Our lives are largely made up of the things we do not have. In May,
the time of the apple blossoms--just a year from the swift wooing of
Margaret--Miss Forsythe received a letter from John Lyon. It was in a
mourning envelope. The Earl of Chisholm was dead, and John Lyon was Earl
of Chisholm. The information was briefly conveyed, but with an air of
profound sorrow. The letter spoke of the change that this loss brought
to his own life, and the new duties laid upon him, which would confine
him more closely to England. It also contained congratulations--which
circumstances had delayed--upon Mrs. Henderson's marriage, and a simple
wish for her happiness. The letter was longer than it need have been
for these purposes; it seemed to love to dwell upon the little visit to
Brandon and the circle of friends there, and it was pervaded by a tone,
almost affectionate, towards Miss Forsythe, which touched her very
deeply. She said it was such a manly letter.
America, the earl said, interested him more and more. In all history,
he wrote, there never had been such an opportunity for studying
the formation of society, for watching the working out of political
problems; the elements meeting were so new, and the conditions so
original, that historical precedents were of little service as guides.
He acknowledged an almost irresistible impulse to come back, and he
announced his intention of another visit as soon as circumstances
permitted.
I had noticed this in English travelers of intelligence before. Crude
as the country is, and uninteresting according to certain established
standards, it seems to have a “drawing” quality, a certain unexplained
fascination. Morgan says that it is the social unconventionality that
attracts, and that the American women are the loadstone. He declares.
that when an Englishman secures and carries home with him an American
wife, his curiosity about the country is sated. But this is generalizing
on narrow premises.
There was certainly in Lyon's letter a longing to see the country again,
but the impression it made upon me when I read it--due partly to its
tone towards Miss Forsythe, almost a family tone--was that the earldom
was an empty thing without the love of Margaret Debree. Life is so brief
at the best, and has so little in it when the one thing that the heart
desires is denied. That the earl should wish to come to America again
without hope or expectation was, however, quite human nature. If a man
has found a diamond and lost it, he is likely to go again and again and
wander about the field where he found it, not perhaps in any defined
hope of finding another, but because there is a melancholy satisfaction
in seeing the spot again. It was some such feeling that impelled
the earl to wish to see again Miss Forsythe, and perhaps to talk of
Margaret, but he certainly had no thought that there were two Margaret
Debrees in America.
To her aunt's letter conveying the intelligence of Mr. Lyon's loss,
Margaret replied with a civil message of condolence. The news had
already reached the Eschelles, and Carmen, Margaret said, had written
to the new earl a most pious note, which contained no allusion to
his change of fortune, except an expression of sympathy with his now
enlarged opportunity for carrying on his philanthropic plans--a most
unworldly note. “I used to think,” she had said, when confiding what
she had done to Margaret, “that you would make a perfect missionary
countess, but you have done better, my dear, and taken up a much more
difficult work among us fashionable sinners. Do you know,” she went on,
“that I feel a great deal less worldly than I used to?”
Margaret wrote a most amusing account of this interview, and added that
Carmen was really very good-hearted, and not half as worldly-minded as
she pretended to be; an opinion with which Miss Forsythe did not at all
agree. She had spent a fortnight with Margaret after Easter, and she
came back in a dubious frame of mind. Margaret's growing intimacy with
Carmen was one of the sources of her uneasiness. They appeared to be
more and more companionable, although Margaret's clear perception of
character made her estimate of Carmen very nearly correct. But the fact
remained that she found her company interesting. Whether the girl tried
to astonish the country aunt, or whether she was so thoroughly a child
of her day as to lack certain moral perceptions, I do not know, but her
candid conversation greatly shocked Miss Forsythe.
“Margaret,” she said one day, in one of her apparent bursts of
confidence, “seems to have had such a different start in life from mine.
Sometimes, Miss Forsythe, she puzzles me. I never saw anybody so much in
love as she is with Mr. Henderson; she doesn't simply love him, she is
in love with him. I don't wonder she is fond of him--any woman might be
that--but, do you know, she actually believes in him.”
“Why shouldn't she believe in him?” exclaimed Miss Forsythe, in
astonishment.
“Oh, of course, in a way,” the girl went on. “I like Mr. Henderson--I
like him very much--but I don't believe in him. It isn't the way now to
believe in anybody very much. We don't do it, and I think we get along
just as well--and better. Don't you think it's nicer not to have any
deceptions?”
Miss Forsythe was too much stunned to make any reply. It seemed to her
that the bottom had fallen out of society.
“Do you think Mr. Henderson believes in people?” the girl persisted.
“If he does not he isn't much of a man. If people don't believe in each
other, society is going to pieces. I am astonished at such a tone from a
woman.”
“Oh, it isn't any tone in me, my dear Miss Forsythe,” Carmen continued,
sweetly. “Society is a great deal pleasanter when you are not anxious
and don't expect too much.”
Miss Forsythe told Margaret that she thought Miss Eschelle was a
dangerous woman. Margaret did not defend her, but she did not join,
either, in condemning her; she appeared to have accepted her as a part
of her world. And there were other things that Margaret seemed to
have accepted without that vigorous protest which she used to raise
at whatever crossed her conscience. To her aunt she was never more
affectionate, never more solicitous about her comfort and her pleasure,
and it was almost enough to see Margaret happy, radiant, expanding day
by day in the prosperity that was illimitable, only there was to her a
note of unreality in all the whirl and hurry of the busy life. She liked
to escape to her room with a book, and be out of it all, and the two
weeks away from her country life seemed long to her. She couldn't
reconcile Margaret's love of the world, her tolerance of Carmen,
and other men and women whose lives seemed to be based on Carmen's
philosophy, with her devotion to the church services, to the city
missions, and the dozens of charities that absorb so much of the time of
the leaders of society.
“You are too young, dear, to be so good and devout,” was Carmen's
comment on the situation.
To Miss Forsythe's wonder, Margaret did not resent this impertinence,
but only said that no accumulation of years was likely to bring Carmen
into either of these dangers. And the reply was no more satisfactory to
Miss Forsythe than the remark that provoked it.
That she had had a delightful visit, that Margaret was more lovely
than ever, that Henderson was a delightful host, was the report of Miss
Forsythe when she returned to us. In a confidential talk with my wife
she confessed, however, that she couldn't tell whither Margaret was
going.
One of the worries of modern life is the perplexity where to spend the
summer. The restless spirit of change affects those who dwell in the
country, as well as those who live in the city. No matter how charming
the residence is, one can stay in it only a part of the year. He
actually needs a house in town, a villa by the sea, and a cottage in the
hills. When these are secured--each one an establishment more luxurious
year by year--then the family is ready to travel about, and is in a
greater perplexity than before whether to spend the summer in Europe
or in America, the novelties of which are beginning to excite the
imagination. This nomadism, which is nothing less than society on
wheels, cannot be satirized as a whim of fashion; it has a serious
cause in--the discovery of the disease called nervous prostration, which
demands for its cure constant change of scene, without any occupation.
Henderson recognized it, but he said that personally he had no time to
indulge in it. His summer was to be a very busy one. It was impossible
to take Margaret with him on his sudden and tedious journeys from
one end of the country to the other, but she needed a change. It was
therefore arranged that after a visit to Brandon she should pass the
warm months with the Arbusers in their summer home at Lenox, with a
month--the right month--in the Eschelle villa at Newport; and he hoped
never to be long absent from one place or the other.
Margaret came to Brandon at the beginning of June, just at the season
when the region was at its loveliest, and just when its society was
making preparations to get away from it to the sea, or the mountains,
or to any place that was not home. I could never understand why a people
who have been grumbling about snow and frost for six months, and longing
for genial weather, should flee from it as soon as it comes. I had made
the discovery, quite by chance--and it was so novel that I might have
taken out a patent on it--that if one has a comfortable home in our
northern latitude, he cannot do better than to stay in it when the hum
of the mosquito is heard in the land, and the mercury is racing up and
down the scale between fifty and ninety. This opinion, however, did not
extend beyond our little neighborhood, and we may be said to have had
the summer to ourselves.
I fancied that the neighborhood had not changed, but the coming of
Margaret showed me that this was a delusion. No one can keep in the same
place in life simply by standing still, and the events of the past two
years had wrought a subtle change in our quiet. Nothing had been changed
to the eye, yet something had been taken away, or something had been
added, a door had been opened into the world. Margaret had come home,
yet I fancied it was not the home to her that she had been thinking
about. Had she changed?
She was more beautiful. She had the air--I should hesitate to call it
that of the fine lady--of assured position, something the manner of that
greater world in which the possession of wealth has supreme importance,
but it was scarcely a change of manner so much as of ideas about life
and of the things valuable in it gradually showing itself. Her delight
at being again with her old friends was perfectly genuine, and she
had never appeared more unselfish or more affectionate. If there was
a subtle difference, it might very well be in us, though I found it
impossible to conceive of her in her former role of teacher and simple
maiden, with her heart in the little concerns of our daily life. And why
should she be expected to go back to that stage? Must we not all live
our lives? Miss Forsythe's solicitude about Margaret was mingled with
a curious deference, as to one who had a larger experience of life
than her own. The girl of a year ago was now the married woman, and was
invested with something of the dignity that Miss Forsythe in her pure
imagination attached to that position. Without yielding any of her
opinions, this idea somehow changed her relations to Margaret; a little,
I thought, to the amusement of Mrs. Fletcher and the other ladies, to
whom marriage took on a less mysterious aspect. It arose doubtless from
a renewed sense of the incompleteness of her single life, long as it had
been, and enriched as it was by observation.
In that June there were vexatious strikes in various parts of the
country, formidable combinations of laboring-men, demonstrations of
trades-unions, and the exhibition of a spirit that sharply called
attention to the unequal distribution of wealth. The discontent was
attributed in some quarters to the exhibition of extreme luxury and
reckless living by those who had been fortunate. It was even said that
the strikes, unreasonable and futile as they were, and most injurious
to those who indulged in them, were indirectly caused by the railway
manipulation, in the attempt not only to crush out competition, but to
exact excessive revenues on fictitious values. Resistance to this could
be shown to be blind, and the strikers technically in the wrong, yet the
impression gained ground that there was something monstrously wrong
in the way great fortunes were accumulated, in total disregard of
individual rights, and in a materialistic spirit that did not take into
account ordinary humanity. For it was not alone the laboring class that
was discontented, but all over the country those who lived upon small
invested savings, widows and minors, found their income imperiled by the
trickery of rival operators and speculators in railways and securities,
who treated the little private accumulations as mere counters in the
games they were playing. The loss of dividends to them was poorly
compensated by reflections upon the development of the country, and the
advantage to trade of great consolidations, which inured to the benefit
of half a dozen insolent men.
In discussing these things in our little parliament we were not
altogether unprejudiced, it must be confessed. For, to say nothing
of interests of Mr. Morgan and my own, which seemed in some danger of
disappearing for the “public good,” Mrs. Fletcher's little fortune was
nearly all invested in that sound “rock-bed” railway in the Southwest
that Mr. Jerry Hollowell had recently taken under his paternal care. She
was assured, indeed, that dividends were only reserved pending some sort
of reorganization, which would ultimately be of great benefit to all the
parties concerned; but this was much like telling a hungry man that if
he would possess his appetite in patience, he would very likely have a
splendid dinner next year. Women are not constituted to understand this
sort of reasoning. It is needless to say that in our general talks on
the situation these personalities were not referred to, for although
Margaret was silent, it was plain to see that she was uneasy.
Morgan liked to raise questions of casuistry, such as that whether money
dishonestly come by could be accepted for good purposes.
“I had this question referred to me the other day,” he said. “A
gambler--not a petty cheater in cards, but a man who has a splendid
establishment in which he has amassed a fortune, a man known for his
liberality and good-fellowship and his interest in politics--offered
the president of a leading college a hundred thousand dollars to endow a
professorship. Ought the president to take the money, knowing how it was
made?”
“Wouldn't the money do good--as much good as any other hundred thousand
dollars?” asked Margaret.
“Perhaps. But the professorship was to bear his name, and what would be
the moral effect of that?”
“Did you recommend the president to take the money, if he could get it
without using the gambler's name?”
“I am not saying yet what I advised. I am trying to get your views on a
general principle.”
“But wouldn't it be a sneaking thing to take a man's money, and refuse
him the credit of his generosity?”
“But was it generosity? Was not his object, probably, to get a
reputation which his whole life belied, and to get it by obliterating
the distinction between right and wrong?”
“But isn't it a compromising distinction,” my wife asked, “to take
his money without his name? The president knows that it is money
fraudulently got, that really belongs to somebody else; and the
gambler would feel that if the president takes it, he cannot think very
disapprovingly of the manner in which it was acquired. I think it would
be more honest and straightforward to take his name with the money.”
“The public effect of connecting the gambler's name with the college
would be debasing,” said Morgan; “but, on the contrary, is every charity
or educational institution bound to scrutinize the source of every
benefaction? Isn't it better that money, however acquired, should be
used for a good purpose than a bad one?”
“That is a question,” I said, “that is a vital one in our present
situation, and the sophistry of it puzzles the public. What would you
say to this case? A man notoriously dishonest, but within the law, and
very rich, offered a princely endowment to a college very much in need
of it. The sum would have enabled it to do a great work in education.
But it was intimated that the man would expect, after a while, to be
made one of the trustees. His object, of course, was social position.”
“I suppose, of course,” Margaret replied, “that the college couldn't
afford that. It would look like bribery.”
“Wouldn't he be satisfied with an LL.D.?” Morgan asked.
“I don't see,” my wife said, “any difference between the two cases
stated and that of the stock gambler, whose unscrupulous operations have
ruined thousands of people, who founds a theological seminary with the
gains of his slippery transactions. By accepting his seminary the public
condones his conduct. Another man, with the same shaky reputation,
endows a college. Do you think that religion and education are benefited
in the long-run by this? It seems to me that the public is gradually
losing its power of discrimination between the value of honesty and
dishonesty. Real respect is gone when the public sees that a man is able
to buy it.”
This was a hot speech for my wife to make. For a moment Margaret flamed
up under it with her old-time indignation. I could see it in her eyes,
and then she turned red and confused, and at length said:
“But wouldn't you have rich men do good with their money?”
“Yes, dear, but I would not have them think they can blot out by their
liberality the condemnation of the means by which many of them make
money. That is what they are doing, and the public is getting used to
it.”
“Well,” said Margaret, with some warmth, “I don't know that they are any
worse than the stingy saints who have made their money by saving, and
act as if they expected to carry it with them.”
“Saints or sinners, it does not make much difference to me,” now put
in Mrs. Fletcher, who was evidently considering the question from a
practical point of view, “what a man professes, if he founds a hospital
for indigent women out of the dividends that I never received.”
Morgan laughed. “Don't you think, Mrs. Fletcher, that it is a good sign
of the times, that so many people who make money rapidly are disposed to
use it philanthropically?”
“It may be for them, but it does not console me much just now.”
“But you don't make allowance enough for the rich. Perhaps they are
under a necessity of doing something. I was reading this morning in the
diary of old John Ward of Stratford-on-Avon this sentence: 'It was a
saying of Navisson, a lawyer, that no man could be valiant unless he
hazarded his body, nor rich unless he hazarded his soul.'”
“Was Navisson a modern lawyer?” I asked.
“No; the diary is dated 1648-1679.”
“I thought so.”
There was a little laugh at this, and the talk drifted off into a
consideration of the kind of conscience that enables a professional man
to espouse a cause he knows to be wrong as zealously as one he knows to
be right; a talk that I should not have remembered at all, except for
Margaret's earnestness in insisting that she did not see how a lawyer
could take up the dishonest side.
Before Margaret went to Lenox, Henderson spent a few days with us.
He brought with him the abounding cheerfulness, and the air of a
prosperous, smiling world, that attended him in all circumstances. And
how happy Margaret was! They went over every foot of the ground on which
their brief courtship had taken place, and Heaven knows what joy there
was to her in reviving all the tenderness and all the fear of it! Busy
as Henderson was, pursued by hourly telegrams and letters, we could
not but be gratified that his attention to her was that of a lover. How
could it be otherwise, when all the promise of the girl was realized
in the bloom and the exquisite susceptibility of the woman? Among other
things, she dragged him down to her mission in the city, to which he
went in a laughing and bantering mood. When he had gone away, Margaret
ran over to my wife, bringing in her hand a slip of paper.
“See that!” she cried, her eyes dancing with pleasure. It was a check
for a thousand dollars. “That will refurnish the mission from top to
bottom,” she said, “and run it for a year.”
“How generous he is!” cried my wife. Margaret did not reply, but she
looked at the check, and there were tears in her eyes.