I
The Pennsylvania town of New Munich was electrified by the sudden and
entirely unlooked-for announcement of the betrothal of Daniel Leitzel,
Esquire; but his two maiden sisters with whom he lived, and to whom the
news was also wholly unexpected, were appalled, confounded. That Danny
should have taken such a step independently of them (who did all his
thinking for him outside of his profession) was a cataclysmal episode.
Of course it never would have happened without their knowledge if Danny
had not been temporarily away from his home on business and far removed
from their watchful care--watchful these twenty years past that no
designing Jezebel might get a chance at the great fortune of their
petted little brother--though it must be admitted that Danny was by
this time of a marriageable age, being just turned forty-five.
"To think he'd leave us learn about it in the newspapers yet, sooner 'n
he'd come home and face us with it! Yes, it looks anyhow as if he was
ashamed of the girl he's picked out!" exclaimed Jennie, a stern and
uncompromising spinster of sixty, as she and her sister Sadie, sitting
in the elaborately furnished and quite hideous sitting-room of their
big, fine house on Main Street, stared in consternation at the glaring
headlines of the New Munich _Evening Intelligencer_, which announced,
in type that to the sisters seemed letters of flame, the upsetting news
of their idolized brother having been at last matrimonially trapped.
Being confronted with his betrothal in print seemed to make it
hopelessly incontrovertible. They might have schemed to avert the
impending catastrophe of his marriage (in case Danny had been taken in
by an Adventuress) did not the _Intelligencer_ unequivocally state (and
the _Intelligencer's_ statements were scarcely less authoritative to
Jennie and Sadie Leitzel than the Bible itself) that Danny would be
married to the Unknown inside of a month. If the _Intelligencer_ said
so, it seemed useless to try to stop it.
"To think he'll be married to her already before we get a chance, once,
to look her over and tell him if she'd suit him!" lamented Sadie who
was five years younger than Jennie.
"Well," pronounced Jennie, setting her thin lips in a hard line,
"she'll find out when she gets here that she ain't getting her fingers
on our Danny's money! She'll get fooled if she's counting on _that_.
She'll soon learn that she'll have to do with just what he likes to
give her and no more! And of course Danny'll consult _us_ as to just
how much he ought to leave her handle. When she finds out," Jennie
grimly prophesied, "that our Danny always does the way we advise him to
and that she'll have to keep on the right side of _us_, I guess she
won't like it very well!"
"We can only hope that she ain't such a bold, common thing that just
took our Danny in, that way!" sighed Sadie.
"But why would he hurry it up so, like as if he was afraid we would
mebby put a stop to it? _She_ put him up to fixing it all tight before
he could change his mind!" Jennie shrewdly surmised.
"It does look that way!" fretted Sadie.
Jennie, the elder sister, was tall, gaunt, and rawboned. Though
approaching old age, her dominating spirit and grasping ambitions had
preserved her vigour, physically and mentally. Her sharp face was
deeply lined, but the keenness of her eyes was undimmed, her shoulders
were erect, her hair was thick and black. The expression of her thin
slit of a mouth was almost relentlessly hard.
Sadie, five years younger, had also a will of her own, but happily it
had always operated on a line so entirely in harmony with that of her
sister, that they had lived together all their lives without friction,
the younger woman unconsciously dominated by the elder. Indeed, no one
could abide under the same roof with Jennie Leitzel who ventured openly
to differ with her. Fortunately, even Sadie's passion for dress did
not clash with Jennie's miserliness, for Sadie, too, was miserly, and
Jennie loved to see her younger sister arrayed gorgeously in cheap
finery, her taste inclining to that of a girl of sixteen. A dormant
mother-instinct, too, such as must exist, however obscurely, in every
frame of woman, even in that of a Jennie Leitzel, found an outlet in
coddling Sadie's health and in ministering to and encouraging a certain
plaintiveness in the younger woman's disposition. So, these two
sisters, depending upon and complementing each other, of congenial
temperaments, and with but one common paramount interest in life, the
welfare of their incomparable younger brother whom they had brought up
and of whom they were inordinately proud, lived together in the supreme
enjoyment of the high estate to which their ambitions and their
unflagging efforts had uplifted the Leitzel family--from rural
obscurity to prominence and influence in their county town of New
Munich.
To be sure, the sisters realized that they held what they called their
"social position" only as appendages to Danny--Danny who had been to
college, who was the head of a great corporation law firm, who was
enormously rich and a highly eligible young man; that is, he used to be
young; and though New Munich regarded him as a confirmed old bachelor,
his sisters still looked upon him as a dashing youth and a great
matrimonial prize. They were not ashamed, but proud, of the fact that
people tolerated them because they were Danny's sisters.
It may seem strange that anything calling itself "society" could admit
women so crude as Jennie and Sadie, even though they were appendages to
a bait so dazzling as Danny Leitzel, Esquire. But in communities where
the ruling class is descended from the Pennsylvania Dutch, "society" is
remarkably elastic and has almost no closed doors to the appeal of
wealth, however freighted it may be with vulgarity and illiteracy; and,
be it known, Danny's sisters were not only financially independent of
Danny, but even wealthy, quite in their own right.
In spite of this fact, however, what social footing they had in the
little town of New Munich had not been acquired so easily as to make it
appear to them other than a very great possession.
As to the big, fine house in which they lived, it had been Danny's
money which, in the early days of his prosperity, had, at his sisters'
instigation, built this grand dwelling on the principal street of New
Munich, to dazzle and catch the town.
The room in which the sisters sat to-night would have seemed to one who
knew them a perfect expression of themselves--its tawdry grandeur
speaking loudly of their pride in money and display, and of, at the
same time, their penuriousness; the absence of books and of real
pictures, but the obtrusive decorations of heavy gilt frames on
chromos; the luridly coloured domestic carpets; heavy, ugly upholstered
furniture, manifesting the unfortunate combination of ample means with
total absence of culture. It would seem that in a rightly organized
social system women like these would not possess wealth, but would be
serving those who knew how to use wealth.
"To think our Danny'd marry a stranger, yet, from away down South, when
he could have picked out Congressman Ocksreider's daughter, or Judge
Kuntz's oldest girl--or Mamie Gundaker and her father a bank president!
Any of these high ladies of New Munich he could have!" wailed Sadie.
"They'd be only too glad to _get_ our Danny! And here he goes and
marries a stranger!"
"It ain't _like_ him that he'd up and do this thing behind our backs,
without askin' our adwice!" Jennie exclaimed.
"Think of the grand wedding we could have had here in New Munich!"
Sadie sighed.
"And we don't even know if she's well-fixed or poor!" cried Jennie in a
wildly worried tone.
"But I hardly think," Sadie tried to comfort her, "that Danny would
pick out a _poor_ girl. Nor a common one, either, so genteel as what
we raised him!"
"But men get so easy fooled with women, Sadie! If she's smart, she
could easy come over Danny."
"Unless he got stubborn-headed for her."
"Well," admitted Jennie, "to be sure Danny can get awful
stubborn-headed sometimes. But if she's smart and found out how rich
he is, she'd take care not to get him stubborn-headed."
"Yes, that's so, too," nodded Sadie. "I wonder if she's a fancy
dresser?"
Sadie's love of clothes was second only to her devotion to Danny. She
was dressed this evening in a girlish Empire gown made of red
cheesecloth.
"What will folks _say_ to this news, anyhow?" scolded Jennie. "I'll
have a shamed face to go on the street, us not knowing anything about
it, not even who she is yet! If folks ast us, Sadie, we must leave on
we did know--we'll just say, 'Oh, it ain't news to _us_!'"
"But how could we know much when Danny himself has knew her only a
little over a month, Jennie?"
"Yes, don't it, now, beat all?"
"Yes, don't it!"
"That shows what she is--marrying a man she knew only a month or so!"
"Well, to be sure, it wouldn't take her even a month, Jennie, to see
what a catch our Danny is."
"If she does turn out to be a common person," said Jennie with her most
purse-proud look and tone, "she's anyhow got to act genteel before
folks and not give Danny and us a shamed face here in New Munich--high
up as we've raised our Danny and hard as we worked to do it yet!"
"Yes, the idea!" mourned Sadie.
"Yes, the very idea!" nodded Jennie vindictively. "I shouldn't
wonder," she added anxiously, always concerned for her sister's health
which was really quite remarkably perfect, "if this shock give you the
headache, Sadie!"
"I shouldn't wonder!" Sadie shook her head sadly.
"Read me off the piece in the paper and see what it says all," Jennie
ordered. "But sit so the light don't give you the headache."
Sadie, adjusting her spectacles and turning on the electric table lamp
at her elbow, read the glaring article which had that evening appeared
on the first page of their daily paper and which every household in New
Munich was, they knew, now reading with feelings of astonishment,
curiosity, disappointment or chagrin, as the case might be, for the
sisters were sure that many heartaches among the marriageable maidens
of the town would be caused by the news that Danny was no longer within
their possible reach. These twenty-five years past he and his gold had
been dangling before them--and now to have him appropriated, without
warning, by a non-resident!
The article was headed in large type:
"ONE MORE VICTIM OF CUPID'S DARTS--
DANIEL LEITZEL LED LIKE A LAMB
TO HYMEN'S ALTAR."
Sadie breathed heavily as she read:
In a communication received at this office to-day from our esteemed
fellow-citizen, Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, sojourning for the past four
weeks in the balmy South, we are informed of his engagement and
impending marriage to "a young lady of distinguished Southern lineage,"
one who, we may feel sure, will grace very acceptably the social circle
here of which Mr. Leitzel is such a prominent, prosperous, and pleasant
member. The news comes to our town as a great surprise, for we had
almost begun to give Danny up as a hopeless bach. He will, however,
lead his bride to Hymen's altar early next month and bring her
straightway to his palatial residence on Main Street, presided over by
his estimable sisters, Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie. New Munich offers
its congratulations to her esteemed fellow-citizen, though some of us
wonder why he found it necessary to go so far away to find a wife, with
so many lovely ladies here in his native town to choose from. Love,
however, we all know, is a capricious mistress and none may guess
whither she may lead.
The happy and fortunate lady, Miss Margaret Berkeley of Berkeley Hill,
a distinguished and picturesque old colonial homestead two miles out of
Charleston, S.C., is, we are informed, a lineal descendant on her
mother's side of two governors of her native state and the niece of the
learned scholar and eminent psychologist, the late Dr. Osmond Berkeley,
with whom Miss Margaret made her home at Berkeley Hill until his
decease a year ago, since which sad event she has continued to reside
at this same homestead, her married sister and family living with her,
this sister being the wife of a Charleston attorney with whom Daniel
Leitzel, Esquire, has been conducting some legal railroad business in
Charleston and through whom our esteemed fellow-citizen, it seems, met
his happy doom.
New Munich's most aristocratic society will anticipate with pleasurable
interest the arrival of the happy bride and groom, Mrs. and Mr. Daniel
Leitzel. No doubt many very elegant society events will take place
this winter in honour of the newcomer among us; for New Munich is noted
for its hospitality.
"It don't say," Jennie sharply remarked, "whether she's
well-fixed--though to be sure if she comes from such high people they'd
have to be rich."
"But her grand relations are all deceased, the paper says," returned
Sadie despondently. "You may better believe, Jennie, if she had money,
Danny would have told the noospapers."
"It says in the paper she's living with her married sister, and it
looks to me," Jennie shrewdly surmised, "as if her brother-in-law (that
lawyer Danny had dealings with) wanted to get rid of her and worked her
off on our Danny. Or else that she took up with Danny to get a home of
her own."
"Do you _think_ Danny could be so easy worked?" Sadie doubtfully
inquired.
"He's a man," Jennie affirmed conclusively (though there were those
among Danny's acquaintances who would not have agreed with Jennie);
"and any man can be worked."
"You think?"
"To be sure. Danny would have been roped in long ago a'ready if I
hadn't of opened his eyes to it, still, when he was being worked."
"Yes, I guess," agreed Sadie. "Say, Jennie, what'll Hiram say when he
hears it, I wonder!"
Hiram was their brother next in age to Jennie, who, upon the family's
sudden, unexpected access to wealth thirty-five years before, through
the discovery of coal on some farm land they owned, had been a young
farmer working in the fields, and had immediately decided to use his
share of the money obtained from leasing the coal land to prepare
himself for what had then seemed to him a dizzy height of ambition, the
highest human calling, the United Brethren ministry. For twenty years
now he had been pastor of a small church in the neighbouring borough of
Millerstown. His sisters were very proud to have a brother who was "a
preacher." It was so respectable. They never failed to feel a thrill
at sight of his printed name in an occasional number of the Millerstown
_New Era_--"Rev. Hiram Leitzel." But Hiram did not, of course, hold
Danny's high place in their regard; Danny, their little brother whom
they had reared and who had repaid them by such a successful career in
money-making that he had, at the age of forty-five, accumulated a
fortune many times larger than that he had inherited.
"Hiram will take it awful hard that Danny's getting married," affirmed
Jennie. "He'd like you and me an Danny, too, to will our money to
_his_ children. He always hoped, I think, that Danny wouldn't ever get
married, so's his children would get all. To be sure the ministry
ain't a money-making calling and Hiram has jealous feelings over Danny
that he's so rich and keeps getting richer. Hiram likes money, too, as
much as Danny does."
"I wonder," speculated Sadie, "if Danny's picked out as saving and
hard-working a wife as what Hiram's got."
The characteristic Leitzel caution that Hiram had exercised in "picking
out" a wife had prolonged his bachelorhood far into middle life. He
had now been married ten years and had four children.
Keenly as the Leitzels loved money, none of them, not even Hiram
himself, had ever regretted his going into the ministry. It gave him
the kind of importance in the little borough of Millerstown that was
manna to the Leitzel egotism. Hiram really thought of himself (as in
his youth he had always looked upon ministers) as a kind of demigod;
and as the people of Millerstown and even his own wife treated him as
though he were one, he lived in the complacent enjoyment of his
delusion.
He had greatly pleased his sisters and his brother Daniel by marrying
the daughter of the richest man in his congregation, and they all
approved of the frugality by which he and his wife managed to live on
the little salary he drew from his church, letting his inherited wealth
and that of his wife accumulate for the children.
"It ain't likely," Jennie replied to Sadie's speculation, "that Danny's
marrying as well as Hiram married, when he's acting without our adwice."
"No, I guess anyhow not," agreed Sadie. "Say, Jennie!" she suddenly
whispered mysteriously.
"Well, what?"
"Will we leave Mom know about Danny's getting married?"
"Well, to be sure she'll have to find it out," Jennie curtly answered.
"It'll mebby be printed in the _County Gazette_ and she sees that
sometimes."
"Say, Jennie, if Danny's wife _is_ a way-up lady, what'll she think of
Mom yet, with her New Mennonite garb and her Dutch talk that way, and
all! My goodness!"
"Well, a body can't help for their step-mothers, I guess!"
"But she's so wonderful common and ignorant. I guess Danny would be
ashamed to leave his wife see her. And his wife would laugh so at her
clothes and her talk!"
"But how would his wife ever get a chance to see her? We don't ever
have Mom in here and we never take any one out to see her."
"That's so, too," Sadie acquiesced.
"I guess Hiram'll press it more'n ever now that we'd ought to put Mom
to the poorhouse and rent our old home. The land would bring a good
rent, he says, and we've no call to leave her live on it free any
longer. But I tell Hiram it would make talk if we put her to the
poorhouse. Hardly any one knows we _got_ a step-mother, and we don't
want to start any talk."
"Yes, well, but how could they blame us when she ain't our own mother?"
Sadie protested.
"But _you_ know how she brags about us so proud to her neighbours out
there in Martz Township--just as if we _was_ her own sons and
daughters--and tells 'em how grand we live and how much Danny is
thought of and how smart he is and what fine sermons Hiram preaches and
how she kep' us all when we were little while Pop drank so and we
hadn't anything but what she earned at the wash-tub! Yes," said Jennie
indignantly, "she tells it all right out perfectly shameless and
anybody to hear her talk would think we was her own flesh and blood!"
"Yes, it often worries me the way the folks out there talk down on us
and say she always treated us like her own and we always treated her
like a _step_-mother!" fretted Sadie.
"Well, I guess we needn't mind what such common, poor country folks say
about _us_!" sneered Jennie. "All the same"--she suddenly lowered her
voice apprehensively--"we darsent start folks talking, or first thing
we know they'll be saying we _cheated_ Mom out of her widow's third
because she was too ignorant to claim it!"
"How would they have dare to say that when the land come from our own
mother in the first place?" pleaded Sadie. "And Danny always says
we've got our moral right to all the money even if we haven't the legal
right."
"Yes, and he always says, too, that if we ain't awful careful we'll
have a lawsuit yet, and be _forced_ to give a lot of our money over to
Mom! Yes, I often say to Hiram, 'Better leave sleeping dogs lay,' I
say, 'and not go tryin' to put Mom into the poorhouse.'"
"Yes, I guess anyhow then!" breathed Sadie.
"By to-morrow"--Jennie veered off from the precarious topic of their
step-mother, for here was ice too thin for even private family
handling--"we'll be getting a letter from Danny giving us the
_de_tails. Say, Sadie, if he don't offer to pay our way, I ain't using
my money to travel that far to his wedding."
"Nor me, either," said Sadie. "Do you think, Jennie," she anxiously
asked, "folks will talk at our still keeping house for Danny when he's
married? You know how Danny always made us promise we'd stay by him,
married or single?"
Jennie sniffed. "As if he could get along without us! As if any one
else could learn his ways and how he likes things--and him so
particular about his little comforts! _He_ wouldn't leave us go away!
And look at what he _saves_ with us paying half the household expenses!"
"And as for his wife's not liking it----" began Sadie.
"As for her," Jennie sharply put in, "she's coming here without asking
us if we like it--she'll be put in _her_ place right from the start."
"But if she's got money of her own mebby," Sadie suggested doubtfully,
"she could be independent, too, then."
"Well, to be sure she'd put her money in her husband's care, wouldn't
she?--and him a lawyer."
"A body couldn't be sure she'd do that till they saw once what kind of
a person she was, Jennie."
"Well," Jennie stoutly maintained, "Danny'll _see_ that she does."
It will be noted that the story of Miss Berkeley's "distinguished
lineage" did not greatly impress Jennie and Sadie Leitzel. They did
not quite understand it. They knew nothing about such a thing as a
distinguished lineage; New Munich "aristocrats" certainly did not have
any; and the sisters' experiences being limited to life as it was in
New Munich, whose "first families" were such only by reason of their
"means," Sadie and Jennie were ignorant of any other measure of
excellence. To be poor and at the same time of any significance, was a
combination unknown to them.
As the newspapers did not state how closely those ancestral governors
were related to Miss Berkeley, the relationship was undoubtedly so
distant as to be negligible.
The one thing that would have softened their attitude toward their new
relative would have been an unequivocal statement as to the firm
financial standing of her family. And on that point the newspaper,
though furnished by Daniel himself with the facts, was ominously
silent. The conclusion was unmistakable. She was certainly penniless.
It was not greatly to be wondered at that the Leitzels worshipped
money. It was money that had done everything for them: it had rescued
them from a fearful struggle for a bare existence on a small, heavily
mortgaged farm; it had freed them from the grind of slavish labour;
from an obscurity that had been bitterly humiliating to the self-esteem
and the ambition which was characteristic of every one of them. It was
money that had given them power, place, influence; that made their
fellowmen treat them with deference and relieved them from the
necessity of treating any one else with deference. They knew of no
worth in life unpurchasable by money. They did not, therefore, know of
their own spiritual pauperism; their abject poverty.