THE TREADWELLS
Above the Dinwiddie of Virginia's girlhood, rising sharply out of the
smoothly blended level of personalities, there towered, as far back as
she could remember, the grim and yet strangely living figure of Cyrus
Treadwell. From the intimate social life of the town he had remained
immovably detached; but from the beginning it had been impossible for
that life to ignore him. Among a people knit by a common pulse, yet
separated by a multitude of individual differences, he stood aloof and
indispensable, like one of the gaunt iron bridges of his great railroad.
He was at once the destroyer and the builder--the inexorable foe of the
old feudal order and the beneficent source of the new industrialism.
Though half of Dinwiddie hated him, the other half (hating him, perhaps
none the less) ate its bread from his hands. The town, which had lived,
fought, lost, and suffered not as a group of individuals, but as a
psychological unit, had surrendered at last, less to the idea of
readjustment than to the indomitable purpose of a single mind.
And yet nobody in Dinwiddie, not even Miss Willy Whitlow, who sewed out
by the day, and knew the intimate structure of every skeleton in every
closet of the town--nobody could tell the precise instant at which Cyrus
had ceased to be an ordinary man and become a great one. A phrase,
which had started as usual, "The Mr. Treadwell, you know, who married
poor Belinda Bolingbroke--" swerved suddenly to "Cyrus Treadwell told me
that, and you must admit that _he_ knows what he is talking about"--and
a reputation was made! His marriage to "poor Belinda," which had at
first appeared to be the most conspicuous fact in his career, dwindled
to insignificance beside the rebuilding of the tobacco industry and his
immediate elevation to the vacant presidency of one of the Machlin
railroads.
It was true that in the meantime he had fought irreproachably, but
without renown, through a number of battles; and returning to a
vanquished and ruined city, had found himself still young enough to go
to school again in matters of finance. Whether he had learned from
Antrum, the despised carpet-bagger for Machlin & Company, or had taken
his instructions at first hand from the great Machlin himself, was in
the eighties an open question in Dinwiddie. The choice was probably
given him to learn or starve; and aided by the keen understanding and
the acute sense of property he had inherited from his Scotch-Irish
parentage, he had doubtless decided that to learn was, after all, the
easier way. Saving he had always been, and yet with such strange and
sudden starts of generosity that he had been known to seek out distant
obscure maiden relatives and redeem the mortgaged roof over their heads.
His strongest instinct, which was merely an attenuated shoot from his
supreme feeling for possessions, was that of race, though he had
estranged both his son and his daughter by his stubborn conviction that
he was not doing his duty by them except when he was making their lives
a burden. For, as with most men who have suffered in their youth under
oppression, his ambition was not so much to relieve the oppressed as to
become in his turn the oppressor. Owing, perhaps, to his fine
Scotch-Irish blood, which ran a little muddy in his veins, he had never
lost a certain primitive feeling of superstition, like the decaying root
of a religious instinct; and he was as strict in his attendance upon
church as he was loose in applying the principles of Christianity to his
daily life. Sunday was vaguely associated in his mind with such popular
fetiches as a frock coat and a roast of beef; and if the roast had been
absent from dinner, he would have felt precisely the same indefinite
disquietude that troubled him when the sermon was left out of the
service. So completely did his outward life shape itself around the
inner structure of his thought, that, except for the two days of the
week which he spent with unfailing regularity in Wall Street, he might
have been said to live only in his office. Once when his doctor had
prescribed exercise for a slight dyspepsia, he had added a few
additional blocks to his morning and evening walk, and it was while he
was performing this self-inflicted penance that he came upon Gabriel,
who was hastening toward him in behalf of John Henry.
For an instant a gleam of light shone on Cyrus's features, and they
stood out, palely illuminated, like the features of a bronze statue
above which a torch suddenly flares. His shoulders, which stooped until
his coat had curved in the back, straightened themselves with a jerk,
while he held out his hand, on which an old sabre cut was still visible.
This faded scar had always seemed to Gabriel the solitary proof that
the great man was created of flesh and blood.
"I've come about a little matter of business," began the rector in an
apologetic tone, for in Cyrus's presence he was never without an uneasy
feeling that the problems of the spirit were secondary to the problems
of finance.
"Well, I'm just going into the office. Come in and sit down. I'm glad to
see you. You bring back the four happiest years of my life, Gabriel."
"And of mine, too. It's queer, isn't it, how the savage seems to sleep
in the most peaceable of men? We were half starved in those days, half
naked, and without the certainty that we'd live until sunset--but,
dreadful as it sounds, I was happier then--God help me!--than I've ever
been before or since."
Passing through an outer office, where a number of young men were
bending over ledgers, they entered Cyrus's private room, and sat down in
two plain pine chairs under the coloured lithograph of an engine which
ornamented the largest space on the wall. The room was bare of the most
ordinary comforts, as though its owner begrudged the few dollars he must
spend to improve his surroundings.
"Well, those days are over, and you say it's business that you've come
about?" retorted Cyrus, not rudely, but with the manner of a man who
seldom wastes words and whose every expenditure either of time or of
money must achieve some definite result.
"Yes, it's business." The rector's tone had chilled a little, and he
added in spite of his judgment, "I'm afraid it's a favour. Everybody
comes begging to you, I suppose?"
"Then, it's the Sunday-school picnic, I reckon. I haven't forgotten it.
Smithson!" An alert young man appeared at the door. "Make a note that
Mr. Pendleton wants coaches for the Saint James' Church picnic on the
twenty-ninth. You said twenty-ninth, didn't you, Gabriel?"
"If the weather's good," replied Gabriel meekly, and then as Smithson
withdrew, he glanced nervously at the lithograph of the engine. "But it
wasn't about the picnic that I came," he said. "The fact is, I wanted to
ask you to use your influence in the matter of getting John Henry a
place in the bank. He has done very well at the night school, and I
believe that you would find him entirely satisfactory."
At the first mention of the bank, a look of distrust crept into Cyrus's
face--a look cautious, alert, suspicious, such as he wore at directors'
meetings when there was a chance that something might be got out of him
if for a minute he were to go off his guard.
"I feel a great responsibility for him," resumed Gabriel almost sternly,
though he was painfully aware that his assurance had deserted him.
"Why don't you go to James? James is the one to see about such a
matter."
If the rector had spoken the thought in his mind, he would have
answered, "Because James reminds me of a fish and I can't abide him";
but instead, he replied simply, "I know James so slightly that I don't
feel in a position to ask a favour of him."
The expression of suspicion left Cyrus's face, and he relaxed from the
strained attitude in which he had sat ever since the Sunday-school
picnic had been dismissed from the conversation. Leaning back in his
chair, he drew two cigars from the pocket of his coat, and after
glancing a little reluctantly at them both, offered one to the rector.
"I believe he really wanted me to refuse it!" flashed through Gabriel's
mind like an arrow--though the other's hesitation had been, in fact,
only an unconscious trick of manner which he had acquired during the
long lean years when he had fattened chiefly by not giving away. The
gift of a cigar could mean nothing to a man who willingly contributed to
every charity in town, but the trivial gestures that accompany one's
early habits occasionally outlast the peculiar circumstances from which
they spring.
For a few minutes they smoked in silence. Then Cyrus remarked in his
precise voice: "James is a clever fellow--a clever fellow."
"I've heard that he is as good as right hand to you. That's a fine thing
to say of a son."
"Yes, I don't know what I should do without James. He's a saving hand,
and, I tell you, there are more fortunes made by saving than by
gambling."
"Well, I don't think James need ever give you any concern on that
account," replied Gabriel, not without gentle satire, for he recalled
several unpleasant encounters with the younger Treadwell on the subject
of charity. "But I've heard different tales of that nephew of yours who
has just come back from God knows what country."
"He's Henry's son," replied Cyrus with a frown. "You haven't forgotten
Henry?"
"Yes, I remember. Henry and George both went out to Australia to open
the tobacco market, and Henry died poor while George lived and got rich,
I believe?"
"George kept free of women and attended to his affairs," returned Cyrus,
who was as frank about his family as he was secretive about his
business.
"But what about Henry's son? He's a promising chap, isn't he?"
"It depends upon what you call promising, I reckon. Before he came I
thought of putting him into the bank, but since I've seen him, I can't,
for the life of me, think of anything to do with him. Unless, of course,
you could see your way toward taking him into the ministry," he
concluded with sardonic humour.
"His views on theology would prevent that, I fear," replied the rector,
while all the kindly little wrinkles leaped out around his eyes.
"Views? What do anybody's views matter who can't make a living? But to
tell the truth, there's something about him that I don't trust. He isn't
like Henry, so he must take after that pretty fool Henry married. Now,
if he had James's temper, I could make something out of him, but he's
different--he's fly-up-the-creek--he's as flighty as a woman."
Gabriel, who had been a little cheered to learn that the young man, with
all his faults, did not resemble James, hastened to assure Cyrus that
there might be some good in the boy, after all--that he was only
twenty-two, and that, in any case, it was too soon to pass judgment.
"I can't stand his talk," returned the other grimly. "I've never heard
anybody but a preacher--I beg your pardon, Gabriel, nothing
personal!--who could keep going so long when nobody was listening. A
mere wind-bag, that's what he is, with a lot of nonsensical ideas about
his own importance. If there wasn't a girl in the house, it would be no
great matter, but that Susan of mine is so headstrong that I'm half
afraid she'll get crazy and imagine she's fallen in love with him."
This proof of parental anxiety touched Gabriel in his tenderest spot.
After all, though Cyrus had a harsh surface, there was much good at the
bottom of him. "I can enter into your feelings about that," he answered
sympathetically, "though my Jinny, I am sure, would never allow herself
to think seriously about a man without first asking my opinion of him."
"Then you're fortunate," commented Cyrus dryly, "for I don't believe
Susan would give a red cent for what I'd think if she once took a fancy.
She'd as soon elope with that wild-eyed scamp as eat her dinner, if it
once entered her head."
A knock came at the door, and Smithson entered and conferred with his
employer over a telegram, while Gabriel rose to his feet.
"By the way," said Cyrus, turning abruptly from his secretary and
stopping the rector as he was about to pass out of the door, "I was just
wondering if you remembered the morning after Lee's surrender, when we
started home on the road together?"
"Why, yes." There was a note of surprise in Gabriel's answer, for he
remembered, also, that he had sold his watch a little later in the day
to a Union soldier, and had divided the eighty dollars with Cyrus. For
an instant, he almost believed that the other was going to allude for
the first time to that incident.
"Well, I've never forgotten that green persimmon tree by the roadside,"
pursued the great man, "and the way you stopped under it and said, 'O
Lord, wilt Thou not work a miracle and make persimmons ripen in the
spring?'"
"No, I'd forgotten it," rejoined Gabriel coolly, for he was hurt by the
piece of flippancy and was thinking the worst of Cyrus again.
"You'd forgotten it? Well, I've a long memory, and I never forget.
That's one thing you may count on me for," he added, "a good memory. As
for John Henry--I'll see James about it. I'll see what James has to
say."
When Gabriel had gone, accompanied as far as the outer door by the
secretary, Cyrus turned back to the window, and stood gazing over a
steep street or two, and past the gabled roof of an old stone house, to
where in the distance the walls of the new building of the Treadwell
Tobacco Company were rising. Around the skeleton structure he could see
the workmen moving like ants, while in a widening circle of air the
smoke of other factories floated slowly upward under a brazen sky.
"There are too many of them," he thought bitterly. "It's competition
that kills. There are too many of them."
So rapt was his look while he stood there that there came into his face
an expression of yearning sentiment that made it almost human. Then his
gaze wandered to the gleaming tracks of the two great railroads which
ran out of Dinwiddie toward the north, uncoiling their length like
serpents between the broad fields sprinkled with the tender green of
young crops. Beside them trailed the ashen country roads over which
farmers were crawling with their covered wagons; but, while Cyrus
watched from his height, there was as little thought in his mind for the
men who drove those wagons through the parching dust as for the beasts
that drew them. It is possible even that he did not see them, for just
as Mrs. Pendleton's vision eliminated the sight of suffering because her
heart was too tender to bear it, so he overlooked all facts except those
which were a part of the dominant motive of his life. Nearer still,
within the narrow board fences which surrounded the backyards of negro
hovels, under the moving shadows of broad-leaved mulberry or sycamore
trees, he gazed down on the swarms of mulatto children; though to his
mind that problem, like the problem of labour, loomed vague, detached,
and unreal--a thing that existed merely in the air, not in the concrete
images that he could understand.
"Well, it's a pity Gabriel never made more of himself," he thought
kindly. "Yes, it's a pity. I'll see what I can do for him."
At six o'clock that evening, when the end of his business day had come,
he joined James at the door for his walk back to Bolingbroke Street.
"Have you done anything about Jones's place in the bank?" was the first
question he asked after his abrupt nod of greeting.
"No, sir. I thought you were waiting to find out about Oliver."
"Then you thought wrong. The fellow's a fool. Look up that nephew of
Gabriel Pendleton, and see if he is fit for the job. I am sorry Jones is
dead," he added with a touch of feeling. "I remember I got him that
place the year after the war, and I never knew him to be ten minutes
late during all the time that I worked with him."
"But what are we to do with Oliver?" inquired James after a pause. "Of
course he wouldn't be much good in the bank, but----"
And without finishing his sentence, he glanced up in a tentative,
non-committal manner into Cyrus's face. He was a smaller and somewhat
imperfect copy of his father, naturally timid, and possessed of a
superstitious feeling that he should die in an accident. His thin anæmic
features lacked the strength of the Treadwells, though in his cautious
and taciturn way he was very far indeed from being the fool people
generally thought him. Since he had never loved anything with passion
except money, he was regarded by his neighbours as a man of
unimpeachable morality.
At the end of the block, while the long pointed shadows of their feet
kept even pace on the stone crossing, Cyrus answered abruptly: "Put him
anywhere out of my sight. I can't bear the look of him."
"How would you like to give him something to do on the road? Put him
under Borrows, for instance, and let him learn a bit about freight?"
"Well, I don't care. Only don't let me see him--he turns my stomach."
"Then as long as we've got to support him, I'll tell him he may try his
hand at the job of assistant freight agent, if he wants to earn his
keep."
"He'll never do that--just as well put him down under 'waste,' and have
done with him," replied Cyrus, chuckling.
A little girl, rolling a hoop, tripped and fell at his feet, and he
nodded at her kindly, for he had a strong physical liking for children,
though he had never stopped to think about them in a human or personal
way. He had, indeed, never stopped to think about anything except the
absorbing problem of how to make something out of nothing. Everything
else, even his marriage, had made merely a superficial impression upon
him. What people called his "luck" was only the relentless pursuit of an
idea; and in this pursuit all other sides of his nature had been sapped
of energy. From the days when he had humbly accepted small commissions
from the firm of Machlin & Company, to the last few years, when he had
come to be regarded almost superstitiously as the saviour of sinking
properties, he had moved quietly, cautiously, and unswervingly in one
direction. The blighting panic of ten years before had hardly touched
him, so softly had he ventured, and so easy was it for him to return to
his little deals and his diet of crumbs. They were bad times, those
years, alike for rich and poor, for Northerner and Southerner; but in
the midst of crashing firms and noiseless factories, he had cut down his
household expenses to a pittance and had gone on as secretively as
ever--waiting, watching, hoping, until the worst was over and Machlin &
Company had found their man. Then, a little later, with the invasion of
the cigarette, there went up the new Treadwell factory which the subtle
minded still attributed to the genius of Cyrus. Even before George and
Henry had sailed for Australia, the success of the house in Dinwiddie
was assured. There was hardly a drug store in America in those days that
did not offer as its favourite James's crowning triumph, the Magnolia
cigarette. A few years later, competition came like a whirlwind, but in
the beginning the Treadwell brand held the market alone, and in those
few years Cyrus's fortune was made.
"Heard from George lately?" he inquired, when they had traversed,
accompanied by their long and narrow shadows, another couple of blocks.
The tobacco trade had always been for him merely a single pawn in the
splendid game he was playing, but he had suspected recently that James
felt something approaching a sentiment for the Magnolia cigarette, and
true to the Treadwell scorn of romance, he was forever trying to trick
him into an admission of guilt.
"Not since that letter I showed you a month ago," answered James. "Too
much competition, that's the story everywhere. They are flooding the
market with cigarettes, and if it wasn't for the way the Magnolia holds
on, we'd be swamped in little or no time."
"Well, I reckon the Claypole would pull us through," commented Cyrus.
The Claypole was an old brand of plug tobacco with which the first
Treadwell factory had started. "But you're right about competition. It's
got to stop or we'll be driven clean out of the business."
He drew out his latchkey as he spoke, for they had reached the corner of
Bolingbroke Street, and the small dingy house in which they lived was
only a few doors away. As they passed between the two blossoming
oleanders in green tubs on the sidewalk, James glanced up at the flat
square roof, and observed doubtfully, "You'll be getting out of this old
place before long now, I reckon."
"Oh, someday, someday," answered Cyrus. "There'll be time enough when
the market settles and we can see where the money is coming from."
Once every year, in the spring, James asked his father this question,
and once every year he received exactly the same answer. In his mind,
Cyrus was always putting off the day when he should move into a larger
house, for though he got richer every week, he never seemed to get quite
rich enough to commit himself to any definite change in his
circumstances. Of course, in the nature of things, he knew that he ought
to have left Bolingbroke Street long ago; there was hardly a family
still living there with whom his daughter associated, and she complained
daily of having to pass saloons and barber shops whenever she went out
of doors. But the truth was that in spite of his answer to James's
annual question, neither of them wanted to move away from the old home,
and each hoped in his heart that he should never be forced into doing
so. Cyrus had become wedded to the house as a man becomes wedded to a
habit, and since the clinging to a habit was the only form of sentiment
of which he was capable, he shrank more and more from what he felt to be
the almost unbearable wrench of moving. A certain fidelity of purpose,
the quality which had lifted him above the petty provincialism that
crippled James, made the display of wealth as obnoxious to him as the
possession of it was agreeable. As long as he was conscious that he
controlled the industrial future of Dinwiddie, it was a matter of
indifference to him whether people supposed him to be a millionaire or a
pauper. In time he would probably have to change his way of living and
put an end to his life-long practice of saving; but, meanwhile, he was
quite content to go on year after year mending the roof and the chimneys
of the old house into which he had moved the week after his marriage.
Entering the hall, he hung his hat on the walnut hat-rack in the dark
corner behind the door, and followed the worn strip of blue and red
oilcloth which ran up the narrow staircase to the floor above. Where the
staircase bent sharply in the middle, the old-fashioned mahogany
balustrade shone richly in the light of a gas-jet which jutted out on a
brass stem from the wall. Although a window on the upper floor was
opened wide to the sunset, the interior of the house had a close musty
smell, as if it had been shut up, uninhabited, for months. Cyrus had
never noticed the smell, for his senses, which were never acute, had
been rendered even duller than usual by custom.
At the top of the stairs, a coloured washerwoman, accompanied by a
bright mulatto boy, who carried an empty clothes basket on his head,
waited humbly in the shadow for the two men to pass. She was a dark
glistening creature, with ox-like eyes, and the remains of a handsome
figure, now running to fat.
"Howdy, Marster," she murmured under her breath as Cyrus reached her, to
which he responded brusquely, "Howdy, Mandy," while he glanced with
unseeing eyes at the mulatto boy at her side. Then, as he walked rapidly
down the hall, with James at his heels, the woman turned back for a
minute and gazed after him with an expression of animal submission and
acquiescence. So little personal to Cyrus and so free from individual
consciousness was this look, that it seemed less the casual glance from
a servant to a master than the intimate aspect of a primitive racial
attitude toward life.
At the end of the hall, beyond the open door of the bedroom (which he
still occupied with his wife from an ineradicable conviction that all
respectable married persons slept together no matter how uncomfortable
they might be), Cyrus discerned the untidy figure of Mrs. Treadwell
reflected in a mirror before which she stood brushing her back hair
straight up from her neck to a small round knot on the top of her head.
She was a slender, flat-chested woman, whose clothes, following some
natural bent of mind, appeared never to be put on quite straight or
properly hooked and buttoned. It was as if she perpetually dressed in a
panic, forgetting to fasten her placket, to put on her collar or to mend
the frayed edges of her skirt. When she went out, she still made some
spasmodic attempts at neatness; but Susan's untiring efforts and
remonstrances had never convinced her that it mattered how one looked in
the house--except indeed when a formal caller arrived, for whom she
hastily tied a scarf at the neck of her dirty basque and flung a purple
wool shawl over her shoulders. Her spirit had been too long broken for
her to rebel consciously against her daughter's authority; but her mind
was so constituted that the sense of order was missing, and the pretty
coquetry of youth, which had masqueraded once as the more enduring
quality of self-respect, was extinguished in the five and thirty
penitential years of her marriage. She had a small vacant face, where
the pink and white had run into muddiness, a mouth that sagged at the
corners like the mouth of a frightened child, and eyes of a sickly
purple, which had been compared by Cyrus to "sweet violets," in the only
compliment he ever paid her. Thirty-five years ago, in one of those
attacks of indiscretion which overtake the most careful man in the
spring, Cyrus had proposed to her; and when she declined him, he had
immediately repeated his offer, animated less by any active desire to
possess her, than by the dogged male determination to over-ride all
obstacles, whether feminine or financial. And pretty Belinda
Bolingbroke, being alone and unsupported by other suitors at the
instant, had entwined herself instinctively around the nearest male prop
that offered. It had been one of those marriages of opposites which
people (ignoring the salient fact that love has about as much part in it
as it has in the pursuit of a spring chicken by a hawk) speak of with
sentiment as "a triumph of love over differences." Even in the first
days of their engagement, there could be found no better reason for
their marriage than the meeting of Cyrus's stubborn propensity to have
his way with the terror of imaginary spinsterhood which had seized
Belinda in a temporary lapse of suitors. Having married, they
immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent, to make the worst of it.
She, poor fluttering dove-like creature, had lost hope at the first
rebuff, and had let go all the harmless little sentiments that had
sweetened her life; while he, having married a dove by choice and
because of her doveliness, had never forgiven her that she did not
develop into a brisk, cackling hen of the barnyard. As usually happens
in the cases where "love triumphs over differences," he had come at last
to hate her for the very qualities which had first caught his fancy. His
ideal woman (though he was perfectly unconscious that she existed) was a
managing thrifty soul, in a starched calico dress, with a natural
capacity for driving a bargain; and Life, with grim humour, had rewarded
this respectable preference by bestowing upon him feeble and insipid
Belinda, who spent sleepless nights trying to add three and five
together, but who could never, to save her soul, remember to put down
the household expenses in the petty cash book. It was a case, he
sometimes told himself, of a man, who had resisted temptation all his
life, being punished for one instant's folly more harshly than if he
were a practised libertine. No libertine, indeed, could have got himself
into such a scrape, for none would have surrendered so completely to a
single manifestation of the primal force. To play the fool once, he
reflected bitterly, when his brief intoxication was over, is after all
more costly than to play it habitually. Had he pursued a different pair
of violet eyes every evening, he would never have ended by embracing the
phantom that was Belinda.
But it was more than thirty years since Cyrus had taken the trouble to
turn his unhappiness into philosophy--for, aided by time, he had become
reconciled to his wife as a man becomes reconciled to a physical
infirmity. Except for that one eventful hour in April, women had stood
for so little in his existence, that he had never stopped to wonder if
his domestic relations might have been pleasanter had he gone about the
business of selection as carefully as he picked and chose the tobacco
for his factory. Even the streak of sensuality in his nature did not run
warm as in the body of an ordinary mortal, and his vices, like his
virtues, had become so rarefied in the frozen air of his intelligence
that they were no longer recognizable as belonging to the common
frailties of men.
"Ain't you dressed yet?" he inquired without looking at his wife as he
entered--for having long ago lost his pride of possession in her, he had
ceased to regard her as of sufficient importance to merit the ordinary
civilities.
"I was helping Miss Willy whip one of Susan's flounces," she answered,
turning from the mirror, with the hairbrush held out like a peace
offering before her. "We wanted to get through to-day," she added
nervously, "so Miss Willy can start on Jinny Pendleton's dress the first
thing in the morning."
If Cyrus had ever permitted himself the consolation of doubtful
language, he would probably have exclaimed with earnestness, "Confound
Miss Willy!" but he came of a stock which condemned an oath, or even an
expletive, on its face value, so this natural outlet for his irritation
was denied him. Instead, therefore, of replying in words, he merely
glanced sourly at the half-open door, through which issued the whirring
noise of the little dressmaker at her sewing. Now and then, in the
intervals when her feet left the pedal, she could be heard humming
softly to herself with her mouth full of pins.
"Isn't she going?" asked Cyrus presently, while he washed his hands at
the washstand in one corner and dried them on a towel which Belinda had
elaborately embroidered in red. Peering through the crack of the door as
he put the question, he saw Miss Willy hurriedly pulling basting threads
out of a muslin skirt, and the fluttering bird-like motions of her hands
increased the singular feeling of repulsion with which she inspired him.
Though he was aware that she was an entirely harmless person, and,
more-over, that her "days" supplied the only companionship his wife
really enjoyed, he resented angrily the weeks of work and gossip which
the little seamstress spent under his roof. Put two gabbling women like
that together and you could never tell what stories would be set going
about you before evening! A suspicion, unfortunately too well founded,
that his wife had whimpered out her heart to the whirring accompaniment
of Miss Willy's machine, had caused him once or twice to rise in his
authority and forbid the dressmaker the house; but, in doing so, he had
reckoned without the strength which may lie in an unscrupulous weakness.
Belinda, who had never fought for anything else in her life, refused
absolutely to give up her dressmaker. "If I can't see her here, I'll go
to her house," she had said, and Cyrus had yielded at last as the bully
always yields before the frenzied violence of his victim.
After a hasty touch to the four round flat curls on her forehead, Mrs.
Treadwell turned from the bureau with her habitually hopeless air, and
slipped her thin arms into the tight sleeves of a black silk basque
which she took up from the bed.
"Did you see Oliver when you came in?" she asked. "He was in here
looking for you a few minutes ago."
"No, I didn't see him, but I'm going to. He's got to give up this
highfaluting nonsense of his if he expects me to support him. There's
one thing the fellow's got to understand, and that is that he can choose
between his precious stuff and his bread and meat. Before I give him a
job, he'll have to let me see that he is done with all this business of
play-writing."
A frightened look came into his wife's face, and indifferently glancing
at her as he finished, he was arrested by something enigmatical and yet
familiar in her features. A dim vision of the way she had looked at him
in the early days of their marriage floated an instant before him.
"Do you think he wants to do that?" she asked, with a little sound as if
she had drawn her breath so sharply that it whistled. What in thunder
was the matter with the woman? he wondered irritably. Of course she was
a fool about the scamp--all the women, even Susan, lost their heads over
him--but, after all, why should it make any difference to her whether he
wrote plays or took freight orders, as long as he managed to feed
himself?
"Well, I don't reckon it has come to a question of what he wants," he
rejoined shortly.
"But the boy's heart is bound up in his ambition," urged Belinda, with
an energy he had witnessed in her only once before in her life, and that
was on the occasion of her historic defence of the seamstress.
For a moment Cyrus stared at her with attention, almost with curiosity.
Then he opened his lips for a crushing rejoinder, but thinking better of
his impulse, merely repeated dryly, "His heart?" before he turned toward
the door. On the threshold he looked back and added, "The next time you
see him, tell him I'd like a word with him."
Left alone in her room, Mrs. Treadwell sat down in a rocking-chair by
the window, and clasped her hands tightly in her lap with a nervous
gesture which she had acquired in long periods of silent waiting on
destiny. Her mental attitude, which was one of secret, and usually
passive, antagonism to her husband, had stamped its likeness so
indelibly upon her features, that, sitting there in the wan light, she
resembled a woman who suffers from the effects of some slow yet deadly
sickness. Lacking the courage to put her revolt into words, she had
allowed it to turn inward and embitter the hidden sources of her being.
In the beginning she had asked so little of life that the denial of that
little by Fate had appeared niggardly rather than tragic. A man--any man
who would have lent himself gracefully as an object of worship--would
have been sufficient material for the building of her happiness.
Marriage, indeed, had always appeared to her so desirable as an end in
itself, entirely apart from the personal peculiarities or possibilities
of a husband, that she had awakened almost with surprise one morning to
the knowledge that she was miserable. It was not so much that her
romance had met with open disaster as that it had simply faded away.
This gradual fading away of sentiment, which she had accepted at the
time as only one of the inevitable stages in the slow process of
emotional adjustment, would perhaps have made but a passing impression
on a soul to whom every other outlet into the world had not been closed
by either temperament or tradition. But love had been the one window
through which light could enter her house of Life; and when this
darkened, her whole nature had sickened and grown morbid. Then at last
all the corroding bitterness in her heart had gathered to a canker which
ached ceaselessly, like a physical sore, in her breast.
"He saw I'd taken to Oliver--that's why he's anxious to spite him," she
thought resentfully as she stared with unseeing eyes out into the gray
twilight. "It's all just to worry me, that's why he is doing it. He
knows I couldn't be any fonder of the boy if he had come of my own
blood." And she who had been a Bolingbroke set her thin lips together
with the only consciousness of superiority to her husband that she had
ever known--the secret consciousness that she was better born. Out of
the wreck of her entire life, this was the floating spar to which she
still clung with a sense of security, and her imagination, by long
concentration upon the support that it offered, had exaggerated its
importance out of all proportion to the other props among which it had
its place. Like its imposing symbol, the Saint Memin portrait of the
great Archibald Bolingbroke, which lent distinction, by its very
inappropriateness, to the wall on which it hung, this hidden triumph
imparted a certain pathetic dignity to her manner.
"That's all on earth it is," she repeated with a kind of smothered
fierceness. But, even while the words were on her lips, her face changed
and softened, for in the adjoining room a voice, full of charm, could be
heard saying: "Sewing still, Miss Willy? Don't you know that you are
guilty of an immoral act when you work overtime?"
"I'm just this minute through, Mr. Oliver," answered the seamstress in
fluttering tones. "As soon as I fold this skirt, I'm going to quit and
put on my bonnet."
A few more words followed, and then the door opened wider and Oliver
entered--with his ardent eyes, his irresolute mouth, and his physical
charm which brought an air of vital well-being into the depressing
sultriness of the room.
"I missed you downstairs, Aunt Belinda. You haven't a headache, I hope,"
he said, and there was the same caressing kindness in his tone which he
had used to the dressmaker. It was as if his sympathy, like his charm,
which cost him so little because it was the gift of Nature, overflowed
in every casual expression of his temperament.
"No, I haven't a headache, dear," replied Mrs. Treadwell, putting up her
hand to his cheek as he leaned over her. "Your uncle is waiting for you
in the library, so you'd better go down at once," she added, catching
her breath as she had done when Cyrus first spoke to her about Oliver.
"Have you any idea what it means? Did he tell you?"
"Yes, he wants to talk to you about business."
"The deuce he does! Well, if that's it, I'd be precious glad to get out
of it. You don't suppose I could cut it, do you? Susan is going to take
me to the Pendletons' after supper, and I'd like to run upstairs now and
make a change."
"No, you'd better go down to him. He doesn't like to be kept waiting."
"All right, then--since you say so."
Meeting the dressmaker on the threshold, he forgot to answer her
deprecating bow in his eagerness to have the conversation with Cyrus
over and done with.
"I declare, he does startle a body when you ain't used to him," observed
Miss Willy, with a bashful giggle. She was a diminutive, sparrow-like
creature, with a natural taste for sick-rooms and death-beds, and an
inexhaustible fund of gossip. As Mrs. Treadwell, for once, did not
respond to her unspoken invitation to chat, she tied her bonnet strings
under her sharp little chin, and taking up her satchel went out again,
after repeating several times that she would be "back the very minute
Mrs. Pendleton was through with her." A few minutes later, Belinda,
still seated by the window, saw the shrunken figure ascend the area
steps and cross the dusty street with a rapid and buoyant step, as
though she, also, plain, overworked and penniless, was feeling the
delicious restlessness of the spring in her blood. "I wonder what on
earth she's got to make her skip like that," thought Belinda not without
bitterness. "I reckon she thinks she's just as important as anybody,"
she added after an instant, touching, though she was unaware of it, the
profoundest truth of philosophy. "She's got nothing in the world but
herself, yet I reckon to her that is everything, even if it doesn't make
a particle of difference to anybody else whether she is living or dead."
Her eyes were still on Miss Willy, who stepped on briskly, swinging her
bag joyously before her, when the sound of Cyrus's voice, raised high in
anger, came up to her from the library. A short silence followed; then a
door opened and shut quickly, and rapid footsteps passed up the
staircase and along the hall outside of her room. While she waited,
overcome by the nervous indecision which attacked her like palsy
whenever she was forced to take a definite action, Susan ran up the
stairs and called her name in a startled and shaking voice.
"Oh, mother, father has quarrelled dreadfully with Oliver and ordered
him out of the house!"