II

It was at Vevey, one morning late in August, that Truesdale Marshall

received the letter which turned his face homeward--the summons which

made it seem obligatory for him to report at headquarters, as he phrased

it, without too great a delay. He was pacing along the terrace which

bounded the pension garden lakeward, and his eye wandered back and forth

between the superscription of the envelope and the distant mountain-shore

of Savoy, as it appeared through the tantalizing line of clipped acacias

which bordered the roadway that ran below him.

"'Richard T. Marshall, Esq.,'" he read, slowly, with his eye on the

accumulation of post-marks and renewed addresses. "They keep it up right

along, don't they? I can't make them feel that initials on an envelope

are not the best form. I can't bring them to see that 'Esq.' on foreign

letters is worse than a superfluity." He referred once more to the

mountains of Savoy; they seemed to offer no loophole of escape. "Well,

I've got to do it, I suppose."

He made some brief calculations, and found that he could put himself in

marching order within a month or so. There was the trunk stored at

Geneva; there was that roomful of furniture at

Freiburg--Freiburg-im-Breisgau; there was that brace of paintings boxed

up in Florence; and there were the frayed and loosely flying ends of

many miscellaneous friendships.

"I should think the end of October might do for them," he droned,

reflectively. "They can't mean to cut me off any shorter than that."

He saw the steamer taking on passengers between the two rotund

chestnut-trees that adorned the end of the stubby little stone pier.

Voices of shrieking gladness came across from the coffee-tables on the

terrace of the Three Crowns, his nearest neighbor to the right.

"Well, America is meeting me half way," he said; "I don't want to seem

reluctant myself. Suppose we make it Southampton, about October 15th?"

Truesdale Marshall had been away from home and friends for about the

length of time ordinarily required by a course through college, but it

was not at college that most of this period had been passed. He had left

Yale at the end of his sophomore year, and had taken passage, not for

Chicago, but for Liverpool, compromising thus his full claims on nurture

from an alma mater for the more alluring prospect of culture and

adventure on the Continent. This supplementary course of self-improvement

and self-entertainment had now continued for three years.

He had written back to his family at discreet intervals, his

communications not being altogether untinctured, it is true, by

considerations of a financial nature; and his sister Jane, who charged

herself with the preservation of this correspondence, would have

undertaken to reconstruct his route and to make a full report of his

movements up to date on ten minutes' notice. She kept his letters in a

large box-file that she had teased from her father at the store; and two

or three times a year she overhauled her previous entries, so to speak,

and added whatever new ones were necessary to bring her books down to the

present day.

She pleased herself, on the occasion of such reviews, with the thought

that her brother's long absence was so largely and so laboriously

educational. There, for example, was his winter and spring at Heidelberg,

which she figured as given over to Kant and Hegel. This sojourn was

attested by a photograph which showed her brother in a preposterous

little round cap, as well as with a bar of sticking-plaster (not markedly

philosophical, it must be confessed) upon one cheek.

Again, there was his six months' stay in Paris, during which time he had

dabbled in pigments at one of the studios affected by Americans. Her

vouchers for this period consisted of several water-colors; they were

done in a violent and slap-dash fashion, and had been inspired,

apparently, by scenes in the environs of the capital. They were marked

"Meudon" and "St. Cloud" and "Suresnes," with the dates; both names and

dates were put where they showed up very prominently. Jane was rather

overcome by these sketches on a first view, and after she had pinned them

up on the walls of her bedroom (she had made no scruple over an immediate

individual appropriation) she was obliged to acknowledge that you had to

step back some little distance in order to "get them."

Then there was his year at Milan, during which he was engaged in the

cultivation of his voice at the Conservatory. "A whole year," said

innocent Jane to herself; "think of Dick's staying in one place as long

as that!" She made no account of the easily accessible joys of Monte

Carlo, but figured him, instead, as running interminable scales at all

hours of day and night, and as participating, now and then, in the chorus

at the Scala, for which purpose, as he wrote her, he had had a pair

of tights made to order. In another letter he sent her a pen-and-ink

sketch of himself as he appeared while studying the last act of

"Favorita." He explained that the large looking-glasses surrounding him

were designed to give the disillusioned Fernando opportunity to see

whether his facial expression was corresponding to the nature of the

music he was interpreting.

All this completely overpowered poor Jane; it enveloped her brother's

head in a roseate halo; it wrapped him in the sweet and voluminous folds

of a never-failing incense; it imparted a warm glow to his coolish summer

in the Engadine, and it illumined his archaeological prowlings through

the Peloponnesus; it opened up a dozen diverging vistas to the

enthusiastic girl herself, and advanced her rapidly in long courses of

expansion and improvement. Above all, it filled her with a raging

impatience for his return. "Between him and me," she would say to

herself, "something _may_ be done. Pa'll never do anything to get us out

of this rut; nor ma. Neither will Roger nor Alice. And Rosy--well, Rosy's

too young to count on, yet. But Richard Truesdale Marshall, the younger

son of the well-known David Marshall, of Lake Street, recently returned

from a long course of travel and study abroad"--she seemed to be quoting

from the printed column--"_can_. Especially when assisted by his sister,

the clever and intellectual Miss Jane Marshall, who--"

"Oh, bother this bang!" exclaimed Miss Jane Marshall, pettishly. She

threw her comb down between pin-cushion and cologne bottle, and flattened

a frowning and protesting glance against her mirror. "I guess I'll give

up trying to be beautiful, and just be quaint."

David Marshall received his son with less exaltation. He had a vivid

recollection of the liberal letter of credit which had started the young

man on his way, and this recollection had subsequently been touched up

and heightened by the payment of many drafts for varying but considerable

amounts; and he was now concerning himself with the practical question,

What have I got for my money? He felt his own share in the evolution

of this brilliant and cultured youth, whose corona of accomplishments

might well dazzle and even abash a plain business person; and he awaited

with interest a response to the reasonable interrogation, to what end

shall all these means be turned? He received his son with a dry and

cautious kindness, determined not to be too precipitate in ascertaining

the young man's ideas as to the future--a week more or less could make no

great difference now.

David Marshall was a tall, spare man whose slow composure of carriage

invested him with a sort of homely dignity. He wore a reddish beard, now

largely touched with white--a mixture whose effect prompted the

suggestion that his grandfather might have been a Scotchman; and the look

from his blue eyes (though now no longer at their brightest) convinced

you that his sight was competent to cover the field of vision to which he

had elected to restrict himself. He seemed completely serious, to have

been so always, to have been born half grown up, to have been dowered at

the start with too keen a consciousness of the burdens and

responsibilities of life. Coltishness, even by a retrospect of fifty

years, it was impossible to attribute to him. You imagined him as having

been caught early, broken to harness at once, and kept between the shafts

ever since. It was easy to figure him as backing into position with a

sweet and reasonable docility--a docility which saw no other course or

career for a properly minded young horse, and which looked upon the

juvenile antics of others in the herd as an unintelligible and rather

reprehensible procedure. He knew what he was for, and his way was before

him.

He had acted on his knowledge, and now, at sixty, he seemed still to be

travelling over the same long straight road, blinders at his eyes, a high

wall on either side, no particular goal in the dusty distance, and an air

of patient, self-approving resignation all about him. His burden, too,

had increased with the years--just as his rut had grown deeper. Counting

his family and his poor relations, and his employés and _their_ families

and poor relations, five or six hundred people were dependent on him.

Many of these, of course, had seats so low that they were almost choked

by the dust of the roadway; but others, more pleasantly situated, were

able to overlook the enclosing walls and to enjoy the prospect beyond.

Among these last was his younger son, who sat in the highest place of

all, and thence surveyed the universe.

The Marshall house had been built at the time of the opening of the War,

and as far "out" as seemed advisable for a residence of the better sort.

In those days no definite building-line had been established, so that it

was quite a walk from the front gate to the foot of the front steps.

Neither, at that time, was ground too valuable to make a good bit of yard

impracticable--so that the house had plenty of space on all sides. It was

a low, plain, roomy building with a sort of belvedere and a porch or two.

The belvedere was lingeringly reminiscent of the vanishing classic, and

the decorative woodwork of the porches showed some faint traces of the

romantico-lackadaisical style which filled up the years between the ebb

of the Greek and the vulgar flood-tide of Second-empire renaissance.

Taken altogether, a sedate, stable, decorous old homestead, fit for the

family within it.

In the back yard, behind a latticed screen-work, some shrubs and bushes

survived from a garden once luxuriant, but now almost vanished. There had

been a cherry-tree, too--a valiant little grower, which put forth a cloud

of white blossoms late in every May, and filled a small pail with fruit

early in every July. It was thus that Jane was enabled to celebrate her

birthday (which fell about this time of year) with a fair-sized cherry

pie; and in especially favorable seasons enough cherries were left over

to make a small tart for Rosy.

But the atmosphere had years ago become too urban for the poor

cherry-tree, which had long since disappeared from mortal ken; and the

last of the currant-bushes, too, were holding their own but poorly

against the smoke and cinders of metropolitan life. One of Jane's

earliest recollections was that of putting on her flat and taking her tin

pan and accompanying her mother out to pick currants for the annual

jelly-making. Her mother wore a flat, too, and carried a tin pan--both of

proportionate size. The flats had long since been cast aside, and the

pans had become less necessary with the dwindling of the currant-bushes;

but the jelly-making returned with every recurring July. A great many

quarts of alien currants and a great many pounds of white sugar were

fused in that hot and sticky kitchen, and then the red-stained cloths

were hung to dry upon the last remaining bushes. Jane would sometimes

reproach her parent with such a proceeding--which seemed to her hardly

less reprehensible than the seething of a kid in its mother's milk; but

Eliza Marshall had scant receptivity for any such poetical analogies. The

cloths, as seen through the lattice-work, had a somewhat sensational

aspect; they spoke of battle and murder and sudden death, and sometimes

the policeman passing by, if he was a new one, thought for a second that

he had stumbled on a "clew."

Eliza Marshall took this risk quite willingly; the idea of buying her

jelly ready-made never crossed her mind. No; she made her own year after

year, and poured it out into her little glass tumblers, and sealed each

tumbler with a half-sheet of notepaper, and marked each sheet according

to the sort of jelly it protected--sometimes she made grape or

crab-apple, too. She doled out her products very economically during the

winter and spring. Then she would discover, about the first of June,

that she had a three months' supply still on hand. Then, during the

summer, the family would live on jelly and little else.

But she remained, year after year, the same firm, determined, peremptory

person in her kitchen; she never spared herself there, and she never

spared anybody else.

She gave no more quarter at the front of the house than at the back. To

get fresh air into her dim and time-worn parlor and to keep sun and dust

and smoke out--this was her one besetting problem. There were those windy

days at the end of autumn, after the sprinkling-carts had been withdrawn

from the boulevard; there were the days (about three hundred and

sixty-five in the year) when the smoke and cinders from the suburban

trains made her house as untidy as a switch-yard; and there was her

husband's unconquerable propensity for smoking--a pleasure which she

compelled him to take outside on the foot pavement. Here, on pleasant

evenings, he would walk up and down alone, in a slow, meditative

fashion--having little to say and nobody to say it to--until bedtime

came.

This came early--from a habit early formed. The Chicago of his young

married life had given him little reason for being abroad after half-past

nine at night, and he appeared to find little more reason now than then.

It would not, indeed, have been impossible to make him see that, in the

interval, balls, concerts, spectacles, and such-like urban doings had

come on with increasing number and brilliancy, and that there were now

more interests to justify a man in remaining up until half-past ten, or

even until eleven. But you could not have convinced him that all these

opportunities were his.

Yet the consciousness of festivities sometimes obtruded upon his

indifference. Now and then on summer evenings, when the wind was from the

west, certain brazen discords originating a street or two behind the

house would come to advise him that the Circassian girl was on view, or

that a convention of lady snake-charmers was in session. Then there would

be weeks of winter nights when the frozen macadam in front of the house

would ring with a thousand prancing hoofs and rumble for an hour with a

steady flow of carriages, and the walls of the great temple of music a

few hundred yards to the north would throw back all this clamor, with the

added notes of slamming doors and shouted numbers and epic struggles

between angry drivers and determined policemen; sometimes he would extend

his smoking stroll far enough to skirt the edge of all this Babel. Then,

towards midnight, long after all staid and sensible people were abed, the

flood would roll back, faster yet under the quiet moon, louder yet

through the frosty air. But he never met the Circassian beauty, and he

would have found "l'Africaine," for example, both tedious and

unreasonable. To him each of these publics was new, and no less new than

alien. Besides, it would have seemed an uncanny thing to be abroad and

stirring at midnight.

Why did he go to bed at half-past nine? In order that he might be at the

store by half-past seven. Why must he be at the store by half-past seven?

Because a very large area to the west and northwest of the town looked to

him for supplies of teas, coffees, spices, flour, sugar, baking-powder;

because he had always been accustomed to furnish these supplies; because

it was the only thing he wanted to do; because it was the only thing he

could do; because it was the only thing he was pleased and proud to do;

because it was the sole thing which enabled him to look upon himself as a

useful, stable, honored member of society.

But it need not be supposed that the Marshalls in their young married

days had lived totally bereft of social diversion. Quite the contrary.

They had had tea-parties and card-parties now and then, and more than

once they had thrown their house open for a church sociable. But the day

came when the church jumped from its old site three blocks away to a new

site three miles away. And by that time most of their old neighbors and

fellow church-members had gone too--some southward, some northward, some

heavenward. Then business, in the guise of big hotels, began marching

down the street upon them, and business in all manner of guise ran up

towering walls behind them that shut off the summer sun hours before it

was due to sink; and traffic rang incessant gongs at their back door, and

drew lengthening lines of freight-cars across the lake view from their

front one; and Sunday crowds strolled and sprawled over the wide green

between the roadway and the waterway, and tramps and beggars and peddlers

advanced daily in a steady and disconcerting phalanx, and bolts and bars

and chains and gratings and eternal vigilance were all required to keep

mine from becoming thine; until, in the year of grace 1893, the Marshalls

had almost come to realize that they were living solitary and in a state

of siege. But they had never yet thought of capitulation nor of retreat;

they were the Old Guard; they were not going to surrender, nor to die

either.

As the advance guard of all, old David Marshall frequently occupied the

most advanced bastion of all, the parlor bay-window. Here, in the

half-dark, he was accustomed to sit and think; and his family let him sit

and think, unconscious that it would sometimes be a kindness to break in

upon the habit. He pondered on the markets and on the movements of trade;

he kept one eye for the shabby wayfarers who threw a longing look upon

his basement gratings, and another for the showers of sparks and black

plumes of smoke which came to remind him of corporate encroachments upon

municipal rights. And here one evening he sat, some few days after his

son's return, while a hubbub of female voices came to him from the next

room. His sister-in-law from three miles down the street, and his married

daughter from ten miles out in the suburbs, had come to show some

civility to the returned traveller, and the conjunction of two such stars

was not to be effected in silence. Nor was silence to be secured even by

a retreat from one room to another.

"Well, pa, you _are_ here, sure enough." A hand pulled aside the curtain

and made the bay-window a part of the parlor again. "Poking off by

yourself, and thinking--I know. When I've told you so many times not to."

It was Jane. It was her office to keep the family from disintegration.

None of them realized it--hardly she herself.

She perched on the arm of his big chair, placed her hand on his forehead,

and looked in his face with a quizzical pretence of impatience. These

little passages sometimes occurred in the bay-window--hardly anywhere

else.

"Well, what is it this time?" she asked. Her intention was

tender, but her voice issued with a kind of explosive grate--the

natural product of vocal cords racked by the lake winds of thirty springs

and wrecked by a thousand sudden and violent transitions from heat to

cold and back again. "Not Mr. Belden, I hope?"

"No, Jennie. That will come out all right, I expect. We had a talk with

the builder about it today."

He looked at her with a kind of wan and patient smile. His own voice was

dry, husky, sibilant--sixty years of Lake Michigan.

She smiled back at his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such

occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety.

"No."

"Well, then, is it the--Sisters?"

"Not the Sisters. They were in last week."

"Guess again, then," said Jane, perseveringly. "Is it--is it the

Benevolent Policemen?"

"No, not the Policemen. They won't be around for a month yet."

Her hand dropped to his shoulder and her eyes searched his. To another

they might have seemed staring; to him they were only intent. "Poor pa;

he's like a ten-pin standing at the end of the alley, isn't he? They all

take a turn at him, don't they?"

"I'm afraid that's about it, Jennie." He smiled rather wanly again and

smoothed her hand with his own.

"Well, what else is there?" pondered Jane. "Is it the Afro-American

bishop raising the mortgage on their chapel?"

"No. I guess the Afro-Americans have about paid things off by this time."

"How lonesome they must leave you? H'm! is it the Michigan Avenue

Property Owners assessing you again to fight the choo-choo cars?"

Her father shook his head and almost laughed.

"Is it The Wives of the Presidents'? Is it 'The Mothers of Great Men'?"

"What a girl!" he said, and laughed aloud. It seemed as if he wanted to

laugh.

She eyed him narrowly. "There's only one thing more I can think of," she

declared, screwing up her mouth and her eyes. "But I sha'n't ask you

that--it's too silly. If I imagined for a moment that you could be

thinking about old Mother Van Horn--"

She paused. Her father cast down his eyes half guiltily.

"Don't say you are, pa. That would be too absurd. You, with all the

important things you have to carry in your head, to waste a minute on

that frowzy old hag! It isn't worth it; it's nonsense."

"I don't know whether it is or not," responded her father, slowly. He

passed a careful hand through the fringe of the chair. "That's what I'd

like to find out."

"Oh, fiddlesticks!" rejoined Jane. "You sha'n't sit poking here in the

dark and thinking of any such thing as that--not another minute. Come in

and hear Dick tell how those students in Paris tied him to the wall and

daubed him all red and green, and what he did to get even. _That's_ worth

while. And you haven't seen Aunt Lyddy yet, have you? So is _that_--isn't

it? Then come along, do."