The generous words were blurred to her eyes by the tears that sprang
into them. But she could only write in answer:--
"Please do not come; I have made up my mind. As long as this trouble
is hanging over us, I cannot see you. And if father is unfortunate,
all is over between us."
She brought his letter to her mother, and told her what she had written
in reply. Her mother was thoughtful a while before she said, with a
sigh, "Well, I hope you've begun as you can carry out, Pen."
"Oh, I shall not have to carry out at all. I shall not have to do
anything. That's one comfort--the only comfort." She went away to her
own room, and when Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the affair, he was
silent at first, as she had been. Then he said, "I don't know as I
should have wanted her to done differently; I don't know as she could.
If I ever come right again, she won't have anything to feel meeching
about; and if I don't, I don't want she should be beholden to anybody.
And I guess that's the way she feels."
The Coreys in their turn sat in judgment on the fact which their son
felt bound to bring to their knowledge.
"She has behaved very well," said Mrs. Corey, to whom her son had
spoken.
"My dear," said her husband, with his laugh, "she has behaved TOO well.
If she had studied the whole situation with the most artful eye to its
mastery, she could not possibly have behaved better."
The process of Lapham's financial disintegration was like the course of
some chronic disorder, which has fastened itself upon the constitution,
but advances with continual reliefs, with apparent amelioration, and at
times seems not to advance at all, when it gives hope of final recovery
not only to the sufferer, but to the eye of science itself. There were
moments when James Bellingham, seeing Lapham pass this crisis and that,
began to fancy that he might pull through altogether; and at these
moments, when his adviser could not oppose anything but experience and
probability to the evidence of the fact, Lapham was buoyant with
courage, and imparted his hopefulness to his household. Our theory of
disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and
novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives
and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches
us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to
the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Bursts
of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the
stricken survivors have their jests together, in which the thought of
the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many
others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the
sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and
making it all up again with the conventional fitness of things.
Lapham's adversity had this quality in common with bereavement. It was
not always like the adversity we figure in allegory; it had its moments
of being like prosperity, and if upon the whole it was continual, it
was not incessant. Sometimes there was a week of repeated reverses,
when he had to keep his teeth set and to hold on hard to all his
hopefulness; and then days came of negative result or slight success,
when he was full of his jokes at the tea-table, and wanted to go to the
theatre, or to do something to cheer Penelope up. In some miraculous
way, by some enormous stroke of success which should eclipse the
brightest of his past prosperity, he expected to do what would
reconcile all difficulties, not only in his own affairs, but in hers
too. "You'll see," he said to his wife; "it's going to come out all
right. Irene'll fix it up with Bill's boy, and then she'll be off
Pen's mind; and if things go on as they've been going for the last two
days, I'm going to be in a position to do the favours myself, and Pen
can feel that SHE'S makin' a sacrifice, and then I guess may be she'll
do it. If things turn out as I expect now, and times ever do get any
better generally, I can show Corey that I appreciate his offer. I can
offer him the partnership myself then."
Even in the other moods, which came when everything had been going
wrong, and there seemed no way out of the net, there were points of
consolation to Lapham and his wife. They rejoiced that Irene was safe
beyond the range of their anxieties, and they had a proud satisfaction
that there had been no engagement between Corey and Penelope, and that
it was she who had forbidden it. In the closeness of interest and
sympathy in which their troubles had reunited them, they confessed to
each other that nothing would have been more galling to their pride
than the idea that Lapham should not have been able to do everything
for his daughter that the Coreys might have expected. Whatever
happened now, the Coreys could not have it to say that the Laphams had
tried to bring any such thing about.
Bellingham had lately suggested an assignment to Lapham, as the best
way out of his difficulties. It was evident that he had not the money
to meet his liabilities at present, and that he could not raise it
without ruinous sacrifices, that might still end in ruin after all. If
he made the assignment, Bellingham argued, he could gain time and make
terms; the state of things generally would probably improve, since it
could not be worse, and the market, which he had glutted with his
paint, might recover and he could start again. Lapham had not agreed
with him. When his reverses first began it had seemed easy for him to
give up everything, to let the people he owed take all, so only they
would let him go out with clean hands; and he had dramatised this
feeling in his talk with his wife, when they spoke together of the
mills on the G. L. & P. But ever since then it had been growing harder,
and he could not consent even to seem to do it now in the proposed
assignment. He had not found other men so very liberal or faithful
with him; a good many of them appeared to have combined to hunt him
down; a sense of enmity towards all his creditors asserted itself in
him; he asked himself why they should not suffer a little too. Above
all, he shrank from the publicity of the assignment. It was open
confession that he had been a fool in some way; he could not bear to
have his family--his brother the judge, especially, to whom he had
always appeared the soul of business wisdom--think him imprudent or
stupid. He would make any sacrifice before it came to that. He
determined in parting with Bellingham to make the sacrifice which he
had oftenest in his mind, because it was the hardest, and to sell his
new house. That would cause the least comment. Most people would
simply think that he had got a splendid offer, and with his usual luck
had made a very good thing of it; others who knew a little more about
him would say that he was hauling in his horns, but they could not
blame him; a great many other men were doing the same in those hard
times--the shrewdest and safest men: it might even have a good effect.
He went straight from Bellingham's office to the real-estate broker in
whose hands he meant to put his house, for he was not the sort of man
to shilly-shally when he had once made up his mind. But he found it
hard to get his voice up out of his throat, when he said he guessed he
would get the broker to sell that new house of his on the water side of
Beacon. The broker answered cheerfully, yes; he supposed Colonel
Lapham knew it was a pretty dull time in real estate? and Lapham said
yes, he knew that, but he should not sell at a sacrifice, and he did
not care to have the broker name him or describe the house definitely
unless parties meant business. Again the broker said yes; and he
added, as a joke Lapham would appreciate, that he had half a dozen
houses on the water side of Beacon, on the same terms; that nobody
wanted to be named or to have his property described.
It did, in fact, comfort Lapham a little to find himself in the same
boat with so many others; he smiled grimly, and said in his turn, yes,
he guessed that was about the size of it with a good many people. But
he had not the heart to tell his wife what he had done, and he sat
taciturn that whole evening, without even going over his accounts, and
went early to bed, where he lay tossing half the night before he fell
asleep. He slept at last only upon the promise he made himself that he
would withdraw the house from the broker's hands; but he went heavily
to his own business in the morning without doing so. There was no such
rush, anyhow, he reflected bitterly; there would be time to do that a
month later, probably.
It struck him with a sort of dismay when a boy came with a note from a
broker, saying that a party who had been over the house in the fall had
come to him to know whether it could be bought, and was willing to pay
the cost of the house up to the time he had seen it. Lapham took
refuge in trying to think who the party could be; he concluded that it
must have been somebody who had gone over it with the architect, and he
did not like that; but he was aware that this was not an answer to the
broker, and he wrote that he would give him an answer in the morning.
Now that it had come to the point, it did not seem to him that he could
part with the house. So much of his hope for himself and his children
had gone into it that the thought of selling it made him tremulous and
sick. He could not keep about his work steadily, and with his nerves
shaken by want of sleep, and the shock of this sudden and unexpected
question, he left his office early, and went over to look at the house
and try to bring himself to some conclusion here. The long procession
of lamps on the beautiful street was flaring in the clear red of the
sunset towards which it marched, and Lapham, with a lump in his throat,
stopped in front of his house and looked at their multitude. They were
not merely a part of the landscape; they were a part of his pride and
glory, his success, his triumphant life's work which was fading into
failure in his helpless hands. He ground his teeth to keep down that
lump, but the moisture in his eyes blurred the lamps, and the keen pale
crimson against which it made them flicker. He turned and looked up,
as he had so often done, at the window-spaces, neatly glazed for the
winter with white linen, and recalled the night when he had stopped
with Irene before the house, and she had said that she should never
live there, and he had tried to coax her into courage about it. There
was no such facade as that on the whole street, to his thinking.
Through his long talks with the architect, he had come to feel almost
as intimately and fondly as the architect himself the satisfying
simplicity of the whole design and the delicacy of its detail. It
appealed to him as an exquisite bit of harmony appeals to the unlearned
ear, and he recognised the difference between this fine work and the
obstreperous pretentiousness of the many overloaded house-fronts which
Seymour had made him notice for his instruction elsewhere on the Back
Bay. Now, in the depths of his gloom, he tried to think what Italian
city it was where Seymour said he had first got the notion of treating
brick-work in that way.
He unlocked the temporary door with the key he always carried, so that
he could let himself in and out whenever he liked, and entered the
house, dim and very cold with the accumulated frigidity of the whole
winter in it, and looking as if the arrest of work upon it had taken
place a thousand years before. It smelt of the unpainted woods and the
clean, hard surfaces of the plaster, where the experiments in
decoration had left it untouched; and mingled with these odours was
that of some rank pigments and metallic compositions which Seymour had
used in trying to realise a certain daring novelty of finish, which had
not proved successful. Above all, Lapham detected the peculiar odour
of his own paint, with which the architect had been greatly interested
one day, when Lapham showed it to him at the office. He had asked
Lapham to let him try the Persis Brand in realising a little idea he
had for the finish of Mrs. Lapham's room. If it succeeded they could
tell her what it was, for a surprise.
Lapham glanced at the bay-window in the reception-room, where he sat
with his girls on the trestles when Corey first came by; and then he
explored the whole house to the attic, in the light faintly admitted
through the linen sashes. The floors were strewn with shavings and
chips which the carpenters had left, and in the music-room these had
been blown into long irregular windrows by the draughts through a wide
rent in the linen sash. Lapham tried to pin it up, but failed, and
stood looking out of it over the water. The ice had left the river,
and the low tide lay smooth and red in the light of the sunset. The
Cambridge flats showed the sad, sodden yellow of meadows stripped bare
after a long sleep under snow; the hills, the naked trees, the spires
and roofs had a black outline, as if they were objects in a landscape
of the French school.
The whim seized Lapham to test the chimney in the music-room; it had
been tried in the dining-room below, and in his girls' fireplaces
above, but here the hearth was still clean. He gathered some shavings
and blocks together, and kindled them, and as the flame mounted gaily
from them, he pulled up a nail-keg which he found there and sat down to
watch it. Nothing could have been better; the chimney was a perfect
success; and as Lapham glanced out of the torn linen sash he said to
himself that that party, whoever he was, who had offered to buy his
house might go to the devil; he would never sell it as long as he had a
dollar. He said that he should pull through yet; and it suddenly came
into his mind that, if he could raise the money to buy out those West
Virginia fellows, he should be all right, and would have the whole game
in his own hand. He slapped himself on the thigh, and wondered that he
had never thought of that before; and then, lighting a cigar with a
splinter from the fire, he sat down again to work the scheme out in his
own mind. He did not hear the feet heavily stamping up the stairs, and
coming towards the room where he sat; and the policeman to whom the
feet belonged had to call out to him, smoking at his chimney-corner,
with his back turned to the door, "Hello! what are you doing here?"
"What's that to you?" retorted Lapham, wheeling half round on his
nail-keg.
"I'll show you," said the officer, advancing upon him, and then
stopping short as he recognised him. "Why, Colonel Lapham! I thought
it was some tramp got in here!"
"Have a cigar?" said Lapham hospitably. "Sorry there ain't another
nail-keg."
The officer took the cigar. "I'll smoke it outside. I've just come
on, and I can't stop. Tryin' your chimney?"
"Yes, I thought I'd see how it would draw, in here. It seems to go
first-rate."
The policeman looked about him with an eye of inspection. "You want to
get that linen window, there, mended up."
"Yes, I'll speak to the builder about that. It can go for one night."
The policeman went to the window and failed to pin the linen together
where Lapham had failed before. "I can't fix it." He looked round once
more, and saying, "Well, good night," went out and down the stairs.
Lapham remained by the fire till he had smoked his cigar; then he rose
and stamped upon the embers that still burned with his heavy boots, and
went home. He was very cheerful at supper. He told his wife that he
guessed he had a sure thing of it now, and in another twenty-four hours
he should tell her just how. He made Penelope go to the theatre with
him, and when they came out, after the play, the night was so fine that
he said they must walk round by the new house and take a look at it in
the starlight. He said he had been there before he came home, and
tried Seymour's chimney in the music-room, and it worked like a charm.
As they drew near Beacon Street they were aware of unwonted stir and
tumult, and presently the still air transmitted a turmoil of sound,
through which a powerful and incessant throbbing made itself felt. The
sky had reddened above them, and turning the corner at the Public
Garden, they saw a black mass of people obstructing the perspective of
the brightly-lighted street, and out of this mass a half-dozen engines,
whose strong heart-beats had already reached them, sent up volumes of
fire-tinged smoke and steam from their funnels. Ladders were planted
against the facade of a building, from the roof of which a mass of
flame burnt smoothly upward, except where here and there it seemed to
pull contemptuously away from the heavy streams of water which the
firemen, clinging like great beetles to their ladders, poured in upon
it.
Lapham had no need to walk down through the crowd, gazing and
gossiping, with shouts and cries and hysterical laughter, before the
burning house, to make sure that it was his.
"I guess I done it, Pen," was all he said.
Among the people who were looking at it were a party who seemed to have
run out from dinner in some neighbouring house; the ladies were
fantastically wrapped up, as if they had flung on the first things they
could seize.
"Isn't it perfectly magnificent!" cried a pretty girl. "I wouldn't
have missed it on any account. Thank you so much, Mr. Symington, for
bringing us out!"
"Ah, I thought you'd like it," said this Mr. Symington, who must have
been the host; "and you can enjoy it without the least compunction,
Miss Delano, for I happen to know that the house belongs to a man who
could afford to burn one up for you once a year."
"Oh, do you think he would, if I came again?"
"I haven't the least doubt of it. We don't do things by halves in
Boston."
"He ought to have had a coat of his noncombustible paint on it," said
another gentleman of the party.
Penelope pulled her father away toward the first carriage she could
reach of a number that had driven up. "Here, father! get into this."
"No, no; I couldn't ride," he answered heavily, and he walked home in
silence. He greeted his wife with, "Well, Persis, our house is gone!
And I guess I set it on fire myself;" and while he rummaged among the
papers in his desk, still with his coat and hat on, his wife got the
facts as she could from Penelope. She did not reproach him. Here was
a case in which his self-reproach must be sufficiently sharp without
any edge from her. Besides, her mind was full of a terrible thought.
"O Silas," she faltered, "they'll think you set it on fire to get the
insurance!"
Lapham was staring at a paper which he held in his hand. "I had a
builder's risk on it, but it expired last week. It's a dead loss."
"Oh, thank the merciful Lord!" cried his wife.
"Merciful!" said Lapham. "Well, it's a queer way of showing it."
He went to bed, and fell into the deep sleep which sometimes follows a
great moral shock. It was perhaps rather a torpor than a sleep.