CHAPTER XXXIII.LEGITIMATE, OR ILLEGITIMATE.
The doctor only stayed a short time, which was mostly employed in discussing the famous enterprise of the great French capitalist at Guise—theFamilistère, or Social Palace. The count had been there on a visit, and he was eloquent in the praise of the work, which he called the most important and significant movement of the nineteenth century. “It points unmistakably,” he said, “to the elevation and culture of the people, and to a just distribution of the products of labor.” None present, except the doctor and Miss Delano, had ever heard of the great enterprise, and they listened eagerly, as if the count were telling an entrancing tale of some other, and more harmonious world.
“It won’t work, though,” said Burnham. “The equal distribution of wealth is a chimera.”
“But, my dear sir, itdoeswork,” said the count. “It has been in splendid working operation several years, and pays six per cent. on the invested capital. Do not lose sight of facts; and then, I did not say an equal, but ajust, distribution of the products of labor, or wealth, for all wealth is that and nothing else. Depend upon it, we are living in an age corresponding to that of puberty in an individual. There are no very marked changes fromchildhood up to this period, except that of increase in size; and then, everything being ripe for it, there is a marvelous sudden transformation in six months or a year, and the child assumes all the characteristics of the man or woman. Ask yourself why the man who makes your plow, or tills your ground, should be inferior to you who muddle your lives away in counting-rooms or offices? You can’t answer it, except to say the chances ought to be in favor of the one who has the most varied exercise of his muscles and mental faculties. I tell you, with the increased facilities for education among the people and for travel and intercommunication, they are beginning to feel their power.”
“Building palaces and living in hovels begins to strike the workers as something more than a joke,” said the doctor; “but up to this time they have done it very composedly. They have woven the finest fabrics, and clothed themselves and their children in rags, or mean and cheap materials. Bettering their condition was next to impossible when they had to work from sunrise to sunset to gain a bare living; but shortening the hours of labor will work wonders. It will give men time to read and improve their mental condition.”
“Yes, if it would only have that effect; but will it?” asked Kendrick.
“Of course it will not,” said Mrs. Kendrick. “There are the three hundred workmen of Ely & Gerrish. They struck, you know, and got their hours reduced to ten; and I hear that most of them spend their extra time in bar-rooms and billiard-rooms.”
“Well, madam,” replied the count, “do you expect men who have been drudges, to suddenly turn out philosophers,and give their spare time to algebra and political economy? Why, many of them are no doubt so degraded by their lives of unceasing toil, that the bar-room is a culture to them, and getting drunk a luxury. But you must remember you have not collected the facts upon which to formulate a judgment. I do not believe the greater part of them, as you say, spend their time in bar-rooms and billiard-rooms.”
“Oh, no doubt of it; no doubt of it,” said Burnham.
“My dear Kendrick, you must have doubts,” said the count.
“Not the slightest, upon my honor.”
“Well, then, let us decide it in the English way. We have had a bet, you and I, before this. I’ll lay you three to one, on any sum you like, that not one-third of these workmen spend more time in drinking-saloons or billiard-saloons than they did before their reduction of hours.”
“Done!” said Kendrick, very sure of his money. “Let it be two hundred dollars.”
“Oh, shocking!” said Mrs. Kendrick. “You are like two dissolute young men. I do not approve of betting.”
“I don’t approve of it either, madam,” said the count, “but this is to establish the honor of the ‘hodden grey;’ and to make the transaction more respectable or excusable in your severe eyes, let us further decide, Kendrick, that whoever wins shall donate the money to your new hospital.”
“Oh, that will be nice!” said Mrs. Kendrick, brightening. She was one of the board of managers, and had in vain tried to get her husband to subscribe anything further than the pitiful sum of fifty dollars at starting. The doctor also, highly approved of this disposition ofthe money. He had long agitated the subject of a hospital, and Mrs. Kendrick at last had come to be, he said, his “right-hand man.” He was one of the committee to draw up the prospectus then under consideration. He wished especially to have the hospital so organized that not only the poor could avail themselves of it, but those in better circumstances—for the private family, he said, was no place for a sick person. He could not receive the necessary care without feeling himself a burden, which vexed and irritated him, and so retarded recovery.
After arguing upon the method of collecting the facts about the workingmen of Ely & Gerrish, and after calling out the count at some length on the particulars of the working of theFamilistèreat Guise, the doctor left, and Kendrick and Burnham returned to the charge of the insurance scheme. Burnham insisted that the growing enterprise of Oakdale, and its steady increase of population, made everything favorable for a “big thing” in the insurance line.
“I see,” said the count, “that you are not disposed to take my suggestions about making your insurance a mutual thing among your citizens. Now, the longer I live, the more I am interested in the independence of the people. Your rates of insurance, in private joint-stock companies, are too high for the poor man, who needs insurance infinitely more than the rich do. Now, as for Oakdale enterprises, I see none so worthy of consideration as this well-managed flower business of Dykes & Delano. That is something worth taking stock in.” Here Burnham turned away with ill-concealed impatience, not to say disgust; but Kendrick, anxious to keep on the right side of his rich guest and relative, said, smiling blandly:
“Well, count, one like you might invest in the Dykes-Delano paper, and still have a balance for our little insurance enterprise.” The count did not at all like the covert sneer in this speech. “Kendrick,” he said, “your heart is as dry and crisp as one of your bank-notes. It is not touched at all by the struggle of these women, while to me it is inspiring. You never even told me of it, and I have had to learn the facts outside. They commenced with absolutely nothing but a few plants in a friend’s bay-window. One of them sold her watch and jewels, I hear, to help build the second addition to the hot-house. I tell you, they ought to be encouraged and helped in every way.”
“Pity they couldn’t have kept respectability on their side. That would have been the best help,” said Mrs. Burnham. Old Burnham could have choked her; not that he had more charity than his wife, but more policy.
“Respectability!” said the count, thoroughly aroused. “I wonder that women do not hate the very word. No woman ever becomes worthy of herself until she finds out what a sham it is—a very bugbear to frighten slaves. No woman knows her strength until she has had to battle with the cry of ‘strong-minded,’ ‘out-of-her-sphere,’ ‘unfeminine,’ and all the other weapons of weak and hypocritical antagonists. I tell you, a woman who has fought that fight, and conquered an independent position by her own industry, has attractions in the eyes of a true man, as much above the show of little graces, polite accomplishments, meretricious toilet arts, and the gabble of inanities, as heaven is above the earth. She is a woman whom no man can hold by wealth or social position, but only by the love his devotion and manliness can inspire.”
No dissenting word followed this burst, which was Greek to the solid men. The count was a little daft anyway, on the subject of women, according to them. Mrs. Kendrick, after a moment, offered some safe, negative remark, and Burnham, anxious to neutralize the mischief his wife had done, said he thought a woman might, at least some women might, “work up” a business and yet remain feminine. Men were not so hard on women, it was their own sex. This roused Mrs. Burnham, for she knew well he talked very differently in the bosom of his family. She took up the thread of conversation. “I am sure,” she said—and here occurred a little jerky interruption to her speech, the cause of which no one knew but her lord, who had kicked her foot under the table, which meant, in his delicate, marital sign language, “Hold your tongue!” But like many of the slaves, as the doctor called married women, she made up in perversity what she lacked in independence; so glancing spitefully at her “lord,” she continued, “I am sure I think women have a right to all the money they can honestly gain, and if Miss Dykes had conducted herself properly, I should have much sympathy with her success.”
“Was it her fault, Mrs. Burnham,” asked the count, “that the man who won her affection did not marry her?——”
“My dear Louise,” said Mrs. Kendrick, begging the count’s pardon for interrupting, “I think you had better retire. It is getting rather late for you.”
“No; let her stay, my dear madam. I am not going to say anything that the Virgin Mary herself might not hear. Let her stay. I see she listens intently, and if to-night she gains a broader conception of the true positionof her sex, you will hereafter rejoice in the fact. She is a pretty, a charming girl, just coming into the glare of the footlights on life’s stage, with bandaged eyes. This is what you mothers all do; and then if they stumble for want of eyes to see the trap-doors of the stage, you blame them—not yourselves. Teach a girl to know herself—to consider all her functions as worthy of admiration and respect; teach her to be independent, proud of her womanhood, and she will turn as instinctively from the seductive words of selfish men, as from the touch of unholy hands. Now, this little woman, Miss Dykes, had no such teaching, no knowledge of the world whatever, no standard by which to measure the honor of men’s motives; and, for believing and trusting, you, Mrs. Burnham, and other Christians, would stone her to death. But Nature is kinder than you are, madam, for it pardons her weakness, and compensates for her suffering by a most precious gift. Her child is one of the very brightest and loveliest I have ever met.”
“It is certainly a very charming little thing,” said Mrs. Kendrick, “and her mother’s conduct is now, I believe, every way exemplary. I am truly sorry that her child is illegitimate.”
“Illegitimate!” repeated Von Frauenstein, as if speaking in his sleep. “Why, all children must be legitimate. Howcana child be otherwise? I must be a barbarian. I can see nothing in the same light that others do. Well, by heaven! I’ll adopt that child, if her mother will consent. I’ll take her abroad and educate her. I’ll give her my name, and present her at a dozen royal courts. There’ll be no question then, whether she isbegotten by law or by the more primitive process of nature.” The company were astounded.
“Good heavens, count!” exclaimed Mrs. Kendrick, breaking the silence that followed this speech. “Would you really do such a thing?”
“Yes, my dear friend. I’ll do it—so help me God! and I’ll bring her back to Oakdale, when her education is finished, a perfect queen of a woman. You call her illegitimate, madam, and yet the time may come when you’ll be proud to kiss her hand!”
Mrs. Kendrick rose from the table, and the others followed. Miss Charlotte had retired some time before.
Kendrick, who could not imagine for a moment that the count was serious, was disposed to take the matter as a good joke. “If your knightly passion is the adoption of bastards, why have you never adopted any before? I think this is the first. Isn’t it?”
“Yes; because I have never known a case where the mother, being poor and uneducated, rose out of her disgrace so nobly. The doctor tells me she is a great student—reads and studies regularly, while working like a martyr to get the flower business on a safe footing. I mean to go and see her to-morrow, and if she wants capital, I’m her man. It is just as safe an investment as your insurance business, though it won’t pay so high a rate of interest.” Kendrick could have strangled him. Burnham and his wife retired with sufficient discomfiture for any amount of conjugal infelicity. Burnham declared, as soon as the door closed behind the happy pair, that but for her “gabble about those women, Frauenstein would not have made such a fool of himself.”Mrs. Burnham assumed the silent air of the martyred wife. So they went home to their grand house, second only in cost to the Kendrick mansion, and laid their heads to rest on two contiguous pillows, with as much justification for the proximity as the law allows. Meanwhile a very similar conjugal harmony expressed itself in the grander home of the Kendricks; but Mrs. Kendrick did not play the rôle of the silent victim as Mrs. Burnham did. As her husband was removing his cravat, she said, “Now here’s a fine mess you’ve got into with the count.”
“I!Well, that’s cool. What do you mean?” asked Mr. Kendrick, not for information, as his wife knew; so she answered somewhat impatiently:
“You ought to know Frauenstein well enough to see that he would never sympathize with any narrow social distinctions. He’s seen Clara Forest, thinks her unjustly treated, and so he has gone over to the enemy.”
“Seen Clara? I should say he had seen the other, by the way he talked. Shouldn’t wonder if he fell in love with that brat, and the mother too.”
“That’s as much as you know. Men never see anything. I’m perfectly sure that he is smitten with Clara. That’s the way it will end. You’ll see,” said Mrs. Kendrick, bitterly. She had long cherished the hope that Louise might win the count; but she spoke very despairingly about it now.
“Oh, I always told you that would never work. Men like that, know too well what a woman is. Louise has arms and legs like spermaceti candles.”
“Well, I must say, for a father to speak like that, is shameful,” answered Mrs. Kendrick.
“It’s all your own fault; you took her away from the high-school because she got hurt a little in the gymnasium, and sent her to that namby-pamby seminary of half idiots at Worcester. Didn’t I always want her to work in the garden and in the hot-house, and develop her muscles? She’ll always be sickly, just as she is now.”
“I’m sure she has had a great deal of exercise, and her health is as good as mine was at her age, and she is not a bit thinner in flesh.” Mr. Kendrick made no denial, and his wife continued: “Working in the garden spreads out a girl’s hands, and makes them red; and what man, I should like to know, ever likes hands and arms like a washer-woman’s? You were always praising the smallness and whiteness of mine. I mean before we were married, of course.” Still Kendrick was silent, but his thoughts were very busy. Someway the world was out of joint, and he was wondering if, after all, these radicals, with their talk about making women free and teaching them to depend on themselves, were not pretty near the truth. Here was Frauenstein, for example, rich enough to put a wife in a palace, and surround her with attendants, and he was always admiring women who worked. This he expressed to Mrs. Kendrick, and said that it certainly was commendable in Clara, since she would be a fool and throw away her rights as Delano’s wife, to take care of herself, instead of coming home and living on her father.
“Of course,” said his wife; “and we ought never to have cut her. You heard what the count said.”
“Who’s to blame for the cutting? Not I. Men don’t cut women, my dear.”
“Well, Elias, I think you can take the palm for sneakingout of a responsibility. Men don’t cut women, indeed! I know they don’t; but they insult them worse than we do. I know you bow as graciously to Clara as if she were a duchess; but would you let Louise visit her? You know you wouldn’t. That’s the way men take the part of women whom their wives and daughters avoid.” Mr. Kendrick thought silence the best reply to this just reflection of his wife. He thought he could trust her to bring harmony out of the discord; for while he wanted to keep the count’s money from straying away from the family, she, on her part, was equally anxious to secure his name and rank for Louise; and he knew she would hang on to that hope to the last.
The next morning, after breakfast, which had been a serene affair, showing no trace of the perturbation of the previous evening, the count drove over to the doctor’s. The doctor was out, but would return very soon. Frauenstein waited, and spent the time mostly at the piano. The twins were both delighted, though timid, especially in the presence of such a lion. Linnie, after they had sung, asked him to say frankly what he thought of their voices. “Do you allow your sister to speak for you, Miss Leila?” he asked, turning his fine eyes upon hers.
“Yes—no,” blushing and laughing just like nothing in the world but a young girl. “I mean yes, in this case,” she finally managed to say.
“Well, then, yours has most power, but it is wiry. Miss Linnie’s is more flexible, more emotional. She feels more than you do, or, rather, more than youseemto, when she sings. If you were both equally to cultivate your voices, and also continue your practice for the nextfive years, Linnie would win more applause for her singing, and you for your playing. That is my opinion; but I ought to add, as the French do,maintenant je n’en sais rien.” Then the count made them both speak French, he carefully constructing his sentences as much as possible afterFasquelle’s French Course, which he knew was their text-book, they having no idea of the reason why they were able to get along so well with him. He understood their worst sentences like a Parisian. Any foreigner who has been in Paris will understand that. He will recall how, in his abominable murdering of the language, sentences which he could not for his life have understood himself, written or spoken, were instantly seized and graciously and gravely replied to, as if they had been models of elegance. When the count finished singing a charming aria in his best style, Linnie said, with enthusiasm,
“Oh, I wish my sister Clara could hear you sing!”
“She shall hear me sing,” he said, looking up to Linnie, who stood on his left, with an expression in his face that she had never seen there. It affected her senses like a caress.
Pretty soon the doctor entered; and after greeting the count, he said, “What a fusillade of French! What a state of excitement these girls are in! I believe you are bewitching them both, Frauenstein.”
“On the contrary, I am the victim of both, and I dare not stay another moment. I have come to take you over the river. I want you to see my fifty acres, on which I am going to build a social palace, if the gods are propitious.”
It was a clear, balmy day in the first week of Aprilthat the count sought this interview with the doctor. So far in his life, he had never found a man who was so much “after his own heart.” He believed in him fully from the first hour he conversed with him, since when they had corresponded, expressing their views fearlessly; and thus far had found them in perfect accord. To say they loved each other like brothers would by no means express the sentiment existing between these two men, so unlike in many respects, yet so closely in sympathy that thought answered to thought like the voice of one’s own soul. During the drive, for they went past the fifty acres away into the country, neither asking for what reason, the count gave in detail his plans. “If I build this palace,” he said, “I shall do it with this clear granite sand of the river. I know the secret of making stones of it—bricks, we call them—which, moulded in any shape, and tinted any hue, will last for centuries. I can have a man here in three days to conduct the work. He will guarantee that they shall be finished this summer. If I do it, it shall be a magnificent structure, beside which the palace of Versailles will seem the work of a ‘prentice hand.’ I can profit by the original palace at Guise, and make it much handsomer, though that is truly splendid. The apartments must be larger, and the whole should accommodate about two thousand people. Now, I have already one industry for its occupants. What is your idea for a second?”
“Making these very bricks,” said the doctor, “if only you have got at the secret of their perfect durability, as you have, I know, or you would not speak so positively. But this industry would not suit all. You want one more.”
“Of course. One that will employ women. What shall it be? I have thought of silk-weaving, for a certain reason of my own. It is proverbial, you know, that those who make the silks, laces, and velvets—pure luxuries, and the most costly—are the worst paid of any laborers in the world. Look at Spitalfields, England, and Lyons, the great velvet manufacturing centre of France. In India, those who make the fabulous-priced Cashmere shawls are the most pitiably paid of all. I am willing, if necessary, to lose a considerable fortune to prove that good wages can be paid to silk-makers, and yet have a fair profit on the product. I should go into that manufacture with some advantages. I have a first class steamer already plying between San Francisco and China. I can get silk as cheap as anybody.”
“Good!” said the doctor. “Let the third industry be silk-weaving.” The count had not mentioned the first, but the doctor knew well he meant floriculture.
“There’s only one thing lacking, doctor, and that is—the motive: the motive for the first step. That depends——” And suddenly checking himself and turning his horse in the road, he asked, abruptly, “Doctor, have you ever been in love?”
“With a woman—no; with a man, yes.”
“I understand. You have met a man who responded to all the needs a man could respond to, but never a woman to respond to what you need there. That is my own case exactly, though I have loved, of course—few men more, I think.”
“If men only knew,” said the doctor, “how they cramp their own growth by making idols of women!”
“By idols, you mean slaves. Only free women areworthy of free men; and the time is not come, though it is near, when they will be emancipated. Then we shall see the dawn of the Golden Age. Men think they are free; but they are bound by many shackles, only they have thrown off some which they still compel women to wear.”
“And some they cannot throw off,” said the doctor, “until women are recognized as their political equals. I have great patience with the women; they are coming up slowly, through much tribulation.”