The Conflict Part 3

"So, you wouldn't approve of my marrying Davy?" said the girl.

Her father grunted--chuckled. "I didn't say that. Does he want to marry you?"

"I didn't say that," retorted Jane. "He's an unattached young man--and I, being merely a woman, have got to look out for a husband."

Martin looked gloomy. "There's no hurry," said he. "You've been away six years. Seems to me you might stay at home a while."

"Oh, I'd bring him here, popsy I've no intention of leaving you. You were in an awful state, when I came home. That mustn't ever happen again. And as you won't live with Martha and Hugo--why, I've got to be the victim."

"Yes--it's up to you, Miss, to take care of me in my declining years.... You can marry Davy--if you want to. Davy--or anybody. I trust to your good sense."

"If I don't like him, I can get rid of him," said the girl.

Her father smiled indulgently. "That's A LEETLE too up-to-date for an old man like me," observed he. "The world's moving fast nowadays.

It's got a long ways from where it was when your ma and I were young."

"Do you think Davy Hull will make a career?" asked Jane. She had heard from time to time as much as she cared to hear about the world of a generation before--of its bareness and discomfort, its primness, its repulsive piety, its ignorance of all that made life bright and attractive--how it quite overlooked this life in its agitation about the extremely problematic life to come. "I mean a career in politics,"

she explained.

The old man munched and smacked for full a minute before he said, "Well, he can make a pretty good speech. Yes--I reckon he could be taken in hand and pushed. He's got a lot of fool college-bred ideas about reforming things. But he'd soon drop them, if he got into the practical swing. As soon as he had a taste of success, he'd stop being finicky. Just now, he's one of those nice, pure chaps who stand off and tell how things ought to be done. But he'd get over that."

Jane smiled peculiarly--half to herself. "Yes--I think he would. In fact, I'm sure he would." She looked at her father. "Do you think he amounts to as much as Victor Dorn?" she asked, innocently.

The old man dropped a half raised spoonful of milk and crackers into the bowl with a splash. "Dorn--he's a scoundrel!" he exclaimed, shaking with pa.s.sion. "I'm going to have that dirty little paper of his stopped and him put out of town. Impudent puppy!--foul-mouthed demagogue! I'll SHOW him!"

"Why, he doesn't amount to anything, father," remonstrated the girl.

"He's nothing but a common working man--isn't he?"

"That's all he is--the hound!" replied Martin Hastings. A look of cruelty, of tenacious cruelty, had come into his face. It would have startled a stranger. But his daughter had often seen it; and it did not disturb her, as it had never appeared for anything that in any way touched her life. "I've let him hang on here too long," went on the old man, to himself rather than to her. "First thing I know he'll be dangerous."

"If he's worth while I should think you'd hire him," remarked Jane shrewdly.

"I wouldn't have such a scoundrel in my employ," cried her father.

"Oh, maybe," pursued the daughter, "maybe you couldn't hire him."

"Of course I could," scoffed Hastings. "Anybody can be hired."

"I don't believe it," said the girl bluntly.

"One way or another," declared the old man. "That Dorn boy isn't worth the price he'd want."

"What price would he want?" asked Jane.

"How should I know?" retorted her father angrily.

"You've tried to hire him--haven't you?" persisted she.

The father concentrated on his crackers and milk. Presently he said: "What did that fool Hull boy say about Dorn to you?"

"He doesn't like him," replied Jane. "He seems to be jealous of him--and opposed to his political views."

"Dorn's views ain't politics. They're--theft and murder and highfalutin nonsense," said Hastings, not unconscious of his feeble anti-climax.

"All the same, he--or rather, his mother--ought to have got damages from the railway," said the girl. And there was a sudden and startling s.h.i.+ft in her expression--to a tenacity as formidable as her father's own, but a quiet and secret tenacity.

Old Hastings wiped his mouth and began fussing uncomfortably with a cigar.

"I don't blame him for getting bitter and turning against society,"

continued she. "I'd have done the same thing--and so would you."

Hastings lit the cigar. "They wanted ten thousand dollars," he said, almost apologetically. "Why, they never saw ten thousand cents they could call their own."

"But they lost their bread-winner, father," pleaded the girl. "And there were young children to bring up and educate. Oh, I hate to think that--that we had anything to do with such a wrong."

"It wasn't a wrong, Jen--as I used to tell your ma," said the old man, much agitated and shrill of voice. "It was just the course of business. The law was with our company."

Jane said nothing. She simply gazed steadily at her father. He avoided her glance.

"I don't want to hear no more about it," he burst out with abrupt violence. "Not another word!"

"Father, I want it settled--and settled right," said the girl. "I ask it as a favor. Don't do it as a matter of business, but as a matter of sentiment."

He s.h.i.+fted uneasily, debating. When he spoke he was even more explosive than before. "Not a cent! Not a red! Give that whelp money to run his crazy paper on? Not your father, while he keeps his mind."

"But--mightn't that quiet him?" pleaded she. "What's the use of having war when you can have peace? You've always laughed at people who let their prejudices stand in the way of their interests. You've always laughed at how silly and stupid and costly enmities and revenges are.

Now's your chance to ill.u.s.trate, popsy." And she smiled charmingly at him.

He was greatly softened by her manner--and by the wisdom of what she said--a wisdom in which, as in a mirror, he recognized with pleasure her strong resemblance to himself. "That wouldn't be a bad idea, Jen,"

said he after reflection, "IF I could get a guarantee."

"But why not do it generously?" urged the girl. "Generosity inspires generosity. You'll make him ashamed of himself."

With a cynical smile on his shrivelled face the old man slowly shook his big head that made him look as top-heavy as a newborn baby. "That isn't as smart, child, as what you said before. It's in them things that the difference between theory and practice shows. He'd take the money and laugh at me. No, I'll try to get a guarantee." He nodded and chuckled. "Yes, that was a good idea of yours, Jen."

"But--isn't it just possible that he is a man with--with principles of a certain kind?" suggested she.

"Of course, he THINKS so," said Hastings. "They all do. But you don't suppose a man of any sense at all could really care about and respect working cla.s.s people?--ignorant, ungrateful fools. _I_ know 'em.

Didn't I come from among 'em? Ain't I dealt with 'em all my life? No, that there guy Dorn's simply trying to get up, and is using them to step up on. I did the same thing, only I did it in a decent, law-abiding way. I didn't want to tear down those that was up. I wanted to go up and join 'em. And I did."

And his eyes glistened fondly and proudly as he gazed at his daughter.

She represented the climax of his rising--she, the lady born and bred, in her beautiful clothes, with her lovely, delicate charms. Yes, he had indeed "come up," and there before him was the superb tangible evidence of it.

Jane had the strongest belief in her father's worldly wisdom. At the same time, from what David Hull said she had got an impression of a something different from the ordinary human being in this queer Victor Dorn. "You'd better move slowly," she said to her father. "There's no hurry, and you might be mistaken in him."

"Plenty of time," a.s.serted her father. "There's never any need to hurry about giving up money." Then, with one of those uncanny flashes of intuition for which he, who was never caught napping, was famous, he said to her sharply: "You keep your hands off, miss."

She was thrown into confusion--and her embarra.s.sment enraged her against herself. "What could _I_ do?" she retorted with a brave attempt at indifference.