"You might have thought it no great concern of his—you might have imagined all our efforts as only a part of a play, and his interest merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet."
David Marshall fixed an intent and anxious gaze on his son's face, and ran his hand tremulously along the arm of his chair. He knew about how Roger felt; Truesdale had more than once made him feel the same way himself.
The old man had remained at home throughout the day. Too ill and nervous for the store, and too resourceless for the house, he had worried through twelve hours as wearing as any he could recollect. He had never been more unfitted for business, yet never (as he made it seem) more demanded by it. He imagined himself as still the king-pin of the Marshall & Belden Company—indeed, he found in that belief some consolation for his difficulty in reconciling himself to the style and title that the course of the business had finally evolved. He tormented himself with thoughts of odds and ends of work left over from yesterday or from last week, or with the apprehension of some fresh step taken, some new course entered upon by the younger and more ardent men of whom the company was largely composed. He had laughed more than once over the joke of business acquaintances who told him they had had to take young men into partnership because it was impossible to pay the salaries they demanded; yet something more radical had happened to himself: the young men had not only come in, but they were showing a disposition to get things into their own hands. Their former manager, their credit man, several heads of departments—all these had rallied under Belden, and together seemed to be trimming the sails to as speculative a course as a craft essentially conservative in its nature could well be made to take. Marshall had not formulated so clearly as this the practical primacy of Belden, but he felt the necessity of his own presence, and chafed under the temporary withdrawal of his own guiding hand.
But more than the course of affairs at the store, more than the avalanche of complicated minutiae involved in the progress of the new house, more than the dawning risks attendant upon Roger's widening operations in land, more than the amiable persecutions of friends whose ambitions for him were greater than his own, did the courses of his younger son and all their threatening consequences disturb his days and harass his nights—haunting alike the hours set apart for work and for sleep, and even the few brief intervals between. He would rise in the morning haggard and dry-eyed after a sleepless night; he would toil through the weary and perplexing hours of a dragging day; and he would spend his evenings, usually, in a miserable and solitary contemplation of all his thickening annoyances and ills.
"Poor pa," Jane would say to her mother, as she watched his bent and lagging steps moving towards the recess of the bay-window; "there he goes worrying, all off by himself again."
Her mother, over her sewing or the evening paper, perhaps, would check the girl's impulse to follow. "Don't chase after your father, Jane; he's got enough things to bother him already." So that, except for the occasional charitable moment when Jane, unimpeded, perched on the arm of his chair and attempted to divert his wearing thoughts from their ever-deepening channel, the old man spent his evenings largely—too largely—alone.
The rare visits of Roger, never highly ameliorative, were none the more so now; the grisly wrestling with realities does little to promote the exudation of balm. Roger was tough and technical and litigious; his was the hand to seize, not to soothe.
Roger had had a second and more explicit interview with Truesdale, before Truesdale had taken an airy and irresponsible flitting from town. He had also prosecuted various inquiries of his own in various directions, and these inquiries had resulted in his coming to look up Truesdale's frothy suggestion with more seriousness, and upon Truesdale himself with more consideration, if not with more respect—thathe still withheld.
"He isn't a complete fool, after all," admitted Roger.
"I never thought he was," responded his father, dully.
"He has some little sense, I acknowledge."
"If it were only common-sense," said the old man, with a mournful, dragged-out smile.
Roger looked forth streetward, pondering. A long passenger-train shifted its line of glimmering squares rapidly southward; two or three couples passed by on the pavement, respiring the suave air of an early June evening.
"It means money," said Roger, presently.
"As much as is necessary," replied his father, tremulously; "though I never could spare it worse than now."
"And more—well, more dirty work for me." He thought of the Van Horn matter, now as good as abandoned. "Never mind, though; I'm getting used to it."
"You are the only help I have, Roger—the only one to save us from this disgrace."
There were tears in his eyes, and a feeble tremor ran through the fore-arm and fingers that he advanced towards Roger's shoulder.
"Father is not the man he used to be," thought Roger. He felt that his sympathy was largely qualified by the impatience and aversion which must always move a young man when he observes the first signs of physical and mental impairment in an older one, and he regretted that it was so. And he was almost ashamed to feel relieved when his father withdrew his hand.
Besides Roger and his father, only Mrs. Marshall and Jane were at home. Rosamund was in Wisconsin, and no one was sorry to have her away. She was a guest of Mrs. Bates at Lake Geneva—the central figure of a house-party, in fact. Mrs. Bates's fondness for nature did not stop with flowers; it led her to the fields and woods where they grew. No sooner was the back of the winter fairly broken than she began to preach the gospel of country life. She took the cream of June, and left to later comers the skimmed milk of July and August. She always saw that her Wisconsin place was ready for her by the middle of May; then for the next five months she passed back and forth between town and country, according to the nature of her engagements and the character of the weather.
Truesdale was in Wisconsin, too—but not of the house-party. "You know, my dear," Mrs. Bates said to Jane, "I had meant to have your brother, but—"
Jane bowed her head and never thought of venturing to ask her how sheknew. That same night Jane slowly tore her plans for the working-girls' home into long strips and burned them in the gas, one at a time. "Pa'll never listen to a word about anything like this now."
Truesdale left behind no precise indications of his movements. The only person to whom he announced anything like a programme was Arthur Fasten, who met him on the way to the station, with his bag in one hand and his kit in the other.
"Off, are you?" called Paston. "Don't you begin the season rather early?"
"Just for a few days," replied Truesdale; "a little sketching tour upNorth. Change of scene and air, you know."
"Where are you going?"
"Oh, 'most anywhere. I shall be at Bellagio to-morrow, and at Pontresina the day after. Then I shall dip down towards Scheveningen. And Zante, if possible—I have always wanted to try Zante." He smiled jovially. "I hear there's a lovely ruined abbey at Fort Atkinson—everybody does it; and they say, too, that the capital at Madison is a grand old structure."
He gave a hitch to his light valise and moved on with a diminished smile.
"Of course you've got your Cook's ticket and your meal coupons?" calledPaston, grinning broadly.
"Don't," protested Truesdale, turning back; "you never looked less like a gentleman."
"I hope your ticket takes in Geneva," said Paston, in no degree offended."If it does, I may meet you there; I'm going up to stay over Sunday."
"I can't tell without looking," replied Truesdale; "it's away at the bottom of my trunk." And he moved on. "Rosy's there, though," he called back. He did this largely under the promptings of a sense of justice: Paston was as much entitled to push one project as he himself was to push another.
"Yes, I know," said Paston.
This ubiquitous and ever-welcome person made his presence known throughout Geneva with no loss of time. He caused himself to be remembered by Mrs. Bates for a small dance on Saturday night, and also secured himself from forgetfulness in connection with her steam-yacht excursion for Sunday morning. This active and well-intentioned woman was the prime mover in a poor children's camp which was in process of construction near the far end of the lake. She could not expect her dozen young people to take an absorbing interest in her middle-aged philanthropies; but she knew that an excursion was none the worse for having an objective point, and she did not feel that she was likely to please her guests the less by giving a little incidental pleasure to herself.
"I've got to have something todo," she explained to Paston. "I couldn't be content to come up here and pass the summer in mere idleness." They were sitting on a pair of camp-stools up near the bow. Paston, looking backward, saw Rosamund and William Bates together near the stern.
"It must be a terrible thing to be cursed with ambition and executive ability," observed Paston. "I'm awfully gladIhaven't got any."
"Well, there it is," she responded. "I've got to have something on hand.I've got to engineer. I've got to manage."
Paston brought back his eyes from William Bates and Rosamund. "Everybody knows what a capable manager you are." He said this, as he said so many other things, with a frank and bold directness that made any suspicion of anarrière-penséealmost an impossibility.
"Well, don't commit yourself until you get there; then you can make your own observations." She took his remark as almost anybody else would have felt obliged to take it—just for what it sounded. Nobody understood better than Paston the deceptive quality resident in a truth plumply told.
"Shall I see Cecilia Ingles there?" Paston was stopping with the Ingleses, and had rowed across immediately after breakfast. "I think I heard them speak about driving down. I say," he added, "it's a rum go for her."
"I don't see why," rejoined Susan Bates, disputatiously. "She is old enough to take things seriously; she has got far enough along to begin to be in earnest. The first thing she asked me was how much money I wanted. 'I don't want any of your money at all,' I told her; 'for such a cause as this I can scoop up all the money I want by the shovelful. No; what I want is your personal interest.' That's about the hardest thingtoget in cases like this."
"Well, I believe you've got it," declared Paston, hitching about on his seat. "She has given up all hope of escaping from you. You're a tyrant—an inexorable tyrant, she says. She's going to do as you direct."
"All right," returned Susan Bates; "only don't be so sticky about it." She pronounced this epithet very distinctly and deliberately; she had long meant to use it with Paston, some time or other—ever since Jane had imparted it to her, in fact.
"Sticky!" cried the young man. "Me—sticky?"
"Yes—fussy, critical, disagreeable, censorious." She moved her fingers as if disentangling them from a sheet of fly-paper. "It's one of your own words, isn't it?"
"Yes, but what it means is stiff, poky, awkward; and nobody else has ever called me that!"
Susan Bates, with a slight touch of mortification, at once set the whole matter aside. "Cecilia is good enough at heart," she went on, instantly. "No, I don't want her money," she ploughed rapidly ahead, "except as a visitor. Every visitor must give something, and the first must give the most. You are the first."
"I?" stammered Paston, with an uneasy laugh.
"All of you, I mean." She waved her hand over the whole yacht. "Feel for your dollars; you will find a contribution-box fastened to the first tree, at the landing."
"Really?" said Paston, vastly ill at ease.
Susan Bates merely laughed, feeling that she had regained the upperhand. She had not been so tickled since the day when Minnie Peters had put into her hands the official notification that she was at length a member of that obdurate and exacting musical society. "But, poor fellow," she said to herself, "I mustn't tease him!" She looked back the length of the boat towards Rosy; Rosy, at the same moment, was looking forward the length of the boat towards her. A pause had apparently come in William Bates's careful enumeration of the country-seats which covered the wooded slopes of either shore. Many of them were the residences of people whom Rosy had met for the first time during the past winter, and their interest was therefore biographical as well as topographical. But now the interest, of whatever kind, was running a bit thinly; Rosy gave a careless word now and then to another young girl beside her or to a new young man sprawling at her feet, but her eyes turned every few minutes towards the bow.
"You catch the idea?" Mrs. Bates was saying. "We bring them out on the train in two hours, and give them a ride on the public steamer to the camp; we keep them a week. We start in with a fresh lot every Monday morning, right through the summer."
"Where do you get them?" asked Pasten, making talk industriously. "Do you set traps for them? Or perhaps you go to the Bureau of Child Labor and say: So many tons of orphans, to be delivered on the fifth instant, at nine-thirty A.M., sharp; eh?" He had quite recovered his spirits.
"Get them? Dear me, there are plenty to be got. I expect we shall have to enlarge the dormitories before the summer is half over."
"And what is Mrs. Ingles to do with them after theyaregot?" he asked, with his eye on the foam and bubbles of the wake. "Is she to take the kinks out of their hair every morning by early candle-light? Is she to wash all their little porringers and hang them up in rows on their little hooks? Is she to keep tab when they go in paddling and check them off as they come out, to see how many have been carried away by the undertow?"
Mrs. Bates declined to consider the undertow. "See; there it is." The yacht had rounded a small wooded promontory and now approached a shallow shore, where a gingerly landing was to be effected at a rude and rickety little pier.
A grove of oak and maple came almost to the water's edge, and within it a number of barrack-like structures of clean yellow pine were taking shape and substance. The odor of the pine mingled with the earthy smells of the grove; now and then a little pile of sawdust was taken swirlingly by the breeze, and here and there a long, fresh shaving was seen caught upon the prickly branches of some June rose.
Paston helped Mrs. Bates out on to the pier with a cautious gallantry, and immediately betook himself to the younger members of the party; he considered the courtesies due from a guest as now amply accomplished. He attached himself at once to Rosamund; he helped her over the loose litter of lumber; he steadied ladders for her at every fresh feint of mounting; he bestirred himself to a rapacious culling of wild-flowers for the mere opportunity of tying them together with a shaving. Once he sprinkled them over with a handful of sawdust, after the manner of a florist extemporizing a heavy dew. Rosy laughed and nodded, and thrust the flowers into her belt.
"You will never be serious," she protested.
"Oh yes, I shall. I am always a good deal more serious than people suppose." He bestowed upon her a look serious enough to match his words. It was as serious as any one could have wished, and Rosy dropped her eyes and was distinctly pensive for a minute or two.
Presently the Ingleses came picking their way through the grove in a surrey. Cecilia Ingles alighted with the air of one somewhat at sea. She greeted Rosy quite pleasantly, but seemed to be looking about for the captain. The dry, shrewd, middle-aged face of her husband adjusted its expression readily enough to the matter before them. He was a born manager and manipulator. When he could not juggle with a dollar for profit, he was content to juggle with a penny for pleasure.
Susan Bates hastened up to his wife at once, and kissed her roundly. "So good of you to come! And on Sunday, too!"
"Never mind," said Ingles; "we can put twice as much on the plate nextSunday."
Mrs. Ingles at once appropriated William Bates for a walk through the framework of the unfinished dormitories. Ingles followed with Mrs. Bates.
"Things are going first-rate," declared Susan Bates. "We shall be under cover in a week, and ready for the painters."
"No plaster?" asked Ingles.
"Dear me, no. Two coats of paint will be quite warm enough."
Rosy, meanwhile, sat upon a pack of shingles under a young maple-tree which grew within a few steps of the water. Paston lay at her feet and dug in the sand with a split shingle drawn from the pack, while the other young people tramped and frolicked with shrill cries through the dismantled grove and unfinished buildings.
"It was at her house, you remember, that I first met you," said Paston.He nodded to Mrs. Ingles, who was just moving by with the reluctantWilliam Bates.
"And a handsome house, too," declared Rosy. "Still, I suppose that hers, or even Mrs. Bates's, can't be compared with some in London."
"Don't be so sure," rejoined Paston. He thought of "10, King's-gate Gardens, S. Kensington"; he would have been the last to force a comparison between that and the town-house of Cecilia Ingles. "A house is no better for being more than a home," he said, somewhat ruefully.
Rosy was far from subscribing to this. Her ideal home was one that had been immemorially a palace and a show-place, with troops of servants to show the troops of tourists through.
"All these places around here are nice enough," she acknowledged, "but—new. That one over there, now." She pointed across the lake to the roofs and gables of a large country-seat set on a wooded hill-top. "They have had to stain it green to make it look old and mossy."
"Sometimes the appearance of age is to be preferred to the reality," observed Paston, thoughtfully. His mind was on "Boxton Park, Witham, Essex," and he was wishing devoutly enough that means were available for keeping that in a state of fresh repair equal to the state of the house where he was now staying.
But Rosy was entertaining her own vision of Boxton Park. It was a spacious and glorious domain, and its noble manor house was a perfect commingling of old-time picturesqueness and modern comfort. And the peacocks paraded again on the terrace.
Rosy shifted her seat on the pile of shingles in order to take a more general view of the landscape. She shrugged her shoulders slightly. "No lanes, no hedge-rows, no weirs, no coppices…"
"What's the matter with these maples?" asked Fasten, abandoning himself to the American idiom. "And where are there handsomer elms than right here in Wisconsin? And what have you against those hills?" He thought of the wide flatness of Essex; what would not Boxton Park give for a foothold on such a shore, a prospect over such a sheet of rippling blue?
But Rosy had her own conception of Essex. In some miraculous way it combined the sweetness of Devonshire, the fatness of Warwick, the boldness of Westmorland, the severity of Cornwall. And through this enchanting tract the fox-hounds ever sped in full, re-echoing cry.
Paston gave a sudden dig with his shingle, and a lump of damp sand fell with a splash far out upon the water. "But, after all, it's dear old England," he said, plaintively.
"The dearest land in all the world, I'm sure," sighed Rosy, sympathetically. She dug her toe at a single tuft of coarse grass in the midst of the sand, and wondered over his "after all."
"Indeed, it is. You would like it, I'm sure."
"I know I should. I shall never be happy until I've seen it."
"But think of me—four thousand miles away from it."
"I do," said Rosy, softly.
"We younger sons," sighed Paston, in a tone of great self-commiseration.
"We younger daughters," echoed Rosy, with an implication that all the drawbacks were not on one side.
The rest of the party came flocking down to the shore; the Ingleses among them—to see the others off.
"I suppose you go back as you came?" said Ingles, to Paston.
"Pretty nearly," replied Paston, in the cheery tone he usually adopted for general converse. And back he went, with this small difference: that on the return he occupied the place of William Bates.
Truesdale returned home from Wisconsin after an absence of ten or twelve days; he came back without having visited Geneva. He had visited Madison, however.
His feeling, as he traversed the streets of that pleasant capital, was distinctly one of pique. To be hemmed in, to be barred out, to be shut up, to be cut off, to be turned aside—any and all of these things seemed to have been suffered by him; he felt them as stripes or as fetters applied to the degradation of an inexpugnable personality. "I shall not take it so passively as they think," he said.
His friendly but tempered interest in Bertie Patterson had risen to a higher pitch in view of the insensate safeguards thrown around her by her friends; besides, he felt himself at a juncture where he must not permit himself to falter in the maintenance of his own dignity. "I shall not be balked so easily as they imagine," he said.
He paused before a large, white frame-house which stood on a kind of banked terrace; the house was shaded by a number of evergreens, and was shut in from the street by a picket-fence. "This must be it," he said, as he clicked the latch of the gate. Patterson, as one of the large retail dry-goods merchants of the town, was of course a "prominent citizen"; his residence was easy enough to find.
"Mrs. Patterson is at home?" he uttered with the appropriate inflection, and extended his card. He made this tender to a firm-faced woman of forty in a plain black dress, who came to the door with a half-hemmed towel in her hand.
"I am Mrs. Patterson," she said. She read the card; there was no doubt of her appreciation of his identity. The more picturesque and decorative phases of his character had been presented to her, doubtless, by the docile and transparent Bertie—by letter, possibly. The less approved side (concerning which Bertie's own conception was in all likelihood darkling enough still) had probably come to her—also by letter—from Bertie's conscientious but disappointed guardian.
Truesdale dexterously insinuated himself into the house; he had instantly perceived, with a pang of mortification, that no formal encouragement to enter was likely to be extended.
"My daughter," said Mrs. Patterson, coldly, in answer to his inquiries, "is visiting friends in Watertown." This was true. "She is to remain several days." This was not true; Bertie was expected home on the morrow. But it was made true, for all purposes, by an instant message which permitted the girl to extend the period of her visit.
Truesdale bowed himself out of the house with no apparent diminution of grace and prestige. "How inexhaustible are the beauties of nature," he thought—"Wisconsin nature. I must make another sketching-tour before long."
Four or five days later he sat in his bedroom, looking over a number of water-colors that covered the counterpane and largely obscured the pillows—views of Green Lake, scenes from the rocks and gorges of the upper Wisconsin. "I've done very well," he thought—"very well, indeed." He was trying to make himself believe that he had successfully accomplished the principal object of his trip.
Rosy also returned from Wisconsin at about the same time; with an air of calm decision she announced to her mother her engagement to Arthur Paston. She regarded this statement as definitive—an admission towards which the others of the family advanced with a doubting reluctance. Jane, by reason of the place and of her own participation in the hopes of Susan Bates, thought the proceeding characterized by indelicacy, if not by disloyalty. Truesdale, on receipt of the intelligence, vented a jarring laugh. He saw little reason why Paston should have succeeded at Geneva when he himself had failed at Madison (he was conscious, here, of forcing the terms in order to compass a striking antithesis); and that it should have been his own sister whose hand Paston had won seemed to him a triumph greater and more discordant still.
David Marshall himself heard these tidings with a grave concern. It all seemed like another weight added to the load under which he was already staggering. He debated with himself on the subject of this proposed new household: where was it to be established, of whom was it to be composed, by whom (above all) was it to be supported? Marshall, in his most prosperous and least careworn days, had never acquired the useful and agreeable art of spending money; the outlay of any considerable sum had always afflicted him as with a physical pain. How much greater, then, was his shrinking dread to-day, when demands upon him were doubling up so finely, and when the last demand of all was on behalf of an alien who might well attempt to make an alien of his daughter too? He talked with Rosy about her future in a hesitating and perturbed fashion. Rosy would set her lips, and eye him coldly, and tell him that he did not love her. In the meantime the new house progressed towards its ridge-poles, and it was Jane's daily speculation whether the boudoir designed for Rosy would ever be occupied by her—or by somebody else. By somebody else, she was afraid; for since that luckless Sunday dinner, Theodore Brower had called but twice, and had been as distant as if he had not come at all.
A few weeks after the intrusion of Paston upon the board, another piece was happily removed. This removal involved, as is often the case in such manipulations, a certain amount of sharp playing and a large element of sacrifice. Truesdale, when the recital was made to him in his brother's office, showed a scant appreciation of the sacrifice, but listened interestedly enough to the detailed report of Roger's endeavor.
"So you have found Monsieur Y, after all? And do you hold him fast?"
Roger contemptuously ignored this revival of his brother's flippant Gallic formula. He contented himself with giving a brief and stern account of the processes that he had been driven to employ. He had prosecuted his inquiries through one of those extra-legal agencies which even the highest respectability may be compelled, upon occasion, to fall back on, and he had arrived at an acquaintance with the Leppins, in all their grovelling ramifications, equal to the previous one which he had achieved with the Van Horns. His close inquiries had extended through the ranks of all their associates and connections, and in the end he had lighted upon one individual whose disposition towards Sophie Leppin and her family could be made to serve the end in view. This young man was the foreman of a tailor's establishment, and Roger wasted no more consideration upon him than upon the rest of them. Before the assembled horde he made his proposition with a blunt, business-like brutality which almost startled him at the moment, and which disgusted him with himself for a fortnight to follow.
"And they accepted it. More shame for me, more shame for them, more shame for human nature. Butyouare safe." He viewed Truesdale with an undisguised scorn, and Truesdale did not attempt to withstand it.
"I attended the ceremony," Roger said, grimly. "I presented the bride with a bouquet. For the matter of that," he continued, in a scornful jest of himself, "I was the one who took out the marriage license."
"Did you pay the minister his fee?" Truesdale asked this principally for the purpose of reasserting himself.
"Minister!" cried Roger, half shocked. "No; I had a justice of the peace. I was the guest of honor," he went on, with a savage irony. "With good reason; it was I who paid the bride's dowry."
Truesdale sat with his eyes on the floor. "The check; was it—was it a large one?" he asked, in a low voice.
"Check!" cried Roger again. "I paid them in hundred-dollar bills." His fingers played back and forth many and many times.
"Not so much as that!" exclaimed Truesdale, his eyes opening widely.
"More," said Roger. "I put the notices in the newspapers, too. And now, Truesdale," he said, with a final brief phrase of dismissal, "think what your father and I have had to do for you, and try to be a man." And he turned away towards other matters.
Truesdale passed out, crestfallen for the first time in his life. Not over his own follies, not over the anxieties and expenditures he had caused his father, but over the fact that Roger had treated him like a boy—and had done it all so briefly. He blushed, too, for the vulgar ending of the episode (if ended, indeed, it were); for it seemed to outrage all literary and artistic precedent. No farce at the Palais Royal had ever developed so grotesque a dénouement; no novel of Véron, of Belot, of Montépin had ever come to so sordid an ending; no Mimi, no Musette could have ever followed a line of conduct so littlespirituelas that taken by Sophie Leppin. What, then; were the books wrong, and only life true? No; it was the fault of America itself. "Quel pays!" reflected Truesdale; "equally without the atmosphere of art and the atmosphere of intrigue!" This observation pleased him; he felt that he had pierced the marrow of a complicated question, and he passed along the street holding a higher head.
He drew a letter from his pocket and creased it thoughtfully in his hands as he walked on. The envelope, from which he did not draw the enclosure, was addressed in the hand of Gladys McKenna. He had parted from her just as he had meant to part—at the carriage door. She had forgiven this, and was now writing in terms no less ardent and clinging than before.
"Poor Gladys!" he said, half aloud. "I haven't treated her any too well; yet she is about the only one who cares for me or understands me or appreciates me. I'm glad, though, she's back home; I should be guilty of some horriblesottiseor other if she were here."
All the same, he made her absence seem another deprivation; he included it in the catalogue of his injuries and woes. "I declare," he said, "take it all together, and it's enough to drive a man to—business. It wouldn't surprise me very much to be talking with father about that very thing within a month or so. For what can a man of leisure do, after all, in such a town as this?"
But the summer moved onward, and Truesdale still considerately refrained from harassing an anxious and overburdened father with the further task of contriving a harmony between such a son and such amétier. The old man was left to recover from the sting inflicted by the Leppins, to study over the future of his youngest daughter, to keep a careful eye upon his business associates, and to combat—as one combats the alkali dust of the Plains—all the insinuating minutiae of house-building. The new home of the Marshalls moved on with the summer, and reached in due course the stage when such elemental features as walls and roofs gave way to the minor considerations involved in the swinging of doors, the placing of gas-jets, and the arrangements of pantries. Eliza Marshall now began to appear more frequently on the scene, and to confound both architect and builder after the fashion possible for the experienced and accomplished house-keeper. She usually exacted the support of her husband, with a pertinacity the greater for the smallness of the point at issue; and David Marshall, wearied and borne down with more important, more vital affairs, wished daily that the new house had never been undertaken at all.
Thomas Bingham stood Eliza Marshall's annoying picket-fire with the patience proper to a friend of the family; and he took advantage of the same position to press further upon her husband his own continuing sense of a rich man's duties towards the public. Marshall may be said by this time to have fixed himself in the general eye. He had made a second public address—the skilful product of Jane's literary knack and of his own previous experience. As a consequence of this he had been asked to sit on one or two platforms, and to sign two or three addresses and petitions; and though his indifferent health and his many preoccupations had somewhat impeded his advance, yet his well-wishers felt the marked disposition shown to concede him the place that they held him entitled to take.
Bingham experienced a personal interest in Marshall's maintenance of the foothold thus won. As the two toured through the half-plastered rooms or stooped to consider the question of sewerage amid the litter of the basement, Bingham, with a tactful seriousness, would urge the old man, as he had urged him often enough before, to crown his career and perpetuate his memory by the erection of some enduring structure for the public good and use.
"All of my experience is at your disposal," he would say. "And all of your own"—with a wave of the hand over the chaos prevailing about them.
The old man would give him a non-committal sidelong glance, half smiling, half protesting "I'm glad to have you acknowledge, Bingham, that there is some experience involved in building a house. There's a good deal more than I expected."
"You're not having a hard time of it," returned Bingham. "You don't realize how easy I've been making it for you."
But Marshall was coming to develop a firm reluctance towards turning the knowledge gained in his private building to the erection of some larger and different building for the public good. With every month of the past year had his estimate of the public and its character been modified by the kind of treatment that he had suffered from certain of the less worthy members of it. The Van Horns seemed to have passed the goad on to the Leppins, and it was largely under these merciless proddings that he had formed his conception of the new town which had evolved itself during the past twenty years. To these personal grievances he added the general grievances of a tax-payer under the present loose-geared régime, and there were days when he thought he saw the legitimate outcome of democracy as applied to large capitals: the organizing of criminals for the spoliation of the well-to-do. And if Bingham had pushed him too hard, he might have precipitated the blunt declaration that a man's best use for his own money was to protect himself and his interests from the depredations of an alien and rabble populace.
"But Babylon itself was built of mud bricks," Bingham would rejoin. "And the noblest mountain in the world, when you come right down to details, is only a heap of dirt and rocks strewn over with sticks and stones. But if you will just step back far enough to get the proper point of view—well, you know what the painters can do with such things as these."
"I can't step back, Bingham. I started here; I've stayed here; I belong here. I'm living rightonyour mountain, and its sticks and stones are all about me. Don't ask me to see them for anything else; don't ask me to call them anything else."
Then he would say to Bingham what he said later to Susan Bates when she came with Jane to view the wainscotings and the panelled ceilings of the long succession of rooms: that the man who met all the legal exactions of the community and all the needs and requirements of his own flesh and blood was doing quite enough for the preservation of his own credit. And when Theodore Brower cautiously suggested that the bitterness of certain experiences might be turned to sweetness by the institution of a bureau of justice for the poor and unfriended, the sensitive old man shrank back as if from contact with a nettle. Indeed, it is probable that so unconventional and untravelled a road to philanthropic renown would have proven uninviting to his feet at any time. And Jane, who, after the failure of her own idea, had transferred her support to the idea of Brower, now made a second transfer and came to the support of the idea of Susan Bates. If she could do nothing for the cause of labor, and nothing for the cause of justice, she was willing to accomplish what she could for the cause of education.
Under such urgings as these, David Marshall began irritably to impugn the motives of those men whose philanthropic disposition had earned for them the approval of the well-disposed. One was actuated by vanity and vainglory; another by political ambitions; a third took to philanthropy as to the current fad.
"There might be worse ones," Bingham would retort. "Sixty or seventy years ago the fad hereabouts was scalp-raising. Isn't the present one an improvement on that?"
"You bring up Ingles," the other went on; "he's simply philanthropic as an additional vent to his own energies. You talk about Bates; he merely makes all those benefactions to please his wife. And so with others."
"Is that a bad motive—the wish to please one's wife by a generous deed?"
"I havemywife to please," returned Marshall. His observation came out with a sort of raw and awkward directness. It seemed to convey the odd implication that the way to please this wife would be not to do a generous deed, but to refrain from doing it. And Bingham, who appreciated the saplessness of Eliza Marshall's sympathies and the narrowness of her horizon, made no effort to give his friend's remark a more favorable aspect.
Marshall derived support not only from the narrow selfishness of his wife, but also from the fastidiousness of his younger son, who met with open derision any project involving the accomplishment of a piece of actual architecture. He improvised an ornate and airy edifice of his own, which he allowed them to dedicate to art, to education, to charity, to what you will. Then he festooned it with telegraph wires, and draped it with fire-escapes, and girdled it with a stretch of elevated road, and hung it with signboards, and hedged it in with fruit-stands, and swathed it in clouds of coal smoke, and then asked them to find it; that was the puzzle, he said. His view of the town's architectural conditions—as too debased to justify one's serious endeavors towards improvement—was so nearly in harmony with the view that his father's inflamed mind sometimes took of the town's social conditions that the two were dangerously near to the common ground upon which they had never yet met.
Bingham would have completely dissented from all this, of course; and he agreed with Marshall no better as regarded the precarious condition of his affairs—being disposed to assume that the old man's depression over his business was due largely to the multiplied checks on his own control of it; nor any better as regarded his unusual domestic expenses—present, just past, or just about to come. He was mindful of the house-building, but looked upon it, with Roger, as an investment. He knew of the thousands extorted through Truesdale, but made the loss less than might have resulted from a maladroit barter in real estate, for example. He could anticipate, too, the demands foreshadowed by the coming marriage of Rosamund; but a considerable expenditure for a favorite daughter at the most important juncture of her life was not unprecedented. He even found some ameliorating circumstances for the persistent pressure which Roger and his affairs were now coming to bring upon the paternal estate—Roger, who had served so valiantly his father and his family, and who was now demanding a compensatory assistance amid the thickening risks and dangers of his own business operations. Not only had he extricated Truesdale from his difficulties, but he had supported his father in his demand for the dismissal of the unseemly Andreas Leppin from the business.
"He shall go!" cried David Marshall, with a trembling voice and a shaking hand, which, without reinforcement, would have constituted but a feeble demonstration.
"He shall stay!" returned Belden, with a cold insolence. "He is useful to me. Besides, he has suffered enough wrong from you already."
"He shall go!" cried Roger, rising into a threatening savagery over the brazen hypocrisy of such a pretence. "If he is here another hour, I will drag him out with my own hands." The young man seemed to tear out all his powers from his own person, as one draws a sword from its sheath, and to wield his vehemence and indignation over Belden's head as one might sweep a burning brand. He exercised the compelling power that is to be attained sometimes only by the free and impassioned employment of all one's energies; he seemed capable of an instant physical violence in more directions than one, and he carried his point.
Another outbreak of passion followed when he applied to his father for assistance during a precarious passage through the risks and dangers of an expanding business, and was met with reluctant excuses that seemed the very acme of ingratitude. He hurled forth an indignant reminder of all the services he had performed for the family—services at once degrading and gratuitous; and he demanded if a year's dabbling in such delectable detail were not a sufficient warrant for asking the help that he now required. In fact, he hectored his father as unscrupulously, as unceremoniously, as he had browbeaten Belden.
David Marshall met as well as he could the demands of his choleric son; never before had he been trampled on rough-shod by one of his own children. He almost seemed to see the moral fibre of Roger's nature coarsening—perhaps disintegrating—under his very eyes, and he asked himself half reproachfully how much this might be due to tasks of his own imposition.
All these things had their place in his mind as he followed Bingham through the new house, scuffing over the plaster-encrusted floors, watching the adjustment of window-weights, or drawing back before the long, thin strips of moulding brought in by carpenters. No, his children did not love him. There was Rosy, who had learned her lesson of selfishness from the world all too early, and who now, in her preoccupations for the future, had less thought of him than ever. There was Alice, who saw him often enough if she saw him half a dozen times a year, and whose infrequent comings always disclosed some petty motive of domestic finance and economics. There was Truesdale, a flippant and insolent egotist, who had neither affection nor respect for his own parents, his own family, his own birthplace. There was Roger, who hewed roughly his own independent course, and who did not scruple to turn his powers against his own father if crossed in his desires or balked in his ambitions. And there was—
No; not Jane. "She is the only one of them all who really loves me," he said. He was standing in one of the upper rooms under the crude light of a northern window. On the yellow ground beneath him a workman was stacking up sheets of blue slate in regular piles, and from some remote quarter of the place came the sharp, metallic hammerings of the last remaining plumbers. The searching daylight lit up cruelly the hollows of the old man's eyes, and brought out from his whitened chin and cheeks the last few threads of dim and dulling red. His tall, thin figure shrank away from its loose coverings; never before had he seemed so detached, so impersonal, so slightly poised on any mere physical basis.
He turned to Bingham. "This will beherroom—Jane's room. It must be right, whatever the others are. Jane—cares for me. She has always been a dutiful daughter; never a trial, never a disappointment—nothing but a comfort. There must be no shortcoming here, Bingham."
Bingham, standing beside him at the window, fixed an intent regard upon the sheets of shifting slate. There was a moist smile in his eyes, and a warm glow of sympathetic appreciation permeated his whole being.
"There won't be," he said.
And Jane's chamber took on shape and finish in the minds of the two men who stood there side by side overlooking the slate piles and saying no word further; and neither recognized in her the first cause of all these changes and of the many trials and difficulties proceeding from them.
The approaching completion of the new house did little towards diminishing the rigors of the daily routine within the old one; no greater insistence upon detail could be encountered at Gibraltar or at Ehrenbreitstein than that which prevailed under the direction of Eliza Marshall, to whom the near breaking of camp was no reason for the slightest break in discipline. Nor was there any relaxation because the garrison happened to be on a mere peace footing; it made little difference that both Rosamund and Truesdale were spending the better part of the summer in Wisconsin. Rosy had resumed her round among the country-houses of her friends; she expected to repay these attentions in the near future by an elegant and lavish hospitality, whose time, place, and method still remained more or less indeterminate. Truesdale, too, had made a second and longer excursion northward—Waukesha, Geneva, Oconomowoc, and again, Madison. Jane alone remained at home, and it was she who helped her mother through the thirtieth and last of the annual jelly-makings. For the first time in all these years the entire supply of currants had come from outside; the last of their own bushes, which had put on faintly its customary greenness in May, had peaked and dwindled through June, and had died at last in the early days of July.
"That reconciles me, Jane," said Eliza Marshall, as she viewed the dead bush while flapping one of her ensanguined cloths from the kitchen window; "I shall be ready to move when the time comes."
Jane sighed softly for reply; she was beginning to realize what all this change might mean.
David Marshall himself bowed to the same stringent discipline that ruled the others. Though he felt his powers weakening beneath days of worry and nights of broken rest, he would have been surprised by the smallest concession, and would even have considered it a weakness to ask for any. That his rest was broken did not postpone the early breakfast by a single five minutes; that his health was failing did not alter the somewhat primitive and rigorous character of the dishes set before him; that he returned home jaded and exhausted by the day's doings did not entitle him, any more than ever, to smoke a quiet cigar within doors. He smoked without, upon the sidewalk, according to his wont; but he never paced very far up or down, nor very long. The old routine went on—a little too inexorably. And though many of his nights were coming to be sleepless throughout, and though the strain of it all was obvious enough as his thin, drawn face bent over a breakfast for which he could find no relish, yet the tradition that he was above all physical frailties and exempt from all natural laws clamped its curious hold upon his family and even upon himself. Eliza Marshall had almost come to regard him as she regarded his business: each was a respectable and estimable abstraction which held its own without too direct a heed from her; each an admirable contrivance that had accomplished its purposes so long and with so trustworthy a regularity that the thought of hitch, lapse, failure never presented itself as a really tangible consideration. Each day he grew a shade paler, a degree feebler, but the change came too gradually for the unobservant and over-habituated eyes of his wife.
Rosy noticed it, however, when she came back to town, to begin seriously her preparations for her wedding. "I don't think papa looks very well," she was contented to observe.
"Of course he doesn't," returned Jane, anxiously. "He ought to go off somewhere for a change and rest. I've told him so a dozen times.You"—to Rosy—"ought to know plenty of places. If I had my way about it, he would start off to-morrow."
"Well, I don't know," observed her mother, slowly. "He neverhasgone off. And if you don't happen to feel first-rate, I don't know where you can be better taken care of than right at home."
"You might go to Geneva—both of you," replied Jane; "I wish you would, if only on my account. Mrs. Bates is just about getting tired of asking you, and I'm 'most worn out with making up excuses for your not going." Jane had been giving an occasional attendance on Susan Bates's dormitory and children. Mrs. Bates herself had bowed to Rosy's preference with a resigned reasonableness, and had abated not one jot in her friendliness towards Rosy's family.
But to Eliza Marshall a summer's outing could easily be made to seem superfluous, impracticable, revolutionary; nor did Jane succeed any better with her father himself. He seemed to take a pathetic pride in standing at his post; he almost appeared to be imbued with the fatalistic notion that there was, indeed, no leaving it. He continued to smoke his cigar outside, to cover haltingly sheets of paper with figures under the library lamp, and to yield himself to hours of depressing and harassing reflection within the shadows of the bay-window.
When Truesdale came home his father's decline was even more noticeable. Truesdale commented briefly on his appearance, suggested as briefly a little trip into the country, and after these few passes at filial duty he concentrated his attention upon his own personal affairs.
On his second visit to Madison he had met Bertie Patterson face to face. He had encountered her in one of the broad and leafy walks before the Capitol, and she was in company with another young man. "One of those students," thought Truesdale, as he noted the smooth face and slender immaturity of her escort. "They swarm. The town is full of them. What chance has anybody else against them?"
Bertie showed him a little face at once surprised, startled, puzzled. She bowed slightly and gave him a smile which seemed to him timid, shrinking, and amusingly deferential; but she showed no disposition to pause, or even to slacken her pace. "She doesn't know, after all," he thought; "she is imagining some vague horror or other that is too dreadful to be true, or even possible."
Bertie and her youth passed on through the contending sun and shade of the path. "Can they be engaged?" thought Truesdale, upon whom certain fine shades in posture and address were not thrown away; "he looks hardly a junior." He presently met a senior of his acquaintance who told him he understood they were. "Ouf!" commented Truesdale, further; "a mere boy-and-girl affair." And he pleased himself with thinking how his own participation in such an affair would give it a much greater maturity and weight.
But as regarded this particular one, he definitely withdrew from all participation whatever. He had now done enough to satisfy his curiosity—or his interest, as he might have preferred to have it called—and fully enough to preserve the dignity so absurdly jeoparded by the fantastic scruples of his aunt Lydia. He presently dismissed the whole matter, and fell to bestowing an exaggerated care upon the tips of his brushes. "The rest of the summer I propose to enjoy," he declared.
As for David Marshall himself, he employed the rest of the summer in a laborious attempt to form the acquaintance of his coming son-in-law. Scodd-Paston presented to him an assemblage of qualities towards whose scheduling and comprehending he received but little help from his familiarity with the ordinary workaday type of local young man. Paston was uniformly gay, jovial, companionable, definite sometimes as regarded particulars, indefinite always as regarded generals. He stood constantly in a lambent flicker of humorous good-nature, and he baffled the old gentleman as one is baffled by the play of sunshine over a rippling pool. Marshall would ask himself whether the depth of the pool was a finger-length or a fathom, and would speculate on what there might be lying at the bottom of it—strange deposits, perhaps, representing the social and business developments of another age, or at least another civilization. He sometimes questioned his daughter's capacity to cope with the classification of such a collection—supposing so exacting a task ever to devolve upon her.
He sometimes canvassed the matter with Theodore Brower, as the two sat smoking together on the door-step through the long summer twilights, while other warm-weather loungers scuffled aimlessly over the cindered paths of the dingy grass-stretch opposite, or, lying on their backs, crossed their legs self-indulgently and lifted over-worn brogans towards the contemptuous stars. He opened himself unreservedly to Brower, as to a friend of the family; and Brower could not but feel that his two years' attendance at the house, with thus far no definite outcome, had given the head of it ample warrant for considering him as he did. Once or twice, while Brower was counselling with X Marshall on the door-step, another man—Tom Bingham—had been entertained by Jane within the breezy recesses of the bay-window. It was then that Brower realized with a kind of muffled desperation how completely he and Bingham seemed to have changed positions. One had begun as the friend of a single member of the family, to become in the end the common and equal friend of all, and to sit discussing now with the head of it as one gray-beard with another. The other had begun as the general friend of the household, and had now advanced to the stage where he could fill in the dusk of an early September evening with the talk and company of the one young woman in the world whose talk and company were in any degree worth considering. Brower crunched his cigar between his teeth, and replied to Marshall's observations with a brusque carelessness for which he rebuked himself as being neither respectful nor civil.
"I had never thought," said the old gentleman, looking lakeward through the smoky twilight with a kind of vague wistfulnes, "but that all my girls would marry Americans." He spoke slowly, musingly, in his huskily sibilant tones.
"Um," said Brower, moodily, from the depth of an absurd jealousy. The man whose voice was coming to them with a certain deep indistinctness from the bay-window was an American—decidedly so.
"And not only an American," pursued Marshall, "but a Westerner."
"Um," said Brower, with an increasing gloom. The man who had just provoked that last clouded response from Jane was a Westerner, truly.
"And not only a Western man, but an out-and-out Chicago man; one who knows the town, one who is in sympathy with it, one who has done a little something to make it what it is."
"Um," said Brower once more, with a deeper despondency. Who had done more to make the town what it was than Bingham had done?
"Then I should understand his ideas and ambitions," the old man proceeded, in a tone of plaintive yet unavailing protest. "I should know better about his connections and belongings. I should be able to foresee the future in some degree. I should have a clearer idea of what to expect. I should know, perhaps, where he—where he meant to live." Marshall ended this discourse with a feeble and helpless sigh.
There was nothing indefinite about Bingham, thought poor Brower; there was no doubt as to wherehewould continue to exist. "You mean to say it isn't decided yet where they are going to live?" Brewer's inquiry was prompted by civility rather than by interest. It was the first observation of any length that he had made for some time. Jane, who had been straining her ears during the last ten minutes for the mere sound of his voice, leaned back in her chair with an approximate comfort.
"I don't know, just exactly," replied Marshall, rather dismally. His tone made him say that he did not know at all. "I've talked with Rosy and I've talked with Arthur…." He lapsed into a comfortless silence, and ran his thin old hand over his blanched and furrowed forehead.
"When are they going to be married?" asked Brower. His eyes were on the bay-window, through whose curtains there showed the face of Bingham, his own look anxiously fixed on Marshall.
Jane caught indistinctly the muffled tone of these few syllables. She made them mean a dozen different things and finally nothing at all, but she was glad of the opportunity to do even that.
"In a month," answered Marshall; "early in October. Rosy lays great stress on an October wedding—that's the only right sort, it seems." He sighed with a full sense of the imminence of the inevitable. The voice of Bingham came with a slow, deep gravity from the bay-window, and Jane's voice, responding, mingled nervously with her father's sigh.
"Not from the new house?" said Brower.
"Hardly. It will be almost finished, but far from furnished. Perhaps they will have their receptions there, if they decide to—to come back."
"Come back?" Brower spoke up loudly; a jangling freight train had paused opposite, and the locomotive was blowing off steam.
"To America," the old man explained. He laid his hands to his temples."Do you sleep well?"
"Always."
"Rosy thinks the new house ought to be hurried more. But why should she object to being married from the old house she was born in? Most girls would be pleased with such a thought as that." He placed his hand over his weary old eyes. "You do, do you—always? I don't; I can't. These trains—they keep me awake. I slept hardly half an hour last night, and none at all the night before. Do you know anything about chloral?"
The voice of Bingham came to a pause, and that of Jane was presently distinguished in response—trembling, apprehensive, lapsing away into little breaks and pauses.
"I know it's dangerous," replied Brower. "And morphine, too. And all such things; they're not to be used except in the last extremity. So they are going to England for their wedding-trip, then?"
"To England, yes." He smiled half sorrowfully, half bitterly. He was thinking how easy it might be for Rosamund to give up her old home and her old friends altogether; and he was asking himself, too, if he had really toiled through these many years only to have the results squandered at last by a stranger in a strange land.
"To England, yes," he repeated. "Arthur has postponed his vacation until late in the fall, and he hopes to be able to spend as much as two or three weeks at home. At home; he is a British subject, you know—he has never been naturalized."
The air quivered with the quick pulsations of the locomotive of a passing suburban train. As it moved away Brower heard again the voice of Bingham slow, grave, earnest—a voice of warning and alarm, one might have thought.
"Some of them are here for years before they take out their papers," rejoined Brower. "And lots of them never take them out at all."
"I don't know what's to be done," said Marshall, with a fretful anxiety. "I've given up coffee; some tell me that I ought to give up smoking, too, but others say it really doesn't make any difference. But I must do something; I must have better rest.
"I can't work without my sleep, and I—I can't let myself fail—now."
Jane was speaking once again—more steadily, more coolly, more composedly, it seemed. "Poor pa;—it can't be so serious as that," the listener thought he understood her to say.
"I've heard of bromine," said Brower. "That's simpler, isn't it—and safer?" Jane's voice had ceased, and silence maintained its sway within.
"She will meet all his family," the old gentleman went on. "She seems to expect to find them very fine people—finer than any we have here. And she will see the place where they live—a very much handsomer place, I make out, than any in this part of the world." A drawn and weary smile passed lightly over his face.
There was a movement in the bay-window, and presently a solid footstep in the hall.
"There's nothing like finding things out for yourself," said Brower, colorlessly.
Bingham appeared on the door-step, just as the tail of locomotive smoke swept over the front yard. "Will you smoke with us?" asked Marshall.
Brower smiled, though neither of the others seemed conscious of any secondary meaning in this simple question. "Thank you, no," replied Bingham. "I am moving on to an appointment, and am a little late as it is." He looked down on Marshall with an expression of friendly solicitude, and shook hands with him in a long, slow clasp. "Good-night; you are entitled to better care than you are giving yourself." And he moved down the footpath towards the front gate.
Marshall looked after him wistfully. "If I were only in that man's shoes! If I but had half his health and strength!" Brower heard nothing of this; he was straining his ears for a further sound from within.
"I must get rest," cried the old man, pitifully. "I'm wearing out. I stay up till midnight and after, every night, and even then it's sometimes daylight before I have a minute's sleep, I can't stand it; nobody can."
There was a sound inside, as of scuffling among the furniture. It wasJane, feeling her way through the dark, listening for the sound ofTheodore Brower's voice, and murmuring tremulously with her own,"Toujours fidèle; toujours fidèle!"
"What can I do?" asked the old man, with an appealing grip on Brower's arm. "What doctor can I see? Where can I go for a change and for rest? Or how," he groaned, "can I go away at all? They are crowding me down; they are wrenching my business from my hands! I can't give way at such a time as this!"
Brower hardly heard him; he was listening for Jane, who was now doubling the newel-post just within, and whose quavering undertone broke at the turn as she chanted once more her phrase of hope and reassurance. Brower heard her intonation, and wondered over its meaning; but he would have found no meaning in the words themselves, even if they had been distinctly audible, for he knew no French.
Jane crooned the same brief snatch of melody many a time as the preparations for her sister's wedding moved along—particularly during those hours when she sat in her own room and directed the invitations. It was the only bed-chamber which she remembered ever to have occupied—the same furniture, the same fireplace, the same outlook, the same familiar curtains, gas-jets, door-knobs that had been known to her tomboy childhood, to her formidably plain girlhood, to her ambitious and philanthropic spinsterhood. The very air of it seemed thick with her varying hopes and plans and dreams and projects and ideals. In this retired bower she had slept for her whole life, and no fairy prince had ever penetrated to it to awaken her. One had come for Alice and one for Rosy, but never a—"Toujours fidèle!" moaned Jane, in her deepest contralto, and fell to work with renewed zeal upon her envelopes.
There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Rosy had imagined a function of the first magnitude, and it was not to dwindle for mere lack of material. She had determined upon a ceremony in church and a large reception at the house, with everything in the way of music, flowers, functionaries, and supernumeraries that the most approved forms could incorporate. She stood out for a bishop, a surpliced choir, a wedding-breakfast after the English manner—in short, for the utmost attainable in the way of spendor, thoroughness, and distinction. The preparations moved on with a swirl and a sweep, and involved the whole household to the exclusion of all else.
"But, for Heaven's sake," demanded Jane, "how are you going to get all these people into the house?" She had already disposed of Paston's short list, and had even found a certain pleasure in the quaint and complicated addresses that abounded throughout it. But the other list, compiled by Rosy and her mother, seemed to pass all bounds; not her mother's part, which was limited to certain old-time friends and connections, but Rosy's own, which dealt with "society" almost in its entirety. Jane appreciated now, for the first time, the comprehensive thoroughness of Rosy's year of social endeavor.
"Here, let me have it," said Rosy, brusquely snatching the list from Jane. She fixed her eye upon the part of it that was written in her mother's cramped and antiquated hand. "Who are these Browns?"
"Why, don't you remember the Browns? They were old neighbors of ours; pa used to think everything of them. They sent Alice a beautiful present."
"Never heard of them in my life," declared Rosy. "They needn't come; they can just have announcement-cards. Who are the Grahams?—here's four of them."
"Why," faltered Jane, "they used to have the pew right behind us in the old church. Ma and Mrs. Graham had a booth together at the Sanitary Fair."
"The pew behind, eh? I haven't the slightest recollection of them." She marked the name off altogether.
She made a thorough revision of her mother's list. Then she turned to her own. "Now,thesepeople—Iknowall ofthem, and am indebted to them, and expect to have relations with them after I come back. They've all got to stay on."
"Very good," said Jane, meekly. What else could she say? Was it not to some such social triumph as this that for a good six months she had bent all her own endeavors? She tried now to make the triumph seem as glorious as it should, but she could not feel that she was succeeding.
Another stage in the proceeding arrived when the gowns began to come home from the dress-maker's. Jane then laid aside her pen to find pins, to contrive ruchings, to catch up the loose ends of draperies, while her mother and her sister Alice and her aunt Lydia circled and fluttered and swooped and chattered through a hundred suggestions and amendments and alterations. Then Jane would stand upon the threshold, and blink tearfully and indignantly into the gloom of the hall. "Nobody thinks ofme," she would say, chokingly; "nobody cares for me; nobody seems to imagine that I've got a heart, too!"
And, lastly, the day itself;—when Truesdale, decorated with a daring and wanton orchid, followed Paston out into the middle of the chancel of a crowded and buzzing church; when his father, despite his failing powers and an innate repugnance to the conscious dramatization involved in the ceremonial side of life, led Rosamond up a long aisle with the tremulous embarrassment of an invalid and a novice, and parted from her in front of a broad pair of lawn sleeves; and when Cecilia Ingles scattered a wide shower of rice over the broken flagging of the old front walk, as Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Scodd-Paston, of Boxton Park, Witham, Essex, England (as one of the newspapers took the trouble to put it) passed out through the rusty old front gate into married life.
A few days later David Marshall, to the surprise and dismay of the remaining members of the family, took to his bed.