It was probable that the dying man did not recognize Lane, though it was
hard to say what dim perception entered through the glazing eyes and
penetrated the clouding brain. The children had been about the room all the
morning, Alice said, and from the way the father clung to Jack's hand she
thought there still was recognition. But the sense of the outer world was
fast fading now. The doctor was there, by way of kindly solicitude,--he
could do nothing; and when the Lanes came he went away, whispering to John
as he left, "Not long now." Alice had sent away the nurse, as she had the
night before, refusing to lose these last minutes of service. She told
Isabelle that in the early morning, while she was watching and had thought
Steve was asleep from his quieter breathing, she had found his eyes resting
on her with a clear look of intelligence, and then kneeling down with her
face close to his lips he had whispered thickly. Her eyes were still
shining from those last lover's words in the night....
When John went back to the city, Isabelle stayed on, taking luncheon with
the nurses and little Belle. Neighbors came to the door to inquire, to
leave flowers. These neighbors had been very kind, Alice had said often,
taking the boys to their homes and doing the many little errands of the
household. "And I hardly knew them to bow to! It's wonderful how people
spring up around you with kindness when trouble comes!"...
Meanwhile, overhead the life was going out, the strong man yielding slowly
to the inevitable. Twilight came on, the doctor returned and went away
again, and the house became absolutely still. Once Isabelle crept upstairs
to the door of the sick room. Alice was holding Steve's head, with one arm
under his pillow, looking,--looking at him with devouring eyes! ...
Gradually the breathing grew fainter, at longer intervals, the eyelids fell
over the vacant eyes, and after a little while the nurse, passing Isabelle
on the stairs, whispered that it was over,--the ten days' losing fight.
Presently Alice came out of the room, her eyes still shining strangely, and
smiled at Isabelle.
When they went out the next afternoon, there was in the house that dreary
human pause created by the fact of death,--pause without rest. Flowers
scented the air, and people moved about on tiptoe, saying nothings in
hushed voices, and trying to be themselves.
But in the dim room above, where Alice took them, there was peace and
naturalness. The dead man lay very straight beneath the sheet, his fleshy
body shrunken after its struggle to its bony stature. Isabelle had always
thought Steve a homely man,--phlegmatic and ordinary in feature. She had
often said, "How can Alice be so romantic over old Steve!" But as the dead
man lay there, wasted, his face seemed to have taken on a grave and austere
dignity, an expression of resolute will in the heavy jaw, the high brow,
the broad nostril, as though the steadfast soul within, so prosaically
muffled in the flesh, had at the last spoken out to those nearest him the
meaning of his life, graving it on his dead face. Lane, caught by this
high, commanding note of the lifeless features, as of one who, though
removed by infinite space, still spoke to the living, gazed steadily at the
dead man. And Isabelle felt the awe of his presence; here was one who could
speak with authority of elemental truths....
Alice, her arms resting on the foot-rail of the bed, was leaning forward,
looking with eyes still shining at her husband, her lover, her mate. And
her lips parted in a little smile. Large and strong and beautiful, in the
full tide of conscious life, she contemplated her dead comrade.
A feeling that she was in the presence of mystery--the mystery of perfect
human union--stole through Isabelle. The woman standing there at the feet
of her dead man had had it all,--all the experience that woman can have.
Had she not loved this man, received his passion, borne his children,
fought by his side the fight of life,--and above all and beyond all else
cherished in her the soul of the man, the sacred part of him, that beauty
unknown to others hitherto, now written plain for all to see on his face!
And her lighted eyes seemed to say, 'What place is there here for grief?
Even though I am left in mid life, to struggle on alone with my children,
without his help, yet have I not had it all? Enough to warm my heart and
soul through the empty years that must come!'...
Tears dropped from Isabelle's eyes, and convulsively she grasped the hand
that rested beside her, as though she would say, 'To lose all this, what
you two have had, how can you bear it!' Alice bent down over her
tear-stained face and kissed her,--with a little gesture towards Steve,
murmuring "I have had so much!"
* * * * *
They walked slowly back to the city in the warm April night. Neither had
spoken since they left the little house, until Isabelle said with a deep
solemnity:--
"It was perfect--that!"
"Yes! Steve was a good man, and Alice loved him."
Each knew what lay behind these commonplace words in the heart of the
other. These two, Steve and Alice, in spite of hardship, the dull grind of
their restricted existence, the many children, the disappointments, had had
something--a human satisfaction--that _they_ had missed--forever; and as
they walked on through the deserted streets silently, side by side, they
saw that now it could never be for them. It was something that missed once
in its perfection was missed for all time. However near they might come to
be, however close in understanding and effort, they could never know the
mystery of two who had lived together, body and soul, and together had
solved life.
For mere physical fidelity is but a small part of the comradeship of
marriage.
CHAPTER LXXVII
Miss Marian Lane was such a thorough cosmopolite that she had no
discernible affection for any place. She referred to Central Park, to the
Farm, to the Price house in St. Louis, to Grosvenor with equal indifference
and impartiality, as she might later to London or Paris or Rome. She did
not even ask her mother where they were to spend the summer. That there was
a Park in St. Louis, as in all properly created cities, she had confidence,
because she asked Miss Joyce to take her there the day after her arrival.
Isabelle's own childhood had been strongly colored by places,--the old
house in K Street, this ugly Victorian mansion, and especially the Farm.
Places had meant so much to her in her youth, her feelings reflecting their
physical atmosphere, that they had been more vivid than persons. But Molly
was equally content anywhere. She needed merely Miss Joyce, a Park, and
pretty clothes.
Clothes, indeed, were the only subject that aroused a semblance of passion
in Molly's sedate soul. "Oh, we shall go shopping, mamma!" she exclaimed
with the first real animation Isabelle had seen in her, when her
grandmother remarked that Molly had outgrown all her dresses this winter.
They were sitting in the large front bedroom that the Colonel and his wife
had always occupied. Mrs. Price had just returned from the Springs, and was
already talking of spending the summer in Europe. Since the Colonel's death
she had become a great globe-trotter, indefatigably whisking hither and
thither with her reliable maid. It seemed as if after all these years of
faithful economy and routine living, the suppressed restlessness of her
race, which had developed at an earlier age in Isabelle, was revenging
itself upon the old lady. "Mother's travels" had become a household
joke....
"Can't we go to-day? Miss Joyce and I saw some lovely things at Roseboro's,
mother!" Molly urged, jumping up from the lounge, where she had been
telling her grandmother about Grosvenor. "Oh, yes, grandmother," Isabelle
had heard her say in a listless voice, "we had a pleasant time in
Grosvenor. Miss Joyce took me coasting with James Pole. And we had sleigh
rides. Miss Joyce was afraid to drive the horses, so we did not go except
when Mrs. Pole took us.... Aunt Margaret was very nice. Miss Joyce gave us
all dancing lessons."...
It was always Miss Joyce this and Miss Joyce that, since Molly's return,
until Isabelle had impatiently concluded that the faithful English
governess with her narrow character had completely ironed out the
personality of her charge. As she listened to Molly's conversation with her
grandmother, she resolved to get rid of Miss Joyce, in order to escape
hearing her name if for no other reason.
"I suppose you'll wait to get her clothes until you are back in New York,"
the practical Mrs. Price observed; "they are so much cheaper and more
tasteful there. The stores here don't seem to be what they were,--even
Roseboro's can't compare with Altman's and Best's for children's things."
"We may not be in New York this spring," Isabelle replied, waking from her
meditations on the subject of Miss Joyce and her daughter. "John's plans
are uncertain--and I don't care to go without him."
"You can try Roseboro's, then; but I don't believe you will be satisfied."
"Oh, mamma, can't we go in the motor now!"
And Molly ran to Miss Joyce to dress herself for the expedition.
Isabelle had scrutinized her little daughter with fresh interest the few
days she had been with her. Molly had always been an unresponsive child
since she was a baby. In spite of her beautiful pink coloring, carefully
preserved by country life, she was scarcely more alive than an automaton.
Whatever individuality she had was so deeply buried that her mother could
not discover it. Why was it? Why was she so colorless? She had been "moved
about" a good deal, like many American children, according to the
exigencies of the family,--to St. Louis, the Farm, the New York hotel, the
New York house, Europe, Grosvenor,--a rapid succession of panoramas for one
small mind to absorb. But Molly had never seemed disturbed by it. One place
was as good as another,--one set of children, provided they had nice
manners and were well dressed, as agreeable as any other. If she were put
down in a Pasadena hotel, she found playmates, judiciously selected by Miss
Joyce, of course, who supervised their games. In all the changes of scene
Isabelle had been most scrupulous in her care for diet, exercises, regime,
and as long as the child seemed content and physically well she had seen no
harm in taking her about from scene to scene. Now Isabelle had her doubts.
The little girl came downstairs, followed by the capable Miss Joyce, who
was brushing out a fold in her white broadcloth coat and arranging a curl,
and looked in at her mother's room, with a pretty little smile and a
gesture of the fingers she had copied from some child. "All ready,
mamma,--shall we wait for you in the motor?" As she passed on, followed by
Miss Joyce,--the figure of dainty young plutocracy and her
mentor,--Isabelle murmured, "I wonder if it has been good for her to move
about so much!"
Mrs. Price, a literal old lady, took up the remark:--
"Why, she looks healthy. Miss Joyce takes excellent care of her. I think
you are very fortunate in Miss Joyce, Isabelle."
"I don't mean her health, mother!"
"She is as forward as most children of her age,--she speaks French very
prettily," the grandmother protested. "She has nice manners, too."
Isabelle saw the futility of trying to explain what she meant to her
mother, and yet the old lady in her next irrelevant remark touched the very
heart of the matter.
"Children have so much attention these days,--what they eat and do is
watched over every minute. Why, we had a cat and a dog, and a doll or two,
the kitchen and the barn to run about in--and that was all. Parents were
too busy to fuss about their children. Boys and girls had to fit into the
home the best they could."
There was a home to fit into! A cat and a dog, a few dolls, and the kitchen
and the barn to run about in,--that was more than Molly Lane with all her
opportunities had ever had.
"There weren't any governesses or nurses; but we saw more of our father and
mother, naturally," the old lady continued. "Only very rich people had
nurses in those times."
The governess was a modern luxury, provided to ease the conscience of lazy
or incompetent mothers, who had "too much to do" to be with their children.
Isabelle knew all the arguments in their favor. She remembered Bessie
Falkner's glib defence of the governess method, when she had wanted to
stretch Rob's income another notch for this convenience,--"If a mother is
always with her children, she can't give her best self either to them or to
her husband!" Isabelle had lived enough since then to realize that this
vague "best self" of mothers was rarely given to anything but distraction.
Isabelle had been most conscientious as a mother, spared no thought or
pains for her child from her birth. The trained nurse during the first two
years, the succession of carefully selected governesses since, the lessons,
the food, the dentist, the doctors, the clothes, the amusements,--all had
been scrupulously, almost religiously, provided according to the best
modern theories. Nothing had been left to chance. Marian should be a
paragon, physically and morally. Yet, her mother had to confess, the child
bored her,--was a wooden doll! In the scientifically sterilized atmosphere
in which she had lived, no vicious germ had been allowed to fasten itself
on the young organism, and yet thus far the product was tasteless. Perhaps
Molly was merely a commonplace little girl, and she was realizing it for
the first time. Isabelle's maternal pride refused to accept such a
depressing answer, and moreover she did not believe that any young thing,
any kitten or puppy, could be as colorless, as little vital as the
exquisite Miss Lane. She must find the real cause, study her child, live
with her awhile. The next generation, apparently, was as inscrutable a
manuscript to read as hers had been to the Colonel and her mother. Her
parents had never understood all the longings and aspirations that had
filled her fermenting years, and now she could not comprehend the dumbness
of her child. Those fermenting years had gone for nothing so far as
teaching her to understand the soul of her child. The new ferment was of a
different composition, it seemed....
* * * * *
Isabelle was to find that her daughter had developed certain tastes besides
a love for clothes and a delight in riding in motor-cars.... Molly was in
the library after luncheon, absorbed in an illustrated story of a popular
magazine, which Isabelle glanced over while Miss Joyce made ready her
charge to accompany her mother to the Johnstons'. The story was "innocent,"
"clean reading" enough,--thin pages of smart dialogue between prettily
dressed young men and athletic girls, the puppy loves of the young
rich,--mere stock fiction-padding of the day. But the picture of life--the
suggestion to the child's soft brain? Isabelle tossed the magazine into the
waste basket, and yawned. Molly had left it with a sigh.
On the way to the Bryn Mawr house Isabelle tried to explain to Molly what
had happened to the Johnstons through the loss of the father, telling her
what a good man Steve was, the sorrow the family had to bear. Molly
listened politely.
"Yes, mother!" And she asked, "Are they very poor?" An innocent remark that
irritated Isabelle unreasonably.
The children played together downstairs while Isabelle discussed with Alice
some business matters. It had not sounded very lively below, and when the
mothers came down they found Molly and Belle sitting on opposite sides of
the little parlor, looking stiffly at each other. The boys had slipped off
for more stirring adventures outdoors, which Molly had refused to join, as
she was making a formal call with her mother. In the motor going home Molly
remarked: "The boys haven't good manners. Belle seems a nice girl. She
hasn't been anywhere and can't talk. That was a very homely dress she had
on; don't you think so? Does she have to wear dresses like that? Can't you
give her something prettier, mamma?"
Isabelle, who thought her god-daughter an interesting child, full of
independence and vitality in spite of her shyness, wondered, "Is Molly just
a stick, or only a little snob?"
Molly was sitting very gracefully in her grandmother's limousine, riding
through the parks and avenues with the air of a perfect little lady
accustomed to observe the world from the cushioned seat of a brougham or
motor-car. Catching sight of a bill board with the announcement of a
popular young actress's coming engagement, she remarked:--
"Miss Daisy May is such a perfect dear, don't you think, mamma? Couldn't
Miss Joyce take me to see her act next Saturday afternoon? It's a perfectly
nice play, you know."
Repressing a desire to shake her daughter, Isabelle replied: "I'll take you
myself, Molly. And shan't we invite Delia Conry? You know she is at school
here and has very few friends."
"Oh!" Molly said thoughtfully. "Delia is so ordinary. I should like to ask
Beatrice Lawton,--Miss Joyce knows her governess.... Or if we must be good
to some one, we might take Belle."
"We'll take them both."
"I don't think Beatrice would enjoy Belle," her daughter objected after
further reflection.
"Well, I shall ask Delia and Belle, then, to go with me alone!"
(She had looked up the Conry child at the school where Vickers had sent
her, and had arranged to have her brother's small estate settled on the
girl, as she felt he would have wished. Delia, whose mother had never been
heard from, was a forlorn little object and Isabelle pitied her.)
When her temporary irritation with Molly had passed, she saw there was
nothing unnatural in the child's attitude. Probably she was a little snob.
Most children brought up as Molly had been, most of her friends, were
little snobs. Their governesses taught them snobbery, unconsciously; their
domestic habits taught them snobbery.
Isabelle resolved more firmly that she should dispense with the excellent
Miss Joyce. A beginning very far down would have to be made, if she were to
reach the individuality of this perfectly nurtured modern child of hers.
There was nothing bad about Molly; she was irritatingly blameless. But what
she lacked was appalling! At eighteen she would be unendurable.
And the mother had no warm feeling, no impelling affection for her
daughter, any more than the child had for her. That lack would make it all
the harder to do what must be done. Here, again, as with her husband, she
must begin to pay for all the years that she had shirked her job,--for the
sake of "her own life," her intellectual emancipation and growth,--shirked,
to be sure, in the most conscientious and enlightened modern manner.
For nobody could call Miss Lane a neglected child.
CHAPTER LXXVIII
It would be very simple for Mrs. Price to provide Alice with a comfortable
income,--the Colonel would have done so; and when Isabelle suggested it to
her mother after the funeral of Steve, the old lady agreed, though she was
not of a philanthropic nature and recalled the fact that the marriage had
been a foolish one. But Alice flatly refused the arrangement. She had been
trained to work; she was not too old to find something to do, and she had
already taken steps to secure a place as matron in a hospital. "I am
strong," she said to Isabelle. "Steve has left it for me to do,--all of it.
And I want to show him that I can do it. I shall be happier!"
John had a better comprehension of her feelings and of the situation than
either Isabelle or her mother. "Alice is an able woman," he had said; "she
will not break down,--she is not that kind. And she'll be happier working."
So he took care of her little life insurance money. He also obtained a
scholarship in a technical school for the oldest boy, and undertook to fit
the second one for college, as he showed studious tendencies. Isabelle
would look after Belle's education. In all these practical details of
readjusting the broken family, John Lane was more effective than his wife,
giving generously of his crowded hours to the Johnston affairs, ever ready
to do all that might be done without hurting the widow's pride and vigorous
will.
And this, as Isabelle knew, came in the days of his greatest personal
perplexity. His resignation as third vice-president had been accepted after
protest, negotiations, and then had elicited a regretful communication to
the press (emanating from the Senator's office) of an eulogistic nature,
concluding with the delicately phrased suggestion that "Mr. Lane's untiring
devotion to his work necessitates his taking a rest from all business cares
for the present. It is understood that he contemplates a long vacation in
Europe."
John handed the paper to Isabelle with an ironical smile.
"You see we are to go abroad,--the usual thing! That's the Senator's crafty
hand. He wants everything decently smooth."
But the public no longer cared. The coal cases had gone up to a higher
court on appeal, and when the final decision was handed down, the "street"
would be interested not in the question of John Lane's guilt or innocence,
but in the more important question of whether the Supreme Court "would back
up the President's campaign against capital."
Meanwhile, there was none of the social stigma attached to the verdict
against her husband that Isabelle had resolutely expected. As soon as it
was known that the Lanes were established in the city for the spring, their
friends sought them out and they were invited to dine more than Isabelle
cared for. In their class, as she quickly perceived from jesting references
to the trial, such legal difficulties as John's were regarded as merely the
disagreeable incidents of doing business in a socialistic age. Lane, far
from being "down and out," was considered in the industrial and railroad
world a strong man rather badly treated by a weak-kneed board of directors,
who had sought to save themselves from trouble by sacrificing an able
servant to the public storm. No sooner was his resignation published than
he received an offer of the presidency of a large transit company in the
middle West. While he was considering this offer, he was approached by
representatives of another great railroad, which, though largely owned by
the same "interests" that controlled the Atlantic and Pacific, was
generally supposed to be a rival. Lane was too valuable a man to be lost to
the railroad army. The "interests" recognized in him a powerful instrument,
trained from boyhood for their purposes,--one "who knew how to get
business." The offer flattered Lane, and soothed that sore spot in his
inner consciousness. He saw himself reinstated in his old world, with a
prospect of crossing swords with his old superiors in a more than secondary
position.
Isabelle knew all about this offer. She and her husband talked together
more freely than they had ever done before. The experiences of the past
weeks,--Steve's death, the planning for Alice's future, as well as the
emotional result of the trial--had brought them nearer an understanding.
Lane had begun to realize a latent aptitude in his wife for grasping the
essential matters of business,--investments, risks, corporation management.
She understood far more than the distinction between stock and bond, which
is supposedly the limit of woman's business intelligence. As the warm May
days came on they took long rides into the fresh country, talking over the
endless detail of affairs,--her money, her mother's money, the Colonel's
trust funds, the Johnstons' future, the railroad situation,--all that John
Lane had hitherto carried tightly shut in his own mind.
And thus Isabelle began to comprehend the close relation between what is
called "business" and the human matters of daily life for every individual
in this complex world. There was not simply a broad mark between right and
wrong,--dramatic trials; but the very souls of men and women were involved
in the vast machine of labor and profit.
She was astonished to discover the extent of her husband's interests, his
personal fortune, which had grown amazingly during these last ten fat years
of the country's prosperity.
"Why, you don't have to take any position!"
"Yes, we could afford to make that European trip the Board so kindly
indicated."
"We _might_ go abroad," she said thoughtfully.
A few years before she would have grasped the chance to live in Europe
indefinitely. Now she found no inclination in her spirit for this solution.
"It isn't exactly the time to leave home," her husband objected; "there is
sure to be a severe panic before long. All this agitation has unsettled
business, and the country must reap the consequences. We could go for a few
months, perhaps."
"It wouldn't be good for Molly."
And though she did not say it, it would not be good for him to leave the
struggle for any length of time. Once out of the game of life, for which he
had been trained like an athlete, he would degenerate and lose his peculiar
power. And yet she shrank unaccountably from his reentering the old life,
with the bitter feeling in his heart he now had. It meant their living in
New York, for one thing, and a growing repugnance to that huge, squirming,
prodigal hive had come over her. Once the pinnacle of her ambitions, now it
seemed sordid, hectic, unreal. Yet she was too wise to offer her
objections, to argue the matter, any more than to open the personal wound
of his trial and conviction. Influence, at least with a man of John Lane's
fibre, must be a subtle, slow process, depending on mutual confidence,
comprehension. And she must first see clearly what she herself knew to be
best. So she listened, waiting for the vision which would surely come.
In these business talks her mind grasped more and more the issues of
American life. She learned to recognize the distinction between the
officials of corporations and the control behind,--the money power. There
emerged into view something of a panorama of industry, organized on modern
lines,--the millions of workers in the industrial armies; the infinite
gradations of leadership in these armies, and finally far off in the
distance, among the canons of the skyscrapers in the great cities, the Mind
of it all, the Control, the massed Capital. There were the Marshals'
quarters! Even the chiefs of great corporations were "little people"
compared with their real employers, the men who controlled capital. And
into that circle of intoxicating power, within its influence, she felt that
her husband was slowly moving--would ultimately arrive, if success
came,--at the height of modern fame. Men did not reach the Marshals'
quarters with a few hundred thousands of dollars, nor with a few millions,
with savings and inheritances and prudent thrift. They must have tens of
millions at their command. And these millions came through alliances,
manipulations, deals, by all sorts of devices whereby money could be made
to spawn miraculously....
Meanwhile the worker earned his wage, and the minor officers their
salaries--what had they to complain of?--but the pelf went up to the
Marshals' camp, the larger part of it,--in this land where all were born
free and equal. No! Isabelle shuddered at the spectacle of the bloody road
up to the camp, and prayed that her life might not be lived in an
atmosphere of blood and alarms and noisy strife, even for the sake of
millions of dollars and limitless Power.
One evening in this period of dubitation Lane remarked casually:--
"Your father's friend, Pete Larrimore, came in to-day to see me. Do you
remember him, Isabelle? The old fellow with the mutton-chop whiskers, who
used to send us bags of coffee from his plantation in Mexico."
"Awful coffee,--we couldn't give it away!"
"He wanted to talk to me about a scheme he is interested in. It seems that
he has a lot of property in the southwest, Oklahoma and the Texas
Panhandle, some of it very valuable. Among other things he has become
involved in a railroad. It was started by some people who hadn't the
capital to carry it through, and now it begins nowhere and ends in the same
place. Larrimore and his friends think they can get the capital to carry
the road south to the line and up north, and ultimately will sell it
perhaps to one of the big systems.... They are looking for a man to build
it and push it through."
"What did you say?" Isabelle demanded eagerly.
"Oh, I just listened. If they can get the money, it might be successful.
That country is growing fast.... It would be a chance for some young man to
win his spurs,--hard work, though."
He talked on, explaining the strategic position of the new road, its
relation to rivals, the prospects of that part of the country, the present
condition of the money market in respect to new enterprises; for Isabelle
seemed interested. But when she interrupted with sudden energy, "Do it,
John! Why don't _you_ take it?" he looked puzzled.
"It is a young man's job,--pioneer work."
"But you are young--we are young! And it would be something worth doing,
pioneer work, building up a new country like that."
"There's not much money in it," he replied, smiling at her girlish
enthusiasm, "and I am afraid not much fame."
Not money, not the fame of the gladiator, the fame of the money power;
merely the good report of a labor competently performed, the reward of
energy and capacity--and the thing done itself. But to Isabelle this
pioneer quality of the work appealed strongly. Her imagination expanded
under the idea.
"I can see you living for the next ten years in a small Texas town!" he
jested. "However, I suppose you wouldn't live out there."
"But I should!" she protested. "And it is what I should like best of all, I
think--the freedom, the open air, the new life!"
So from a merely casual suggestion that Lane had not thought worth serious
consideration, there began to grow between them a new conception of their
future. And the change that these last weeks had brought was marked by the
freedom with which husband and wife talked not only about the future, but
about the past. Isabelle tried to tell her husband what had been going on
within her at the trial, and since then.
"I know," she said, "that you will say I can't understand, that my feeling
is only a woman's squeamishness or ignorance.... But, John, I can't bear to
think of our going back to it, living on in that way, the hard way of
success, as it would be in New York."
Lane looked at her narrowly. He was trying to account for this new attitude
in his wife. That she would be pleased, or at least indifferent, at the
prospect of returning to the East, to the New York life that she had always
longed for and apparently enjoyed, he had taken for granted. Yet in spite
of the fixed lines in which his nature ran and the engrossing
preoccupations of his interests, he had felt many changes in Isabelle since
her return to St. Louis,--changes that he ascribed generally to the
improvement in her health,--better nerves,--but that he could not
altogether formulate. Perhaps they were the indirect result of her
brother's death. At any rate his wife's new interest in business, in his
affairs, pleased him. He liked to talk things over with her....
Thus the days went steadily by towards the decision. Lane had promised his
wife to consider the Larrimore offer. One morning the cable brought the
startling news that the president of the Atlantic and Pacific had committed
suicide in his hotel room in Paris the evening before he was to sail for
home. "Bad health and nervous collapse," was the explanation in the
despatch. But that a man of sixty-three, with a long record of honorable
success, a large fortune, no family troubles, should suddenly take his own
life, naturally roused the liveliest amazement throughout the country.
Nobody believed that the cable told the whole truth; but the real reasons
for the desperate act were locked tight among the directors of the railroad
corporation and a few intimate heads of control--who know all.
Lane read the news to Isabelle. It shook him perceptibly. He had known
Farrington Beals for years, ever since at the Colonel's suggestion he had
been picked out of the army of underlings and given his first chance.
Isabelle remembered him even longer, and especially at her wedding with the
Senator and her father. They were old family friends, the Bealses.
"How terrible for Mrs. Beals and Elsie!" she exclaimed. "How could he have
done it! The family was so happy. They all adored him! And he was about to
retire, Elsie told me when I saw her last, and they were all going around
the world in their yacht.... He couldn't have been very ill."
"No, I am afraid that wasn't the only reason," John admitted, walking to
and fro nervously.
He was thinking of all that the old man had done for him, his resentment at
his chief's final desertion of him forgotten; of how he had learned his
job, been trained to pull his load by the dead man, who had always
encouraged him, pushed him forward.
"He went over for a little rest, you said. And he always went every year
about this time for a vacation and to buy pictures. Don't you remember,
John, what funny things he bought, and how the family laughed at him?"
"Yes,--I know." He also knew that the president of the Atlantic and Pacific
had gone across the ocean "for his yearly vacation" just at the opening of
the coal investigation to escape the scandal of the trial, and had not
returned at the usual time, although the financial world was unsettled. And
he knew other things; for already clubs and inner offices had been buzzing
with rumors.
"I am afraid that it is worse than it seems," he said to his wife on his
return from the city that afternoon. "Beals was terribly involved. I hear
that a bank he was interested in has been closed.... He was tied up
fast--in all sorts of ways!"
"John!" Isabelle cried, and paused. Did this old man's death mean another
scandal, ruin for another family, and one she had known well,--disgrace,
scandal, possibly poverty?
"Beals was always in the market--and this panic hit him hard; he was on the
wrong side lately."
It was an old story, not in every case with the same details, but horribly
common,--a man of the finest possibilities, of sturdy character, rising up
to the heights of ambition, then losing his head, playing the game wantonly
for mere pride and habit in it,--his judgment giving way, but playing on,
stumbling, grasping at this and that to stop his sliding feet, breaking the
elementary laws! And finally, in the face of disaster, alone in a hotel
room the lonely old man--no doubt mentally broken by the strain--putting
the pistol to his head with his shaking hand. And, afterwards, the debris
of his wreck would be swept aside to clear the road for others!
Farrington Beals was not a single case. In this time of money disturbance,
suicide and dishonor were rife in the streets, revealing the rotten timber
that could not stand the strain of modern life, lived as it had been lived
the past ten years. It was not one blast that uprooted weak members of the
forest, but the eating decay of the previous years, working at the heart of
many lives. "The frantic egotism of the age!" Yes, and the divided souls,
never at peace until death put an end to the strife at last,--too much for
little bodies of nerve and tissue to stand,--the racking of divided wills,
divided souls.
"John!" Isabelle cried that night, after they had again talked over the
tragedy; "let us go--go out there--to a new land!" She rose from the lounge
and swept across the room with the energy of clear purpose--of Vision. "Let
us put ourselves as far as possible out of this sort of thing! .... It will
kill us both. Do it for my sake, even if you can't feel as I do!"
And then there poured forth all the story of these years, of their life
apart, as she had come to see it the last months, in the remote and
peaceful hills, in the court-room, in the plain pathos of Steve's death and
Alice's heroism, and now in this suicide,--all that had given her insight
and made her different from what she had been,--all that revealed the
cheapness of her old ideals of freedom, intellectual development,
self-satisfaction, that cult of the ego, which she had pursued in sympathy
with the age. Now she wished to put it away, to remove herself and her
husband, their lives together, outwardly as she had withdrawn herself
inwardly. And her husband, moved in spite of himself by her tense desire,
the energy of her words, listened and comprehended--in part.
"I have never been a real wife to you, John. I don't mean just my love for
that other man, when you were nobly generous with me. But before that, in
other ways, in almost all ways that make a woman a wife, a real wife....
Now I want to be a real wife. I want to be with you in all things.... You
can't see the importance of this step as I do. Men and women are different,
always. But there is something within me, underneath, like an inner light
that makes me see clearly now,--not conscience, but a kind of flame that
guides. In the light of that I see what a petty fool I have been. It all
had to be--I don't regret because it all had to be--the terrible waste, the
sacrifice," she whispered, thinking of Vickers. "Only now we must live, you
and I together,--together live as we have never lived before!"
She held out her hands to him as she spoke, her head erect, and as he
waited, still tied by years of self-repression, she went to him and put her
arms about him, drawing her to him, to her breast, to her eyes. Ten years
before he had adored her, desired her passionately, and she had shrunk from
him. Then life had come imperceptibly in between them; he had gone his way,
she hers. Now she was offering herself to him. And she was more desirable
than before, more woman,--at last whole. The appeal that had never been
wholly stifled in the man still beat in his pulses for the woman. And the
appeal never wholly roused in the woman by him reached out now for him; but
an appeal not merely of the senses, higher than anything Cairy could rouse
in a woman, an appeal, limitless, of comradeship, purpose, wills. He kissed
her, holding her close to him, realizing that she too held him in the inner
place of her being.
"We will begin again," he said.
"Our new life--together!"
* * * * *
And this is Influence, the work of one will upon another, sometimes
apparent, dramatic, tragic; sometimes subtle, unknowable, speaking across
dark gulfs. The meaning of that dead man's austere face, the howl of
journalists on his uncovered trail, the old man dead in his hotel room
disgraced, the deep current of purpose in his new wife,--all these and much
more sent messages into the man's unyielding soul to change the atmosphere
therein, to alter the values of things seen, to shape--at last--the will.
For what makes an act? Filaments of nerve, some shadowy unknown process in
brain cells? These are but symbols for mystery! Life pressing
multifariously its changing suggestions upon the sentient organism prompts,
at last, the act. But there is something deeper than the known in all this
wondrous complexity....
John Lane, the man of fact, the ordered efficient will, was dimly conscious
of forces other than physical ones, beyond,--not recognizable as
motives,--self-created and impelling, nevertheless; forces welling up from
the tenebrous spaces in the depths of his being, beneath conscious life.
And at last, something higher than Judgment swayed the man.
CHAPTER LXXIX
The private car Olympus had been switched for the day to a siding at the
little town of Orano on the edge of the Texas upland. The party within--the
Lanes, Margaret and her children, and several men interested in the new
railroad--had been making a leisurely tour of inspection, passing through
the fertile prairies and woodlands of Oklahoma, stopping often at the
little towns that were springing up along the road, aiming south until they
had reached the Panhandle. These September days the harvests were rich and
heavy, covered with a golden haze of heat,--the sweat of earth's
accomplishment. The new soil was laden with its fruit. The men had been
amazed by the fertility, the force of the country. "Traffic, traffic," Lane
had murmured enthusiastically, divining with his trained eye the enormous
possibilities of the land, the future for the iron highroad he was pushing
through it. Traffic,--in other words, growth, business, human effort and
human life,--that is the cosmic song that sings itself along the iron road.
Margaret had said mockingly:--
"Wouldn't it do our New York friends a world of good to get out here once a
year and realize that life goes on, and very real life, outside the narrow
shores of Manhattan!"
That was the illuminating thought which had come to them all in different
ways during this slow progress from St. Louis south and west. This broad
land of states had a vital existence, a life of its own, everywhere, not
merely in the great centres, the glutted metropolitan points. Men lived and
worked, happily, constructively, in thousands and thousands of small
places, where the seaboard had sunk far beneath the eastern horizon. Life
was real, to be lived vitally, as much here in prairie and plain as
anywhere on the earth's surface. The feeling which had come to Isabelle on
her westward journey in March--the conviction that each one counted, had
his own terrestrial struggle, his own celestial drama, differing very
little in importance from his neighbor's; each one--man, woman, or
child--in all the wonderful completeness of life throughout the
millions--swept over her again here where the race was sowing new land. And
lying awake in the stillness of the autumn morning on the lofty plateau, as
she listened to the colored servants chaffing at their work, there came to
her the true meaning of that perplexing phrase, which had sounded with the
mockery of empty poetry on the lips of the district attorney,--"All men
born free and equal." Yes! in the realm of their spirits, in their
souls,--the inner, moving part of them, "free and equal"! ...
"It's the roof of the world!" Margaret said, as she jumped from the car
platform and looked over the upland,--whimsically recalling the name of a
popular play then running in New York.
An unawakened country, dry and untilled, awaiting the hand of the master,
it lifted westward in colored billows of undulating land. Under the clear
morning sun it was still and fresh, yet untouched, untamed.
"It _is_ the roof of the world," she repeated, "high and dry and
extraordinarily vast,--leading your eyes onward and upward to the heavens,
with all the rest of the earth below you in the fog. How I should like to
live here always! If I were you, Isabelle, I should get your husband to
give you a freight-car like those the gangs of track-layers use, with a
little stovepipe sticking out of one corner, and just camp down in it
here,--on the roof of the world."
She lifted her thin, delicate face to the sun, reaching out her arms to it
hungrily.
"We must sleep out to-night under the stars, and talk--oh, much talk, out
here under the stars!"
During the past year at Grosvenor her frail body had strengthened, revived;
she was now firm and vigorous. Only the deep eyes and the lines above them
and about the mouth, the curve of the nostril and chin, showed as on a
finely chased coin the subtle chiselling of life. And here in the uplands,
in the great spaces of earth and sky, the elemental desire of her soul
seemed at last wholly appeased, the longing for space and height and light,
the longing for deeds and beauty and Peace. At last, after the false roads,
the fret and rebellion, she had emerged into the upper air....
"How well the little man rides!" Isabelle remarked as the children went by
them on some ponies they had found.
Margaret's face glowed with pride.
"Yes, Ned has improved very fast. He will go to school with the others
now.... The doctor has really saved his life--and mine, too," she murmured.
So the two slept out under the stars, as Margaret wished, with dotted
heavens close above and vague space all about; and they talked into the
morning of past years, of matters that meant too much to them both for
daylight speech. Isabelle spoke of Vickers, of the apparent waste of his
life. "I can see now," she said, "that in going away with that woman as he
did he expressed the real soul of him, as he did in dying for me. He was
born to love and to give, and the world broke him. But he escaped!" And she
could not say even to Margaret what she felt,--that he had laid it on her
to express his defeated life.
They spoke even of Conny. "You received the cards for her wedding?"
Margaret asked. "The man is a stockbroker. She is turning her talents to a
new field,--money. I hear the wedding was very smart, and they are to live
on Long Island, with a yacht and half a dozen motors."
"I thought she would marry--differently," Isabelle observed vaguely,
recalling the last time she had seen Conny.
"No! Conny knows her world perfectly,--that's her strength. And she knows
exactly what to take from it to suit her. She is a bronze Cleopatra with
modern variations. I think they ought to put her figure on the gold eagles
as the American Woman Triumphant, ruling her world."
"And on the other side the figure of a Vampire, stacking at the souls of
men." ...
And then they talked of the future, the New Life, as it would shape itself
for Isabelle and her husband, talked as if the earth were fresh and life
but in the opening.
"He may do something else than this," Isabelle said. "He has immense power.
But I hope it will always be something outside the main wheels of industry,
as Mr. Gossom would say,--something with another kind of reward than the
Wall Street crown."
"I wish he might find work here for Rob," Margaret said; "something out
here where he belongs that will not pay him in fame or money. For he has
that other thing in him, the love of beauty, of the ideal." She spoke with
ease and naturally of her lover. "And there has been so little that is
ideal in his life,--so little to feed his spirit."
And she added in a low voice, "I saw her in New York--his wife."
"Bessie!"
"Yes,--she was there with the girl,--Mildred.... I went to see her--I had
to.... I went several times. She seemed to like me. Do you know, there is
something very lovable in that woman; I can see why Rob married her. She
has wrecked herself,--her own life. She would never submit to what the
doctor calls the discipline of life. She liked herself just as she was; she
wanted to be always a child of nature, to win the world with her charm, to
have everything nice and pleasant and gay about her, and be petted into the
bargain. Now she is gray and homely and in bad health--and bitter. It is
pitiful to wake up at forty after you have been a child all your life, and
realize that life was never what you thought it was.... I was very sorry
for her."
"Will they ever come together again?"
"Perhaps! Who knows? The girl must bring them together; she will not be
wholly satisfied with her mother, and Rob needs his daughter.... I hope
so--for his sake. But it will be hard for them both,--hard for him to live
with a spent woman, and hard for her to know that she has missed what she
wanted and never quite to understand why.... But it may be better than we
can see,--there is always so much of the unknown in every one. That is the
great uplifting thought! We live in space and above unseen depths. And
voices rise sometimes from the depths."
And lying there under the stars Margaret thought what she could not
speak,--of the voice that had risen within her and made her refuse the
utmost of personal joy. She had kissed her lover and held him in her arms
and sent him away from her. Without him she could not have lived; nor could
she live keeping him....
At last they came to Renault, the one who had opened their eyes to life and
to themselves.
"Still working," Margaret said, "burning up there in the hills like a
steady flame! Some day he will go out,--not die, just wholly consume from
within, like one of those old lamps that burn until there is nothing, no
oil left, not even the dust of the wick."
As the faint morning breeze began to draw across the upland they fell
asleep, clasping hands.
CHAPTER LXXX
The rising sun had barely shot its first beams over the eastern swell when
Lane came to the tent to call them for the early breakfast before the day's
expedition to a wonderful canon. Isabelle, making a sign to John not to
disturb Margaret, who was still fast asleep, drew the blanket over her
shoulders and joined her husband. The level light flooded the rolling
upland with a sudden glory of gold, except along the outer rim of the
horizon where the twilight color of deep violet still held. Husband and
wife strolled away from the tents in the path of the sun.
"Big, isn't it?" he exclaimed.
"Yes!" she murmured. "It is a big, big world!" And linking her arm in his
they walked on towards the sun together.
In the morning light the earth was fresh and large and joyous. And life, as
Renault had said over the body of the dead child, seemed good, all of it!
That which was past, lived vainly and in stress, and that which was to come
as well. So Alice had affirmed in the presence of her bereavement.... Life
is good, all of it,--all its devious paths and issues!
"It is so good to be here with you!" Isabelle whispered to her husband.
"Yes,--it is a good beginning," he replied. And in his face she read that
he also understood that a larger life was beginning for them both.
As they turned back to the tents, they saw Margaret huddled in her blanket
like a squaw, gazing steadily at the sun.
"And the morrow is added to the morrow to make eternity," she was murmuring
to herself. "But always a new world, a new light, a new life!"