The matter was adjusted in a small and compact court-room.
The matter was adjusted in a small and compact court-room high up in a certain vast and pillared pile—a room which differed little in size and not greatly in furnishings from an ordinary office. The court reporters and the crowd of court loungers had withdrawn; nobody remained behind save the clerk and a bailiff or two. Yet the spectre of publicity seemed hovering there; it hurled a flood of glaring light in through the high and curtainless windows, it shimmered on the staring yellow oak furnishings of bench and bar, and it searched out the darkest corner of the yawning jury-box. Abbie Brainard, standing beside her sister, peopled all this void with jargoning lawyers and callous constables and malicious witnesses and indifferent jurymen and sharp-witted reporters and trivial, time-killing spectators; and then she set her unveiled sister in that revolving witness-chair and brought to bear upon her the searching glare from the lofty windows and the more pitiless glare of the thousand-eyed crowd. She shuddered, and thanked Heaven—without going too deeply beneath the surface of things—that present conditions were so favorable.
For they involved none of the ordinary phenomena of a "trial." There was no wrangling, no eloquence, no auditory; there was no humiliation—beyond that which was inevitable. It was hardly more than a conference. The judge, with a quiet gravity, took a simple conversational tone—a keynote to which the indignation of Burt, the mortification of his sister, the sorrow of Jane Doane, and the juvenility of Freddy Pratt all came to be attuned. There was a simple recital of uncombated facts, the separation was decreed, and Mary Vibert was presently at liberty to resume her maiden name. It was considered best that she be known henceforth as Mrs. Mary Brainard. There was no report in the next day's papers, nor the next; on the third day things took a different turn.
One or two of the newspapers had sacrificed the Vibert-Doane story with considerable reluctance. They felt a certain degree of martyrdom, too, in withholding their hand from Brainard, who had been a standard subject of attack throughout the careers of all the younger writers. Nor were they at all sure that their position as guardians of the public morals justified any such suppression of the truth. They learned of the clandestine trial of the Vibert case, and that decided them. Their virtue was strengthened; the whole affair was reopened and thoroughly ventilated. The encroachments of wealth and privilege were held up before the alarmed eyes of the public; the entire episode, with everything leading up to it, was minutely rehearsed. A good many people were interviewed—a few who knew something of the circumstances, a good many who did not. Reportorial requisitions were also made on the bank and the house. Some persons contributed facts relating to the matter in hand; others, facts relating to matters whose connection was not so close; still others volunteered opinions on the method of procedure that made the trial noteworthy. "Vox Populi" and "Ruat Coelum" wrote letters "to the editor." Rough cuts from sketches and photographs made their appearance. The whole career of Brainard was reviewed with merciless detail, and the issue of one edition of a particular publication was attended with the shouting of his name through the streets. Certain sheets whose existence is unknown to the majority of reputable people and whose circulation is in accordance therewith, gave their clients a scare-head full of exclamation-points; and one pink publication, whose single connection with respectability is through the barber-shops, devoted its whole front page to the illustration of the case: the wronged girl claimed her surpliced betrayer at the altar-rail, while the equally wronged wife swooned in a front pew. There was an appropriate Gothic background, while one corner of the foreground—piquant touch of innocence—was filled in by an open-eyed choir-boy.
All these manifestations of public interest caused Ogden a keen personal distress that surprised him. He heard the names of Brainard and Vibert bawled in the streets. He became familiar, for the first time, with the salient points in Brainard's career. He heard himself referred to once or twice as a clerk in Brainard's bank. As he handled that pink sheet in the Clifton barber-shop while awaiting his turn, he half expected some acquaintance to brand him as a caller at Brainard's house. As he lay, lathered and defenceless, in his chair, he almost dreaded lest some pitiless friend might happen in and stamp him as a suitor for the hand of Brainard's daughter.... He paused and blushed under the barber's eye; he saw now the reason for his personal distress over these odious domestic entanglements. His surprise passed away, but it left behind it a distress greater still.
The appearance and deportment of young Frederick Pratt as a witness in the Vibert case offered several delicate shades whose noting and whose accounting for may justify a paragraph or two. His general effect, then, was in the highest degree sobered, chastened, depressed. To what was this to be attributed?
To his consciousness of the overshadowing majesty of the law? No; for the law had turned its softest and most silken side outward; the little party had taken up its informal grouping at the judge's elbow and had replied conversationally to the interrogations of the judge himself or to the prompting inquiries of Brainard's attorney. Justicia had appeared in her most sympathetic and domestic aspect.
Was the youth disappointed as to his performance of abeau rôle? There is no doubt that he had anticipated with some relish his first appearance in the witness-box. He would have been obliged, it is true, to confess himself a minor, and he might have been exposed to the humiliating necessity of declaring that he understood the nature of an oath; but after that all would have been smooth sailing. Only to be for full fifteen minutes the observed of all observers, to be able to lift up his voice and tell—all—he—knew! Yet to be balked in this called for exasperation rather than deep dejection, and deep dejection, after all, was what he chiefly showed.
Was this dejection the sign of sympathetic sorrow for the woes of his former friend and playmate? Not quite. His sympathy, while real enough, was largely the sprightly product of novelty, curiosity, and conscious self-importance; unentangled with other considerations, it would have shown itself in a nervous and volatile loquacity.
But Freddy in court was not loquacious; he gave his testimony after a benumbed and backward fashion that indicated other and deeper troubles. The boy, in fact, was under a cloud. An issue of some importance had arisen between the Underground National Bank and its youngest messenger; it involved no less a question than that ofmeumandtuum. Freddy Pratt, as messenger, had been in the habit of making two or three daily trips through the business district, during which the notes and acceptances that filled his big official wallet came to be exchanged for checks and greenbacks that represented corresponding values. One or two discrepancies had developed that called for attention.
The boy's father came down to the Underground to contribute his share of this attention. He was a grave, repressive, saturnine person, who might have been set down as possessed of far greater means to meet the requirements of a growing boy in the midst of a circle of well-to-do urban acquaintances than of inclination to study those requirements. He was received in Brainard's own private room, and the affairs of the penitent and sobbing boy were discussed over his head by his parent and his employer.
"You foolish child," said the elder Pratt to his son, in the self-conscious tone by which we address age through youth; "if you wanted anything, why didn't you ask me for it?"
This father, seriously handicapped as he was by his own temperament, was attempting to treat the matter as something rather slight and trivial. The pettiness of the amount involved, the perfect ease of restitution, the youth of the offender, the utter simplicity and primitiveness of his method—all these he touched upon with a feint of light-handed ease. Another might have blown an airy bubble like this, even in the face of Brainard's ominous and taciturn frown; but Pratt was not the man to do it. He soon left the upper air of informal jocularity for the firmer ground of argument and expostulation, and this ground, before he ended, was almost pressed by the knees of entreaty.
"It's plain enough," said Brainard, at length; "he took it, and he kept it."
Each one, from his own point of view, cast his eye on the culprit.
"But it can't be that you mean to ruin a boy's future in any such way as this?" snarled the boy's father with a rasping expostulation.
Brainard turned a look on him from under his overhanging brows.
"Um," he merely said, in a voice which might have meant anything.
But the affair presently came to adjustment—a treaty with several clauses. Brainard wished to use the boy in court; to dispose of the Vibert matter in the cursory fashion that he hoped to follow permitted scant margin for the plea of desertion, and he was depending on young Pratt for the recital of certain occurrences which, in a cumulative way, might have their bearings on the plea of cruelty. Pratt, Jr., was to testify in court, Pratt, Sr., was to reimburse the bank, and the boy's final dismissal from the Underground would then be timed in a way so disassociated from any particular cause as to excite no comment and to occasion no injury. But all this was scant and nominal payment for Brainard's clemency; a larger one followed.
Brainard owned a number of woe-begone tenements scattered here and there over that unattractive part of the West Side which is most affected by manufacturers of furniture. One of these tumble-down dwellings adjoined a large lot owned by Ingles—took out one corner, in fact, in such a way as to interfere seriously with its value for building purposes. Ingles, in treaty with a furniture firm for the putting up of a building, had made an offer for this corner. Brainard, informed as to the circumstances, had put a price on it that was excessive—exorbitant. Ingles had taken time for consideration; and at the very moment of Pratt's call a letter from him lay on Brainard's desk, to the effect that he was looking elsewhere; evidently, on principle, he was drawing off. Brainard had no use for the property, and it was hardly paying taxes. He wanted to sell it at his own figure, and he had expected to. Ingles's tactics nettled him; he solaced himself by a step that reached Ingles and Pratt at the same time. He sardonically raised his price a peg higher, and offered the property to Pratt with an intimation that refusal would not be entertained. He put his lot still further beyond the reach of Ingles's possible necessities, and he made it realize even more than Ingles had declined to pay. Pratt swallowed this mouthful with such grace as he could command; and with the celerity possible to a perfected system of land transfer when supplemented by the guarantee of a title company, Norval H. Pratt, in a day or two, became the owner, at an excessive price, of a piece of property for which he had no use, and for which, so far as he knew, no one else had any use either.
This transaction was at once noted by McDowell, whose study of the daily transfers as reported in the real-estate publications was minute, and whose attention had been fixed for some time on this particular piece of ground. He knew something of Ingles's intentions, through the people whom Ingles was endeavoring to accommodate, and he saw here the entering wedge that he had waited for so long. He had approached Brainard unsuccessfully; he now tried Pratt. Pratt, who figured himself justly enough as a lamb led to the shearing, made no effort to evade the rôle; he promptly made an agreement for the transfer of the Brainard lot to McDowell. He let it go at a decided sacrifice—he sold it at a possible shade under its actual value.
McDowell, whose eagerness had committed him to an out-and-out purchase, was now in a position to approach Ingles. He was willing to sell the ground for simply what it had cost him; his profits would come later, through that open door between 1262 and 1263. Ingles received him coldly. He had disposed, he said, of his holdings in that neighborhood, and was using the proceeds to build for his new tenants in another quarter. He bowed McDowell out with a faintly cynical contempt, and this enterprising person was left with an unpromising piece of ground on his hands to dispose of as best he might. He tried the new purchasers of Ingles's lot; his own was not necessary to their purposes.
McDowell was seriously embarrassed. This bit of ground was a trifle in itself—to Ingles or to Pratt it mattered little either way; but to McDowell, who was of a considerably smaller calibre, the thing came as a kind of last straw. In expectation of great activity in acres he had loaded himself down with outside property; everything of his own was invested in that way, everything that was his wife's, and something, to tell the truth, that was neither his nor his wife's. He was in up to his chin, and at this moment came Ogden, asking him in set terms for an accounting and a settlement.
McDowell met this demand with a promise of figures, and he renewed this promise several times. The intervals between gave opportunity for a slow insinuation of the truth—for a graduated confession that a considerable part of old Mr. Ogden's estate was tied up in the operations of his son-in-law. This confession was followed by his statement; but it was some time before the account opened at the Underground by George received any great enlargement through the agent of the administratrix.
"It's all right, though," McDowell said; "you don't need to worry, and there's no use in stirring things up. There's big money ahead, and you'll stand in."
But the statement was the ground, and a sufficient one, for a rupture. McDowell, in order to diminish his indebtedness to the estate, had charged it with various fees and percentages of his own, and with numerous items that properly concerned his individual and household expenses. He charged the estate with a new porch on the front of his own house, and with the full expense of railway travel which had been undertaken in great part for his own interests. He even made a hardy attempt to force the Brainard lot upon the indignant widow.
Mrs. Ogden immediately left his house, in spite of the good offices of her bewildered daughter. George himself, forecasting the future, beheld a long succession of wrangling days in the law-courts and in the offices of attorneys—days that threatened to surpass in worry, loss, expense, and nerve-wear anything that his family had experienced yet. He felt himself on the threshold of a struggle for which he was but scantily equipped, and in which he was certain to be seriously handicapped through consideration for Kittie.
Absorbed in these moody reflections, he was crossing the court of the Clifton on a Saturday afternoon when a pencil-tap on one of the great glass panes took his attention. The tap sounded on the court frontage of Darrell & Bradley's branch, and George started from his revery to see the face of Bradley himself looking out at him over the rulers, mucilage bottles, and memorandum-books that formed symmetrical piles within.
Bradley hastened to throw open the narrow glass door adjoining the show-window, and motioned George in with a friendly and quizzical grimace.
"Let Jones walk," he said, crinkling up his eyes and laying his fat hand on Ogdens shoulder.
"He is walking," responded George, with a wan smile.
Bradley drew him in and closed the door.
"Well, let him walk in a different path, then. Let him come out to Hinsdale to-morrow and try the primrose path."
"Of dalliance?" asked George, with a doleful attempt to meet half-way the cheery facetiousness of the other.
Well, I dont think a little dalliance would hurt him." Bradley made it seem quite absurd that a young fellow of twenty-five should have any real cares and annoyances. "All work and no playyou know."
"Im afraid so, admitted George, with a pathos that the elder man found amusing.
Bradley stepped back to a snug office that was was stowed away behind a tall piece of shelving piled with newly bound account-books, to pick up his hat. "I'm glad to have caught sight of you," he proceeded, with the friendliness of an elder brother; "I've just taken an hour or so to overhaul things here a little. If you're going north, I'll walk a block or two with you."
They passed out into the street and picked their way along through the splashing, slumping, and dripping that marks the spring break-up. They elbowed other pedestrians over miry flaggings, and they dodged the muddy spray that bumping trucks sent up from the street-car tracks at almost every crossing.
"My wife's wondering what has become of you," Bradley puffed out among many other things, as he tried to keep up with Ogden's supple and light-footed gait. "And Jessie, too. She's home to-morrow—just back from Evanston. You come out on the eleven fifty-five, and we'll have an early dinner, and that will leave enough of the afternoon to make things worth while. And we'll show you that spring is a little nearer at hand than you'd suspect in town. Your first spring here?"
"Yes."
"Pretty bad, ain't it?"
"Worse than Boston," said George, in a tone implying that nothing further could be added.
At the next corner Bradley paused, detaining him for a moment with a friendly hand.
"Sunday noon, then. You provide the dalliance and we'll see to the primroses. Care anything for 'em?"
"Oh, yes, indeed."
"Good thing; can't have chrysanthemums all the year round. Well, good-by. Jessie will drive down for you in the buggy."
"I'll be there," called Ogden, as they drifted apart in the thickening crowd.
He had reached the point where he felt it would be a relief to cut away from town and everything in it—the bustle, the uproar, the filth, the routine of the bank, the complications of the Brainards, the entanglements of the Ogdens. It was a simple thing to do—only so many miles of flimsy and shabby shanties and back views of sheds and stables; of grimy, cindered switch-yards, with the long flanks of freight-houses and interminable strings of loaded or empty cars; of dingy viaducts and groggy lamp-posts and dilapidated fences whose scanty remains called to remembrance lotions and tonics that had long passed their vogue; of groups of Sunday loungers before saloons, and gangs of unclassifiable foreigners picking up bits of coal along the tracks; of muddy crossings over roads whose bordering ditches were filled with flocks of geese; of wide prairies cut up by endless tracks, dotted with pools of water, and rustling with the dead grasses of last summer; then suburbs new and old—some in the fresh promise of sidewalks and trees and nothing else, others unkempt, shabby, gone to seed; then a high passage over a marshy plain, a range of low wooded hills, emancipation from the dubious body known as the Cook County Commissioners—and Hinsdale.
At the station Jessie Bradley sat drawn up in a buggy: she had her place in a small convention of phaetons, carryalls, and express-wagons. She tossed her head brightly and waved her whip.
"I could have walked as well as not," said Ogden, climbing in. "What's half a mile?"
"Three quarters—almost," she corrected. She gathered up the lines and secured the approved hold on the whip. "Unlessyoucare to drive?" she suggested.
"Not particular," replied Ogden, leaning back easily. "Quite willing to be a passenger."
He took a look at her sidewise from behind. She wore a pert little flat-brimmed, flat-crowned hat, set straight on the top of her head; a stray lock of hair brushed across her ear in the breeze; she had a bunch of pale purple primroses at her throat.
"You may if you want to," she said, with a sudden turn in his direction. Her eyes snapped and sparkled.
"'Here we go,' she cried, 'Sunday or no Sunday, I hate to poke.'"
"I'd as soon see you—unless you don't care to."
"Oh, as far as that goes! Just hold on tight, though. Get up, John!"
She drew a taut rein and flicked the horse over the ear. He was a mettlesome five-year-old, and he rushed into his best gait at once. "Here we go!" she cried, "Sunday or no Sunday. I hate to poke."
She rushed him through the outskirts of the town; she bumped over the cumbrous plank crossings, she grazed one or two of the wooden posts that held up oil-lamps, she charged a flock on its homeward way from church and cut it into two frightened and indignant halves. She was on her native heath; she felt it; she showed it.
George grasped the buggy-cover with his left hand and held his right in readiness to seize the reins. The buggy, with many a bump and sudden wrench, sped on over the stones and ruts and puddles and rough crossings of an indifferent country road, and presently it turned into a yard with a rasping graze on one of the two painted white posts that made the entrance way. On the side porch of the house stood the girl's parents. They were laughing.
Jessie jumped out briskly. She struck a masculine attitude on the carriage-block, her right hand resting on the stock of her whip, her left arm a-kimbo.
"I was to get yer through on time; them was my orders, and here ye are!"
George climbed out carefully.
"Poor Horace!" chuckled Bradley, coming down; "he's here all right, but is he able to give his lecture?"
Mrs. Bradley followed, to shake hands. She wore a black silk dress, and there was a bit of lace over her thin hair—an adornment which her consciousness seemed to put forth as a modish novelty. Her wrinkles all flowed together in a companionable smile.
"He may have lost his voice on the way," she joked, "but we hope he saved his appetite."
"They're both all right," said George, laughing in turn.
Bradley was at the horse's head. "The voice is there, anyway," he said in cautious acknowledgment. "And we'll see about the appetite as soon as you've got enough spare breath to say 'Amen' to our grace." The Bradley house was a mere box of a building set in an acre lot. They had built for themselves, on finally breaking with the city, two years before; and they had accepted the gables and dormers and shingles and the brown and yellow paint that the modest suburban house of the period finds it so difficult to evade. They stood on high, rolling ground; there were half-hints of considerable vistas here and there, and they were surrounded by groves and copses through which, to-day, the first faint colors of the spring were hurtling. Bradley, after dinner, walked Ogden around the house—previous visits had been confined to the parlor. He dwelt on the swelling of the lilac buds, and he drew attention with an impartial interest to the first sproutings of his peonies and of his rhubarb. The back of the place was littered with the debris of a second green-house in an advanced stage of construction, and through this disorder he picked his way, along with his daughter and his guest, towards the door of the first.
"Hop in," said Bradley, lifting his own foot over the perpendicular threshold. The air within was but a few degrees warmer than the air without, yet closer. On either side stretched fragmental beds of young plants, with frequent breaks between. "It's late for prims, after all; and a good many of them are outside, anyway." He waved his hand over a few patches of color on the left; there were white, pink, cherry, pale purple, such as Jessie was wearing, and a few belated clumps of young and indeterminate green.
Ogden passed to and fro, with the oh's and ah's that accompany the exposition of any host's pet hobby, however partial and trifling the exhibit may be. He had done the same last autumn with the chrysanthemums.
Bradley took this tribute with the customary complacency, and presently drifted to one side for a word with his man about a small matter of glazing—he had quite an eye for broken panes. Ogden leaned against a damp ledge. Jessie had seated herself on one of the steps of a rude flower-stand; she brushed aside two or three small pots that had been left standing on it.
She showed an air of lassitude; it had been stealing over her all through dinner, and now it had completely overtaken her in the languid atmosphere of the flowers. Her slender arms hung limply, and she moved her back as if to find a comfortable rest for it. Her face, under the pallor of the painted glass, looked rather colorless and a little drawn, and a languorous apathy seemed to have taken the sparkle from hereyes.
She looked up at him as she dropped the petals of a primrose one by one. "You didn't care to drive, then?"
"Bid you want me to? I'm sorry not to have understood. You drove down, and so I thought—Was it too much for you, both ways?"
"Oh, no. It only struck me that you might want to. You were not—that is, you understand horses?"
"Certainly; I drive on occasion." He smiled serenely, not in the least disturbed by her perfectly obvious thought. "However, a wise man never goes out of his way to handle a strange horse—perhaps that isn't one of Solomon's proverbs, but it ought to be."
"You are awfully cautious." She rose undecidedly, and presently she sat down again with a little sigh.
"I have to be. That is my business—from half-past eight till four. Perhaps it's growing on me."
"I don't mean that. Ton were born cautions; you'd be cautions anyway."
"I'm a Down-easter, you know. Look before you leap. Perhaps I shall learn the off-hand Western ways in time. I'll try to. I'll make myself over."
"I wonder if you can," she said, half to herself. Then aloud:
"But I don't believe all Down-easters are as careful as you are. There must be lots of them who would have just laid the whip on that horse, and run over a boy or two, and knocked our gate-post to pieces, and come up to the door with a wheel just ready to break to flinders. Why couldn't you have done it? I shouldn't have minded it—I should have liked it first-rate." She spoke with a kind of lingering drawl, and there was a half-smile in her lack-lustre eye.
"Your father would have minded it, though, and so should I. Never begin to dance without arranging about the fiddler—good rule, don't you think?"
She threw a bare stem to the ground. "Oh, yes; but tiresome." She rose. "Close in here, isn't it? Let's go outside."
The sun that had given some warmth to the early hours of the afternoon was dimmed, later, by an overcasting of thin clouds, and the rest of the time was passed in-doors. George smoked a friendly cigar with Bradley in the dining-room, and after Mrs. Bradley had disappeared for a short nap he whiled away the remaining hours with Jessie in the parlor. They sat in two easy-chairs on opposite sides of the fireplace, in which a handful of coal was working against the last lingering chill of winter. The girl had partly recovered her earlier tone, and she chatted with him in a-string of smart jocularities with the manner which sometimes assures a doubtful caller that he has not made a mistake in coming and that he has not remained too long after coming. But between these uptilted strata of facetiousness there came now and then a layer of greater seriousness, and in one of these intervals she trenched on the domestic affairs of the Brainards.
"Poor Mayme went South the other day, didn't she? I hardly suppose you could call it a visit?" She looked at him soberly, with her eyebrows slightly raised.
George winced. "To visit her uncle's family," he answered. He half wondered why he reiterated her word and even emphasized it.
"Her sister was going to run down there with her."
"I heard so."
"You see Abbie occasionally?"
"Occasionally."
"I suppose she is at the bank a good deal?"
"Not often." He fixed his eye on the last Bickerings of the coals and lapsed into silence. It was not so easy now as once before to discuss Abbie Brainard with Jessie Bradley.
Mrs. Bradley came in brisk and refreshed about half an hour before train-time. The young people were chatting amusedly enough on indifferent subjects, and she urged Ogden to stay to tea with the clinging insistency of the suburban housekeeper.
"You can go home by moonlight; I've arranged it all for you." She drew aside a window curtain and showed him a pale white disk in a bluish sky.
"It's full, you see. We just have cold meat and tea and biscuits—I don't want to keep you under false pretences."
The moon kept faith with his hostess;—lighting him to the station and following him in to town and keeping him in sight through a mile of noisy and glaring streets. From the car-window, now and then, as the train passed back through a string of scattered suburbs and crossed the flat reaches of prairie-land between he was conscious of her bland insipidity; and as he traversed the down-town business district she raked the long parallels of the east-and-west streets with an undiscriminating indifference that a mind less preoccupied might have found irritating. It was all the same to that big, foolish face—town and country were one. It had its vacuous smile for trees and fields, and it had the same smile for the variant lights of the street-cars, for the clamorous cab-drivers around the depots, for the flaring jewelled guide-posts of the theatres, for the gaudy fronts of sample-rooms, for the cheap dishevelment of occasional strayed revellers, for the signs of chiropodists and the swinging shingles of justices of the peace, and for a certain meditative young man, whether he was traversing the rustic roads of Hinsdale or the sophisticated planks of the State Street Bridge. Ogden's thoughts flowed along with a quiet and grateful sense of the friendliness of the Bradleys, and with many a ripple, wave, and eddy to correspond with the changing moods of their daughter. He made a careful rehearsal of some of their bits of talk—why had she said this? what had she meant by that? why had she done the other? He dwelt on these matters with an absorbed speculation, and with a young man of Ogden's temperament speculation was but the first step on the way to love.
The spring trailed along slowly, with all its discomforts of latitude and locality, and then came the long, fresh evenings of early June, when domesticity brings out its rugs and druggets, and invites its friends and neighbors to sit with it on its front steps. The Brainards had these appendages to local housekeeping—lingering reminders of a quick growth from village to city. Theirs was a large rug made of two breadths of Brussels carpeting and surrounded on all four sides with a narrow border of pink and blue flowers on a moss-colored background. This rug covered the greater part of the long flight of lime-stone steps. In the beautiful coolness of these fresh June evenings Abbie frequently sat there on the topmost step, under the jig-saw lace-work of the balcony-like canopy over the front door, while her mother occupied a carpet camp-chair within the vestibule and languidly allowed the long twilight to overtake her neglected chess-board. They sat out, now, only after dark. Ogden called at intervals, and was not flattered that the poor girl brightened at his coming; it seemed as if she must brighten at the coming of almost anybody.
One evening he elected to tell off their long street on foot—the street whose ornamental lamp-posts and infrequent spindling elms had partly decided him in the selection of his first quarters. When within a few streets of the Brainard corner he passed a house (one of a long row) on whose front steps (as with its neighbors, right and left) were camped a large and merry party, whose exaggerated domesticity made it plain that they were all fellow-boarders. They occupied two rugs as well as two chairs and a foot-stool at the head of the steps. Through their light-minded hubbub came dominatingly a voice which Ogden recognized, and he threw up his head to meet the frank but overdone bow of Cornelia McNabb. Beside Cornelia sat a young man who bowed at the same time with a somewhat forced and conscious smile. It was Burton Brainard.
Cornelia had returned to the neighborhood of her early trials. She considered herself now on a distinctly fashionable street; she put "Washington Boulevard" on her cards, and thought her eight dollars a week was none too much. She had had a plate engraved and a hundred cards printed. She had not found it easy to dispose of many of them; sometimes she gave them in shops, when she was asked to what address the goods were to be sent.
"But just wait till I order my next plate!" she would say to herself.
"They sat out now only after dark."
She had left one of her cards with Mrs. Gore. The poor, good soul (come in from her baking) was quite taken aback. Then Cornelia, conscious of too stiff an application of the social code, kissed her on coming away and made herself more intelligible.
"Yes," Abbie was saying to Ogden, a few minutes later, "Cornelia is a pretty smart girl. Father has come to be quite taken with her."
He noticed that she said—Cornelia.
"She takes down some of his letters, now, too," she continued. "I never learned," she added, in a tone of slight self-reproach.
"Good Peter!" exclaimed Ogden, with a protesting admiration, "you can do almost everything else!"
She waved aside this ardent apology, and looked rather shyly through the rusty iron-work of the hand-rail. The syringas were in blossom; the asphalt path had stopped its afternoon's running and had solidified since sundown.
"I think he likes her because she isn't afraid of him. Neither are you," she added, in a low tone, as if on an after-thought. She did not look his way.
Ogden appreciated this appreciation of his behavior. He had always been prompt and respectful with Brainard, but he had never knuckled down.
"He gives her letters almost every day. She corrects his mistakes."
"And he corrects hers?"
"He says she doesn't make many. When she does she sticks it out. She talks back. That's where she's bright. It kind of irritates him, I think, to have his—his clerks—his employés seem afraid. It pleases him, though, when other business men are."
This piece of filial analysis fell softly and slowly on the thickening darkness. The lamplighter was zigzagging across the wide roadway with his kerosene torch, and the voices of talkative neighbors on the other side of the street were brought over by the breeze along with the fumes of burning oil.
Ogden was pleased with this touch of gilding that the daughter's devotion applied to the father's clay. Perhaps the old man was not hopelessly beyond the reach of idealization's hand, after all.
Besides the people on other steps around, many clattered by over the asphalt pavement, and others promenaded slowly along the sidewalk. These moved in couples towards the Park, whose scant clumps of citified foliage appeared a few hundred yards away under the light of a waning moon and a half-bemisted sprinkling of stars; many of them issued from basement doors.
Presently another couple came sauntering along, and they paused at the foot of the Brainard steps. They were Burt and Cornelia. Cornelia came up and found a place on the rug that suited her, and greeted Mrs. Brainard in a familiar and masterful manner, before which the good woman soon boxed up her chessmen and retired. Cornelia then turned on Ogden.
"Stiff—or bashful?"
"H'm?"
"Why didn't you stop and say a word as you passed by?"
"Oh! Yes, bashful; too many people."
"Too bad about you!" She turned to Burton. He had seated himself on a lower step with his back to the others. His hat was on the back of his head and his chin was propped up by his knees and elbows. He was looking thoughtfully at the curbstone. "Come up and be sociable," she called.
Burt rose and ascended a step or two.
"Oh, how are you, Ogden?" he said rather absently. George felt that he should have said more, and said it sooner and said it differently.
Cornelia passed a cushion down to Burt. "There; take that and be comfortable." She regarded him studiously. It was dark, but he was all there—the short, thick, yellow moustache, the virile chin lately shaved and powdered, the dense hair that rose in a level line from the top of his forehead. Cornelia would have seen all these things in darkness that was Egyptian. She felt her fingers working towards them.
Cornelia was dressed with a trim and subdued modishness. She had taken a good many cues from Mrs. Floyd, and she had not been above cultivating an intimacy with a girl who worked for the excessively dear and fashionable house that dressed Mrs. Ingles. Mrs. Floyd had had no need to teach Cornelia anything about grammar, but she had shown her, all unconsciously, the advantage of a regulated use of slang.
Her fingers, debarred by the cold conventions of society from any entanglement in the head of hair just before her, smoothed and patted the folds in her own skirt. She further relieved herself by a high, sniffling toss of the head and a long, deep respiration.
"Well, isn't this a great night!" she said, addressing the little party generally. "Isn't the air splendid! I declare, I could just ramble about till morning. And yet I suppose your mother"—to Abbie—"has checkmated herself and gone to bed. Dear me, if there wasn't any city, and no clatter-clatter on that machine! Seems as if I must just make a break for the country before long—just get up home and hop into my little boat and paddle all around that whole blessed lake!"
"Why don't you?" asked Ogden. "Can't you give yourself a vacation?" He spoke a little wistfully; there was none ahead for him—no Underground man ever had an outing during his first year.
"I don't see hour. They say you can't serve two masters. Well, I've got five—four too many. At least," she tacked on, as if a closer calculation would further increase the number of these superfluities. "Can I go all over the building and tell each one of them that my services are going to be demanded exclusively for several days by some other one of them? Or shall I he sick—just for a day, at first, and keep adding days, one at a time, until I've had a week? I don't know whattodo."
"Drop the whole business," said Burt brusquely, without turning about.
"And leave all my poor people in the lurch?" she cried, as if her employers were her most poignant concern.
"They can get somebody else."
"Oh, yes!" cried Cornelia, with mock humility; "I'm nobody; I can be easily replaced." She cast her humility aside lightly. "I'll tell you what I would do, though, if I was up at Pewaukee this eve. I'd paddle down to Lakeside and back—by the light of that moon." She pointed down the street towards the park foliage. "The moon that gilds those fruit-tree tops—Shakespeare. And it would be a good deal brighter up there than it is in this smoky old place."
"Can you row?" asked Ogden.
"Can I? I guess. Pair of oars made to order; and I can feather with 'em, too. Speaking of Lakeside, I know who's going to be there the last of this month; that Miss Bradley—Mrs. Floyd's niece."
"Cousin," corrected George.
"Is it? Cousin, then. She's a lively girl; she and I would make a pair. Only she don't look very strong."
"I thought," said he, "that she was going to Ocon—Ocon—"
Cornelia gave an encouraging ha, ha. "That's right! Take time and you'll get it. Mow, then; Ocono—"
"Ocono—"
"Mowoc."
"Mowoc."
"Oconomowoc; easy enough when you have it. Accent on second syllable. The only trouble is when you write it; you never know where to stop. Well, so sheisgoing to Oconomowoc, later—to stay through July. They're only twelve miles apart."
"You know Miss Bradley, then?" Abbie asked Ogden. "She was over here once or twice, to see—Mayme. She seemed like a real nice girl."
Ogden bowed assent. He found himself as unwilling to discuss Jessie Bradley with Abbie Brainard as he had been to discuss Abbie Brainard with Jessie Bradley. Whenever he debated them it was a silent debate, in which he himself took both sides.
"She's a high-stepper," volunteered Cornelia, filling in Ogden's silence. "Good deal of style, too. Yet they say her father isn't so extra well off. She's a great contriver, I expect. Well, gumption goes a long ways; it's wriggledmeoff my back a good many times." She turned to Burt. "Now then, young man, do you want to walk me along to the park? Haven't we roosted about long enough?"
"All right," said he, getting up promptly. He seemed to be smiling appreciatively at her pertness.
"Ta!" cried Cornelia, dabbing her hand to Ogden and Abbie; and off she went. "Perhaps you'll see us later—if you're good!"
A big, bulky figure came stamping along the walk, and reached the foot of the steps just as Burt and Cornelia started off.
"I guess they'll be good," a heavy voice said. The voice was not greatly disguised by its assumption of unaccustomed jocularity, and George with a flush recognized it as Brainard's.
"Well, Abbie," he said, lumbering up the steps. And, "How are you, Ogden?" he said to George, as he passed on and seated himself with a loud grunt on his wife's chair.
George bit his lip; the old man had no business to misuse other people's pronouns in that way. Cornelia's "you" might have meant one person—if it meant more than one still it might have meant them separately; but Brainard's perverting "they" bracketed him and his companion in a fashion utterly unwarranted.
Brainard lingered a few moments above their heads. He made one or two clumsy attempts at facetiousness, and George surmised that this was his way of showing a friendliness. But his joking was much more painful than any hectoring could have been, and George was greatly relieved when he presently rose and retired unceremoniously into the house.
After Brainard's withdrawal Abbie and Ogden sat for some time in silence. The moon sank; the clatter of hoofs on the asphalt sounded less frequently; some of the neighbors over the way had pulled in their rugs, and were now seen, by new-lighted gas-jets, at upper windows pulling down their shades. The breeze freshened; it rustled the lilacs and syringas in the side yard, and it swayed the stringy mass of wild cucumbers that had taken it upon themselves to hide the red hideousness of the barn.
Suddenly Ogden spoke.
"There! I knew I should forget it, and I have. I laid it on my bureau the last thing, too!"
"What?"
"Why—'A False Start.' You haven't wanted it, have you?"
"No; keep it if you like. I've read it."
She meant, "Keep it; please do. Keep it, for my sake."
"It's a pretty good book; didn't you think so?" he asked.
"Yes; I liked it ever so much. He married the right one, after all, didn't he?"
"Might have done it before," Ogden commented. "No earthly reason why not. Only you know how they spin these things out."
There was a sudden shutting down of windows over their heads. Ogden drew out his watch, and turned it so as to profit by the lamp-post on the corner. "Why, I'd no idea!" Burt and Cornelia had not returned from the park, or, if so, had passed on the other side of the street. "Good-night."
"It isn't late, is it?"
"Only for a North-sider."
"Good-night," she said, slowly, and sat alone on the steps until her father came down and called her in.
On the first of July Brainard summoned George into his own private room.
"We have about decided to have an assistant cashier here," he said. His voice was gruff, but his glance was a little sheepish. "Mr. Fairchild thinks it will be convenient about signatures and a good many other things. Burt's out a good deal and likely to be off all through August, and I don't like to have drafts signed in advance. You could make up the reports, too, and swear to 'em. Besides, it's elective—puts you in the Bankers' Almanac, for one thing. As to salary, I suppose we could stand an extra five hundred—or six."
He looked at George with some constraint, but his intention appeared to be friendly.
"We might expect you to go on helping with the tellers' work on occasion—vacation-time, for instance. Now, about your own vacation—"
George bowed with an additional acknowledgment of the favor; he had expected to pass an unbroken summer in town.
"Thursday's the Fourth. Put five or six days with it, if you like—to get accustomed to the new deal."
He turned to his desk. "That's all right; talk to Fairchild." It seemed that anything beyond the merest word of thanks would be distasteful, and George withdrew.
He accepted his elevation and his vacation with unfeigned pleasure; he attributed his advance to the old man's softened mood occasioned by his son's engagement to Cornelia McNabb. Burt, a few mornings back, had told his father, plainly and promptly, that it was his intention to marry Cornelia—and soon. He had prepared himself for remonstrance—even for opposition, and he had braced himself to demonstrate to his father that he was going to have his own way. The old man, however, made no difficulties; Cornelia had certain qualities that he appreciated, and he knew that Burt had a strong and a strengthening will. Besides, a son-in-law was one thing, and a daughter-in-law another. A daughter's husband must come as an ally, offensive and defensive; he must contribute money, and if not money, then abilities. There must he abilities in actual exercise, or there must be the certain promise of their development in the pursuit of some such career as would be recognized and endorsed by business men of his own sort. That ten-dollar-a-week man—that anthem singer! His fist clenched and his eye glared at the very thought of him. But a son's wife could be moulded—if not moulded, then coerced. There was to be no breaking away from two such wills as his and Burt's. He liked vim; he recognized snap; he was prepared to welcome Cornelia as a vital force.
"Oconomowoc," murmured George to himself. He was bending over his bureau drawer, sorting out his collars. The gas-flame reflected itself in the mirror and threw a doubled glare upon his face.
"Eh!" said Brower, sitting cross-legged on his trunk. He laid the book down across two of the top slats; it was "David Grieve"—he read everything.
They were still in the Bush Street house. Mrs. Ogden had a room on the floor below.
"Did I speak?" asked George.
"Ton said—Oconomowoc. Is that where you are going?"
"Queer name, isn't it? What's the place like?"
"If you've got a chance to go there, you go." The oracle spoke and retired into his book.
George went. The train made its rapid run up to Milwaukee, took its short stop, and turned westward on its way towards La Crosse. At Pewaukee there was the usual halt; it lengthened to an unusual halt. George paced the long platform impatiently; his mind had projected itself through Nagowicka and Nashotah and Okauchee to Oconomowoc, and his body was eager to follow.
"What's the trouble?" he asked the brakeman.
"St. Paul express late—passes us here."
The platform was swarming with passengers and townspeople. A figure rushed through the crowd and grasped George by the hand.
"So you're gallivanting, too? And I'll bet a nickel you've been aboard all the way up—parlor-car. Now, haven't you?" The voice sounded a trumpet-note of wide-flung triumph. It was Cornelia's.
Her cheeks blazed and her eyes burned with the magnificence of conscious conquest. Her glory spread about her the same succession of flowing circles that a stone spreads over a pond. It seemed as if her expansiveness must crowd the train from its track and the station from its foundations.
"Ma," she called back into the crowd, "come here—do! I want you to meet Mr. Ogden. He's one of my most particular friends; but I guess you don't need to be told that—you've heard enough about him. Mr. Ogden, this is my mother, and she's about the best mother that ever lived."
Mrs. McNabb smiled bravely and took Ogden's slender palm in her large, capable grasp. She wore a sedate black bonnet; her gray hair was parted in the middle and fell right and left in two wide, crinkly folds.
"And I want pa to come, too; no dodging." An elderly man came forward reluctantly, in his loose, short trousers and his thick boots with broad, square toes; he seemed to find Ogden, in his modified tourist guise, a disconcerting object. He lifted up his shrewd but retiring eyes, placing one embarrassed hand on his grizzled chin whiskers and giving George the other; it was rough, and the nails were broken.
George shook hands with the old fellow—who went well enough with other features of the Wisconsin landscape: the shaggy tamarack swamps, the gashed sides of gravelly "hog-backs," the long stretches of disordered barbed-wire fences, the rusty reds of depots and storehouses, and the marshy ponds, edged by the ragged scantlings of gigantic ice-houses.
Cornelia did not perceive this harmony—or ignored it.
"Yes," she declared, "ma's the best ma, and pa ain't far behind. Now don't shy, pa; Mr. Ogden is more scary than you are. He'd been trying for near three months to ask me to go to the theatre with him, when along came Burt and plumped out and asked me inside of a week. Burt's enterprising; no mistake."
The old people smiled at each other, half embarrassed by Cornelia's frankness.
"But we won't shut out George—oh, dear! I mean Mr. Ogden—altogether. Bear witness, both of you: I ask him to be one of my ushers." George stared. Was the girl meaning to be married in church after—everything? Then he bowed. "On Abbie's account—if at all," he thought.
"Going to Coonie for the Fourth, I suppose?" Cornelia continued.
"Coonie?"
"Oh, well—'Con'm'woc, if you must have it all. Well, we're on the move, too. Good-by. But"—meaningly—"you'd find us all again in town pretty soon; and if pa and ma don't see the whole place from the tip-top of the Clifton, my name is McMudd. On a clear day, too—when you can tell where the smoke ends and the land begins. Good-by. Our house is on the right, a mile farther; watch out for it."
Oconomowoc, from Ogden's point of view, appeared as one wide street running between two small lakes that were only a few hundred feet asunder. The business part of the street was built neatly and compactly of the cream-colored brick of Milwaukee, and the rest of it was a thickly shaded stretch bordered with a double string of summer cottages, which fronted on the street and backed on the water. In the midst of the cottages stood a big hotel of yellow brick; it was faced with a lofty row of seven immense white columns, and above the maples before it there rose a steep roof set with a series of dormer-windows. George was given a room which one of these dormers lighted, and presently stepped down the street to inquire at one of the cottages for Jessie Bradley. He soon stepped back again; she was not expected for two days yet. He thanked Brainard again for his full week, and threw himself into one of the chairs under the big colonnade.
The town was at the beginning of its annual patriotic flurry; after the Fourth it settles down, and the real season begins a week or two later. A good many young people were scurrying about, many of them in aquatic attire; those who did not carry rackets carried banjos. Nobody noticed him except the young wife of the proprietor. She stood in the doorway; her black eyebrows were contracted in a study of him. She wore her raven hair in a Japanesque fashion, but she corrected the plump dumpiness of the Japanese maiden by a tall and slender grace of her own. "He's all right," she said to herself, and sank down in a chair beside him.
"You poor, lonesome man," she began, with a graceful audacity that was her peculiar possession, "let me talk to you."
"Do," answered George, smilingly. He seemed to have known her a week.
"That is, if you're not just married or not just going to be. Are you?"
"N—no."
"We see so much of that sort of thing. May is dreadful; this year we had five couples in a week—it's so pleasant and quiet here then. The fifth was from Detroit; they stayed quite a while, and when they went away they thanked us all over. We hadn't done a thing for them—we simply left them alone and let them go about. But they were just chuck full of it—they'd have been in glory anywhere. What do you think of our columns?"
Two men could hardly have spanned their fluted shafts. George cast his eye up to their capitals, on a level with the third-story windows. "They're great."
"Aren't they? They've only been on two or three years. We call them the Seven Bridegrooms."
"The Seven Bridegrooms? Is each the gift of a happy man?"
"Hot quite; one happy man gave them all. He was here a week; he gave us one every day. Think how happy he must have been."
She smiled at his inquiring glance.
"He wanted things his own way, and could afford it," she said. "His name was Ingles."
Ogden did some lounging up and down the street. He crossed a bridge where one lake fell into the other over a mill-dam, and found himself in another cluster of cottages. They stood on a bluff and looked down the three miles of the lower lake. Both shores were diversified by promontories and islands, and the red roofs of other cottages showed everywhere over the tufted foliage of the shores.
"How it balances—how it composes!" he said of the view, as he recrossed the bridge. "And how it's kept!" he said of the town, as he retraced his steps to the hotel. "Really"—with unconscious patronage—"it's the only thing West, so far, that has tone and finish."
He took a boat. The next day, the same. The town was full, but was lying back quietly for the excitement of the morrow; he had the water almost to himself.
Sloops and cat-boats were being rigged for a coming regatta. A scow for fireworks was being anchored two or three hundred yards from shore. He paddled about with a trolling-line. But the line was neglected. He had a good deal to think about; here was place and time to do it.
His future was assured. He could now marry. He wanted to marry. There was only the question—which?
He had surrendered his primitive theory that marriage was a matter which concerned only the two principals. Kittie's marriage—who had come to be more deeply concerned in it than he?
He thought of Abbie Brainard, and he thought of her family—a divorced sister; a disreputable brother, whose future was to sound, perhaps, depths yet undreamed of; another brother, whose coming marriage was but conclusive evidence of the coarseness of the family grain.
And the father—his scandalous success; his tainted millions; his name a byword. Those bawlings in the streets; those disgraceful and degrading pictures; the stench of the whole scandal.
His oars dropped idly, and he sat with his eyes fixed on the bottom of the boat.
But the old man would die. Yes; and then would come the division of the spoil. If there had been so much trouble in a poor sixty or eighty thousand, how much more might there be in all these millions? If he had found such difficulty in getting restitution from McDowell—a restitution so incomplete as to be even yet largely in the future—what might there be to expect from other brothers-in-law and from other new relations that so much money would be sure to bring?
He ran his troubled eyes along the shore. A party of children were wading and splashing at the foot of a high, wooded point.
That money—those millions! It was the talk of the bank that Burt, on his wedding-day, was to have five hundred thousand dollars as an out-and-out gift. And if Burt, why not Abbie—in the proper degree? Those shameful, indecent millions—millions that it would be a disgrace to receive, to handle.
"Boat ahoy!" A sloop swept by. He dodged its bowsprit and was tossed by its wake. He threw out his oars to steady himself.
The husband of a rich wife—another Valentine. My house—my furniture!
Then, he had meant to get on—in business, in society. Was he to marry a recluse?—a girl inexperienced in the ways of his world—perhaps incapable of adapting herself to them—surely careless of them.
Abbie was before him in her tender and steadfast serenity, in her stanch and genuine capability. He set his teeth, and took up his oars again, and rowed half a mile with a furious vigor. He stopped, panting and exhausted, in a clump of reeds off a sedgy shore, near a group of linden-trees. He had left Abbie behind.