← catalogue

The Second Generation

by David Graham Phillips · English · Gutenberg #11614 · 652,652 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Second Generation
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Second Generation

Author: David Graham Phillips


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11614]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11614

Credits: Produced by Rick Niles, John Hagerson, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECOND GENERATION ***

                         THE SECOND GENERATION

                       BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

AUTHOR OF "THE COST," "THE PLUM TREE," "THE SOCIAL SECRETARY," "THE
DELUGE," ETC.

                                 1906




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

     I.--"PUT YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER!"
    II.--OF SOMEBODIES AND NOBODIES
   III.--MRS. WHITNEY INTERVENES
    IV.--THE SHATTERED COLOSSUS
     V.--THE WILL
    VI.--MRS. WHITNEY NEGOTIATES
   VII.--JILTED
  VIII.--A FRIEND IN NEED
    IX.--THE LONG FAREWELL
     X.--"THROUGH LOVE FOR MY CHILDREN"
    XI.--"SO SENSITIVE"
   XII.--ARTHUR FALLS AMONG LAWYERS
  XIII.--BUT IS RESCUED
   XIV.--SIMEON
    XV.--EARLY ADVENTURES OF A 'PRENTICE
   XVI.--A CAST-OFF SLIPPER
  XVII.--POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE
 XVIII.--LOVE, THE BLUNDERER
   XIX.--MADELENE
    XX.--LORRY'S ROMANCE
   XXI.--HIRAM'S SON
  XXII.--VILLA D'ORSAY
 XXIII.--A STROLL IN A BYPATH
  XXIV.--DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES
   XXV.--MAN AND GENTLEMAN
  XXVI.--CHARLES WHITNEY'S HEIRS
 XXVII.--THE DOOR AJAR
XXVIII.--THE DEAD THAT LIVE




THE SECOND GENERATION




CHAPTER I

"PUT YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER!"


In six minutes the noon whistle would blow. But the workmen--the seven
hundred in the Ranger-Whitney flour mills, the two hundred and fifty in
the Ranger-Whitney cooperage adjoining--were, every man and boy of them,
as hard at it as if the dinner rest were hours away. On the threshold of
the long room where several scores of filled barrels were being headed
and stamped there suddenly appeared a huge figure, tall and broad and
solid, clad in a working suit originally gray but now white with the
flour dust that saturated the air, and coated walls and windows both
within and without. At once each of the ninety-seven men and boys was
aware of that presence and unconsciously showed it by putting on extra
"steam." With swinging step the big figure crossed the packing room. The
gray-white face held straight ahead, but the keen blue eyes paused upon
each worker and each task. And every "hand" in those two great factories
knew how all-seeing that glance was--critical, but just; exacting, but
encouraging. All-seeing, in this instance, did not mean merely
fault-seeing.

Hiram Ranger, manufacturing partner and controlling owner of the
Ranger-Whitney Company of St. Christopher and Chicago, went on into the
cooperage, leaving energy behind him, rousing it before him. Many times,
each working day, between seven in the morning and six at night, he made
the tour of those two establishments. A miller by inheritance and
training, he had learned the cooper's trade like any journeyman, when he
decided that the company should manufacture its own barrels. He was not a
rich man who was a manufacturer; he was a manufacturer who was
incidentally rich--one who made of his business a vocation. He had no
theories on the dignity of labor; he simply exemplified it, and would
have been amazed, and amused or angered according to his mood, had it
been suggested to him that useful labor is not as necessary and
continuous a part of life as breathing. He did not speculate and talk
about ideals; he lived them, incessantly and unconsciously. The talker of
ideals and the liver of ideals get echo and response, each after his
kind--the talker, in the empty noise of applause; the liver, in the
silent spread of the area of achievement.

A moment after Hiram roused the packing room of the flour mill with the
master's eye, he was in the cooperage, the center of a group round one of
the hooping machines. It had got out of gear, and the workman had bungled
in shutting off power; the result was chaos that threatened to stop the
whole department for the rest of the day. Ranger brushed away the
wrangling tinkerers and examined the machine. After grasping the problem
in all its details, he threw himself flat upon his face, crawled under
the machine, and called for a light. A moment later his voice issued
again, in a call for a hammer. Several minutes of sharp hammering; then
the mass of iron began to heave. It rose at the upward pressure of
Ranger's powerful arms and legs, shoulders and back; it crashed over on
its side; he stood up and, without pause or outward sign of his exertion
of enormous strength, set about adjusting the gearing to action, with the
broken machinery cut out. "And he past sixty!" muttered one workman to
another, as a murmur of applause ran round the admiring circle. Clearly
Hiram Ranger was master there not by reason of money but because he was
first in brain and in brawn; not because he could hire but because he
could direct and do.

In the front rank of the ring of on-looking workmen stood a young man,
tall as himself and like him in the outline of his strong features,
especially like him in the fine curve of the prominent nose. But in
dress and manner this young man was the opposite of the master workman
now facing him in the dust and sweat of toil. He wore a fashionable suit
of light gray tweed, a water-woven Panama with a wine-colored ribbon, a
wine-colored scarf; several inches of wine-colored socks showed below his
high-rolled, carefully creased trousers. There was a seal ring on the
little finger of the left of a pair of large hands strong with the
symmetrical strength which is got only at "polite" or useless exercise.
Resting lightly between his lips was a big, expensive-looking Egyptian
cigarette; the mingled odor of that and a delicate cologne scented the
air. With a breeziness which a careful observer of the niceties of manner
might have recognized as a disguise of nervousness, the young man
advanced, extending his right hand.

"Hello, father!" said he, "I came to bring you home to lunch."

The master workman did not take the offered hand. After a quick glance of
pride and pleasure which no father could have denied so manly and
handsome a son, he eyed the young man with a look that bit into every one
of his fashionable details. Presently he lifted his arm and pointed. The
son followed the direction of that long, strong, useful-looking
forefinger, until his gaze rested upon a sign: "No Smoking"--big, black
letters on a white background.

"Beg pardon," he stammered, flushing and throwing away the cigarette.

The father went to the smoking butt and set his foot upon it. The son's
face became crimson; he had flung the cigarette among the shavings which
littered the floor. "The scientists say a fire can't be lighted from
burning tobacco," he said, with a vigorous effort to repair the rent in
his surface of easy assurance.

The old man--if that adjective can be justly applied to one who had such
strength and energy as his--made no reply. He strode toward the door, the
son following, acute to the grins and winks the workmen were exchanging
behind his back. The father opened the shut street door of the cooperage,
and, when the son came up, pointed to the big, white letters: "No
Admittance. Apply at the Office."

"How did you get in here?" he asked.

"I called in at the window and ordered one of the men to open the door,"
explained the son.

"Ordered." The father merely repeated the word.

"Requested, then," said the son, feeling that he was displaying
praiseworthy patience with "the governor's" eccentricities.

"Which workman?"

The son indicated a man who was taking a dinner pail from under a
bench at the nearest window. The father called to him: "Jerry!" Jerry
came quickly.

"Why did you let this young--young _gentleman_ in among us?"

"I saw it was Mr. Arthur," began Jerry.

"Then you saw it was not anyone who has any business here. Who gave you
authority to suspend the rules of this factory?"

"Don't, father!" protested Arthur. "You certainly can't blame him. He
knew I'd make trouble if he didn't obey."

"He knew nothing of the sort," replied Hiram Ranger. "I haven't been
dealing with men for fifty years--However, next time you'll know what to
do, Jerry."

"He warned me it was against the rules," interjected Arthur.

A triumphant smile gleamed in the father's eyes at this vindication of
the discipline of the mills. "Then he knew he was doing wrong. He must be
fined. You can pay the fine, young _gentleman_--if you wish."

"Certainly," murmured Arthur. "And now, let's go to lunch."

"To dinner," corrected the father; "your mother and I have dinner in the
middle of the day, not lunch."

"To dinner, then. Anything you please, pa, only let's go."

When they were at the office and the father was about to enter the inner
room to change his clothes, he wheeled and said: "Why ain't you at
Harvard, passing your examinations?"

Arthur's hands contracted and his eyes shifted; in a tone to which
repression gave a seeming lightness, he announced: "The exams, are over.
I've been plucked."

The slang was new to Hiram Ranger, but he understood. In important
matters his fixed habit was never to speak until he had thought well;
without a word he turned and, with a heaviness that was new in his
movements, went into the dressing room. The young man drew a cautious but
profound breath of relief--the confession he had been dreading was over;
his father knew the worst. "If the governor only knew the world better,"
he said to himself, "he'd know that at every college the best fellows
always skate along the edge of the thin ice. But he doesn't, and so he
thinks he's disgraced." He lit another cigarette by way of consolation
and clarification.

When the father reappeared, dressed for the street, he was apparently
unconscious of the cigarette. They walked home in silence--a
striking-looking pair, with their great similar forms and their handsome
similar faces, typical impersonations of the first generation that is
sowing in labor, and the second generation that is reaping in idleness.

"Oh!" exclaimed Arthur, as they entered the Ranger place and began to
ascend the stone walk through the lawns sloping down from the big,
substantial-looking, creeper-clad house. "I stopped at Cleveland half a
day, on the way West, and brought Adelaide along." He said this with
elaborate carelessness; in fact, he had begged her to come that she might
once more take her familiar and highly successful part of buffer between
him and his father's displeasure.

The father's head lifted, and the cloud over his face also. "How is she?"
he asked. "Bang up!" answered Arthur. "She's the sort of a sister a man's
proud of--looks and style, and the gait of a thoroughbred." He
interrupted himself with a laugh. "There she is, now!" he exclaimed.

This was caused by the appearance, in the open front doors, of a strange
creature with a bright pink ribbon arranged as a sort of cockade around
and above its left ear--a brown, hairy, unclean-looking thing that gazed
with human inquisitiveness at the approaching figures. As the elder
Ranger drew down his eyebrows the creature gave a squeak of alarm and,
dropping from a sitting position to all fours, wheeled and shambled
swiftly along the wide hall, walking human fashion with its hind feet,
dog fashion with its fore feet or arms.

At first sight of this apparition Ranger halted. He stared with an
expression so astounded that Arthur laughed outright.

"What was that?" he now demanded.

"Simeon," replied Arthur. "Del has taken on a monk. It's the latest fad."

"Oh!" ejaculated Ranger. "Simeon."

"She named it after grandfather--and there _is_ a--" Arthur stopped
short. He remembered that "Simeon" was his father's father; perhaps his
father might not see the joke. "That is," he explained, "she was looking
for a name, and I thought of 'simian,' naturally, and that, of course,
suggested 'Simeon'--and--"

"That'll do," said Hiram, in a tone of ominous calm which his family
knew was the signal that a subject must be dropped.

Now there was a quick _froufrou_ of skirts, and from the sitting room to
the left darted a handsome, fair girl of nineteen, beautifully dressed in
a gray summer silk with simple but effectively placed bands of pink
embroidery on blouse and skirt. As she bounded down the steps and into
her father's arms her flying skirts revealed a pair of long, narrow feet
in stylish gray shoes and gray silk stockings exactly matching the rest
of her costume. "Daddy! Daddy!" she cried.

His arms were trembling as they clasped her--were trembling with the
emotion that surged into her eyes in the more obvious but less
significant form of tears. "Glad to see you, Delia," was all he said.

She put her slim white forefinger on his lips.

He smiled. "Oh! I forgot. You're Adelaide, of course, since you've
grown up."

"Why call me out of my name?" she demanded, gayly. "You should have
christened me Delia if you had wanted me named that."

"I'll try to remember, next time," he said, meekly. His gray eyes were
dancing and twinkling like sunbeams pouring from breaches in a spent
storm-cloud; there was an eloquence of pleasure far beyond laughter's in
the rare, infrequent eye smiles from his sober, strong face.

Now there was a squeaking and chattering behind them. Adelaide whirled
free of her father's arms and caught up the monkey. "Put out your hand,
sir," said she, and she kissed him. Her father shuddered, so awful was
the contrast between the wizened, dirty-brown face and her roselike
skin and fresh fairness. "Put out your hand and bow, sir," she went on.
"This is Mr. Hiram Ranger, Mr. Simeon. Mr. Simeon, Mr. Ranger; Mr.
Ranger, Mr. Simeon."

Hiram, wondering at his own weakness, awkwardly took the paw so uncannily
like a mummied hand. "What did you do this for, Adelaide?" said he, in a
tone of mild remonstrance where he had intended to be firm.

"He's so fascinating, I couldn't resist. He's so wonderfully human--"

"That's it," said her father; "so--so--"

"Loathsomely human," interjected Arthur.

"Loathsome," said the father.

"That impression soon wears off," assured Adelaide, "and he's just like a
human being as company. I'd be bored to death if I didn't have him. He
gives me an occupation."

At this the cloud settled on Ranger's face again--a cloud of sadness. An
occupation!

Simeon hid his face in Adelaide's shoulder and began to whimper. She
patted him softly. "How can you be so cruel?" she reproached her father.
"He has feelings almost like a human being."

Ranger winced. Had the daughter not been so busy consoling her unhappy
pet, the father's expression might have suggested to her that there was,
not distant from her, a being who had feelings, not almost, but quite
human, and who might afford an occupation for an occupation-hunting young
woman which might make love and care for a monkey superfluous. But he
said nothing. He noted that the monkey's ribbon exactly matched the
embroidery on Adelaide's dress.

"If he were a dog or a cat, you wouldn't mind," she went on.

True enough! Clearly, he was unreasonable with her.

"Do you want me to send him away?"

"I'll get used to him, I reckon," replied Hiram, adding, with a faint
gleam of sarcasm, "I've got used to a great many things these last
few years."

They went silently into the house, Adelaide and Arthur feeling that their
father had quite unreasonably put a damper upon their spirits--a feeling
which he himself had. He felt that he was right, and he was puzzled to
find himself, even in his own mind, in the wrong.

"He's hopelessly old-fashioned!" murmured Arthur to his sister.

"Yes, but _such_ a dear," murmured Adelaide.

"No wonder _you_ say that!" was his retort. "You wind him round
your finger."

In the sitting room--the "back parlor"--Mrs. Ranger descended upon them
from the direction of the kitchen. Ellen was dressed for work; her old
gingham, for all its neatness, was in as sharp contrast to her daughter's
garb of the lady of leisure as were Hiram's mill clothes to his son's
"London latest." "It's almost half-past twelve," she said. "Dinner's been
ready more than half an hour. Mary's furious, and it's hard enough to
keep servants in this town since the canning factories started."

Adelaide and Arthur laughed; Hiram smiled. They were all thoroughly
familiar with that canning-factory theme. It constituted the chief
feature of the servant problem in Saint X, as everybody called St.
Christopher; and the servant problem there, as everywhere else, was the
chief feature of domestic economy. As Mrs. Ranger's mind was concentrated
upon her household, the canning factories were under fire from her early
and late, in season and out of season.

"And she's got to wait on the table, too," continued Ellen, too
interested in reviewing her troubles to mind the amusement of the rest of
the family.

"Why, where's the new girl Jarvis brought you?" asked Hiram.

"She came from way back in the country, and, when she set the table, she
fixed five places. 'There's only four of us, Barbara,' said I. 'Yes,
Mrs. Ranger,' says she, 'four and me.' 'But how're you going to wait on
the table and sit with us?' says I, very kindly, for I step mighty soft
with those people. 'Oh, I don't mind bouncin' up and down,' says she; 'I
can chew as I walk round.' When I explained, she up and left in a huff.
'I'm as good as you are, Mrs. Ranger, I'd have you know,' she said, as
she was going, just to set Mary afire; 'my father's an independent
farmer, and I don't have to live out. I just thought I'd like to visit
in town, and I'd heard your folks well spoke of. I'll get a place in the
canning factory!' I wasn't sorry to have her go. You ought to have seen
the way she set the table!"

"We'll have to get servants from the East," said Arthur. "They know their
place a little better there. We can get some English that have just come
over. They're the best--thoroughly respectful."

He did not see the glance his father shot at him from under his heavy
eyebrows. But Adelaide did--she was expecting it. "Don't talk like a cad,
Artie!" she said. "You know you don't think that way."

"Oh, of course, I don't admire that spirit--or lack of it," he replied.
"But--what are you going to do? It's the flunkies or the Barbaras and
Marys--or doing our own work."

To Hiram Ranger that seemed unanswerable, and his resentment against his
son for expressing ideas for which he had utter contempt seemed
unreasonable. Again reason put him in the wrong, though instinct was
insisting that he was in the right.

"It's a pity people aren't contented in 'the station to which God has
called them,' as the English prayer book says," continued Arthur, not
catching sensitive Adelaide's warning frown.

"If your mother and I had been content," said Hiram, "you and Delia would
be looking for places in the canning factory." The remark was doubly
startling--for the repressed energy of its sarcasm, and because, as a
rule, Hiram never joined in the discussions in the family circle.

They were at the table, all except Mrs. Ranger. She had disappeared in
the direction of the kitchen and presently reappeared bearing a soup
tureen, which she set down before her husband. "I don't dare ask Mary to
wait on the table," said she. "If I did, she's just in the humor to up
and light out, too; and your mother's got no hankering for hanging over a
hot stove in this weather."

She transferred the pile of soup plates from the sideboard and seated
herself. Her husband poured the soup, and the plates were passed from
hand to hand until all were served. "If the Sandyses could see us now,
Del," said Arthur.

"Or the Whitneys," suggested Adelaide, and both laughed as people laugh
when they think the joke, or the best part of it, is a secret between
themselves.

Nothing more was said until the soup was finished and Mrs. Ranger rose
and began to remove the dishes. Adelaide, gazing at the table, her
thoughts far away, became uneasy, stirred, looked up; she saw that the
cause of her uneasiness was the eyes of her father fixed steadily upon
her in a look which she could not immediately interpret. When he saw that
he had her attention, he glanced significantly toward her mother, waiting
upon them. "If the Sandyses or the Whitneys could see us _now_!" he said.

She reddened, pushed back her chair, and sprang up. "Oh, I never
thought!" she exclaimed. "Sit down, mother, and let _me_ do that. You
and father have got us into awful bad ways, always indulging us and
waiting on us."

"You let me alone," replied her mother. "I'm used to it. I did my own
work for fifteen years after we were married, and I'd have been doing it
yet if your father hadn't just gone out and got a girl and brought her
in and set her to work. No; sit down, Del. You don't know anything about
work. I didn't bring you up to be a household drudge."

But Del was on her way to the kitchen, whence she presently reappeared
with a platter and a vegetable dish. Down the front of her skirt was a
streak of grease. "There!" exclaimed Mrs. Ranger, coloring high with
exasperation, "your dress is spoiled! I don't believe I can take it out
of that kind of goods without leaving a spot. Hiram, I do wish you
wouldn't meddle with the children! It seems to me you've got enough to do
to 'tend your own affairs at the mill."

This was unanswerable, or so it seemed to her husband. Once more he felt
in the wrong, when he knew that, somehow, he was in the right.

But Adelaide was laughing and going forward gracefully with her duties as
waitress. "It's nothing," she said; "the stain will come out; and, if it
doesn't, there's no harm done. The dress is an old thing. I've worn it
until everybody's sick of the sight of it."

Mrs. Ranger now took her turn at looking disapproval. She exclaimed:
"Why, the dress is as good as new; much too good to travel in. You ought
to have worn a linen duster over it on the train."

At this even Hiram showed keen amusement, and Mrs. Ranger herself joined
in the laugh. "Well, it was a good, sensible fashion, anyhow," said she.

Instead of hurrying through dinner to get back to his work with the one
o'clock whistle, Hiram Ranger lingered on, much to the astonishment of
his family. When the faint sound of the whistles of the distant factories
was borne to them through the open windows, Mrs. Ranger cried, "You'll be
late, father."

"I'm in no hurry to-day," said Ranger, rousing from the seeming
abstraction in which he passed most of his time with his assembled
family. After dinner he seated himself on the front porch. Adelaide
came up behind and put her arm round his neck. "You're not feeling
well, daddy?"

"Not extra," he answered. "But it's nothing to bother about. I thought
I'd rest a few minutes." He patted her in shy expression of gratitude for
her little attention. It is not strange that Del overvalued the merit of
these trivial attentions of hers when they were valued thus high by her
father, who longed for proofs of affection and, because of his shyness
and silence, got few.

"Hey, Del! Hurry up! Get into your hat and dust-coat!" was now heard, in
Arthur's voice, from the drive to the left of the lawns.

Hiram's glance shifted to the direction of the sound. Arthur was perched
high in a dogcart to which were attached two horses, one before the
other. Adelaide did not like to leave her father with that expression on
his face, but after a brief hesitation she went into the house. Hiram
advanced slowly across the lawn toward the tandem. When he had inspected
it in detail, at close range, he said: "Where'd you get it, young
gentleman?" Again there was stress on the "gentleman."

"Oh, I've had it at Harvard several months," he replied carelessly. "I
shipped it on. I sold the horses--got a smashing good price for 'em.
Yours ain't used to tandem, but I guess I can manage 'em."

"That style of hitching's new to these parts," continued Hiram.

Arthur felt the queerness of his father's tone. "Two, side by side, or
two, one in front of the other--where's the difference?"

True, reflected Hiram. He was wrong again--yet again unconvinced.
Certainly the handsome son, so smartly gotten up, seated in this smart
trap, did look attractive--but somehow not as he would have had _his_
son look. Adelaide came; he helped her to the lower seat. As he watched
them dash away, as fine-looking a pair of young people as ever
gladdened a father's eye, this father's heart lifted with pride--but
sank again. Everything _seemed_ all right; why, then, did everything
_feel_ all wrong?

"I'm not well to-day," he muttered. He returned to the porch, walking
heavily. In body and in mind he felt listless. There seemed to be
something or some one inside him--a newcomer--aloof from all that he had
regarded as himself--aloof from his family, from his work, from his own
personality--an outsider, studying the whole perplexedly and gloomily.

As he was leaving the gate a truck entered the drive. It was loaded with
trunks--his son's and his daughter's baggage on the way from the station.
Hiram paused and counted the boxes--five huge trunks--Adelaide's beyond
doubt; four smaller ones, six of steamer size and thereabouts--profuse
and elegant Arthur's profuse and elegant array of canvas and leather.
This mass of superfluity seemed to add itself to his burden. He recalled
what his wife had once said when he hesitated over some new extravagance
of the children's: "What'd we toil and save for, unless to give them a
better time than we had? What's the use of our having money if they can't
enjoy it?" A "better time," "enjoy"--they sounded all right, but were
they _really_ all right? Was this really a "better time"?--really
enjoyment? Were his and his wife's life all wrong, except as they had
contributed to this new life of thoughtless spending and useless activity
and vanity and splurge?

Instead of going toward the factories, he turned east and presently out
of Jefferson Street into Elm. He paused at a two-story brick house
painted brown, with a small but brilliant and tasteful garden in front
and down either side. To the right of the door was an unobtrusive
black-and-gold sign bearing the words "Ferdinand Schulze, M.D." He rang,
was admitted by a pretty, plump, Saxon-blond young woman--the doctor's
younger daughter and housekeeper. She looked freshly clean and
wholesome--and so useful! Hiram's eyes rested upon her approvingly; and
often afterwards his thoughts returned to her, lingering upon her and his
own daughter in that sort of vague comparisons which we would not
entertain were we aware of them.

Dr. Schulze was the most distinguished--indeed, the only
distinguished--physician in Saint X. He was a short, stout, grizzled,
spectacled man, with a nose like a scarlet button and a mouth like a
buttonhole; in speech he was abrupt, and, on the slightest pretext or no
pretext at all, sharp; he hid a warm sympathy for human nature,
especially for its weaknesses, behind an uncompromising candor which he
regarded as the duty of the man of science toward a vain and deluded race
that knew little and learned reluctantly. A man is either better or worse
than the manner he chooses for purposes of conciliating or defying the
world. Dr. Schulze was better, as much better as his mind was superior to
his body. He and his motherless daughters were "not in it" socially.
Saint X was not quite certain whether it shunned them or they it. His
services were sought only in extremities, partly because he would lie to
his patients neither when he knew what ailed them nor when he did not,
and partly because he was a militant infidel. He lost no opportunity to
attack religion in all its forms; and his two daughters let no
opportunity escape to show that they stood with their father, whom
they adored, and who had brought them up with his heart. It was Dr.
Schulze's furious unbelief, investing him with a certain suggestion of
Satan-got intelligence, that attracted Saint X to him in serious
illnesses--somewhat as the Christian princes of mediaeval Europe
tolerated and believed in the Jew physicians. Saint X was only just
reaching the stage at which it could listen to "higher criticism" without
dread lest the talk should be interrupted by a bolt from "special
Providence"; the fact that Schulze lived on, believing and talking as he
did, could be explained only as miraculous and mysterious forbearance in
which Satan must somehow have direct part.

"I didn't expect to see _you_ for many a year yet," said Schulze, as
Hiram, standing, faced him sitting at his desk.

The master workman grew still more pallid as he heard the thought that
weighted him in secret thus put into words. "I have never had a doctor
before in my life," said he. "My prescription has been, when you feel
badly stop eating and work harder."

"Starve and sweat--none better," said Schulze. "Well, why do you come
here to-day?"

"This morning I lifted a rather heavy weight. I've felt a kind of
tiredness ever since, and a pain in the lower part of my back--pretty
bad. I can't understand it."

"But I can--that's my business. Take off your clothes and stretch
yourself on this chair. Call me when you're ready."

Schulze withdrew into what smelled like a laboratory. Hiram could hear
him rattling glass against glass and metal, could smell the fumes of
uncorked bottles of acids. When he called, Schulze reappeared, disposed
instruments and tubes upon a table. "I never ask my patients questions,"
he said, as he began to examine Hiram's chest. "I lay 'em out here and go
over 'em inch by inch. I find all the weak spots, both those that are
crying out and those worse ones that don't. I never ask a man what's the
matter; I tell him. And my patients, and all the fools in this town,
think I'm in league with the devil. A doctor who finds out what's the
matter with a man Providence is trying to lay in the grave--what can it
be but the devil?"

He had reached his subject; as he worked he talked it--religion, its
folly, its silliness, its cruelty, its ignorance, its viciousness. Hiram
listened without hearing; he was absorbed in observing the diagnosis. He
knew nothing of medicine, but he did know good workmanship. As the
physician worked, his admiration and confidence grew. He began to feel
better--not physically better, but that mental relief which a courageous
man feels when the peril he is facing is stripped of the mystery that
made it a terror. After perhaps three quarters of an hour, Schulze
withdrew to the laboratory, saying: "That's all. You may dress."

Hiram dressed, seated himself. By chance he was opposite a huge image
from the Orient, a hideous, twisted thing with a countenance of sardonic
sagacity. As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances
to the physician himself. When Schulze reappeared and busied himself
writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with
fascinated repulsion--the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike.
Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the
eccentric physician's--his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his
ironic jeer at the superstitions of Saint X.

"There!" said Schulze, looking up. "That's the best I can do for you."

"What's the matter with me?"

"You wouldn't know if I told you."

"Is it serious?"

"In this world everything is serious--and nothing."

"Will I die?"

Schulze slowly surveyed all Hiram's outward signs of majesty that had
been denied his own majestic intellect, noted the tremendous figure, the
shoulders, the forehead, the massive brow and nose and chin--an
_ensemble_ of unabused power, the handiwork of Nature at her best, a
creation worth while, worth preserving intact and immortal.

"Yes," he answered, with satiric bitterness; "you will have to die, and
rot, just like the rest of us."

"Tell me!" Hiram commanded. "Will I die soon?"

Schulze reflected, rubbing his red-button nose with his stubby fingers.
When he spoke, his voice had a sad gentleness. "You can bear hearing it.
You have the right to know." He leaned back, paused, said in a low tone:
"Put your house in order, Mr. Ranger."

Hiram's steadfast gray eyes met bravely the eyes of the man who had just
read him his death warrant. A long pause; then Hiram said "Thank you," in
his quiet, calm way.

He took the prescriptions, went out into the street. It looked strange to
him; he felt like a stranger in that town where he had spent half a
century--felt like a temporary tenant of that vast, strong body of his
which until now had seemed himself. And he--or was it the stranger within
him?--kept repeating: "Put your house in order. Put your house in order."




CHAPTER II

OF SOMEBODIES AND NOBODIES


At the second turning Arthur rounded the tandem out of Jefferson Street
into Willow with a skill that delighted both him and his sister. "But why
go that way?" said she. "Why not through Monroe street? I'm sure the
horses would behave."

"Better not risk it," replied Arthur, showing that he, too, had had, but
had rejected, the temptation to parade the crowded part of town. "Even if
the horses didn't act up, the people might, they're such jays."

Adelaide's estimate of what she and her brother had acquired in the East
was as high as was his, and she had the same unflattering opinion of
those who lacked it. But it ruffled her to hear him call the home folks
jays--just as it would have ruffled him had she been the one to make the
slighting remark. "If you invite people's opinion," said she, "you've no
right to sneer at them because they don't say what you wanted."

"But _I_'m not driving for show if _you_ are," he retorted, with a
testiness that was confession.

"Don't be silly," was her answer. "You know you wouldn't take all this
trouble on a desert island."

"Of course not," he admitted, "but I don't care for the opinion of any
but those capable of appreciating."

"And those capable of appreciating are only those who approve," teased
Adelaide. "Why drive tandem among these 'jays?'"

"To keep my hand in," replied he; and his adroit escape restored his
good humor.

"I wish I were as free from vanity as you are, Arthur, dear," said she.

"You're just as fond of making a sensation as I am," replied he. "And,
my eye, Del! but you _do_ know how." This with an admiring glance at
her most becoming hat with its great, gracefully draped _chiffon_ veil,
and at her dazzling white dust-coat with its deep blue facings that
matched her eyes.

She laughed. "Just wait till you see my new dresses--and hats."

"Another shock for your poor father."

"Shock of joy."

"Yes," assented Arthur, rather glumly; "he'll take anything off you.
But when I--"

"It's no compliment to me," she cut in, the prompter to admit the truth
because it would make him feel better. "He thinks I'm 'only a woman,'
fit for nothing but to look pretty as long as I'm a girl, and then to
devote myself to a husband and children, without any life or even ideas
of my own."

"Mother always seems cheerful enough," said Arthur. His content with the
changed conditions which the prosperity and easy-going generosity of the
elder generation were making for the younger generation ended at his own
sex. The new woman--idle and frivolous, ignorant of all useful things,
fit only for the show side of life and caring only for it, discontented
with everybody but her own selfish self--Arthur had a reputation among
his friends for his gloomy view of the American woman and for his courage
in expressing it.

"You are _so_ narrow-minded, Artie!" his sister exclaimed impatiently.
"Mother was brought up very differently from the way she and father have
brought me up--"

"Have let you bring yourself up."

"No matter; I _am_ different."

"But what would you do? What can a woman do?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "But I _do_ know I hate a humdrum life."
There was the glint of the Ranger will in her eyes as she added:
"Furthermore, I shan't stand for it."

He looked at her enviously. "You'll be free in another year," he said.
"You and Ross Whitney will marry, and you'll have a big house in Chicago
and can do what you please and go where you please."

"Not if Ross should turn out to be the sort of man you are."

He laughed. "I can see Ross--or any man--trying to manage _you_! You've
got too much of father in you."

"But I'll be dependent until--" Adelaide paused, then added a
satisfactorily vague, "for a long time. Father won't give me anything.
How furious he'd be at the very suggestion of dowry. Parents out here
don't appreciate that conditions have changed and that it's necessary
nowadays for a woman to be independent of her husband."

Arthur compressed his lips, to help him refrain from comment. But he felt
so strongly on the subject that he couldn't let her remarks pass
unchallenged. "I don't know about that, Del," he said. "It depends on the
woman. Personally, I'd hate to be married to a woman I couldn't control
if necessary."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," cried Del, indignant. "Is _that_
your idea of control--to make a woman mercenary and hypocritical? You'd
better change your way of thinking if you don't want Janet to be very
unhappy, and yourself, too."

"That sounds well," he retorted, "but you know better. Take our case, for
instance. Is it altogether love and affection that make us so cautious
about offending father?"

"Speak for yourself," said Adelaide. "_I'm_ not cautious."

"Do try to argue fair, even if you are a woman. You're as cautious in
your way as I am in mine."

Adelaide felt that he was offended, and justly. "I didn't mean quite what
I said, Artie. You _are_ cautious, in a way, and sometimes. But often
you're reckless. I'm frightened every once in a while by it, and I'm
haunted by the dread that there'll be a collision between father and you.
You're so much alike, and you understand each other less and less, all
the time."

After a silence Arthur said, thoughtfully: "I think I understand him.
There are two distinct persons inside of me. There's the one that was
made by inheritance and by my surroundings as a boy--the one that's like
him, the one that enables me to understand him. Then, there's this other
that's been made since--in the East, and going round among people that
either never knew the sort of life we had as children or have grown away
from it. The problem is how to reconcile those two persons so that
they'll stop wrangling and shaming each other. That's _my_ problem, I
mean. Father's problem--He doesn't know he has one. I must do as he
wishes or I'll not be at all, so far as he is concerned."

Another and longer silence; then Adelaide, after an uneasy, affectionate
look at his serious profile, said: "I'm often ashamed of myself,
Artie--about father; I don't _think_ I'm a hypocrite, for I do love him
dearly. Who could help it, when he is so indulgent and when even in his
anger he's kind? But you--Oh, Artie, even though you are less, much less,
uncandid with him than I am, still isn't it more--more--less manly in
you? After all, I'm a woman and helpless; and, if I seriously offend him,
what would become of me? But you're a man. The world was made for men;
they can make their own way. And it seems unworthy of you to be afraid to
be yourself before _any_body. And I'm sure it's demoralizing."

She spoke so sincerely that he could not have resented it, even had her
words raised a far feebler echo within him. "I don't honestly believe,
Del, that my caution with father is from fear of his shutting down on me,
any more than yours is," he replied. "I know he cares for me. And often I
don't let him see me as I am simply because it'd hurt him if he knew how
differently I think and feel about a lot of things."

"But are you right?--or is he?"

Arthur did not answer immediately. He had forgotten his horses; they were
jogging along, heads down and "form" gone. "What do _you_ think?" he
finally asked.

"I--I can't quite make up my mind."

"Do you think I ought to drudge and slave, as he has? Do you think I
ought to spend my life in making money, in dealing in flour? Isn't there
something better than that?"

"I don't think it's what a man deals in; I think it's _how_ he deals.
And I don't believe there's any sort of man finer and better than
father, Arthur."

"That's true," he assented warmly. "I used to envy the boys at
college--some of them--because their fathers and mothers had so much
culture and knowledge of the world. But when I came to know their
parents better--and them, too--I saw how really ignorant and
vulgar--yes, vulgar--they were, under their veneer of talk and manner
which they thought was everything. 'They may be fit to stand before
kings' I said to myself, 'but my father _is_ a king--and of a sort they
ain't fit to stand before.'"

The color was high in Del's cheeks and her eyes were brilliant. "You'll
come out all right, Artie," said she. "I don't know just how, but you'll
_do_ something, and do it well."

"I'd much rather do nothing--well," said he lightly, as if not sure
whether he was in earnest or not. "It's so much nicer to dream than to
do." He looked at her with good-humored satire. "And you--what's the
matter with your practising some of the things you preach? Why don't you
marry--say, Dory Hargrave, instead of Ross?"

She made a failure of a stout attempt to meet his eyes and to smile
easily. "Because I don't love Dory Hargrave," she said.

"But you wouldn't let yourself if you could--would you, now?"

"It's a poor love that lags for let," she replied. "Besides, why talk
about me? I'm 'only a woman.' I haven't any career, or any chance to
make one."

"But you might help some man," he teased.

"Then you'd like me to marry Dory--if I could?"

"I'm just showing you how vain your theorizing is," was his not
altogether frank reply. "You urge me to despise money when you
yourself--"

"That isn't fair, Arthur. If I didn't care for Ross I shouldn't think of
marrying him, and you know it."

"He's so like father!" mocked Arthur.

"No, but he's so like _you_," she retorted. "You know he was your ideal
for years. It was your praising him that--that first made me glad to do
as father and mother wished. You know father approves of him."

Arthur grinned, and Del colored. "A lot father knows about Ross as he
really is," said he. "Oh, he's clever about what he lets father see.
However, you do admit there's some other ideal of man than successful
workingman."

"Of course!" said Adelaide. "I'm not so silly and narrow as you try to
make out. Only, I prefer a combination of the two. And I think Ross is
that, and I hope and believe he'll be more so--afterwards."

Adelaide's tone was so judicial that Arthur thought it discreet not to
discuss his friend and future brother-in-law further. "He isn't good
enough for Del," he said to himself. "But, then, who is? And he'll
help her to the sort of setting she's best fitted for. What side
they'll put on, once they get going! She'll set a new pace--and it'll
be a grand one."

At the top of the last curve in the steep road up from Deer Creek the
horses halted of themselves to rest; Arthur and his sister gazed out upon
the vast, dreamy vision--miles on miles of winding river shimmering
through its veil of silver mist, stately hills draped in gauziest blue.
It was such uplifting vistas that inspired the human imagination, in the
days of its youth, to breathe a soul into the universe and make it a
living thing, palpitant with love and hope; it was an outlook that would
have moved the narrowest, the smallest, to think in the wide and the
large. Wherever the hills were not based close to the water's edge or
rose less abruptly, there were cultivated fields; and in each field, far
or near, men were at work. These broad-hatted, blue-shirted toilers in
the ardent sun determined the turn of Adelaide's thoughts.

"It doesn't seem right, does it," said she, "that so many--almost
everybody--should have to work so hard just to get enough to eat and to
wear and a place to sleep, when there's so much of everything in the
world--and when a few like us don't have to work at all and have much
more than they need, simply because one happened to be born in such or
such conditions. I suppose it's got to be so, but it certainly looks
unjust--and silly."

"I'm not sure the workers haven't the best of it," replied Arthur. "They
have the dinner; we have only the dessert; and I guess one gets tired of
only desserts, no matter how great the variety."

"It's a stupid world in lots of ways, isn't it?"

"Not so stupid as it used to be, when everybody said and thought it was
as good as possible," replied he. "You see, it's the people in the world
that make it stupid. For instance, do you suppose you and I, or anybody,
would care for idling about and doing all sorts of things our better
judgment tells us are inane, if it weren't that most of our fellow-beings
are stupid enough to admire and envy that sort of thing, and that we are
stupid enough to want to be admired and envied by stupid people?"

"Did you notice the Sandys's English butler?" asked Adelaide.

"_Did_ I? I'll bet he keeps every one in the Sandys family up to
the mark."

"That's it," continued Adelaide. "He's a poor creature, dumb and
ignorant. He knows only one thing--snobbishness. Yet every one of us was
in terror of his opinion. No doubt kings feel the same way about the
people around them. Always what's expected of us--and by whom? Why, by
people who have little sense and less knowledge. They run the world,
don't they?"

"As Dory Hargrave says," said her brother, "the only scheme for making
things better that's worth talking about is raising the standards of the
masses because their standards are ours. We'll be fools and unjust as
long as they'll let us. And they'll let us as long as they're ignorant."

By inheritance Arthur and Adelaide had excellent minds, shrewd and with
that cast of humor which makes for justice of judgment by mocking at the
solemn frauds of interest and prejudice. But, as is often the case with
the children of the rich and the well-to-do, there had been no necessity
for either to use intellect; their parents and hirelings of various
degrees, paid with their father's generously given money, had done their
thinking for them. The whole of animate creation is as lazy as it dares
be, and man is no exception. Thus, the Ranger children, like all other
normal children of luxury, rarely made what would have been, for their
fallow minds, the arduous exertion of real thinking. When their minds
were not on pastimes or personalities they were either rattling round in
their heads or exchanging the ideas, real and reputed, that happened to
be drifting about, at the moment, in their "set." Those ideas they and
their friends received, and stored up or passed on with never a thought
as to whether they were true or false, much as they used coins or notes
they took in and paid out. Arthur and Adelaide soon wearied of their
groping about in the mystery of human society--how little direct interest
it had for them then! They drove on; the vision which had stimulated them
to think vanished; they took up again those personalities about friends,
acquaintances and social life that are to thinking somewhat as massage is
to exercise--all the motions of real activity, but none of its spirit.
They stopped for two calls and tea on the fashionable Bluffs.

When they reached home, content with tandem, drive, themselves, their
friends, and life in general, they found Hiram Ranger returned from work,
though it was only half-past five, and stretched on the sofa in the
sitting room, with his eyes shut. At this unprecedented spectacle of
inactivity they looked at each other in vague alarm; they were stealing
away, when he called: "I'm not asleep."

His expression made Adelaide impulsively kneel beside him and gaze
anxiously into his face. He smiled, roused himself to a sitting posture,
well concealing the effort the exertion cost him.

"Your father's getting old," he said, hiding his tragedy of aching body
and aching heart and impending doom in a hypocrisy of cheerfulness that
would have passed muster even had he not been above suspicion. "I'm not
up to the mark of the last generation. Your grandfather was fifty when I
was born, and he didn't die till I was fifty."

His face shadowed; Adelaide, glancing round for the cause, saw Simeon,
half-sitting, half-standing in the doorway, humble apology on his
weazened, whiskered face. He looked so like her memory-picture of her
grandfather that she burst out laughing. "Don't be hard on the poor old
gentleman, father," she cried. "How can you resist that appeal? Tell him
to come in and make himself at home."

As her father did not answer, she glanced at him. He had not heard her;
he was staring straight ahead with an expression of fathomless
melancholy. The smile faded from her face, from her heart, as the light
fades before the oncoming shadow of night. Presently he was
absent-mindedly but tenderly stroking her hair, as if he were thinking of
her so intensely that he had become unconscious of her physical presence.
The apparition of Simeon had set him to gathering in gloomy assembly a
vast number of circumstances about his two children; each circumstance
was so trivial in itself that by itself it seemed foolishly
inconsequential; yet, in the mass, they bore upon his heart, upon his
conscience, so heavily that his very shoulders stooped with the weight.
"Put your house in order," the newcomer within him was solemnly warning;
and Hiram was puzzling over his meaning, was dreading what that meaning
might presently reveal itself to be. "Put my house in order?" muttered
Hiram, an inquiring echo of that voice within.

"What did you say, father?" asked Adelaide, timidly laying her hand on
his arm. Though she knew he was simple, she felt the vastness in him that
was awe-inspiring--just as a mountain or an ocean, a mere aggregation of
simple matter, is in the total majestic and incomprehensible. Beside him,
the complex little individualities among her acquaintances seemed like
the acrostics of a children's puzzle column.

"Leave me with your brother awhile," he said.

She glanced quickly, furtively at Arthur and admired his
self-possession--for she knew his heart must be heavier than her own. She
rose from her knees, laid her hand lingeringly, appealingly upon her
father's broad shoulder, then slowly left the room. Simeon, forgotten,
looked up at her and scratched his head; he turned in behind her, caught
the edge of her skirt and bore it like a queen's page.

The son watched the father, whose powerful features were set in an
expression that seemed stern only because his eyes were hid, gazing
steadily at the floor. It was the father who broke the silence. "What do
you calculate to do--now?"

"Tutor this summer and have another go at those exams in September. I'll
have no trouble in rejoining my class. I sailed just a little too close
to the wind--that's all."

"What does that mean?" inquired the father. College was a mystery to
him, a deeply respected mystery. He had been the youngest of four sons.
Their mother's dream was the dream of all the mothers of those pioneer
and frontier days--to send her sons to college. Each son in turn had,
with her assistance, tried to get together the sum--so small, yet so
hugely large--necessary to make the start. But fate, now as sickness,
now as crop failure, now as flood, and again as war, had been too
strong for them. Hiram had come nearest, and his defeat had broken his
mother's heart and almost broken his own. It was therefore with a sense
of prying into hallowed mysteries that he began to investigate his
son's college career.

"Well, you know," Arthur proceeded to explain; "there are five
grades--A, B, C, D, and E. I aimed for C, but several things came
up--interfered--and I--just missed D."

"Is C the highest?"

Arthur smiled faintly. "Well--not in one sense. It's what's called the
gentleman's grade. All the fellows that are the right sort are in
it--or in D."

"And what did _you_ get?"

"I got E. That means I have to try again."

Hiram began to understand. So _this_ was the hallowed mystery of higher
education. He was sitting motionless, his elbows on his knees, his big
chest and shoulders inclined forward, his gaze fixed upon a wreath of red
roses in the pattern of the moquette carpet--that carpet upon which
Adelaide, backed by Arthur, had waged vain war as the worst of the many,
to cultured nerves, trying exhibitions of "primitive taste" in Ellen's
best rooms. When Hiram spoke his lips barely opened and his voice had no
expression. His next question was: "What does A mean?"

"The A men are those that keep their noses in their books. They're a
narrow set--have no ideas--think the book side is the only side of a
college education."

"Then you don't go to college to learn what's in the books?"

"Oh, of course, the books are part of it. But the real thing is
association--the friendships one makes, the knowledge of human nature and
of--of life."

"What does that mean?"

Arthur had been answering Hiram's questions in a flurry, though he had
been glib enough. He had had no fear that his father would appreciate
that he was getting half-truths, or, rather, truths prepared skillfully
for paternal consumption; his flurry had come from a sense that he was
himself not doing quite the manly, the courageous thing. Now, however,
something in the tone of the last question, or, perhaps, some element
that was lacking, roused in him a suspicion of depth in his simple
unworldly father; and swift upon this awakening came a realization that
he was floundering in that depth--and in grave danger of submersion. He
shifted nervously when his father, without looking up and without putting
any expression into his voice, repeated: "What do you mean by
associations--and life--and--all that?"

"I can't explain exactly," replied Arthur. "It would take a long time."

"I haven't asked you to be brief."

"I can't put it into words."

"Why not?"

"You would misunderstand."

"Why?"

Arthur made no reply.

"Then you can't tell me what you go to college for?"

Again the young man looked perplexedly at his father. There was no anger
in that tone--no emotion of any kind. But what was the meaning of the
_look_, the look of a sorrow that was tragic?

"I know you think I've disgraced you, father, and myself," said Arthur.
"But it isn't so--really, it isn't. No one, not even the faculty, thinks
the less of me. This sort of thing often occurs in our set."

"Your 'set'?"

"Among the fellows I travel with. They're the nicest men in Harvard.
They're in all the best clubs--and lead in supporting the athletics
and--and--their fathers are among the richest, the most distinguished men
in the country. There are only about twenty or thirty of us, and we make
the pace for the whole show--the whole university, I mean. Everybody
admires and envies us--wants to be in our set. Even the grinds look up to
us, and imitate us as far as they can. We give the tone to the
university!"

"What is 'the tone'?"

Again Arthur shifted uneasily. "It's hard to explain that sort of
thing. It's a sort of--of manner. It's knowing how to do the--the right
sort of thing."

"What is the right sort of thing?"

"I can't put it into words. It's what makes you look at one man and say,
'He's a gentleman'; and look at another and see that he isn't."

"What is a 'gentleman'--at Harvard?"

"Just what it is anywhere."

"What is it anywhere?"

Again Arthur was silent.

"Then there are only twenty or thirty gentlemen at Harvard? And the
catalogue says there are three thousand or more students."

"Oh--of course," began Arthur. But he stopped short.

How could he make his father, ignorant of "the world" and dominated by
primitive ideas, understand the Harvard ideal? So subtle and evanescent,
so much a matter of the most delicate shadings was this ideal that he
himself often found the distinction quite hazy between it and that which
looked disquietingly like "tommy rot."

"And these gentlemen--these here friends of yours--your 'set,' as you
call 'em--what are they aiming for?"

Arthur did not answer. It would be hopeless to try to make Hiram Ranger
understand, still less tolerate, an ideal of life that was elegant
leisure, the patronage of literature and art, music, the drama, the turf,
and the pursuit of culture and polite extravagance, wholly aloof from the
frenzied and vulgar jostling of the market place.

With a mighty heave of the shoulders which, if it had found outward
relief, would have been a sigh, Hiram Ranger advanced to the hard part of
the first task which the mandate, "Put your house in order," had set for
him. He took from the inside pocket of his coat a small bundle of papers,
the records of Arthur's college expenses. The idea of accounts with his
children had been abhorrent to him. The absolute necessity of business
method had forced him to make some records, and these he had expected to
destroy without anyone but himself knowing of their existence. But in the
new circumstances he felt he must not let his own false shame push the
young man still farther from the right course. Arthur watched him open
each paper in the bundle slowly, spread it out and, to put off the
hateful moment for speech, pretend to peruse it deliberately before
laying it on his knee; and, dim though the boy's conception of his father
was, he did not misjudge the feelings behind that painful reluctance.
Hiram held the last paper in a hand that trembled. He coughed, made
several attempts to speak, finally began: "Your first year at Harvard,
you spent seventeen hundred dollars. Your second year, you spent
fifty-three hundred. Last year--Are all your bills in?"

"There are a few--" murmured Arthur.

"How much?"

He flushed hotly.

"Don't you know?" With this question his father lifted his eyes without
lifting his shaggy eyebrows.

"About four or five thousand--in all--including the tailors and other
tradespeople."

A pink spot appeared in the left cheek of the old man--very bright
against the gray-white of his skin. Somehow, he did not like that word
"tradespeople," though it seemed harmless enough. "This last year, the
total was," said he, still monotonously, "ninety-eight hundred odd--if
the bills I haven't got yet ain't more than five thousand."

"A dozen men spend several times that much," protested Arthur.

"What for?" inquired Hiram.

"Not for dissipation, father," replied the young man, eagerly.
"Dissipation is considered bad form in our set."

"What do you mean by dissipation?"

"Drinking--and--all that sort of thing," Arthur replied. "It's considered
ungentlemanly, nowadays--drinking to excess, I mean."

"What do you spend the money for?"

"For good quarters and pictures, and patronizing the sports, and
club dues, and entertainments, and things to drive in--for living as
a man should."

"You've spent a thousand, three hundred dollars for tutoring since you've
been there."

"Everybody has to do tutoring--more or less."

"What did you do with the money you made?"

"What money, father?"

"The money you made tutoring. You said everybody had to do tutoring. I
suppose you did your share."

Arthur did not smile at this "ignorance of the world"; he grew red, and
stammered: "Oh, I meant everybody in our set employs tutors."

"Then who does the tutoring? Who're the nobodies that tutor the
everybodies?"

Arthur grew cold, then hot. He was cornered, therefore roused. He stood,
leaned against the table, faced his father defiantly. "I see what you're
driving at, father," he said. "You feel I've wasted time and money at
college, because I haven't lived like a dog and grubbed in books day in
and day out, and filled my head with musty stuff; because I've tried to
get what I believe to be the broadest knowledge and experience; because
I've associated with the best men, the fellows that come from the good
families. You accept the bluff the faculty puts up of pretending the A
fellows are really the A fellows, when, in fact, everybody there and all
the graduates and everyone everywhere who knows the world knows that the
fellows in our set are the ones the university is proud of--the fellows
with manners and appearance and--"

"The gentlemen," interjected the father, who had not changed either his
position or his expression.

"Yes--the gentlemen!" exclaimed Arthur. "There are other ideals of life
besides buying and selling."

"And working?" suggested Hiram.

"Yes--and what you call working," retorted Arthur, angry through and
through. "You sent me East to college to get the education of a man in my
position."

"What is your position?" inquired Hiram--simply an inquiry.

"Your son," replied the young man; "trying to make the best use of the
opportunities you've worked so hard to get for me. I'm not you, father.
You'd despise me if I didn't have a character, an individuality, of my
own. Yet, because I can't see life as you see it, you are angry with me."

For answer Hiram only heaved his great shoulders in another suppressed
sigh. He _knew_ profoundly that he was right, yet his son's
plausibilities--they could only be plausibilities--put him clearly in the
wrong. "We'll see," he said; "we'll see. You're wrong in thinking I'm
angry, boy." He was looking at his son now, and his eyes made his son's
passion vanish. He got up and went to the young man and laid his hand on
his shoulder in a gesture of affection that moved the son the more
profoundly because it was unprecedented. "If there's been any wrong
done," said the old man--and he looked very, very old now--"I've done it.
I'm to blame--not you."

A moment after Hiram left the room, Adelaide hurried in. A glance at her
brother reassured her. They stood at the window watching their father as
he walked up and down the garden, his hands behind his back, his
shoulders stooped, his powerful head bent.

"Was he very angry?" asked Del.

"He wasn't angry at all," her brother replied. "I'd much rather he had
been." Then, after a pause, he added: "I thought the trouble between us
was that, while I understood him, he didn't understand me. Now I know
that he has understood me but that I don't understand him"--and, after a
pause--"or myself."




CHAPTER III

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.




CHAPTER IV

THE SHATTERED COLOSSUS


That night there was sleep under Hiram Ranger's roof for Mary the cook
only. Of the four wakeful ones the most unhappy was Hiram himself, the
precipitator of it all. Arthur had the consolation of his conviction that
his calamity was unjust; Adelaide and her mother, of their conviction
that in the end it could not but be well with Arthur. For Hiram there was
no consolation. He reviewed and re-reviewed the facts, and each time he
reached again his original conclusion; the one course in repairing the
mistakes of the boy's bringing up was a sharp rightabout. "Don't waste no
time gettin' off the wrong road, once you're sure it's wrong," had been a
maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He
appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right
than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies
between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him
here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he
loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way;
he had usually been forced to do right in the wrong way--to hide himself
from them behind a manner of cold and silent finality, and, so, to
prevent them from forming an alliance and a junction of forces with the
traitor softness within him. Besides, gentle, roundabout, gradual
measures would require time--delay; and he must "put his house in order"
forthwith.

Thus, even the consolation that he was at least doing right was denied
him. As he lay there he could see himself harshly forcing the bitter
medicine upon his son, the cure for a disease for which he was himself
responsible; he could see his son's look and could not deny its justice.
"I reckon he hates me," thought Hiram, pouring vitriol into his own
wounds, "and I reckon he's got good cause to."

But there was in the old miller a Covenanter fiber tough as ironwood.
The idea of yielding did not enter his head. He accepted his sufferings
as part of his punishment for past indulgence and weakness; he would
endure, and go forward. His wife understood him by a kind of intuition
which, like most of our insight into the true natures of those close
about us, was a gradual permeation from the one to the other rather than
clear, deliberate reasoning. But the next morning her sore and anxious
mother's heart misread the gloom of his strong face into sternness
toward her only son.

"When did you allow to put the boy to work, father?" she finally said,
and her tone unintentionally made Hiram feel more than ever as if he had
sentenced "the boy" to hard labor in the degradation and disgrace of a
chain gang.

As he waited some time for self-control before answering, she thought her
inquiry had deepened his resentment. "Not that I don't think you're
right, maybe," she hastened to add, "though"--this wistfully, in a
feminine and maternal subtlety of laying the first lines for sapping and
mining his position--"I often think about our life, all work and no play,
and wonder if we oughtn't to give the children the chance we never had."

"No good never came of idleness," said Hiram, uncompromisingly, "and to
be busy about foolishness is still worse. Work or rot--that's life."

"That's so; that's so," she conceded. And she was sincere; for that was
her real belief, and what she had hinted was a mere unthinking repetition
of the shallow, comfortable philosophy of most people--those "go easys"
and "do nothings" and "get nowheres" wherewith Saint X and the
surrounding country were burdened. "Still," she went on, aloud, "Arthur
hasn't got any bad habits, like most of the young men round here with
more money than's good for them."

"Drink ain't the only bad habit," replied Hiram. "It ain't the worst,
though it looks the worst. The boy's got brains. It ain't right to allow
him to choke 'em up with nonsense."

Ellen's expression was assent.

"Tell him to come down to the mill next Monday," said Hiram, after
another silence, "and tell him to get some clothes that won't look
ridiculous." He paused, then added; "A man that ain't ready to do
anything, no matter what so long as it's useful and honest, is good
for nothing."

The night had bred in Arthur brave and bold resolves. He would not tamely
submit; he would cast his father off, would go forth and speedily carve a
brilliant career. He would show his father that, even if the training of
a gentleman develops tastes above the coarseness of commerce, it also
develops the mental superiority that makes fleeing chaff of the obstacles
to fame and wealth. He did not go far into details; but, as his essays at
Harvard had been praised, he thought of giving literature's road to
distinction the preference over the several others that must be smooth
before him. Daylight put these imaginings into silly countenance, and he
felt silly for having lingered in their company, even in the dark. As he
dressed he had much less than his wonted content with himself. He did not
take the same satisfaction in his clothes, as evidence of his good taste,
or in his admired variations of the fashion of wearing the hair and tying
the scarf. Midway in the process of arranging his hair he put down his
military brushes; leaning against the dressing table, he fixed his mind
upon the first serious thoughts he had ever had in his whole
irresponsible, sheltered life. "Well," he said, half-aloud, "there _is_
something wrong! If there isn't, why do I feel as if my spine had
collapsed?" After a long pause, he added: "And it has! All that held it
steady was father's hand."

The whole lofty and beautiful structure of self-complacence upon which
he had lounged, preening his feathers and receiving social triumphs and
the adulation of his "less fortunate fellows" as the due of his own
personal superiority, suddenly slipped from under him. With a rueful
smile at his plight, he said: "The governor has called me down." Then,
resentfully, and with a return of his mood of dignity outraged and pride
trampled upon: "But he had no right to put me up there--or let me climb
up there." Once a wrong becomes "vested," it is a "vested right," sacred,
taboo. Arthur felt that his father was committing a crime against him.

When he saw Adelaide and his mother their anxious looks made him furious.
So! They knew how helpless he was; they were pitying him. _Pitying_ him!
Pitying _him_! He just tasted his coffee; with scowling brow he hastened
to the stables for his saddle horse and rode away alone. "Wait a few
minutes and I'll come with you," called Adelaide from the porch as he
galloped by. He pretended not to hear. When clear of the town he "took it
out" on his horse, using whip and spur until it gripped the bit and ran
away. He fought savagely with it; at a turn in the road it slipped and
fell, all but carrying him under. He was in such a frenzy that if he had
had a pistol he would have shot it. The chemical action of his crisis
precipitated in a black mass all the poison his nature had been absorbing
in those selfish, supercilious years. So long as that poison was held in
suspense it was imperceptible to himself as well as to others. But now,
there it was, unmistakably a poison. At the sight his anger vanished.
"I'm a beast!" he ejaculated, astonished. "And here I've been imagining I
was a fairly decent sort of fellow. What the devil have I been up to, to
make me like this?"

He walked along the road, leading his horse by the bridle slipped over
his arm. He resumed his reverie of the earlier morning, and began a
little less dimly to see his situation from the new viewpoint. "I deserve
what I'm getting," he said to himself. Then, at a twinge from the
resentment that had gone too deep to be ejected in an instant, he added:
"But that doesn't excuse _him_." His father was to blame for the whole
ugly business--for his plight within and without. Still, fixing the blame
was obviously unimportant beside the problem of the way out. And for that
problem he, in saner mood, began to feel that the right solution was to
do something and so become in his own person a somebody, instead of being
mere son of a somebody. "I haven't got this shock a minute too soon," he
reflected. "I must take myself in hand. I--"

"Why, it's you, Arthur, isn't it?" startled him.

He looked up, saw Mrs. Whitney coming toward him. She was in a winter
walking suit, though the day was warm. She was engaged in the pursuit
that was the chief reason for her three months' retirement to the bluffs
overlooking Saint X--the preservation of her figure. She hated exercise,
being by nature as lazy, luxurious, and self-indulgent physically as she
was alert and industrious mentally. From October to July she ate and
drank about what she pleased, never set foot upon the ground if she could
help it, and held her tendency to hips in check by daily massage. From
July to October she walked two or three hours a day, heavily dressed, and
had a woman especially to attend to her hair and complexion, in addition
to the _masseuse_ toiling to keep her cheeks and throat firm for the
fight against wrinkles and loss of contour.

Arthur frowned at the interruption, then smoothed his features into a
cordial smile; and at once that ugly mass of precipitated poison began to
redistribute itself and hide itself from him.

"You've had a fall, haven't you?"

He flushed. She, judging with the supersensitive vanity of all her
self-conscious "set," thought the flush was at the implied criticism of
his skill; but he was far too good a rider to care about his
misadventure, and it was her unconscious double meaning that stung him.
She turned; they walked together. After a brief debate as to the time for
confessing his "fall," which, at best, could remain a secret no longer
than Monday, he chose the present. "Father's begun to cut up rough," said
he, and his manner was excellent. "He's taken away my allowance, and I'm
to go to work at the mill." He was yielding to the insidious influence of
her presence, was dropping rapidly back toward the attitude as well as
the accent of "our set."

At his frank disclosure Mrs. Whitney congratulated herself on her
shrewdness so heartily that she betrayed it in her face; but Arthur did
not see. "I suppose your mother can do nothing with him." This was spoken
in a tone of conviction. She always felt that, if she had had Hiram to
deal with, she would have been fully as successful with him as she
thought she had been with Charles Whitney. She did not appreciate the
fundamental difference in the characters of the two men. Both were iron
of will; but there was in Whitney--and not in Hiram--a selfishness that
took the form of absolute indifference to anything and everything which
did not directly concern himself--his business or his physical comfort.
Thus his wife had had her way in all matters of the social career, and he
would have forced upon her the whole responsibility for the children if
she had not spared him the necessity by assuming it. He cheerfully paid
the bills, no matter what they were, because he thought his money's power
to buy him immunity from family annoyances one of its chief values. She,
and everyone else, thought she ruled him; in fact, she not only did not
rule him, but had not even influence with him in the smallest trifle of
the matters he regarded as important.

The last time he had looked carefully at her--many, many years before--he
had thought her beautiful; he assumed thenceforth that she was still
beautiful, and was therefore proud of her. In like manner he had made up
his mind favorably to his children. As the bills grew heavier and
heavier, from year to year, with the wife and two children assiduously
expanding them, he paid none the less cheerfully. "There is some
satisfaction in paying up for them," reflected he. "At least a man can
feel that he's getting his money's worth." And he contrasted his luck
with the bad luck of so many men who had to "pay up" for "homely frumps,
that look worse the more they spend."

But Arthur was replying to Mrs. Whitney's remark with a bitter "Nobody
can do anything with father; he's narrow and obstinate. If you argue with
him, he's silent. He cares for nothing but his business."

Arthur did not hesitate to speak thus frankly to Mrs. Whitney. She seemed
a member of the family, like a sister of his mother or father who had
lived with them always; also he accepted her at the valuation she and all
her friends set upon her--he, like herself and them, thought her generous
and unselfish because she was lavish with sympathetic words and with
alms--the familiar means by which the heartless cheat themselves into a
reputation for heart. She always left the objects of her benevolence the
poorer for her ministrations, though they did not realize it. She adopted
as the guiding principle of her life the cynical philosophy--"Give people
what they want, never what they need." By sympathizing effusively with
those in trouble, she encouraged them in low-spiritedness; by lavishing
alms, she weakened struggling poverty into pauperism. But she took away
and left behind enthusiasm for her own moral superiority and humanity.
Also she deceived herself and others with such fluid outpourings of fine
phrases about "higher life" and "spiritual thinking" as so exasperated
Hiram Ranger.

Now, instead of showing Arthur what her substratum of shrewd sense
enabled her to see, she ministered soothingly unto his vanity. His father
was altogether wrong, tyrannical, cruel; he himself was altogether right,
a victim of his father's ignorance of the world.

"I decided not to submit," said Arthur, as if the decision were one which
had come to him the instant his father had shown the teeth and claws of
tyranny, instead of being an impulse of just that moment, inspired by
Mrs. Whitney's encouragement to the weakest and worst in his nature.

"I shouldn't be too hasty about that," she cautioned. "He is old and
sick. You ought to be more than considerate. And, also, you should
be careful not to make him do anything that would cut you out of
your rights."

It was the first time the thought of his "rights"--of the share of his
father's estate that would be his when his father was no more--had
definitely entered his head. That he would some day be a rich man he had
accepted just as he accepted the other conditions of his environment--all
to which he was born and in which consisted his title to be regarded as
of the "upper classes," like his associates at Harvard. Thinking now on
the insinuated proposition that his father might disinherit him, he
promptly rejected it. "No danger of his doing that," he assured her, with
the utmost confidence. "Father is an honest man, and he wouldn't think of
anything so dishonest, so dishonorable."

This view of a child's rights in the estate of its parents amused Mrs.
Whitney. She knew how quickly she would herself cut off a child of hers
who was obstinately disobedient, and, while she felt that it would be an
outrage for Hiram Ranger to cut off his son for making what she regarded
as the beginning of the highest career, the career of "gentleman," still
she could not dispute his right to do so. "Your father may not see your
rights in the same light that you do, Arthur," said she mildly. "If I
were you, I'd be careful."

Arthur reflected. "I don't think it's possible," said he, "but I guess
you're right. I must not forget that I've got others to think of
besides myself."

This patently meant Janet; Mrs. Whitney held her discreet tongue.

"It will do no harm to go to the office," she presently continued. "You
ought to get some knowledge of business, anyhow. You will be a man of
property some day, and you will need to know enough about business to be
able to supervise the managers of your estate. You know, I had Janet take
a course at a business college, last winter, and Ross is in with his
father and will be active for several years."

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus it came about that on Monday morning at nine Arthur sauntered into
the offices of the mills. He was in much such a tumult of anger,
curiosity, stubbornness, and nervousness as agitates a child on its
first appearance at school; but in his struggle not to show his feelings
he exaggerated his pose into a seeming of bored indifference. The door of
his father's private room was open; there sat Hiram, absorbed in
dictating to a stenographer. When his son appeared in the doorway, he
apparently did not realize it, though in fact the agitation the young man
was concealing under that unfortunate manner was calmness itself in
comparison with the state of mind behind Hiram's mask of somber
stolidity.

"He's trying to humiliate me to the depths," thought the son, as he stood
and waited, not daring either to advance or to retreat. How could he know
that his father was shrinking as a criminal from the branding iron, that
every nerve in that huge, powerful, seemingly impassive body was in
torture from this ordeal of accepting the hatred of his son in order that
he might do what he considered to be his duty? At length the young man
said: "I'm here, father."

"Be seated--just a minute," said the father, turning his face toward his
boy but unable to look even in that direction.

The letter was finished, and the stenographer gathered up her notes and
withdrew. Hiram sat nerving himself, his distress accentuating the stern
strength of his features. Presently he said: "I see you haven't come
dressed for work."

"Oh, I think these clothes will do for the office," said Arthur, with
apparent carelessness.

"But this business isn't run from the office," replied Hiram, with a
gentle smile that to the young man looked like the sneer of a tyrant.
"It's run from the mill. It prospers--it always has prospered--because
I work with the men. I know what they ought to do and what they are
doing. We all work together here. There ain't a Sunday clothes job
about the place."

Arthur's fingers were trembling as he pulled at his small mustache. What
did this tyrant expect of him? He had assumed that a place was to be made
for him in the office, a dignified place. There he would master the
business, would gather such knowledge as might be necessary successfully
to direct it, and would bestow that knowledge in the humble,
out-of-the-way corner of his mind befitting matters of that kind. And
here was his father, believing that the same coarse and toilsome methods
which had been necessary for himself were necessary for a trained and
cultured understanding!

"What do you want me to do?" asked Arthur.

Hiram drew a breath of relief. The boy was going to show good sense and
willingness after all. "I guess you'd better learn barrel-making first,"
said he. He rose. "I'll take you to the foreman of the cooperage, and
to-morrow you can go to work in the stave department. The first thing is
to learn to make a first-class barrel."

Arthur slowly rose to follow. He was weak with helpless rage. If his
father had taken him into the office and had invited him to help in
directing the intellectual part of that great enterprise, the part that
in a way was not without appeal to the imagination, he felt that he might
gradually have accustomed himself to it; but to be put into the mindless
routine of the workingman, to be set about menial tasks which a mere
muscular machine could perform better than he--what waste, what
degradation, what insult!

He followed his father to the cooperage, the uproar of its machinery
jarring fiercely upon him, but not so fiercely as did the common-looking
men slaving in torn and patched and stained clothing. He did not look at
the foreman as his father was introducing them and ignored his proffered
hand. "Begin him at the bottom, Patrick," explained Hiram, "and show him
no favors. We must give him a good education."

"That's right, Mr. Ranger," said Patrick, eying his new pupil dubiously.
He was not skilled in analysis of manner and character, so Arthur's
superciliousness missed him entirely and he was attributing the cold and
vacant stare to stupidity. "A regular damn dude," he was saying to
himself. "As soon as the old man's gone, some fellow with brains'll do
him out of the business. If the old man's wise, he'll buy him an annuity,
something safe and sure. Why do so many rich people have sons like that?
If I had one of his breed I'd shake his brains up with a stave."

Arthur mechanically followed his father back to the office. At the door
Hiram, eager to be rid of him, said: "I reckon that's about all we can do
to-day. You'd better go to Black and Peters's and get you some clothes.
Then you can show up at the cooperage at seven to-morrow morning, ready
to put in a good day's work."

He laid his hand on his son's shoulder, and that gesture and the
accompanying look, such as a surgeon might give his own child upon whom
he was performing a cruelly painful operation, must have caused some part
of what he felt to penetrate to the young man; for, instead of bursting
out at his father, he said appealingly: "Would it be a very great
disappointment to you if I were to go into--into some--some other line?"

"What line?" asked Hiram.

"I haven't settled--definitely. But I'm sure I'm not fitted for this." He
checked himself from going on to explain that he thought it would mean a
waste of all the refinements and elegancies he had been at so much pains
to acquire.

"Who's to look after the business when I'm gone?" asked Hiram. "Most of
what we've got is invested here. Who's to look after your mother's and
sister's interests, not to speak of your own?"

"I'd be willing to devote enough time to it to learn the management,"
said Arthur, "but I don't care to know all the details."

It was proof of Hiram's great love for the boy that he had no impulse of
anger at this display of what seemed to him the most priggish ignorance.
"There's only one way to learn," said he quietly. "That's the way I've
marked out for you. Don't forget--we start up at seven. You can breakfast
with me at a quarter past six, and we'll come down together."

As Arthur walked homeward he pictured himself in jumper and overalls on
his way from work of an evening--meeting the Whitneys--meeting Janet
Whitney! Like all Americans, who become inoculated with "grand ideas,"
he had the super-sensitiveness to appearances that makes foreigners call
us the most snobbishly conventional people on earth. What would it avail
to be in character _the_ refined person in the community and in position
_the_ admired person, if he spent his days at menial toil and wore the
livery of labor? He knew Janet Whitney would blush as she bowed to him,
and that she wouldn't bow to him unless she were compelled to do so
because she had not seen him in time to escape; and he felt that she
would be justified. The whole business seemed to him a hideous dream, a
sardonic practical joke upon him. Surely, surely, he would presently wake
from this nightmare to find himself once more an unimperiled gentleman.

In the back parlor at home he found Adelaide about to set out for the
Whitneys. As she expected to walk with Mrs. Whitney for an hour before
lunch she was in walking costume--hat, dress, gloves, shoes, stockings,
sunshade, all the simplest, most expensive-looking, most
unpractical-looking white. From hat to heels she was the embodiment of
luxurious, "ladylike" idleness, the kind that not only is idle itself,
but also, being beautiful, attractive, and compelling, is the cause of
idleness in others. She breathed upon Arthur the delicious perfume of the
elegant life from which he was being thrust by the coarse hand of his
father--and Arthur felt as if he were already in sweaty overalls.

"Well?" she asked.

"He's going to make a common workman of me," said Arthur, sullen,
mentally contrasting his lot with hers. "And he's got me on the hip. I
don't dare treat him as he deserves. If I did, he's got just devil enough
in him to cheat me out of my share of the property. A sweet revenge he
could take on me in his will."

Adelaide drew back--was rudely thrust back by the barrier between her and
her brother which had sprung up as if by magic. Across it she studied him
with a pain in her heart that showed in her face. "O Arthur, how can you
think such a thing!" she exclaimed.

"Isn't it so?" he demanded.

"He has a right to do what he pleases with his own." Then she softened
this by adding, "But he'd never do anything unjust."

"It isn't his own," retorted her brother. "It belongs to us all."

"We didn't make it," she insisted. "We haven't any right to it, except to
what he gives us."

"Then you think we're living on his charity?"

"No--not just that," she answered hesitatingly. "I've never thought it
out--never have thought about it at all."

"He brought us into the world," Arthur pursued. "He has accustomed us to
a certain station--to a certain way of living. It's his duty in honesty
and in honor to do everything in his power to keep us there."

Del admitted to herself that this was plausible, but she somehow felt
that it was not true. "It seems to me that if parents bring their
children up to be the right sort--useful and decent and a credit," said
she, "they've done the biggest part of their duty. The money isn't so
important, is it? At least, it oughtn't to be."

Arthur looked at her with angry suspicion. "Suppose he made a will giving
it all to you, Del," he said, affecting the manner of impartial,
disinterested argument, "what would _you_ do?"

"Share with you, of course," she answered, hurt that he should raise the
question at a time when raising it seemed an accusation of her, or at
least a doubt of her.

He laughed satirically. "That's what you think now," said he. "But, when
the time came, you'd be married to Ross Whitney, and he'd show you how
just father's judgment of me was, how wicked it would be to break his
last solemn wish and will, and how unfit I was to take care of money. And
you'd see it; and the will would stand. Oh, you'd see it! I know human
nature. If it was a small estate--in those cases brothers and sisters
always act generously--no, not always. Some of 'em, lots of 'em, quarrel
and fight over a few pieces of furniture and crockery. But in a case of
a big estate, who ever heard of the one that was favored giving up his
advantage unless he was afraid of a scandal, or his lawyers advised him
he might as well play the generous, because he'd surely lose the suit?"

"Of course, Arthur, I can't be sure what I'd do," she replied gently;
"but I hope I'd not be made altogether contemptible by inheriting a
little money."

"But it wouldn't seem contemptible," he retorted. "It'd be legal and
sensible, and it'd seem just. You'd only be obeying a dead father's last
wishes and guarding the interests of your husband and your children. They
come before brothers."

"But not before self-respect," she said very quietly. She put her arm
around his neck and pressed her cheek against his. "Arthur--dear--dear--"
she murmured, "please don't talk or think about this any more.
It--it--hurts." And there were hot tears in her eyes, and at her heart a
sense of sickness and of fright; for his presentation of the other side
of the case made her afraid of what she might do, or be tempted to do, in
the circumstances he pictured. She knew she wouldn't--at least, not so
long as she remained the person she then was. But how long would that be?
How many years of association with her new sort of friends--with the sort
Ross had long been--with the sort she was becoming more and more
like--how many, or, rather, how few years would it take to complete the
process of making her over into a person who would do precisely what
Arthur had pictured?

Arthur had said a great deal more than he intended--more, even, than he
believed true. For a moment he felt ashamed of himself; then he reminded
himself that he wasn't really to blame; that, but for his father's
harshness toward him, he would never have had such sinister thoughts
about him or Adelaide. Thus his apology took the form of an outburst
against Hiram. "Father has brought out the worst there is in me!" he
exclaimed. "He is goading me on to--"

He looked up; Hiram was in the doorway. He sprang to his feet. "Yes, I
mean it!" he cried, his brain confused, his blood on fire. "I don't care
what you do. Cut me off! Make me go to work like any common laborer!
Crush out all the decency there is in me!"

The figure of the huge old man was like a storm-scarred statue. The
tragedy of his countenance filled his son and daughter with awe and
terror. Then, slowly, like a statue falling, he stiffly tilted forward,
crashed at full length face downward on the floor. He lay as he had
fallen, breathing heavily, hoarsely. And they, each tightly holding the
other's hand like two little children, stood pale and shuddering, unable
to move toward the stricken colossus.




CHAPTER V

THE WILL


When Hiram had so far improved that his period of isolation was obviously
within a few days of its end, Adelaide suggested to Arthur, somewhat
timidly, "Don't you think you ought to go to work at the mills?"

He frowned. It was bad enough to have the inward instinct to this, and to
fight it down anew each day as a temptation to weakness and cowardice.
That the traitor should get an ally in his sister--it was intolerable.
The frown deepened into a scowl.

But Del had been doing real thinking since she saw her father stricken
down, and she was beginning clearly to see his point of view as to
Arthur. That angry frown was discouraging, but she felt too strongly to
be quite daunted. "It might help father toward getting well," she urged,
"and make _such_ a difference--in _every_ way."

"No more hypocrisy. I was right; he was wrong," replied her brother. He
had questioned Dr. Schulze anxiously about his father's seizure; and
Schulze, who had taken a strong fancy to him and had wished to put him at
ease, declared that the attack must have begun at the mills, and would
probably have brought Hiram down before he could have reached home, had
he not been so powerful of body and of will. And Arthur, easily reassured
where he must be assured if he was to have peace of mind, now believed
that his outburst had had no part whatever in causing his father's
stroke. So he was all for firm stand against slavery. "If I yield an inch
now," he went on to Adelaide, "he'll never stop until he has made me his
slave. He has lorded it over those workingmen so long that the least
opposition puts him in a frenzy."

Adelaide gave over, for the time, the combat against a stubbornness which
was an inheritance from his father. "I've only made him more set by what
I've said," thought she. "Now, he has committed himself. I ought not to
have been so tactless."

Long after Hiram got back in part the power of speech, he spoke only when
directly addressed, and then after a wait in which he seemed to have cast
about for the fewest possible words. After a full week of this emphasized
reticence, he said, "Where is Arthur?"

Arthur had kept away because--so he told himself and believed--while he
was not in the least responsible for his father's illness, still seeing
him and being thus reminded of their difference could not but have a bad
effect. That particular day, as luck would have it, he for the first time
since his father was stricken had left the grounds. "He's out driving,"
said his mother.

"In the tandem?" asked Hiram.

"Yes," replied Ellen, knowing nothing of the last development of the
strained relations between her husband and her "boy."

"Then he hasn't gone to work?"

"He's stayed close to the house ever since you were taken sick, Hiram,"
said she, with gentle reproach. "He's been helping me nurse you."

Hiram did not need to inquire how little that meant. He knew that, when
anyone Ellen Ranger loved was ill, she would permit no help in the
nursing, neither by day nor by night. He relapsed into his brooding over
the problem which was his sad companion each conscious moment, now that
the warning "Put your house in order" had been so sternly emphasized.

The day Dr. Schulze let them bring him down to the first floor, Mrs.
Hastings--"Mrs. Fred," to distinguish her from "Mrs. Val"--happened to
call. Mrs. Ranger did not like her for two reasons--first, she had
married her favorite cousin, Alfred Hastings, and had been the
"ruination" of him; second, she had a way of running on and on to
everyone and anyone about the most intimate family affairs, and
close-mouthed Ellen Ranger thought this the quintessence of indiscretion
and vulgarity. But Hiram liked her, was amused by her always interesting
and at times witty thrusts at the various members of her family,
including herself. So, Mrs. Ranger, clutching at anything that might
lighten the gloom thick and black upon him, let her in and left them
alone together. With so much to do, she took advantage of every moment
which she could conscientiously spend out of his presence.

At sight of Henrietta, Hiram's face brightened; and well it might. In
old-fashioned Saint X it was the custom for a married woman to "settle
down" as soon as she returned from her honeymoon--to abandon all
thoughts, pretensions, efforts toward an attractive exterior, and to
become a "settled" woman, "settled" meaning purified of the last grain of
the vanity of trying to please the eye or ear of the male. And
conversation with any man, other than her husband--and even with him, if
a woman were soundly virtuous, through and through--must be as clean
shorn of allurement as a Quaker meetinghouse. Mrs. Fred had defied this
ancient and sacred tradition of the "settled" woman. She had kept her
looks; she frankly delighted in the admiration of men. And the fact that
the most captious old maid in Saint X could not find a flaw in her
character as a faithful wife, aggravated the offending. For, did not her
devotion to her husband make dangerous her example of frivolity retained
and flaunted, as a pure private life in an infidel made his heresies
plausible and insidious? At "almost" forty, Mrs. Hastings looked "about"
thirty and acted as if she were a girl or a widow. Each group of gods
seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it. Saint X's set
of gods of conventionality doubtless seems ridiculous to those who knock
the dust before some other set; but Saint X cannot be blamed for having a
sober face before its own altars, and reserving its jeers and pitying
smiles for deities of conventionality in high dread and awe elsewhere.
And if Mrs. Fred had not been "one of the Fuller heirs," Saint X would
have made her feel its displeasure, instead of merely gossiping and
threatening.

"I'm going the round of the invalids to-day," began Henrietta, after she
had got through the formula of sick-room conversation. "I've just come
from old John Skeffington. I found all the family in the depths. He
fooled 'em again last night."

Hiram smiled. All Saint X knew what it meant for old Skeffington to "fool
'em again." He had been dying for three years. At the first news that he
was seized of a mortal illness his near relations, who had been driven
from him by his temper and his parsimony, gathered under his roof from
far and near, each group hoping to induce him to make a will in its
favor. He lingered on, and so did they--watching each other, trying to
outdo each other in complaisance to the humors of the old miser. And he
got a new grip on life through his pleasure in tyrannizing over them and
in putting them to great expense in keeping up his house. He favored
first one group, then another, taking fagots from fires of hope burning
too high to rekindle fires about to expire.

"How is he?" asked Hiram.

"_They_ say he can't last till fall," replied Henrietta; "but he'll last
another winter, maybe ten. He's having more and more fun all the time. He
has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he
happens to be sleeping badly--and that's pretty often--he bangs on the
anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then,
maybe he'll set 'em all to work mending his fishing tackle--right in the
dead of night."

"Are they all there still?" asked Hiram. "The Thomases, the Wilsons, the
Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?"

"Everyone--except Miss Frisbie. She's gone back home to Rushville, but
she's sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow. I saw Dory
Hargrave in the street a while ago. You know his mother was a first
cousin of old John's. I told him he ought not to let strangers get the
old man's money, that he ought to shy _his_ castor into the ring."

"And what did Dory say?" asked Hiram.

"He came back at me good and hard," said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored
laugh. "He said there'd been enough people in Saint X ruined by
inheritances and by expecting inheritances. You know the creek that flows
through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the
reservoir. Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had
been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any
graveyard creek, yet nobody talked of stopping it."

The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over
the other--a certain sign that he was thinking intently.

"There's a good deal of truth in what he said," she went on. "Look at our
family, for instance. We've been living on an allowance from Grandfather
Fuller in Chicago for forty years. None of us has ever done a stroke of
work; we've simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his
millions. Look at us! Bill and Tom drunkards, Dick a loafer without even
the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep
alive. Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our
family they began to loaf and wait. We've been waiting in decent, or I
should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we're still waiting.
We're a lot of paupers. We're on a level with the Wilmots."

"Yes--there are the Wilmots, too," said Hiram absently.

"That's another form of the same disease," Henrietta went on. "Did you
know General Wilmot?"

"He was a fine man," said Hiram, "one of the founders of this town, and
he made a fortune out of it. He got overbearing, and what he thought was
proud, toward the end of his life. But he had a good heart and worked for
all he had--honest work."

"And he brought his family up to be real down-East gentlemen and
ladies," resumed Henrietta. "And look at 'em. They lost the money,
because they were too gentlemanly and too ladylike to work to hold on to
it. And there they live in the big house, half-starved. Why, really, Mr.
Ranger, they don't have enough to eat. And they dress in clothes that
have been in the family for a generation. They make their underclothes
out of old bed linen. And the grass on their front lawns is three feet
high, and the moss and weeds cover and pry up the bricks of their walks.
They're too 'proud' to work and too poor to hire. How much have they
borrowed from you?"

"I don't know," said Hiram. "Not much."

"I know better--and you oughtn't to have lent them a cent. Yesterday old
Wilmot was hawking two of his grandfather's watches about. And all the
Wilmots have got brains, just as our family has. Nothing wrong with
either of us, but that stream Dory Hargrave was talking about."

"There's John Dumont," mused Ranger.

"Yes--_he_ is an exception. But what's he doing with what his father left
him? I don't let them throw dust in my eyes with his philanthropy as they
call it. The plain truth is he's a gambler and a thief, and he uses what
his father left him to be gambler and thief on the big scale, and so keep
out of the penitentiary--'finance,' they call it. If he'd been poor, he'd
have been in jail long ago--no, he wouldn't--he'd have done differently.
It was the money that started him wrong."

"A great deal of good can be done with money," said Hiram.

"Can it?" demanded Mrs. Fred. "It don't look that way to me. I'm full of
this, for I was hauling my Alfred over the coals this very morning"--she
laughed--"for being what I've made him, for doing what I'd do in his
place--for being like my father and my brothers. It seems to me, precious
little of the alleged good that's done with wealth is really good; and
what little isn't downright bad hides the truth from people. Talk about
the good money does! What does it amount to--the good that's good, and
the good that's rotten bad? What does it all amount to beside the good
that having to work does? People that have to work hard are usually
honest and have sympathy and affection and try to amount to something.
And if they are bad, why at least they can't hurt anybody but themselves
very much, where a John Dumont or a Skeffington can injure
hundreds--thousands. Take your own case, Mr. Ranger. Your money has never
done you any good. It was your hard work. All your money has ever done
has been--Do you think your boy and girl will be as good a man and woman,
as useful and creditable to the community, as you and Cousin Ellen?"

Hiram said nothing; he continued to slide his great, strong,
useful-looking hands one over the other.

"A fortune makes a man stumble along if he's in the right road, makes him
race along if he's in the wrong road," concluded Henrietta.

"You must have been talking a great deal to young Hargrave lately," said
Hiram shrewdly.

She blushed. "That's true," she admitted, with a laugh. "But I'm not
altogether parroting what he said. I do my own thinking." She rose. "I'm
afraid I haven't cheered you up much."

"I'm glad you came," replied Hiram earnestly; then, with an
admiring look, "It's a pity some of the men of your family haven't
got your energy."

She laughed. "They have," said she. "Every one of us is a first-rate
talker--and that's all the energy I've got--energy to wag my tongue.
Still--You didn't know I'd gone into business?"

"Business?"

"That is, I'm backing Stella Wilmot in opening a little shop--to sell
millinery."

"A Wilmot at work!" exclaimed Hiram.

"A Wilmot at work," affirmed Henrietta. "She's more like her great
grandfather; you know how a bad trait will skip several generations and
then show again. The Wilmots have been cultivating the commonness of work
out of their blood for three generations, but it has burst in again. She
made a declaration of independence last week. She told the family she
was tired of being a pauper and beggar. And when I heard she wanted to do
something I offered to go in with her in a business. She's got a lot of
taste in trimming hats. She certainly has had experience enough."

"She always looks well," said Hiram.

"And you'd wonder at it, if you were a woman and knew what she's had to
work on. So I took four hundred dollars grandfather sent me as a birthday
present, and we're going to open up in a small way. She's to put her name
out--my family won't let me put mine out, too. 'Wilmot & Hastings' would
sound well, don't you think? But it's got to be 'Wilmot & Co.' We've
hired a store--No. 263 Monroe Street. We have our opening in August."

"Do you need any--" began Hiram.

"No, thank you," she cut in, with a laugh. "This is a close corporation.
No stock for sale. We want to hold on to every cent of the profits."

"Well," said Hiram, "if you ever do need to borrow, you know where to
come."

"Where the whole town comes when it's hard up," said Henrietta; and she
astonished the old man by giving him a shy, darting kiss on the brow.
"Now, don't you tell your wife!" she exclaimed, laughing and blushing
furiously and making for the door.

When Adelaide, sent by her mother, came to sit with him, he said: "Draw
the blinds, child, and leave me alone. I want to rest." She obeyed him.
At intervals of half an hour she opened the door softly, looked in at
him, thought he was asleep, and went softly away. But he had never been
further from sleep in his life. Henrietta Hastings's harum-scarum
gossiping and philosophizing happened to be just what his troubled mind
needed to precipitate its clouds into a solid mass that could be clearly
seen and carefully examined. Heretofore he had accepted the conventional
explanations of all the ultimate problems, had regarded philosophers as
time wasters, own brothers to the debaters who whittled on dry-goods
boxes at the sidewalk's edge in summer and about the stoves in the rear
of stores in winter, settling all affairs save their own. But now,
sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses
from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, half of his mind.

Even as Henrietta was talking, he began to see what seemed to him the
hidden meaning in the mysterious "Put your house in order" that would
give him no rest. But he was not the man to make an important decision in
haste, was the last man in the world to inflict discomfort, much less
pain, upon anyone, unless the command to do it came unmistakably in the
one voice he dared not disobey. Day after day he brooded; night after
night he fought to escape. But, slowly, inexorably, his iron inheritance
from Covenanter on one side and Puritan on the other asserted itself.
Heartsick, and all but crying out in anguish, he advanced toward the
stern task which he could no longer deny or doubt that the Most High God
had set for him.

He sent for Dory Hargrave's father.

Mark Hargrave was president of the Tecumseh Agricultural and Classical
University, to give it its full legal entitlements. It consisted in a
faculty of six, including Dr. Hargrave, and in two meager and modest,
almost mean "halls," and two hundred acres of land. There were at that
time just under four hundred students, all but about fifty working their
way through. So poor was the college that it was kept going only by
efforts, the success of which seemed miraculous interventions of
Providence. They were so regarded by Dr. Hargrave, and the stubbornest
infidel must have conceded that he was not unjustified.

As Hargrave, tall and spare, his strong features illumined by life-long
unselfish service to his fellow-men, came into Hiram Ranger's presence,
Hiram shrank and grew gray as his hair. Hargrave might have been the
officer come to lead him forth to execution.

"If you had not sent for me, Mr. Ranger," he began, after the greetings,
"I should have come of my own accord within a day or two. Latterly God
has been strongly moving me to lay before you the claims of my boys--of
the college."

This was to Hiram direct confirmation of his own convictions. He tried to
force his lips to say so, but they would not move.

"You and Mrs. Ranger," Hargrave went on, "have had a long life, full of
the consciousness of useful work well done. Your industry, your fitness
for the just use of God's treasure, has been demonstrated, and He has
made you stewards of much of it. And now approaches the final test, the
greatest test, of your fitness to do His work. In His name, my old
friend, what are you going to do with His treasure?"

Hiram Ranger's face lighted up. The peace that was entering his soul lay
upon the tragedy of his mental and physical suffering soft and serene
and sweet as moonlight beautifying a ruin. "That's why I sent for you,
Mark," he said.

"Hiram, are you going to leave your wealth so that it may continue to do
good in the world? Or, are you going to leave it so that it may tempt
your children to vanity and selfishness, to lives of idleness and folly,
to bring up their children to be even less useful to mankind than they,
even more out of sympathy with the ideals which God has implanted? All of
those ideals are attainable only through shoulder-to-shoulder work such
as you have done all your life."

"God help me!" muttered Hiram. The sweat was beading his forehead and his
hands were clasped and wrenching each at the other, typical of the two
forces contending in final battle within him. "God help me!"

"Have you ever looked about you in this town and thought of the meaning
of its steady decay, moral and physical? God prospered the hard-working
men who founded it; but, instead of appreciating His blessings, they
regarded the wealth He gave them as their own; and they left it to their
children. And see how their sin is being visited upon the third and
fourth generations! Industry has been slowly paralyzing. The young
people, whose wealth gave them the best opportunities, are leading idle
lives, are full of vanity of class and caste, are steeped in the sins
that ever follow in the wake of idleness--the sins of selfishness and
indulgence. Instead of being workers, leading in the march upward,
instead of taking the position for which their superior opportunities
should have fitted them, they set an example of idleness and indolence.
They despise their ancestry of toil which should be their pride. They
pride themselves upon the parasitism which is their shame. And they set
before the young an example of contempt for work, of looking on it as a
curse and a disgrace."

"I have been thinking of these things lately," said Hiram.

"It is the curse of the world, this inherited wealth," cried Hargrave.
"Because of it humanity moves in circles instead of forward. The ground
gained by the toiling generations, is lost by the inheriting generations.
And this accursed inheritance tempts men ever to long for and hope for
that which they have not earned. God gave man a trial of the plan of
living in idleness upon that which he had not earned, and man fell. Then
God established the other plan, and through it man has been rising--but
rising slowly and with many a backward slip, because he has tried to
thwart the Divine plan with the system of inheritance. Fortunately, the
great mass of mankind has had nothing to leave to heirs, has had no hope
of inheritances. Thus, new leaders have ever been developed in place of
those destroyed by inherited prosperity. But, unfortunately, the law of
inheritance has been able to do its devil's work upon the best element in
every human society, upon those who had the most efficient and exemplary
parents, and so had the best opportunity to develop into men and women of
the highest efficiency. No wonder progress is slow, when the leaders of
each generation have to be developed from the bottom all over again, and
when the ideal of useful work is obscured by the false ideal of living
without work. Waiting for dead men's shoes! Dead men's shoes instead of
shoes of one's own."

"Dead men's shoes," muttered Hiram.

"The curse of unearned wealth," went on his friend. "Your life, Hiram,
leaves to your children the injunction to work, to labor cheerfully and
equally, honestly and helpfully, with their brothers and sisters; but
your wealth--If you leave it to them, will it not give that injunction
the lie, will it not invite them to violate that injunction?"

"I have been watching my children, my boy, especially," said Hiram. "I
don't know about all this that you've been saying. It's a big subject;
but I do know about this boy of mine. I wish I'd 'a' taken your advice,
Mark, and put him in your school. But his mother was set on the East--on
Harvard." Tears were in his eyes at this. He remembered how she, knowing
nothing of college, but feeling it was her duty to have her children
educated properly, a duty she must not put upon others, had sent for the
catalogues of all the famous colleges in the country. He could see her
poring over the catalogues, balancing one offering of educational
advantage against another, finally deciding for Harvard, the greatest of
them all. He could hear her saying: "It'll cost a great deal, Hiram. As
near as I can reckon it out it'll cost about a thousand dollars a
year--twelve hundred if we want to be v-e-r-y liberal, so the catalogue
says. But Harvard's the biggest, and has the most teachers and scholars,
and takes in all the branches. And we ought to give our Arthur the best."
And now--By what bitter experience had he learned that the college is not
in the catalogue, is a thing apart, unrelated and immeasurably different!
His eyes were hot with anger as he thought how the boy's mother, honest,
conscientious Ellen, had been betrayed.

"Look here, Mark," he blazed out, "if I leave money to your college I
want to see that it can't ever be like them eastern institutions of
learning." He made a gesture of disgust. "Learning!"

"If you leave us anything, Hiram, leave it so that any young man who gets
its advantages must work for them."

"That's it!" exclaimed Hiram. "That's what I want. Can you draw me up
that kind of plan? No boy, no matter what he has at home, can come to
that there college without working his way through, without learning to
work, me to provide the chance to earn the living."

"I have just such a plan," said Hargrave, drawing a paper from his
pocket. "I've had it ready for years waiting for just such an
opportunity."

"Read it," said Hiram, sinking deep in his big chair and closing his eyes
and beginning to rub his forehead with his great hand.

And Hargrave read, forgetting his surroundings, forgetting everything in
his enthusiasm for this dream of his life--a university, in fact as well
as in name, which would attract the ambitious children of rich and
well-to-do and poor, would teach them how to live honestly and nobly,
would give them not only useful knowledge to work with but also the light
to work by. "You see, Hiram, I think a child ought to begin to be a man
as soon as he begins to live--a man, standing on his own feet, in his own
shoes, with the courage that comes from knowing how to do well something
which the world needs."

He looked at Hiram for the first time in nearly half an hour. He was
alarmed by the haggard, ghastly gray of that majestic face; and his
thought was not for his plan probably about to be thwarted by the man's
premature death, but of his own selfishness in wearying and imperiling
him by importunity at such a time. "But we'll talk of this again," he
said sadly, putting the paper in his pocket and rising for instant
departure.

"Give me the paper," said Hiram, putting out his trembling hand, but not
lifting his heavy, blue-black lids.

Mark gave it to him hesitatingly. "You'd better put it off till you're
stronger, Hiram."

"I'll see," said Hiram. "Good morning, Mark."

       *       *       *       *       *

Judge Torrey was the next to get Ranger's summons; it came toward
mid-afternoon of that same day. Like Hargrave, Torrey had been his
life-long friend.

"Torrey," he said, "I want you to examine this plan"--and he held up the
paper Hargrave had left--"and, if it is not legal, put it into legal
shape, and incorporate it into my will. I feel I ain't got much time."
With a far-away, listening look--"I must put my house in order--in order.
Draw up a will and bring it to me before five o'clock. I want you to
write it yourself--trust no one--no one!" His eyes were bright, his
cheeks bluish, and he spoke in a thick, excited voice that broke and
shrilled toward the end of each sentence.

"I can't do it to-day. Too much haste--"

"To-day!" commanded Hiram. "I won't rest till it's done!"

"Of course, I can--"

"Read the paper now, and give me your opinion."

Torrey put on his glasses, opened the paper. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "I
remember this. It's in my partner's handwriting. Hargrave had Watson
draw it up about five years ago. We were very careful in preparing it.
It is legal."

"Very well," continued Hiram. "Now I'll give you the points of my will."

Torrey took notebook and pencil from his pocket.

"First," began Hiram, as if he were reciting something he had learned by
heart, "to my wife, Ellen, this house and everything in it, and the
grounds and all the horses and carriages and that kind of thing."

"Yes," said Torrey, looking up from his note making.

"Second, to my wife an income of seven thousand a year for life--that is
what it cost her and me to live last year, and the children--except the
extras. Seven thousand for life--but only for life."

"Yes," said Torrey, his glance at Hiram now uneasy and expectant.

"Third, to my daughter, Adelaide, two thousand a year for her life--to be
divided among her daughters equally, if she have any; if not, to revert
to my estate at her death."

"Yes," said Torrey.

"Fourth, to my son, five thousand dollars in cash."

A long pause, Torrey looking at his old friend and client as if he
thought one or the other of them bereft of his senses. At last, he said,
"Yes, Hiram."

"Fifth, to my brothers, Jacob and Ezra, four hundred dollars each,"
continued Hiram, in his same voice of repeating by rote, "and to my
sister Prudence, five thousand dollars--so fixed that her husband can't
touch it."

"Yes," said Torrey.

"Sixth, the rest of my estate to be made into a trust, with Charles
Whitney and Mark Hargrave and Hampden Scarborough trustees, with power to
select their successors. The trust to be administered for the benefit of
Tecumseh University under the plan you have there."

Torrey half-rose from his chair, his usually calm features reflecting his
inner contention of grief, alarm, and protest. But there was in Hiram's
face that which made him sink back without having spoken.

"Seventh," continued Hiram, "the mills and the cooperage to be continued
as now, and not to be sold for at least fifteen years. If my son Arthur
wishes to have employment in them, he is to have it at the proper wages
for the work he does. If at the end of fifteen years he wishes to buy
them, he to have the right to buy, that is, my controlling interest in
them, provided he can make a cash payment of ten per cent of the then
value; and, if he can do that, he is to have ten years in which to
complete the payment--or longer, if the trustees think it wise."

A long pause; Hiram seemed slowly to relax and collapse like a man
stretched on the rack, who ceases to suffer either because the torture is
ended or because his nerves mercifully refuse to register any more pain.
"That is all," he said wearily.

Torrey wiped his glasses, put them on, wiped them again, hung them on the
hook attached to the lapel of his waistcoat, put them on, studied the
paper, then said hesitatingly: "As one of your oldest friends, Hiram, and
in view of the surprising nature of the--the--"

"I do not wish to discuss it," interrupted Hiram, with that gruff
finality of manner which he always used to hide his softness, and which
deceived everyone, often even his wife. "Come back at five o'clock with
two witnesses."

Torrey rose, his body shifting with his shifting mind as he cast about
for an excuse for lingering. "Very well, Hiram," he finally said. As he
shook hands, he blurted out huskily, "The boy's a fine young fellow, Hi.
It don't seem right to disgrace him by cutting him off this way."

Hiram winced. "Wait a minute," he said. He had been overlooking the
public--how the town would gossip and insinuate. "Put in this, Torrey,"
he resumed after reflecting. And deliberately, with long pauses to
construct the phrases, he dictated: "I make this disposal of my estate
through my love for my children, and because I have firm belief in the
soundness of their character and in their capacity to do and to be. I
feel they will be better off without the wealth which would tempt my son
to relax his efforts to make a useful man of himself and would cause my
daughter to be sought for her fortune instead of for herself."

"That may quiet gossip against your children," said Torrey, when he had
taken down Hiram's slowly enunciated words, "but it does not change the
extraordinary character of the will."

"John," said Hiram, "can you think of a single instance in which
inherited wealth has been a benefit, a single case where a man has become
more of a man than he would if he hadn't had it?"

Hiram waited long. Torrey finally said: "That may be, but--" But what?
Torrey did not know, and so came to a full stop.

"I've been trying for weeks to think of one," continued Hiram, "and
whenever I thought I'd found one, I'd see, on looking at all the facts,
that it only _seemed_ to be so. And I recalled nearly a hundred instances
right here in Saint X where big inheritances or little had been ruinous."

"I have never thought on this aspect of the matter before," said Torrey.
"But to bring children up in the expectation of wealth, and then to leave
them practically nothing, looks to me like--like cheating them."

"It does, John," Hiram answered. "I've pushed my boy and my girl far
along the broad way that leads to destruction. I must take the
consequences. But God won't let me divide the punishment for my sins with
them. I see my duty clear. I must do it. Bring the will at five o'clock."

Hiram's eyes were closed; his voice sounded to Torrey as if it were the
utterance of a mind far, far away--as far away as that other world which
had seemed vividly real to Hiram all his life; it seemed real and near to
Torrey, looking into his old friend's face. "The power that's guiding
him," Torrey said to himself, "is one I daren't dispute with." And he
went away with noiseless step and with head reverently bent.




CHAPTER VI

MRS. WHITNEY NEGOTIATES


The Rangers' neighbors saw the visits of Hargrave and Torrey. Immediately
a rumor of a bequest to Tecumseh was racing through the town and up the
Bluffs and through the fashionable suburb. It arrived at Point Helen, the
seat of the Whitneys, within an hour after Torrey left Ranger. It had
accumulated confirmatory detail by that time--the bequest was large; was
very large; was half his fortune--and the rest of the estate was to go to
the college should Arthur and Adelaide die childless.

Mrs. Whitney lost no time. At half-past four she was seated in the same
chair in which Hargrave and Torrey had sat. It was not difficult to bring
up the subject of the two marriages, which were doubly to unite the
houses and fortunes of Ranger and Whitney--the marriages of Arthur and
Janet, of Ross and Adelaide. "And, of course," said Mrs. Whitney, "we all
want the young people started right. I don't believe children ought to
feel dependent on their parents. It seems to me that puts filial and
parental love on a very low plane. Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Hiram.

"The young people ought to feel that their financial position is secure.
And, as you and Ellen and Charles and I have lived for our children, have
toiled to raise them above the sordid cares and anxieties of life, we
ought to complete our work now and make them--happy."

Hiram did not speak, though she gave him ample time.

"So," pursued Mrs. Whitney, "I thought I wouldn't put off any longer
talking about what Charles and I have had in mind some months. Ross and
Janet will soon be here, and I know all four of the children are anxious
to have the engagements formally completed."

"Completed?" said Hiram.

"Yes," reaffirmed Matilda. "Of course they can't be completed until we
parents have done our share. You and Ellen want to know that Arthur and
Adelaide won't be at the mercy of any reverse in business Charles might
have--or of any caprice which might influence him in making his will. And
Charles and I want to feel the same way as to our Ross and Janet."

"Yes," said Hiram. "I see." A smile of stern irony roused his features
from their repose into an expressiveness that made Mrs. Whitney
exceedingly uncomfortable--but the more resolute.

"Charles is willing to be liberal both in immediate settlement and in
binding himself in the matter of his will," she went on. "He often says,
'I don't want my children to be impatient for me to die. I want to make
'em feel they're getting, if anything, more because I'm alive.'"

A long pause, then Hiram said: "That's one way of looking at it."

"That's _your_ way," said Matilda, as if the matter were settled. And
she smiled her softest and sweetest. But Hiram saw only the glitter in
her cold brown eyes, a glitter as hard as the sheen of her
henna-stained hair.

"No," said he emphatically, "that's _not_ my way. That's the broad and
easy way that leads to destruction. Ellen and I," he went on, his
excitement showing only in his lapses into dialect, "we hain't worked
all our lives so that our children'll be shiftless idlers, settin'
'round, polishin' their fingernails, and thinkin' up foolishness and
breedin' fools."

Matilda had always known that Hiram and Ellen were hopelessly vulgar; but
she had thought they cherished a secret admiration for the "higher
things" beyond their reach, and were resolved that their son should be a
gentleman and their daughter a lady. She found in Hiram's energetic
bitterness nothing to cause her to change her view. "He simply wants to
hold on to his property to the last, and play the tyrant," she said to
herself. "All people of property naturally feel that way." And she held
steadily to her programme. "Well, Hiram," she proceeded tranquilly, "if
those marriages are to take place, Charles and I will expect you to meet
us halfway."

"If Ross and my Delia and Arthur and your Jane are fond of each other,
let 'em marry as you and Charles, as Ellen and I married. I ain't buyin'
your son, nor sellin' my daughter. That's my last word, Tillie."

On impulse, he pressed the electric button in the wall behind him.
When the new upstairs girl came, he said: "Tell the children I want
to see 'em."

Arthur and Adelaide presently came, flushed with the exercise of the
tennis the girl had interrupted.

"Mrs. Whitney, here," said Hiram, "tells me her children won't marry
without settlements, as it's called. And I've been tellin' her that my
son and daughter ain't buyin' and sellin'."

Mrs. Whitney hid her fury. "Your father has a quaint way of expressing
himself," she said, laughing elegantly. "I've simply been trying to
persuade him to do as much toward securing the future of you two as Mr.
Whitney is willing to do. Don't be absurd, Hiram. You know better than to
talk that way."

Hiram looked steadily at her. "You've been travelin' about, 'Tilda,"
he said, "gettin' together a lot of newfangled notions. Ellen and I
and our children stick to the old way." And he looked at Arthur, then
at Adelaide.

Their faces gave him a twinge at the heart. "Speak up!" he said. "Do you
or do you not stick to the old way?"

"I can't talk about it, father," was Adelaide's evasive answer, her face
scarlet and her eyes down.

"And you, sir?" said Hiram to his son.

"You'll have to excuse me, sir," replied Arthur coldly.

Hiram winced before Mrs. Whitney's triumphant glance. He leaned forward
and, looking at his daughter, said: "Del, would you marry a man who
wouldn't take you unless you brought him a fortune?"

"No, father," Adelaide answered. She was meeting his gaze now. "But, at
the same time, I'd rather not be dependent on my husband."

"Do you think your mother is dependent on me?"

"That's different," said Adelaide, after a pause.

"How?" asked Hiram.

Adelaide did not answer, could not answer. To answer honestly would be
to confess that which had been troubling her greatly of late--the
feeling that there was something profoundly unsatisfactory in the
relations between Ross and herself; that what he was giving her was
different not only in degree but even in kind from what she wanted, or
ought to want, from what she was trying to give him, or thought she
ought to try to give him.

"And you, Arthur?" asked Hiram in the same solemn, appealing tone.

"I should not ask Janet to marry me unless I was sure I could support her
in the manner to which she is accustomed," said Arthur. "I certainly
shouldn't wish to be dependent upon her."

"Then, your notion of marrying is that people get married for a
living, for luxury. I suppose you'd expect her to leave you if you
lost your money?"

"That's different," said Arthur, restraining the impulse to reason with
his illogical father whose antiquated sentimentalism was as unfitted to
the new conditions of American life as were his ideas about work.

"You see, Hiram," said Mrs. Whitney, good-humoredly, "your children
outvote you."

The master workman brought his fist down on the arm of his chair--not a
gesture of violence, but of dignity and power. "I don't stand for the
notion that marriage is living in luxury and lolling in carriages and
showing off before strangers. I told you what my last word was, Matilda."

Mrs. Whitney debated with herself full half a minute before she
spoke. In a tone that betrayed her all but departed hope of changing
him, she said: "It is a great shock to me to have you even pretend to
be so heartless--to talk of breaking these young people's hearts--just
for a notion."

"It's better to break their hearts before marriage," replied Hiram, "than
to let them break their lives, and their hearts, too, on such marriages.
The girl that wants my son only if he has money to enable her to make a
fool of herself, ain't fit to be a wife--and a mother. As for Del and
Ross--The man that looks at what a woman _has_ will never look at what
she _is_--and my daughter's well rid of him."

A painful silence, then Mrs. Whitney rose. "If I hadn't suspected, Hiram,
that you intended to cheat your children out of their rights in order to
get a reputation as a philanthropist, I'd not have brought this matter up
at this time. I see my instincts didn't mislead me. But I don't give up
hope. I've known you too many years, Hiram Ranger, not to know that your
heart is in the right place. And, after you think it over, you will give
up this wicked--yes, wicked--plan old Doctor Hargrave has taken advantage
of your sickness to wheedle you into."

Hiram, his face and hands like yellow wax, made no answer. Arthur and
Adelaide followed Mrs. Whitney from the room. "Thank you, Mrs. Whitney,"
said Arthur, gratefully, when they were out of his father's hearing. "I
don't know what has come over him of late. He has gone back to his
childhood and under the spell of the ideas that seemed, and no doubt
were, right then. I believe you have set him to thinking. He's the best
father in the world when he is well and can see things clearly."

Mrs. Whitney was not so sanguine, but she concealed it. She appreciated
what was troubling Hiram. While she encouraged her own son, her Ross, to
be a "gentleman," she had enough of the American left to see the flaws in
that new ideal of hers--when looking at another woman's son. And the
superciliousness which delighted her in Ross, irritated her in Arthur;
for, in him, it seemed a sneering reflection upon the humble and
toilsome beginnings of Charles and herself. She believed--not without
reason--that, under Ross's glossy veneer of gentleman, there was a shrewd
and calculating nature; it, she thought, would not permit the gentleman
to make mess of those matters, which, coarse and sordid though they were,
still must be looked after sharply if the gentleman was to be kept going.
But she was, not unnaturally, completely taken in by Arthur's similar
game, the more easily as Arthur put into it an intensity of energy which
Ross had not. She therefore thought Arthur as unpractical as he so
fashionably professed, thought he accepted without reservation "our
set's" pretenses of aristocracy for appearance's sake. "Of course, your
father'll come round," she said, friendly but not cordial. "All that's
necessary is that you and Adelaide use a little tact."

And she was in her victoria and away, a very grand-looking lady, indeed,
with two in spick and span summer livery on the box, with her exquisite
white and gold sunshade, a huge sapphire in the end of the handle, a
string of diamonds worth a small fortune round her neck, a gold bag,
studded with diamonds, in her lap, and her superb figure clad in a
close-fitting white cloth dress. In the gates she swept past Torrey and
his two clerks accompanying him as witnesses. She understood; her face
was anything but an index to her thoughts as she bowed and smiled
graciously in response to the old judge's salutation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Torrey read the will to Hiram slowly, pausing after each paragraph for
sign of approval or criticism. But Hiram gave no more indication of his
thought, by word or expression or motion, than if he had been a seated
statue. The reading came to an end, but neither man spoke. The choir of
birds, assembled in the great trees round the house, flooded the room
with their evening melody. At last, Hiram said: "Please move that table
in front of me."

Torrey put the table before him, laid the will upon it ready for
the signing.

Hiram took a pen; Torrey went to the door and brought in the two clerks
waiting in the hall. The three men stood watching while Hiram's eyes
slowly read each word of the will. He dipped the pen and, with a hand
that trembled in spite of all his obvious efforts to steady it, wrote his
name on the line to which Torrey silently pointed. The clerks signed as
witnesses.

"Thank you," said Hiram. "You had better take it with you, judge."

"Very well," said Torrey, tears in his eyes, a quaver in his voice.

A few seconds and Hiram was alone staring down at the surface of the
table, where he could still see and read the will. His conscience told
him he had "put his house in order"; but he felt as if he had set fire to
it with his family locked within, and was watching it and them burn to
ashes, was hearing their death cries and their curses upon him.

       *       *       *       *       *

The two young people, chilled by Mrs. Whitney's manner, flawless though
it was, apparently, had watched with sinking hearts the disappearance of
her glittering chariot and her glistening steeds. Then they had gone into
the garden before Torrey and the clerks arrived. And they sat there
thinking each his own kind of melancholy thoughts.

"What did she mean by that remark about Doctor Hargrave?" asked Arthur,
after some minutes of this heavy silence.

"I don't know," said Adelaide.

"We must get mother to go at father," Arthur continued.

Adelaide made no answer.

Arthur looked at her irritably. "What are you thinking about, Del?"
he demanded.

"I don't like Mrs. Whitney. Do you?"

"Oh, she's a good enough imitation of the real thing," said Arthur. "You
can't expect a lady in the first generation."

Adelaide's color slowly mounted. "You don't mean that," said she.

He frowned and retorted angrily: "There's a great deal of truth that
we don't like. Why do you always get mad at me for saying what we
both think?"

"I admit it's foolish and wrong of me," said she; "but I can't help it.
And if I get half-angry with you, I get wholly angry with myself for
being contemptible enough to think those things. Don't you get angry at
yourself for thinking them?"

Arthur laughed mirthlessly--an admission.

"We and father can't both be right," she pursued. "I suppose we're both
partly right and partly wrong--that's usually the way it is. But I can't
make up my mind just where he begins to be wrong."

"Why not admit he's right through and through, and be done with it?"
cried Arthur impatiently. "Why not tell him so, and square yourself
with him?"

Adelaide, too hurt to venture speech, turned away. She lingered a while
in the library; on her way down the hall to ascend to her own room she
looked in at her father. There he sat so still that but for the regular
rise and fall of his chest she would have thought him dead. "He's
asleep," she murmured, the tears standing in her eyes and raining in her
heart. Her mother she could judge impartially; her mother's disregard of
the changes which had come to assume so much importance in her own and
Arthur's lives often made her wince. But the same disregard in a man did
not offend her; it had the reverse effect. It seemed to her, to the woman
in her, the fitting roughness of the colossal statue. "That's a _man_!"
she now said to herself proudly, as she gazed at him.

His eyes opened and fixed upon her in a look so agonized, that she
leaned, faint, against the door jamb. "What is it, father?" she gasped.

He did not answer--did not move--sat rigidly on, with that expression
unchanging, as if it had been fixed there by the sculptor who had made
the statue. She tried to go to him, but at the very thought she was
overwhelmed by such fear as she had not had since she, a child, lay in
her little bed in the dark, too terrified by the phantoms that beset her
to cry out or to move. "Father! What is it?" she repeated, then wheeled
and fled along the hall crying: "Mother! Mother!"

Ellen came hurrying down the stairs.

"It's father!" cried Adelaide.

Together they went into the back parlor. He was still motionless, with
that same frozen yet fiery expression. They went to him, tried to lift
him. Ellen dropped the lifeless arm, turned to her daughter. And Adelaide
saw into her mother's inmost heart, saw the tragic lift of one of those
tremendous emotions, which, by their very coming into a human soul, give
it the majesty and the mystery of the divine.

"Telephone for Dr. Schulze," she commanded; then, as Adelaide sped, she
said tenderly to her husband: "Where is the pain? What can I do?"

But he did not answer. And if he could have answered, what could she have
done? The pain was in his heart, was the burning agony of remorse for
having done that which he still believed to be right, that which he now
thought he would give his soul's salvation for the chance to undo. For,
as the paralysis began to lock his body fast in its vise, the awful
thought had for the first time come to him: "When my children know what I
have done they will _hate_ me! They will hate me all their lives."

Dr. Schulze examined him. "Somewhat sooner than I expected," he muttered.

"How long will it last?" said Ellen.

"Some time--several weeks--months--perhaps." He would let her learn
gradually that the paralysis would not relax its grip until it had borne
him into the eternal prison and had handed him over to the jailer who
makes no deliveries.




CHAPTER VII

JILTED


Mrs. Ranger consented to a third girl, to do the additional heavy work;
but a nurse--no! What had Hiram a wife for, and a daughter, and a son, if
not to take care of him? What kind of heartlessness was this, to talk of
permitting a stranger to do the most sacred offices of love? And only by
being on the watch early and late did Adelaide and Arthur prevent her
doing everything for him herself.

"Everybody, nowadays, has trained nurses in these cases," said Dr.
Schulze. "I don't think you ought to object to the expense."

But the crafty taunt left her as indifferent as did the argument from
what "everybody does."

"I don't make rules for others," replied she. "I only say that nobody
shall touch Hiram but us of his own blood. I won't hear to it, and the
children won't hear to it. They're glad to have the chance to do a little
something for him that has done everything for them."

The children thus had no opportunity to say whether they would "hear to
it" or not. But Arthur privately suggested to Adelaide that she ought
to try to persuade her mother. "It will make her ill, all this extra
work," said he.

"Not so quickly as having some one about interfering with her,"
replied Adelaide.

"Then, too, it _looks_ so bad--so stingy and--and--old-fashioned," he
persisted.

"Not from mother's point of view," said Adelaide quietly.

Arthur flushed. "Always putting me in the wrong," he sneered. Then,
instantly ashamed of this injustice, he went on in a different tone, "I
suppose this sort of thing appeals to the romantic strain in you."

"And in mother," said Del.

Whereupon they both smiled. Romantic was about the last word anyone would
think of in connection with frankly practical Ellen Ranger. She would
have died without hesitation, or lived in torment, for those she loved;
but she would have done it in the finest, most matter-of-fact way in the
world, and without a gleam of self-conscious heroics, whether of boasting
or of martyr-meekness or of any other device for signaling attention to
oneself. Indeed, it would not have occurred to her that she was doing
anything out of the ordinary. Nor, for that matter, would she have been;
for, in this world the unheroic are, more often than not, heroes, and the
heroic usually most unheroic. We pass heroism by to toss our silly caps
at heroics.

"There are some things, Artie, our education has been taking out of us,"
continued Del, "that I don't believe we're the better for losing. I've
been thinking of those things a good deal lately, and I've come to the
conclusion that there really is a rotten streak in what we've been
getting there in the East--you at Harvard, I at Mrs. Spenser's Select
School for Young Ladies. There are ways in which mother and father are
better educated than we."

"It does irritate me," admitted Arthur, "to find myself caring so much
about the _looks_ of things."

"Especially," said Adelaide, "when the people whose opinion we are afraid
of are so contemptibly selfish and snobbish."

"Still mother and father are narrow-minded," insisted her brother.

"Isn't everybody, about people who don't think as they do?"

"I've not the remotest objection to their having their own views," said
Arthur loftily, "so long as they don't try to enforce those views on me."

"But do they? Haven't we been let do about as we please?"

Arthur shrugged his shoulders. The discussion had led up to property
again--to whether or not his father had the right to do as he pleased
with his own. And upon that discussion he did not wish to reenter. He had
not a doubt of the justice of his own views; but, somehow, to state them
made him seem sordid and mercenary, even to himself. Being really
concerned for his mother's health, as well as about "looks," he strongly
urged the doctor to issue orders on the subject of a nurse. "If you
demand it, mother'll yield," he said.

"But I shan't, young man," replied Schulze curtly and with a conclusive
squeezing together of his homely features. "Your mother is right. She
gives your father what money can't buy and skill can't replace, what has
often raised the as-good-as-dead. Some day, maybe, you'll find out what
that is. You think you know now, but you don't." And there the matter
rested.

The large room adjoining Hiram and Ellen's bedroom was made over into a
sitting room. The first morning on which he could be taken from his bed
and partially dressed, Mrs. Ranger called in both the children to assist
her. The three tried to conceal their feelings as they, not without
physical difficulty, lifted that helpless form to the invalid's chair
which Ellen wheeled close to the bedside. She herself wheeled him into
the adjoining room, to the window, with strands of ivy waving in and out
in the gentle breeze, with the sun bright and the birds singing, and all
the world warm and vivid and gay. Hiram's cheeks were wet with tears;
they saw some tremendous emotion surging up in him. He looked at Arthur,
at Adelaide, back to Arthur. Evidently he was trying to say
something--something which he felt must be said. His right arm trembled,
made several convulsive twitches, finally succeeded in lifting his right
hand the few inches to the arm of the chair.

"What is it, father?" said Ellen.

"Yes--yes--yes," burst from him in thick, straining utterances.
"Yes--yes--yes."

Mrs. Ranger wiped her eyes. "He is silent for hours," she said; "then he
seems to want to say something. But when he speaks, it's only as just
now. He says 'Yes--yes--yes' over and over again until his strength
gives out."

The bursting of the blood vessels in his brain had torn out the nerve
connection between the seat of power of speech and the vocal organs. He
could think clearly, could put his thoughts into the necessary words; but
when his will sent what he wished to say along his nerves toward the
vocal organs, it encountered that gap, and could not cross it.

What did he wish to say? What was the message that could not get through,
though he was putting his whole soul into it? At first he would begin
again the struggle to speak, as soon as he had recovered from the last
effort and failure; then the idea came to him that if he would hoard
strength, he might gather enough to force a passage for the words--for he
did not realize that the connection was broken, and broken forever. So,
he would wait, at first for several hours, later for several days; and,
when he thought himself strong enough or could no longer refrain, he
would try to burst the bonds which seemed to be holding him. With his
children, or his wife and children, watching him with agonized faces, he
would make a struggle so violent, so resolute, that even that dead body
was galvanized into a ghastly distortion of tortured life. Always in
vain; always the same collapse of despair and exhaustion; the chasm
between thought and speech could not be bridged. They brought everything
they could think of his possibly wanting; they brought to his room
everyone with whom he had ever had any sort of more than casual
relations--Torrey, among scores of others. But he viewed each object and
each person with the same awful despairing look, his immobile lips giving
muffled passage to that eternal "Yes! Yes! Yes!" And at last they decided
they were mistaken, that it was no particular thing he wanted, but only
the natural fierce desire to break through those prison walls, invisible,
translucent, intangible, worse than death.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sorrow and anxiety and care pressed so heavily and so unceasingly upon
that household for several weeks that there was no time for, no thought
of, anything but Hiram. Finally, however, the law of routine mercifully
reasserted itself; their lives, in habit and in thought, readjusted,
conformed to the new conditions, as human lives will, however chaotic has
been the havoc that demolished the old routine. Then Adelaide took from
her writing desk Ross's letters, which she had glanced at rather than
read as they came; when she finished the rereading, or reading, she was
not only as unsatisfied as when she began, but puzzled, to boot--and
puzzled that she was puzzled. She read them again--it did not take long,
for they were brief; even the first letter after he heard of her father's
illness filled only the four sides of one sheet, and was written large
and loose. "He has sent short letters," said she, "because he did not
want to trouble me with long ones at this time." But, though this excuse
was as plausible as most of those we invent to assist us to believe what
we want to believe, it did not quite banish a certain hollow, hungry
feeling, a sense of distaste for such food as the letters did provide.
She was not experienced enough to know that the expression of the
countenance of a letter is telltale beyond the expression of the
countenance of its writer; that the face may be controlled to lie, but
never yet were satisfying and fully deceptive lies told upon paper.
Without being conscious of the action of the sly, subconscious instinct
which prompted it, she began to revolve her friend, Theresa Howland,
whose house party Ross was honoring with such an extraordinarily long
lingering. "I hope Theresa is seeing that he has a good time," she said.
"I suppose he thinks as he says--that he'd only be in the way here.
That's a man's view! It's selfish, but who isn't selfish?"

Thus, without her being in the least aware of the process, her mind was
preparing her for what was about to happen. It is a poor mind, or poorly
served by its subconscious half, that is taken wholly by surprise by any
blow. There are always forewarnings; and while the surface mind
habitually refuses to note them, though they be clear as sunset
silhouettes, the subconscious mind is not so stupid--so blind under the
sweet spells of that arch-enchanter, vanity.

At last Ross came, but without sending Adelaide word. His telegram to his
mother gave just time for a trap to meet him at the station. As he was
ascending the broad, stone approaches of the main entrance to the house
at Point Helen, she appeared in the doorway, her face really beautiful
with mother-pride. For Janet she cared as it is the duty of parent to
care for child; Ross she loved. It was not mere maternal imagination that
made her so proud of him; he was a distinguished and attractive figure of
the kind that dominates the crowds at football games, polo and tennis
matches, summer resort dances, and all those events which gather together
the youth of our prosperous classes. Of the medium height, with a strong
look about the shoulders, with sufficiently, though not aggressively,
positive features and a clear skin, with gray-green eyes, good teeth, and
a pleasing expression, he had an excellent natural basis on which to
build himself into a particularly engaging and plausible type of
fashionable gentleman. He was in traveling tweeds of pronounced plaid
which, however, he carried off without vulgarity. His trousers were
rolled high, after the fashion of the day, to show dark red socks of the
same color as his tie and of a shade harmonious to the stripe in the
pattern of shirt and suit and to the stones in his cuff links. He looked
clean, with the cleanness of a tree after the measureless drenching of a
storm; he had a careless, easy air, which completely concealed his
assiduous and self-complacent self-consciousness. He embraced his mother
with enthusiasm.

"How well you look!" he exclaimed; then, with a glance round, "How well
_everything_ looks!"

His mother held tightly to his arm as they went into the house; she
seemed elder sister rather than mother, and he delighted her by
telling her so--omitting the qualifying adjective before the sister.
"But you're not a bit glad to see me," he went on. "I believe you don't
want me to come."

"I'm just a little cross with you for not answering my letters,"
replied she.

"How is Del?" he asked, and for an instant he looked embarrassed and
curiously ashamed of himself.

"Adelaide is very well," was her reply in a constrained voice.

"I couldn't stay away any longer," said he. "It was tiresome up at
Windrift."

He saw her disappointment, and a smile flitted over his face which
returned and remained when she said: "I thought you were finding Theresa
Howland interesting."

"Oh, you did?" was his smiling reply. "And why?"

"Then you have come because you were bored?" she said, evading.

"And to see you and Adelaide. I must telephone her right away."

It seemed to be secretly amusing him to note how downcast she was by
this enthusiasm for Adelaide. "I shouldn't be too eager," counseled
she. "A man ought never to show eagerness with a woman. Let the women
make the advances, Ross. They'll do it fast enough--when they find that
they must."

"Not the young ones," said Ross. "Especially not those that have choice
of many men."

"But no woman has choice of many men," replied she. "She wants the best,
and when _you're_ in her horizon, you're the best, always."

Ross, being in the privacy of his own family, gave himself the pleasure
of showing that he rather thought so himself. But he said: "Nonsense. If
I listened to your partiality, I'd be making a fearful ass of myself most
of the time."

"Well--don't let Adelaide see that you're eager," persisted his
mother subtly. "She's very good-looking and knows it and I'm afraid
she's getting an exaggerated notion of her own value. She feels _so_
certain of you."

"Of course she does," said Ross, and his mother saw that he was unmoved
by her adroit thrust at his vanity.

"It isn't in human nature to value what one feels sure of."

"But she _is_ sure of me," said Ross, and while he spoke with
emphasis, neither his tone nor his look was quite sincere. "We're
engaged, you know."

"A boy and girl affair. But nothing really settled."

"I've given my word and so has she."

Mrs. Whitney had difficulty in not looking as disapproving as she felt.
A high sense of honor had been part of her wordy training of her
children; but she had relied--she hoped, not in vain--upon their common
sense to teach them to reconcile and adjust honor to the exigencies of
practical life. "That's right, dear," said she. "A man or a woman can't
be too honorable. Still, I should not wish you to make her and yourself
unhappy. And I know both of you would be unhappy if, by marrying, you
were to spoil each other's careers. And your father would not be able
to allow or to leave you enough to maintain an establishment such as
I've set my heart on seeing you have. Mr. Ranger has been acting very
strange of late--almost insane, I'd say." Her tone became constrained
as if she were trying to convey more than she dared put into words. "I
feel even surer than when I wrote you, that he's leaving a large part
of his fortune to Tecumseh College." And she related--with judicious
omissions and embroideries--her last talk with Hiram, and the events
that centered about it.

Ross retained the impassive expression he had been cultivating ever since
he read in English "high life" novels descriptions of the bearing of men
of the "_haut monde_." "That's of no consequence," was his comment, in a
tone of indifference. "I'm not marrying Del for her money."

"Don't throw yourself away, Ross," said she, much disquieted. "I feel
sure you've been brought up too sensibly to do anything reckless. At
least, be careful how you commit yourself until you are sure. In our
station people have to think of a great many things before they think of
anything so uncertain and so more or less fanciful as love. Rest assured,
Adelaide is thinking of those things. Don't be less wise than she."

He changed the subject, and would not go back to it; and after a few
minutes he telephoned Adelaide, ordered a cart, and set out to take her
for a drive. Mrs. Whitney watched him depart with a heavy heart and so
piteous a face that Ross was moved almost to the point of confiding in
her what he was pretending not to admit to himself. "Ross is sensible
beyond his years," she said to herself sadly, "but youth is _so_
romantic. It never can see beyond the marriage ceremony."

Adelaide, with as much haste as was compatible with the demands of so
important an occasion, was getting into a suitable costume. Suddenly she
laid aside the hat she had selected from among several that were what the
Fifth Avenue milliners call the "_dernier cri_." "No, I'll not go!" she
exclaimed.

Ever since her father was stricken she had stayed near him. Ellen had his
comfort and the household to look after, and besides was not good at
initiating conversation and carrying it on alone; Arthur's tongue was
paralyzed in his father's presence by his being unable for an instant to
forget there what had occurred between them. So Del had borne practically
the whole burden of filling the dreary, dragging hours for him--who could
not speak, could not even show whether he understood or not. He had never
been easy to talk to; now, when she could not tell but that what she said
jarred upon a sick and inflamed soul, aggravating his torture by
reminding him of things he longed to know yet could not inquire about,
tantalizing him with suggestions--She dared not let her thoughts go far
in that direction; it would soon have been impossible to send him any
message beyond despairing looks.

Sometimes she kissed him. She knew he was separated from her as by a
heavy, grated prison door, and was unable to feel the electric thrill
of touch; yet she thought he must get some joy out of the sight of
the dumb show of caress. Again, she would give up trying to look
cheerful, and would weep--and let him see her weep, having an instinct
that he understood what a relief tears were to her, and that she let
him see them to make him feel her loving sympathy. Again, she would be
so wrought upon by the steady agony of those fixed eyes that she would
leave him abruptly to hide herself and shudder, tearless, at the utter
misery and hopelessness of it all. She wondered at her mother's calm
until she noticed, after a few weeks, how the face was withering with
that shriveling which comes from within when a living thing is dying
at the core.

She read the Bible to him, selecting consolatory passage with the aid of
a concordance, in the evenings after he had been lifted into bed for the
night. She was filled with protest as she read; for it seemed to her that
this good man, her best of fathers, thus savagely and causelessly
stricken, was proof before her eyes that the sentences executed against
men were not divine, but the devilish emanations of brute chance. "There
may be a devil," she said to herself, frightened at her own blasphemy,
"but there certainly is no God." Again, the Bible's promises, so
confident, so lofty, so marvelously responsive to the longings and
cravings of every kind of desolation and woe, had a soothing effect upon
her; and they helped to put her in the frame of mind to find for
conversation--or, rather, for her monologues to him--subjects which her
instinct told her would be welcome visitors in that prison.

She talked to him of how he was loved, of how noble his influence had
been in their lives. She analyzed him to himself, saying things she would
never have dared say had there been the slightest chance of so much
response as the flutter of an eyelid. And as, so it seemed to her, the
sympathetic relations and understanding between them grew, she became
franker, talked of her aspirations--new-born aspirations in harmony with
his life and belief. And, explaining herself for his benefit and bringing
to light her inmost being to show to him, she saw it herself. And when
she one day said to him, "Your illness has made a better woman of me,
father, dear father," she felt it with all her heart.

It was from this atmosphere, and enveloped in it, that she went out to
greet Ross; and, as she went, she was surprised at her own calmness
before the prospect of seeing him again, after six months'
separation--the longest in their lives.

His expression was scrupulously correct--joy at seeing her shadowed by
sympathy for her calamity. When they were safely alone, he took her hand
and was about to kiss her. Her beauty was of the kind that is different
from, and beyond, memory's best photograph. She never looked exactly the
same twice; that morning she seemed to him far more tempting than he had
been thinking, with his head for so many weeks full of worldly ideas. He
was thrilled anew, and his resolve hesitated before the fine pallor of
her face, the slim lines of her figure, and the glimpses of her smooth
white skin through the openwork in the yoke and sleeves of her blouse.
But, instead of responding she drew back, just a little. He instantly
suspected her of being in the state of mind into which he had been trying
to get himself. He dropped her hand. A trifling incident, but a trifle is
enough to cut the communications between two human beings; it often
accomplishes what the rudest shocks would not. They went to the far,
secluded end of the garden, he asking and she answering questions about
her father.

"What is it, Del?" he said abruptly, at length. "You act strained toward
me." He did not say this until she had been oppressed almost into silence
by the height and the thickness of the barrier between them.

"I guess it's because I've been shut in with father," she suggested.
"I've seen no one to talk to, except the family and the doctor, for
weeks." And she tried to fix her mind on how handsome and attractive he
was. As a rebuke to her heart's obstinate lukewarmness she forced herself
to lay her hand in his.

He held it loosely. Her making this slight overture was enough to
restore his sense of superiority; his resolve grew less unsteady. "It's
the first time," he went on, "that we've really had the chance to judge
how we actually feel toward each other--that's what's the matter." His
face--he was not looking at her--took on an expression of sad reproach.
"Del, I don't believe you--care. You've found it out, and don't want to
hurt my feelings by telling me." And he believed what he was saying. It
might have been--well, not quite right, for him to chill toward her and
contemplate breaking the engagement, but that she should have been doing
the same thing--his vanity was erect to the last feather. "It's most kind
of you to think so considerately of me," he said satirically.

She took her hand away. "And you?" she replied coldly. "Are your
feelings changed?"

"I--oh, you know I love you," was his answer in a deliberately
careless tone.

She laughed with an attempt at raillery. "You've been too long up at
Windrift--you've been seeing too much of Theresa Howland," said she,
merely for something to say; for Theresa was neither clever nor pretty,
and Del hadn't it in her to suspect him of being mercenary.

He looked coldly at her. "I have never interfered with your many
attentions from other men," said he stiffly. "On the contrary, I have
encouraged you to enjoy yourself, and I thought you left me free in the
same way."

The tears came to her eyes; and he saw, and proceeded to value still less
highly that which was obviously so securely his.

"Whatever is the matter with you, Ross, this morning?" she cried. "Or is
it I? Am I--"

"It certainly is not I," he interrupted icily. "I see you again after six
months, and I find you changed completely."

A glance from her stopped him. "Oh!" she exclaimed, with a dangerous
smile. "You are out of humor this morning and are seeking a quarrel."

"That would be impossible," he retorted. "_I_ never quarrel. Evidently
you have forgotten all about me."

Her pride would not let her refuse the challenge, convert in his words,
frank in his eyes.

"Possibly," mocked she, forcing herself to look amusedly at him. "I don't
bother much about people I don't see."

"You take a light view of our engagement," was his instant move.

"I should take a still lighter view," retorted she, "if I thought the way
you're acting was a fair specimen of your real self."

This from Adelaide, who had always theretofore shared in his almost
reverent respect for himself. Adelaide _judging_ him, criticising _him_!
All Ross's male instinct for unquestioning approval from the female was
astir. "You wish to break our engagement?" he inquired, with a glance of
cold anger that stiffened her pride and suppressed her impulse to try to
gain time.

"You're free," said she, and her manner so piqued him, that to nerve
himself to persist he had to think hard on the magnificence of Windrift
and the many Howland millions and the rumored Ranger will. She, in a
series of jerks and pauses, took off the ring; with an expression and a
gesture that gave no further hint of how she had valued it, both for its
own beauty and for what it represented, she handed it to him. "If that's
all," she went on, "I'll go back to father." To perfect her pretense, she
should have risen, shaken hands cheerfully with him, and sent him
carelessly away. She knew it; but she could not.

He was not the man to fail to note that she made no move to rise, or to
fail to read the slightly strained expression in her eyes and about the
corners of her mouth. That betrayal lost Adelaide a triumph; for, seeing
her again, feeling her beauty and her charm in all his senses, reminded
of her superiority in brains and in taste to the women from whom he might
choose, he was making a losing fight for the worldly wise course.
"Anyhow, I must tame her a bit," he reflected, now that he was sure she
would be his, should he find on further consideration that he wanted her
rather than Theresa's fortune. He accordingly took his hat, drew himself
up, bowed coldly.

"Good morning," he said. And he was off, down the drive--to the lower end
where the stableboy was guarding his trap--he was seated--he was driving
away--he was gone--_gone_!

She did not move until he was no longer in sight. Then she rushed into
the house, darted up to her room, locked herself in and gave way. It was
the first serious quarrel she had ever had with him; it was so little
like a quarrel, so ominously like a--No; absurd! It could not be a
finality. She rejected that instantly, so confident had beauty and
position as a prospective heiress made her as to her powers over any man
she chose to try to fascinate, so secure was she in the belief that Ross
loved her and would not give her up in any circumstances. She went over
their interview, recalled his every sentence and look--this with
surprising coolness for a young woman as deeply in love as she fancied
herself. And her anger rose against him--a curious kind of anger, to
spring and flourish in a loving heart. "He has been flattered by Theresa
until he has entirely lost his point of view," she decided. "I'll give
him a lesson when he comes trying to make it up."

       *       *       *       *       *

He drove the part of his homeward way that was through streets with his
wonted attention to "smartness." True "man of the world," he never for
many consecutive minutes had himself out of his mind--how he was
conducting himself, what people thought of him, what impression he had
made or was making or was about to make. He estimated everybody and
everything instinctively and solely from the standpoint of advantage to
himself. Such people, if they have the intelligence to hide themselves
under a pleasing surface, and the wisdom to plan, and the energy to
execute, always get just about what they want; for intelligence and
energy are invincible weapons, whether the end be worthy or not. As soon,
however, as he was in the road up to the Bluffs, deserted at that hour,
his body relaxed, his arms and hands dropped from the correct angle for
driving, the reins lay loose upon the horse's back, and he gave himself
to dejection. He had thought--at Windrift--that, once he was free from
the engagement which was no longer to his interest, he would feel
buoyant, elated. Instead, he was mentally even more downcast a figure
than his relaxed attitude and gloomy face made him physically. His
mother's and his "set's" training had trimmed generous instincts close to
the roots, and, also, such ideals as were not purely for material
matters, especially for ostentation. But, being still a young man, those
roots not only were alive, but also had an under-the-soil vigor; they
even occasionally sent to the surface sprouts--that withered in the
uncongenial air of his surroundings and came to nothing. Just now these
sprouts were springing in the form of self-reproaches. Remembering with
what thoughts he had gone to Adelaide, he felt wholly responsible for the
broken engagement, felt that he had done a contemptible thing, had done
it in a contemptible way; and he was almost despising himself, looking
about the while for self-excuses. The longer he looked the worse off he
was; for the more clearly he saw that he was what he called, and thought,
in love with this fresh young beauty, so swiftly and alluringly
developing. It exasperated him with the intensity of selfishness's
avarice that he could not have both Theresa Howland's fortune and
Adelaide. It seemed to him that he had a right to both. Not in the coldly
selfish only is the fact of desire in itself the basis of right. By the
time he reached home, he was angry through and through, and bent upon
finding some one to be angry with. He threw the reins to a groom and,
savagely sullen of face, went slowly up the terrace-like steps.

His mother, on the watch for his return, came to meet him. "How is Mr.
Ranger this morning?" she asked.

"Just the same," he answered curtly.

"And--Del?"

No answer.

They went into the library; he lit a cigarette and seated himself at the
writing table. She watched him anxiously but had far too keen insight to
speak and give him the excuse to explode. Not until she turned to leave
the room did he break his surly silence to say: "I might as well tell
you. I'm engaged to Theresa Howland."

"O Ross, I'm _so_ glad!" she exclaimed, lighting up with pride and
pleasure. Then, warned by his expression, she restrained herself. "I have
felt certain for a long time that you would not throw yourself away on
Adelaide. She is a nice girl--pretty, sweet, and all that. But women
differ from each other only in unimportant details. A man ought to see to
it that by marrying he strengthens his influence and position in the
world and provides for the standing of his children. And I think Theresa
has far more steadiness; and, besides, she has been about the world--she
was presented at court last spring a year ago, wasn't she? She is _such_
a lady. It will be so satisfactory to have her as the head of your
establishment--probably Mr. Howland will give her Windrift. And her
cousin--that Mr. Fanning she married--is connected with all the best
families in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. They are at the top of
our aristocracy."

This recital was not to inform, but to inspire--to remind him what a wise
and brilliant move he had made in the game of life. And it had precisely
the effect she intended. Had she not herself created and fostered in him
the nature that would welcome such stuff as a bat welcomes night?

"I'm going back to Windrift to-morrow," he said, still sullen, but with
the note of the quarrel-seeker gone from his voice.

"When do you wish me to write to her?"

"Whenever you like," he said. The defiance in his tone was for Adelaide.
"The engagement is to be announced as soon as I get back."

Mrs. Whitney was called away, and Ross tried to write to Theresa. But the
words wouldn't come. He wandered restlessly about the room, ordered the
electric, went to the Country Club. After an hour of bitterness, he
called up his mother. "You needn't send that note we were talking about
just yet," he said.

"But I've already sent it," his mother answered. In fact, the note was
just then lying on the table at her elbow.

"What were you in such a devil of a hurry for?" he stormed--an
unnecessary question, for he knew his mother was the sort of person
that loses no time in settling an important matter beyond possibility
of change.

"I'm sorry, Ross," she replied soothingly. "I thought I might as well
send it, as you had told me everything was settled."

"Oh--all right--no matter." He could break with Theresa whenever he
wished. Perhaps he would not wish to break with her; perhaps, after a few
days he would find that his feeling for Adelaide was in reality no
stronger than he had thought it at Windrift, when Theresa was tempting
him with her huge fortune. There was plenty of time before it would be
necessary to make final choice.

Nevertheless, he did not leave Saint X, but hung round, sour and morose,
hoping for some sign from "tamed" Adelaide.

       *       *       *       *       *

As soon as Theresa got Mrs. Whitney's note, she wrote to Adelaide. "I've
promised not to tell," her letter began, "but I never count any promise
of that kind as including _you_, dear, sweet Adelaide--"

Adelaide smiled as she read this; Theresa's passion for intimate
confession had been the joke of the school. "Besides," Adelaide read on,
"I think you'll be especially interested as Ross tells me there was some
sort of a boy-and-girl flirtation between you and him. I don't see how
you could get over it. Now--you've guessed. Yes--we're engaged, and will
probably be married up here in the fall--Windrift is simply divine then,
you know. And I want you to be my 'best man.' The others'll be Edna and
Clarice and Leila and Annette and perhaps Jessie and Anita. We're to live
in Chicago--father will give us a house, I'm sure. And you must come to
visit us--"

It is hardly fair to eavesdrop upon a young woman in such an hour as
this of Adelaide's. Only those might do so who are willing freely to
concede to others that same right to be human which they themselves
exercise, whether they will or no, when things happen that smash the
veneer of "gentleman" or "lady" like an eggshell under a plowboy's heel,
and penetrate to and roil that unlovely human nature which is in us all.
Criticism is supercilious, even when it is just; so, without criticism,
the fact is recorded that Adelaide paced the floor and literally raved in
her fury at this double-distilled, double treachery. The sense that she
had lost the man she believed she loved was drowned in the oceanic flood
of infuriated vanity. She raged now against Ross and now against Theresa
"She's marrying him just because she's full of envy, and can't bear to
see anybody else have anything," she fumed. "Theresa couldn't love
anybody but herself. And he--he's marrying her for her money. She isn't
good to look at; to be in the house with her is to find out how mean and
small and vain she is. It serves me right for being snob enough to have
such a friend. If she hadn't been immensely rich and surrounded by such
beautiful things I'd never have had anything to do with her. She's buying
him; he's se

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/11614