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Title: The Man Who Wins

Author: Robert Herrick

Release Date: August 26, 2009 [EBook #29808]

Language: English

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                         THE MAN WHO WINS

                                BY

                          ROBERT HERRICK


                     CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
                          NEW YORK, 1897


                       COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY
                     CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS


                          TROW DIRECTORY
                 PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
                             NEW YORK




                               _TO_

                               H. H.




                         THE MAN WHO WINS




I


The Four Corners in Middleton made a pleasant drive from the
university town of Camberton. Many a time in the history of the house
a party of young fellows had driven over the old turnpike that started
where the arsenal used to stand in the sacred quarter of Camberton,
and as the evening sun gilded the low, fresh-water marshes beyond
Spring Pond, would trot on toward the rolling hills of Middleton.
After dinner, or a dance, or, perhaps, mere chat over a late supper,
they rode away at midnight singing as they whipped up their sleepy
nags and otherwise disturbing the decorum of night in Middleton. Or,
maybe, routed out early on a frosty October morning, after lighting
pipes and a word with the stable-boy, they would snuggle into
overcoats and spin away over the hard roads where the night frost
still lay on the caked dust in the hollows like a crust of milk. In
crossing the meadows the autumn sun swung into their faces, a
comfortable solace on a morning drive, exciting them forward toward
Camberton that they might report in the little stucco chapel while the
tinny college bell was still harshly calling to prayer.

The Ellwells had kept the old Four Corners in Middleton long after the
family had moved out into the wider world of Boston, and from farming
and the ministry had entered the spheres of commerce and money-owning.
In the time of old Roper Ellwell the Four Corners had been the
parsonage for Middleton, and there first the Rev. Roper Ellwell had
stirred the placid waters of meeting-house faith until something like
a primitive revival had spread into neighboring parishes. His wife, a
learned woman, had managed half a dozen young men who were preparing
their Greek and Latin for Camberton. Those were the homely and kindly
days of the Four Corners.

Then Roper Ellwell was called by the Second Church, in Boston, to be
their pastor. This was the beginning of the Ellwell family in the good
society of New England. The pastor's eloquence waxed into books that
are found to-day on the shelves of the Harvard Library, with the
University book-plate recording their gift by the author; also in
black-cloth bindings, admirably printed, going to auction from some
private library formed by a parishioner of the noted divine. When he
became old in service, the congregation, now rich and fashionable,
added to his ministrations the vigor of a younger man. Yet Roper
Ellwell, on fine Sundays, still fired one of his former discourses
from the lofty pulpit of his church. As these days grew rarer, the old
pastor divided his time between his son's house on Beacon Street and
the Four Corners.

Mark Ellwell was, as he should be, his father's son with the leaven of
a newer world which led him into business instead of the ministry. But
a fair product of Camberton, and a man well known and liked in Boston,
where he was a merchant, when that term did not cover shop-keeping or
gambling. He made a solid fortune in wool; built a house just beyond
Charles Street on Beacon Street; was a member of two good clubs, and a
deacon in his father's church.

In these days the Four Corners was used chiefly in the autumn months,
and as a playhouse for the feeble pastor. Mark Ellwell built a summer
home in Nahant.

There was one son who grew up--John. This Ellwell was sent to
Camberton in due time, where he broke the family tradition by living a
licentious life. He was kept in the university for two years, from
respect to his family, in spite of his drunkenness and idleness. When
the war broke out--John was then in his third year at Camberton--the
wilder blood at the university found its field. Young Ellwell shirked
his chance; while his mates were enlisting and leaving college, he
slunk away in little sprees, pleading weak health. Mark Ellwell,
shamed and mortified, would have horsewhipped his son into the ranks,
but the mother defended the weakling.

One day young Ellwell announced his marriage to a Salem girl whom he
had met the week before. His father gave him a house; as he chose to
be a broker, his father started him with his own credit. A few years
later, when the war was over and John Ellwell was succeeding in the
general tide of success, established with a family and three young
children, all seemed well. Now the Four Corners was rarely visited.
The verandas broke down; grass and hardy roses grew into the cracks
where the clap-boards had started. The Ellwells, father and son, were
fashionable people; the family had developed.

Early in the seventies there came rumors of young Ellwell's disgrace
in the Tremont Club. He was detected cheating at play, and left the
club, of which Mark Ellwell was vice-president. John Ellwell was a
large, florid man, with the fine features of the good New England
pastor, a slightly Roman nose, and a gouty tendency in his walk. He
was the flourishing broker, of the kind who worked on nerve, who was
never sober after three in the afternoon, and having begun to drink at
ten was uncertain after twelve. He knew a side of business life that
his father had never seen; he associated with men whom the stiff Mark
would have disdained to recognize. But his reputation for cleverness
carried him on in spite of the club affair until....

One day, after a spree, he went on the Board wild and flurried. What
he did he could never remember, but when the settlement for that day's
transactions was made he was ruined. The Board gave him a week to find
the necessary funds and pay his debts. His father settled the affair,
opened the Four Corners for his family, sold his own house on Beacon
Street, and taking his two daughters, who had never married, sailed
for Europe. That was the end of the Ellwells in old Boston. Mark
Ellwell never came back.

"The old man is done with me." That had been John's comment to his
wife. And well might Mark Ellwell be done with him; there was not much
left for another clearing up. There were the Four Corners, and his
seat in the Board, and then--beggary. So in the third generation the
Ellwells established themselves once more in Middleton at the Four
Corners.




II


Good people, people of fortunes nicely won and carefully transmitted,
well-known people, in short the members of society who make life an
important affair to be honorably transacted in due reverence for their
own reputation and the opinion of their neighbors, had nothing more to
do with the family. They were blotted out of the blue book of Boston
and never ventured beyond the shady walks of the Common on the Beacon
Street side. In the other world, about the exchange, in the bar-rooms
and restaurants of the downtown hotels, John Ellwell still led a
comfortable life. The Board liked him. His transactions never again
assumed large proportions, but in the way of little things he did a
brisk business and went his old, corrupt, uncertain path.

The old house at Middleton was pulled to pieces and made fit for a
gentleman's family, with a comfortable dining-room and broad-bayed
windows, fine mahogany from the Beacon Street house, and an opulent
cellar. Wide verandas were run about the house again, giving
delightful vine-covered nooks for talk and sewing in the hazy, heated
summer days. The lawn was nicely shaved and watered; the drive that
led through the orchard to the cross-roads which gave the name to the
place was weeded and gravelled. A new stable was put up behind, and
furnished with three horses, some smart little carts, besides a close
carriage for rainy days. The exile was made tolerable--for the sake of
the children.

Mrs. John Ellwell counted for little. She had married in romance the
handsome, swell young man; reality had blasted her. She had sunk into
a will-less invalid, and made admiration of her husband into pride and
a religion. She had accepted; she never protested. The eldest son by
the dint of much pushing had been put into Camberton just before the
final smash and the exile. In the hall of the college there hung a
portrait of his great grandfather in his black preacher's robes; of
this, Roper Ellwell, second, was a weak travesty. The thin features
had been blurred in the process of transmitting; an inclination to
flabby stoutness of person made the young man portly, where the old
minister had been nervously fragile. But Roper Ellwell, second, rarely
compared notes, for he dined, not in hall under this picture, but at a
private club with his own set.

These young fellows drove over now and then to the Four Corners, a
pleasant place for a man to spend an evening or a Sunday when the
weather was fair and the fields green. The dinners were long and
rich; the wines good; and if old Ellwell was a somewhat scandalous
host, pleasing only to the coarser lads, there were other members of
the family--the two daughters, Leonora and Ruby.

The appearance of these two girls in this earthy family was anomalous.
Leonora, the older sister, was like a water-lily in a pool of ooze and
slime, delicately floating on the stagnant waters without a visible
stain at a single point of contact. She had the Ellwell features,
regular, angular, prominent; with her father's high forehead and
finely tapering hands, and also her father's thin unwholesome skin.
But instead of the livid tan complexion of the man who had beaten
about the years of his life, the woman's pinkish transparency likened
her again to the water-lily of the Middleton ponds. Her sister Ruby
was more striking, much in the florid style of her brother. While she
was young, she would be delicate enough to carry this kind of beauty;
ten years might bring about an unpleasant fulness of bloom. Both had
been petty invalids over many small ills, until now the monotony of
the Four Corners was bringing about a gentle activity and health.

If the mother was will-less in the general concerns of life, she had
shown one power in forming her daughters upon her own ideal of
refinement. It was the way of life for men to be brutes, in a curious
coarse fashion in speech, in appetites, in tastes; all that was an
unaccountable arrangement of providence. So likewise it was befitting
women to be chaste and refined, and to endure. Leonora comprehended
her mother's sad position, yet she never held her father responsible.
Men were made so, with a necessity for wickedness; some day she would
be called upon to marry such a man, and suffer patiently, without
scandal, a similar experience with vice. The woman's task was to keep
fresh and unspotted herself, her home, her rooms, like some cool
temple hidden away from summer heats and noisy commonness.

This girl of eighteen knew the family story as thoroughly as her
mother; knew the disgraceful episodes, the unstable condition of
fortune which they must expect. Tranquilly, daintily she trod her way,
avoiding "scenes," covering up brutality, ignoring beastly talk or
unpleasant dinner companions; occupying herself with her fresh
dresses, or household matters; now decorating a room in the old Four
Corners, or watering the ivies that were replacing the gnarled
woodbines. Mrs. Ellwell had never kept improper books from her
daughters--it seemed so hopeless--and she read what her father read,
accepting the lurid picture of life presented in the novels
plentifully scattered about the house as probably correct, yet with
an indifference and weariness. Some cool twilight at the Four Corners,
when the little tasks of the day had been done, before the carriage
arrived from the station with the unaccountable male element of life,
she might sit for a reflective half hour wondering why it had all been
made so; why passion was recklessly rampant in life; why the world
creaked in its action, groaning over the follies so thickly spread in
its course. In the daring of dreams, provoked by the long shadows and
the deep quiet, other forms, strange possibilities, might flicker in
her mind; but she was a woman! And soon it was time to dress for the
long dinner.

There were evenings when the carriage returned empty, merely a
telegram at the most, to account for the broker's absence; and these
nights, sad for the neglected wife, were a relief to the daughter. The
sweet monotonous day could go on (the country day she secretly loved
when there were only women about the house) even down to night with
rest, the shrieking world banished. There were other evenings when
Ellwell drove up alone, morose, biting his iron-gray mustache in
sullen disgust and ennui at some failure, perhaps in self-discontent
and fear. Leonora met him at the veranda with a kiss, and a bubbling,
clever greeting that dragged out a smile. Dinner was then a pleasant
place for talk, the elder daughter taking the lead and holding it
until she had roused the others. And there were other evenings when
the broker brought with him friends, anyone he happened upon, when he
was excited and loud, and the daughter had fears of the end. If the
talk grew too boisterous, the women would hurry the courses and then
withdraw to a side of the veranda, to sit sadly by themselves. If a
quieter man, or some young fellow from Camberton, slipped away from
the dining-room and joined them, they would talk gayly, simulating
ease and naturalness.

For all this tolerance Mrs. Ellwell had the reputation with the broker
and his companions, of being "a good woman" and a "good wife." And
Ellwell considered that he had redeemed his note to propriety in
marrying and having children, who become hampering things when a man
is in a tight place. The servants gossiped, were insolent at times,
but in such a household there were many pickings. The Middleton
people, driving by at night within sound of the noise when the Four
Corners was garishly lit, would repeat the family story and recall old
Roper Ellwell, who lay in a green mound near his first church. But the
broker, the "village magnate," as his daughters called him, was
generous and free-handed in the parish. A "high liver" but "a good
fellow" was his reputation; so it was considered a good thing for
Middleton that the Ellwells had returned to the Four Corners.

From the serene frugal household of Roper Ellwell where the wife had
fitted boys "in the classical tongues" for Camberton, the family had
come to this uncertain state, feverish, like the fickle fluctuations
of the stock market; now prodigal and easy, again in a panicky
distress with dire fear of unknown depths of poverty and humiliation.
Whatever happened--reckless, with a philosophy that did not embrace
the morrow.




III


Roper second's set dined at Tony Lamb's in Camberton. For the most
part they belonged to the same club, the A. O., and were
congenial souls--young men, rich, from the great cities, who were
taking the Camberton degree as a brevet in the social profession. In
winter they could be found at the New York and the Boston hotels; in
summer at the Bar Harbor hotels.

A few men of different stamp were left over from a previous college
generation of A. O.'s, such as Jarvis Thornton, who had begun
when a boy out of school to dine with his old schoolfellows at Tony
Lamb's, and had kept it up from inertia and the loose liking of
college fellowship, long after his way had parted from that of the
present A. O.'s. Thornton had entered Camberton with all the
distinction that a well-connected Massachusetts family, easy
circumstances, and distinct scholarship would give. His course had
been a gentle current of prosperity. He took first a high degree in
the college, then a good degree in medicine. Now he was engaged in
pushing forward some biological work on which he had already published
a monograph and which had brought him membership in some learned
societies.

One day at the beginning of the long vacation, Roper Ellwell and he
found themselves alone at dinner. Young Ellwell was bored with the
prospect of his own companionship for a lonely drive to the country.

"I say, Thornton," he threw out at random, "come down to our place
over night. The cart will be round in a few minutes."

Thornton, flaccid from hot days in the laboratory, welcomed any
proffered excuse for a loaf. So they jogged away in the soft evening,
from the cropped green hedges and the red brick buildings of Camberton
into the country turnpike, smoking and keeping a peaceful silence.
After athletics and carts had been talked out there was not much to
start fresh conversation with. Camberton slipped away, with its
endless problems, its ambitious prods. Jarvis Thornton entered another
atmosphere when the cart crunched the gravel of the drive at the Four
Corners. The Ellwells were on the veranda. "Who are the Ellwells?"
Thornton asked himself as he found a chair next the white dress of the
daughter. "And why did I get myself into a family party for a day and
two nights without knowing what to expect?"

He discovered an order of things he had never seen before in the
rounds of his proper visiting list--the broker world. Ellwell had the
possibilities of a gentleman, and in comparison with the three or
four companions that he had with him this Sunday, his manners were
distinguished. He was a Camberton man, he would have Jarvis Thornton
understand, a classmate of Thornton's father, and if their paths had
separated, Ellwell, nevertheless, had a position equal to the
Thorntons. As for the others, they were clerks, who in one way or
another had managed to get their seats--men with no great permanent
stake in the community, the modern substitute for the condottiere
class. The Four Corners gave them a place to eat and drink and play a
long game of poker, which amusements satisfied their cravings for
diversion. Jarvis Thornton was a mere young prig that had walked
inadvertently their way; young Roper Ellwell joined the Sunday game,
while Thornton was left with the women to pass the day. The Sunday
went off quietly with a long drive in the afternoon. At dinner
Thornton sat beside the elder daughter. There were stretches of
silence, for the general talk and the table interested him more than
his companion. The other men discussed business or scandal; old
Ellwell told stories that were broad and fatuous, to which young
Ellwell responded with heavy laughter. Ruby joked with an old-young
man named Bradley, a broker, who had been winning in the day's game.
As they came near the end of the long dinner Mrs. Ellwell excused
herself. Thornton scrutinized his companion. The fumes of the place
seemed to circulate about her unnoticed.

"Does she understand it?" Thornton asked himself. "Is this abstraction
a mere bluff because I am a stranger? Or is she only bored?"

When she noticed that Thornton was not eating or drinking she
questioned him mutely with her eyes.

"Shall we leave?"

He nodded. She rose and opened the long window--passed out, as if
accustomed to avoid the puddles of life. She led the way to the
farther end of the veranda, where only an occasional high voice could
be heard. When she had settled herself on a lounge, she sighed
inconsequently.

"But perhaps you didn't want to come? You can go back. We always walk
about a good deal you know, and nobody will notice. You will want your
coffee and cigar; and Colonel Sparks tells amusing wicked little
stories. I will stay here, though."

"And I think I will," the young man added, simply. "It's really hot."

She opened her eyelids, which usually hung a little down as if heavy.

"It tired you too, did it? Somehow I never felt so weary from it as I
do to-night."

"Is it always just so?" he asked, bluntly.

"Why, of course; why not? There are different people. But dinner is
always the chief affair of the day in our house; you see the men are
free then and their cares are over. My father is very particular about
dinner, but it is tiresome sometimes."

Talk dropped. This line was dangerous.

"Tell me," she said again in curious inquiry; "you are not one of
Roper's set?"

"No, he is some years my junior."

"But that does not make any difference. You never belonged to Roper's
set. Isn't it very dull being a grind? Roper says you are a dig and
fearfully clever."

"One must play for something." He waived aside the compliment.

"But how do you do it? Tell me just what you do every day."

Thornton was willing to take her seriously. He sketched his humdrum
labors, the prizes in his way of life. "And it isn't so stupid," he
ended with a laugh, "to play the game that way when once you have
begun it." He added carelessly, as if to himself, "the body will give
you only a few sensations, such a very few, and so humiliatingly
inadequate."

"So _we_ live for the body," the girl said, sharply, diving into his
meaning.

"How do I know?" Thornton replied, irritated at his foolish remark.

"No you meant it; you meant it, and I suppose it is so. But one feels
the body so constantly. Neuralgia racks me, and fatigue. Some days one
would do anything to satisfy the cravings of that same body you seem
to think we shouldn't pamper."

"If you give in you must do more another time," he added a little
solemnly.

"How you must despise us!" Her eyes flashed suddenly. "You live
coolly, tranquilly on for something at the end, never, never
forgetting to have balance."

"Nonsense, I am blue at times, and life is tame."

"And we stumble about with our senses, making a muddle of our earth."

"Here is the carriage already!" It was a relief to find an excuse to
break away.

"You will not come again, I fancy?" she asked, simply. An hour ago he
would have answered yes, meaning in his heart never. Now the unsolved
woman opposite prompted him to say: "If you want to see me again, if I
may?"

"Come down some, some week-day, when it is so quiet. We can have more
talk, and I promise you it will do you good to mix with the herd
occasionally."

She laughed lightly.

"The blood has run out," Thornton mused, as the cart rolled on through
the gentle night. "This fellow here is a flabby lump. She has
neuralgia and long stretches of apathy, and other ills. Her children
stand to lose, if she ever has any. She has kept the frame of the
splendid old stock, but in its house the nerves and tissues are
morbid and she is waiting," he paused, and then the words came,
"waiting for dissolution and endless rest."

"Have another cigar?" His companion interrupted his musing.

"The old man keeps a good lot. Whew, how he plays! I left the little
game; the family couldn't stand two in that. The old man will be
savage this week. He can't play against that Bradley. Bradley is a
regular sucker. I tipped the pater a pointer on that long ago, and got
well cursed for my pains. When the old man gets on a tear there's no
stopping him; no let up until he bucks his head against something
hard. Well," he lashed the horse into a gentle gallop, "he can't kick
at my batch of bills. When he gets on a high horse, I know how to fix
him." He laughed. Jarvis Thornton turned a curious eye on his
companion. Just this kind of intimacy in families he had never
experienced--an armed neutrality of viciousness. He was anxious to get
on, to reach his Camberton rooms, where the Sunday forlornness was
peace after this swinish atmosphere. Once back in his arm-chair, in
the familiar confusion of books and papers and letters lying about, he
wondered again what curious freak had led him to accept Roper
Ellwell's invitation. The Four Corners faded from his imagination into
a murky blur, with one central point of white light made by a thin
summer dress, a girlish figure, a face that had come into the world
tired--devitalized.

The next morning he plunged again into a stress of work with his old
swing and intensity, as if single-handed at one spurt he was to make
his way to the close of his labors. He ate his hurried meals at a
little restaurant near the laboratory, and came back to his rooms late
at night, unexhausted, nervously eager to begin again.




IV


Ten days went by. One morning he woke late, listless and unprepared
for the usual tussle. The June sun was pouring into his rooms, the old
portieres shaking gently in the soft breeze. Outside the world was
flooded with sunlight. The new green grass, the full bushes along the
paths, the warm blue of the sky seemed to mock his petty ardors, his
foolish boyish designs of making prodigious strides. Life was not
accomplished that way. One made a little, a very little step, then
came lassitude; later, one must go over the same ground again. There
were no great strides in nature. All was accomplished by subtle
change. He dressed leisurely and looked about for a comfortable
breakfast. There was something stronger than work in the world,
especially to-day. He longed to meet the sunlight and earthly
blessedness; it was such a small thing to fag one's self out at the
laboratory. Half unconsciously he strolled toward the livery stable
where he kept his nag. And then a quarter of an hour later he found
himself on the turnpike, trotting along the fresh-water meadows,
sniffing the air and the scented brooks. He laughed at himself. His
horse plunged, freakish from his long rest in the stable. Suddenly he
spurred on and rode furiously over the country roads, as if mad to
reach a certain end. A little later, he cantered up the gravelled
drive of the Four Corners, his horse wet and trembling, and he with a
craving unexplained, a desire that had found a swift, brutal
expression.

"You took a long time to think about it," she was looking up at him
reproachfully, cool and fresh, with a morning blitheness about her, a
physical calm that he had not felt before. The horse shivered and
poked his head around to look at her.

He flung himself off the horse, and took her hands; she reached him
two as if one for a handshake would be inexpressive.

"But it is splendid now that you have come! We have a whole, long,
quiet day!" Her tones were calm and slow, full of the summer peace and
warmth. He felt straightway content with himself. "Come," she
continued, smiling. "I will make you a cool drink. Mamma has gone to
town and Ruby is off somewhere in the pony cart." When she had left
him on the veranda he laughed at his prudish fancies that had pestered
him a fortnight ago. This June morning she had exactly the necessary
amount of animation and health. All was well with her, and at peace.

They had much gentle desultory conversation. She took him about the
place, showed him the old orchard where her great-grandmother's pupils
had played--one end was now made into a tennis-court, and the stable
with its traces of the old barn where the Rev. Roper Ellwell had kept
his horse and cow. Then there were little pigs and chickens, the
various gardens that were all dear to her, where she patted and
caressed the plants as if they had been alive. She took him to her own
den, a little room where the grandfatherly sermons had once been
written, and where hung a copy of that oil portrait which Thornton had
seen in the Camberton Hall.

"Am I not like him?" she asked suddenly, placing herself in the same
light as the portrait.

"Yes," Thornton answered, "with a difference."

"What is it?" she pressed him anxiously.

"I don't know, the something that has come in with the three
generations," he answered, slowly.

"Tell me honestly," she persisted, with all the egotism of youth
aroused over a personal verdict.

"Shall I?" he said, seriously. She grew grave, but nodded. Thornton
watched the color leave and a trace of helplessness cross her face.

"The old fellow," he kept looking from the portrait to the woman
before him, "in spite of his stiff board costume and the manner he's
painted in, was a great lump of fire. It burned hard in him, burned
away flesh and common passions; he must have been a restless, fervent
man. You are calmer," he ended, stupidly.

"Yes, you mean that his fire has burnt out; that I am weak as water,
when he was strong."

"No, not that, exactly," Thornton protested.

"Yes, you did," she reiterated, sadly. "And it is so, too. I am
generally so tired. There are only hours like these, when something
flows in and I forget things and am happy. But it fades away, it fades
away."

They stood silent before the portrait. Suddenly she remembered
herself.

"Luncheon must be ready."

Ruby came in for luncheon and made amusing talk. She had been into the
village and was full of the farmers.

"I should think they would go crazy," she ended, scornfully. "What
have they got to live for? I don't wonder that the girls go into the
mills and do anything rather than sit about this little hole."

Later they set out for the fields as the afternoon sun was quietly
going down behind the fringe of pines that skirted the horizon. The
atmosphere of the day had changed and become like the still calm of
perfected life. The little aspirations of the morning, the
fascinations of nature, had given place to a content full of warmth.
Miss Ellwell took a winding wood-road that led first across the
meadow, then over the pine-needles to a little pond. As they sauntered
along Thornton watched his companion draw in the saturated air of the
summer afternoon, as if consciously living thereon. She seemed to him
detached, like a plant that drew its best power away from man, in
fields and woods, a kind of parasite.

"You love this?" he said, idly.

"Love it! I live on it. I come out here and sit down under the trees
and close my eyes. Then the odor from the earth seems to enter me and
make me over. Do you suppose grandfather Roper ever had such desires,
such coarse joys in nature?"

"No, his ancestors had lived that for him. He had it stored up in him,
and he gave it out in moral passion."

"And--they have gone on giving it out in passion----"

She raised her heavy lids questioningly, dreamily.

"So I must be planted again, for I am exhausted. Ah, well, she is a
kindly mother, is old nature, and I like to lie down in her arms."

A little brook flowed sluggishly about big tufts of meadow-grass. The
late violets and swamp pinks sent up heavy odors, mixed with a strong
earthy smell. They seemed to be in the midst of nature's housekeeping
and walked lightly as unannounced guests. They wandered on to an open
patch in the woods and sat down, sinking into the dry, heated
wood-moss. Thornton had no desire to talk; she, who had listened to
him the other time, now took him in charge.

"You are so far away, here, in the heat and the earth; so far away
from the world. One gets tired always trying to catch up, and always
being tired."

As she talked he felt his limbs heavy in obedience to her words. His
mind became tranquil as under the influence of a narcotic; it seemed
such a little thing what he did over there in Camberton, and so far
removed from the strong pulse that beat beneath his body deep down in
the earth.

"Why are men so foolish," she whispered on. "We want really a few
things only; quiet, rest, peace, tranquil bodies, and this great earth
to shimmer and change forever." His eyes followed her face. Her skin
was so transparent that each word seemed to make a dot of flashing
color; her bosom gently moved in rhythm to her words, and her eyes
with the heavy falling lids smiled at him in conspiracy with the
mouth.

"But that is not all the story--repose!" his words sounded hollow,
like a lesson he had learned by rote and propriety had obliged him to
repeat.

"No!" her voice was lower yet than ever; "then comes love, and with
love will flow in the passion and energy of life!"

The words moved her body. What she said seemed to him intensely true
for the moment. Again propriety offered protest.

"And the other things--success and reputation and the good that the
world needs."

She moved her hands carelessly.

"You would not need them." There was great scorn in that _them_. They
lay quietly for several minutes while the earth murmured about. She
had drawn him passively into her net. Like some parasitic growth she
was taking her strength from him. But it was a new side to him, this
yielding, and so in a few moments he remembered that hard, angular
self that went about the week in his clothes. He jumped up.

"I must ride back."

She followed without protest. She seemed to swim beside him, happy in
elemental, very simple thoughts, a thin color flushing over her face.

"We have been so happy. It has been such a long, full day. Will you
ever come again?" They stood in the shadows on the lawn. He was minded
to say, _no_, but as he took her hand the Ellwell carriage drove up
the country road. After glancing at it she blanched. Ellwell got out
of the carriage unsteadily, with his large handsome face flushed and
distorted. He was half drunk, and in a great passion. Seizing the
carriage whip in one hand and taking the bridle of the horse by the
other, he lashed the trembling beast for some seconds. Mrs. Ellwell
slipped out of the rear seat and half ran into the house. Bradley got
out of the carriage slowly, with a sneer on his face, and nodded to
Thornton. He smiled, as if to say: "Badly jagged, old fool."

"Go, there is Pete with your horse!" Miss Ellwell whispered. He was
about to put his foot in the stirrup, and get away from the
uncomfortable scene, when old Ellwell turned toward him.

"Don't let me scare you, young man," he said, with his regulation
courtesy, the air of the old Ellwells. Thornton shook hands with him,
noticing his bloodshot eyes, the puffy folds under the eyelids, the
general bloat of an ill-regulated human animal. "Are you going before
dinner?" Ellwell continued. Thornton murmured something about duties
and engagements. Ellwell bowed and lifted his hat. Miss Ellwell
advanced as if to say good-by, then stopped. Her face was sad.
Thornton's horse wheeled impatiently. He grasped the saddle, and a
moment later he was down the road out into the self-respecting fields
and woods, where all had the sanctified peace of a starlight night.

"She did not like to ask me again, poor girl," he murmured.




V


Whether Jarvis Thornton would have yielded again of his own accord to
the impulse to travel Four Corners-ward remained unsolved. He had on
hand some experiments that he was undertaking for a paper which he had
to deliver at the close of the month. His day of dissipation seemed to
spur him on once more along the accustomed path, and only in the few
lazy moments at the end of the day did his mind recur to the still
meadows baked in the June sun, and to the woman who had tempted him
into a dangerous world. One evening, when he was speculating
luxuriously on that day of impulse, Roper Ellwell knocked at his door
and entered.

Ellwell had never been there before. Jarvis Thornton had seen him from
time to time at the A. O.; but a fast set, the Roper-Ellwell
crowd, having made the club over into a drinking and poker-playing
establishment, he had ceased to go there frequently. Ellwell was
considerably battered, Thornton noticed, as he invited him, coolly, to
take a seat and help himself to a cigar. He had come to pour himself
out, and a dirty enough story there was to tell. He had been dropped
from Camberton for general inadequacy; but that was the least of his
troubles.

"I could go to the old man and tell him that," he explained, "his own
record at Camberton wasn't any too fine, and he has a grudge against
the old place. I am in here for a lot of money, which he will have to
stand. But----"

Thornton looked at him unsympathetically, without commenting on his
story. Why should he be troubled with the Ellwell excesses in the
fourth generation? He failed yet to see the point to all these
confidences.

"Your break-up is fairly complete," he said at last, coldly. "Many go
down here, make a slip and bark their shins, but you have used two
years in doing for yourself altogether."

Roper Ellwell hung his head.

"So the Dean said; and there's something else." Jarvis Thornton ceased
to smoke as he went on. "I am married; the old man will never stand
that, and it will break up the mater and my sisters fearfully." In
short, he had come to Thornton, with the confidence that an
acquaintance with an older man inspires, to beg him to break the news
to his people. Imbeciles gravitate to the strong.

"Why don't you go yourself?" Thornton inquired, sick of the foolish
affair. But one glance at the drooping, disjointed, miserable figure
before him answered his question. He sat for some minutes debating the
point with himself. He could make a conventional excuse, and play the
man of the world, who did not involve himself with unpleasant people.
But his imagination presented the picture of the two sad women; their
last hope knocked away by this cropping out of the family blight.
Perhaps he could put it to them in a better light than either Roper or
his father. He saw again the girl's face standing on the lawn in the
summer twilight--a face that must be constantly sad.

"Well," he said, "is she a bad lot, the woman you have induced to
share your future?"

Young Ellwell was too miserable to take fire at this brutality.

"No, she isn't their sort though; she is a Swedish girl; she is a
nurse in a hospital."

"You were forced to marry her?" the older man asked.

Ellwell nodded assent.

"And now she is making it uncomfortable for you."

"I am trying to find something to do," the young fellow protested.
"Then I won't trouble them; but if I go down there the old man will
fling me out of the house."

In short, Jarvis Thornton rose early the next morning, and before the
sun had heated the road, was on his way to the Four Corners. There was
not much that he could do, after all, in his pitiful errand; at least,
for the mother. One more insult for her to accept, to be borne in
stupid passivity. But for the daughter who had to live, it would be a
different question; and by the time he had reached Middleton, he had
not made up his mind how the tale was to be told.

It was warm when he walked his horse over the gravelled drive at the
Four Corners. Mrs. Ellwell and her elder daughter were sitting on the
piazza sewing. Pete was washing carriages; the dogs were asleep in the
grass. The place was quiet and in peace. The women received him
cordially; a bright color spread over the girl's face with a contented
smile that seemed to speak intimately to him. He plunged into his
business quickly, putting the case sympathetically before them. They
listened without a word, the girl's face trembling and twitching
slightly. Ruby had joined them, and Thornton interrupted his story,
but Mrs. Ellwell motioned him to go ahead. While he was talking he
hunted about for some bit of light to throw on the situation at the
end. "He wants to go away, and it might be best, if we can find
something for him. I have an uncle in Minnesota on a railroad. He
might find a little place to transplant him to." He stopped.

"You have an uncle in Minnesota," Mrs. Ellwell repeated, mechanically,
her dry eyes staring idealess at him. "You are very, very kind." She
rose and walked into the house.

"Fool," Ruby muttered; her dark face flamed up angrily. Thornton
noticed how much she resembled her handsome father. She had more fire
in her than Roper second. "I suppose he hadn't pluck enough to come
home with his own story. Father will be pretty mad. What did he
_marry_ that woman for!"

"Well," Thornton answered, calmly. "Perhaps we can build on that, the
fact that he _did_ marry her. That seems to me the most promising part
of it."

The young girl cast a contemptuous glance at him and rustled into the
house after her mother. Miss Ellwell had not uttered a word; her face
was bent over her work; and he noticed a few suspicious spots on the
dark linen cloth she was hemming. He turned his face away to the
sunny lawn and the dark, full-leaved trees that lay beyond the road. A
flock of sparrows were rowing in sharp tones among the leaves. The
house-dog picked himself up lazily and walked over to Thornton,
placing a wet muzzle on his trousers. The place was so peaceful, such
a nest of an old Puritan! And here were the demons that the divine had
warred against holding his home as their arsenal. When he permitted
himself to turn his face to the girl at his side, she was grave and
pale, and somehow exhausted. All the weariness of the struggle between
flesh and will seated itself in her heavy-lidded, sad eyes.

"You must be a brave woman and help him," Thornton said, feeling the
conventionality and silliness of any remark. "He mustn't be hounded
out of here like a dog, but made to feel that he can make a decent
future." She nodded. "It isn't the money," she said at last. "Though I
can't see where it will come from. Nor the marriage, but the perpetual
disgrace. It goes on increasing. We are all bad, worn out; dear old
grandpapa was the last good one. It is what you call a curse, a
disintegration. Why struggle? If we could all go to sleep and sleep it
off? There is nothing ahead, nothing ahead!"

"That is folly," Thornton explained. "We have all been held in thrall
by this curse of heredity. It has been talked at us, and written at
us, and proved to us, until it makes us cowards!"

She looked at him sadly.

"'The sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation,'" she
repeated.

"Damn!" He rose excitedly. "That is the most awful doctrine in the
Bible, and we have believed it like sheep until we really make it
true. When a weak man wants to go to thunder, he thinks of an uncle
who was a drunkard, or a father who was a thief, and he goes and does
likewise. Naturally! And now science comes along and says it isn't so,
or at any rate there is strong doubt about it. In a few years we may
prove that it isn't so and free mankind from that superstitious
curse."

The girl comprehended him but half. "Why, I think that old grandfather
Roper must have been a very passionate man, who fought against himself
and conquered."

"Yes," Thornton admitted, "there was a lot of vice bottled up among
the Puritan saints. It has been spilling out ever since, but that
makes no difference," he went on vehemently to explain his theories.
Somehow, now that his heart was touched, he put passion and conviction
into what his sober reason held as speculation. He made clear to her
the newest theories from Germany. He had come out as a diplomat in a
distasteful cause; he became a pleader full of conviction. His
imagination woke into a flame, and he saw anew, vitally, all the old
problems that he had handled coldly in the laboratory. The woman sat
dumbly, sucking in his statements and arguments. Then, as they stood
on the grass waiting for Pete to bring up his nag, she said:

"We are free, you think." Her mind was laboring with his words.

"In a large measure, we can start fresh: the die is not cast
beforehand." He added less warmly.

"But we copy what is about us. If we can't escape from what you call
the current of ideals we are born in, what difference does it make? It
amounts to the same thing!"

She, the woman, pleaded with him, the man, to free her, to take her
away. He answered, tenderly:

"We can; each one can live his own life as a stranger to his
shipmates. You have done so."

"It means a sacrifice. Some one must lift us. From some other life we
could get the strength, and that other one loses--just so much as he
gives."

Thornton's brows contracted. She read the comment of reason that ran
beside his text.

"Who knows? Everything can't be weighed in scales."

She did not ask him if he would return; she knew in her heart that he
would.




VI


Certain natural results followed from Jarvis Thornton's first
interference in the Ellwell family troubles. He felt bound to do what
he could with the Minnesota uncle to secure some kind of a berth for
young Roper. In a few weeks he was able to make another journey to the
Four Corners, with the definite offer of a small agency in a little
frontier town. He found the family conditions troubled, but
temporarily quiet. Old Ellwell, after a passionate and violent attack,
had lapsed into a glum silence. The son kept out of his way; hung
about the premises during the day-time, and took himself off as often
as the mother and sisters could find money for him to spend. After
several visits to the Four Corners, in such times of family stress,
Thornton found himself on the most intimate terms with the young woman
who seemed to realize the suffering most.

He made up his mind that, come what might, he should, in justice to
his father, tell him the story. Thornton's father was an elderly man
whom most good Boston people were glad to know. He had a little
fortune; he owned a comfortable little brick box on Marlboro' Street;
he had cultivated enough tastes to keep him reasonably occupied ever
since his wife's sudden death years ago. Jarvis Thornton enjoyed his
father, and the enjoyment was reciprocal. The two had put their heads
together and planned out the younger man's life-work, and each felt an
equal interest and responsibility for the success of their
speculation. What the father's career had lacked in effectiveness,
they now determined should be supplied by Jarvis. So the son felt
already some compunctions when he realized how far he had gone in this
important matter without putting his father in the way of criticizing
it.

It was a stifling July evening that Jarvis took to open the matter to
his father. The old man had been unusually silent, almost preoccupied
during the dinner they had eaten together in the little back
dining-room. The son noticed that the heat had told on his father, and
he blamed himself for keeping him in this dusty, deserted town, while
he completed his laboratory work. The electric cars made a great
whirr, just around the corner, every few moments, and the little strip
of park behind the house was full of the poor people who had crawled
out of their hot holes to get some breathable air in the green spots
abandoned by the rich. Jarvis Thornton cast his eyes lazily over the
dusty library where they had gone for their smoke. Among its tall
rows of sober-looking books he had got his first taste for the life he
was beginning to lead, the life on the whole that seemed to him the
most satisfactory of any he had looked at. There was a gulf between
him and this passion-ridden mob which swarmed about the public parks
in a hot summer; there was, also, a gulf between him and his neighbors
in the contiguous brick boxes, who strove merely to make the boxes
comfortable. And to his father who sat opposite to him, his fine thin
face with the short gray beard occasionally lighted by the red coal of
his cigar, he owed it all. Somehow to-night he felt that he was about
to propose a raid across that gulf, a voluntary abandonment of the
calm, effective position that he had been blessed with.

He had no difficulty in broaching the affair. To discuss a matter with
his father was like talking to a more experienced and patient self.

"Did you ever know the Ellwells?" he began, simply. "One of them was
the old pastor in the Second Church, and his grandson is on the stock
board now." The older man nodded. Then he continued, describing his
first introduction to the family, his impression of the Four Corners,
his first visit there, with clear, simple portraits of the various
Ellwells of this generation. When he came to the slump of Roper
Ellwell, second, he found it less easy to explain how it had involved
him. His last visits to the Four Corners he passed over hastily, and
after a few broken remarks about the woman who had drawn him there, he
came to an awkward silence. His father kept on smoking, as if waiting
for a final statement. As it did not come, he spoke, in a clear,
impartial voice.

"Yes, I have known all the Ellwells except these young people. I was
just out of Camberton when the war broke out. John Ellwell shirked
then; it was not much to do to go to the front. It was in the air to
fight." He paused to let this aspect of the case sink in. "Later I was
chairman of the committee that requested him to leave the Tremont
Club. And still later, when his swindle on the exchange came to light,
I helped his father hush the matter up. He was a bad lot."

"Yes," his son answered slowly. "An unusually bad lot. He is rotten!"

"Of course, besides the scandals we have mentioned there were,
probably are, others with women. What you say about the children shows
how impoverished is the blood. The son could hardly end otherwise. You
have given him a new soil to grow in, but the end must be there!"

The old man pointed stiffly to the street. Jarvis Thornton made no
reply. Presently his father continued:

"They were not transplanted in time. They are degenerate Puritans.
There are a great many like them, who have petered out on the stony
farms, or in little clerkships, or in asylums of one sort or another.
The stock was too finely bred in and in, over and over, for three
hundred years nearly. Insanity and vice have been hoarded and
repressed and passed on." He seemed to speak with personal bitterness.

"We have the taint of scrofula, of drink, of insanity, all covered up.
Those were wisest who scattered themselves forty years ago into new
lands. Then the magnificent old stock took a new life. It would not be
too much to say that wherever we find good life, hope, joy, or
prosperity in our broad country, you may trace it all back to New
England."

The son listened wonderingly to this essay on the Puritan stock.

"But I don't believe in it," the young man protested. "I don't believe
that it is good science or good morals to hang about our necks this
horrid millstone of heredity."

His father continued in his impartial tone. "You know how much of that
rotten stuff is in our family. You remember the Sharps, and the
Dingleys, and the Abraham Clarkes. You know your mother died from
sheer exhaustion," the old man trembled, "and I have been spared for a
fairly useless life by constant patching up. The war didn't knock me
up only----"

"I will not believe it!" Jarvis Thornton uttered, in intense tones.
His father sighed.

"And by some fortune you were spared; you have grown up strong and
sound and equable. I led your interests to the line of work you have
chosen, for a purpose----"

He paused again. "In order that sex, mere sex, might have no special
unhealthy fascination for you; that you might meet these problems and
treat them as judiciously as you would a matter of banking--without
sentiment, without passion, without an ignorant, liquorish
hallucination----"

The son raised his hand.

"And now it has come in a new way," he said, quietly, "through your
pity and your generosity and your faith. But it has come."

What Jarvis Thornton replied was neither coherent nor weighty. He
flung aside the idea of pity or generosity as absurd. He loved this
woman for herself, because, because he loved her. His father smiled a
sad, kind smile.

"The mother does not seem to have added much to the blood." He threw
this out in order to get the subject back into more reasonable
channels.

"No, she is a weak woman. But what of it? I don't marry the family. We
shall leave them and build a new life, and break the curse." He
smiled, slightly.

"Granting your beliefs that no harm would come to your children, that
it is all chance about these matters," persisted the father, "still
you _cannot_ escape the family. You marry the conditions; they will
remain with you. _They_, if nothing else, will ruin your life."

The younger man rose as if to shake off a physical bandage. For the
first time in his life he felt conscious of a rebellion with the
elemental conditions of existence.

"What if it does mean corruption and misery! I want my joy, my life,
even if they write 'Failure' at the bottom of my page."

"No, no!" his father protested. "You will take the pain all right and
the consequences like a man, but you will never believe that swinish
statement you have just made."

This brought the younger man to his calmer mood.

"I hate them," he said, bitterly, "more than you can; but her I love."

"And to her you will sacrifice all?"

His father looked at him searchingly, longingly.

"Yes, if need be, _all_, but you!"

The old man smiled coolly.

"I shall not count long, and you are independent, anyway. But I don't
care to put the matter on such a footing. We have not lived that way."

"I will do whatever you desire," the son said, "except----"

"I shall ask nothing," his father replied, gently. "If you mean to
marry her you must do so now, when she will need you most. There can
be no compromise, unless your own mind is divided."

As Jarvis Thornton left the house that night he felt that he had dealt
his father a blow.




VII


Some days later when Jarvis Thornton took the familiar turnpike road
he had not recovered from the serious mood his father's talk had
brought about. It hung on him like a weight. He did not ride at a
lover's pace; rather, cool and determined, with a spice of pride in
following his own judgment. But the old man's prophecy met an
answering fear in his own mind--it was dangerous to pluck roses from
some ruins.

His father's sweetness in the matter got hold of him, and he began to
appreciate, in a vague way, the yearning that old men have to witness
fulfilment on the part of the younger generation. Mere age, he saw,
reduces the complexity of desire, but renders it single and intense.
Whether his father was right or not in his gloomy analysis, he was
deeply convinced and foiled. His last method of success had turned out
illusive, yet he had not reproached, nor domineered, nor dictated, nor
appealed. He had expressed a little of his keen sorrow, but
insidiously this attitude had tainted the young man's ecstasy.

Would _she_ comprehend his father's nobility? He could hardly explain
the situation to her in all its bearings, even if she were fitted to
understand. And he felt that hers would be a woman's sympathy, so
ready, yet on the surface. It needed a man, with his less expressive
nature, to comprehend deep down the bearings of this case. However, if
she loved him--it was pleasant to feel that she _did_ love him--she
must plan with him to defeat the old man's prophecy. They would cut
loose from the conditions, come what might. He closed his mouth
firmly. Manlike he planned as if he knew all the elements of the
question.

His horse trotted up the little gravel way to the Four Corners.
Suddenly she appeared standing on the big grooved millstone which
served as a horse-block. Her white dress had an under bodice of pink,
that gave her more than ever the appearance of an opening water-lily.

"I have a new walk for you to-day."

Her greeting betrayed no surprise. She was evidently sure of the
outcome. As Thornton flung himself from his horse, he had a sensation
of yielding--to the pre-arranged.

"But you must be so hot," she added, taking in his solemn face. "Come
into the pantry while I make you a cocktail. Papa says I could get a
place as a bar-maid."

With a ripple of contented laughter she led the way to the little
pantry over the wine-cellar. It was stocked and arranged like a
miniature bar; a high side-board was carefully crowded with polished
cut-glass, and the little room exhaled aromatic odors from the various
wines and bitters. He sat down near the open window while she busied
herself in crushing ice to a flaky coolness and gathering the
materials. To see her at this job seemed to put all of the solemnity
of the occasion far away. Yet he sneered at himself for his prudery.

The sun blazed down outside on the scorched lawn; here the summer heat
brought out all the pungent odors of the place, permeated, so it
seemed, by the stock-broker, by the kind of American who could endure
life only when his nerves were soothed in some way. Pfa! The
atmosphere of the Four Corners' swine! They reminded him of the
bondage to the flesh that in his masterful mood he hated. He sipped
his cocktail and lit a cigarette, inhaling it with deliberation,
noting with idle curiosity how his pulses responded by sharp little
beats.

The escape from reality! He had always liked blunt reality, and
believed in it professionally. You must have a sane mind and a normal
body to believe in reality, and hence few cared for that kind of
bitter bread. The mob tried to escape. Would he too, perhaps, try to
escape? What a time he was losing from that slow methodical task he
had set himself? Three months ago had occurred the first break in his
regular current of thought, and now he was drifting about aimlessly in
a mess of passions and desires.

"Do you like it?" Miss Ellwell asked, anxiously. He had it on his lips
to say:

"I hate it." That would sound silly and incomprehensible, like an
impromptu lecture on the sins of strong drink. His eyes wandered over
her, resting on one white arm that lolled across the side-board.

"I like you," his eyes said. A wave of brutal indifference to
everything but immediate desire surged in the man. However, tossing
away his cigarette, he nodded.

A little dash of pink in her face and neck answered his eyes.

"Now come." She put back the last glass and pulled down the shade,
shutting in the heavy odors.

They sauntered out through the orchard to the wood-road that led
eastward from the Four Corners.

There was a section of Middleton dominated by a high hill, with a
country pond at its foot, that possessed an air of distinction, of
being apart from the flat village and the small barren farms. High
stone-walls ribbed its green surfaces, meeting in a heap at the top,
where also a few wind-blown apple-trees maintained their stunted
growth. A little below the crown of the hill there was a thick
cluster of nut-trees. From this height one could see the Hampton hills
to the east, outlined by a thin row of trees drawn as if with a heavy
brush along the margin of the landscape. Elsewhere the hills were
rounded bare mounds. Farther north this undulating line dipped into a
green plain, and there, so the tradition ran, you could see on a clear
day the white sails of coasting schooners and a shimmer of eastern
light that might be the marshes of Essex, or indeed the blue sea
itself. This apple-tree crowned peak was a kind of lookout from the
dead country to the living sea.

Miss Ellwell brought Thornton out at the mound of stones on the crest;
they rested their arms on the wall, looking east searchingly for the
bit of blue coast and the sails.

"There, there, I can see it," she cried. He looked at her
incredulously. There was nothing but a nebulous mass of blue. "Well, I
have seen it," she protested, "two or three times. To-day it is a bit
hazy."

"Why do you want to see it?" he asked, idly.

"Oh, it is so different! It is big and strange and unfamiliar; don't
you like it?"

"'There is a world beyond!'" He answered without direct appositeness.
They turned to the shade of the nut-trees. In the July sun the woods
seemed asleep, merely soothed by a wandering breeze, and they flung
themselves down on the warm ground. All about the air swam with
pleasant, heated, drowsy, earthy odors.

As she took off her hat and nestled back into the undergrowth,
Thornton felt her anaemic body, pale from the fatigue of the hot walk,
as if the water-lily were drooping in the mid-day sun. Yet she was
somehow intimately connected with the brooding earth. There were two
bodies--the body of flesh that had come with fatigue and feebleness
into the world, and the body of passion that was blooming into power.

She talked of the thousand trivialities that go to make the
conversation between a man and a woman. Thornton lay silently,
stretched on the warm leaves at her feet, feeling her bloodless face
with its sharp blue veining. Each was conscious of a dynamic something
in the air; their minds had a frank understanding while the talk
skipped in and out among nothings. When she began once more to talk of
the sea that lay down there beyond the green meadows and the blue
haze, a faint rose-color of animation darted over the pallor and made
the moist eyes flash. The sea! That stood in her mind for the
mysteries of change, of the unknown. Thornton knew that this
wistfulness after change had nothing definite in it, was merely a
girl's hunger for motion; yet that had divided her in his mind from
her kind.

"There is a world beyond," she murmured, in wondering repetition of
his words. The branches of the nut-trees swayed in the odorous wind as
if whispering, "Yes, yes, we know of it. That world beyond ... over
the hills of flesh, and the tedious wastes of tired bodies, there _is_
a world of peace beyond!"

Her eyes came to his face wistfully. He held the keys of that
beyond.... Something had snapped in his well-ordered mechanism, and he
was going, going, drifting will-lessly into feeling and longing. And
the next moment he held her, looking into a face that burned with
love. There were no words. Life had been too strong for his little
plans; it had mocked him and driven him passionward, like a bit of
straw caught in a gale. The hours swam on unheeded, while they rested
there face to face. Then came the going home across the afternoon
woods; she silent and content, he trying to account for himself. When
he had speculated about such matters, he had seen himself discussing,
quite properly, the serious affairs of life with some tall girl of
distinguished carriage, some one of the many young women whose
acquaintance had made up his Boston parties. He had expected that
their conversation would grow more serious as this intimacy deepened,
and that at last, having found themselves of one accord on the sober
ideals of life, he should broach to her this final proposition
involving both their lives. He had half imagined such a situation with
several fine young women; the scene had always been played out in a
drawing-room filled with bric-a-brac and heavy hangings, he in his
long black afternoon coat. There had been a touch of solemnity in it,
a weighty sense of responsibility that would have made their first
kiss a little sepulchral.

Now, this! Her hand touched his; his mind left these bizarre images,
and suddenly it seemed that life was one wilderness of woods in the
late afternoon sun, down which he was fated to wander in a lethargic
dream. One dominant feeling of tenderness; one indifference to the
baying of reason--merely love, and the soft, warm earth, and the
greenness of living things, and the woman whose dress brushed his arm.
Ah! that was sweet and precious at any price.




VIII


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 anaemic 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.




IX


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 the _repertoire_ among 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 is
_something_ different."

"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 dejeuner."

"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--_you_ at any rate, Miss
Thornton?"

The doctor sighed and crept away.

"The condition for the fever," he muttered.




X


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 had _gone_ at 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 say _no_. 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
that _nothing_--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.




                         THE IVORY SERIES

  _Each, 16mo, gilt top, 75 cents_

  AMOS JUDD. By J. A. Mitchell
    Editor of "Life"

  IA. A Love Story. By Q
    [Arthur T. Quiller-Couch]

  THE SUICIDE CLUB
    By Robert Louis Stevenson

  IRRALIE'S BUSHRANGER
    By E. W. Hornung

  A MASTER SPIRIT
    By Harriet Prescott Spofford

  MADAME DELPHINE
    By George W. Cable

  ONE OF THE VISCONTI
    By Eva Wilder Brodhead

  A BOOK OF MARTYRS
    By Cornelia Atwood Pratt

  A BRIDE FROM THE BUSH
    By E. W. Hornung

  THE MAN WHO WINS
    By Robert Herrick

  AN INHERITANCE
    By Harriet Prescott Spofford

  _Other Volumes to be announced_




Transcriber's note:
In this etext the Greek character 'Omega' is represented as O.





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