"Those whom God has joined together let no man put asunder." It seemed
to the bride that the Rev. George Prentiss laid especially solemn
stress on these words, and as she listened to the announcement that,
forasmuch as Emil Stuart and Constance Forbes had consented together in
holy matrimony, he pronounced them to be man and wife, her nerves
quivered with satisfaction at the thought that she was Emil's forever.
The deed was done, and she was joyous that the doubt which had harassed
her in her weak moments--whether she was ready to renounce her ambition
to help in the great work of education for the sake of any man--was
solved and merged in the ocean of their love. Doubtless Emil was not
perfect, but she adored him. No one had even hinted that he was not
perfect, but she had made up her mind not to be ridiculous in her
rapture, and to look the probable truth squarely in the face as became
an intelligent woman. She knew that until recently he had been only a
clerk with Toler & Company, lumber merchants, and that he had just
started in business on his own account. He was dependent for support
on his individual labors, but she had in her own name the nice little
nest-egg of five thousand dollars, realized from the sale of the family
homestead at Colton, the country town, ten miles distant, from which,
an orphan, she had come to Benham a year previous. She was marrying
for love a young man who had his own way to make, just as hundreds of
others were doing every day, and she was proud of her part in the
compact. A great happiness had come into her life, almost against her
will, but now that it had come she recognized that it was nature
working in the ordinary way, and that she would not remain single for
all the kindergartens in creation. She had known Emil only a year;
still that year had been one of courtship, and no one had ever spoken
ill of him, though she had been told that Mr. Prentiss, as a rector
charged with overseeing the destinies of friendless girls who were
members of his parish, had made inquiries. Moreover, Mr. Prentiss had
agreed that two young people, situated as they were, whose hearts were
united, did well to marry on a small income and trust somewhat to the
future. How otherwise, as he sagely remarked, was ideal love to
flourish, and were mercenary considerations to be kept at bay? Emil
was twenty-five, and she just twenty. Youthful, but still of a proper
age, and they were growing older every day. Decidedly it was a prudent
love-match, and she had a right to be joyful, for there was nothing to
reproach herself with or to regret.
It will thus be observed that Constance Forbes was no happy-go-lucky
sort of girl, and that though she was marrying younger than she had
expected, she was marrying with her eyes open. She had scrutinized
severely the romantic episode which had made her and her lover
acquainted, and had even refused him the first time he asked her in
order to counterbalance the glamour resulting from that meeting. The
episode was a sequel to an accident to the train on which she was
travelling from Colton to Benham. The engine ran into the rear of some
freight cars, owing to a misplaced switch, and the tracks were strewed
with splintered merchandise, so that the train was delayed four hours.
The natural thing for passengers with time to kill was to inspect the
wreckage, which, besides the dilapidated railroad apparatus, consisted
of mangled chairs and tables, and bursted bags of grain, a medley of
freight impressive in its disorder. Constance found herself presently
discussing with a young man the injuries to the cow-catcher of the
engine, which had been twisted ludicrously awry. A moment before two
other persons, one of them a woman, had been on the spot, and the
conversation had been innocuously general, but they had drifted off.
Constance was conscious of having noticed the young man in her car, and
of having casually observed that he had an alert expression, and that
his hair rose perpendicularly from his brow, suggesting the
assertiveness of a king-bird. To allow a young man to scrape
acquaintance with her in cold blood would ordinarily have been entirely
repugnant to her ideas of maidenly propriety, but she resisted her
first impulse to turn her back on him and abruptly close the interview
as needlessly harsh. It would surely be prudish to abstain from
examining the battered locomotive, which lay on one side, with its nose
in the air, as though it had fallen in the act of rearing, merely
because a respectable-looking male passenger happened to be equally
interested in the results of the catastrophe. So it chanced that after
they had exchanged observations concerning the injuries to the
overthrown "Vulcan" and speculated as to how long they were likely to
be delayed, their conversation became less impersonal. That is, the
young man informed her that he was in the employ of Toler & Company,
lumber merchants, and was returning to Benham after having made some
collections for them in the neighboring country. Then he was familiar
with Benham? Familiar? He should say so. He had been settled there
for three years, and--(so he gave Constance to understand)--there was
absolutely nothing regarding the place which he could not tell her.
First of all, Benham was a growing, thriving city. Its population had
quadrupled in fifteen years. Think of that! So that now (in 1886)
there were upward of three hundred and fifty thousand souls in the
city's limits. It was a hustling place. A shrewd, energetic man, who
kept his wits active, ought to make his fortune there in ten years, if
he were given a proper chance. Was she going to live in Benham?
Constance admitted that she was, and, helped along by friendly
inquiries, she told him briefly her story. That she had lost her
father and mother within a few months of each other, and that she had
decided to come to Benham, of which, of course, she had heard as a
progressive city, in order to learn the kindergarten methods of
teaching. Subsequently she hoped to obtain an appointment as a
school-teacher, and so earn her own living.
"When you've finished your lessons and are ready to teach, let me know.
I may be able to help you. I'm a little in politics myself, and a word
to the school committee from a free and independent constituent might
get you a place."
He spoke jauntily though respectfully; but the offer reminded Constance
that the conversation was taking a more intimate turn than she had
bargained for. She thanked him, and began to move slowly away, not
with any definite idea of direction, but as a maidenly interruption.
Mr. Stuart--for he had told her his name--kept pace with her and seemed
quite unconscious of her purpose. In the few minutes during which they
had been chatting she had observed that he was somewhat above the
average height and rather spare, with a short mustache which curled up
at the ends and was becoming. Also, that he had small, dark eyes,
which he moved rapidly and which gave him, in conjunction with his
rising brow and hair, a restless, nervous expression.
As they walked along the track the conductor was coming toward them.
He had been to the telegraph office and was returning with a telegram
in his hands.
"Well, what are our chances of getting away from here?" Emil asked,
with the manner of a man to whom time is precious.
"It'll be a good three hours before the wrecking train arrives and the
road is clear."
The youth and the maid looked at each other and laughed at the
gloominess of the situation.
"In that case," said Constance, glancing at the sloping banks bordering
the railroad tracks, which were bright with white weed and other flora
of the early summer time, "we shall have to dine on wild flowers."
"I have some chocolate in my bag."
Constance flushed slightly with embarrassment. Her random remark
seemed almost to amount to a premeditated invitation to share his
resources.
Emil's gaze had followed hers in her allusion to the wild flowers.
"I'll tell you what," he exclaimed, impulsively, "since we have three
hours to wait, why shouldn't we escape from this culvert and see what
there is to be seen from the top of the bank? I shall be able to show
you Benham," he added, noticing, perhaps, that she looked doubtful,
"for we are only nine or ten miles away."
This was tempting. Besides it would surely be ridiculous to remain
where she was rather than explore the country merely because he was a
casual acquaintance and had some chocolate in his travelling bag. The
circumstances were harmless and unavoidable, unless she wished to write
herself down a prude. The result was the logic of common-sense
prevailed, and Constance gave her consent to the proposal. So they
climbed the bank presently, pausing on the way to gather some posies,
with which the party of the second part proceeded to adorn her hat,
after they had established themselves on an eligible fallen tree
commanding a pleasing view. The fallen tree was at the edge of a copse
of pine wood some two hundred yards from the bank. Thus they were
sheltered from the sun. Out of the copse, almost at their feet, ran a
bubbling brook, which added a touch of romance to the landscape rolling
away in undulating and occasionally wooded farming land, as far as the
eye could reach, until it terminated in a stretch of steeples and
towers surmounted by a murky cloud. There was Benham.
Although they were too distant to discern more than a confused
panorama, Emil essayed a few topographical details. He explained that
twenty-five years earlier Benham had comprised merely a cluster of
frame houses in the valley of the peaceful river Nye, which still
served as an aid to description. Primarily a village on the south side
of the stream, it had first developed in a southerly direction,
spreading like a bursting seed also laterally to east and west. Its
original main street, once bordered by old-fashioned frame houses with
grass-plots and shade trees, had evolved into Central Avenue, at first
the desirable street for residences, but now, and considerably prior to
his advent, the leading retail shopping artery, alive with dry-goods
shops, into which the women swarmed like flies. To the west of Central
Avenue lay the tide of social fashion culminating two miles distant in
the River Drive, a wide avenue of stately private houses, situated
where the Nye made a broad bend to the north, and the new district
beyond the river, where the mansion of Carleton Howard, the railroad
magnate, stood a pioneer among Elysian fields of real estate
enterprise, sanctified by immaculate road surfaces and liberal electric
light.
Constance listened eagerly. She was interested to know particulars
concerning the city where she was to live, and she enjoyed the lively
sardonic touches which relieved his description. Though possessing an
essentially earnest soul, she was susceptible to humor, and had an
aversion for lack of appreciation of true conditions.
To the east of Central Avenue, Stuart further explained, lay first the
shops and the business centre, and then the polyglot army of citizens
who worked in the mills, oil yards, and pork factories. Across the
river to the south, approached by seven bridges of iron, replacing two
frail wooden bridges of former days, were the mills and other
industrial establishments. Beyond these still further to the north was
Poland, so called, a settlement of the Poles, favorite resort of the
young ladies of Benham's first families eager to offer the benefits of
religion and civilization to the ignorant poor. Following the Nye in
its sweep to the north, until it deflected again to the east, so as to
run almost parallel to its first course, but in the opposite direction,
were the public park, the land bonded for an Art Museum, Wetmore
College (the Woman's Academy of learning), and the other more or less
ornamental institutions. This region of embryo public buildings,
garnished with august spaces, was a sort of boundary line on the north,
turning the current of industrial population more to the east. Just as
the tide to the west of Central Avenue was one of increasing comfort
and fashion, this to the southeast, stretching out as the city spread,
and forced constantly forward by the encroachments of trade, was one of
common workaday conditions, punctuated (as he phrased it) now and again
by poverty and distress.
"I tell you, Miss----"
"Forbes, Constance Forbes is my name."
"Thank you. I tell you, Miss Forbes, Benham is a wideawake city. We
have all the modern improvements. But the rich man gets the cream
every time. I heard millionaire Carleton Howard, the railroad magnate,
say the other day from the platform, that there is no country in the
world where the poor man is so well off as in this. Yet it's equally
true that the rich are all the time getting richer and the poor poorer.
He neglected to state that." He laughed scornfully, and his eyes
sought Constance's face for approval. She knew little concerning
millionaires or the truth of the proposition he was advancing, but it
interested her to perceive that he was evidently on the side of the
unfortunate, for she cherished a keen pity for the ignorant poor almost
as a heritage. Her father had been a country physician--an energetic,
sympathetic man, whose large vitality had been spent in relieving the
sufferings of a clientage of small tillers of the soil over an area of
fifteen miles. He had often spoken to her with pathos of the patient
struggles of the common people. Her own susceptibility to human
suffering had been early quickened by the destiny of her mother, who
had been thrown from a sleigh shortly after Constance's birth, and had
remained a paralytic invalid to the day of her death, requiring
incessant care.
"When I run for Congress," he resumed, scowling slightly as he fixed
his gaze on the murky cloud surmounting Benham, "it'll be on a platform
advocating government ownership of railroads, telegraphs, water-works,
electric street cars, and all the other fat things out of which our
modern philanthropists with capital squeeze enormous profits at the
expense of their fellow-citizens. I'm against all that sort of thing.
Buy a gas plant to-day and consolidate it with another to-morrow.
Profit to the promoter two hundred per cent., without leaving the
office. What does the consumer get? Cheaper gas and greater
efficiency. That's the fine-sounding tag; and some of the horny-handed
multitude are guileless enough to believe it. It won't be long though
now before I make my own pile," he added, not quite relevantly. "I'd
have made it before this if they hadn't hindered me."
Constance perceived that he expected her to inquire what this meant,
and she was curious to know. So she asked.
"My employers, Toler & Company. If I had had the capital and the
opportunities of those people, I should be wearing diamonds. I've
tried to point out to them more than once that they were throwing big
chances away by being so conservative and old-fashioned in their
methods instead of branching out boldly and making a ten strike. One
thing is certain, I'm not going to invent ideas for them for a pitiful
one thousand dollars a year much longer. If they think they can afford
not to raise my salary and give me a chance to show what I can do, I'm
going to let them try after January first. It isn't very pleasant,
Miss Forbes, to be doing most of the work and see someone else reaping
all the profits. They can't help making money, old fogies as they are."
It was certainly a galling situation. Constance, who was young
herself, felt that she sympathized with his desire to compel
recognition.
"It doesn't seem right at all," she said, "that you should be kept
down."
"I've made up my mind to give them notice that I must have an interest
in the business after the first of the year, or I quit and start on my
own account. I've my eye on a man with five thousand dollars who will
go into partnership with me I hope."
Constance thought of her own five thousand dollars. She would almost
like to lend it to him, though, of course, that was out of the
question. Still, there would be no harm in offering moral support.
"If I were a man," she said, "and had faith in my own abilities, I
wouldn't remain in a subordinate position a moment longer than was
really necessary."
In response to this note of sympathy Emil opened his bag and produced
two sticks of chocolate. He broke them apart and presented one to his
companion. He also exhibited a compressible metal drinking-cup, which
he filled from the bubbling brook. A crow cawed in the pine copse as
though to call attention to the idyl, but only the two philosophers on
the fallen tree-trunk were within hearing of his note of irony, and
they regarded it merely as an added rural charm.
"Would you object to my smoking my pipe?"
"Not in the least. My father was devoted to his pipe."
Another bond of sympathy. Or at least an indication to the swain that
here was a maiden who was no spoil-sport and who would not have to be
wooed by the sacrifice of personal comfort. Moreover, it was not lost
on him that she was an attractive-looking maiden, and that her voice
was well modulated and refined. Yet he was not thinking of her, but
merely of her sex in general, when he said, "Besides, I hope to be
married some day. How could I support a wife in Benham on one thousand
dollars a year in the manner in which I should wish her to live?"
Constance could not answer this question, and did not try. It belonged
to the category of remarks which were to be treated by a single woman
as monologues. But she was keenly interested. One thousand dollars a
year did not seem to her a very pitiful sum for a young couple just
starting in life. She had heard her father say that when he married
her mother he had only a hundred dollars in the world, and no assurance
of practice. But that was not in Benham. She had already divined that
Benham was to be a land of surprises. At all events she could not help
admiring Mr. Stuart's chivalric attitude toward his future wife. His
ambition was obviously quickened by the thought of his future
sweetheart, whoever she might be; which was an agreeable tribute to her
own sex, suggesting susceptibility to sentiment.
"Yes, I'd have been married before this if Toler & Company had not, as
you say, kept me down," he continued, pensively, blowing a ring of
smoke to emphasize his mood. "When after working hard all day I go to
my room at night and take up my violin, I often think that if I could
play to the woman I loved, instead of to the blank wall, how much
happier I should be. But I suppose some of my friends would declare
that I was a fool to desire a yoke around my neck before fate placed it
there."
His own readiness to relieve the stress of his confession by a sardonic
turn counteracted the constraint which his intimate avowal had aroused.
Incredible as it is that a man in his sober senses should offer himself
to a woman the first time he beholds her, no woman is altogether
unaware that he is liable to do so. A modest and thoughtful young girl
shrinks from precipitate progress in affairs of the heart. Obviously
the ground was less dangerous than it had for a moment appeared, but
Constance sought the avenue of escape which his allusion to music
offered. Besides it pleased her to hear that he was æsthetic in his
interests.
"You play on the violin, then?" she asked. "I envy anybody who has the
talent and the opportunity for anything of that sort. I sing a little,
but my voice is uncultivated, for in Colton there was no one to tell us
our faults." The earnest gleam in her fine dark eyes seemed to second
the fresh enthusiasm of her tone.
The warning scream of the whistle, not the voice of the crow, broke in
at this point on their preoccupation with each other. This was the
romantic episode from which their acquaintance dated--an episode which
might readily have signified nothing. But on the other hand, it
naturally supplied to the party of the second part a fair field of
memory in which her imagination might wander when stirred by the
subsequent attentions of this young knight with sympathy for the
unfortunate, resolute confidence in his own abilities, generous views
in regard to matrimony and a sensitive, æsthetic soul. For Emil Stuart
sought her out at once, visited her at her lodgings and gave
unmistakable signs that his purpose was both honorable and definite.
Within six months she knew from his own lips that he wished to make her
his wife. She took another three in which to conquer her scruples and
maidenly disinclination to be won too easily. Why should she not
yield? He was her first lover, and she loved him, and he declared with
fervor that he adored her. Contact with the conditions of a large city
had shown her unmistakably that only after years of struggle could she
hope to be more than a mere hand-maiden in the work of education, and
that during the early period of her employment, if not indeed for life,
the hours of work would be long and confining and her pleasures few.
Here was a companion who would provide her with a home, and upon whom
the tenderness of her woman's nature could be freely bestowed. It was
the old, old story, she said to herself, but was there a better one?