CHAPTER VII
Thelectures went admirably. Mrs. Wilbur’s house was crowded every Wednesday morning for the eight weeks of the course with “the most prominent and fashionable leaders among Chicago women.” The new house did something to attract; the lecturer himself more, having the skill to hold the curiosity of his audience with his novel point of view, while he tickled the sensibilities of the most intelligent. Then the gossip about Erard’s old intimacy with Mrs. Wilbur added sauce to the affair. Given that basis for elaboration in any other great city, an acrid scandal would have fermented rapidly; Chicago was sensible and tolerant. For the irrationality of any serious entanglement between the clever, prosperous, and rising Mrs. Wilbur and the personally unprepossessing and penniless young man, who in professional standing was rather like a dancing-master, was too apparent to need statement.
As the lectures drew to a close, other matters occupied Mrs. Wilbur’s attention. Her child gave her anxiety. Then a letter from her Uncle Sebastian, a pathetic arrangement of his affairs on paper, had disturbed her. A telegram from St. Louis summoned her the eve of the last lecture. She hurried away with a forlorn feeling at the heart. Somehow Uncle Sebastian, sparing ofwords as he had been, was a pillar of sympathy. How much alone she should be without him!
She found him very feeble—placid as ever, with an increased distance of abstraction in his face. He smiled on seeing her, and the next day collected himself enough to say something about his affairs.
“You will have most of it—a respectable fortune.” Later he said with a sigh, “I’ve had misgivings about Erard,—the way I treated him. Perhaps I drove him to give up doing anything worth while.”
His niece comprehended this wistful thought, and the desire to give Erard help even if he should make nothing of himself. As the old man got ready to die, the eternal desirability of success, of making a stir in this patchy world of ours, seemed less self-evident. To know something beautiful, to make others know it,—best of all to create a new beautiful thing, a bit of colour, a union of tones, a fine line, that was perhaps the only solace for much pain.
Mrs. Anthon had taken her brother-in-law in hand more vigorously since her daughter’s marriage. And at seventy Sebastian Anthon felt that it was hardly worth while to protest against his environment. He had compromised with himself for his life of ineffective respectability by leaving his money largely to his niece, whom he regarded as the most enlightened member of his family.
“You can throw it away somehow,” he explained, weakly.
“Yes,” Mrs. Wilbur answered soothingly, “I will help people to explode, andIwill see thathe—”
“No, you cannot do anything for him now.”
Later he raised himself enough to say querulously, “Why didyoumarry Wilbur?”
She smiled sadly.
“But it will beyourmoney, not Wilbur’s. And perhaps,” an amused and slightly wicked smile crept over his face, “there will not always be a Wilbur.” That seemed to be his hope in leaving her this money.
Then he had been content to lie without speaking, his hand resting in hers. A few hours later, when he had died, she fancied that the face, instead of looking at her emptily, spoke again frankly. “There are few great things in this troublesome life. Don’t live to be old and miss them.” She kissed the white cheek and left him to sleep undistracted and appeased.
Her anxiety for her child made her leave immediately after the funeral. A few days later she received an account of the will. The only item she found much interest in was a legacy to Molly Parker—a thousand a year to add to her tiny income. “Dear old uncle,” she thought, “he knew she would like it best just this way from his hand, not mine.”
Every thought now centred on the little Sebastian; her child seemed a refuge, the remnant of her former life. He bound her to her husband, to the pledges she had made, and she could not contemplate a future without that bond. All her rebellion over the child’s coming maddened her. How futile she had been! Through him, she was responsible to a world that had some elements of gracious affection in it. So she passed thedays in a hush, where every breath from the feeble little body sounded separately in her ears and sent a twinge of pain and reproach into her whole being. She could not cry over it—that was not her way; she could see people and carry about a cold, impassive face. Her hardness frightened Molly Parker.
“Don’t you care?” she exclaimed impulsively, bluntly.
“Care?” The word echoed back as if sounded from her whole tense being. “It is most myself that is going.” But her husband was puzzled to find her so “unfeeling.”
One windy afternoon in the early spring she came to the library and led him, with a firm step, to the child’s room, where they sat without speaking until the low breathing ceased with a flutter.
“It is over,” she explained, in a matter-of-fact voice. She took a little shawl and laid it softly over the child as if it might be cold. Then she rested the head gently on the pillow and stood quietly looking at her child.
“Adela.” Wilbur had put an arm about her waist to comfort her. His eyes were wet. She looked at him blankly, wonderingly.
“It is over,” she repeated slowly, looking back at the child. Then disentangling herself from her husband’s arm she said “Come,” and opened the door.
Wilbur followed, amazed and hurt, feeling that his attempts to be near her in their trouble had been repulsed. Her mood was the same the next day when he had kissed her and spoken hopefully of the life that was yet before them. If bereaved now, checked in their full tide ofpossession, why, the years would bring them other children. Theirs was a common grief.
She had looked at him vacantly, as if he had been talking of an outsider, or some small possession that had been and now was gone to be replaced by another. “It is over,” she repeated, “gone.” She wondered if he could understand that some things went, never to return.
Thus he had his grief, a good, honest grief, his tears and his sentiment over his firstborn. Then hopeful physical sanity, the round of living, obliterated the slight scar. But the event left him with a sore, puzzled feeling over his wife. She had been growing so stately, so cold and forbidding. Tacked away in his mind was a memory of the talk at Remsen’s, and something told him that his trouble dated from that night.
He was wrong. It dated some generations back, and it mattered little when the breach declared itself. It was there, and widening in little ways. It was a relief to him when, a few weeks after the child’s death, his wife brought about a business talk.
“You know Uncle Seb left me almost all his money?” Wilbur nodded.
“It’s in bricks, and for some personal reasons I don’t think I care to disturb it. It might have been for the child, you know, and now it can lie until I see my way to using it. But I should like to use my own fortune, if you can convert the investments to cash.”
Wilbur waited attentively. He was preparing to leave for his office: the brougham was standing outside on the clean white flags.
“I should like to turn over to you just what this place cost, one hundred and fifty thousand, wasn’t it? If there is anything left of my fortune, you can put it to my credit.”
“Buy the house?” Wilbur asked, puzzled.
“Yes,—if you have no objections.”
“I planned to give it to you clear of all mortgage in June, as a birthday present.”
“Oh! no, youmustn’tdo that.”
“Why not?”
Mrs. Wilbur left her breakfast and walked nervously across the room. “I shouldn’t feel quite right about it.”
Wilbur flashed out what was in his mind.
“Your old nonsense over the traction stocks!”
“We had better not go into that matter. After all, I suppose it is only a question of form, but I should like to feel that as long as I live here, my home represents my money.”
“So you put yourself off from me, and what is good enough for me isn’t for you.”
Mrs. Wilbur looked at him coldly.
“We disagreed: you don’t understand my position.”
“I’ll be hanged if I do.”
“Will you sell the house?”
Wilbur got up to leave in a pet. Then his good-nature returned,—it was all such a ridiculously small matter.
“Why, of course, Ada; it only amounts to a change of name in the stocks. I’ll bring you the deeds in a few days.”
He kissed her lightly and left the room. She opened her letters one by one, absent-mindedly, tossing the envelopes into the fire. Then she ordered her carriage, and gathering up the mass of loose notes, went to her library. She could not straighten out the difficulty merely by a transfer of names on some pieces of paper.