The Second Generation Part 9

"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 sn.o.bbishly 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 coa.r.s.e 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sociation 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, hoa.r.s.ely. 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 rea.s.sured where he must be a.s.sured 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 G.o.ds seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it. Saint X's set of G.o.ds 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 f.a.gots from fires of hope burning too high to rekindle fires about to expire.

"How is he?" asked Hiram.