"Where are you, Jane?"
Eliza Marshall's voice sounded impatiently in the hallway, and presently
her nervous hand was placed on the knob of her daughter's door.
"Well, here you are, finally. And what is the matter, for the land's
sake? And where is the pillow you went to get for your father?--we can't
keep him waiting out in the carriage on such a day as this. Come, get up;
you'll catch your death of cold yourself."
Jane was lying on the bare floor of her stripped and emptied room, with
her head pillowed upon the window-sill. She wore her sack, but her hat
had fallen off and lay at her side. In her hand she held a stiff and
curling width of paper just torn from the wall, and her body shook with
sobs as she lifted her wide and welling eyes to her mother's face.
"I am to blame," she cried, wildly; "I am to blame for it all! If it
hadn't been for me we should never have left our old home and given up
our old life, and Rosy wouldn't have cut all our friends and gone to
England to live; and Truesdale wouldn't be talking about starting off
across the Pacific for somewhere or other, and we should never have made
enemies of those Beldens, and poor pa wouldn't have lost his business,
and wouldn't be going off to die inch by inch in that big cold place out
on the prairie. I'm to blame for it all; but I--I meant as well as
anybody could!"
"'Sh, Jane! Rosy hasn't gone to England to live, and your father isn't
dying. How can you talk that way?"
"And my old room!" Jane went on with a stringent cry, as her eyes roamed
despairingly over its dismantled walls. "I never lived anywhere else, and
I don't want to, and I can't! I don't want to live at all! And this old
house isn't ours any longer, and those carriage people will begin to tear
it down to-morrow. They'll take away the barn and chop down the trees,
and there won't be a single thing left to remember it all by." She bent
her head on the window-sill again, and sobbed more vehemently still.
"Oh, Jane, Jane!" cried her mother, protestingly, "how can you act that
way when there is so much to be done, and when your father is feeling so
much worse than usual? Where were those pillows left, anyway? Come,
come!"
Jane rose to her knees and tried to wipe her face with the piece of
wall-paper. Then her mother lifted her up and led her out through the
hall.
It was a chilly day in early November--a high wind lashing the gray and
foaming lake--when David Marshall, wrapped in shawls and bolstered up
with pillows, was driven carefully over the three miles of flinty macadam
which led from his old house to his new one, and was put to bed again in
a large, half-warmed apartment, fitted up scantily and provisionally with
an old chamber-set that had escaped the auctioneer. His own illness
and his daughter's marriage had almost brought the furnishing of the new
house to a stand-still, while the anxiety of the purchasers of the old
place to get their foundations in before the real cold weather had made
it impossible for the family to re-remain a single day beyond the
stipulated term. No new furnishings had been attempted beyond carpets and
curtains, and for the first few days that the old man lay in these new
quarters he had little to assure him that he was not in some hotel or in
some hospital, save the echoing tread of the hard-finishers in other
rooms about him. The first slight flurry of snow dusted the dead weeds of
the open spaces round the house, and the reflections from it passed
through the clear, broad panes of the windows to strike a grimmer chill
from the shimmering surfaces of ash and oak. Never before had the world
seemed to him so empty and so cold and so unsympathetic. And when his
own wife had said to him, in accents almost of reproach, "Oh, David,
David, how could you take such a time as this to be sick, with all the
worry of moving and furnishing and Rosy's wedding and everything else?"
he felt as bare and chill and numb as a naked sailor cast ashore on some
alien and inhospitable coast.
Susan Bates appeared at the new house almost immediately; she felt its
need now, if ever, of being habitable. She stuffed her carriage with rugs
and draperies; she sent an expressman out with her favorite easy-chair.
She brought alcohol lamps and chafing-dishes. She seldom came without
fruit or flowers. She set fire-screens and adjusted window-shades. She
went deeply into the subject of opiates, and she talked by the hour with
Jane and her mother about symptoms and remedies.
Marshall, while grateful for her attentions, was almost embarrassed
by them--not that they should come from her rather than from his wife (or
at least more copiously and spontaneously), but that they should come at
all. Never before in his life had he received such minute and solicitous
ministrations; he felt with a shy self-depreciation that he must be
making himself a great burden. If Susan Bates threw back her
bonnet-strings and suggested to Jane a lowering of the window-shades,
he would almost protest against the girl's laying aside her book or her
sewing; and the preparation of any special dish, such as is an invalid's
due, would even now still cause him that sense of guilt which he had
always felt on breaking in upon the household routine of his wife. "Poor
man!" Susan Bates would say; "how must he have lived all these years!
Why, I could hardly get him even to let me oil the door-hinges!"
She would sit by his bedside and try to soothe and divert this wan and
weary and half-desperate old man. He enjoyed but the most fitful slumber,
and even that only by the action of narcotics. Through the lagging hours
of the day and through the maddening watches of the night his mind,
ticking like an unstillable clock, beat for him an incessant rhythmical
reminder of the impending ruin of his house and of his own powerlessness
to avert it. He reviewed again and again the whole course of his life and
his business--they were one: his lowly beginnings, his early struggles in
the raw but ambitious prairie town, the laborious stages of endeavor by
which he had developed and strengthened his business--his. Then, as the
house had grown, others had insinuated themselves, or imposed themselves;
and these were now banded together to dominate it, and to check
and circumvent him, its founder and their benefactor, and finally to
bring it to the very brink of ruin, and to make the labors of his whole
lifetime come to naught. And he in bed here--with his feeble hands
working desperately at the hem of the sheet, and his aching head
throbbing unavailingly through the cruel, open-eyed watches of the night.
He raged over the world's injustice and his own impotence; the thought
was never absent from him--he was coming under the disastrous domination
of the _idèe fixe_.
He spoke of these things to Susan Bates with such an increasing frequency
and insistency as almost to transfer the rack of them from his own brain
to hers. Once or twice, in an interval of semi-delirium, he bewept the
ruin not only of his business, but of himself and of his family and of
all his belongings. He infected her with his own dread and panic; she saw
his property dispersed, his home in others' hands, his family in the
depths of despairing poverty.
One morning she appeared at Roger's office; Minnie Peters accompanied
her. The one carried a large leather bag in her hand; the other had a
large brown-paper parcel under her arm.
"Your poor father!" said Susan Bates, advancing straight towards Roger
with moistened eyes and with a nervous tremor in her voice and body
alike. She set her satchel on the corner of Roger's desk and began
tugging at its catches. "You open yours too, Minnie," she said; and
Minnie Peters began working at the knots in the cord that bound her stiff
brown bundle with a tight-drawn tension. Roger looked at both his callers
with a great surprise.
"Poor David!" said Susan Bates, with her lips twitching; "to think of his
toiling and slaving so many years, and of everything going all to pieces
in the end, like this! It can't be! It sha'n't be!--not if I can help
it."
She thrust her hand into the top of Minnie Peter's package. She drew out
a heavy folded document and followed it with others. "There! that's the
abstract; and here are the leases, and here is the insurance." She threw
out a sheaf of policies; the one on top was for ten thousand dollars. "I
didn't know just what you would need; I brought everything connected with
the whole building--here's the receipt for last year's taxes. Now, I want
you to put a mortgage on it right away. It's clear, Mr. Bates says."
Roger glanced at one of the leases and placed the building in an instant.
It was a vast structure in the dry-goods district, occupied by half a
dozen firms of the highest standing.
Mrs. Bates now thrust her hand into her own bag. She drew it out time and
time again, until she had covered the top of Roger's desk with packages
of securities--bank stock, railroad bonds, State and county issues of all
kinds; there was even one bright-green batch of water bonds from a far
town in North Dakota.