It was two o'clock in the morning when Jane said good-bye to Theodore
Brower in the vestibule and burst into the house. There was a light
burning in the library, and thitherward Jane swept in high feather. Her
father was sitting there; as she entered he took up a newspaper that he
had completely read out three hours before.
"Why, poppy!" she cried; "isn't this pretty late for you? But I know what
you've been sitting up for so long: to have me tell you all about the
party. Now, haven't you?"
Her father looked up at her in some wonder. Jane was distinctly in a
state of exhilaration. She seemed conscious of having played well her
part--no mean part, either--in a large performance; one might have
fancied indeed that the splendor and success of the occasion was in some
degree due to her own participation. She was decidedly gay, bright,
sparkling; her father felt that here at last was his daughter almost
pretty.
"Maybe I was," he answered. He threw down the newspaper so as to make it
cover several loose sheets full of figures. "Did you enjoy yourself?"
"I should say I did!" She seated herself on the arm of his
chair; one of her big puffed sleeves almost covered his face.
"Don't think I was a wallflower, either; I wasn't. I went out
on the floor three times. Mr. Brower walked me around once, and Mr.
Bingham waltzed with me once. And so did Truedy. Oh, poppy, he was so
good to me! And he was the only young man there with violet eyes--I
didn't see another one."
Her father gave vent to a low, inarticulate monosyllable; it seemed to
convey little appreciation of his son's eyes.
Jane had met Truesdale for a moment just before she came away. "How's the
handkerchief?" she had asked. "All right," he responded, cheerfully. He
took it folded and crumpled from his coat-pocket and showed it to her. He
had carried it in his trousers pocket until a moment before; but Jane
never knew.
"And I went to supper with Mrs. Bates and Theo--Mr. Brower," she
continued. "And the oldest Bates boy took Rosy. We all went up in the
elevator together and had a table quite to ourselves. I saw Mr. Bates
there too. And lots of other elderly gentlemen. I wish _you_ had been
there. Several of them made themselves prominent enough--no younger than
you, no richer, no more deserving of notice. Poppy, you must get out that
coat some time and brush it up, and go somewhere with _me_."
Marshall thrust a finger under the edge of the newspaper. "I don't know,
Jennie. There are lots of other things to think about."
Rosy came home at four. Mrs. Rhodes dropped her on her own way southward.
Bertie Patterson nodded sleepily in one corner of the carriage. She was
unused to late hours, and had been ready to go long before. But Rosy made
it plain to all involved that she regarded herself as the first to be
considered; she did not design leaving a minute sooner or a minute later
than her own good pleasure should will. Her card was filled to the last
line, and she danced it out--with William Bates, with Arthur Paston, and
with a score of other young men for whose names the present pages have no
need.
In the course of a week Arthur Paston called. Truesdale, who happened to
be at home, found himself regarding Paston's presence with something the
reverse of complacency, and his bearing with something that distinctly
approached disapproval. He recalled to mind many of the diversions in
which they had participated together, and he felt offended that Paston
should bring here the same jaunty, familiar, off-hand ways that he had
displayed in other scenes but slightly approved by Propriety. He
would have preferred a line of conduct suggestive, in some small degree
at least, of the penitent, the chastened, the abashed; a laugh less
ready; a smile less confident; a bearing less self-assured, less divested
of any sense of his need of tolerance, charity, forbearance. "I don't
precisely like his acting in that free fashion here with Rosy," thought
Truesdale; "there are times and times, and there are places and places."
His thought presently turned towards himself. He had no less need, truly,
of charity and forbearance than Paston, yet he was not in the habit, to
any great degree, of adjusting his own manner to varying conditions. He
treated other fellows' sisters just as Paston was treating his. The
idealizing gaze of little Bertie Patterson was upon him; it was not
precisely with reverence, certainly, that he was in the habit of treating
her, for example. And the other girl with the red gown and the wax-work
eyes--her he had treated almost with open derision. But that was
different.
Paston's cheery laugh rang out from the parlor. Truesdale stood in the
library before the bookcase, reading the tarnished titles of the few
spare volumes, as he shifted his weight from one foot to another,
uncertain whether to advance or to retire. Paston knew him for what he
was; but Bertie Patterson, he felt sure, would never acknowledge that he
could be guilty of any wrong. "Hideous thing to be poetized," thought
Truesdale; "but they all do it in one way or another." He thought of the
faithful little hearts that beat in the German garrison towns. "'Byron's
Poems'--I could easily be better than I am--'Lossing's History of the
American Revolution,' volume one, volume two--and I must try to be. 'The
Lamplighter'; 'The Wide, Wide World';--oh, curse that fellow's funny
stories!" as Rosy's ready laugh came from the next room. Truesdale
blushed as he thought of some of the stories that Paston could tell, when
so minded; and he stamped his foot that such a--such a--(he found no
word)--should be telling his sister any story at all. "But he's as good
as I am," Truesdale was forced to avow, as he passed through the hallway
and ascended to his room. "And better than lots of others. What can _I_
say or do?"
Rosy herself, however, would have asked for no change in Paston's manner.
She found him charming, fascinating; compared with him, William Bates was
far from entertaining. If Paston had attempted the chastened, the
deprecatory, she would have feared that he was not enjoying himself. She
would have taken but little satisfaction in deference pushed to humility.
She was beginning to idealize him, as Bertie Patterson had begun to
idealize her brother; but Rosy's idealization was not half so
generous.
While walking on his arm a week ago, she had not felt her self in a
public hall within a few hundred yards of her own home; no, she was at
Buckingham Palace or at St. James's--she was not sure which. There were
moments, indeed, when it was not a palace at all: it was the terrace of
some Tudor house, with stone balls on all the posts, or it was the trim
path of some village church-yard, bordered by yew-trees and by tombstones
with cherubs' heads and hour-glasses. She was the bride of a month, and
this was her first service in England. The people around them figured no
longer as the swell crush of London, but as a respectful, lock-tugging,
courtesy-dropping tenantry who fell off on either side as she passed out
to her carriage on her husband's arm. There were side-long glimpses, too,
of forgeries and murders and lost wills and stolen jewels and people
drowned in wells; in one book there had been a maniac girl shut up in a
room--but she should try to avoid all these superfluities; a duchess in
possession of her senses would be decidedly preferable. A week later and
she was deeper in Burke and Debrett than ever.
"Well, here it is finally--Saltonstall, Scamperdown, Scodd-Paston."
Rosy bent her head and studied the large gilt volume with redoubled
vigor. "It's pretty near the end, after all."
Rosy sat at a desk in a big new granite building to one side of a small
park. Above the window-ledge appeared the tops of trees, the towers and
gables of a pair of churches, the dark and dignified façade of a
club-house, and the various elements that make up one of the half-dozen
local views which bear in any great degree the stamp of civilization.
Around her people fluttered leaves, or put books back on their shelves,
or carried on the cataloguing of a large and but half-arranged library.
But Rosy gave heed to none of this. "Scodd-Paston," she said; "here's a
whole paragraph." And she buried herself in it at once.
She had begun with the Queen and the royal family and the order of
precedence. Then she had gone through the dukes, very carefully; then
through the marquesses, not so carefully; then through the earls,
somewhat cursorily: "Here's one with eight daughters, the Honourable
Gertrude-Adeline, and seven more." Then she had bolted through the
viscounts and barons: "This one's awfully new--only from 1810." Then she
slid lightly over the baronets. Then she passed on to the knights. "I
don't suppose it's _here_." But it was.
"'General Sir John-George-Alexander Scodd-Paston,'--that's a pretty good
name," thought the girl--"'born in 1835; entered Life Guards in 1855;
married in 1857 to Mary-Victoria, dau. of James, Lord Lyndhurst'--I
wonder if she was of higher rank than he. Oh, here we come to his own.
'Attained rank of colonel, 1869; general, 1877; served in Egyptian
campaign of 1882; appointed Groom-in-Waiting to Her Majesty in
1883'--ever so many capital letters. 'C.B., 1882; K.C.B., 1885'--a lot
more. Whatever do they mean? Does he wear stars and things? And here's
where he lives: 'Boxton Park, Witham, Essex.' And somewhere else, too:
'10, King's-gate Gardens, S. Kensington'--that's in London, I suppose.
And here are his clubs: 'Whitehall and United Service.' Only two; why,
lots of the others have five or six. But papa hasn't got one, even.
Besides, think of _our_ ever being in a book!"
She paused a moment in perplexity. "But where are his children--all
the sons and daughters, and when they were born, and who they married,
and everything? It tells in the dukes and earls. Never mind, though; I
don't need a book for that. Boxton Park, Witham, Essex," she mused. The
posts came back again with the stone balls on top of them; and a few
oriel-windows; and a peacock or two strutting on a terrace. The prospect
widened; ditches and hedge-rows under a low, gray sky, packs of yelping
hounds, hunters following in red coats....
Rosamund went home in a thoughtful mood. It was within a fortnight of
this that she was taking hurdles at her riding-school.
This involved still another horse, and a habit, and a saddle. Rosamund
was teaching her father how to spend money; no other member of the
family, save Truesdale, had ever attempted as much.
"Are we going on forever living in this same old place?" Rosy asked her
mother one day. She had fallen into the way of making comparisons between
Boxton Park and No. two hundred and whatever-it-may-have-been Michigan
Avenue--just as she had made comparisons with the many fine houses where
she had lately been entertained.
"I don't expect to live anywhere forever," replied her mother, tartly.
"It's so old and dismal," Rosy went on. "I declare, I hate almost to ask
anybody here. And it's getting so noisy and dirty--and all those awful
people over there on those streets behind us."
Eliza Marshall's thought flew swiftly towards the second-hand dealer of
those purlieus who had carried away so much good, solid furniture, and
then had declined to pay for it. But this did not prevent her from
looking on her child now as if a viper, warmed at her hearth, had roused
to life and stung her.
"Why can't we change?" Rosy proceeded; "why can't we move? Why can't we
build somewhere--where we can have neighbors, and a house to invite them
to?"
"What do you call the Blackburns and the Freemans?" asked her mother,
severely. "Where can you find nicer folks? Why do we want to chase after
a lot of new people that we don't know anything about?"
"The Blackburns and the Freemans are no company for me," Rosy declared.
"All the people I know are up on the North side or down on Prairie
Avenue."
"The North side!" repeated her mother, out of all patience. "I see myself
moving to the North side at my time of life, after living on this side
for more than forty years. I should feel as much at home in Milwaukee.
And don't talk to me about Prairie, either; as long as I live, I live on
Michigan, and nowhere else. I don't want to hear any more about it--no,
not a word."
While Rosy assailed her mother about the house, Jane attacked her father
about himself. Her social triumphs (so she regarded them) had made her
more ambitious and more aggressive than ever. She was less solicitous
about the family in general, which seemed to be moving on satisfactorily
enough, than she was about the head of it himself, who appeared
distinctly to be lagging behind.
Marshall now listened to his daughter's urgings with a more serious
consideration; she was only saying to him what older and more experienced
people had said already--Susan Bates, for example, and Tom Bingham. Susan
Bates, in fact, had renewed the attack, and she prosecuted it whenever
occasion offered. She had not scrupled, indeed, to pursue the theme
within the precincts of her own house.
Mrs. Bates had not yet achieved the peculiar aboriginal function which
she had outlined to Jane in the course of their first talk--the reel, the
old settlers, and the young squaws to pour firewater were still in the
future; but she had entertained the Marshalls at dinner, _en famille_,
and she had pushed the subject with still greater insistency in her own
house than at David Marshall's office.
For the occasion of the Marshall dinner Mrs. Bates put her household on a
peace footing. She banished, as far as possible, all traces of social
war-paint. She determined to dispense with as many of the men-servants as
might be, and to have those who were left over wear their plainest
liveries; she even thought of arranging to have the Marshalls' ring
answered by a maid instead of a footman. So when David Marshall came, in
the dress-coat that had not seen the light for over a year, and Eliza
Marshall, in the plum-colored silk whose only recent airing had been at
Rosy's coming-out, they had little to contend against save the house
itself and its furnishings.
Jane accompanied them. "Tom Bingham is going to take you out," Mrs. Bates
announced. "He is very much interested in you. He thinks you are quite a
clever girl."
"All right," replied Jane. "I'm interested in him, too. I think him a
person of great discernment."
"I had some notion of asking Rosy at first; Billy was so taken with her.
But this is really an old folks' party, after all. Besides, Billy had a
theatre engagement."
"Sorry," said Jane; "I'm sure pa and ma would have liked to meet him."
Whatever little plan Mrs. Bates may have been revolving in her mind, Jane
was too loyal to throw cold water on it. "So should I myself."
Susan Bates gave the Marshalls a short, plain dinner; she had no desire
to glorify herself or to embarrass her guests. But Eliza Marshall learned
more of contemporanics in that one evening than she had picked up in the
previous decade. She learned how people received, how they set their
tables and served them, how they built their houses and furnished them.
She learned not only the possibilities but the actualities of splendor
and luxury in the town where she had led a retired and humdrum existence
for nearly a lifetime. She now thrust her head forth from her dim old
cavern, and fed her eyes on the flowers and fields and skies and goodly
streams of the great world outside.
While Jane supported her mother against the lumbering charges of Granger
Bates's conversational cavalry, his wife engrossed Marshall's attention
for her dormitory. Her plans had taken shape in her own mind, and were
now beginning to take shape on paper.
"It's more than a mere dormitory, of course." She cleared a space between
them, and took up a dessert-spoon. "Here's the vestibule and
entrance-hall," she began, drawing with the spoon on the table-cloth;
"and here's where the stairs run up. Off to this side--John, do take some
of these glasses away--off to this side"--with a wider sweep of the
spoon--"is a sort of parlor and reception-room--quite a good size, you
see. Right next to it is the dining-room--so that they can be thrown
together, when the girls receive."
"Good," said Bingham; "nothing more civilizing than receptions."
"On this side of the dining-room," pursued Mrs. Bates, "is going to be a
sort of alcove--Jane, dear, just push me over that salt and pepper.
There!" She planted the two bottles in her alcove; "that's the tank for
tea, and this is the tank for coffee. Practical, don't you think?"--to
Bingham.
"First-rate. And I suppose you have a screen that you can put in front."
"Precisely." She laid a tiny spoon across her alcove. "Hardwood floors
down-stairs, throughout. Up-stairs, bedrooms for fifty girls, and each
one shall have a closet, if possible. We begin the foundations in five or
six weeks--as soon as the frost is out."
Susan Bates cleared a larger space, and appropriated more knives and
forks and spoons, and went on in a lower tone for Marshall's ear alone.
Jane strained to catch her words. She, saw her father blush once,
slightly, and then smile, as if partly flustered--as Jane herself phrased
it.
"What a dear good old sentimental soul she is!" thought the girl. "I'll
bet a cent she is asking pa to put up a dormitory for boys on the other
side of the campus!"
Mrs. Bates presently carried Jane and her mother into the library,
leaving the men behind to contemplate a litter of disordered wineglasses
and dishevelled napkins, and to smoke themselves out, in the course of
half an hour, to the women.
Mrs. Bates's talk, here as heretofore, was frankly personal. On a
previous occasion she had talked to Rosy's mother about Rosy; now she
exacted that Rosy's mother should talk to her about her own boy Billy.
"The best boy in the world; his father says he's making a splendid
business man." She took a cabinet photograph from over the fireplace.
"There; this is the latest, but it doesn't do him any kind of justice."
"Well, he's got a real _good_ face," said Eliza Marshall.
"And a real good-looking face, too," rejoined his mother, quickly. "Jane,
dear, run up to my room and get the one before this--that's something
like; second drawer on the left. And stop eying those books; you can't
get at them with anything less than a cold-chisel!
"But why should you depend on pictures?" Mrs. Bates observed, presently.
"See the boy yourself. Go down-stairs next time he calls. Oh, he will
call again, I assure you," concluded Susan Bates, archly.
"Tell him to inquire for ma, and send in a card for her, too," whispered
Jane. "Rosy's getting awfully sticky."
"'Sticky'?"
"Yes; fussy, stiff, critical--that's what it means, as near as I can make
out. It's a word Dick brought home from London."
"H'm," said Susan Bates, "I'll remember it."
The men, meanwhile, sat round the dining-room table. Marshall smoked with
the others and tried to forget his boutonnière--the first he had ever
worn.
"I shall make them very small and unobtrusive," Susan Bates had said;
"only a dozen violets." Marshall noticed that Bates had put his flowers
into his right-hand button-hole, and Bingham his into his left. Jane saw
her father hesitate; finally he imitated Bates. "Well, that's cutting it
pretty fine," thought the girl; "I wonder if there is a right or wrong
way. But think of pa with any button-hole bouquet at all! We shall budge
him yet!" She smiled; she knew the forces were all arrayed against him
to-night.
"What this town needs more than anything else," Bingham was saying, "is a
big assembly hall--one with a capacity of ten thousand, say. Something
not too fine--we've got that already; and something not too rough--we've
had that in plenty. A hall suitable for conventions, for promenade
concerts, for mass-meetings, for horse shows--in short, something after
the fashion of that magnificent thing in New York."
"The Madison Square Garden?" asked Bates. "You're perfectly right."
"Now that Garden," pursued Bingham, "is not exactly a paying
investment--wasn't meant to be. The last time I was down East--"
"Yes--"
--"some fellows there quoted it to me as an evidence of public
spirit--the spirit that we here suppose not to exist in New York at all.
The men who put it up could easily have got more on their money; but
there it stands, one of the most useful and beneficent features of the
whole city."
"We ought to have one here," declared Bates.
"And I should like to build it," declared Bingham. "The man who would
give such a thing to Chicago, or who would even take the headship of it
and make a suitable contribution, would be doing as much for himself and
for the town as any one man well could."
"But don't look at me," said Bates. "My wife has drained me: dry--you
know about her dormitory and all her other schemes. Look at--well, look
at Marshall. What is Marshall doing for the good of the city?"
Marshall lowered his eyes and fingered the broad foot of an empty
wineglass. He sat between two of the great powers of the town, and he had
never felt smaller. He wondered whether he had deserved his success; he
wondered if he himself had really made it. After all, he had come on the
ground before competition had fairly set in. He had done nothing by force
or by audacity; he had been slow, cautious, even timorous, and he
confessed inwardly that there were men in his own employ--men on a mere
salary--who were cleverer, readier, more resourceful than he--men who, in
a fair field and on even terms, could have distanced him completely. He
gave the wineglass another turn or two, and did not lift his eyes.
He heard Bingham's voice again. It was declaring that in the history of
every great mercantile city there was a single short period--a passing
moment, almost--on which the citizen who wished to impress himself upon
the community and to imbed himself in the local annals must seize.
Marshall heard him instancing the Fuggers, of Augsburg, and the Loredani
and Morosini, of Venice, and the Medici and Tornabuoni, of Florence,
and many other names alien and all unfamiliar--merchants, most of them,
it seemed, who had perpetuated their name and fame by improving the
precise moment when their town, like plaster-of-Paris, was taking its
"set."
"Make your impression while you may," concluded Bingham. "This is the
time--this very year. The man who makes his mark here to-day will enjoy a
fame which will spread as the fame of the city spreads and its power and
prosperity increases. You know what we are destined to be--a hundred
times greater than we are to-day. Fasten your name on the town, and your
name will grow as the town itself does."
Marshall drove home thoughtfully in the new carriage, with the new
horses, and August in his new cape-coat. Eliza Marshall, who had sat
gingerly upon the edge of her seat in driving out, now leaned back at her
ease when returning; it seemed that, with a little practice, she might
easily become habituated to luxury. As she re-entered her old familiar
parlor, she almost gave a gulp of mortification over its plainness and
shabbiness; for the first time in years she had given herself a chance to
know it for what it was.
"There, now," Jane declared loudly, "you've both seen what money and
brains can do. Well, haven't _we_ got money? Haven't _we_ got brains? Is
there any reason why _we_ shouldn't be known, and looked up to, and
respected?" And at breakfast next morning she opened out upon her father
once more. Her lunch-room was now, thanks to her solicitings and her
concert, in full running order, and moving on to a marked success. To-day
she was rising to a more ambitious plane. Not a college building, not
an assembly-hall; no, during the watches of the night she had risen to
the conception of a working-girls' home. Her father had been listening to
the mellow and flowing hautboy of Susan Bates, and to the deep diapason
of Tom Bingham; but his daughter had now pulled out the coupler and was
screaming shrilly above all the other voices of the organ. He felt almost
deafened, stunned.
The "second girl" came in, frightened. "What is it?" asked Eliza
Marshall.
"August is in the kitchen, with his face all cut and bleeding." Jane left
her father. "Let me go out and see what it is." It was another chapter in
the Van Horn matter. Roger, having become more familiar with police-court
methods, had been pushing things with greater vigor and effect. During
the past night two or three ruffians had broken into the stable, had
shattered the windows of the new carriage and defaced its panels, and had
beaten the coachman.
"There!" cried Rosy. "How much longer have we got to live down here among
all these savages and hoodlums?"
Eliza Marshall made no reply, and Rosy felt that this in itself was to
have gained a point.