"It's a pretty good book; didn't you think so?" he asked.
"Yes; I liked it ever so much. He married the right one, after all,
didn't he?"
"Might have done it before," Ogden commented. "No earthly reason why
not. Only you know how they spin these things out."
There was a sudden shutting down of windows over their heads. Ogden
drew out his watch, and turned it so as to profit by the lamp-post on
the corner. "Why, I'd no idea!" Burt and Cornelia had not returned
from the park, or, if so, had passed on the other side of the street.
"Good-night."
"It isn't late, is it?"
"Only for a North-sider."
"Good-night," she said, slowly, and sat alone on the steps until her
father came down and called her in.
On the first of July Brainard summoned George into his own private room.
"We have about decided to have an assistant cashier here," he said. His
voice was gruff, but his glance was a little sheepish. "Mr. Fairchild
thinks it will be convenient about signatures and a good many other
things. Burt's out a good deal and likely to be off all through August,
and I don't like to have drafts signed in advance. You could make up
the reports, too, and swear to 'em. Besides, it's elective--puts you in
the Bankers' Almanac, for one thing. As to salary, I suppose we could
stand an extra five hundred--or six."
He looked at George with some constraint, but his intention appeared to
be friendly.
"We might expect you to go on helping with the tellers' work on
occasion--vacation-time, for instance. Now, about your own vacation--"
George bowed with an additional acknowledgment of the favor; he had
expected to pass an unbroken summer in town.
"Thursday's the Fourth. Put five or six days with it, if you like--to
get accustomed to the new deal."
He turned to his desk. "That's all right; talk to Fairchild." It seemed
that anything beyond the merest word of thanks would be distasteful,
and George withdrew.
He accepted his elevation and his vacation with unfeigned pleasure;
he attributed his advance to the old man's softened mood occasioned
by his son's engagement to Cornelia McNabb. Burt, a few mornings
back, had told his father, plainly and promptly, that it was his
intention to marry Cornelia--and soon. He had prepared himself for
remonstrance--even for opposition, and he had braced himself to
demonstrate to his father that he was going to have his own way.
The old man, however, made no difficulties; Cornelia had certain
qualities that he appreciated, and he knew that Burt had a strong
and a strengthening will. Besides, a son-in-law was one thing, and a
daughter-in-law another. A daughter's husband must come as an ally,
offensive and defensive; he must contribute money, and if not money,
then abilities. There must he abilities in actual exercise, or there
must be the certain promise of their development in the pursuit of some
such career as would be recognized and endorsed by business men of his
own sort. That ten-dollar-a-week man--that anthem singer! His fist
clenched and his eye glared at the very thought of him. But a son's
wife could be moulded--if not moulded, then coerced. There was to be no
breaking away from two such wills as his and Burt's. He liked vim; he
recognized snap; he was prepared to welcome Cornelia as a vital force.
"Oconomowoc," murmured George to himself. He was bending over his
bureau drawer, sorting out his collars. The gas-flame reflected itself
in the mirror and threw a doubled glare upon his face.
"Eh!" said Brower, sitting cross-legged on his trunk. He laid the
book down across two of the top slats; it was "David Grieve"--he read
everything.
They were still in the Bush Street house. Mrs. Ogden had a room on the
floor below.
"Did I speak?" asked George.
"Ton said--Oconomowoc. Is that where you are going?"
"Queer name, isn't it? What's the place like?"
"If you've got a chance to go there, you go." The oracle spoke and
retired into his book.
George went. The train made its rapid run up to Milwaukee, took its
short stop, and turned westward on its way towards La Crosse. At
Pewaukee there was the usual halt; it lengthened to an unusual halt.
George paced the long platform impatiently; his mind had projected
itself through Nagowicka and Nashotah and Okauchee to Oconomowoc, and
his body was eager to follow.
"What's the trouble?" he asked the brakeman.
"St. Paul express late--passes us here."
The platform was swarming with passengers and townspeople. A figure
rushed through the crowd and grasped George by the hand.
"So you're gallivanting, too? And I'll bet a nickel you've been aboard
all the way up--parlor-car. Now, haven't you?" The voice sounded a
trumpet-note of wide-flung triumph. It was Cornelia's.
Her cheeks blazed and her eyes burned with the magnificence of
conscious conquest. Her glory spread about her the same succession of
flowing circles that a stone spreads over a pond. It seemed as if her
expansiveness must crowd the train from its track and the station from
its foundations.
"Ma," she called back into the crowd, "come here--do! I want you to
meet Mr. Ogden. He's one of my most particular friends; but I guess you
don't need to be told that--you've heard enough about him. Mr. Ogden,
this is my mother, and she's about the best mother that ever lived."
Mrs. McNabb smiled bravely and took Ogden's slender palm in her large,
capable grasp. She wore a sedate black bonnet; her gray hair was parted
in the middle and fell right and left in two wide, crinkly folds.
"And I want pa to come, too; no dodging." An elderly man came forward
reluctantly, in his loose, short trousers and his thick boots with
broad, square toes; he seemed to find Ogden, in his modified tourist
guise, a disconcerting object. He lifted up his shrewd but retiring
eyes, placing one embarrassed hand on his grizzled chin whiskers and
giving George the other; it was rough, and the nails were broken.
George shook hands with the old fellow--who went well enough with other
features of the Wisconsin landscape: the shaggy tamarack swamps, the
gashed sides of gravelly "hog-backs," the long stretches of disordered
barbed-wire fences, the rusty reds of depots and storehouses, and the
marshy ponds, edged by the ragged scantlings of gigantic ice-houses.
Cornelia did not perceive this harmony--or ignored it.
"Yes," she declared, "ma's the best ma, and pa ain't far behind. Now
don't shy, pa; Mr. Ogden is more scary than you are. He'd been trying
for near three months to ask me to go to the theatre with him, when
along came Burt and plumped out and asked me inside of a week. Burt's
enterprising; no mistake."
The old people smiled at each other, half embarrassed by Cornelia's
frankness.
"But we won't shut out George--oh, dear! I mean Mr. Ogden--altogether.
Bear witness, both of you: I ask him to be one of my ushers." George
stared. Was the girl meaning to be married in church after--everything?
Then he bowed. "On Abbie's account--if at all," he thought.
"Going to Coonie for the Fourth, I suppose?" Cornelia continued.
"Coonie?"
"Oh, well--'Con'm'woc, if you must have it all. Well, we're on the
move, too. Good-by. But"--meaningly--"you'd find us all again in town
pretty soon; and if pa and ma don't see the whole place from the
tip-top of the Clifton, my name is McMudd. On a clear day, too--when
you can tell where the smoke ends and the land begins. Good-by. Our
house is on the right, a mile farther; watch out for it."
Oconomowoc, from Ogden's point of view, appeared as one wide street
running between two small lakes that were only a few hundred feet
asunder. The business part of the street was built neatly and compactly
of the cream-colored brick of Milwaukee, and the rest of it was
a thickly shaded stretch bordered with a double string of summer
cottages, which fronted on the street and backed on the water. In the
midst of the cottages stood a big hotel of yellow brick; it was faced
with a lofty row of seven immense white columns, and above the maples
before it there rose a steep roof set with a series of dormer-windows.
George was given a room which one of these dormers lighted, and
presently stepped down the street to inquire at one of the cottages for
Jessie Bradley. He soon stepped back again; she was not expected for
two days yet. He thanked Brainard again for his full week, and threw
himself into one of the chairs under the big colonnade.
The town was at the beginning of its annual patriotic flurry; after
the Fourth it settles down, and the real season begins a week or two
later. A good many young people were scurrying about, many of them in
aquatic attire; those who did not carry rackets carried banjos. Nobody
noticed him except the young wife of the proprietor. She stood in the
doorway; her black eyebrows were contracted in a study of him. She wore
her raven hair in a Japanesque fashion, but she corrected the plump
dumpiness of the Japanese maiden by a tall and slender grace of her
own. "He's all right," she said to herself, and sank down in a chair
beside him.
"You poor, lonesome man," she began, with a graceful audacity that was
her peculiar possession, "let me talk to you."
"Do," answered George, smilingly. He seemed to have known her a week.
"That is, if you're not just married or not just going to be. Are you?"
"N--no."
"We see so much of that sort of thing. May is dreadful; this year we
had five couples in a week--it's so pleasant and quiet here then. The
fifth was from Detroit; they stayed quite a while, and when they went
away they thanked us all over. We hadn't done a thing for them--we
simply left them alone and let them go about. But they were just chuck
full of it--they'd have been in glory anywhere. What do you think of
our columns?"
Two men could hardly have spanned their fluted shafts. George cast his
eye up to their capitals, on a level with the third-story windows.
"They're great."
"Aren't they? They've only been on two or three years. We call them the
Seven Bridegrooms."
"The Seven Bridegrooms? Is each the gift of a happy man?"
"Hot quite; one happy man gave them all. He was here a week; he gave us
one every day. Think how happy he must have been."
She smiled at his inquiring glance.
"He wanted things his own way, and could afford it," she said. "His
name was Ingles."
Ogden did some lounging up and down the street. He crossed a bridge
where one lake fell into the other over a mill-dam, and found himself
in another cluster of cottages. They stood on a bluff and looked down
the three miles of the lower lake. Both shores were diversified by
promontories and islands, and the red roofs of other cottages showed
everywhere over the tufted foliage of the shores.
"How it balances--how it composes!" he said of the view, as he
recrossed the bridge. "And how it's kept!" he said of the town,
as he retraced his steps to the hotel. "Really"--with unconscious
patronage--"it's the only thing West, so far, that has tone and finish."
He took a boat. The next day, the same. The town was full, but was
lying back quietly for the excitement of the morrow; he had the water
almost to himself.
Sloops and cat-boats were being rigged for a coming regatta. A scow for
fireworks was being anchored two or three hundred yards from shore. He
paddled about with a trolling-line. But the line was neglected. He had
a good deal to think about; here was place and time to do it.
His future was assured. He could now marry. He wanted to marry. There
was only the question--which?
He had surrendered his primitive theory that marriage was a matter
which concerned only the two principals. Kittie's marriage--who had
come to be more deeply concerned in it than he?
He thought of Abbie Brainard, and he thought of her family--a divorced
sister; a disreputable brother, whose future was to sound, perhaps,
depths yet undreamed of; another brother, whose coming marriage was but
conclusive evidence of the coarseness of the family grain.
And the father--his scandalous success; his tainted millions; his
name a byword. Those bawlings in the streets; those disgraceful and
degrading pictures; the stench of the whole scandal.
His oars dropped idly, and he sat with his eyes fixed on the bottom of
the boat.
But the old man would die. Yes; and then would come the division of
the spoil. If there had been so much trouble in a poor sixty or eighty
thousand, how much more might there be in all these millions? If he
had found such difficulty in getting restitution from McDowell--a
restitution so incomplete as to be even yet largely in the future--what
might there be to expect from other brothers-in-law and from other new
relations that so much money would be sure to bring?
He ran his troubled eyes along the shore. A party of children were
wading and splashing at the foot of a high, wooded point.
That money--those millions! It was the talk of the bank that Burt,
on his wedding-day, was to have five hundred thousand dollars as an
out-and-out gift. And if Burt, why not Abbie--in the proper degree?
Those shameful, indecent millions--millions that it would be a disgrace
to receive, to handle.
"Boat ahoy!" A sloop swept by. He dodged its bowsprit and was tossed by
its wake. He threw out his oars to steady himself.
The husband of a rich wife--another Valentine. My house--my furniture!
Then, he had meant to get on--in business, in society. Was he to marry
a recluse?--a girl inexperienced in the ways of his world--perhaps
incapable of adapting herself to them--surely careless of them.
Abbie was before him in her tender and steadfast serenity, in her
stanch and genuine capability. He set his teeth, and took up his oars
again, and rowed half a mile with a furious vigor. He stopped, panting
and exhausted, in a clump of reeds off a sedgy shore, near a group of
linden-trees. He had left Abbie behind.
[Illustration: He sat with his eyes fixed on the bottom of the boat.]
An elderly couple were standing among the rashes. They regarded him
with a friendly and companionable smile. They seemed to offer him
the "middling lot" that the sage and poet have called the best and
safest. "No hazardous and complicated relationships," they seemed to
say; "no struggle over dead men's dollars, no swamping of self-respect
in ill-got gains; only our daughter--"
George pressed his forehead confusedly and raised his eyes to get his
bearings; the late afternoon sun dazzled him with its level beams. He
saw a house set high among the trees; and on its porch, amidst a tangle
of bittersweet, a girl was standing. He shaded his eyes; it was as if
she waved a handkerchief at him. Presently she strolled to the brow of
the bank.
"Glad to see you," she called; "we have just driven over."
It was Jessie Bradley.