Truesdale returned home from Wisconsin after an absence of ten or twelve
days; he came back without having visited Geneva. He had visited Madison,
however.
His feeling, as he traversed the streets of that pleasant capital, was
distinctly one of pique. To be hemmed in, to be barred out, to be shut
up, to be cut off, to be turned aside--any and all of these things seemed
to have been suffered by him; he felt them as stripes or as fetters
applied to the degradation of an inexpugnable personality. "I shall not
take it so passively as they think," he said.
His friendly but tempered interest in Bertie Patterson had risen to a
higher pitch in view of the insensate safeguards thrown around her by her
friends; besides, he felt himself at a juncture where he must not permit
himself to falter in the maintenance of his own dignity. "I shall not be
balked so easily as they imagine," he said.
He paused before a large, white frame-house which stood on a kind of
banked terrace; the house was shaded by a number of evergreens, and was
shut in from the street by a picket-fence. "This must be it," he said, as
he clicked the latch of the gate. Patterson, as one of the large retail
dry-goods merchants of the town, was of course a "prominent citizen"; his
residence was easy enough to find.
"Mrs. Patterson is at home?" he uttered with the appropriate inflection,
and extended his card. He made this tender to a firm-faced woman of forty
in a plain black dress, who came to the door with a half-hemmed towel in
her hand.
"I am Mrs. Patterson," she said. She read the card; there was no doubt of
her appreciation of his identity. The more picturesque and decorative
phases of his character had been presented to her, doubtless, by the
docile and transparent Bertie--by letter, possibly. The less approved
side (concerning which Bertie's own conception was in all likelihood
darkling enough still) had probably come to her--also by letter--from
Bertie's conscientious but disappointed guardian.
Truesdale dexterously insinuated himself into the house; he had instantly
perceived, with a pang of mortification, that no formal encouragement to
enter was likely to be extended.
"My daughter," said Mrs. Patterson, coldly, in answer to his inquiries,
"is visiting friends in Watertown." This was true. "She is to remain
several days." This was not true; Bertie was expected home on the morrow.
But it was made true, for all purposes, by an instant message which
permitted the girl to extend the period of her visit.
Truesdale bowed himself out of the house with no apparent diminution of
grace and prestige. "How inexhaustible are the beauties of nature," he
thought--"Wisconsin nature. I must make another sketching-tour before
long."
Four or five days later he sat in his bedroom, looking over a number of
water-colors that covered the counterpane and largely obscured the
pillows--views of Green Lake, scenes from the rocks and gorges of the
upper Wisconsin. "I've done very well," he thought--"very well, indeed."
He was trying to make himself believe that he had successfully
accomplished the principal object of his trip.
Rosy also returned from Wisconsin at about the same time; with an air of
calm decision she announced to her mother her engagement to Arthur
Paston. She regarded this statement as definitive--an admission towards
which the others of the family advanced with a doubting reluctance. Jane,
by reason of the place and of her own participation in the hopes of Susan
Bates, thought the proceeding characterized by indelicacy, if not by
disloyalty. Truesdale, on receipt of the intelligence, vented a jarring
laugh. He saw little reason why Paston should have succeeded at Geneva
when he himself had failed at Madison (he was conscious, here, of forcing
the terms in order to compass a striking antithesis); and that it should
have been his own sister whose hand Paston had won seemed to him a
triumph greater and more discordant still.
David Marshall himself heard these tidings with a grave concern. It all
seemed like another weight added to the load under which he was already
staggering. He debated with himself on the subject of this proposed new
household: where was it to be established, of whom was it to be composed,
by whom (above all) was it to be supported? Marshall, in his most
prosperous and least careworn days, had never acquired the useful and
agreeable art of spending money; the outlay of any considerable sum had
always afflicted him as with a physical pain. How much greater, then, was
his shrinking dread to-day, when demands upon him were doubling up so
finely, and when the last demand of all was on behalf of an alien who
might well attempt to make an alien of his daughter too? He talked with
Rosy about her future in a hesitating and perturbed fashion. Rosy would
set her lips, and eye him coldly, and tell him that he did not love
her. In the meantime the new house progressed towards its ridge-poles,
and it was Jane's daily speculation whether the boudoir designed for Rosy
would ever be occupied by her--or by somebody else. By somebody else, she
was afraid; for since that luckless Sunday dinner, Theodore Brower had
called but twice, and had been as distant as if he had not come at all.
A few weeks after the intrusion of Paston upon the board, another piece
was happily removed. This removal involved, as is often the case in such
manipulations, a certain amount of sharp playing and a large element of
sacrifice. Truesdale, when the recital was made to him in his brother's
office, showed a scant appreciation of the sacrifice, but listened
interestedly enough to the detailed report of Roger's endeavor.
"So you have found Monsieur Y, after all? And do you hold him fast?"
Roger contemptuously ignored this revival of his brother's flippant
Gallic formula. He contented himself with giving a brief and stern
account of the processes that he had been driven to employ. He had
prosecuted his inquiries through one of those extra-legal agencies which
even the highest respectability may be compelled, upon occasion, to fall
back on, and he had arrived at an acquaintance with the Leppins, in all
their grovelling ramifications, equal to the previous one which he had
achieved with the Van Horns. His close inquiries had extended through
the ranks of all their associates and connections, and in the end he had
lighted upon one individual whose disposition towards Sophie Leppin and
her family could be made to serve the end in view. This young man was the
foreman of a tailor's establishment, and Roger wasted no more
consideration upon him than upon the rest of them. Before the assembled
horde he made his proposition with a blunt, business-like brutality
which almost startled him at the moment, and which disgusted him with
himself for a fortnight to follow.
"And they accepted it. More shame for me, more shame for them, more shame
for human nature. But _you_ are safe." He viewed Truesdale with an
undisguised scorn, and Truesdale did not attempt to withstand it.
"I attended the ceremony," Roger said, grimly. "I presented the bride
with a bouquet. For the matter of that," he continued, in a scornful jest
of himself, "I was the one who took out the marriage license."
"Did you pay the minister his fee?" Truesdale asked this principally for
the purpose of reasserting himself.
"Minister!" cried Roger, half shocked. "No; I had a justice of the peace.
I was the guest of honor," he went on, with a savage irony. "With good
reason; it was I who paid the bride's dowry."
Truesdale sat with his eyes on the floor. "The check; was it--was it a
large one?" he asked, in a low voice.
"Check!" cried Roger again. "I paid them in hundred-dollar bills." His
fingers played back and forth many and many times.
"Not so much as that!" exclaimed Truesdale, his eyes opening widely.
"More," said Roger. "I put the notices in the newspapers, too. And now,
Truesdale," he said, with a final brief phrase of dismissal, "think what
your father and I have had to do for you, and try to be a man." And he
turned away towards other matters.
Truesdale passed out, crestfallen for the first time in his life. Not
over his own follies, not over the anxieties and expenditures he had
caused his father, but over the fact that Roger had treated him like a
boy--and had done it all so briefly. He blushed, too, for the vulgar
ending of the episode (if ended, indeed, it were); for it seemed to
outrage all literary and artistic precedent. No farce at the Palais Royal
had ever developed so grotesque a dénouement; no novel of Véron, of
Belot, of Montépin had ever come to so sordid an ending; no Mimi, no
Musette could have ever followed a line of conduct so little
_spirituel_ as that taken by Sophie Leppin. What, then; were the
books wrong, and only life true? No; it was the fault of America itself.
"_Quel pays_!" reflected Truesdale; "equally without the atmosphere of
art and the atmosphere of intrigue!" This observation pleased him; he
felt that he had pierced the marrow of a complicated question, and he
passed along the street holding a higher head.
He drew a letter from his pocket and creased it thoughtfully in his hands
as he walked on. The envelope, from which he did not draw the enclosure,
was addressed in the hand of Gladys McKenna. He had parted from her just
as he had meant to part--at the carriage door. She had forgiven this, and
was now writing in terms no less ardent and clinging than before.
"Poor Gladys!" he said, half aloud. "I haven't treated her any too well;
yet she is about the only one who cares for me or understands me or
appreciates me. I'm glad, though, she's back home; I should be guilty of
some horrible _sottise_ or other if she were here."
All the same, he made her absence seem another deprivation; he included
it in the catalogue of his injuries and woes. "I declare," he said, "take
it all together, and it's enough to drive a man to--business. It wouldn't
surprise me very much to be talking with father about that very thing
within a month or so. For what can a man of leisure do, after all, in
such a town as this?"
But the summer moved onward, and Truesdale still considerately refrained
from harassing an anxious and overburdened father with the further task
of contriving a harmony between such a son and such a _métier_. The old
man was left to recover from the sting inflicted by the Leppins, to study
over the future of his youngest daughter, to keep a careful eye upon his
business associates, and to combat--as one combats the alkali dust of
the Plains--all the insinuating minutiae of house-building. The new home
of the Marshalls moved on with the summer, and reached in due course the
stage when such elemental features as walls and roofs gave way to the
minor considerations involved in the swinging of doors, the placing of
gas-jets, and the arrangements of pantries. Eliza Marshall now began to
appear more frequently on the scene, and to confound both architect and
builder after the fashion possible for the experienced and accomplished
house-keeper. She usually exacted the support of her husband, with a
pertinacity the greater for the smallness of the point at issue; and
David Marshall, wearied and borne down with more important, more vital
affairs, wished daily that the new house had never been undertaken at
all.
Thomas Bingham stood Eliza Marshall's annoying picket-fire with the
patience proper to a friend of the family; and he took advantage of the
same position to press further upon her husband his own continuing sense
of a rich man's duties towards the public. Marshall may be said by this
time to have fixed himself in the general eye. He had made a second
public address--the skilful product of Jane's literary knack and of his
own previous experience. As a consequence of this he had been asked to
sit on one or two platforms, and to sign two or three addresses and
petitions; and though his indifferent health and his many preoccupations
had somewhat impeded his advance, yet his well-wishers felt the marked
disposition shown to concede him the place that they held him entitled to
take.
Bingham experienced a personal interest in Marshall's maintenance of the
foothold thus won. As the two toured through the half-plastered rooms or
stooped to consider the question of sewerage amid the litter of the
basement, Bingham, with a tactful seriousness, would urge the old man, as
he had urged him often enough before, to crown his career and perpetuate
his memory by the erection of some enduring structure for the public
good and use.
"All of my experience is at your disposal," he would say. "And all of
your own"--with a wave of the hand over the chaos prevailing about them.
The old man would give him a non-committal sidelong glance, half smiling,
half protesting "I'm glad to have you acknowledge, Bingham, that there is
some experience involved in building a house. There's a good deal more
than I expected."
"You're not having a hard time of it," returned Bingham. "You don't
realize how easy I've been making it for you."
But Marshall was coming to develop a firm reluctance towards turning the
knowledge gained in his private building to the erection of some larger
and different building for the public good. With every month of the past
year had his estimate of the public and its character been modified by
the kind of treatment that he had suffered from certain of the less
worthy members of it. The Van Horns seemed to have passed the goad on to
the Leppins, and it was largely under these merciless proddings that
he had formed his conception of the new town which had evolved itself
during the past twenty years. To these personal grievances he added the
general grievances of a tax-payer under the present loose-geared régime,
and there were days when he thought he saw the legitimate outcome of
democracy as applied to large capitals: the organizing of criminals for
the spoliation of the well-to-do. And if Bingham had pushed him too hard,
he might have precipitated the blunt declaration that a man's best use
for his own money was to protect himself and his interests from the
depredations of an alien and rabble populace.
"But Babylon itself was built of mud bricks," Bingham would rejoin. "And
the noblest mountain in the world, when you come right down to details,
is only a heap of dirt and rocks strewn over with sticks and stones. But
if you will just step back far enough to get the proper point of
view--well, you know what the painters can do with such things as these."
"I can't step back, Bingham. I started here; I've stayed here; I belong
here. I'm living right _on_ your mountain, and its sticks and stones are
all about me. Don't ask me to see them for anything else; don't ask me to
call them anything else."
Then he would say to Bingham what he said later to Susan Bates when she
came with Jane to view the wainscotings and the panelled ceilings of the
long succession of rooms: that the man who met all the legal exactions of
the community and all the needs and requirements of his own flesh and
blood was doing quite enough for the preservation of his own credit. And
when Theodore Brower cautiously suggested that the bitterness of certain
experiences might be turned to sweetness by the institution of a bureau
of justice for the poor and unfriended, the sensitive old man shrank back
as if from contact with a nettle. Indeed, it is probable that so
unconventional and untravelled a road to philanthropic renown would have
proven uninviting to his feet at any time. And Jane, who, after the
failure of her own idea, had transferred her support to the idea of
Brower, now made a second transfer and came to the support of the idea
of Susan Bates. If she could do nothing for the cause of labor, and
nothing for the cause of justice, she was willing to accomplish what she
could for the cause of education.
Under such urgings as these, David Marshall began irritably to impugn the
motives of those men whose philanthropic disposition had earned for them
the approval of the well-disposed. One was actuated by vanity and
vainglory; another by political ambitions; a third took to philanthropy
as to the current fad.
"There might be worse ones," Bingham would retort. "Sixty or seventy
years ago the fad hereabouts was scalp-raising. Isn't the present one an
improvement on that?"
"You bring up Ingles," the other went on; "he's simply philanthropic
as an additional vent to his own energies. You talk about Bates; he
merely makes all those benefactions to please his wife. And so with
others."
"Is that a bad motive--the wish to please one's wife by a generous deed?"
"I have _my_ wife to please," returned Marshall. His observation
came out with a sort of raw and awkward directness. It seemed to convey
the odd implication that the way to please this wife would be not to do a
generous deed, but to refrain from doing it. And Bingham, who appreciated
the saplessness of Eliza Marshall's sympathies and the narrowness of her
horizon, made no effort to give his friend's remark a more favorable
aspect.
Marshall derived support not only from the narrow selfishness of his
wife, but also from the fastidiousness of his younger son, who met with
open derision any project involving the accomplishment of a piece of
actual architecture. He improvised an ornate and airy edifice of his own,
which he allowed them to dedicate to art, to education, to charity, to
what you will. Then he festooned it with telegraph wires, and draped it
with fire-escapes, and girdled it with a stretch of elevated road, and
hung it with signboards, and hedged it in with fruit-stands, and swathed
it in clouds of coal smoke, and then asked them to find it; that was the
puzzle, he said. His view of the town's architectural conditions--as too
debased to justify one's serious endeavors towards improvement--was so
nearly in harmony with the view that his father's inflamed mind sometimes
took of the town's social conditions that the two were dangerously near
to the common ground upon which they had never yet met.
Bingham would have completely dissented from all this, of course; and he
agreed with Marshall no better as regarded the precarious condition of
his affairs--being disposed to assume that the old man's depression over
his business was due largely to the multiplied checks on his own control
of it; nor any better as regarded his unusual domestic expenses--present,
just past, or just about to come. He was mindful of the house-building,
but looked upon it, with Roger, as an investment. He knew of the
thousands extorted through Truesdale, but made the loss less than might
have resulted from a maladroit barter in real estate, for example. He
could anticipate, too, the demands foreshadowed by the coming marriage of
Rosamund; but a considerable expenditure for a favorite daughter at the
most important juncture of her life was not unprecedented. He even found
some ameliorating circumstances for the persistent pressure which
Roger and his affairs were now coming to bring upon the paternal
estate--Roger, who had served so valiantly his father and his family, and
who was now demanding a compensatory assistance amid the thickening risks
and dangers of his own business operations. Not only had he extricated
Truesdale from his difficulties, but he had supported his father in his
demand for the dismissal of the unseemly Andreas Leppin from the
business.
"He shall go!" cried David Marshall, with a trembling voice and a shaking
hand, which, without reinforcement, would have constituted but a feeble
demonstration.
"He shall stay!" returned Belden, with a cold insolence. "He is useful to
me. Besides, he has suffered enough wrong from you already."
"He shall go!" cried Roger, rising into a threatening savagery over the
brazen hypocrisy of such a pretence. "If he is here another hour, I will
drag him out with my own hands." The young man seemed to tear out all his
powers from his own person, as one draws a sword from its sheath, and to
wield his vehemence and indignation over Belden's head as one might sweep
a burning brand. He exercised the compelling power that is to be
attained sometimes only by the free and impassioned employment of all
one's energies; he seemed capable of an instant physical violence in more
directions than one, and he carried his point.
Another outbreak of passion followed when he applied to his father for
assistance during a precarious passage through the risks and dangers of
an expanding business, and was met with reluctant excuses that seemed the
very acme of ingratitude. He hurled forth an indignant reminder of all
the services he had performed for the family--services at once degrading
and gratuitous; and he demanded if a year's dabbling in such delectable
detail were not a sufficient warrant for asking the help that he now
required. In fact, he hectored his father as unscrupulously, as
unceremoniously, as he had browbeaten Belden.
David Marshall met as well as he could the demands of his choleric son;
never before had he been trampled on rough-shod by one of his own
children. He almost seemed to see the moral fibre of Roger's nature
coarsening--perhaps disintegrating--under his very eyes, and he asked
himself half reproachfully how much this might be due to tasks of his own
imposition.
All these things had their place in his mind as he followed Bingham
through the new house, scuffing over the plaster-encrusted floors,
watching the adjustment of window-weights, or drawing back before the
long, thin strips of moulding brought in by carpenters. No, his children
did not love him. There was Rosy, who had learned her lesson of
selfishness from the world all too early, and who now, in her
preoccupations for the future, had less thought of him than ever. There
was Alice, who saw him often enough if she saw him half a dozen times a
year, and whose infrequent comings always disclosed some petty motive
of domestic finance and economics. There was Truesdale, a flippant
and insolent egotist, who had neither affection nor respect for his own
parents, his own family, his own birthplace. There was Roger, who hewed
roughly his own independent course, and who did not scruple to turn his
powers against his own father if crossed in his desires or balked in his
ambitions. And there was--
No; not Jane. "She is the only one of them all who really loves me," he
said. He was standing in one of the upper rooms under the crude light of
a northern window. On the yellow ground beneath him a workman was
stacking up sheets of blue slate in regular piles, and from some remote
quarter of the place came the sharp, metallic hammerings of the last
remaining plumbers. The searching daylight lit up cruelly the hollows of
the old man's eyes, and brought out from his whitened chin and cheeks the
last few threads of dim and dulling red. His tall, thin figure shrank
away from its loose coverings; never before had he seemed so detached, so
impersonal, so slightly poised on any mere physical basis.
He turned to Bingham. "This will be _her_ room--Jane's room. It must be
right, whatever the others are. Jane--cares for me. She has always been a
dutiful daughter; never a trial, never a disappointment--nothing but a
comfort. There must be no shortcoming here, Bingham."
Bingham, standing beside him at the window, fixed an intent regard upon
the sheets of shifting slate. There was a moist smile in his eyes, and a
warm glow of sympathetic appreciation permeated his whole being.
"There won't be," he said.
And Jane's chamber took on shape and finish in the minds of the two men
who stood there side by side overlooking the slate piles and saying no
word further; and neither recognized in her the first cause of all these
changes and of the many trials and difficulties proceeding from them.