They dined in the lofty, sombre room at the rear of the house, overlooking
a patch of turf between the house and the stable. Above the massive
sideboard hung an oil portrait of the Colonel, a youthful painting but
vigorous, where something of the old man's sweetness and gentle wisdom had
been caught. This dining room had been done over the year before Isabelle
was married; its taste seemed already heavy and bad.
Her mother's old servants served the same rich, substantial meal they had
served when she was a child, with some poor sherry, the Colonel's only
concession to domestic conviviality. The room and the food subtly typified
the spirit of the race,--that spirit which was illuminated in the
court-room--before it had finally evolved.... The moral physiology of men
is yet to be explored!
Lane leaned back in the Colonel's high-backed chair, gray and weary under
the brilliant light. At first he tried to be interested in Grosvenor, asked
questions of his wife, but soon he relapsed into a preoccupied silence.
This mood Isabelle had never seen in her husband, nor his physical
lassitude. After a time she ventured to ask:--
"Is it likely to last much longer, the trial?"
"A couple of days, the lawyers think." And after a while he added morosely:
"Nobody can tell how long if it is appealed.... I have had to muddle away
the better part of the winter over this business, first and last! It's
nothing but popular clamor, suspicion. The government is playing to the
gallery. I don't know what the devil will happen to the country with this
lunatic of a President. Capital is already freezing up tight. The road will
have to issue short-time notes to finance the improvements it has under
way, and abandon all new work. Men who have money to invest aren't going to
buy stock and bonds with a set of anarchists at Washington running the
country!"
It was quite unlike Lane to explode in this manner. It was not merely the
result of nervous fatigue, Isabelle felt: it indicated some concealed sore
in her husband's mind.
"How do you think it will be decided?" she asked timidly.
"The trial? Nobody can guess. The judge is apparently against us, and that
will influence the jurors,--a lot of farmers and sore-heads! ... But the
verdict will make no difference. We shall carry it up, fight it out till
the last court. The government has given us enough errors,--all the opening
we need!"
The government had played badly, that is. Isabelle had it on her tongue to
demand: "But how do _you_ feel about it,--the real matter at issue? What is
right--_just_?" Again she refrained, afraid to array herself apparently on
the side of his enemies.
"It is all this infernal agitation, which does nobody any good and will
result in crippling business," he repeated, as they went to the library for
their coffee.
This room, where the Colonel usually sat evenings with his wife and the
neighbors who dropped in, was exactly as it had been in the old days,--even
the same row of novels and books of travel in a rack on the polished table.
Only the magazines had been changed.
Lane lighted a cigar and sipped his coffee. Revived by his dinner and
cigar, he began to talk more freely, in the same mood of disgusted
irritation, the mood of his class these days, of the men he met at his
club, in business,--the lawyers, the capitalists, the leaders of society.
Isabelle, listening to his bitter criticism, wished that she might get him
to speak more personally,--tell her all the detail that had led up to the
suit, explain his connection with it,--show her his inmost heart as he
would show it to himself in a time of exact truth! With this feeling she
went over to where he was sitting and put her hand on his shoulder, and as
he glanced up in surprise at this unexpected demonstration, she said
impulsively:--
"John, please, John! ... Tell me everything--I can understand.... Don't you
think there might be some little truth in the other side? Was the road
fair, was it just in this coal business? I so want to know, John!"
Her voice trembled with suppressed emotion. She wished to draw him to her,
in the warmth of her new feeling to melt his stern antagonism, his harsh
mood. But as he looked inquiringly at her--weighing as it were the meaning
of this sudden interest in his affairs--the wife realized how far apart she
was from her husband. The physical separation of all these years, the
emotional separation, the intellectual separation had resulted in placing
them in two distinct spheres spiritually. The intervening space could not
be bridged in a moment of expansive emotion. It would be a slow matter, if
it ever could be accomplished, to break the crust that had formed like ice
between their souls. Isabelle went back to her seat and drank her coffee.
"I don't know what you mean by fair and just," he replied coldly. "Business
has to be done according to its own rules, not as idealists or reformers
would have it done. The railroad has done nothing worse than every big
business is compelled to do to live,--has made a profit where there was one
to make.... This would be a poor sort of country, even for the reformers
and agitators, if the men who have the power to make money should be bound
hand and foot by visionaries and talkers. You can't get the sort of men
capable of doing things on a large scale to go into business for clerk's
wages. They must see a profit--and a big one,--and the men who aren't worth
anything will always envy them. That's the root of the whole matter."
It would be useless, Isabelle saw, to point out that his defence was
general, and an evasion of the point she wished to see clearly,--what the
real _fact_ with him was. His mind was stiffened by the prejudices of his
profession, tempered in fierce fires of industrial competition as a result
of twenty years of triumphant struggle with men in the life and death
grapple of business. He was strong just because he was narrow and blind. If
he had been able to doubt, even a little, the basis of his actions, he
would never have become the third vice-president of the Atlantic and
Pacific, one of the most promising of the younger men in his profession.
Recognizing her defeat, Isabelle asked about the Johnstons.
"I have seen Steve a couple of times," Lane replied. "I meant to write you,
but hadn't the time. Steve didn't make good in that lumber business. Those
men he went in with, it looks to me, were sharks. They took all his money
away,--every cent. You know they mortgaged the house, too. Then the company
failed; he was thrown out. Steve was not sharp enough for them, I guess."
"Isn't that too bad!"
"Just what might have been expected," Lane commented, associating Steve
Johnston's failure with his previous train of thought; "I told him so when
he gave up railroading. He was not an all-round man. He had one talent--a
good one--and he knew the business he was trained in. But it wasn't good
enough for him. He must get out and try it alone--"
"It wasn't to make more money," Isabelle protested, remembering the day at
the Farm when the two men had walked back and forth, delaying luncheon,
while they heatedly discussed Steve's determination to change his business.
"He had this reform virus in his system, too! ... Well, he is bookkeeper,
now, for some little down-town concern at eighteen hundred a year. All he
can get these days. The railroads are discharging men all the time. He
might be earning six thousand in the position I offered him then. Do you
think Alice and the boys will be any better off for his scruples? Or the
country?"
"Poor Alice! ... Are they still living in the house at Bryn Mawr?"
"Yes, I believe so. But Steve told me he couldn't carry the mortgage after
the first of the year,--would have to give up the house."
"I must go out there to-morrow," she said quickly; and after a time she
added, "Don't you think we could do something for them, John?"
Lane smiled, as if the suggestion had its touch of irony.
"Why, yes! I mean to look into his affairs when I can find the time....
I'll see what I can do."
"Oh, that is good!" Isabelle exclaimed warmly. It was like her husband,
prompt generosity to a friend in trouble. And this matter brought husband
and wife closer in feeling than they had been since her arrival.
"Ready money is a pretty scarce commodity," Lane remarked; "but I will see
what can be done about his mortgage."
It was not easy, he wished his wife to know, even for the strong to be
generous these days, thanks to the reformers, and the "crazy man in
Washington," with whom he suspected she sympathized.
They sat in silence after this until he had finished his cigar. There were
many subjects that must be discussed between them, which thrust up their
heads like sunken rocks in a channel; but both felt their danger. At last
Isabelle, faint from the excitement of the day, with all its mutations of
thought and feeling, went to her room. She did not sleep for hours, not
until long after she heard her husband's step go by the door, and the click
of the switches as he turned out the electric lights.
There was much to be done before their marriage could be recreated on a
living principle. But where the man was strong and generous, and the woman
was at last awakened to life, there was no reason to despair.