MRS. WHITNEY INTERVENES
As Hiram had always been silent and seemingly abstracted, no one but
Ellen noted the radical change in him. She had brought up her children in
the old-fashioned way--her thoughts, and usually her eyes, upon them all
day, and one ear open all night. When she no longer had them to guard,
she turned all this energy of solicitude to her husband; thus the
passionate love of her youth was having a healthy, beautiful old age. The
years of circumventing the easily roused restiveness of her spirited boy
and girl had taught her craft; without seeming to be watching Hiram, no
detail of his appearance or actions escaped her.
"There's mighty little your pa don't see," had been one of her stock
observations to the children from their earliest days. "And you needn't
flatter yourselves he don't care because he don't speak." Now she noted
that from under his heavy brows his eyes were looking stealthily out,
more minutely observant than ever before, and that what he saw either
added to his sadness or took a color of sadness from his mood. She
guessed that the actions of Adelaide and Arthur, so utterly different
from the actions of the children of her and Hiram's young days--except
those regarded by all worth-while people as "trifling and trashy"--had
something to do with Hiram's gloom. She decided that Arthur's failure and
his lightness of manner in face of it were the chief trouble--this until
Hiram's shoulders began to stoop and hollows to appear in his cheeks and
under his ears, and a waxlike pallor to overspread his face. Then she
knew that he was not well physically; and, being a practical woman, she
dismissed the mental causes of the change. "People talk a lot about their
mental troubles," she said to herself, "but it's usually three-fourths
stomach and liver."
As Hiram and illness, real illness, could not be associated in her mind,
she gave the matter no importance until she heard him sigh heavily one
night, after they had been in bed several hours. "What is it, father?"
she asked.
There was no answer, but a return to an imitation of the regular
breathing of a sleeper.
"Hiram," she insisted, "what is it?"
"Nothing, Ellen, nothing," he answered; "I must have ate something that
don't sit quite right."
"You didn't take no supper at all," said she.
This reminded him how useless it was to try to deceive her. "I ain't been
feeling well of late," he confessed, "but it'll soon be over." He did not
see the double meaning of his words until he had uttered them; he stirred
uneasily in his dread that she would suspect. "I went to the doctor."
"What did he say?--though I don't know why I should ask what such a fool
as Milbury said about anything."
"I got some medicine," replied he, evading telling her what doctor.
Instantly she sat up in bed. "I haven't seen you take no drugs!" she
exclaimed. Drugs were her especial abhorrence. She let no one in the
family take any until she had passed upon them.
"I didn't want to make a fuss," he explained.
"Where is it?" she demanded, on the edge of the bed now, ready to rise.
"I'll show it to you in the morning, mother. Lie down and go to sleep.
I've been awake long enough."
"Where is it?" she repeated, and he heard her moving across the room
toward the gas fixture.
"In my vest pocket. It's a box of pills. You can't tell nothin'
about it."
She lit the gas and went to his waistcoat, hanging where it always hung
at night--on a hook beside the closet door. He watched her fumble
through the pockets, watched her take her spectacles from the corner of
the mantel and put them on, the bridge well down toward the end of her
nose. A not at all romantic figure she made, standing beside the
sputtering gas jet, her spectacles balanced on her nose, her thin neck
and forearms exposed, and her old face studying the lid of the pill box
held in her toil- and age-worn hands. The box dropped from her fingers
and rolled along the floor. He saw an awful look slowly creep over her
features as the terrible thought crept over her mind. As she began to
turn her face toward him, with a motion of the head like that of a
machine on unoiled bearings, he closed his eyes; but he felt her
looking at him.
"Dr. Schulze!" she said, an almost soundless breathing of the name that
always meant the last resort in mortal illness.
He was trying to think of lies to tell her, but he could think of
nothing. The sense of light upon his eyelids ceased. He presently felt
her slowly getting into bed. A pall-like silence; then upon his cheek, in
long discontinued caress, a hand whose touch was as light and soft as the
fall of a rose leaf--the hand of love that toil and age cannot make
harsh, and her fingers were wet with her tears. Thus they lay in the
darkness and silence, facing together the tragedy of the eternal
separation.
"What did he say, dearest?" she asked. She had not used that word to him
since the first baby came and they began to call each other "father" and
"mother." All these years the children had been between them, and each
had held the other important chiefly as related to them. Now it was as
in their youth--just he and she, so close that only death could come
between them.
"It's a long way off," said Hiram. He would not set ringing in her ears
that knell which was clanging to him its solemn, incessant, menacing "Put
your house in order!"
"Tell me what he said," she urged gently.
"He couldn't make out exactly. The medicine'll patch me up."
She did not insist--why fret him to confess what she knew the instant
she read "Schulze" on the box? After an hour she heard him breathing as
only a sleeper can breathe; but she watched on until morning. When they
were dressing, each looked at the other furtively from time to time, a
great tenderness in his eyes, and in hers the anguish of a dread that
might not be spoken.
On the day after Mrs. Whitney's arrival for the summer, she descended in
state from the hills to call upon the Rangers.
When the front bell rang Mrs. Ranger was in the kitchen--and was dressed
for the kitchen. As the "girl" still had not been replaced she answered
the door herself. In a gingham wrapper, with her glasses thrust up into
her gray hair, she was facing a footman in livery.
"Are Mrs. Ranger and Miss Ranger at home?" asked he, mistaking her for
a servant and eying her dishevelment with an expression which was not
lost on her.
She smiled with heartiest good nature. "Yes, I'm here--I'm Mrs.
Ranger," said she; and she looked beyond him to the victoria in which
sat Mrs. Whitney. "How d'ye do, Matilda?" she called. "Come right in.
As usual when the canneries are running, I'm my own upstairs girl. I
reckon your young man here thinks I ought to discharge her and get one
that's tidier."
"Your young man here" was stiffly touching the brim of his top hat and
saying: "Beg parding, ma'am."
"Oh, that's all right," replied Mrs. Ranger; "I am what I look to be!"
Behind her now appeared Adelaide, her cheeks burning in mortification she
was ashamed of feeling and still more ashamed of being unable to conceal.
"Go and put on something else, mother," she urged in an undertone; "I'll
look after Mrs. Whitney till you come down."
"Ain't got time," replied her mother, conscious of what was in her
daughter's mind and a little contemptuous and a little resentful of it.
"I guess Tilly Whitney will understand. If she don't, why, I guess we can
bear up under it."
Mrs. Whitney had left her carriage and was advancing up the steps. She
was a year older than Ellen Ranger; but so skillfully was she got
together that, had she confessed to forty or even thirty-eight, one who
didn't know would have accepted her statement as too cautious by hardly
more than a year or so. The indisputably artificial detail in her
elegant appearance was her hair; its tinting, which had to be made
stronger year by year as the gray grew more resolute, was reaching the
stage of hard, rough-looking red. "Another year or two," thought
Adelaide, "and it'll make her face older than she really is. Even now
she's getting a tough look."
Matilda kissed Mrs. Ranger and Adelaide affectedly on both cheeks. "I'm
so glad to find you in!" said she. "And you, poor dear"--this to Mrs.
Ranger--"are in agony over the servant question." She glanced behind her
to make sure the carriage had driven away. "I don't know what we're
coming to. I can't keep a man longer than six months. Servants don't
appreciate a good home and good wages. As soon as a man makes
acquaintances here he becomes independent and leaves. If something isn't
done, the better class of people will have to move out of the country."
"Or go back to doing their own work," said Mrs. Ranger.
Mrs. Whitney smiled vaguely--a smile which said, "I'm too polite to
answer that remark as it deserves."
"Why didn't you bring Jenny along?" inquired Mrs. Ranger, when they were
in the "front parlor," the two older women seated, Adelaide moving
restlessly about.
"Janet and Ross haven't come yet," answered Mrs. Whitney. "They'll be on
next week, but only for a little while. They both like it better in the
East. All their friends are there and there's so much more to do." Mrs.
Whitney sighed; before her rose the fascination of all there was to "do"
in the East--the pleasures she was denying herself.
"I don't see why you don't live in New York," said Mrs. Ranger. "You're
always talking about it."
"Oh, I can't leave Charles!" was Mrs. Whitney's answer. "Or, rather
he'd not hear of my doing it. But I think he'll let us take an
apartment at Sherry's next winter--for the season, just--unless Janet
and I go abroad."
Mrs. Ranger had not been listening. She now started up. "If you'll excuse
me, Mattie, I must see what that cook's about. I'm afraid to let her out
of my sight for five minutes for fear she'll up and leave."
"What a time your poor mother has!" said Mrs. Whitney, when she and
Adelaide were alone.
Del had recovered from her attack of what she had been denouncing to
herself as snobbishness. For all the gingham wrapper and spectacles
anchored in the hair and general air of hard work and no "culture," she
was thinking, as she looked at Mrs. Whitney's artificiality and listened
to those affected accents, that she was glad her mother was Ellen Ranger
and not Matilda Whitney. "But mother doesn't believe she has a hard
time," she answered, "and everything depends on what one believes
oneself; don't you think so? I often envy her. She's always busy and
interested. And she's so useful, such a happiness-maker."
"I often feel that way, too," responded Mrs. Whitney, in her most
profusely ornate "_grande dame_" manner. "I get _so_ bored with leading
an artificial life. I often wish fate had been more kind to me. I was
reading, the other day, that the Queen of England said she had the tastes
of a dairy maid. Wasn't that charming? Many of us whom fate has condemned
to the routine of high station feel the same way."
It was by such deliverances that Mrs. Whitney posed, not without success,
as an intellectual woman who despised the frivolities of a fashionable
existence--this in face of the obvious fact that she led a fashionable
existence, or, rather, it led her, from the moment her _masseuse_
awakened her in the morning until her maid undressed her at night. But,
although Adelaide was far too young, too inexperienced to know that
judgment must always be formed from actions, never from words, she was
not, in this instance, deceived. "It takes more courage than most of us
have," said she, "to do what we'd like instead of what vanity suggests."
Mrs. Whitney did not understand this beyond getting from it a vague sense
that she had somehow been thrust at. "You must be careful of that skin of
yours, Adele," she thrust back. "I've been looking at it. You can't have
been home long, yet the exposure to the sun is beginning to show. You
have one of those difficult, thin skins, and one's skin is more than half
one's beauty. You ought never to go out without a veil. The last thing
Ross said to me was, 'Do tell Adelaide to keep her color down.' You know
he admires the patrician style."
Adelaide could not conceal the effect of the shot. Her skin was a great
trial to her, it burned so easily; and she hated wrapping herself in
under broad brims and thick veils when the feeling of bareheadedness was
so delightful. "At any rate," said she sweetly, "it's easier to keep
color down than to keep it up."
Mrs. Whitney pretended not to hear. She was now at the window which gave
on the garden by way of a small balcony. "There's your father!" she
exclaimed; "let's go to him."
There, indeed, was Hiram, pacing the walk along the end of the garden
with a ponderousness in the movements of his big form that bespoke age
and effort. It irritated Mrs. Whitney to look at him, as it had irritated
her to look at Ellen; very painful were the reminders of the ravages of
time from these people of about her own age, these whom she as a child
had known as children. Crow's-feet and breaking contour and thin hair in
those we have known only as grown people, do not affect us; but the same
signs in lifelong acquaintances make it impossible to ignore Decay
holding up the mirror to us and pointing to aging mouth and throat, as he
wags his hideous head and says, "Soon--_you_, too!"
Hiram saw Matilda and his daughter the instant they appeared on the
balcony, but he gave no hint of it until they were in the path of his
monotonous march. He was nerving himself for Mrs. Whitney as one nerves
himself in a dentist's chair for the descent of the grinder upon a
sensitive tooth. Usually she got no further than her first sentence
before irritating him. To-day the very sight of her filled him with
seemingly causeless anger. There was a time when he, watching Matilda
improve away from her beginnings as the ignorant and awkward daughter of
the keeper of a small hotel, had approved of her and had wished that
Ellen would give more time to the matter of looks. But latterly he had
come to the conclusion that a woman has to choose between improving her
exterior and improving her interior, and that it is impossible or all but
impossible for her to do both; he therefore found in Ellen's very
indifference to exteriors another reason why she seemed to him so
splendidly the opposite of Charles's wife.
"You certainly look the same as ever, Hiram," Matilda said, advancing
with extended, beautifully gloved hand. The expression of his eyes as he
turned them upon her gave her a shock, but she forced the smile back into
her face and went on, "Ross says you always make him think of a tower on
top of a high hill, one that has always stood there and always will."
The gray shadow over Hiram's face grew grayer. "But you ought to rest,"
Mrs. Whitney went on. "You and Charles both ought to rest. It's
ridiculous, the way American men act. Now, Charles has never taken a real
vacation. When he does go away he has a secretary with him and works all
day. But at least he gets change of scene, while you--you rarely miss a
day at the mills."
"I haven't missed a whole day in forty-three years," replied Hiram,
"except the day I got married, and I never expect to. I'll drop in the
harness. I'd be lost without it."
"Don't you think that's a narrow view of life?" asked Mrs. Whitney.
"Don't you think we ought all to take time to cultivate our higher
natures?"
"What do you mean by higher natures?"
Mrs. Whitney scented sarcasm and insult. To interrogate a glittering
generality is to slur its projector; she wished her hearers to be
dazzled, not moved to the impertinence of cross-examination. "I think you
understand me," she said loftily.
"I don't," replied Hiram. "I'm only a cooper and miller. I haven't had
the advantages of a higher education"--this last with a steady look
toward his son, approaching from the direction of the stables. The young
man was in a riding suit that was too correct at every point for good
taste, except in a college youth, and would have made upon anyone who
had been born, or initiated into, the real mysteries of "good form" an
impression similar to that of Mrs. Whitney's costume and accent and
manner. There was the note of the fashion plate, the evidence of pains,
of correctness not instinctive but studied--the marks our new-sprung
obstreperous aristocracy has made familiar to us all. It would have
struck upon a sense of humor like a trivial twitter from the oboe
trickling through a lull in the swell of brasses and strings; but Hiram
Ranger had no sense of humor in that direction, had only his instinct
for the right and the wrong. The falseness, the absence of the quality
called "the real thing," made him bitter and sad. And, when his son
joined them and walked up and down with them, he listened with heavier
droop of face and form to the affected chatter of the young "man of the
world" and the old "_grande dame_" of Chicago society. They talked the
language and the affairs of a world he had never explored and had no
wish to explore; its code and conduct, his training, his reason and his
instinct all joined in condemning as dishonorable shirking of a man's
and woman's part in a universe so ordered that, to keep alive in it,
everyone must either work or steal.
But his boy was delighted with the conversation, with Mrs. Whitney, and,
finally, with himself. A long, hard ride had scattered his depression of
many weeks into a mere haze over the natural sunshine of youth and
health; this haze now vanished. When Mrs. Whitney referred to Harvard, he
said lightly, "You know I was plucked."
"Ross told me," said she, in an amused tone; "but you'll get back all
right next fall."
"I don't know that I care to go," said Arthur. "I've been thinking it
over. I believe I've got about all the good a university can do a man. It
seems to me a year or so abroad--traveling about, seeing the world--would
be the best thing for me. I'm going to talk it over with father--as soon
as he gets through being out of humor with me."
Hiram did not look at his son, who glanced a little uneasily at him as
he unfolded this new scheme for perfecting his education as "man of
the world."
"Surely your father's not _angry_" cried Mrs. Whitney, in a tone intended
to make Hiram ashamed of taking so narrow, so rural, a view of his son's
fashionable mischance.
"No," replied Hiram, and his voice sounded curt. He added, in an
undertone: "I wish I were."
"You're wrong there, Hiram," said Mrs. Whitney, catching the words not
intended for her, and misunderstanding them. "It's not a case for
severity."
Arthur smiled, and the look he gave his father was a bright indication of
the soundness of his heart. Severity! The idea was absurd in connection
with the most generous and indulgent of fathers. "You don't get his
meaning, Mrs. Whitney," said he. "I, too, wish he were angry. I'm afraid
I've made him sad. You know he's got old-fashioned views of many things,
and he can't believe I've not really disgraced him and myself."
"Do _you_ believe it?" inquired Hiram, with a look at him as sudden and
sharp as the ray of a search light.
"I _know_ it, father," replied Arthur earnestly. "Am I not right,
Mrs. Whitney?"
"Don't be such an old fogy, Hiram," said Mrs. Whitney. "You ought to be
thankful you've got a son like Arthur, who makes a splendid impression
everywhere. He's the only western man that's got into exclusive societies
at Harvard in years simply on his own merits, and he's a great favorite
in Boston and in New York."
"My children need no one to defend them to me," said Hiram, in what might
be called his quiet tone--the tone he had never in his life used without
drying up utterly the discussion that had provoked it. Many people had
noted the curious effect of that tone and had resolved to defy it at the
next opportunity, "just to see what the consequences would be." But when
the opportunity had come, their courage had always withered.
"You can't expect me to be like you, father. You wouldn't, want it," said
Arthur, after the pause. "I must be myself, must develop my own
individuality."
Ranger stopped and that stopped the others. Without looking at his son,
he said slowly: "I ain't disputing that, boy. It ain't the question."
There was tremendousness in his restrained energy and intensity as he
went on: "What I'm thinking about is whether I ought to keep on _helping_
you to 'develop' yourself, as you call it. That's what won't let me
rest." And he abruptly walked away.
Mrs. Whitney and Arthur stared after him. "I don't think he's quite well,
Artie," she said reassuringly. "Don't worry. He'll come round all right.
But you ought to be a little more diplomatic."
Arthur was silent. Diplomacy meant deceit, and he hadn't yet reached the
stage of polite and comfortable compromise where deceit figures merely as
an amiable convenience for promoting smoothness in human intercourse. But
he believed that his father would "come round all right," as Mrs. Whitney
had so comfortingly said. How could it be otherwise when he had done
nothing discreditable, but, on the contrary, had been developing himself
in a way that reflected the highest credit upon his family, as it marched
up toward the lofty goal of "cultured" ambition, toward high and secure
social station.
Mrs. Whitney, however, did not believe her own statement. In large part
her reputation of being a "good, kind sort," like many such reputations,
rested on her habit of cheering on those who were going the wrong way and
were disturbed by some suspicion of the truth. She had known Hiram Ranger
long, had had many a trying experience of his character, gentle as a
trade wind--and as steady and unchangeable. Also, beneath her surface of
desperate striving after the things which common sense denounces, or
affects to denounce, as foolishness, there was a shrewd, practical
person. "He means some kind of mischief," she thought--an unreasoned,
instinctive conclusion, and, therefore, all-powerful with a woman.
That evening she wrote her daughter not to cut short her visit to get to
Saint X. "Wait until Ross is ready. Then you can join him at Chicago and
let him bring you."
Just about the hour she was setting down this first result of her
instinct's warning against the danger signal she had seen in Hiram
Ranger's manner, he was delivering a bombshell. He had led in the family
prayers as usual and had just laid the Bible on the center-table in the
back parlor after they rose from their knees. With his hands resting on
the cover of the huge volume he looked at his son. There was a
sacrificial expression in his eyes. "I have decided to withdraw Arthur's
allowance," he said, and his voice sounded hollow and distant, as
unfamiliar to his own ears as to theirs. "He must earn his own living. If
he wants a place at the mills, there's one waiting for him. If he'd
rather work at something else, I'll do what I can to get him a job."
Silence; and Hiram left the room.
Adelaide was first to recover sufficiently to speak. "O mother," cried
she, "you're not going to allow this!"
To Adelaide's and Arthur's consternation, Ellen replied quietly: "It
ain't no use to talk to him. I ain't lived all these years with your
father without finding out when he means what he says."
"It's so unjust!" exclaimed Adelaide.
There came into Ellen's face a look she had never seen there before. It
made her say: "O mother, I didn't mean that; only, it does seem hard."
Mrs. Ranger thought so, too; but she would have died rather than have
made the thought treason by uttering it. She followed her husband
upstairs, saying: "You and Arthur can close up, and put out the lights."
Adelaide, almost in tears over her brother's catastrophe, was thrilled
with admiration of his silent, courageous bearing. "What are you going to
do, Artie?"
This incautious question drew his inward ferment boiling to the surface.
"He has me down and I've got to take his medicine," said the young man,
teeth together and eyes dark with fury.
This she did not admire. Her first indignation abated, as she sat on
there thinking it out. "Maybe father is nearer right than we know," she
said to herself finally. "After all, Arthur will merely be doing as
father does. There's _something_ wrong with him, and with me, too, or we
shouldn't think that so terrible." But to Arthur she said nothing.
Encourage him in his present mood she must not; and to try to dissuade
him would simply goad him on.