Certain natural results followed from Jarvis Thornton's first
interference in the Ellwell family troubles. He felt bound to do what
he could with the Minnesota uncle to secure some kind of a berth for
young Roper. In a few weeks he was able to make another journey to the
Four Corners, with the definite offer of a small agency in a little
frontier town. He found the family conditions troubled, but
temporarily quiet. Old Ellwell, after a passionate and violent attack,
had lapsed into a glum silence. The son kept out of his way; hung
about the premises during the day-time, and took himself off as often
as the mother and sisters could find money for him to spend. After
several visits to the Four Corners, in such times of family stress,
Thornton found himself on the most intimate terms with the young woman
who seemed to realize the suffering most.
He made up his mind that, come what might, he should, in justice to
his father, tell him the story. Thornton's father was an elderly man
whom most good Boston people were glad to know. He had a little
fortune; he owned a comfortable little brick box on Marlboro' Street;
he had cultivated enough tastes to keep him reasonably occupied ever
since his wife's sudden death years ago. Jarvis Thornton enjoyed his
father, and the enjoyment was reciprocal. The two had put their heads
together and planned out the younger man's life-work, and each felt an
equal interest and responsibility for the success of their
speculation. What the father's career had lacked in effectiveness,
they now determined should be supplied by Jarvis. So the son felt
already some compunctions when he realized how far he had gone in this
important matter without putting his father in the way of criticizing
it.
It was a stifling July evening that Jarvis took to open the matter to
his father. The old man had been unusually silent, almost preoccupied
during the dinner they had eaten together in the little back
dining-room. The son noticed that the heat had told on his father, and
he blamed himself for keeping him in this dusty, deserted town, while
he completed his laboratory work. The electric cars made a great
whirr, just around the corner, every few moments, and the little strip
of park behind the house was full of the poor people who had crawled
out of their hot holes to get some breathable air in the green spots
abandoned by the rich. Jarvis Thornton cast his eyes lazily over the
dusty library where they had gone for their smoke. Among its tall
rows of sober-looking books he had got his first taste for the life he
was beginning to lead, the life on the whole that seemed to him the
most satisfactory of any he had looked at. There was a gulf between
him and this passion-ridden mob which swarmed about the public parks
in a hot summer; there was, also, a gulf between him and his neighbors
in the contiguous brick boxes, who strove merely to make the boxes
comfortable. And to his father who sat opposite to him, his fine thin
face with the short gray beard occasionally lighted by the red coal of
his cigar, he owed it all. Somehow to-night he felt that he was about
to propose a raid across that gulf, a voluntary abandonment of the
calm, effective position that he had been blessed with.
He had no difficulty in broaching the affair. To discuss a matter with
his father was like talking to a more experienced and patient self.
"Did you ever know the Ellwells?" he began, simply. "One of them was
the old pastor in the Second Church, and his grandson is on the stock
board now." The older man nodded. Then he continued, describing his
first introduction to the family, his impression of the Four Corners,
his first visit there, with clear, simple portraits of the various
Ellwells of this generation. When he came to the slump of Roper
Ellwell, second, he found it less easy to explain how it had involved
him. His last visits to the Four Corners he passed over hastily, and
after a few broken remarks about the woman who had drawn him there, he
came to an awkward silence. His father kept on smoking, as if waiting
for a final statement. As it did not come, he spoke, in a clear,
impartial voice.
"Yes, I have known all the Ellwells except these young people. I was
just out of Camberton when the war broke out. John Ellwell shirked
then; it was not much to do to go to the front. It was in the air to
fight." He paused to let this aspect of the case sink in. "Later I was
chairman of the committee that requested him to leave the Tremont
Club. And still later, when his swindle on the exchange came to light,
I helped his father hush the matter up. He was a bad lot."
"Yes," his son answered slowly. "An unusually bad lot. He is rotten!"
"Of course, besides the scandals we have mentioned there were,
probably are, others with women. What you say about the children shows
how impoverished is the blood. The son could hardly end otherwise. You
have given him a new soil to grow in, but the end must be there!"
The old man pointed stiffly to the street. Jarvis Thornton made no
reply. Presently his father continued:
"They were not transplanted in time. They are degenerate Puritans.
There are a great many like them, who have petered out on the stony
farms, or in little clerkships, or in asylums of one sort or another.
The stock was too finely bred in and in, over and over, for three
hundred years nearly. Insanity and vice have been hoarded and
repressed and passed on." He seemed to speak with personal bitterness.
"We have the taint of scrofula, of drink, of insanity, all covered up.
Those were wisest who scattered themselves forty years ago into new
lands. Then the magnificent old stock took a new life. It would not be
too much to say that wherever we find good life, hope, joy, or
prosperity in our broad country, you may trace it all back to New
England."
The son listened wonderingly to this essay on the Puritan stock.
"But I don't believe in it," the young man protested. "I don't believe
that it is good science or good morals to hang about our necks this
horrid millstone of heredity."
His father continued in his impartial tone. "You know how much of that
rotten stuff is in our family. You remember the Sharps, and the
Dingleys, and the Abraham Clarkes. You know your mother died from
sheer exhaustion," the old man trembled, "and I have been spared for a
fairly useless life by constant patching up. The war didn't knock me
up only----"
"I will not believe it!" Jarvis Thornton uttered, in intense tones.
His father sighed.
"And by some fortune you were spared; you have grown up strong and
sound and equable. I led your interests to the line of work you have
chosen, for a purpose----"
He paused again. "In order that sex, mere sex, might have no special
unhealthy fascination for you; that you might meet these problems and
treat them as judiciously as you would a matter of banking--without
sentiment, without passion, without an ignorant, liquorish
hallucination----"
The son raised his hand.
"And now it has come in a new way," he said, quietly, "through your
pity and your generosity and your faith. But it has come."
What Jarvis Thornton replied was neither coherent nor weighty. He
flung aside the idea of pity or generosity as absurd. He loved this
woman for herself, because, because he loved her. His father smiled a
sad, kind smile.
"The mother does not seem to have added much to the blood." He threw
this out in order to get the subject back into more reasonable
channels.
"No, she is a weak woman. But what of it? I don't marry the family. We
shall leave them and build a new life, and break the curse." He
smiled, slightly.
"Granting your beliefs that no harm would come to your children, that
it is all chance about these matters," persisted the father, "still
you _cannot_ escape the family. You marry the conditions; they will
remain with you. _They_, if nothing else, will ruin your life."
The younger man rose as if to shake off a physical bandage. For the
first time in his life he felt conscious of a rebellion with the
elemental conditions of existence.
"What if it does mean corruption and misery! I want my joy, my life,
even if they write 'Failure' at the bottom of my page."
"No, no!" his father protested. "You will take the pain all right and
the consequences like a man, but you will never believe that swinish
statement you have just made."
This brought the younger man to his calmer mood.
"I hate them," he said, bitterly, "more than you can; but her I love."
"And to her you will sacrifice all?"
His father looked at him searchingly, longingly.
"Yes, if need be, _all_, but you!"
The old man smiled coolly.
"I shall not count long, and you are independent, anyway. But I don't
care to put the matter on such a footing. We have not lived that way."
"I will do whatever you desire," the son said, "except----"
"I shall ask nothing," his father replied, gently. "If you mean to
marry her you must do so now, when she will need you most. There can
be no compromise, unless your own mind is divided."
As Jarvis Thornton left the house that night he felt that he had dealt
his father a blow.