He had put something in motion on that languid July day, and suddenly
he was whirled along in a stream of consequences. There was an
interview with Mr. Ellwell, a sudden opening of the Ellwell family
arms, and he was one of them--not much to his relish. Ruby Ellwell
brought out her engagement to Bradley, the young stock broker her
father had chummed with. The Four Corners renewed its worldly life in
a garden-party, at which both engagements were announced. Thornton had
to stand in line with his new brother-in-law, and for all this
disagreeable business, the sole consolation was the happiness the
woman he loved found in it. For her it was a rehabilitation of the
family, the first dawn of those better times she had looked for all
these years.
He remembered for all his lifetime how his father had met her; how he
had walked across the lawn, old, and gray, and aloof, and had taken
both her hands. He had smiled at her tenderly, as if she were a little
girl, much as he had smiled years before at Jarvis's mother. Then he
had kissed her on both cheeks, and had stood patting her hands in a
gentle caress. Later he had slipped away in the same quiet abstracted
manner. For the rest of the day Jarvis Thornton had been a little sad,
as well as bored, without knowing exactly why.
They had planned a simple wedding for September; they would walk to
the village church, the old white box of a meeting-house where the
first Roper Ellwell had led his congregation. Martinson, Thornton's
youthful hero at the Camberton Theological School, would meet them in
his episcopal robes on the little green in front of the church, and
then the party, not more than a dozen, could walk together into the
bare old building, and in the solemn quiet of the country noon
complete the marriage. A quiet dinner, and then away from the Four
Corners.
But it could not be so. The handsome Ruby wished to have a "function,"
some of the conventional excitements of this entertainment. The two
sisters must be married together; a special train must come from
Boston; a grand reunion would be held of all the old family friends
who had shaken their heads over the Ellwell misfortunes. So the two
quieter souls yielded, and the marriage left a bad taste in the young
bridegroom's cup of joy.
Almost at once they had gone abroad to Berlin, where Thornton proposed
to work for an indefinite time. It seemed to him that he should
accomplish more than one object, by carrying on his work in Europe; he
could insensibly divide himself and his wife from the Ellwell
connection. All went sweetly for his first months; he had begun to
regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But
when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home,
he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at
such a time.
So back to Boston they had gone, Thornton contenting himself with the
reflection that he could go ahead in Boston almost as well as in
Europe; that fortunately he was not tied by money wants, and that the
Camberton laboratories were always open to him. When the little
daughter came he schemed a new move; he was offered a headship of a
laboratory somewhere in the middle West. He began to feel the force of
his father's remarks about transplanting.
Yet they never went. Another man got the appointment while he was
persuading his wife. Her mother was so lonely, now that Ruby was
living in New York. They had no necessity to live far away in order to
earn money. When he proposed moving to Washington, the same ground had
to be gone over again, and the same gentle obstinate resistance to be
met.
"Go to Washington," old Thornton said when his son stood by his
bedside during the last illness. "Go to Washington," he repeated,
querulously. And as the younger man made no reply, but sat with his
hands shoved in his pockets, brooding, the sick man spoke again, "You
will never do anything here."
"Yes, we must make a move," assented his son in a voice that said
"no."
After his father's death, they went to live in the Marlboro' Street
house. There was no more talk of moving away. The Ellwells came in
town for the winter, living in a flat at one of the new hotels near
by. Mrs. Thornton had the habit of spending her mornings in the flat
with her mother and the baby. Thornton could find no reasonable
grounds for the rebellion he felt over this tie, this close proximity
to decay in which he was compelled to live. Yet he loathed the thought
that his child, unimportant as she was now, should begin her life by
imbibing such a forlorn atmosphere.
He could tell each day what had been going on in those long morning
hours; how his wife's sympathies had been on the rack; how mother and
daughter had sighed over the unaccountable miseries of life. She
seemed to him to come home with the old anaemic look, with the old
restless hunger in her face, and then he was reminded that their child
was more than delicate. It would lead him to envy mere gross flesh and
blood, the coarse fibre of some riotously healthy common folk. Indeed
it was a crime against his fellow-men, this maintaining a bankrupt
stock unless he could patch it into vigor. There were hints too that
fell indefinably now and then about the Ellwell affairs, the
stock-broker's poor health, the perpetual disappointments that
discouraged him. His wife had relapsed into the Four Corner's habit of
regarding incapacity and folly as mere misfortune. It irritated him to
realize all this sentimental pity over a blackguard. Yet she was
right; she had the opinion of centuries on her side; was she not their
daughter before she was his wife?
There were times when Ruby came on from New York for a visit, bringing
her child, a boy, with her. Thornton grimly noted this vigorous little
animal of a nephew and compared him minutely with his own feeble
child. He compared also the mothers. Ruby had already begun the
period of over-bloom. The Bradleys, he gathered, lived a kind of a
tramp existence, moving from boarding-house to hotel as Bradley went
up or down. And Ruby, with all her assurance and her affluent person,
had not lost the Ellwell ailments. Yet to her child had been given the
strong stock he envied. Nature had coolly overlooked his, and carried
her blessings where they were not deserved.
Such reflections made him more tender to his wife. He wondered if she
ever thought of this contrast.
When he was working in his little back-room study, he wondered what
the two sisters could find to talk about for hours. He fancied that
they were going over the old items of the family budget, the thousand
trivialities of family gossip that never seemed to be ended and never
lost their interest. One day he could hear Ruby earnestly talking--she
had just come from New York--and then he thought he caught the sound
of suppressed tears. After a time he rose nervously and walked out to
his wife's room where the sisters were.
Ruby's face was excited though sullen. She had not taken off her hat,
and in her haste her gloves had fallen on the floor by the door. Her
sister was crying, quietly. "What's up?" Thornton turned sharply to
Ruby, his voice betraying his desire to sweep her out of his life
forever.
A slight sneer crossed her face. She said nothing, and punched the
footstool with the toe of her boot sullenly, as if resenting his
appearance. As Thornton waited for an explanation, she rose and picked
up her gloves.
"You'll have to tell him," she spoke roughly to her sister. "I'm going
over to mother's."
Thornton accompanied her to the door. Her air was defiant and sullen;
Thornton contemptuously refrained from questioning her.
"Well," he said, quietly, when he had returned. Something very bad was
to come; it had been hanging about in the air for months.
"Jarvis, I can't tell you; it's so awful. What shall we do? Poor Aunt
Mary and Aunt Sophie!"
"They have lost their money."
She nodded.
"Through Bradley?"
"Oh, Jarvis, I have brought you so much trouble; I am afraid I ought
not to have kept you here in Boston."
"I don't see how that could affect this," he replied kindly to her
irrelevant contrition. "Has it all gone?"
"I suppose so."
"How did he get hold of it?"
"I don't remember anything. Papa had it--all their money--to invest,
and he let Ruby's husband have it to put in wheat. It's all gone."
Thornton had heard that John Ellwell's sisters had been left a small
fortune by their father with strict directions to keep it out of their
brother's hands. They were two delicate maiden ladies, who had floated
about Europe aimlessly for a number of years, living in one
watering-place after another. Their refusal to have anything to do
with their brother had been one fruitful topic of family discussion. A
few years before, however, when American stocks were booming, the two
maiden ladies had withdrawn their hundred thousand from the woollen
mill where old Mr. Ellwell had placed it, and had given it to the
stock-broker for reinvestment. Their brother had always fascinated
them. He was clever, wicked perhaps, but so clever that he always got
into good things. The conclusion came shortly. For the last six months
Ellwell had managed to keep up the interest; now he had come to the
end of his rope, and he was about to commit suicide by selling his
seat in order to provide a pittance, at least, for his sisters.
Husband and wife sat silent for a long time.
"Why did Ruby come to break the news?" Thornton asked at last. His
wife looked at him timidly, then flushed.
"I suppose she thought we could do something; but what shall we do? We
never have anything left over."
The bolt had fallen; Thornton traced its course in a few little
moments.
"There is but one thing," he said, gently; "we must see that your
aunts do not starve, at least for the present."
"You'll have to give up your investigations and laboratory work, and
all that?"
She was striving to comprehend his situation, an effort that he had
planned for her that July day when they had become engaged.
"For the present."
"How can you love me? Your life would have been so different. You have
always said that you were equipped with ideal conditions, just enough
money to work as you liked. And now you can't escape unless I die."
He disliked to utter commonplace lies; although she spoke the truth in
her sudden realization of the facts to have him deny it, he could not
protest; so he kissed her instead and said, later:
"We can't reckon things that way." Her old look of misery came back.
"You can't win with me."
"But I have won love."
And she was appeased.
From that date he had become a man in the sordid sense of the word. He
had taken his father-in-law sternly in hand, presented the case
firmly, and showed him the extent of the sacrifice his worthless life
had made necessary. He paid from that day the normal income to the
Misses Ellwell's bankers, but he gave the stock-broker to understand
that was the end. Any further protection for him was not to be found
in this life.
A few months later he hung out his shingle as practising physician and
surgeon. There would be need enough of money in his life; the way to
get it was by using his acquaintances in Boston and practising only
about a few streets of the Back Bay. So at thirty he had begun the
ordinary routine of a well-connected physician--the profession he had
sneered at in his youth, the profession of polite humbug.