"It's Rogers."
"I didn't want you should get in any deeper with him."
"No. You didn't want I should press him either; and I had to do one or
the other. And so I got in deeper."
"Silas," said his wife, "I'm afraid I made you!"
"It's all right, Persis, as far forth as that goes. I was glad to make
it up with him--I jumped at the chance. I guess Rogers saw that he had
a soft thing in me, and he's worked it for all it was worth. But it'll
all come out right in the end."
Lapham said this as if he did not care to talk any more about it. He
added casually, "Pretty near everybody but the fellows that owe ME seem
to expect me to do a cash business, all of a sudden."
"Do you mean that you've got payments to make, and that people are not
paying YOU?"
Lapham winced a little. "Something like that," he said, and he lighted
a cigar. "But when I tell you it's all right, I mean it, Persis. I
ain't going to let the grass grow under my feet, though,--especially
while Rogers digs the ground away from the roots."
"What are you going to do?"
"If it has to come to that, I'm going to squeeze him." Lapham's
countenance lighted up with greater joy than had yet visited it since
the day they had driven out to Brookline. "Milton K. Rogers is a
rascal, if you want to know; or else all the signs fail. But I guess
he'll find he's got his come-uppance." Lapham shut his lips so that the
short, reddish-grey beard stuck straight out on them.
"What's he done?"
"What's he done? Well, now, I'll tell you what he's done, Persis, since
you think Rogers is such a saint, and that I used him so badly in
getting him out of the business. He's been dabbling in every sort of
fool thing you can lay your tongue to,--wild-cat stocks, patent-rights,
land speculations, oil claims,--till he's run through about everything.
But he did have a big milling property out on the line of the P. Y. &
X.,--saw-mills and grist-mills and lands,--and for the last eight years
he's been doing a land-office business with 'em--business that would
have made anybody else rich. But you can't make Milton K. Rogers rich,
any more than you can fat a hide-bound colt. It ain't in him. He'd
run through Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Tom Scott rolled into one in
less than six months, give him a chance, and come out and want to
borrow money of you. Well, he won't borrow any more money of ME; and
if he thinks I don't know as much about that milling property as he
does he's mistaken. I've taken his mills, but I guess I've got the
inside track; Bill's kept me posted; and now I'm going out there to see
how I can unload; and I shan't mind a great deal if Rogers is under the
load when it's off once."
"I don't understand you, Silas."
"Why, it's just this. The Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad has leased
the P. Y. & X. for ninety-nine years,--bought it, practically,--and
it's going to build car-works right by those mills, and it may want
them. And Milton K. Rogers knew it when he turned 'em in on me."
"Well, if the road wants them, don't that make the mills valuable? You
can get what you ask for them!"
"Can I? The P. Y. & X. is the only road that runs within fifty miles of
the mills, and you can't get a foot of lumber nor a pound of flour to
market any other way. As long as he had a little local road like the
P. Y. & X. to deal with, Rogers could manage; but when it come to a big
through line like the G. L. & P., he couldn't stand any chance at all.
If such a road as that took a fancy to his mills, do you think it would
pay what he asked? No, sir! He would take what the road offered, or
else the road would tell him to carry his flour and lumber to market
himself."
"And do you suppose he knew the G. L. & P. wanted the mills when he
turned them in on you?" asked Mrs. Lapham aghast, and falling
helplessly into his alphabetical parlance.
The Colonel laughed scoffingly. "Well, when Milton K. Rogers don't
know which side his bread's buttered on! I don't understand," he added
thoughtfully, "how he's always letting it fall on the buttered side.
But such a man as that is sure to have a screw loose in him somewhere."
Mrs. Lapham sat discomfited. All that she could say was, "Well, I want
you should ask yourself whether Rogers would ever have gone wrong, or
got into these ways of his, if it hadn't been for your forcing him out
of the business when you did. I want you should think whether you're
not responsible for everything he's done since."
"You go and get that bag of mine ready," said Lapham sullenly. "I
guess I can take care of myself. And Milton K. Rogers too," he added.
That evening Corey spent the time after dinner in his own room, with
restless excursions to the library, where his mother sat with his
father and sisters, and showed no signs of leaving them. At last, in
coming down, he encountered her on the stairs, going up. They both
stopped consciously.
"I would like to speak with you, mother. I have been waiting to see
you alone."
"Come to my room," she said.
"I have a feeling that you know what I want to say," he began there.
She looked up at him where he stood by the chimney-piece, and tried to
put a cheerful note into her questioning "Yes?"
"Yes; and I have a feeling that you won't like it--that you won't
approve of it. I wish you did--I wish you could!"
"I'm used to liking and approving everything you do, Tom. If I don't
like this at once, I shall try to like it--you know that--for your
sake, whatever it is."
"I'd better be short," he said, with a quick sigh. "It's about Miss
Lapham." He hastened to add, "I hope it isn't surprising to you. I'd
have told you before, if I could."
"No, it isn't surprising. I was afraid--I suspected something of the
kind."
They were both silent in a painful silence.
"Well, mother?" he asked at last.
"If it's something you've quite made up mind to----"
"It is!"
"And if you've already spoken to her----"
"I had to do that first, of course."
"There would be no use of my saying anything, even if I disliked it."
"You do dislike it!"
"No--no! I can't say that. Of course I should have preferred it if you
had chosen some nice girl among those that you had been brought up
with--some friend or associate of your sisters, whose people we had
known----"
"Yes, I understand that, and I can assure you that I haven't been
indifferent to your feelings. I have tried to consider them from the
first, and it kept me hesitating in a way that I'm ashamed to think of;
for it wasn't quite right towards--others. But your feelings and my
sisters' have been in my mind, and if I couldn't yield to what I
supposed they must be, entirely----"
Even so good a son and brother as this, when it came to his love
affair, appeared to think that he had yielded much in considering the
feelings of his family at all.
His mother hastened to comfort him. "I know--I know. I've seen for
some time that this might happen, Tom, and I have prepared myself for
it. I have talked it over with your father, and we both agreed from
the beginning that you were not to be hampered by our feeling.
Still--it is a surprise. It must be."
"I know it. I can understand your feeling. But I'm sure that it's one
that will last only while you don't know her well."
"Oh, I'm sure of that, Tom. I'm sure that we shall all be fond of
her,--for your sake at first, even--and I hope she'll like us."
"I am quite certain of that," said Corey, with that confidence which
experience does not always confirm in such cases. "And your taking it
as you do lifts a tremendous load off me."
But he sighed so heavily, and looked so troubled, that his mother said,
"Well, now, you mustn't think of that any more. We wish what is for
your happiness, my son, and we will gladly reconcile ourselves to
anything that might have been disagreeable. I suppose we needn't speak
of the family. We must both think alike about them. They have
their--drawbacks, but they are thoroughly good people, and I satisfied
myself the other night that they were not to be dreaded." She rose, and
put her arm round his neck. "And I wish you joy, Tom! If she's half as
good as you are, you will both be very happy." She was going to kiss
him, but something in his looks stopped her--an absence, a trouble,
which broke out in his words.
"I must tell you, mother! There's been a complication--a
mistake--that's a blight on me yet, and that it sometimes seems as if
we couldn't escape from. I wonder if you can help us! They all thought
I meant--the other sister."
"O Tom! But how COULD they?"
"I don't know. It seemed so glaringly plain--I was ashamed of making
it so outright from the beginning. But they did. Even she did,
herself!"
"But where could they have thought your eyes were--your taste? It
wouldn't be surprising if any one were taken with that wonderful
beauty; and I'm sure she's good too. But I'm astonished at them! To
think you could prefer that little, black, odd creature, with her
joking and----"
"MOTHER!" cried the young man, turning a ghastly face of warning upon
her.
"What do you mean, Tom?"
"Did you--did--did you think so too--that it was IRENE I meant?"
"Why, of course!"
He stared at her hopelessly.
"O my son!" she said, for all comment on the situation.
"Don't reproach me, mother! I couldn't stand it."
"No. I didn't mean to do that. But how--HOW could it happen?"
"I don't know. When she first told me that they had understood it so,
I laughed--almost--it was so far from me. But now when you seem to
have had the same idea--Did you all think so?"
"Yes."
They remained looking at each other. Then Mrs. Corey began: "It did
pass through my mind once--that day I went to call upon them--that it
might not be as we thought; but I knew so little of--of----"
"Penelope," Corey mechanically supplied.
"Is that her name?--I forgot--that I only thought of you in relation to
her long enough to reject the idea; and it was natural after our seeing
something of the other one last year, that I might suppose you had
formed some--attachment----"
"Yes; that's what they thought too. But I never thought of her as
anything but a pretty child. I was civil to her because you wished it;
and when I met her here again, I only tried to see her so that I could
talk with her about her sister."
"You needn't defend yourself to ME, Tom," said his mother, proud to say
it to him in his trouble. "It's a terrible business for them, poor
things," she added. "I don't know how they could get over it. But, of
course, sensible people must see----"
"They haven't got over it. At least she hasn't. Since it's happened,
there's been nothing that hasn't made me prouder and fonder of her! At
first I WAS charmed with her--my fancy was taken; she delighted me--I
don't know how; but she was simply the most fascinating person I ever
saw. Now I never think of that. I only think how good she is--how
patient she is with me, and how unsparing she is of herself. If she
were concerned alone--if I were not concerned too--it would soon end.
She's never had a thought for anything but her sister's feeling and
mine from the beginning. I go there,--I know that I oughtn't, but I
can't help it,--and she suffers it, and tries not to let me see that
she is suffering it. There never was any one like her--so brave, so
true, so noble. I won't give her up--I can't. But it breaks my heart
when she accuses herself of what was all MY doing. We spend our time
trying to reason out of it, but we always come back to it at last, and
I have to hear her morbidly blaming herself. Oh!"
Doubtless Mrs. Corey imagined some reliefs to this suffering, some
qualifications of this sublimity in a girl she had disliked so
distinctly; but she saw none in her son's behaviour, and she gave him
her further sympathy. She tried to praise Penelope, and said that it
was not to be expected that she could reconcile herself at once to
everything. "I shouldn't have liked it in her if she had. But time
will bring it all right. And if she really cares for you----"
"I extorted that from her."
"Well, then, you must look at it in the best light you can. There is
no blame anywhere, and the mortification and pain is something that
must be lived down. That's all. And don't let what I said grieve you,
Tom. You know I scarcely knew her, and I--I shall be sure to like any
one you like, after all."
"Yes, I know," said the young man drearily. "Will you tell father?"
"If you wish."
"He must know. And I couldn't stand any more of this, just yet--any
more mistake."
"I will tell him," said Mrs. Corey; and it was naturally the next thing
for a woman who dwelt so much on decencies to propose: "We must go to
call on her--your sisters and I. They have never seen her even; and
she mustn't be allowed to think we're indifferent to her, especially
under the circumstances."
"Oh no! Don't go--not yet," cried Corey, with an instinctive perception
that nothing could be worse for him. "We must wait--we must be
patient. I'm afraid it would be painful to her now."
He turned away without speaking further; and his mother's eyes followed
him wistfully to the door. There were some questions that she would
have liked to ask him; but she had to content herself with trying to
answer them when her husband put them to her.
There was this comfort for her always in Bromfield Corey, that he never
was much surprised at anything, however shocking or painful. His
standpoint in regard to most matters was that of the sympathetic
humorist who would be glad to have the victim of circumstance laugh
with him, but was not too much vexed when the victim could not. He
laughed now when his wife, with careful preparation, got the facts of
his son's predicament fully under his eye.
"Really, Bromfield," she said, "I don't see how you can laugh. Do you
see any way out of it?"
"It seems to me that the way has been found already. Tom has told his
love to the right one, and the wrong one knows it. Time will do the
rest."
"If I had so low an opinion of them all as that, it would make me very
unhappy. It's shocking to think of it."
"It is upon the theory of ladies and all young people," said her
husband, with a shrug, feeling his way to the matches on the mantel,
and then dropping them with a sign, as if recollecting that he must not
smoke there. "I've no doubt Tom feels himself an awful sinner. But
apparently he's resigned to his sin; he isn't going to give her up."
"I'm glad to say, for the sake of human nature, that SHE isn't
resigned--little as I like her," cried Mrs. Corey.
Her husband shrugged again. "Oh, there mustn't be any indecent haste.
She will instinctively observe the proprieties. But come, now, Anna!
you mustn't pretend to me here, in the sanctuary of home, that
practically the human affections don't reconcile themselves to any
situation that the human sentiments condemn. Suppose the wrong sister
had died: would the right one have had any scruple in marrying Tom,
after they had both 'waited a proper time,' as the phrase is?"
"Bromfield, you're shocking!"
"Not more shocking than reality. You may regard this as a second
marriage." He looked at her with twinkling eyes, full of the triumph
the spectator of his species feels in signal exhibitions of human
nature. "Depend upon it, the right sister will be reconciled; the
wrong one will be consoled; and all will go merry as a marriage bell--a
second marriage bell. Why, it's quite like a romance!" Here he laughed
outright again.
"Well," sighed the wife, "I could almost wish the right one, as you
call her, would reject Tom, I dislike her so much."
"Ah, now you're talking business, Anna," said her husband, with his
hands spread behind the back he turned comfortably to the fire. "The
whole Lapham tribe is distasteful to me. As I don't happen to have
seen our daughter-in-law elect, I have still the hope--which you're
disposed to forbid me--that she may not be quite so unacceptable as the
others."
"Do you really feel so, Bromfield?" anxiously inquired his wife.
"Yes--I think I do;" and he sat down, and stretched out his long legs
toward the fire.
"But it's very inconsistent of you to oppose the matter now, when
you've shown so much indifference up to this time. You've told me, all
along, that it was of no use to oppose it."
"So I have. I was convinced of that at the beginning, or my reason
was. You know very well that I am equal to any trial, any sacrifice,
day after to-morrow; but when it comes to-day it's another thing. As
long as this crisis decently kept its distance, I could look at it with
an impartial eye; but now that it seems at hand, I find that, while my
reason is still acquiescent, my nerves are disposed to--excuse the
phrase--kick. I ask myself, what have I done nothing for, all my life,
and lived as a gentleman should, upon the earnings of somebody else, in
the possession of every polite taste and feeling that adorns leisure,
if I'm to come to this at last? And I find no satisfactory answer. I
say to myself that I might as well have yielded to the pressure all
round me, and gone to work, as Tom has."
Mrs. Corey looked at him forlornly, divining the core of real
repugnance that existed in his self-satire.
"I assure you, my dear," he continued, "that the recollection of what I
suffered from the Laphams at that dinner of yours is an anguish still.
It wasn't their behaviour,--they behaved well enough--or ill enough;
but their conversation was terrible. Mrs. Lapham's range was strictly
domestic; and when the Colonel got me in the library, he poured mineral
paint all over me, till I could have been safely warranted not to crack
or scale in any climate. I suppose we shall have to see a good deal of
them. They will probably come here every Sunday night to tea. It's a
perspective without a vanishing-point."
"It may not be so bad, after all," said his wife; and she suggested for
his consolation that he knew very little about the Laphams yet.
He assented to the fact. "I know very little about them, and about my
other fellow-beings. I dare say that I should like the Laphams better
if I knew them better. But in any case, I resign myself. And we must
keep in view the fact that this is mainly Tom's affair, and if his
affections have regulated it to his satisfaction, we must be content."
"Oh yes," sighed Mrs. Corey. "And perhaps it won't turn out so badly.
It's a great comfort to know that you feel just as I do about it."
"I do," said her husband, "and more too."
It was she and her daughters who would be chiefly annoyed by the Lapham
connection; she knew that. But she had to begin to bear the burden by
helping her husband to bear his light share of it. To see him so
depressed dismayed her, and she might well have reproached him more
sharply than she did for showing so much indifference, when she was so
anxious, at first. But that would not have served any good end now.
She even answered him patiently when he asked her, "What did you say to
Tom when he told you it was the other one?"
"What could I say? I could do nothing, but try to take back what I had
said against her."
"Yes, you had quite enough to do, I suppose. It's an awkward business.
If it had been the pretty one, her beauty would have been our excuse.
But the plain one--what do you suppose attracted him in her?"
Mrs. Corey sighed at the futility of the question. "Perhaps I did her
injustice. I only saw her a few moments. Perhaps I got a false
impression. I don't think she's lacking in sense, and that's a great
thing. She'll be quick to see that we don't mean unkindness, and
can't, by anything we say or do, when she's Tom's wife." She pronounced
the distasteful word with courage, and went on: "The pretty one might
not have been able to see that. She might have got it into her head
that we were looking down on her; and those insipid people are terribly
stubborn. We can come to some understanding with this one; I'm sure of
that." She ended by declaring that it was now their duty to help Tom
out of his terrible predicament.
"Oh, even the Lapham cloud has a silver lining," said Corey. "In fact,
it seems really to have all turned out for the best, Anna; though it's
rather curious to find you the champion of the Lapham side, at last.
Confess, now, that the right girl has secretly been your choice all
along, and that while you sympathise with the wrong one, you rejoice in
the tenacity with which the right one is clinging to her own!" He added
with final seriousness, "It's just that she should, and, so far as I
understand the case, I respect her for it."
"Oh yes," sighed Mrs. Corey. "It's natural, and it's right." But she
added, "I suppose they're glad of him on any terms."
"That is what I have been taught to believe," said her husband. "When
shall we see our daughter-in-law elect? I find myself rather impatient
to have that part of it over."