Her mother passed on to the girl's slippers. She wiped the worn gilt of
one stubby foot and then of the other. "They asked him to put a price
on--on--"
"On our home!" cried Jane. There was a tear in each eye as she bowed her
head over the mantel-piece.
Her mother returned to the Rock of Ages, and began to dust it again--as
carefully as before.
"Well," she said, slowly, without turning round, "there's a building of
that same sort a block or two south of us, already." She lingered on the
short arm of the cross. "The Blackburns are talking of going, you know."
Jane bowed her head again and picked at the fringe of the
mantel-covering--a foolish thing that she herself had embroidered and
draped. Now, for the first time, she formulated her mother. "I've half
known it all along," she thought, "and now I know it for sure." In this
moment she definitely saw her mother, not as a creature of the
affections, but as a creature of, mere habit. "And it's been so for the
last twenty years," thought the poor girl.
Eliza Marshall passed back to one of the candelabra; its cracked prisms
tinkled as her broken talk went on. "Well, I don't know, I'm sure. Our
last neighbors are leaving us. Business and boarding-houses all around.
And Rosy wants to change. And there's so much noise and dirt, and so many
peddlers and beggars. And--and--" She was thinking of Susan Bates's
library, but would not permit herself a spoken reference to it. "And
so much work to keep things tidy. And those miserable fellows breaking
into our barn. I don't know, I'm sure."
Marshall himself, meanwhile, talked the matter over with Belden and with
Roger, when Roger came in to consider the assault on the stable and the
policy of employing the police. "I don't know that I should depend too
much on the city's detectives," he had observed; "but I will have them go
down to the house, if you say."
Accordingly, one morning a brace of young Irishmen modestly traversed the
sidewalk which led around the house, and knocked with some show of
decorum at the kitchen door. Each had the fresh complexion of a recent
arrival, chestnut hair plastered in a scallop on his forehead, room under
his nose for a large red mustache, and room under his finger-nails for a
noticeable quantity of "matter misplaced." Presently they put on their
derby hats again and went out to visit the stable. Then they took their
departure and were never heard of more.
The next detective rang at the front door. He wore gloves and a high silk
hat. He was a tough and determined-looking person, whose progress
rearward the family attended with a close watch on their portable
property: he seemed much more corrupt and knowing than any mere
barn-breaker could be. He was more efficacious, too, than the duo that
had preceded him. Even in the stable he gave much less heed to August
than to August's mistress, and in the course of a few days he put his
hands on the offenders. Ten to one he could have done that without having
visited the premises at all.
Roger was the family counsellor in matters of investment as well as
matters of law. He had early made the observation that few lawyers
amassed a fortune in the strict practice of their profession; and he had
accordingly turned a prompt attention to building and to land, operating
largely for himself and for his father, and to the advantage of both.
Indeed, manipulations in real estate had done more for David Marshall's
fortune than had the pursuit of the grocery business--just as they had
done more for his son than the pursuit of the law.
"Your mother won't live anywhere but on Michigan, though," he declared to
Roger.
"She needn't," the other rejoined. "Move south three miles--if you mean
to make any change at all. The best houses in town are going up along
that stretch--just within the old limits. And a house there could be
turned into money at any time."
Roger, as a practical real-estate man, naturally put convertibility
before domesticity.
Marshall also canvassed the matter with Belden. Belden listened to him
somewhat coldly and impassively--with less interest, the old man thought,
than one's partner rightly should. But Belden took the idea of a new
house as another step in the social advance of the Marshalls. It seemed
to him almost like the challenge of a rival; and a rivalry like this
nettled him none the less from being so sudden, so unexpected; so
impracticable, as--six months back--he would have considered it. He felt
himself and his family outdone at every point. Rosamund Marshall had
eclipsed his own daughter at a dozen dances; Truesdale Marshall, thanks
to the half-jocular patronage of the press, was becoming in his way a
celebrity, while his own son merely led a dubious existence which
oscillated between the bar of the Metropole and the billiard-room of the
Lexington, and conferred little distinction upon himself of anybody else;
and even dusty old Eliza Marshall, almost despite herself, was being
dragged up into a circle to which his own wife, notwithstanding all her
lavish and industrious endeavor, remained as alien as at the beginning.
And, to crown all, Marshall himself had finally come forth as a public
figure. Belden had actually been obliged to sit at a banquet-board and to
hear this old man, usually so quiet and inexpressive, loudly applauded by
a hundred hard-headed businessmen, who, a month before, had received an
effort of his own with mere civil toleration.
This new advance of Marshall's was made partly by Jane's help, partly in
spite of it. "Speak?" she had said, when her father broached the subject
one evening; "of course you'll speak. You know all about the topic, if
anybody does; and here's an opportunity right at your hand. I'll help you
get up your speech, myself."
She did. She prepared a long address after the most approved rhetorical
models: a flowing introduction which walked all around the subject before
going into it; a telling peroration whose emphatic periods seemed to
render any subsequent consideration of the matter a mere piece of
futility; and in between, briefly and cursorily, the one or two vital
points of the whole discourse. Thus equipped, David Marshall was to rise
at half an hour before midnight, the last but one of a long line of
speakers, to claim the attention of a great roomful of men sated with
meat and drink and sodden with oratory.
But in the cloak-room the manuscript had slipped from his pocket, and at
the table all its overwrought periods had slipped from his mind. And at
midnight he rose to confront an expanse of disordered table-cloths and an
array of wearied faces, his own ace full of uncertainty, and nothing to
nerve his inexperience save a desperate determination not to disappoint
his daughter.
"Another old bore getting up"--from a distant corner of the smoky room.
"Any idea who he is?"
"Not the slightest." A yawn. "Take another regalia."
David Marshall had forgotten everything but his main points and the facts
that supported them. He began in the very midst of things. He spoke a
minute and a quarter--plainly, simply; and sat down the instant he had
finished.
He had spoken in his usual husky and sibilant voice. Nobody had called
"Louder!" however--because nobody had really wished to hear.
On his ending, the room rang with applause--the applause of gratitude,
largely.
"Well, the old fellow can say his say, after all, eh? And no blooming
oratory, either."
"And sense enough to cut it short--the last man usually shows the least
mercy."
As Marshall sat down his neighbor on the right shook his hand warmly.
"Why haven't you been doing this for us before?"
As he was leaving the hall, the secretary of another club, present by
accident, solicited an address on a cognate subject for a coming meeting
of his own organization. "Why didn't you give yourself a little more
time?" he asked.
Jane was wild with pride and pleasure; her father had given her the
results and not the process. "I knew you could, poppy; I just knew you
could. We'll start in on the other speech right away, and make it even
better than this. We'll show 'em, yet!"
But it was not Marshall himself, for all the inexplicable ease of this
success, who chiefly angered Belden. Nor had he any great feeling against
Rosamund, having no undue interest in the social rivalries of young
girls. Nor was he particularly incensed against her mother, being
offended chiefly by the ostentatious and invidious good-will shown her
by Mrs. Bates. But against Truesdale Marshall he nourished a hot and
rancorous grievance. He did not apprehend Truesdale's attitude towards
the town at large, and the young man's manner in his own house
(regardless of his insolent utterance) seemed to have carried a
half-contemptuous curiosity beyond all decent bounds. "That young
cockerel--I'll soon find a way to quiet his crowing. What does all his
singing and painting and fencing amount to, after all? He couldn't post
an item into a ledger; he couldn't even tie up a pound of tea. He can't
work off any of his foreign smartness on _me_!"
Truesdale, readily figured himself the reverse of _persona grata_ to the
Beldens, and stayed away; but this did not prevent his reception of
advices more or less regular from the heart of the Belden household.
"What's that absurd girl up to _this_ time?" he asked one morning,
as an envelope, directed in a hand already too familiar, came to the
door. He recognized readily enough the sprawling, half-masculine
penmanship of Gladys McKenna, as readily as he divined the rôle which she
must imagine herself to be playing. She was pretending herself to be
a prisoner in some hostile camp--a hostage in some dismal dungeon; and,
despite the close and suspicious watchfulness of those surrounding her,
she was still sending her little messages, all the same, to her _preux
chevalier_ on the opposing side. In the end her reward would come; she
and her knight....
"Ouf!" cried Truesdale, who scented all this crass and forward
romanticism between the trivial lines of her communications; "why does
she write, when she hasn't got anything to say?"
Sometimes she _did_ have something to say--a little. To her statements of
the disposition of the Belden family towards her correspondent, and to
her general recommendation to "beware," would be tagged indications of
her own individual movements. "Poor auntie is laid up with the neuralgia,
and Ethel has gone visiting in Kenwood, so I am the only one to be sent
to Field's for those gloves. Auntie says the best time for the glove
counter is about twelve-thirty, when the crowd is smallest."--"Yes,"
mumbled Truesdale, irritably; "and lunch at one."
Or: "They are going to let me go alone to Modjeska tomorrow afternoon--in
the street-car; just think of it! I think I shall ask for a seat in the
last row--I am so timid about fires." Sometimes she would add "destroy
this," or, "burn this." "Most willingly!" Truesdale would exclaim, and
throw "this" in the fire at once.
Or, again "Imagine; I am to have a tooth filled. Auntie says I needn't
trouble to go away down-town--there is a very good man right on
Twenty-second Street. 'Go early,' she says; 'and try to be over with it
by eleven, so that you can enjoy your lunch.' Did you ever know of such
thoughtfulness?"
"No, I never did," acknowledged Truesdale, grimly.
By these and other such subterfuges did Gladys keep her epistolary hand
in, until the time came when she really had something of consequence to
communicate.
Once or twice she also regaled him with the comments of the Beldens on
the building projects of the Marshalls. Truesdale had the same tepid
interest for these advices as for her other notes and comments. He did
not consider himself as particularly concerned. At best he was but a bird
of passage. And it seemed to him a sad error to load one's self down with
so dense and stationary a thing as a house.
The conferences over this matter went on, however, regardless of
Truesdale's non-participation. Jane discussed it with her father and
mother; and Rosy handled it, and Roger; and Alice came in from Riverdale
Park to stay overnight, and to contend with Jane and Rosy through the
steak and the griddle-cakes in the morning, as well as to intimate to her
father that if he would build out a little library from her parlor, her
husband could pay for the carpet and furniture; and Aunt Lydia Rhodes
came now and then and fluttered around the question, unsettling points
that had been looked on as settled for good and all, and raising other
points of her own that needed no consideration whatever. And, at the end
of a wearisome and contentious month, the matter--with what seemed to
everybody an extraordinary and reckless precipitation, the end once
reached--was finally arranged. Tom Bingham was to build them a house
in the neighborhood favored by Roger, and was to find an architect for
them--a reversal of the usual procedure which afflicted Jane with grave
doubts. And on the morning of the earliest day of spring, when the
piano-organs were trilling through the side streets, and the flower-men
were offering hurried shoppers their earliest verbenas and fuchsias from
the tail ends of their carts, Jane walked down to the store to look at
the signatures on the contracts for the new house.
"Ah!" she said to herself, thoughtfully; "we _are_ moving--faster than I
anticipated, and not precisely in the direction I had fancied."
She was in no degree elated; she experienced, on the contrary, a distinct
feeling of depression.