Hope Mills Part 23

"Here for five years your father has given him a clean sweep with every thing! If you thrust temptation right in a man's way, what can you expect?"

"His honesty would not be of a very high order if it could withstand no temptation," Fred answered rather scornfully. "It was necessary for father to travel in the interests of the business. He surely could not stay here to watch him. And you thought well of Eastman."

"No man would play _me_ such rascally tricks! There is no telling what he has done! Books can be doctored to look very fair."

But they found enough. Pay-rolls for men kept up long after they had been discharged, and many who had never been at all; systematic falsifications that could not be brought to light without a rigid inspection and comparison by an expert. But Hamilton Minor felt, with the world's wisdom, that bringing the Eastmans back as criminals would not be likely to lead to any restoration; while it would prove a family disgrace, and perhaps add Gertrude to the list of dependent ones.

"It makes me heart-sick!" declared Fred. "There is nothing but selfishness and hollowness and greed. Are truth and honor quite dead?"

"Very fine talk, my young friend," said Minor in a sneering tone; "but the question that more nearly concerns you is how you are all going to live, granting even that there may be enough to pay the debts. Of course this great house cannot be kept afloat. You had better discharge some of the servants, and retrench while you do remain in it."

Then had followed the talk with Agatha, when matrimony was proposed as a certain and sure remedy for these present ills: a cure the young man disdained with anger.

Mrs. Lawrence kept to her room, and was too ill to listen to business details, even if she could have helped in any way, which she could not.

She fancied now, like many another woman, that her husband had been her only delight in life, and that there was nothing left. When Agatha suggested that she had been very short-sighted to consent to mortgaging Hope Terrace, she cried, and said "she would have given up every thing for him, and now that he was gone she wanted no fortune,--she should never leave her room again until she was carried."

If there had been any bright little Sylvie to run in and comfort her!

any strong-hearted, tender woman, to whom he could turn! He seemed now to realize more keenly what he had lost, than on the night Sylvie rejected him. And that other strong, manly soul--no, bitterly as he might regret, he could no more go back to him than to Sylvie.

He roused himself, and began his work, utterly astounded at the extravagance that met him on every side. No doubt it looked right enough when there was plenty of money; but it seemed now as if the servants had been masters and mistresses, that all these luxuries existed for their sake,--the gardens and graperies, the greenhouses with their wealth of costly flowers; the horses standing idle in the stable, with only servants to use them; his father a plain man, his mother confined mostly to two or three rooms, and occasional visitors; supplies ordered lavishly, and wasted in a manner that seemed wicked even to him. He wondered in a vague way if the system was not radically wrong that brought such waste and carelessness in vogue, when hundreds had not the necessities of life. He remembered one talk his father had with Horace Eastman over in the library yonder, with champagne and cigars between them, in the height of one of the strikes, and how Eastman had figured to a penny the exact percentage of wages the mill could afford to pay.

What if _they_ had given up a little of their luxury, and _he_ his ill-gotten gains!

He had the pictures packed under his supervision, and sent to New York.

Not without a pang; for many of them he had selected, and each one had some pleasant reminder. The choice collection of the greenhouse was offered for sale, the elegant furniture, and all the most valuable of the personal property. Times were hard, and sales were slow; but there would be sufficient realized, it was thought, to pay the floating indebtedness. Hope Terrace and the mills would probably go for the mortgages. There was a small life-insurance settled upon Mrs. Lawrence, and the children would be fortuneless.

By spring the estate was in a fair way of settlement. Fred had vibrated between the city and Yerbury all winter, but his mother had been taken to Mrs. Minor's. A gardener and his wife were placed in charge of the house, while efforts were being made to rent it. A few rooms had not been disturbed.

And now Frederic De Woolfe Lawrence looked about him to see what could be done. Up to this time he had never given himself an anxious thought about money or his future. Now it stared him unpleasantly in the face.

What could _he_ do?

Many things, he said at first, with the buoyant certainty of youth and inexperience. Here was his education, his talents, his fine mental training. Surely he had the magical open-sesame of some door.

So he set to work industriously, and wrote several articles on the history and the philosophy of the pure sciences. Very fine-drawn indeed, very intellectual and a.n.a.lytical, as he went through the different schools of thought, being able, it seemed to him, to argue as well for the one side as for the other. Then he tried Neo-Platonism with its profoundly mystical aspects and its brilliant array of philosophers, its fascinating aspects of Pantheism. The new world and to-day had nothing for him; the dead and gone past, every thing.

Alas! From every side he heard the cry, Literature had been overdone. No one would buy, no one would read, in this great turmoil. Everybody wrote now, schoolgirls, college-fledglings: even small farmers and mechanics, with the training of the present and a smattering of knowledge, set up for geniuses.

One advised him to try the realistic school: the old-time philosophies had lost the high place they once held, and to gain the attention of to-day writers must have snap and vim. Another recommended popular science made easy and attractive to general readers, something that caught at the first glance. Life was too short to be devoting years to any one branch of study. Still another was fain to persuade him to attack the pernicious systems and monstrous abuses of the present day.

Then he stumbled over Crosby, one of his college-chums and a member of the L---- Club, where he had been a frequent and welcome visitor the winter before.

"My dear fellow," said he, with patronizing good-nature, "take my advice, and let literature alone. It is one of the most uncertain things. To-day you may suit, to-morrow a chap comes along with some new fandango or summersault of high art, and the world leaves everybody to run after him, and you are thrown over. A man cannot earn his salt unless he has the _entree_ of the initiated ring. As for journalism, you may hammer at that for twenty years before you get a position."

Poor Fred went back to his room sorely depressed. It was a quiet, clean room in a second-rate hotel, for which he paid twelve dollars a week.

There he sat and brooded, until taking up the paper one morning he saw the arrival of one of his old professors at the "Grand Union." Perhaps he might put him in the way of something. So he plucked up heart, and went to call.

Professor Dennison received him very cordially, and expressed the warmest sympathy for the loss of his father and his fortune. He listened attentively to the young man's desires, and answered in suavest of tones.

There were so many applications: every avenue seemed full. Young lawyers and doctors, finding no opening, had gone back to teaching, and the college-graduates of every year swelled this number. He would bear it in mind, and see what he could do; but he advised his young friend not to build too high hopes. "If I could make a place I should put you in it at once," he said kindly, just as he said it to a dozen others.

It was so everywhere. There were no copyists, translators, or writers needed. The clerks.h.i.+ps were overcrowded. It was not that there were too many doing one thing, but everything,--too many people in the world.

Could the Malthusian doctrine be right, after all?

He dropped into his brother-in-law's office one morning, and, though he hated to ask a favor of him, discussed in a rather fragmentary and abashed way the possibility of getting any thing to do; and a fortnight after, Mr. Minor sent him word of a broker who wanted a clerk, salary fifty dollars per month.

It was better than nothing. Then, too, it was a beginning, although he could imagine more congenial employments. It did not look much like hard times, to note the immense amount of stocks and bonds that pa.s.sed through the hands of this great house.

Just at this period Irene returned. A fine, stately girl, with the indescribable air that foreign society gives. Yet she seemed haughty, bitter, and satirical; and it came out presently that she and Gertrude had quarrelled over a possible husband, and the amiable Gertrude had taunted her with dependence in the future. Irene had sold some diamonds, and travelled on the proceeds.

"I think you were very short-sighted, Irene," said Mrs. Minor when she had drawn this story out of her sister. "A handsome American girl does stand a better chance for matrimony abroad than here. So many fortunes have been lost in the panic, and certainly I cannot blame these men for choosing heiresses. You have been in society a great deal here, and you will find fresh young girls beginning to crowd you out. Fred has nothing, and from present indications will hardly be able to take care of himself. It was such a misfortune that papa had every thing mortgaged! So Gertrude was right," in a bitterly suave tone: "you must be dependent upon some one until you do marry."

"Oh, no! I might set up millinery,--with my taste and apt.i.tude for arrangement. I think I have read of reduced young women who made fortunes in that line," retorted Irene the queenly, in her unmoved way.

She was not one to cry out at a dagger-thrust.

"Don't be a fool!" advised Mrs. Minor, in a short, incisive tone.

She, like most other people, had meant to economize this summer; but now she made a sudden start for Newport. Irene certainly was peerless in her half-mourning, with her statuesque figure. But there was not an eligible at Newport, so they turned their steps Saratoga-ward. And here they found an old admirer of Mrs. Minor's, Gordon Barringer, a widower for the second time, the owner of a silver-mine and a railroad, and Heaven alone knew the length and breadth of his possessions.

Miss Agatha Lawrence had turned up her aristocratic nose at him, as a rather coa.r.s.e and self-a.s.sured person, as proud of his want of education as other men were of its acquirement. Now he was about forty, stout, high-colored, loud of voice, and with an important swagger. But money had given "our enterprising citizen" power, and he both understood and wielded it skilfully.

His wife had been dead barely six months, but when he met Irene Lawrence he decided at once that the penniless beauty would be only too glad to marry him. He was proud to think he could afford to be so magnanimous.

Mrs. Minor settled herself to the fact that there must be no foolish dallying. Of course Irene _would_ see. She could not be so idiotically, so fatally blind!

I do not know that at this period of her life Irene Lawrence had any ideal. She had made conquests so easily, she had found men so much alike, and in her secret heart she despised them for being so ready to kneel and bow at beauty's shrine. It seemed to her as if youth and fortune were alike boundless; and she literally took no thought for the morrow, until the tidings of her father's death was followed by the subsequent news of loss of fortune.

If George Eastman had a self-conviction that he and his cousin had contributed to this downfall, he tried to make it up to Irene in brotherly kindness and generous expenditure where money was concerned.

He solaced himself with the thought that, after all, he had no more than his own, or what should have been his own rightfully, though he fancied he could not have gone on to the end quite as Horace had.

When Sir Christopher Frodsham came across the two ladies in Paris, Gertrude exulted at the easy conquest. A man of fifty, whose young years and health had been spent in sowing a plentiful crop of wild oats, but to whom had come now, quite unexpectedly, a fortune and a t.i.tle; and prosperity, after years of rather bitter economy, made him miserly, as it not unfrequently does such men. That he would have been glad to marry this young, beautiful girl, for himself alone, was most true. And Irene, in the bewilderment of the losses, inclined to his proposal, and begged time for consideration.

He was not a man she could admire, respect, or love. He was narrow, egotistical, selfish, and with the pitiful vanity of a worn-out _roue_.

Frodsham Park was in a lonely, mountainous part of England, bordering on Wales; and this man would look upon his wife as a nurse and companion, and the mother of an heir.

There must have been a little strain of heroism in the girl. Suddenly, in one of those quick, vivid flashes, like mental lightning, she saw that she could not do this thing. She was not at all given to a.n.a.lysis; she had never dissected her own soul, or that of her neighbors; but she arrived at one of those swift, clear verdicts,--she could not marry Sir Christopher; and she told him so, with a frankness a trifle tenderer, perhaps, than she had used with her lovers heretofore, as if some way she had wronged him in thought.

Over this, as I said, she and Gertrude had bitter words and a parting.

Now the same thing stared her in the face again. This lover was too obtuse to be stung by the fine arts of coquetry that lengthened practice had brought to perfection. In all the bravery of self-a.s.sertion, he did not know when he was beaten; and so he fought against the intangible spear-points with which Miss Lawrence could surround herself.

Mr. Barringer was called to New York on important business law-suits; and two days after, Mrs. Minor declared herself wearied out with Saratoga. Irene felt the walls of fate closing remorselessly about her.

Why should she struggle? she asked herself. After all, what could she do but marry?

Meanwhile, Hope Mills had been sold. Fred made some inquiries about it.

"A woman--a rich old maid, I believe, by name McLeod, who knows enough to drive a sharp bargain--has taken it. Some one is to set up the business, I heard; an impecunious nephew, no doubt. No one but a fool would make a venture when the market is overstocked with goods. It is a shame that the estate had to lose such a valuable piece of property; but there was no income to pay taxes and interest, and, standing empty, it would soon have eaten itself up."

Fred sighed. For the first time, he wondered how it would have ended if he had been brought up to some useful business, and perhaps have taken Eastman's place with his father. As for stock and share jobbing, he was heartily sick of it. To him it appeared an immense system of swindling the ignorant and unsuspecting.

However, he was not destined to nurse his disgust very long in brooding silence. The last of September the great house of Bristol, Stokes, & Co., collapsed. The wreck was unexpected, the ruin wide-spread. The house of Minor & Morgan was hard hit, which did not improve Mr. Minor's temper, though, Spartan-like, he wore a cheerful face, and kept his losses to himself. Even if it should be his turn next, the world must not know it.

"There's a letter that concerns you, though it was sent to me as administrator," said Minor to Fred, as he sauntered in one morning, tossing the missive over to him.