SINCE New Year's there had scarcely been a mild day, and the streets
were full of snow, growing foul under the city feet and hoofs, and
renewing its purity from the skies with repeated falls, which in turn
lost their whiteness, beaten down, and beaten black and hard into a
solid bed like iron. The sleighing was incomparable, and the air was
full of the din of bells; but Lapham's turnout was not of those that
thronged the Brighton road every afternoon; the man at the
livery-stable sent him word that the mare's legs were swelling.
He and Corey had little to do with each other. He did not know how
Penelope had arranged it with Corey; his wife said she knew no more
than he did, and he did not like to ask the girl herself, especially as
Corey no longer came to the house. He saw that she was cheerfuller
than she had been, and helpfuller with him and her mother. Now and
then Lapham opened his troubled soul to her a little, letting his
thought break into speech without preamble or conclusion. Once he
said--
"Pen, I presume you know I'm in trouble."
"We all seem to be there," said the girl.
"Yes, but there's a difference between being there by your own fault
and being there by somebody else's."
"I don't call it his fault," she said.
"I call it mine," said the Colonel.
The girl laughed. Her thought was of her own care, and her father's
wholly of his. She must come to his ground. "What have you been doing
wrong?"
"I don't know as you'd call it wrong. It's what people do all the
time. But I wish I'd let stocks alone. It's what I always promised
your mother I would do. But there's no use cryin' over spilt milk; or
watered stock, either."
"I don't think there's much use crying about anything. If it could
have been cried straight, it would have been all right from the start,"
said the girl, going back to her own affair; and if Lapham had not been
so deeply engrossed in his, he might have seen how little she cared for
all that money could do or undo. He did not observe her enough to see
how variable her moods were in those days, and how often she sank from
some wild gaiety into abject melancholy; how at times she was fiercely
defiant of nothing at all, and at others inexplicably humble and
patient. But no doubt none of these signs had passed unnoticed by his
wife, to whom Lapham said one day, when he came home, "Persis, what's
the reason Pen don't marry Corey?"
"You know as well as I do, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham, with an inquiring
look at him for what lay behind his words.
"Well, I think it's all tomfoolery, the way she's going on. There
ain't any rhyme nor reason to it." He stopped, and his wife waited.
"If she said the word, I could have some help from them." He hung his
head, and would not meet his wife's eye.
"I guess you're in a pretty bad way, Si," she said pityingly, "or you
wouldn't have come to that."
"I'm in a hole," said Lapham, "and I don't know where to turn. You
won't let me do anything about those mills----"
"Yes, I'll let you," said his wife sadly.
He gave a miserable cry. "You know I can't do anything, if you do. O
my Lord!"
She had not seen him so low as that before. She did not know what to
say. She was frightened, and could only ask, "Has it come to the
worst?"
"The new house has got to go," he answered evasively.
She did not say anything. She knew that the work on the house had been
stopped since the beginning of the year. Lapham had told the architect
that he preferred to leave it unfinished till the spring, as there was
no prospect of their being able to get into it that winter; and the
architect had agreed with him that it would not hurt it to stand. Her
heart was heavy for him, though she could not say so. They sat
together at the table, where she had come to be with him at his belated
meal. She saw that he did not eat, and she waited for him to speak
again, without urging him to take anything. They were past that.
"And I've sent orders to shut down at the Works," he added.
"Shut down at the Works!" she echoed with dismay. She could not take
it in. The fire at the Works had never been out before since it was
first kindled. She knew how he had prided himself upon that; how he
had bragged of it to every listener, and had always lugged the fact in
as the last expression of his sense of success. "O Silas!"
"What's the use?" he retorted. "I saw it was coming a month ago.
There are some fellows out in West Virginia that have been running the
paint as hard as they could. They couldn't do much; they used to put
it on the market raw. But lately they got to baking it, and now
they've struck a vein of natural gas right by their works, and they pay
ten cents for fuel, where I pay a dollar, and they make as good a
paint. Anybody can see where it's going to end. Besides, the market's
over-stocked. It's glutted. There wa'n't anything to do but to shut
DOWN, and I've SHUT down."
"I don't know what's going to become of the hands in the middle of the
winter, this way," said Mrs. Lapham, laying hold of one definite
thought which she could grasp in the turmoil of ruin that whirled
before her eyes.
"I don't care what becomes of the hands," cried Lapham. "They've
shared my luck; now let 'em share the other thing. And if you're so
very sorry for the hands, I wish you'd keep a little of your pity for
ME. Don't you know what shutting down the Works means?"
"Yes, indeed I do, Silas," said his wife tenderly.
"Well, then!" He rose, leaving his supper untasted, and went into the
sitting-room, where she presently found him, with that everlasting
confusion of papers before him on the desk. That made her think of the
paper in her work-basket, and she decided not to make the careworn,
distracted man ask her for it, after all. She brought it to him.
He glanced blankly at it and then caught it from her, turning red and
looking foolish. "Where'd you get that?"
"You dropped it on the floor the other night, and I picked it up. Who
is 'Wm. M.'?"
"'Wm. M.'!" he repeated, looking confusedly at her, and then at the
paper. "Oh,--it's nothing." He tore the paper into small pieces, and
went and dropped them into the fire. When Mrs. Lapham came into the
room in the morning, before he was down, she found a scrap of the
paper, which must have fluttered to the hearth; and glancing at it she
saw that the words were "Mrs. M." She wondered what dealings with a
woman her husband could have, and she remembered the confusion he had
shown about the paper, and which she had thought was because she had
surprised one of his business secrets. She was still thinking of it
when he came down to breakfast, heavy-eyed, tremulous, with deep seams
and wrinkles in his face.
After a silence which he did not seem inclined to break, "Silas," she
asked, "who is 'Mrs. M.'?"