Robert Kimberly Part 48

"Always the same. It is an astonis.h.i.+ng vitality in your family, Robert."

"They need all they have."

"But all that need strength do not have it. How is your market to-day?"

"Bad," muttered Kimberly absently.

"I am sorry that you are worried."

"More than the market worries me, Francis. But the market is getting worse and worse. We met again to-day and reduced prices. The outsiders are cutting. We retaliate to protect our customers. When _we_ cut, the cut is universal. Their warfare is guerilla. They are here to-day, there to-morrow."

"I have thought of what you said last night. Cutting you say, has failed. Try something else. To-morrow advance all of your standard brands one quarter. Be bold; cut with your own outside refineries. The profit from the one hand pays the cost of the war on the other."

Kimberly stopped. "How childish of you to waste your life in a shabby black gown, nursing people! Absolutely childis.h.!.+ If you will go into the sugar business, I tell you again, Francis, I will pay you twenty thousand dollars a year for ten years and set aside as much more preferred stock for you."

"Nonsense, Robert."

"You are a merchant. You could make a name for yourself. The world would respect you. There are enough to do the nursing, and too few brains in the sugar business. To-night I will give the orders and the advance shall be made when the market opens."

"But your directors?"

"We will direct the directors. They have had two months to figure how to fight the scalpers; you show me in twenty-four hours. Some monks were in to see me this morning; I was too busy. They told my secretary they were building an asylum for old men. I told him to say, not a dollar for old men; to come to me when they were building an asylum for old women. What do you say to my offer, Francis?"

"What do I say? Ah, Robert, although you are a very big paymaster, I am working for a Paymaster much bigger than you. What do I say? I say to you, give up this sugar business and come with me to the nursing. I will give you rags in place of riches, fasting in place of fine dinners, toil in place of repose, but my Paymaster--He will reward you there for all you endure here."

"Always deferred dividends. Besides, I should make a poor nurse, Francis, and you would make a good sugar man. And you seem to imply I am a bad man in the sugar business. I am not; I am a very excellent man, but you don't seem to know it."

"I hope so; I hope you are. G.o.d has given you splendid talents--he has given you more reason, more heart, more judgment than he has given to these men around you. If you waste, you are in danger of the greater punishment."

"But I don't waste. I build up. What can a man do in this world without power? He must have the sinews of empire to make himself felt.

Francis, what would Cromwell, Frederick, Napoleon have been without power?"

"Ah! These are your heroes; they are not mine. I give glory to no man that overcomes by force, violence, and worse--fraud, broken faith, misrule, falsehood. What is more detestable than the triumph of mere brains? Your heroes, do they not tax, extort, pillage, slaughter, and burn for their own glory? Do they not ride over law, morality, and justice, your world's heroes? They are not my heroes. When men shrink at nothing to gain their success--what shall we say of them? But to hold law, morality, and justice inviolable; to conquer strength but only by weakness, to vanquish with pity, to crush with mercy--that alone is moving greatness."

"Where do you find it?" demanded Kimberly sharply.

"Never where you look for your heroes; often where I look for mine--among the saints of G.o.d. Not in men of bronze but in men of clay.

It is only Christ who puts the souls of heroes into hearts of flesh and blood."

"But you have, along with your saints, some very foolish rules in your church, Francis. Take the case of Mrs. MacBirney. There is a woman who has done evil to no one and good to every one. She finds herself married to a man who thenceforth devotes himself to but one object in life--the piling up of money. She is forgotten and neglected. That is not the worst; he, with no religion of his own, makes it his business to hara.s.s and worry her in the practice of hers. He is filled with insane jealousies, and moved by equally insane hatreds of whatever she desires.

I come into their lives. I see this proud and unhappy woman struggling to keep her trials hidden. I break down the barriers of her reserve--not easily, not without being repulsed and humiliated as I never before have been by a woman--and at last make her, unwillingly, tell me the truth. Meantime her husband, after a scene--of which I have never yet learned the real facts--has left her. I say such a woman has the right to free herself from a brute such as this; your church says 'no.'"

"Robert, I see what you are coming to. But do not make the case harder than it is. She may free herself from him if she cannot live in peace with him; she may leave him under intolerable conditions. But not marry again."

"Precisely. And I offer her my devotion and a home and only ask to make her truly my wife and restore to her the religion he has robbed her of.

And this very religion that he has trampled on and throttled, what does it say? 'No.'"

"You state a hard case. Your reasoning is very plausible; you plead for the individual. There is no law, human or divine, against which the individual might not show a case of hards.h.i.+p. The law that you find a hards.h.i.+p protects society. But to-day, society is nothing, the individual everything. And while society perishes we praise the tolerant anarchism that destroys it."

"Francis, you invoke cruelty. What do I care for society? What has society done for me?"

"No, I invoke responsibility, which none of us can forever escape. You seek remarriage. Your care is for the body; but there is also the soul."

"Your law is intolerant."

"Yours is fatal. How often have you said to me--for you have seen it, as all thoughtful men see it--that woman is sinking every day from the high estate to which marriage once lifted her. And the law that safeguards this marriage and against which you protest is the law of G.o.d. I cannot apologize for it if I would; I would not if I could.

Think what you do when you break down the barrier that He has placed about a woman. It is not alone that the Giver of this law died a shameful death for the souls of men. You do not believe that Christ was G.o.d, and Calvary means nothing to you.

"But, Robert, to place woman in that high position, millions of men like you and me, men with the same instincts, the same appet.i.tes, the same pa.s.sions as yours and mine, have crucified their desires, curbed their appet.i.tes, and mastered their pa.s.sions--and this sacrifice has been going on for nineteen hundred years and goes on about us every day. Who realizes it?

"Faith is ridiculed, fasting is despised, the very idea of self-denial is as absurd to pagan to-day as it was nineteen hundred years ago to pagan Rome. And with its frivolous marriages and easy divorces the world again drags woman back to the couch of the concubine from which Christianity with so much blood and tears lifted her up nineteen hundred years ago."

"Francis, you are a dreamer. Society is gone; you can't restore it. I see only a lovely woman its victim. I am not responsible for the condition that made her one and I certainly shall not stand by and see her suffer because the world is rotten--nor would you--don't protest, I know you, too. So I am going to raise her as high as man can raise a woman. She deserves it. She deserves infinitely more. I am only sorry I can't raise her higher. I am going to make her my wife; and you, Francis, shall dance at the wedding. Oh, you needn't throw up your hands--you are going to dance at the wedding."

"Non posso, non posso. I cannot dance, Robert."

"You don't mean, Francis," demanded Kimberly severely suspicious, "to tell me you would like me the less--that you would be other than you have been to me--if you saw me happily married?"

"How could I ever be different to you from what I have been? Every day, Robert, I pray for you."

Kimberly's brows contracted. "Don't do it."

Francis's face fell. "Not?"

"For the present let me alone. I'm doing very well. The situation is delicate."

Francis's distress was apparent, and Kimberly continued good-naturedly to explain. "Don't stir G.o.d up, Francis; don't you see? Don't attract his attention to me. I'm doing very well. All I want is to be let alone."

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

"By the way, how does it seem to be quite a free woman?" said Kimberly one evening to Alice.

"What do you mean?"

"Your decree was granted to-day."

She steeled herself with an exclamation. "_That_ nightmare! Is it really over?"

He nodded. "Now, pray forget it. You see, you were called to the city but once. You spent only ten minutes in the judge's chambers, and answered hardly half a dozen questions. You have suffered over it because you are too sensitive--you are as delicate as Dresden. And this is why I try to stand between you and everything unpleasant."

"But sha'n't you be tired of always standing between me and everything unpleasant?"

He gazed into her eyes and they returned his searching look with the simplicity of faith. In their expression he felt the measure of his happiness. "No," he answered, "I like it. It is my part of the job.

And when I look upon you, when I am near you, even when I breathe the fragrance of your belongings--of a glove, a fan, a handkerchief--I have my reward. Every trifle of yours takes your charm upon itself."