The Cost Part 3

"He's a tyrant!" shouted Zachariah Scarborough, bringing his huge fist down on the table and upsetting a mug. "He has set up for king. Down with all kings, say I! His head must come off!"

At this knives were drawn, and when Zachariah Scarborough staggered into the darkness of filthy Fleet Street with a cut down his cheek from temple to jaw-bone, his knife was dripping the life of a cousin of Ireton's.

He fled to the Virginia plantations and drifted thence to North Carolina.

His great-grandson, Gaston Scarborough, was one of Marion's men in his boyhood--a fierce spirit made arrogant by isolated freedom, where every man of character owned his land and could conceive of no superior between him and Almighty G.o.d. One autumn day in 1794 Gaston was out shooting with his youngest brother, John, their father's favorite.

Gaston's gun was caught by a creeper, was torn from him; and his hand, reaching for it, exploded the charge into his brother's neck. His brother fell backward into the swamp and disappeared.

Gaston plunged into the wilderness--to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to Indiana.

"And it's my turn," said Hampden Scarborough as he ended a brief recital of the ancestral murders which Pauline had drawn from him--they were out for a walk together.

"Your turn?" she inquired.

"Yes--I'm the great-grandson--the only one. It's always a great-grandson."

"You DO look dangerous," said Pauline, and the smile and the glance she sent with the words might have been misunderstood by a young man entertaining the ideas which were then filling that young man's brain.

Again, he told her how he had been sent to college--she was always leading him to talk of himself, and her imagination more than supplied that which his unaffected modesty, sometimes deliberately, more often unconsciously, kept out of his stories.

Ever since he could remember, his strongest pa.s.sion had been for books, for reading. Before he was born the wilderness was subdued and the cruel toil of his parents' early life was mitigated by the growth of towns, the spread of civilization. There was a chance for some leisure, for the higher gratification of the intense American pa.s.sion for education. A small library had sprung up in one corner of the general room of the old farm-house--from the seeds of a Bible, an almanac, Milton's Paradise Lost, Baxter's Saint's Rest and a Government report on cattle. But the art collection had stood still for years--a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, another of the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, pictures of Washington, Lincoln and Napoleon, the last held in that household second only to Washington in all history as a "leveler."

The only daughter, Arabella, had been sent to boarding-school in Cincinnati. She married a rich man, lived in the city and, under the inspiration of English novels and the tutelage of a woman friend who visited in New York and often went abroad, was developing ideas of family and cla.s.s and rank. She talked feelingly of the "lower cla.s.ses"

and of the duty of the "upper cla.s.s" toward them. Her "goings-on"

created an acid prejudice against higher education in her father's mind. As she was unfolding to him a plan for sending Hampden to Harvard he interrupted with, "No MORE idiots in my family at my expense," and started out to feed the pigs. The best terms Hampden's mother could make were that he should not be disinherited and cast off if he went to Battle Field and paid his own way.

He did not tell Pauline all of this, nor did he repeat to her the conversation between himself and his father a few days before he left home.

"Is 'Bella going to pay your way through?" asked his father, looking at him severely--but he looked severely at every one except Hampden's gentle-voiced mother.

"No, sir." The son's voice was clear.

"Is your mother?"

"No, sir."

"Have you got money put by?"

"Four hundred dollars."

"Is that enough?"

"It'll give me time for a long look around."

The old man drew a big, rusty pocketbook from the inside pocket of the old-fashioned, flowered-velvet waistcoat he wore even when he fed the pigs. He counted out upon his knee ten one-hundred-dollar bills. He held them toward his son. "That'll have to do you," he said. "That's all you'll get."

"No, thank you," replied Hampden. "I wish no favors from anybody."

"You've earned it over and above your keep," retorted his father. "It belongs to you."

"If I need it I'll send for it," said Hampden, that being the easiest way quickly to end the matter.

But he did tell Pauline that he purposed to pay his own way through college.

"My father has a notion," said he, "that the things one works for and earns are the only things worth having. And I think one can't begin to act on that notion too early. If one is trying to get an education, why not an all-round education, instead of only lessons out of books?"

From that moment Pauline ceased to regard dress or any other external feature as a factor in her estimate of Hampden Scarborough.

"But your plan might make a man too late in getting a start--some men, at least," she suggested.

"A start--for what?" he asked.

"For fame or fortune or success of any kind."

Scarborough's eyes, fixed on the distance, had a curious look in them--he was again exactly like that first view she had had of him.

"But suppose one isn't after any of those things," he said. "Suppose he thinks of life as simply an opportunity for self-development. He starts at it when he's born, and the more of it he does the more he has to do. And--he can't possibly fail, and every moment is a triumph--and----" He came back from his excursion and smiled apologetically at her.

But she was evidently interested.

"Don't you think a man ought to have ambition?" she asked. She was thinking of her lover and his audacious schemes for making himself powerful.

"Oh--a man is what he is. Ambition means so many different things."

"But shouldn't you like to be rich and famous and--all that?"

"It depends----" Scarborough felt that if he said what was in his mind it might sound like cant. So he changed the subject. "Just now my ambition is to get off that zoology condition."

IV.

A DUMONT TRIUMPH.

But in the first week of her second month Pauline's interest in her surroundings vanished. She was corresponding with Jennie At.w.a.ter and Jennie began to write of Dumont--he had returned to Saint X; Caroline Sylvester, of Cleveland, was visiting his mother; it was all but certain that Jack and Caroline would marry. "Her people want it,"

Jennie went on--she pretended to believe that Jack and Pauline had given each the other up--"and Jack's father is determined on it.

They're together morning, noon and evening. She's really very swell, though _I_ don't think she's such a raving beauty." Following this came the Saint X News-Bulletin with a broad hint that the engagement was about to be announced.

"It's ridiculously false," said Pauline to herself; but she tossed for hours each night, trying to soothe the sick pain in her heart. And while she scouted the possibility of losing him, she was for the first time entertaining it--a cloud in the great horizon of her faith in the future; a small cloud, but black and bold against the blue. And she had no suspicion that he had returned from Chicago deliberately to raise that cloud.

A few days later another letter from Jennie, full of gossip about Jack and Caroline, a News-Bulletin with a long article about Caroline, ending with an even broader hint of her approaching marriage--and Dumont sent Pauline a note from the hotel in Villeneuve, five miles from Battle Field: "I must see you. Do not deny me. It means everything to both of us--what I want to say to you." And he asked her to meet him in the little park in Battle Field on the bank of the river where no one but the factory hands and their families ever went, and they only in the evenings. The hour he fixed was ten the next morning, and she "cut" ancient history and was there. As he advanced to meet her she thought she had never before appreciated how handsome he was, how distinguished-looking--perfectly her ideal of what a man should be, especially in that important, and at Battle Field neglected, matter, dress.

She was without practice in indirection, but she successfully hid her jealousy and her fears, though his manner was making their taunts and threats desperately real. He seemed depressed and gloomy; he would not look at her; he shook hands with her almost coldly, though they had not seen each other for weeks, had not talked together for months. She felt faint, and her thoughts were like flocks of circling, croaking crows.

"Polly," he began, when they were in the secluded corner of the park, "father wants me to get married. He's in a rage at your father for treating me so harshly. He wants me to marry a girl who's visiting us.

He's always at me about it, making all sorts of promises and threats.

Her father's in the same business that we are, and----"