"Never less," replied Roger, with a quivering nostril and a high, slow
bow.
Susan Bates looked sidewise at Minnie Peters and asked her to behave
herself. But she gave a few hysterical sobs on her own part, and Minnie
Peters echoed them with a faithful promptitude.
"Just like a woman," thought Roger, as he sat alone after Susan Bates's
departure. He drew a hundred lines on an imaginary sheet of paper with a
dry pen. "Like a woman; yes," he added, under the promptings of a feeling
for more exact justice, "a woman in ten thousand."
A few mornings later, when this woman in ten thousand was standing in the
bleak porch of the new house to await the return of her horses from their
last walk up and down, another carriage slipped into its place and
another woman alighted on the curbstone. Susan Bates immediately squared
her shoulders, banished all expression from her face, and began the
descent of the steps with her eyes fixed upon the gaps in the broken
building line over the way.
"That woman! She has never entered _my_ house, and she never shall; and
she should never enter this."
Statira Belden had come to do the decencies; Eliza Marshall received her
with the grim inexpressiveness of a granite bowlder.
"My husband is resting quietly to-day," she said, in response to Mrs.
Belden's inquiries. He was--unconscious under chloral, after three nights
of open-eyed torment.
Mrs. Belden passed one of her large, smooth gloves over the other and
praised the house.
"It is one of the handsomest on the street," replied Eliza Marshall,
firmly. "And one of the best built. We feel completely at home in it
already."
But, in truth, the poor soul was homesick, heartsick, as lost and forlorn
as a shipwrecked sailor on the chill coast of Kamtchatka.
Mrs. Belden smoothed down her yellow locks and deplored, in her thickly
sweet accents, the unfortunate condition of the business.
"My husband's own affairs are going very well," returned Eliza Marshall,
looking forward with unblinking eyes. "My son has charge of them. There
was a full account of his success in the Sunday paper."
Her tone was one of brazen triumph. Yet Eliza Marshall abhorred
speculation with all the dread of the middle-aged female conservative.
One dollar through legitimate trade rather than ten through such paths as
Roger had of late been so fearfully treading.
Mrs. Belden had heard something of Truesdale's intended departure for the
Orient. "He finds Chicago uncongenial, no doubt."
"Truesdale is at home everywhere. He will have adventures everywhere. He
is handsome. He is clever. He can interest wherever he chooses. Sometimes
he interests too easily and too deeply; sometimes in spite of himself and
to his own annoyance."
Eliza Marshall shot out these remarks like bullets from behind a
breastwork. At the end she set her jaws firmly, and stared at Statira
Belden with a proud defiance. Many a night had Truesdale's courses wet
her pillow with tears of sorrow and shame; she now wondered if it were
really she herself who had just celebrated his profligacy, and had seemed
to glory in it at that. She had surmised her son's disdain for the
importunities of Gladys McKenna, and she had joined with him in a ringing
derision when the Beldens had accused him of encouraging her in her folly
that he might employ her as a spy upon the happenings in their house. "My
son," she concluded, "will return at his own pleasure, and will always be
welcome under his father's roof."
Statira Belden's eyes sought the floor. It was she who had made it sure
that knowledge of Truesdale's transgression should reach the ears of
Susan Bates; yet her own son had just established relations with a
"baroness" who still lingered behind on the scene of the late national
festivities, and at the climax of an insane extravagance had been openly
cast off by his family.
"And Rosy?" said Statira Belden, presently, with a reconquered sweetness.
"One would expect to find her home at such a time as this."
Eliza Marshall planted her standard upon her breastwork, and flaunted it
with a firm and magnificent spirit.
"My daughter Rosamund will be with us inside of a week. She has been
detained longer than she had expected among her husband's family." The
old lady rose with a stiff, slow motion, and transferred a large panel
photograph from the centre-table to Statira Belden's hands. "This
reached us yesterday."
It was Rosamund. Her proud and splendid young beauty was set off by a
court-train, an immense bouquet, and a nodding group of ostrich-tips.
"Presented at court!" exclaimed Statira Belden, involuntarily, and bit
her tongue a second after.
Eliza Marshall answered neither yes nor no. She let the photograph speak
for itself.
"Rosamund," she went on, presently, "may return a little too late for her
first reception, but the others will be held here, and she will entertain
a great deal during the winter."
Statira Belden was cowed at last, and Eliza Marshall's heart beat high to
see it. This was her only compensation for the tears shed over the
delayed return of a selfish and unfilial daughter, for the anticipated
ordeal of the gay social happenings which were to follow that return, for
the besetting thought that some dread misfortune might displace all this
future festivity by a worse alternative, and make the lightest diversion
a black impossibility.
"She kissed the Queen's hand?" palpitated Statira Belden with an interest
that she could not stifle; and again Eliza Marshall answered neither yes
nor no.
Rosamund had not kissed the Queen's hand, but her husband's family had
been so fascinated by her beauty, so amazed by her genius for dress, and
so confounded by her boundless aplomb, that one of them had suggested
that she attire herself in a costume which had served a daughter of the
house at a Drawing-room some six months before, and others had demanded
that she be photographed in it. This was the pleasantest impression
that Rosy brought back of her husband's family--their generous and
unbounded appreciation of herself.
Her other impressions were less acute. Boxton Park itself she had found
comfortable, but not at all splendid; and as for its occupants, they
were, in the main, staid and serious people who were doing what they
could to justify the favors that fortune had bestowed upon them. Rosy
sometimes felt that, in general terms, they might have appreciated Jane
quite as fully as they had appreciated her. They were not gay, they were
not lively, they were not like Arthur. Paston had truly described
himself as the youngest, and he was by far the most jovial and
blithesome.
Rosy had not delayed her return on account of any presentation at
court--though the achievement of the photograph may have accounted for a
few days more or less--but on account of the fox-hunting, which had
completely fascinated her. Horse, habit, and country were all in perfect
accord; her prosaic and hum-drum practice at home was now transmuted into
the purest poetry, and under the promptings of this new afflatus she
developed a grace and a daring which accomplished the final and
irrevocable conquest of all her husband's family.
Rosy's continued sojourn in England cost her husband his position and
prospects in America, where he was not of enough importance to assume
such liberties. But this mattered nothing to his wife. She had lived for
more than a fortnight at the seat of a county family, she had breathed
the air of deference that exists for the gentry of the shires, and she
was far from any thought of a permanent submission to the rasping
crudities of provincial America. She had already developed the fixed
determination to return to London for the "season," to accomplish
an actual presentation at court, and to make England her future home for
the rest of her days.
One thing more was lost by Rosamund's delay in Essex--all chance of a
last recognition from her father. When she finally reached home he was in
a state of slight delirium, and when he passed from that it was to enter
into unconsciousness. His ideas ran incessantly on gifts, on
philanthropic endeavor. To-day he built an asylum; to-morrow he endowed a
hospital. He strewed promises over the counterpane with indefatigable
hands, and babbled unending benefactions among his hot and harassing
pillows. Jane, half mad with anguish and remorse, found an added pang in
the recollection that during one of his conscious and least uncomfortable
hours he had yielded to her solicitations and those of Susan Bates, and
had set apart a certain portion of his estate, with the approval of
Roger, for a collegiate building which was to bear his name. "He will be
remembered now," said Jane, for all her poignant sorrow, and she was glad
that Roger had co-operated to make this step a possibility. She tried not
to see too plainly that her father had made no pretence of a keener sense
of his duty towards the public, or of a kindlier disposition towards it.
Whatever he had done was on personal grounds--for the pleasure of a
daughter and of an old friend.
One morning, a week after Rosamund's return, a bow of crape was hanging
upon the door-bell, Susan Bates was busy with Eliza Marshall up-stairs
over certain sombre-hued apparel, and Roger was writing down a list of
names and addresses for Theodore Brower upon the dining-room table.
"We must have eight out of this list," said Roger to Brower, "and we
ought to know by night which of them can serve."
"Whose names have you put down?" asked Jane, reaching for the paper. She
read them over. "Give me that pencil." She wrote down half a dozen more.
"There!" she said, with a sort of frenzied and towering pride, as she
passed the sheet on to Brower. "Those are men that my father knew, and
they are men who must help us now." Roger glanced at the names; each
was a household word to every soul throughout the city. "Try
_them_," said Jane to Brower, "and if any of them refuse you, they will
have to refuse me later." And she walked straight out of the room,
without turning her head an inch to right or left.
"Shall I?" asked Brower, abashed.
"Why not?" demanded Roger, with a laconic severity.
Brower was a quiet, retiring fellow, and entered upon his day's work with
a full consciousness of the ordeal. It meant to lean over the desks of
bank presidents, to intrude upon the meetings of railway directors, to
penetrate to the retiring-rooms of judges, to approach more than one of
the magnates whom, with an imposing vagueness, we call "capitalists." But
Brower, carrying the thought of Jane with him into all these presences,
accomplished his task with modesty, tact, and discretion, and finally,
from the few simple types of greatness that the town possesses, evolved a
list which the pride of the dead man's daughter was willing to accept.
The list of occupants of the carriages Jane made out herself. "In the
first one, mother and Roger and Alice and her husband. In the second,
Arthur and Rosy and Truesdale and me. In the third, Aunt Lydia and the
Bateses--it will be full if Lottie and William both come. I can do
_that_ much for Aunt Lyddy," concluded Jane, with a rueful yet whimsical
smile.
"Where do you put me?" asked Brower, with an inviolate sobriety. They
were alone in the dining-room together.
"In the fourth. You and Mr. Bingham and--"
"I don't want to go in the carriage with Mr. Bingham," interrupted
Brower.
"Why, Theodore, what do you mean? Mr. Bingham is one of our best and
oldest friends. Who is there that has been kinder to poor dear pa, and to
ma, and to me--?"
"Nor in any carriage occupied by--friends," he went on, in the same tense
undertone. He took a firm grip on the back of the chair beside him; Jane
saw the swelling veins of his hand and wondered what it all might mean.
"I want to go in one of the carriages for the family. I want to go in the
carriage that _you_ go in. Do you understand me?"
A sudden consciousness had swept over him, with the mention of Bingham's
name, that he himself, as well as any other, filled measurably the dead
man's ideal of a husband for one of his daughters. He had waited too long
already before making this discovery; he must not wait so long before
declaring it.
She did not understand from his voice, which was strained and muffled to
conceal an emotion all unconcealable. But she understood from his eyes,
which looked into hers with an immense and endless kindness, and from his
hand, which had left its heroic clutch upon the chair to take a very
human hold upon the hand which hung so limply by her side. "Do you
understand me?" he asked again; and his voice was gentler than before.
"I do," answered Jane, feebly, and her head fell upon his shoulder.
Nothing ever seemed to happen to her as to anybody else; but if happiness
chose to come to her swathed in mourning bands, none the less kindly and
thankfully must it be welcomed. And as she reclined against him she
breathed a sigh of thanks that not he, but Bingham, had been concerned in
the laying of her ill-omened corner-stone.
He stood beside her at the open grave, and supported her there, too, as
the rattling sand and gravel rained down upon the coffin. The grave had
been set round with evergreen sprays, and the raw mound of earth beside
it had been concealed in the same kindly fashion. But Jane, in a
self-inflicted penance, would spare herself no pang; she clutched
Brower's arm and stood there, motionless, until the grave had been filled
in and the overplus of earth had been shaped above it. "Put those lilies
at the head," she directed; "they were from Mrs. Bates." And then she
walked away.
She read the next day, with a chastened satisfaction, the newspaper
accounts of her father's career. A new and careless public was carried
back once more to the early day whose revivification is always attempted
for a preoccupied and unsympathetic community upon the passing away of
another old settler. Then the frontier village lifts once more its
bedraggled forlornness from the slime of its humble beginnings, and the
lingering presence of the red man is again made manifest upon the grassy
horizon. Again the struggles of the early days are rehearsed, again fire
deals out its awful devastation, and once more the city grows from an
Indian village to a metropolis of two millions within the lifetime of a
single individual.
One morning, the second after the funeral, Truesdale stood at the front
parlor window, while the first snow-storm of the season swirled over the
long reach of the street and across the straggling paths that traversed
the wide stretches of broken prairie land round about. On the chair
beside him was a newspaper containing the statement that the affairs of
the Marshall & Belden Company were to be wound up, all thought of
continuing the business having been abandoned. And on the table beside
him lay the cards which announced the marriage of Bertie Patterson.
"No business," he said; "no bride." He feigned to himself that he had
really designed going into his father's office, and that he had had a
serious intention of asking Bertie Patterson to become his wife. He
looked out through the wide, clear pane, and thought of the view, of the
weather, of the hideous hubbub of the whole town. "Ouf! What a prospect,
what a climate, what a human hodge-podge! Everything unites for me in
saying--Japan."
David Marshall's will was opened this same day. It made Japan possible
for Truesdale, and England possible for Rosamund. A codicil, added in
Roger's hand at the latest practicable moment, revoked the bequest for a
collegiate building and transferred the whole amount of it directly to
Jane.
"This mustn't make any difference," said Jane to Brower. "It shall go for
that, after all. My father was a good man, and he deserves to be
remembered."
Brower bowed quietly. He appreciated the gravity of this their joint
sacrifice, but he would not dispute the justness of it.