surmised about the growth of her interest in him; it had reached forward
and back from the killing of Partridge Sinnox. “That was the first
time,” she told him, “that I realized you were so—so big. You looked so
miserable on the canal boat, coming out here those years ago, that it
hardly seemed possible for you merely to live; and when you started the
hearths at Tubal Cain everyone who knew anything about iron just laughed
at you—we used to go down sometimes and look at those killing workmen
you had, and that single mule and old horse.
“I wasn't interested then, and I don't know when it happened; but now
I can see that a time soon came when men stopped laughing at you. I
can just remember when father first became seriously annoyed, when he
declared that he was going to force you out of the valleys at once.
But it seemed you didn't go. And then in a few months he came home in a
dreadful temper, when he found that you controlled all the timber on the
mountains. He said of course you would break before he was really short
of charcoal. But it seems you haven't broken. And now I'm married to
you; I'm Gisela Hulings!”
“This is hardly more than the beginning,” he added; “the foundation—just
as iron is the base for so much. I—we—are going on,” he corrected the
period lamely, but was rewarded by a charming smile. “Power!” he said,
shutting up one hand, his straight, fine features as hard as the cameo
in his neckcloth.
She instantly fired at his tensity of will.
“How splendid you are, Alexander!” she cried. “How tremendously
satisfactory for a woman to share! You can have no idea what it means to
be with a man like a stone wall!
“I wish,” she said, “that you would always tell me about your work. I'd
like more than anything else to see you going on, step by step up. I
suppose it is extraordinary in a woman. I felt that way about father's
iron, and he only laughed at me; and yet once I kept a forge daybook
almost a week, when a clerk was ill. I think I could be of real
assistance to you, Alexander.”
He regarded with the profoundest distaste any mingling of his, Alexander
Hulings', wife and a commercial industry. He had married in order to
give his life a final touch of elegance and proper symmetry. No, no; he
wanted Gisela to receive him at the door of his mansion, in fleckless
white, as she was now, and jewels, at the end of his day in the clamor
and soot of business and put it temporarily from his thoughts.
He was distinctly annoyed that her father had permitted her to post the
forge book; it was an exceedingly unladylike proceeding. He told
her something of this in carefully chosen, deliberate words; and she
listened quietly, but with a faint air of disappointment.
“I want you to buy yourself whatever you fancy,” he continued; “nothing
is too good for you—for my wife. I am very proud of you and insist on
your making the best appearance, wherever we are. Next year, if the
political weather clears at all, we'll go to Paris, and you can explore
the mantua-makers there. You got the shawls in your dressing room?”
She hesitated, cutting uncertainly with a heavy silver knife at a
crystallized citron.
Then, with an expression of determination, she addressed him again:
“But don't you see that it is your power, your success over men, that
fascinates me; that first made me think of you? In a way this is not—not
an ordinary affair of ours; I had other chances more commonplace,
which my father encouraged, but they seemed so stupid that I couldn't
entertain them. I love pretty clothes, Alexander; I adore the things
you've given me; but will you mind my saying that that isn't what I
married you for? I am sure you don't care for such details, for money
itself, in the least. You are too strong. And that is why I did marry
you, why I love to think about you, and what I want to follow, to admire
and understand.”
He was conscious of only a slight irritation at this masculine-sounding
speech; he must have no hesitation in uprooting such ideas from his
wife's thoughts; they detracted from her feminine charm, struck at the
bottom of her duties, her privileges and place.
“At the next furnace in blast,” he told her with admirable control, “the
workmen will insist on your throwing in, as my bride, a slipper; and in
that way you can help the charge.”
Then, by planning an immediate trip with her to West Virginia, he
abruptly brought the discussion to a close.
Alexander was pleased, during the weeks which followed, at the fact that
she made no further reference to iron. She went about the house, gravely
busy with its maintenance, as direct and efficient as he was in the
larger realm. Almost her first act was to discharge the housekeeper. The
woman came to Alexander, her fat face smeared with crying, and protested
bitterly against the loss of a place she had filled since the house was
roofed.
He was, of course, curt with her, and ratified Gisela's decision; but
privately he was annoyed. He had not even intended his wife to discharge
the practical duties of living—thinking of her as a suave figure
languidly moving from parlor to dining room or boudoir; however, meeting
her in a hall, energetically directing the dusting of a cornice, in a
rare flash of perception he said nothing.
XII
HE would not admit, even to himself, that his material affairs were less
satisfactory than they had been the year before, but such he vaguely
knew was a fact. Speculation in Western government lands, large
investments in transportation systems for the present fallow, had
brought about a general condition of commercial unrest. Alexander
Hulings felt this, not only by the delayed payment for shipments of
metal, but in the allied interests he had accumulated. Merchandise
was often preceded by demands for payment; the business of a nail
manufactory he owned in Wheeling had been cut in half.
He could detect concern in the shrewd countenance and tones of Samuel
Cryble, a hard-headed Yankee from a Scotch Protestant valley in New
Hampshire, who had risen to the position of his chief assistant and,
in a small way, copartner. They sat together in the dingy office on the
public road and silently, grimly, went over invoices and payments, debts
and debtors. It was on such an occasion that Alexander had word of the
death of Doctor Veneada.
Hulings' involuntary concern, the stirred memories of the dead man's
liberal spirit and mind—he had been the only person Alexander Hulings
could call friend—speedily gave place to a growing anxiety as to how
Veneada might have left his affairs. He had been largely a careless man
in practical matters.
Alexander had never satisfied the mortgage he had granted Veneada on the
timber properties purchased with the other man's money. He had tried to
settle the indebtedness when it had first fallen due, but the doctor had
begged him to let the money remain as it was.
“I'll only throw it away on some confounded soft-witted scheme, Alex,”
he had insisted. “With you, I know where it is; it's a good investment.”
Now Hulings recalled that the second extension had expired only a few
weeks before Veneada's death, incurring an obligation the settlement of
which he had been impatiently deferring until he saw the other.
He had had a feeling that Veneada, with no near or highly regarded
relatives, would will him the timber about the valleys; yet he was
anxious to have the thing settled. The Alexander Hulings Company was
short of available funds. He returned to Eastlake for Veneada's funeral;
and there, for the first time, he saw the cousins to whom the doctor
had occasionally and lightly alluded. They were, he decided, a lean and
rapacious crew.
He remained in Eastlake for another twenty-four hours, but was forced to
leave with nothing discovered; and it was not until a week later that,
again in his office, he learned that Veneada had made no will. This,
it seemed, had been shown beyond any doubt. He rose, walked to a dusty
window, and gazed out unseeingly at an eddy of dead leaves and dry
metallic snow in a bleak November wind.
After a vague, disconcerted moment he shrewdly divined exactly what
would occur. He said nothing to Cryble, seated with his back toward him;
and even Gisela looked with silent inquiry at his absorption throughout
supper. She never questioned him now about any abstraction that might be
concerned with affairs outside their pleasant life together.
The inevitable letter at last arrived, announcing the fact that, in a
partition settlement of Veneada's estate by his heirs, it was necessary
to settle the expired mortgage. It could not have come, he realized, at
a more inconvenient time.
He was forced to discuss the position with Cryble; and the latter heard
him to the end with a narrowed, searching vision.
“That money out of the business now might leave us on the bank,” he
asserted. “As I see it, there's but one thing to do—go over all the
timber, judge what we actually will need for coaling, buy that—or, if
we must, put another mortgage on it—and let the rest, a good two-thirds,
go.”
This, Alexander acknowledged to himself, was the logical if not the only
course. And then John Wooddrop would purchase the remainder; he would
have enough charcoal to keep up his local industries beyond his own life
and another. All his—Alexander's—planning, aspirations, sacrifice, would
have been for nothing. He would never, like John Wooddrop, be a great
industrial despot, or command, as he had so often pictured, the iron
situation of the state. To do that, he would have to control all the
iron the fumes of whose manufacture stained the sky for miles about
Harmony. If Wooddrop recovered an adequate fuel supply Alexander Hulings
would never occupy a position of more than secondary importance.
There was a bare possibility of his retaining all the tracts again by a
second mortgage; but as he examined that, it sank from a potentiality
to a thing without substance. It would invite an investigation, a
public gleaning of facts, that he must now avoid. His pride could not
contemplate the publication of the undeniable truth—that what he had so
laboriously built up stood on an insecure foundation.
“It is necessary,” he said stiffly, “in order to realize on my
calculations, that I continue to hold all the timber at present in my
name.”
“And that's where you make a misjudgment,” Cryble declared, with an
equal bluntness. “I can see clear enough that you are letting your
personal feeling affect your business sense. There is room enough in
Pennsylvania for both you and old Wood-drop. Anyhow, there's got to be
somebody second in the parade, and that is a whole lot better than tail
end.”
Alexander Hillings nodded absently; Cryble's philosophy was correct
for a clerk, an assistant, but Alexander Hillings felt the tyranny of a
wider necessity. He wondered where he could get the money to satisfy
the claim of the doctor's heirs. His manufacturing interests in West
Virginia, depreciated as they were at present, would about cover the
debt. Ordinarily they were worth a third more; and in ten years they
would double in value. He relentlessly crushed all regret at parting
with what was now his best property and promptly made arrangements to
secure permanently the timberland.
Soon, he felt, John Wooddrop must feel the pinch of fuel shortage;
and Alexander awaited such development with keen attention. As he had
anticipated, when driving from the canal, he saw that the Blue Lump
Furnace had gone out of blast, its workmen dispersed. Gisela, the day
before, had been to see her father; and he was curious to hear what
she might report. A feeling of coming triumph, of inevitable worldly
expansion, settled comfortably over him, and he regarded his wife
pleasantly through a curtain of cigar smoke.
They were seated in a parlor, already shadowy with an early February
dusk; coals were burning brightly in a polished open stove, by which
Gisela was embroidering in brightly colored wool on a frame. She had the
intent, placid expression of a woman absorbed in a small, familiar duty.
As he watched her Alexander Hulings' satisfaction deepened—young and
fine and vigorous, she was preeminently a wife for his importance and
position. She gazed at him vacantly, her eyes crinkled at the comers,
her lips soundlessly counting stitches, and a faint smile rose to his
lips.
He was anxious to hear what she might say about John Wooddrop, and yet
a feeling of propriety restrained him from a direct question. He had not
had a line, a word or message, from Wood-drop since he had married
the other's daughter. The aging man, he knew, idolized Gisela; and
her desertion—for so John Wooddrop would hold it—must have torn
the Ironmaster. She had, however, been justified in her choice, he
contentedly continued his train of thought. Gisela had everything a
woman could wish for. He had been a thoughtful husband. Her clothes,
of the most beautiful texture and design, were pinned with jewels; her
deftly moving fingers flashed with rings; the symbol of his success,
his——
“My father looks badly, Alexander,” she said suddenly. “I wish you would
see him, and that he would talk to you. But you won't and he won't. He
is very nearly as stubborn as yourself. I wish you could make a move;
after all, you are younger.... But then, you would make each other
furious in a second.” She sighed deeply.
“Has he shown any desire to see me?”
“No,” she admitted. “You must know he thinks you married me only to get
his furnaces; he is ridiculous about it—just as if you needed any more!
He has been fuming and planning a hundred things since his charcoal has
been getting low.”
She stopped and scrutinized her embroidery, a naïve pattern of rose
and urn and motto. He drew a long breath; that was the first tangible
indication he had had of the working out of his planning, the
justification of his sacrifice.
“I admire father,” she went on once more, conversationally; “my love for
you hasn't blinded me to his qualities. He has a surprising courage and
vigor for an—— Why, he must be nearly seventy! And now he has the most
extraordinary plan for what he calls 'getting the better of you.' He was
as nice with me as possible, but I could see that he thinks you're lost
this time.... No, the darker green. Alexander, don't you think the words
would be sweet in magenta?”
“Well,” he demanded harshly, leaning forward, “what is this plan?”
She looked up, surprised at his hard impatience.
“How queer you are! And that's your iron expression; you know it's
expressly forbidden in the house, after hours. His plan? I'm certain
there's no disloyalty in telling you. Isn't it mad, at his age? And it
will cost him an outrageous amount of money. He is going to change the
entire system of all his forges and furnaces. It seems stone coal has
been found on his slopes; and he is going to blow in with that, and use
a hot blast in his smelting.”
Alexander Hulings sat rigid, motionless; the cigar in his hand cast up
an unbroken blue ribbon of smoke. Twice he started to speak, to exclaim
incredulously; but he uttered no sound. It seemed that all his planning
had been utterly overthrown, ruined; in a manner which he—anyone—could
not have foreseen. The blowing in of furnaces with hard coal had
developed since his entrance into the iron field. It had not been
generally declared successful; the pig produced had been so impure that,
with working in an ordinary or even puddling forge, it had often to be
subjected to a third, finery fire. But he had been conscious of a slow
improvement in the newer working; he had vaguely acknowledged that
sometime anthracite would displace charcoal for manufacturing purposes;
in future years he might adopt it himself.
But John Wooddrop had done it before him; all the square miles of timber
that he had acquired with such difficulty, that he had retained at the
sacrifice of his best property, would be worthless. The greater part
of it could not be teamed across Wooddrop's private roads or hauled
advantageously over a hundred intervening streams and miles. It was all
wasted, lapsed—his money and dreams!
“It will take over a year,” she went on. “I don't understand it at all;
but it seems that sending a hot blast into a furnace, instead of the
cold, keeps the metal at a more even temperature. Father's so interested
you'd think he was just starting out in life—though, really, he is an
old man.” She laughed. “Competition has been good for him.”
All thrown away; in vain! Alexander Hulings wondered what acidulous
comment Cryble would make. There were no coal deposits on his land, its
nature forbade that; besides, he had no money to change the principal
of his drafts. He gazed about at the luxury that surrounded Gisela and
himself; there was no lien on the house, but there still remained some
thousands of dollars to pay on the carpets and fixtures. His credit,
at least, was unimpeachable; decorators, tradespeople of all sorts, had
been glad to have him in their debt. But if any whisper of financial
stringency escaped, a horde would be howling about his gate, demanding
the settlement of their picayune accounts.
The twilight had deepened; the fire made a ruddy area in the gloom, into
the heart of which he flung his cigar. His wife embroidered serenely.
As he watched her, noting her firm, well-modeled features, realizing her
utter unconsciousness of all that he essentially at that moment was, he
felt a strange sensation of loneliness, of isolation.
Alexander Hulings had a sudden impulse to take her into his confidence;
to explain everything to her—the disaster that had overtaken his project
of ultimate power, the loss of the West Virginia interest, the tightness
of money. He had a feeling that she would not be a negligible adviser—he
had been a witness of her efficient management of his house—and he felt
a craving for the sympathy she would instantly extend.
Alexander parted his lips to inform her of all that had occurred; but
the habit of years, the innate fiber of his being, prevented. A wife,
he reminded himself, a woman, had no part in the bitter struggle for
existence; it was not becoming for her to mingle with the affairs
of men. She should be purely a creature of elegance, of solace, and,
dressed in India muslin or vaporous silk, ornament a divan, sing French
or Italian songs at a piano. The other was manifestly improper.
This, illogically, made him irritable with Gisela; she appeared,
contentedly sewing, a peculiarly useless appendage in his present stress
of mind. He was glum again at supper, and afterward retired into an
office he had had arranged on the ground floor of the mansion. There he
got out a number of papers, accounts and pass books; but he spent little
actual time on them. He sat back in his chair, with his head sunk
low, and mind thronged with memories of the past, of his long, uphill
struggle against oblivion and ill health.
Veneada was gone; yes, and Conrad Wishon too—the supporters and
confidants of his beginning. He himself was fifty years old. At that
age a man should be firmly established, successful, and not deviled by a
thousand unexpected mishaps. By fifty a man's mind should be reasonably
at rest, his accomplishment and future secure; yet there was nothing of
security, but only combat, before him.
Wooddrop had been a rich man from the start, when he, Alexander Hulings,
at the humiliating failure of the law, had had to face life with a few
paltry hundreds. No wonder he had been obliged to contract debts, to
enter into impossibly onerous agreements! Nothing but struggle ahead, a
relentless continuation of the past years; and he had reached, passed,
his prime!
There, for a day, he had thought himself safe, moving smoothly toward
the highest pinnacles; when, without warning, at a few words casually
pronounced over an embroidery frame, the entire fabric of his existence
had been rent! It was not alone the fact of John Wooddrop's progressive
spirit that he faced, but now a rapidly accumulating mass of
difficulties. He was dully amazed at the treacherous shifting of life,
at the unheralded change of apparently solid ground for quicksand.
XIII
THOUGH the industries centered in Tubal Cain were operated and
apparently owned Cain by the Alexander Hulings Iron Company, and Hulings
was publicly regarded as their proprietor, in reality his hold on
them was hardly more than nominal. At the erection of the furnaces and
supplementary forges he had been obliged to grant such rebates to
the Columbus Transportation interest in return for capital, he had
contracted to supply them at a minimum price such a large proportion of
his possible output, that, with continuous shifts, he was barely able to
dispose advantageously of a sixth of the year's manufacture.
He had made such agreements confident that he should ultimately control
the Wooddrop furnaces; when, doubling his resources, he would soon free
himself from conditions imposed on him by an early lack of funds. Now
it was at least problematic whether he would ever extend his power
to include the older man's domain. His marriage with Gisela had only
further separated them, hardening John Wooddrop's resolve that Hulings
should never fire a hearth of his, a determination strengthened by the
rebuilding of Wooddrop's furnaces for a stone-coal heat.
The widespread land speculation, together with the variability of
currency, now began seriously to depress the country, and, more
especially, Alexander Hulings. He went to Philadelphia, to Washington,
for conferences; but returned to his mansion and Gisela in an increasing
somberness of mood. All the expedients suggested, the legalizing
of foreign gold and silver, the gradual elimination of the smaller
state-bank notes, an extra coinage, one after another failed in their
purpose of stabilization; an acute panic was threatened.
Alexander was almost as spare of political comments to his wife as he
was of business discussion. That, too, he thought, did not become
the female poise. At times, bitter and brief, he condemned the
Administration; during dinner he all but startled a servant into
dropping a platter by the unexpected violence of a period hurled at
the successful attempts to destroy the national bank. And when, as—he
declared—a result of that, the state institutions refused specie
payment, and a flood of rapidly depreciating paper struck at the base of
commerce, Alexander gloomily informed Gisela that the country was being
sold for a barrel of hard cider.
He had, with difficulty, a while before secured what had appeared to be
an advantageous order from Virginia; and, after extraordinary effort,
he had delivered the iron. But during the lapsing weeks, when the state
banks refused to circulate gold, the rate of exchange for paper money
fell so far that he lost all his calculated profit, and a quarter of the
labor as well. The money of other states depreciated in Pennsylvania a
third. In addition to these things Alexander commenced to have trouble
with his workmen—wages, too, had diminished, but their hours increased.
Hulings, like other commercial operators, issued printed money of his
own, good at the company store, useful in the immediate vicinity
of Tubal Cain, but valueless at any distance. Cryble, as he had
anticipated, recounted the triumph of John Wood-drop.
“The old man can't be beat!” he asserted. “We've got a nice little
business here. Tailed on to Wooddrop's, we should do good; but you are
running it into an iron wall. You ain't content with enough.”
Cryble was apparently unconscious of the dangerous glitter that had
come into Hulings' gaze. Alexander listened quietly until the other
had finished, and then curtly released him from all connection, any
obligation to himself. James Cryble was undisturbed.
“I was thinking myself about a move,” he declared. “This concern is
pointed bull-headed on to destruction! You're a sort of peacock,” he
further told Hulings; “you can't do much besides spread and admire your
own feathers. But you'll get learned.”