The Second Generation Part 44

"But they all say that 'with proper care'--" began Vagen, with the faith of the little in the pretentious.

"So they do! So they do!" interrupted Whitney, whom life had taught not to measure wisdom by profession of it, nor yet by repute for it. And he went on in a drowsy drawl, significantly different from his wonted rather explosive method of speech: "But does any of 'em say what 'proper care'

is? Each gives his opinion. Eight opinions, each different and each cautioning me against the kind of 'care' prescribed by the other seven.

And I paid six thousand dollars!" A cynical smile played round his thin-lipped, sensual, selfish mouth.

"Sixty-three hundred," corrected Vagen. He never missed this sort of chance to impress his master with his pa.s.sion for accuracy.

"Sixty-three, then. I'd better have given you the money to blow in on your fliers on wheat and pork."

At this Vagen looked much depressed. It was his first intimation that his chief knew about his private life. "I hope, sir, n.o.body has been poisoning your mind against me," said he. "I court the fullest investigation. I have been honest--"

"Of course, of course," replied Whitney. "There never was a man as timid as you are that wasn't honest. What a shallow world it is! How often envy and cowardice pa.s.s for virtue!"

"I often say, sir," replied Vagen, with intent to soothe and flatter, "there ain't one man in ten million that wouldn't have done the things you've done if they'd had the brains and the nerve."

"And pray what are the 'things I've done'?" inquired Whitney. But the flame of irritation was so feeble that it died down before his words were out. "I'm going down to Saint X to see old Schulze," he drawled on.

"Schulze knows more than any of 'em--and ain't afraid to say when he don't know." A slow, somewhat sardonic smile. "That's why he's unknown.

What can a wise man, who insists on showing that he's wise, expect in a world of d.a.m.n fools?" A long silence during which the uncomfortable Vagen had the consolation of seeing in that haggard, baggy, pasty-white face that his master's thoughts were serving him much worse than mere discomfort. Then Whitney spoke again: "Yes, I'm going to Saint X. I'm going home to--"

He did not finish; he could not speak the word of finality. Vagen saw the look in his pale, blue-green eyes, saw that the great financier knew he would never again fling his terrible nets broadcast for vast hauls of golden fish, knew his days were numbered and that the number was small.

But, instead of this making him feel sympathetic and equal toward his master, thus unmasked as mere galvanized clay, it filled him with greater awe; for, to the Vagens, Death seems to wear a special costume and walk with grander step to summon the rich and the high.

"Yes, I'll go--this very afternoon," said Whitney more loudly, turning his face toward the door through which came a faint feminine rustling--the _froufrou_ of the finest, softest silk and finest, softest linen.

He looked attentively at his wife as she crossed the threshold--looked with eyes that saw mercilessly but indifferently, the eyes of those who are out of the game of life, out for good and all, and so care nothing about it. He noted in her figure--in its solidity, its settledness--the signs of age the beauty doctors were still almost successful in keeping out of that masklike face which was their creation rather than nature's; he noted the rough-looking red of that hair whose thinness was not altogether concealed despite the elaborate care with which it was arranged to give the impression of careless abundance. He noted her hands; his eyes did not linger there, for the hands had the wrinkles and hollows and age marks which but for art would have been in the face, and they gave him a feeling--he could not have defined it, but it made him shudder. His eyes rested again upon her face, with an expression of pity that was slightly satirical. This struggle of hers seemed so petty and silly to him now; how could any human being think any other fact important when the Great Fact hung from birth threateningly over all?

"You feel worse to-day, dear?" said she, in the tones that sound carefully attuned to create an impression of sympathy. Hers had now become the mechanically saccharine voice which sardonic time ultimately fastens upon the professionally sympathetic to make them known and mocked of all, even of the vainest seekers after sympathy.

"On the contrary, I feel better," he drawled, eyes half-shut. "No pain at all. But--horribly weak, as if I were going to faint in a minute or two--and I don't give a d.a.m.n for anything." There was a personal fling in that last word, an insinuation that he knew her state of mind toward him, and reciprocated.

"Well, to-morrow Janet and her baby will be here," said Mrs. Whitney, and her soothing tones seemed to stimulate him by irritation. "Then we'll all go down to Saint X together, if you still wish it."

"Don't take that tone with me, I tell you!" he said with some energy in his drawl. "_Don't_ talk to me as if you were hanging over my deathbed lying to me about my going to live!" And he closed his eyes, and his breath made his parted, languid lips flutter.

"Mr. Vagen," said Matilda, in her tone of sweet graciousness, "may I trouble you to go and--"

"Go to the devil, Vagen," said Charles, starting up again that slow stream of fainting words and sentences. "Anywhere to get you out of the room so you won't fill the flapping ears of your friends with gossip about Whitney and his wife. Though why she should send you out I can't understand. If you and the servants don't hear what's going on, you make up and tattle worse than what really happens."

Mrs. Whitney gave Vagen a look of sweet resignation and Vagen responded with an expression which said: "I understand. He is very ill. He is not responsible. I admire your ladylike patience." As Whitney's eyes were closed he missed this byplay.

"Here, Vagen--before you go," he drawled, waving a weary hand toward the table at his elbow. "Here's a check for ten thousand. You don't deserve it, for you've used your position to try to get rich on the sly. But inasmuch as I was 'on to' you, and dropped hints that made you lose, I've no hard feelings. Then, too, you did no worse than any other would have done in your place. A man's as good, and as bad, as he has the chance to be. So take it. I've not made my will yet, and as I may not be able to, I give you the money now. You'll find the check in this top drawer, and some other checks for the people near me. I suppose they'll expect something--I've got 'em into the habit of it. Take 'em and run along and send 'em off right away."

Vagen muttered inarticulate thanks. In fact, the check was making small impression on him, or the revelation that his chief had eyes as keen for what was going on under his nose as for the great movements in the big field. He could think only of that terrifying weakness, that significant garrulousness.

When Vagen was out of the way, Charles repeated: "I'm going this afternoon." His listless eyes were gazing vacantly at the carved rosewood ceiling. His hands--the hands of a corpse--looked horribly like sheathed, crumpled claws in the gold silk cuffs of his dark-blue dressing gown. His nose, protruding from his sunken cheeks, seemed not like a huge beak, but indeed a beak.

"But Janet--" began Mrs. Whitney, thinking as she spoke that he surely would "not be spared to us much longer."

"Janet can follow--or stay here--or--I don't care what she does," droned Whitney. "Do you suppose I'm thinking about anybody but myself now? Would you, if you were in my fix. I should say," he amended cynically, "_will_ you, when you're in my fix?"

"Charles!" exclaimed Matilda.

Whitney's smile checked her. "I'm not a fool," he rambled on. "Do you suppose I haven't seen what was going on? Do you suppose I don't know all of you wish I was out of it? Yes, out of it. And you needn't bother to put on that shocked look; it doesn't fool me. I used to say: 'I'll be generous with my family and give 'em more than they'd have if I was gone.' 'No children waiting round eager for me to pa.s.s off,' said I, 'so that they can divide up my fortune.' I've said that often and often. And I've acted on it. And I've raised up two as pampered, selfish children as ever lived. And now--The last seven months I've been losing money hand over fist. Everything I've gone into has turned out bad. I'm down to about half what I had a year ago--maybe less than half. And you and Ross--and no doubt that marchioness ex-daughter of mine--all know it. And you're afraid if I live on, I'll lose more, maybe everything. Do you deny it?"

Matilda was unable to speak. She had known he was less rich; but half!--"maybe less!" The cuira.s.s of steel, whalebone, kid, and linen which molded her body to a fas.h.i.+onable figure seemed to be closing in on her heart and lungs with a stifling clutch.

"No, you don't deny it. You couldn't," Whitney drawled on. "And so my 'indulgent father' d.a.m.ned foolishness ends just where I might have known it'd end. We've brought up the children to love money and show off, instead of to love us and character and self-respect--G.o.d forgive me!"

The room was profoundly silent: Charles thinking drowsily, yet vividly, too, of his life; Matilda burning in anguish over the lost half, or more, of the fortune--and Charles had always been secretive about his wealth, so she didn't know how much the fortune was a year ago and couldn't judge whether much or little was left! Enough to uphold her social position? Or only enough to keep her barely clear of the "middle cla.s.s"?

Soon Whitney's voice broke in upon her torments. "I've been thinking a great deal, this last week, about Hiram Ranger."

Matilda, startled, gave him a wild look. "Charles!" she exclaimed.

"Exactly," said Whitney, a gleam of enjoyment in his dull eyes.

In fact, ever since Hiram's death his colossal figure had often dominated the thoughts of Charles and Matilda Whitney. The will had set Charles to observing, to _seeing_; it had set Matilda to speculating on the possibilities of her own husband's stealthy relentlessness. At these definite, dreadful words of his, her vague alarms burst into a deafening chorus, jangling and clanging in her very ears.

"Arthur Ranger," continued Whitney, languid and absent, "has got out of the beaten track of business--"

"Yes; look at Hiram's children!" urged Matilda. "Everybody that is anybody is down on Arthur. See what his wife has brought him to, with her crazy, upsetting ideas! They tell me a good many of the best people in Saint X hardly speak to him. Yes, Charles, _look_ at Hiram's doings."

"Thanks to Hiram--what he inherited from Hiram and what Hiram had the good sense not to let him inherit--he has become a somebody. He's doing things, and the fact that they aren't just the kind of things I like doesn't make me fool enough to underestimate them or him. Success is the test, and in his line he's a success."

"If it hadn't been for his wife he'd not have done much," said Matilda sourly.

"You've lived long enough, I'd think, to have learned not to say such shallow things," drawled he. "Of course, he has learned from her--don't everybody have to learn somewhere? Where a man learns is nothing; the important thing is his capacity to learn. If a man's got the capacity to learn, he'll learn, he'll become somebody. If he hasn't, then no man nor no woman can teach him. No, my dear, you may be sure that anybody who amounts to anything has got it in himself. And Arthur Ranger is a credit to any father. He's becoming famous--the papers are full of what he's accomplis.h.i.+ng. And he's respected, honest, able, with a wife that loves him. Would he have been anybody if his father had left him the money that would have compelled him to be a fool? As for the girl, she's got a showy streak in her--she's your regular American woman of nowadays--the kind of daughter your sort of mother and my sort of d.a.m.n-fool father breed up.

But Del's mother wasn't like you, Mattie, and she hadn't a fool father like me, so she's married to a young fellow that's already doing big things, in his line--and a good line his is, a better line than tr.i.m.m.i.n.g dollars and donkeys. Our Jenny--Jane that used to be--We've sold her to a Frenchman, and she's sold herself to the devil. Hiram's daughter--G.o.d forgive us, Matilda, for what we've done to Janet." All this, including that last devout appeal, in the manner of a spectator of a scene at which he is taking a last, indifferent, backward glance as he is leaving.

His wife's brain was too busy making plans and tearing them up to follow his monotonous garrulity except in a general way. He waited in vain for her to defend her daughter and herself.

"As for Ross," he went on, "he's keen and quick enough. He's got together quite a fortune of his own--and he'll hold on to it and get more. It's easy enough to make money if you've got money--and ain't too finicky about the look and the smell of the dollars before you gulp 'em down. Your Ross has a good strong stomach that way--as good as his father's--and mother's. But--He ain't exactly the man I used to picture as I was wheeling him up and down the street in his baby carriage in Saint X."

That vulgar reminiscence seemed to be the signal for which Matilda was waiting. "Charles Whitney," she said, "you and I have brought up our children to take their proper place in our aristocracy of wealth and birth and breeding. And I know you're not going to undo what we've done, and done well."

"That's your 'bossy' tone, Mattie," he drawled, his desire to talk getting a fresh excuse for indulging itself. "I guess this is a good time to let you into a secret. You've thought you ran me ever since we were engaged. That delusion of yours nearly lost you the chance to lead these thirty years of wedded bliss with me. If you hadn't happened to make me jealous and afraid the one man I used to envy in those days would get you--I laughed the other day when he was appointed postmaster at Indianapolis--However, I did marry you, and did let you imagine you wore the pants. It seemed to amuse you, and it certainly amused me--though not in the same way. Now I want you to look back and think hard. You can't remember a single time that what you bossed me to do was ever done. I was always fond of playing tricks and pulling secret wires, and I did a lot of it in making you think you were bossing me when you were really being bossed."

It was all Mrs. Whitney could do to keep her mind on how sick he was, and how imperative it was not to get him out of humor. "I never meant to try to influence you, Charles," she said, "except as anyone tries to help those about one. And certainly you've been the one that has put us all in our present position. That's why it distressed me for you even to talk of undoing your work."

Whitney smiled satirically, mysteriously. "I'll do what I think best,"

was all he replied. And presently he added, "though I don't feel like doing anything. It seems to me I don't care what happens, or whether I live--or--don't. I'll go to Saint X. I'm just about strong enough to stand the trip--and have Schulze come out to Point Helen this evening."

"Why not save your strength and have him come here?" urged Matilda.

"He wouldn't," replied her husband. "Last time I saw him he looked me over and said: 'Champagne. If you don't stop it you won't live. Don't come here again unless you cut out that poison.' But I never could resist champagne. So I told myself he was an old crank, and found a great doctor I could hire to agree with me. No use to send for Schulze to come all this distance. I might even have to go to his office if I was at Saint X.

He won't go to see anybody who's able to move about. 'As they want _me_, let 'em come _to_ me, just as I'd go to them if I wanted them,' he says.

'The air they get on the way is part of the cure.' Besides, he and I had a quarrel. He was talking his nonsense against religion, and I said something, and he implied I wasn't as straight in business as I should be--quoted something about 'He that hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent,' and one thing led to another, and finally he said, with that ugly jeer of his: 'You pious bandits are lucky to have a forgiving G.o.d to go to. Now we poor devils have only our self-respect, and _it_ never forgives anything.'" Whitney laughed, reflected, laughed again. "Yes, I must see Schulze. Maybe--Anyhow, I'm going to Saint X--going home, or as near home as anything my money has left me."