Jennie; you always
walk with it about you.
While Jennie was reading this, Edith Collingham, at breakfast at Marillo
Park, was springing a question on her father. She sprang it at breakfast
because it was the only time she was sure of seeing him alone.
"Father, how far are children obliged to marry or not to marry in
deference to their parents' wishes, and how far have fathers and mothers
the right to interfere?"
Dauphin, who was on his haunches near his master's knee, removed himself
to a midway position between the two ends of the table, as if he felt
that in the struggle he perceived to be coming he couldn't throw his
influence with either side. Through the open window Max could be seen in
perpetual motion on the lawn, yet pausing every two minutes to look
wistfully down the avenue in the hope of some loved approach.
Without answering at once, Collingham tapped an egg with a spoon. The
broaching of so personal a question between one of his children and
himself was something new. It had been an established rule in the
household that, however free the intercourse between the boy and the
girl and their mother, the approach to their father was always indirect.
Junia had made it her lifelong part to explain the children to their
father and the father to his children, but rarely to give them a chance
of explaining themselves to each other. Collingham had acquiesced in
this for the reason that the duties of a parent were not those for which
he felt himself, in his own phrase, specially "cut out."
The duties for which he did feel himself cut out were those that had to
do with the investment of money. On this ground, he spoke with
authority; he was original, intuitive, inspired. When it came to a flair
for the stock which was selling to-day at fifty and which to-morrow
would be worth five hundred, he belonged to the _illuminati_. This being
the highest use of intelligence known to man, he felt it his duty to
specialize in it to the exclusion of everything else.
As already hinted, there were two Collinghams. There was the natural
man, a kindly, generous fellow who would never have made a big position
in the world; and there was the other Collingham, standardized to the
accepted, forceful, American-business-man pattern, and who, now that he
was sixty-odd, was the Collingham who mainly had the upper hand.
Mainly, but not completely. The natural Collingham often made timid
attempts to speak and had to be stifled. He was being stifled while the
standardized Collingham tapped his egg. It was the pupil of Junia,
Bickley, and the business world who finally sought to gain time by
asking a counter-question.
"What do you want to know for?"
Edith was prepared for this.
"Because I may make a marriage that you and mother wouldn't like; and I
think it possible that Bob may do the same."
Whatever the natural Collingham might have said to this, the man who had
been evolved from him could have but one response.
"People who act on their own responsibility should be prepared to go the
whole hog."
Edith sipped her coffee while she worked out the significance of this.
"Does that mean that you wouldn't give us any money?"
"Rather that, being so extremely independent, you wouldn't ask for it."
"Oh, ask for it--no; and yet--"
"And yet you think I ought to hand it out."
"I was thinking rather of a kind of _noblesse oblige_--"
"In which all the _noblesse_ must be mine."
"Not exactly that. In which perhaps the _noblesse_ should be _ours_.
Even if I should marry a poor man, I can't help being a Collingham, a
member of a family with large ideas and a large way of living."
"Yes; but, you see, you'd be giving them up."
"You can't give up what's been bred into you. And in my case I should be
bringing the man--you must let me say it, dad--I should be bringing the
man I--I _love_--so little--"
"He's probably counting on a great deal. Poor men who marry rich men's
daughters generally do."
"I was going to say that while he'd be giving me so much, all I could
offer him would be money; and if I didn't bring that--"
"Well? Go on."
"If I didn't bring that, I should feel so humiliated before him--"
He affected an ignorance which was not a fact.
"Who _is_ this paragon, anyhow?"
"I thought mother might have told you. It's Mr. Ayling."
"Oh, that teacher fellow!"
"He's more than that, dad. He's a professor in one of our greatest
universities. He's a writer beginning to be recognized as having ideas.
He has a position of his own--"
"Yes; but only an intellectual one."
She raised her eyebrows.
"'Only'?"
He straightened himself and prepared for business.
"Look here, Edith, don't kid yourself. An intellectual position in this
country is no position at all. The American people have no use for the
intellectual, and they've made that plain."
She could hardly express her amazement.
"Why, dad! There's no country in the world where people go in more for
education, where there are more men who go to colleges--"
"Yes--to fit them for making money, not to turn them into highbrows. You
must have a spade to dig a garden, but it's the garden you're proud of,
not the spade."
"And the very President of the country--"
"Is what you call an intellectual man; but that's a bit of chance. He's
not President because he was a college professor, but because he was a
politician. If he hadn't been a politician--something that the country
values--he'd still be rotting in some two-by-three university. Listen,
Edith!" He emphasized his point by the movement of his forefinger.
"We've a rule in business which is the test of everything. So long as
you stick to it you can't go wrong in your estimates. _The value of a
thing is as much money as it will bring._ You know the value of the
intellectual in American eyes the minute you think of what the American
people is willing to pay for it. You say your intellectual man has a
position of his own. Well, you can see how big the position is by what
he earns. He doesn't earn enough decently to support a wife, and so long
as the American people have anything to say to it, he never will. You
can box the whole compass of fellows who live by their wits--teachers,
writers, journalists, artists, musicians, clergymen, and the whole tribe
of them. We don't want them in this country, except as you want a spade
and a hoe in your tool-house. When they try to get in, we starve them
out; and, Collingham as you are, once you've married this fellow you'll
go with your gang." He pushed back his chair and rose. "That's all I've
got to say. Think it over." As he passed out through the French window
to the terrace beyond he snapped his fingers. "Dauphin, come along!"
But, perhaps for the first time in his life, Dauphin didn't immediately
follow him. Instead, he went first to Edith, laying his long nozzle in
her lap.
For five or ten minutes, as Collingham smoked his morning cigar while
visiting the stables, the garage, and the kitchen garden, the natural
man tried to raise his voice.
"Why didn't you say, 'Marry your man, Edith, my child, and I'll give you
ten thousand a year?' Poor little girl," this first Collingham went on,
"she's so frank and true and high spirited! You've made her unhappy when
you could so easily have made her glad."
"You said what any other American father in your position would have
said," the pupil of Bickley and Junia argued, on the other side. "True,
you've made her unhappy, but young people often have to be made unhappy
in order that the foolish dictates of the heart may be repressed. There
are millions of people all over the world whose lives would have been
spoiled if such early emotional impulses hadn't been thwarted."
And, after all, it was true that the intellectual was not respected. The
public pretended that it was, but when it came to the test of social and
financial reward--the only rewards there were--the pretense was
apparent. There were no intellectual people at Marillo Park; there were
none whom he, Collingham, knew in business. There were men with brains;
but to distinguish them from the intellectual they were described as
brainy. Edith as the wife of an intellectual man would be
self-destroyed; and it was his duty as her father to stop, if he could,
that self-destruction.
By the time he had reached the point in his morning ritual which brought
him to Junia's bedside, he was standardized again, even though it was
with a bleeding heart. He could more easily suffer a bleeding heart than
he could the fear of not being an efficient man of business.
"What use have you had for the twenty-five thousand I've paid in your
account?" he asked, before he kissed her good-by.
She concealed her anxiety that so many days had passed without a sign
from Jennie under an air of nonchalance.
"No use as yet, but I expect to have. I shall let you know when the time
comes."
But no sign could come from Jennie, for the reason that her father died
in mid-July, and during the intervening weeks she was tied to his
bedroom. As the eldest daughter and the only one at home, all her other
functions were absorbed in those of nurse. Luckily, there was money in
the house, for Teddy had been successful in his efforts "on the side,"
and Bob continued to transmit small sums to herself, which she added to
the hundred dollars in the top bureau drawer. Bob, Hubert, Collingham
Lodge, her ambition, and her love became unreal and remote as she
watched the setting of the sun to which her being had been turned. In
the eyes of others, Josiah might be feeble and a failure, but to Teddy
and his sisters he was their father, the pivot of their lives, the
nearest thing to a supreme being they had known.
Lizzie's grief was different. Her heart didn't ache because he was
dying. Life having become what it was, he was better dead. If she could
have died herself, she would have gone to her rest gladly, had it not
been for the children. For their sake, she remained sweet, calm, active,
brewing and baking, sweeping and cleaning, sitting up at night with
Josiah while they were asleep, and hiding the fact that instead of a
heart she felt nothing within her but a stone.
Her grief was not for Josiah; it was for the futility of the best things
human beings could bring to life. Honesty, industry, thrift, devotion,
ambition, and romance had been the qualifications with which Josiah
Follett and Lizzie Scarborough had faced the world; and this was the
best the world could do with them. "It isn't as if we ever faltered or
refused or turned aside," she mused to herself, as she hurried from one
task to another. "We've been absolutely faithful. We've had pluck in the
face of every discouragement and eaten ashes as if it were bread, and,
in the end, we come to this. It makes no difference that we didn't
deserve it; we get it just the same."
Josiah's wanderings as his mind grew feebler turned forever round one
central theme: A job! a job! To be allowed to work! To have a chance to
earn a living! It was his kingdom of heaven, his forgiveness of sins,
his paradise of God. In the middle of night he would open his eyes and
say:
"I've got a job, Lizzie. Fifty a week!"
"Yes, yes," Lizzie would say, drawing the sheet about his shoulders.
"Yes, yes; you'll go to town in the morning. Now turn over, dear, and go
to sleep again."
These excitements were generally in the small hours of the morning. By
day, he was less cheerful.
"I'm all in, Jennie darling," he would say then. "I don't suppose I'll
ever get a chance to do a day's work again."
But one hot afternoon in the middle of July he woke from a long sleep
with a look that startled her. Jennie had never seen the approach of
death, but, now that she did, she knew it could be nothing else. He had
simply rolled over on his back, staring upward with eyes that had become
curiously glassy and sightless. Jennie ran to the head of the stairs.
"Momma! Momma! Come quick!"
He said nothing till Lizzie had reached the bedside. Though he didn't
move his head or look toward her, he seemed to know that she was there.
"Here's mother, Lizzie." He raised his hands, while a look of glad
surprise stole over his face. "There's a country," he stammered on,
brokenly, "no, it isn't a country--it's like a town--they're
working--they've got work for me--and--and they're never--they're
never--fired."
The hands fell, but the look of glad surprise was only shut out of sight
by the coffin lid.
Teddy paid for the lot in the cemetery, as well as the other expenses of
the funeral, within a week of his father's death. "Now I'm through," he
said to himself, with a long sigh of relief.
"You darling Ted," was Jennie's commendation. "You must have given momma
five hundred dollars at least. Now I hope you'll be able to save a
little for yourself."
At the bank, Teddy's younger colleagues were sympathetic, Lobley
especially doing him kindly little turns. He asked him to supper one
evening at a restaurant, where they talked of marksmanship, at which
Teddy had been proficient in the navy. He was out of practice now, he
said, to which Lobley had replied that it was a pity. He, Lobley, had an
automatic pistol illegally at home, and if Teddy would like to borrow it
he could soon bring himself back to his old form. Teddy did so like, and
went back to Pemberton Heights with the thing secreted on his person. It
went with him to the bank next day--and every day.
For Teddy had begun to notice symptoms to which one less keenly
suspicious would be blind. Nothing was ever said of money missing, and
no hint thrown out that he himself was not trusted as before. He had
nothing to go on except that Mr. Brunt became more taciturn than ever,
and once or twice he thought he was being watched. The eyes of Jackman,
the principal house detective, wandered often toward him, and twice he,
Teddy, had seen Jackman in conference with Flynn.
"They'll never get me alive," was his inner consolation, though
immediate suicide suggested itself as an alternative, and flight,
disappearance, an absolute blotting out was a third expedient.
Yet nothing was sure; nothing was even remotely sure. By becoming too
jumpy he might easily give himself away. Nicholson had had five years.
In two years, in one, Teddy meant to be square with the bank again.
But one afternoon, as he emerged into Broad Street on his way home,
Jackman and Flynn were talking together on the opposite pavement. The
boy jumped back, though not before he saw Jackman make a sign to Flynn
which said as plainly as words, "There he is now."
To Teddy, it was the end of the world. All the past, all the future,
merged into this single second of terror. He looked across at them; they
looked across at him. There was a degree of confession in the very way
in which his blanched face stared at them through the intervening
crowds.
Jackman's lips formed half a dozen syllables, emphasized by a nod and a
lifting of the brows.
"That's the guy all righty," were the words Teddy practically heard.
Like a startled wild thing, he had but one impulse--to run. Actual
running in Broad Street at that hour of the day being out of the
question, he dived into the procession mounting toward Wall Street,
ducking, dodging, pushing, almost knocking people down, and mad with
fear. "They'll never get me alive," he was saying to himself; but how in
that crowd to find space in which to turn the pistol to his heart
already puzzled him.
At the corner of Wall Street he summoned courage to look over his
shoulder. They might not be after him. If not, it would prove a false
alarm, such as he had had before. But there they were--Jackman
scrambling laboriously up the other side of Broad Street, and Flynn
crossing it, picking his way among the vans and motor cars.
Like a frightened rabbit, Teddy scurried on again, meaning to gain
Nassau Street and somehow double on his tracks.