John Marvel, Assistant Part 13

Miss Leigh also read the papers that morning and with much amus.e.m.e.nt till in one of them--the most sensational of all the morning journals--she came on an article which first made her heart stop beating and then set it to racing with sheer anger. To think that such a slander could be uttered! She would have liked to make mince-meat of that editor. He was always attacking her father.

A little later she began to think of the rest of the article! What was the truth? Did they have the right to stop the train and hold it back?

This sort of thing was what a writer whom she knew denied in a series of papers which a friend of hers, a young clergyman who worked among the poor, had sent her and which the press generally was denouncing.

She had for some time been reading these papers that had been appearing in the press periodically. They were written by a person who was generally spoken of as "a Jew," but who wrote with a pen which had the point of a rapier, and whose sentences ate into the steely plate of artificial convention like an acid. One of the things he had said had stuck in her memory. "As the remains of animalculae of past ages furnish, when compressed in almost infinite numbers, the lime-food on which the bone and muscle of the present race of cattle in limestone regions are built up, so the present big-boned race of the wealthy cla.s.s live on the mult.i.tudinous cla.s.s of the poor."

The summer before she had met the writer of these articles and he had made an impression on her which had not been effaced. She had not a.n.a.lyzed her feelings to ascertain how far this impression was due to his cla.s.sical face, his deep, luminous eyes, and his impa.s.sioned manner, yet certain it is that all of these had struck her.

Perhaps, I should give just here a little more of Miss Eleanor Leigh's history as I came to know of it later on. How I came to know of it may or may not be divulged later. But, at least, I learned it. She was the daughter of a gentleman who, until she came and began to tyrannize over him, gave up all of his time and talents to building up enterprises of magnitude and ama.s.sing a fortune. He had showed abilities and ambition at college "back East," where he came from, and when he first struck for the West and started out in life, it was in a region and amid surroundings which were just becoming of more than local importance as they a little later grew under the guidance of men of action like himself, to be of more than sectional importance. The new West as it was then had called to him imperiously and he had responded. Flinging himself into the current which was just beginning to take on force, he soon became one of the pilots of the development which, changing a vast region where roamed Indians and buffalo into a land of cities and railways, shortly made its mark on the Nation and, indeed, on the world, and he was before long swept quite away by it, leaving behind all the intellectual ambitions and dreams he had ever cherished and giving himself up soul and body to the pleasure he got out of his success as an organizer and administrator of large enterprises. Wealth at first was important to him, then it became, if not unimportant, at least of secondary importance to the power he possessed. Then it became of importance again--indeed of supreme importance; for the power he wielded was now dependent on wealth and great wealth. His a.s.sociates were all men of large interests, and only one with similar interests could lead them. New conditions had come about of late and new methods which he could neither employ nor contend against successfully.

As he looked back on it later it appeared a feverish dream through which he had pa.s.sed. Its rewards were undeniable: luxury, reputation and power beyond anything he had ever conceived of. Yet what had he not sacrificed for them! Everything that he had once held up before his mind as a n.o.ble ambition: study, reading, a.s.sociation with the great and n.o.ble of all time; art and love of art; appreciation of all except wealth that men have striven for through the ages; friendship--domestic joy--everything except riches and the power they bring. For as he thought over his past in his growing loneliness he found himself compelled to admit that he had sacrificed all the rest. He had married a woman he loved and admired. He had given her wealth and luxury instead of himself, and she had pined and died before he awakened to the tragic fact. He had grieved for her, but he could not conceal from himself the brutal fact that she had ceased years before to be to him as necessary as his business. She had left him one child. Two others had died in infancy, and he had mourned for them and sympathized with her; but he never knew for years, and until too late, how stricken she had been over their loss. The child she had left him had in some way taken hold on him and had held it even against himself. She had so much of himself in her that he himself could see the resemblance; his natural kindness, his good impulses, his wilfulness, his resolution and ambition to lead and to succeed in all he undertook.

Even from the earliest days when she was left to him, Mr. Leigh was made aware by Eleanor that he had something out of the ordinary to deal with.

The arrangement by which, on the death of her mother, she was taken by her half-aunt, Mrs. Argand, to be cared for, "because the poor child needed a mother to look after her," fell through promptly when the little thing who had rebelled at the plan appeared, dusty and dishevelled but triumphant, in her father's home that first evening, as he was preparing, after leaving his office, to go and see her. It was doubtless an auspicious moment for the little rebel; for her father was at the instant steeped in grief and loneliness and self-reproach. He had worked like fury all day to try to forget his loss; but his return home to his empty house had torn open his wounds afresh, and the echoing of his solitary foot-fall on the stair and in the vacant rooms had almost driven him to despair. Every spot--every turn was a red-hot brand on the fresh wound. No man had loved his wife more; but he awoke now when too late to the torturing fact that he had left her much alone. He had worked for her, leaving the enjoyment to the future; and she had died before the future came, in that desolate present which was to be linked forever to the irretrievable past. It was at this moment that he heard a familiar step outside his door. His heart almost stopped to listen. It could not be Eleanor--she was safe at her Aunt's, blocks away, awaiting the fulfilment of his promise to come to see her--and it was now dark.

Could it be a delusion? His over-wrought brain might have fancied it.

Next second the door burst open, and in rushed Eleanor with a cry--"Oh!

Papa!"

"Why, Nelly! How did you come!"

"Slipped out and ran away! You did not come and I could not stay."

When the emotion of the first greeting was over, Mr. Leigh, under the strong sense of what he deemed his duty to the child, and also to the dear dead--which had led him at first to make the sacrifice of yielding to his sister-in-law's urgency, began to explain to the little girl the impropriety of her action, and the importance of her returning to her Aunt, when she had been so kind. But he found it a difficult task. Mr.

Leigh believed in discipline. He had been brought up in a rigid school, and he knew it made for character; but it was uphill work with the little girl's arms clasped about his neck and her hot, tear-streaked little face pressed close to his as she pleaded and met his arguments with a promptness and an aptness which astonished him. Moreover, she had a strong advocate in his own heart, and from the first moment when she had burst in on his heart-breaking loneliness he had felt that he could not let her go again if she were unhappy.

"She would not go back," she a.s.serted defiantly. "She hated her Aunt, anyhow--she was a hateful old woman who scolded her servants; and sent her up-stairs to her supper."

When to this her father promptly replied that she must go back, and he would take her, she as promptly changed her note.

"Very well, she would go back; he need not come with her; but she would die."

"Oh, no, you will not die. You will soon grow very fond of her."

"Then I shall grow very worldly, like her," said Miss Precocity.

"What makes you think that?"

"Because she is a worldly old woman--and you said so yourself."

"I said so! When?" demanded her father, with a guilty feeling of vague recollection.

"To Mamma once--when Mamma said something against her husband, you said that, and Mamma said you ought not to say that about her sister--and you said she was only her half-sister, anyhow, and not a bit like her--and now you want to send me back to her as if I were only your half-child."

The father smiled sadly enough as he drew the anxious little face close to his own.

"Oh! no--You are all mine, and my all. I only want to do what is right."

"Mamma wants me to stay with you--so it must be right."

The present tense used by the child struck the father to the heart.

"What makes you think that?" he asked with a sigh. The little girl was quick to catch at the new hope.

"She told me so the day before she died, when I was in the room with her; she said you would be lonely, and I must be a comfort to you."

Mr. Leigh gave a gasp that was almost a groan, and the child flung her arms about his neck.

"And I sha'n't leave you, my all-Papa, unless you drive me; I promised Mamma I would stay and take care of you, and I will. And you won't make me--will you? For I am your all-daughter--You won't, will you?"

"No, d----d if I do!" said the father, catching her to his heart, and trying to smother the oath as it burst from his lips.

As soon as she had quieted down, he went to her Aunt's to make the necessary explanation. He found it not the easiest task, for the good lady had her own ideas and had formed her plans, and the change was a blow to her _amour propre_. It was, in fact, the beginning of the breach between Mr. Leigh and his sister-in-law which led eventually to the antagonism between them.

"You are going to spoil that child to death!" exclaimed the affronted lady. This Mr. Leigh denied, though in his heart he thought it possible.

It was not a pleasant interview, for Mrs. Argand was deeply offended.

But Mr. Leigh felt that it was well worth the cost when, on his return home, he was greeted by a cry of joy from the top of the stair where the little girl sat in her dressing gown awaiting him. And when with a cry of joy she came rushing down, Cinderella-like, dropping her slipper in her excitement, and flung herself into his arms, he knew that life had begun for him anew.

Mr. Leigh was quite aware of the truth of Mrs. Argand's prophecy; but he enjoyed the spoiling of his daughter, which she had foretold, and he enjoyed equally the small tyrannies which the child exercised over him, and also the development of her mind as the budding years pa.s.sed.

"Papa," she said one day, when she had asked him to take her somewhere, and he had pleaded, "business," "why do you go to the office so much?"

"I have to work to make money for my daughter," said her father, stating the first reason that suggested itself.

"Are you not rich enough now?"

"Well, I don't know that I am, with a young lady growing up on my hands," said her father smiling.

"Am I very expensive?" she asked with a sudden little expression of gravity coming over her face.

"No, that you are not, my dear--and if you were, there is no pleasure on earth to me like giving it to you. That is one of my chief reasons for working so steadily, though there are others."

"I have plenty of money," said Eleanor.

"Then you are happier than most people, who don't know when they have plenty."

"Yes--you see, all I have to do when I want anything is to go into a store and ask for it, and tell them I am your daughter, and they let me have it at once."

"Oh ho!" said her father, laughing, "so that is the way you buy things, is it? No wonder you have plenty. Well, you'd better come to me and ask for what you want."

"I think the other is the easier way, and as you say you like to give it to me, I don't see that it makes any difference."

Mr. Leigh decided that he had better explain the difference.

"I hate rich people," said Eleanor suddenly. "They are so vulgar."

"For example?" enquired her father looking with some amus.e.m.e.nt at the girl whose face had suddenly taken on an expression of severe priggishness.