He had put something in motion on that languid July day, and suddenly he was whirled along in a stream of consequences. There was an interview with Mr. Ellwell, a sudden opening of the Ellwell family arms, and he was one of them—not much to his relish. Ruby Ellwell brought out her engagement to Bradley, the young stock broker her father had chummed with. The Four Corners renewed its worldly life in a garden-party, at which both engagements were announced. Thornton had to stand in line with his new brother-in-law, and for all this disagreeable business, the sole consolation was the happiness the woman he loved found in it. For her it was a rehabilitation of the family, the first dawn of those better times she had looked for all these years.
He remembered for all his lifetime how his father had met her; how he had walked across the lawn, old, and gray, and aloof, and had taken both her hands. He had smiled at her tenderly, as if she were a little girl, much as he had smiled years before at Jarvis's mother. Then he had kissed her on both cheeks, and had stood patting her hands in a gentle caress. Later he had slipped away in the same quiet abstracted manner. For the rest of the day Jarvis Thornton had been a little sad, as well as bored, without knowing exactly why.
They had planned a simple wedding for September; they would walk to the village church, the old white box of a meeting-house where the first Roper Ellwell had led his congregation. Martinson, Thornton's youthful hero at the Camberton Theological School, would meet them in his episcopal robes on the little green in front of the church, and then the party, not more than a dozen, could walk together into the bare old building, and in the solemn quiet of the country noon complete the marriage. A quiet dinner, and then away from the Four Corners.
But it could not be so. The handsome Ruby wished to have a "function," some of the conventional excitements of this entertainment. The two sisters must be married together; a special train must come from Boston; a grand reunion would be held of all the old family friends who had shaken their heads over the Ellwell misfortunes. So the two quieter souls yielded, and the marriage left a bad taste in the young bridegroom's cup of joy.
Almost at once they had gone abroad to Berlin, where Thornton proposed to work for an indefinite time. It seemed to him that he should accomplish more than one object, by carrying on his work in Europe; he could insensibly divide himself and his wife from the Ellwell connection. All went sweetly for his first months; he had begun to regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home, he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at such a time.
So back to Boston they had gone, Thornton contenting himself with the reflection that he could go ahead in Boston almost as well as in Europe; that fortunately he was not tied by money wants, and that the Camberton laboratories were always open to him. When the little daughter came he schemed a new move; he was offered a headship of a laboratory somewhere in the middle West. He began to feel the force of his father's remarks about transplanting.
Yet they never went. Another man got the appointment while he was persuading his wife. Her mother was so lonely, now that Ruby was living in New York. They had no necessity to live far away in order to earn money. When he proposed moving to Washington, the same ground had to be gone over again, and the same gentle obstinate resistance to be met.
"Go to Washington," old Thornton said when his son stood by his bedside during the last illness. "Go to Washington," he repeated, querulously. And as the younger man made no reply, but sat with his hands shoved in his pockets, brooding, the sick man spoke again, "You will never do anything here."
"Yes, we must make a move," assented his son in a voice that said "no."
After his father's death, they went to live in the Marlboro' Street house. There was no more talk of moving away. The Ellwells came in town for the winter, living in a flat at one of the new hotels near by. Mrs. Thornton had the habit of spending her mornings in the flat with her mother and the baby. Thornton could find no reasonable grounds for the rebellion he felt over this tie, this close proximity to decay in which he was compelled to live. Yet he loathed the thought that his child, unimportant as she was now, should begin her life by imbibing such a forlorn atmosphere.
He could tell each day what had been going on in those long morning hours; how his wife's sympathies had been on the rack; how mother and daughter had sighed over the unaccountable miseries of life. She seemed to him to come home with the old anæmic look, with the old restless hunger in her face, and then he was reminded that their child was more than delicate. It would lead him to envy mere gross flesh and blood, the coarse fibre of some riotously healthy common folk. Indeed it was a crime against his fellow-men, this maintaining a bankrupt stock unless he could patch it into vigor. There were hints too that fell indefinably now and then about the Ellwell affairs, the stock-broker's poor health, the perpetual disappointments that discouraged him. His wife had relapsed into the Four Corner's habit of regarding incapacity and folly as mere misfortune. It irritated him to realize all this sentimental pity over a blackguard. Yet she was right; she had the opinion of centuries on her side; was she not their daughter before she was his wife?
There were times when Ruby came on from New York for a visit, bringing her child, a boy, with her. Thornton grimly noted this vigorous little animal of a nephew and compared him minutely with his own feeble child. He compared also the mothers. Ruby had already begun the period of over-bloom. The Bradleys, he gathered, lived a kind of a tramp existence, moving from boarding-house to hotel as Bradley went up or down. And Ruby, with all her assurance and her affluent person, had not lost the Ellwell ailments. Yet to her child had been given the strong stock he envied. Nature had coolly overlooked his, and carried her blessings where they were not deserved.
Such reflections made him more tender to his wife. He wondered if she ever thought of this contrast.
When he was working in his little back-room study, he wondered what the two sisters could find to talk about for hours. He fancied that they were going over the old items of the family budget, the thousand trivialities of family gossip that never seemed to be ended and never lost their interest. One day he could hear Ruby earnestly talking—she had just come from New York—and then he thought he caught the sound of suppressed tears. After a time he rose nervously and walked out to his wife's room where the sisters were.
Ruby's face was excited though sullen. She had not taken off her hat, and in her haste her gloves had fallen on the floor by the door. Her sister was crying, quietly. "What's up?" Thornton turned sharply to Ruby, his voice betraying his desire to sweep her out of his life forever.
A slight sneer crossed her face. She said nothing, and punched the footstool with the toe of her boot sullenly, as if resenting his appearance. As Thornton waited for an explanation, she rose and picked up her gloves.
"You'll have to tell him," she spoke roughly to her sister. "I'm going over to mother's."
Thornton accompanied her to the door. Her air was defiant and sullen; Thornton contemptuously refrained from questioning her.
"Well," he said, quietly, when he had returned. Something very bad was to come; it had been hanging about in the air for months.
"Jarvis, I can't tell you; it's so awful. What shall we do? Poor Aunt Mary and Aunt Sophie!"
"They have lost their money."
She nodded.
"Through Bradley?"
"Oh, Jarvis, I have brought you so much trouble; I am afraid I ought not to have kept you here in Boston."
"I don't see how that could affect this," he replied kindly to her irrelevant contrition. "Has it all gone?"
"I suppose so."
"How did he get hold of it?"
"I don't remember anything. Papa had it—all their money—to invest, and he let Ruby's husband have it to put in wheat. It's all gone."
Thornton had heard that John Ellwell's sisters had been left a small fortune by their father with strict directions to keep it out of their brother's hands. They were two delicate maiden ladies, who had floated about Europe aimlessly for a number of years, living in one watering-place after another. Their refusal to have anything to do with their brother had been one fruitful topic of family discussion. A few years before, however, when American stocks were booming, the two maiden ladies had withdrawn their hundred thousand from the woollen mill where old Mr. Ellwell had placed it, and had given it to the stock-broker for reinvestment. Their brother had always fascinated them. He was clever, wicked perhaps, but so clever that he always got into good things. The conclusion came shortly. For the last six months Ellwell had managed to keep up the interest; now he had come to the end of his rope, and he was about to commit suicide by selling his seat in order to provide a pittance, at least, for his sisters.
Husband and wife sat silent for a long time.
"Why did Ruby come to break the news?" Thornton asked at last. His wife looked at him timidly, then flushed.
"I suppose she thought we could do something; but what shall we do? We never have anything left over."
The bolt had fallen; Thornton traced its course in a few little moments.
"There is but one thing," he said, gently; "we must see that your aunts do not starve, at least for the present."
"You'll have to give up your investigations and laboratory work, and all that?"
She was striving to comprehend his situation, an effort that he had planned for her that July day when they had become engaged.
"For the present."
"How can you love me? Your life would have been so different. You have always said that you were equipped with ideal conditions, just enough money to work as you liked. And now you can't escape unless I die."
He disliked to utter commonplace lies; although she spoke the truth in her sudden realization of the facts to have him deny it, he could not protest; so he kissed her instead and said, later:
"We can't reckon things that way." Her old look of misery came back.
"You can't win with me."
"But I have won love."
And she was appeased.
From that date he had become a man in the sordid sense of the word. He had taken his father-in-law sternly in hand, presented the case firmly, and showed him the extent of the sacrifice his worthless life had made necessary. He paid from that day the normal income to the Misses Ellwell's bankers, but he gave the stock-broker to understand that was the end. Any further protection for him was not to be found in this life.
A few months later he hung out his shingle as practising physician and surgeon. There would be need enough of money in his life; the way to get it was by using his acquaintances in Boston and practising only about a few streets of the Back Bay. So at thirty he had begun the ordinary routine of a well-connected physician—the profession he had sneered at in his youth, the profession of polite humbug.
The next fifteen years that carried Jarvis Thornton over from one generation to another passed with placid monotony. He had been decidedly successful. His little round of Boston streets where he doled out mental and physical encouragement, resounded with his praises. Moreover he was known as a "good fellow," an epithet that his warmest friends in Camberton days would not have bestowed on him. He was sleek and solid; well-groomed and rounded, in spite of constant activity, and if his scientific reputation was not more than mediocre, it was enough to give him a lectureship on neurosis in the Camberton Medical School—that necessary mark of approval for a doctor practising in his circle. He spent eight months of each year in Boston; the other four he practised at Wolf Head, a fashionable sea-side place that he had done much to promote. There he had built a roomy cottage on a little point of land, and he had shrewdly invested in the Improvement Company that held the best lots along the shore. He was a comfortable family physician to have about, with a good digestion and a desirable connection; in his few hours of recreation he could be counted on for tennis or yachting or a dinner-party, even with a dance attached.
One step that marked the prosperity of the Thorntons was their new house on Beacon Street, selected with much care in the short block or two of stable neighborhood. When they had moved into this new house, Mrs. Thornton had referred to the past indirectly.
"Why don't you take the sewing-room?"
"What for? I can't entertain patients on the third floor."
"You could use it for a laboratory for your things," Mrs. Thornton suggested vaguely. "I could get along without it."
The doctor smiled.
"Oh, I don't need so much room for that; I haven't over much time these days."
It touched him that she remembered, even remotely, the bearing of that tragic day when her sister had come to announce the Bradley rascality. Soon she began again, this time nearer the heart of the matter.
"Jarvis, you don't mind it so very much, the change you had to make,now."
"Now that I have more practice than I can attend to?"
The doctor's voice had an inexplicable tone in it at times which made his wife shy of intimate conversation.
"You are such a success," she struggled on; "and everything has come out so—peacefully."
"There are two verbs, my dear, which most people confuse: to succeed and to win." Then, as he noted her troubled face, he kissed her. "That bell has been ringing for half an hour. That is an outward and visible sign of the first verb. I must heed it."
When he left her, she mused over his words. Except for occasional disturbing moments like these, it never occurred to her that her dreams made in that hot summer at the Four Corners had not come true for them both. She had dreamed vaguely and she had realized vaguely. When she contrasted her husband's career with her father's, or with any other that made up therépertoireamong her acquaintances, it seemed fair and unblemished. But men were exacting creatures, who rarely knew what was best for them, and who kept about them a fund of discontent to feed upon.
There was her poor father. He had given up now; Doctor Thornton saw that his wife's parents did not starve. Ellwell was a melancholy skeleton to meet on the streets, bent, walking stiffly at all his joints, his fleshy cheeks fallen in as if after a severe fever. He was shabby, too, though the allowance was a liberal one. Fine mornings he would crawl down Tremont Street to one of the hotels, and lounge away some hours in the bar-room, on the chance of meeting an old acquaintance. Frequently the doctor would hear his husky cough in the hall outside his office door, but the old man slunk away sullenly whenever the door opened. Thornton suspected that on such occasions drains were made upon his wife's allowance. Where else did it go to? He was minded at times to mention this degrading beggary, but always refrained. He would have to build his wife's character over from the foundations in order to make her appreciate his disgust, and he was not sure that he desired such an essential change in her, at least, now. She would confuse the issue: he would seem to be rebuking her pity and natural tenderness. So it mattered little if the old wreck wasted a few hundreds more on the pleasures he was capable of getting.
The doctor's wife had wavered between invalidism and delicate health for some years, and had settled into retirement until her daughter brought her out once more, first at Wolf Head, then in Beacon Street. The household, in spite of the fact that there were only three members, was known as an expensive establishment. But the doctor was supposed to be well off, and his practice was good for more than he spent. If he worked hard all the winter, he was not idle in the vacation months; his fawn-colored horse could be seen jogging about for miles up and down the coast. It was generally well into the evening before his dark face and burning cigar were seen on the path of the cottage.
The summer when his daughter was seventeen, had been particularly busy. They had had a stream of guests as usual, staying for a week or a fortnight, and the busy doctor had not paid much attention whether Ruby Bradley with her young son had come or gone, or whether the second cousins had yet arrived. The house was generally full. He liked that, although he chose to dine alone, quite frequently. His daughter, whom he had watched shrewdly, demanded people, and the safer plan, he thought, was in multitudes. She was a restless young person, tall like him, with fair skin like her mother, dark hair, and nervous, active arms.
"She will always have some man on hand to exercise her egotism on," the doctor reflected, impartially. So he fed her young men. The father and daughter went about a good deal together, and people made pleasant remarks over their intimacy. This summer the doctor thought about her on his long drives, and scrutinized the young men who lounged about his veranda. Most of them were boys in the calf stage, college youths, who were spoiling with vacation. These the doctor called the puppies, and treated indulgently. There were others who came to the hotel for short fortnights, impecunious young business men or lawyers who were looking about for suitable assistance in life. Such candidates were submitted to a close scrutiny, but nothing to warrant active measures had yet occurred.
He had made up his mind precisely about his future son-in-law. For two years he had studied his daughter, and nothing could shake his conviction that he had found the only safe conclusion to a difficult problem—a certain kind of husband. He must be rich, for Maud had inherited the Ellwell dependence upon luxury. And he must be able to devote himself pretty steadily to her whims, subordinate himself good-naturedly, and obtain for her whatever she might fancy for the time.
"She will want to express herself badly," was the doctor's comment. "If they should try to express themselves both at the same time, there would be explosions—rows and divorce and scandal—unhappy children." Once he said to his wife, forlornly, "She is too clever, poor child. She has been talking to me like a marchioness of forty for the last half hour. If this keeps on I shall have to domesticate her great aunts in order to have some children about the house."
The desirable husband must be able to place her well socially, for she had already shown herself keen in making distinctions. It gave her father a wicked pleasure to see her snub young Roper Bradley when he came with his mother to make their annual summer visit. She never mentioned her uncle Roper, and she extended compassion to the doctor on the subject of her grandfather Ellwell.
The doctor was fond of her in spite of his analysis. He thought with pride that she was thoroughbred, capable of masterly strokes. Yet, alas! the opportunities for masterly strokes would come so rarely; meanwhile she was a dangerous, febrile, nervous, chemical compound—something to be isolated. With her five-day enthusiasms, her quick wit, her restlessness, her sense of dress, she would be fascinating.
"If she will only fascinate the right sort!" the doctor prayed. He smiled savagely at the picture he drew of the right sort, which, it is needless to add, was not a congenial type.
"An acquiescent fool for a son-in-law, a kind of gentlemanly valet!" And, "That, I trust, will be the end. Maud as a mother would be atrocious."
His daughter gave the doctor a certain kind of scientific interest. She harked back, so to speak, to former generations, perverting their simple instincts. Her devotion to the Salvation Army for one winter, he pointed out to his wife, was a recrudescence of the old Puritan pastor in his revivalist days. This manifestation would not be permanent, for there were so many other desires crowding each other in her brain. Just now she had developed a longing for art. The doctor had been obliged to exert himself to prevent her sudden departure for Paris, where she pictured herself living on two francs a day at the top of a very dirty flight of stairs.
"Perhaps she will elope," the doctor said to his wife, humorously. "But she won't elope with a mere man: she will go off with an idea and then come around to the front door to be taken back."
"I don't think she is very considerate," Mrs. Thornton hinted. Maud treated her at times with toleration. The doctor understood what that meant—her lack of sympathy with her mother's clinging to her family; deluging the Thornton house with Ellwells and their affairs.
"If she would only cultivate some serious interests, yours, and take the place of a son," thus Mrs. Thornton referred to her husband's youth and its sacrifices.
"I haven't any use for women doctors," Thornton replied; "and Maud as a nurse scrubbing floors would be more absurd than Maud in an Army Rescue Post."
For the art fever, however, the doctor felt to some extent responsible. He had allowed young Addington Long a certain right of way in the house. Long was the son of an old friend, a Camberton man, who had wrecked himself early in his career. Doctor Thornton had taken the boy out of his squalid home, sent him to a boarding-school, and then, as he promised well, paid his way at Camberton. The young fellow had not done anything remarkable, merely grown into a nice gentlemanly manhood, with a taste for illustrating, by which he picked up a few dollars for spending-money, and placed himself pleasantly in Camberton circles. When he graduated, Dr. Thornton fell in with his suggestions that he should like to try his fortunes as an artist. So Long had spent several years in a studio at Paris, and had done solid work. The doctor had felt encouraged with his experiment and treated him liberally.
This was only one of a number of similar experiments in young life that the doctor carried on silently. Earlier in life than most men, he had had the yearning to see others go where fate had forbidden him. A number of young doctors, studying in Berlin or Vienna, and some young scientists scattered over the country owed their freedom to his liberality. He selected his material here and there, without much apparent discrimination, but one test existed, known only to the doctor, a test that was strangely sentimental, and yet shrewd.
Long's interests had been outside his field, but the tenderness he had felt for the father caused him to make this exception. He had not made a mistake, however. Long had exhibited at Berlin and Munich, and had begun to sell his work a little. He was already spoken of by the international press as a promising young American artist. This summer he was at home, sketching in a village not far away, and the end of the day found him quite frequently at the doctor's dinner-table.
The doctor liked him. He had bought Long's first picture in the Salon and had procured him patrons. He took him off on his yacht whenever he had a chance, and the more he saw of the young man the more he was ready to bet on his future. "There is so much that is clean and wholesome in him," he observed to his wife. "He has managed to live over there without catching their cheap bohemianism." Mrs. Thornton felt at liberty to encourage Addington Long's intimacy at the house. But he would not do for a son-in-law; there would be two tragedies instead of one. So when Mrs. Thornton suggested that he should be asked for a visit during September, the doctor put the question off with irrelevant excuses; they had had too many people; September was his time for a rest; young Long should be getting down to hard work, not loafing in a comfortable cottage.
One evening toward the middle of the summer the doctor came home later than usual, and, wearied with his day's driving, he got out of his carriage and let himself into his grounds by the shore path. The evening wind was puffing casually across the bay; in the cottage above the lamps were being lit. The doctor walked slowly, thoughtfully, picking his way in and out of the shrubbery, thinking vaguely of the day's work, the cases visited, the cases to be visited on the morrow, the routine he had established. As his eyes rested on the cottage nestled in its little domain that commanded several miles of the shore-line, he reflected complacently on his business sense which had led him to develop Wolf Head. He had managed, so far, skilfully, and this matter of a daughter that would come to a crisis during the next five years should be handled successfully. No one could be said to have the confidence of the doctor; one would not look to him for confidences of any sort. Did he ever betray any doubts as to the desirability of his career? Indeed, he never put the question to himself. Fate had caught him in a vice; he had spent eighteen active years in padding that vice. Yet he mused as a man will at the close of a busy day, wondering what compelling power drives him over the wonted round.
Suddenly he heard voices on his lawn, and instinctively stepped from the gravel path to the grass. There was a long murmur of a low voice; he wondered at his own intensity in listening. Something in the timbre of the voice, some suppressed emotional quality, struck his experienced ear. When the sound ceased he advanced carefully along the hedge until he came to an opening that gave a view to the lawn. The voice was his daughter's, as he had guessed; beside her was stretched a man's figure in flannels, probably Long's. It was simple enough: tired after their tennis they had flung themselves down where the hedge sheltered them from the evening breeze and were talking. But their attitude arrested him; he felt an undue strain in the air. Presently Long spoke with a low, slow utterance, as if ordering his words. His face was turned away from the doctor, looking up steadily at the girl.
"Yes," he said, and the doctor felt he ought to walk on, "it's hard on a man. You see so many fellows who have failed who are just as good as you are——"
"No, no; not just as good," the girl interrupted, "there issomethingdifferent."
"Well, as far as you can see they are just as good; they have worked terribly hard. Then you shut your teeth and go in again, working desperately from the first light to the last peep until you are plugged out."
"Then?" his companion said, eagerly.
"Perhaps you crawl out to Lavenue's and sit there in the evening watching the people sip and talk, the girls sauntering home, or the students who are gassing forever. It doesn't seem to make any difference what you do then, whether you go on a loaf for a month and fool with those who play, or go home to bed and back to work in the morning. You think the idea will come some day whenever it gets ready, and that there is precious little use in slaving away on a one franc fifty déjeuner."
"Don't you think of home, America, and us who are anxious for you?"
"It seems so far away; and do you care unless I make a strike?"
The girl was silent; her face was turned away while she played with his answer.
"You know we do," shielding herself with a neutral plural.
"There's the other side," the young man's voice sounded out more buoyantly.
"You go around to some friends' studio and see what they are up to, and get ideas and go home with more spirit; or something good comes along, a picture is accepted, an order comes in. You think you have got there all right and it's only the question of a little patience. There's a good dinner or a little trip in the country—it's fine around Paris you know. Then I think of coming home with some kind of a rep., and how all of you will be glad—youat any rate, Miss Thornton?"
The doctor sighed and crept away.
"The condition for the fever," he muttered.
When he had entered his study he sat down to think. His man announced a patient, but the doctor made no reply. Suddenly he glanced up at the waiting servant.
"Will you tell Mr. Long as he leaves that I wish to speak to him."
Then he went on thinking. Soon there was a knock, and Long came into his study. The doctor motioned to the chair he had just left, and, reaching for a box of cigars, took one and lit it. Long watched him expectantly.
"Shall you stay on here much longer?" the doctor asked at last, in his usual composed manner.
"Oh, I don't much know. I want to get back to Paris in the winter if——"
"Don't bother about that," the doctor interrupted him, hastily. "You can trust me to find the amount, you know, until you are squarely on your feet; only," his voice grew sharper, "you won't do much here. You should go at once."
The young man stared.
"Sail next week," the doctor continued, blandly, but fixing his eyes steadily on Long's face.
"I don't know that I can accept——"
The older man waved his hand hastily.
"You can from me. I have been your father for a good many years."
There was a pause. Then Long blushed slowly. "I don't know that I can," he said at length. "Why are you so anxious to get rid of me?" It was the doctor's turn for silence.
"If you don't go now, you will not be likely to go for a long time." His eyes kept firmly on the young man's face.
"And if I have a reason to stay here?"
"There can be no reason stronger than your success."
"But there is—at least," he paused, awkwardly—"I feel there is, I hope there is."
"Do you know why I have backed you so persistently?"
"You have been awfully kind!"
"It was not altogether on your father's account," the doctor interrupted him. "I might have put you in some business and left you to fight your own way. That kind of experience we all know makes men, the successful men, who are tried and found capable of bearing strains. I have saved you so far from that struggle. Why?
"Because," continued the doctor authoritatively, "there are some men who care more to do some one thing, who love one object, more than they care for success, for fame, for pleasure. If they are defeated, if they never have the chance to do that one thing—perhaps the world is no poorer—there are plenty to take their places, but they are capable of misery, real misery, such as no common failure ever brings to the common man. They may be foolish; they may be idle and be drawn aside and think they are happier in doing what comes along, but that is never true. They are wretched. Such men can never love, except as an interlude. Do you understand me?"
The doctor paused at this sharp interrogation; Long's eyes had followed him wonderingly during his long monologue.
"So you thought——" he stammered.
"That you were made in that way," nodded the doctor; "an undomesticated animal."
Long sat brooding over this idea. The doctor went on in his low, swift tones.
"You have the hunger and the thirst for that work over there. You would play with a woman and then put her out of your heart into the street, or try to tame yourself. Which would be worse."
"And if I am not so sure that I am built like that? Suppose I am willing to make the sacrifice, if you call it that?"
The doctor's tone became neutral again.
"You refer to a possible interest in my daughter."
Long's face slowly flushed under the word "possible."
"Yes! at least, perhaps—I have never put it to myself exactly—indeed why do you ask?"
"May I ask how far that interest has gone?"
The younger man half rose from his chair.
"If it hadgoneat all," he said, hotly, "you would have known it."
"Yes," the doctor knitted his eyebrows, "that's all right. Don't feel disturbed. If I didn't consider you to be a gentleman in a more intensive sense of the word than is usual, I shouldn't be talking to you like this. Have a cigar." There was another long pause. The doctor debated quickly with himself what course to take. When he resumed, he used his rough weapon.
"You ought to know that my daughter will have very little in case of my death."—This time the young man rose entirely from his seat. The doctor smiled and waved him back. "And nothing until my death, which won't come while you are a young man. The world reports me well to do, and I am, but I am taxed by society heavily. I mean I have large demands on my income, and aside from certain properties that must be left in trust for other people and a modest provision for my wife and child, there isn't likely to be much. I tell you all this, partly because I like you, and partly because I think it is only fair. I don't think you are after money. But you must realize now that money will make a great difference in your career."
When Long moved hastily, the doctor smiled.
"I don't say that you should hunt a fortune, but you should keep out of the way of attractive women without fortune."
This time he gave Long an opportunity to vent his feelings. When he had finished, he began again quietly.
"What you say is singularly like what I said myself about nineteen years ago. I think I will tell you the story," and he proceeded coldly to give him an outline of his life. Long listened respectfully. At the close he said, "But the cases are not similar, exactly."
"No two human cases ever are, but the theme is the same. You might arrange a different compromise; it would be a compromise."
"Your difficulties were enormous! Why need I plan for such misfortunes?"
"You mean the outside affairs, the money? That might be arranged of course. There would remain my daughter, a subject which I can discuss with precision. She is in fair health, and while I live to look after her she will probably continue so. Her nerves are morbid, her egotism is excessive, her restlessness is abnormal. She is rather a brilliant girl, I think, and to me a very dear one. But her career needs to be guided, or some decided smash will come."
"You have no confidence in me?"
"The greatest. It is not her welfare only which I am considering, but yours. Besides, if she were normal or dull, not an exacting young American, yet she would be a woman. And as such her interests must be opposed to yours forever. Should you marry her, I would be forced to agree with her and oppose you wherever you stepped beyond conventionality."
Suddenly Long turned on his tormentor with a bold question.
"Your marriage you would not consider a failure, even under worse conditions?"
The doctor winced at this thrust, which he considered legitimate.
He had had his moments of doubt even in the thick of his loyalty to his wife and child when this question had tormented him. Miasmatic moments that come to firm men also, and make them dizzy with the thought of the mere waywardness of life. Had he been any better or wiser than Roper Ellwell? When the test of a vital passion had come he had acted like any other inconsiderate, purposeless young man, like any one with a chaotic will-less past!
But this temptation he had mastered, as he had mastered almost all the elements of his fate.
"That kind of a question can never be answered fairly. No one has the complete data. No! I can honestly sayno. Yet it has altered my life profoundly, that I can say."
"Then why are you so pessimistic for me?"
"Because," the doctor replied, slowly, "such a marriage as mine has been, such a marriage as yours would be, is a career in itself. Beyond thatnothing—understand,nothing."
"Love is a great career!"
"It is; but there is hardly a man I have ever known who could embrace it, and that only, for a lifetime. You could not, I think, and you would be miserable. It is a humble career though it is rich. The man who wins does not devote his life to an exacting passion for a neurotic woman. You are the man to win: go in."
The doctor rose.
"Now I must leave you to see a patient who has been waiting. Think—you don't love her, poor child; what do you know of love? You are putting your mind in order for love, and it will come quickly enough."
Long stared irresponsibly at the floor. "I am glad we have been able to talk this over without passion. You have not obliged me to use any coarse authority, or any influence except your own sane judgment. We have been unsentimental men. You have confessed to nothing more than a liking for a pretty girl. You have committed yourself to nothing."
The doctor paused, resting his hands firmly on the table between them. He read the young man's face eagerly, and he felt sure that he had gained his point.
"Now, go," he continued kindly, "and God-speed to you! Go in to win!"
He turned. Long rose mechanically as if ordered by a superior, opened the door, and disappeared into the dark hall. The doctor listened for the sound of his footsteps. When he heard the tread on the ground beneath the office window, he sighed and stepped out into the hall. His daughter was standing in the doorway at the farther end, as if looking for some one.
"Where is Mr. Long, papa?"
"He has gone."
The doctor's voice dwelt slightly on the last word. The girl glanced at him sharply, and then turned back into the lighted drawing-room.
"Dinner is waiting, Jarvis," Mrs. Thornton spoke from a lounge within the room. "Why didn't you keep Mr. Long?"
The doctor walked over to his wife and stood for a moment by her side. She smiled in further interrogation; the doctor bent and kissed her.
"Long didn't care to stay," he replied. Then he went back to his patient.
AMOS JUDD. By J. A. MitchellEditor of "Life"IA. A Love Story. By Q[Arthur T. Quiller-Couch]THE SUICIDE CLUBBy Robert Louis StevensonIRRALIE'S BUSHRANGERBy E. W. HornungA MASTER SPIRITBy Harriet Prescott SpoffordMADAME DELPHINEBy George W. CableONE OF THE VISCONTIBy Eva Wilder BrodheadA BOOK OF MARTYRSBy Cornelia Atwood PrattA BRIDE FROM THE BUSHBy E. W. HornungTHE MAN WHO WINSBy Robert HerrickAN INHERITANCEBy Harriet Prescott SpoffordOther Volumes to be announced
AMOS JUDD. By J. A. MitchellEditor of "Life"IA. A Love Story. By Q[Arthur T. Quiller-Couch]THE SUICIDE CLUBBy Robert Louis StevensonIRRALIE'S BUSHRANGERBy E. W. HornungA MASTER SPIRITBy Harriet Prescott SpoffordMADAME DELPHINEBy George W. CableONE OF THE VISCONTIBy Eva Wilder BrodheadA BOOK OF MARTYRSBy Cornelia Atwood PrattA BRIDE FROM THE BUSHBy E. W. HornungTHE MAN WHO WINSBy Robert HerrickAN INHERITANCEBy Harriet Prescott Spofford