MAN AND GENTLEMAN
A few evenings later, Del, in a less strained, less despondent frame of
mind, coming home from supper at her mother's, found Estelle Wilmot on
the front veranda talking with Lorry Tague. She had seen this same sight
perhaps half-a-dozen times since Estelle and Arden had come to stop with
her at the Villa d'Orsay. On this particular evening his manner toward
Estelle was no different from what it had been the other times; yet, as
Del approached them, she felt the electric atmosphere which so often
envelops two who love each other, and betrays their secret carefully
guarded behind formal manner and indifferent look and tone. She wondered
that she had been blind to what was now obvious.
"Well, Arthur has at last compelled you to go to work," said she
smilingly to the big cooper with the waving tawny hair and the keen, kind
gray eyes. Then, to show her respect for the secret, she said to Estelle,
"Perhaps he hasn't told you that he was made superintendent of the
cooperage to-day?"
Estelle blushed a little, her eyes dancing. "He was just telling me,"
replied she.
"I understand why you yielded," continued Adelaide to Lorry. "Arthur has
been showing me the plans for the new factories. Gardens all round, big
windows, high ceilings, everything done by electricity, no smoke or soot,
a big swimming pool for winter or summer, a big restaurant, dressing
rooms--everything! Who'd have believed that work could be carried on in
such surroundings?"
"It's about time, isn't it," said Lorry, in his slow, musical voice,
"that idleness was deprived of its monopoly of comforts and luxuries?"
"How sensible that is!" said Del admiringly. "Yet nobody thinks of it."
"Why," Lorry went on, "the day'll come when they'll look back on the way
we work nowadays, as we do on the time when a lot of men never went out
to work except in chains and with keepers armed with lashes. The fellows
that call Dory and Arthur crazy dreamers don't realize what ignorant
savages they themselves are."
"They have no imagination," said Estelle.
"No imagination," echoed Lorry. "That's the secret of the stupidity and
the horror of change, and of the notion that the way a thing's done
to-day is the way it'll always be done."
"I'm afraid Arthur is going to get himself into even deeper trouble when
these new plans are announced," said Del.
Arthur's revolution had already inflamed the other manufacturers at Saint
X against him. Huge incomes were necessary to the support of their
extravagant families and to the increase of the fortunes they were piling
up "to save their children from fear of want"--as if that same "fear of
want" were not the only known spur to the natural lethargy of the human
animal! They explained to their workmen that the university industries
were not business enterprises at all, and therefore must not be confused
and compared with enterprises that were "practical"; but the workmen
fixed tenaciously upon the central fact that the university's men worked
at mechanical labor fewer hours each day by four to seven, and even
eight, got higher wages, got more out of life in every way. Nor was there
any of the restraint and degradation of the "model town." The workers
could live and act as they pleased; it was by the power of an intelligent
public opinion that Arthur was inducing his fellows and their families to
build for themselves attractive homes, to live in tasteful comfort, to
acquire sane habits of eating, drinking, and personal appearance. And no
one was more amazed than himself at the swiftness with which the
overwhelming majority responded to the opportunity. Small wonder that
the other manufacturers, who at best never went beyond the crafty,
inexpensive schemes of benevolent charity, were roaring against the
university as a "hotbed of anarchy."
At Adelaide's suggestion of the outburst that would follow the new and
still more "inflammatory" revolution, Lorry shrugged his shoulders and
laughed easily. "Nobody need worry for that brother of yours, Mrs.
Hargrave," said he. "There may be some factories for sale cheap before
many years. If so, the university can buy them in and increase its
usefulness. Dory and Arthur are going to have a university that will be
up to the name before they get through--one for all ages and kinds, and
both sexes, and for everybody all his life long and in all his
relations."
"It's a beautiful dream," said Del. She was remembering how Dory used to
enlarge upon it in Paris until his eloquence made her feel that she loved
him at the same time that it also gave her a chilling sense of his being
far from her, too big and impersonal for so intimate and personal a thing
as the love she craved. "A beautiful dream," she repeated with a sigh.
"That's the joy of life," said Estelle, "isn't it? To have beautiful
dreams, and to help make them come true."
"And this one is actually coming true," said Lorry. "Wait a few years,
only a few, and you'll see the discoveries of science make everything so
cheap that vulgar, vain people will give up vulgarity and vanity in
despair. A good many of the once aristocratic vulgarities have been
cheapened into absurdity already. The rest will follow."
"Only a few years?" said Del, laughing, yet more than half-convinced.
"Use your imagination, Mrs. Hargrave," replied Lorry, in his large,
good-humored way. "Don't be afraid to be sensible just because most
people look on common sense as insanity. A hundred things that used to be
luxuries for the king alone are now so cheap that the day-laborer has
them--all in less than two lifetimes of real science! To-morrow or next
day some one will discover, say, the secret of easily and cheaply
interchanging the so-called elements. Bang! the whole structure of
swagger and envy will collapse!"
They all laughed, and Del went into the house. "Estelle--no woman, no
matter who--could hope to get a better husband than Lorry," she was
thinking. "And, now that he's superintendent, there's no reason why they
shouldn't marry. What a fine thing, what an American thing, that a man
with no chance at all in the start should be able to develop himself so
that a girl like Estelle could--yes, and should--be proud of his love and
proud to love him." She recalled how Lorry at the high school was about
the most amusing of the boys, with the best natural manner, and far and
away the best dancer; how he used to be invited everywhere, until
excitement about fashion and "family" reached Saint X; how he was then
gradually dropped until he, realizing what was the matter, haughtily
"cut" all his former friends and associates. "We've certainly been racing
downhill these last few years. Where the Wilmots used to be about the
only silly people in town, there are scores of families now with noses in
the air and eyes looking eagerly about for chances to snub. But, on the
other hand, there's the university, and Arthur--and Dory." She dismissed
Lorry and Estelle and Saint X's fashionable strivings and, in the
library, sat down to compose a letter to Dory--no easy task in those
days, when there were seething in her mind and heart so much that she
longed to tell him but ought not, so much that she ought to tell but
could not.
Lorry had acted as if he were about to depart, while Adelaide was there;
he resumed his seat on the steps at Estelle's feet as soon as she
disappeared. "I suppose I ought to go," said he, with a humorous glance
up at her face with its regular features and steadfast eyes.
She ran her slim fingers through his hair, let the tips of them linger an
instant on his lips before she took her hand away.
"I couldn't let you go just yet," said she slowly, absently. "This is the
climax of the day. In this great, silent, dim light all my dreams--all
our dreams--seem to become realities and to be trooping down from the sky
to make us happy."
A pause, then he: "I can see them now." But soon he moved to rise. "It
frightens me to be as happy as I am this evening. I must go, dear. We're
getting bolder and bolder. First thing you know, your brother will be
suspecting--and that means your mother."
"I don't seem to care any more," replied the girl. "Mother is really in
much better health, and has got pretty well prepared to expect almost
anything from me. She has become resigned to me as a 'working person.'
Then, too, I'm thoroughly inoculated with the habit of doing as I please.
I guess that's from being independent and having my own money. What a
good thing money is!"
"So long as it means independence," suggested Lorry; "but not after it
means dependence."
But Estelle was thinking of their future. The delay, the seemingly
endless delay, made her even more impatient than it made him, as is
always the case where the woman is really in love. In the man love holds
the impetuosity of passion in leash; in the woman it rouses the deeper,
the more enduring force of the maternal instinct--not merely the
unconscious or, at most, half-conscious longing for the children that are
to be, but the desire to do for the man--to look after his health, his
physical comfort, to watch over and protect him; for, to the woman in
love, the man seems in those humble ways less strong than she--a helpless
creature, dependent on her. "It's going to be much harder to wait," said
she, "now that you are superintendent and I have bought out Mrs.
Hastings's share of my business."
They both laughed, but Lorry said: "It's no joke. A little too much money
has made fools of as wise people as we are--many and many's the time."
"Not as wise a person as you are, and as you'll always make me be, or
seem to be," replied Estelle.
Lorry pressed his big hand over hers for an instant. "Now that I've left
off real work," said he, "I'll soon be able to take your hand without
giving you a rough reminder of the difference between us."
He held out his hands, palms upward. They were certainly not soft and
smooth, but they more than made up in look of use and strength what they
lacked in smoothness. She put her small hands one on either side of his,
and they both thrilled with the keen pleasure the touch of edge of hand
against edge of hand gave them. In the ends of her fingers were the marks
of her needlework. He bent and kissed those slightly roughened finger
ends passionately. "I love those marks!" he exclaimed. "They make me feel
that we belong to each other."
"I'd be sorry to see _your_ hands different," said she, her eyes shining
upon his. "There are many things you don't understand about me--for
instance, that it's just those marks of work that make you so dear to me.
A woman may begin by liking a man because he's her ideal in certain ways,
but once she really cares, she loves whatever is part of him."
In addition to the reasons she had given for feeling "bolder" about her
"plebeian" lover, there was another that was the strongest of all. A few
months before, a cousin of her father's had died in Boston, where he was
the preacher of a most exclusive and fashionable church. He had endeared
himself to his congregation by preaching one Easter Sunday a sermon
called "The Badge of Birth." In it he proceeded to show from the
Scriptures themselves how baseless was the common theory that Jesus was
of lowly origin. "The common people heard Him gladly," cried the Rev.
Eliot Wilmot, "because they instinctively felt His superiority of birth,
felt the dominance of His lineage. In His veins flowed the blood of the
royal house of Israel, the blood of the first anointed kings of Almighty
God." And from this interesting premise the Reverend Wilmot deduced the
divine intent that the "best blood" should have superior
rights--leadership, respect, deference. So dear was he to his flock that
they made him rich in this world's goods as well as in love and honor.
The Wilmots of Saint X had had lively expectations from his estate. They
thought that one holding the views eloquently set forth in "The Badge of
Birth" must dedicate his fortune to restoring the dignity and splendor of
the main branch of the Wilmot family. But, like all their dreams, this
came to naught. His fortune went to a theological seminary to endow
scholarships and fellowships for decayed gentlemen's sons; he remembered
only Verbena Wilmot. On his one visit to the crumbling, weed-choked seat
of the head of the house, he had seen Verbena's wonderful hands, so
precious and so useless that had she possessed rings and deigned to wear
them she would not have permitted the fingers of the one hand to put them
on the fingers of the other. The legacy was five thousand dollars, at
four per cent., an income of two hundred dollars a year. Verbena invested
the first quarterly installment in a long-dreamed-of marble reproduction
of her right hand which, after years of thinking daily about the matter,
she had decided was a shade more perfect than the left.
If one dim eye makes a man king among blind men--to translate to the
vernacular Verbena's elegant reasoning--an income, however trifling, if
it have no taint of toil, no stench of sweat upon it, makes its possessor
entitled to royal consideration in a family of paupers and dead beats,
degraded by harboring a breadwinner of an Estelle. No sudden recipient of
a dazzling, drenching shower of wealth was ever more exalted than was
Verbena, once in possession of "_my_ legacy." Until the Rev. Eliot
Wilmot's posthumous blessing descended upon her, the Wilmots lived
together in comparative peace and loving kindness. They were all, except
for their mania of genealogy, good-humored, extremely well-mannered
people, courteous as much by nature as by deliberate intent. But, with
the coming of the blessing, peace and friendliness in that family were at
an end. Old Preston Wilmot and Arden railed unceasingly against the
"traitor" Eliot; Verbena defended him. Their mother and Estelle were
drawn into the battle from time to time, Estelle always against her will.
Before Verbena had been a woman of property three months, she was hating
her father and brother for their sneers and insults, Arden had gone back
to drinking, and the old gentleman was in a savage and most ungentlemanly
humor from morning until night.
Estelle, the "black sheep" ever since she began to support them by
engaging in trade, drew aloof now, was at home as little as she could
contrive, often ate a cold supper in the back of her shop. She said
nothing to Lorry of the family shame; she simply drew nearer to him. And
out of this changed situation came, unconsciously to herself, a deep
contempt for her father and her brother, a sense that she was indeed as
alien as the Wilmots so often alleged, in scorn of her and her shop;
Verbena's income went to buy adornments for herself, dresses that would
give the hands a fitting background; Estelle's earnings went to her
mother, who distributed them, the old gentleman and Arden ignoring whence
and how the money came.
As Estelle and Lorry lingered on the porch of the Villa d'Orsay that
August evening, alone in the universe under that vast, faintly luminous,
late-twilight sky, Arden Wilmot came up the lawn. Neither Lorry nor
Estelle saw or heard him until his voice, rough with drink and passion,
savagely stung them with, "What the hell does _this_ mean?"
Lorry dropped Estelle's hand and stood up, Estelle behind him, a
restraining hand on his shoulder. Both were white to the lips; their sky,
the moment before so clear and still, was now black and thunderous with a
frightful storm. Estelle saw that her brother was far from sober; and the
sight of his sister caressed by Lorry Tague would have maddened him even
had he not touched liquor. She darted between the two men. "Don't be a
goose, Arden," she panted, with a hysterical attempt to laugh.
"That fellow was touching you!" stormed Arden. "You miserable disgrace!"
And he lifted his hand threateningly to her.
Lorry put his arm round her and drew her back, himself advancing. "You
must be careful how you act toward the woman who is to be my wife, Mr.
Wilmot," he said, afire in all his blood of the man who has the right to
demand of the whole world the justice he gives it.
Arden Wilmot stared dumfounded, first at Lorry, then at Estelle. In the
pause, Adelaide, drawn from the library by the sound of Arden's fury,
reached the front doorway, saw the three, instantly knew the whole cause
of this sudden, harsh commotion. With a twitch that was like the shaking
off of a detaining grasp, with a roar like a mortally wounded beast's,
Arden recovered the use of limbs and voice. "You infernal lump of dirt!"
he yelled. Adelaide saw his arm swing backward, then forward, and up--saw
something bright in his hand. A flash--"O God, God!" she moaned. But she
could not turn her eyes away or close them.
Lorry stood straight as a young sycamore for an instant, turned toward
Estelle. "Good-by--my love!" he said softly, and fell, face downward,
with his hands clasping the edge of her dress.
And Estelle--
She made no sound. Like a ghost, she knelt and took Lorry's head in her
lap; with one hand against each of his cheeks she turned his head.
"Lorry! Lorry!" she murmured in a heartbreaking voice that carried far
through the stillness.
Arden put the revolver back in his pocket, seized her by the
shoulder. "Come away from that!" he ordered roughly, and half-lifted
her to her feet.
With a cry so awful that Adelaide swayed and almost swooned at hearing
it, Estelle wrenched herself free, flung herself on her lover's body,
buried her fingers in his hair, covered his dead face with kisses, bathed
her lips in the blood that welled from his heart. Shouts and heavy, quick
tramping from many directions--the tempest of murder was drawing people
to its center as a cyclone sucks in leaves. Fright in Arden Wilmot's
face, revealed to Adelaide in the light streaming from the big
drawing-room windows. A group--a crowd--a multitude--pouring upon the
lawns from every direction--swirling round Arden as he stood over the
prostrate intermingled forms of his sister and her dead lover.
Then Adelaide, clinging to the door frame to steady herself, heard Arden
say in a loud blustering voice: "I found this fellow insulting my sister,
and I treated him as a Wilmot always treats an insult." And as the words
reached her, they fired her. All her weakness, all her sense of
helplessness fled.
Out of the circle came a man bearing unconscious Estelle, blood upon her
face, upon her bosom, blood dripping from her hands. "Where shall I take
her?" asked the man of Adelaide. "A doctor's been sent for."
"Into the hall--on the sofa--at the end--and watch by her," said Del, in
quick, jerking tones. Her eyes were ablaze, her breath came in gusts.
Without waiting to see where he went with his burden, she rushed down the
broad steps and through the crowd, pushing them this way and that. She
faced Arden Wilmot--not a lady, but a woman, a flaming torch of outraged
human feeling.
"You lie!" she cried, and he seemed to wither before her. "You lie about
him and about her! You, with the very clothes you're dressed in, the very
liquor you're drunk with, the very pistol that shot him down, paid for by
_her_ earnings! He never offended you--not by look or word. You murdered
him--I saw--heard. You murdered the man she was to marry, the man she
loved--murdered him because she loved him. Look at him!"
The crowd widened its circle before the sweep of her arm. Lorry's
blood-stained body came into view. His face, beautiful and, in its pale
calm, stronger than life, was open to the paling sky. "There lies a man,"
she sobbed, and her tears were of the kind that make the fires of passion
burn the fiercer. "A man any woman with a woman's heart would have been
proud to be loved by. And you--you've murdered him!"
"Take care, Mrs. Hargrave," a voice whispered in her ear. "They'll
lynch him."
"And why not?" she cried out. "Why should such a creature live?"
A hundred men were reaching for Arden, and from the crowd rose that
hoarse, low, hideous sound which is the first deep bay of the unleashed
blood-madness. "No, no!" she begged in horror, and waved them back.
"Adelaide!" gasped Arden, wrenching himself free and crouching at her
feet and clinging to her skirts. "Save me! I only did my duty as a
gentleman."
She looked down at him in unpitying scorn, then out at the crowd. "Hear
that!" she cried, with a wild, terrible laugh. "A gentleman! Yes, that's
true--a gentleman. Saving your sister from the coarse contamination of an
honest man!" Then to the men who were dragging at him: "No, I say--_no_!
Let him alone! Don't touch the creature! He'll only foul your hands." And
she pushed them back. "Let him live. What worse fate could he have than
to be pointed at every day of a long life as the worthless drunken thing
who murdered a man, and then tried to save himself by defaming his victim
and his own sister?"
Under cover of her barrier of command, the constable led Arden into the
house, past where his sister lay in a swoon, and by the back way got him
to jail. The crowd, fascinated by her beauty, which the tempest of
passion had transfigured into terrible and compelling majesty, was
completely under her control. She stayed on, facing that throng of men,
many of whom she knew by name, until Lorry's body was taken away. She was
about to go into the house, as the crowd began quietly to disperse, when
there arose a murmur that made her turn quickly toward the doors. There
was Estelle, all disheveled and bloodstained. Her face was like death;
her movements were like one walking in a deep sleep as she descended to
the lawn and came toward them.
"Where is he? Where is he?" she wailed, pushing this way and that through
the crowd, her hands outstretched, her long fair hair streaming like a
bridal veil. Her feet slipped on the wet grass--where it was wet with his
blood. She staggered, swayed uncertainly, fell with her arms outstretched
as if the earth were he she sought. She lay there moaning--the cry of her
tortured nerves alone, for her mind was unconscious.
Adelaide and Madelene, who had just come, bent to lift her. But their
strength failed them and they sank to their knees in terror; for, from
the silent crowd there burst a shriek: "Kill him, kill him!" And all in
an instant the grounds were emptied of those thousands; and to the two
women came an ever fainter but not less awful roar as the mob swept on
uptown toward the jail.
Madelene was first to recover. "Let us carry her in," she said. And when
the limp form was once more on the big sofa and the eyelids were
trembling to unclose, she ripped open the right sleeve and thrust in the
needle that gives oblivion.
Adelaide went to the window and listened. Before her in the moonlight was
the place where that tempest of hate and murder had burst and raged. Once
more her heart hardened in the pitiless fury of outraged mercy. A moan
from Estelle stung her, and she leaned forward the better to catch the
music of the mob's distant shriek. Silence for full five minutes; then a
sound like that which bursts from the throats of the bloodhounds as they
bury their fangs in their quarry. She gave a faint scream, covered her
face. "Oh, spare him! Spare him!" she cried. And she sank to the floor in
a faint, for she knew that Arden Wilmot was dead.
* * * * *
Adelaide took Estelle's store until Estelle came back to it, her surface
calm like the smooth river that hides in its tortured bosom the
deep-plunged rapids below the falls. The day after Estelle's return
Adelaide began to study architecture at the university; soon she was made
an instructor, with the dean delighted and not a little mystified by her
energy and enthusiasm. Yet the matter was simple and natural: she had
emerged from her baptism of blood and fire--a woman; at last she had
learned what in life is not worth while; she was ready to learn what it
has to offer that is worth while--the sole source of the joys that have
no reaction, of the content that is founded upon the rock.