The Second Generation Part 10

"_They_ say he can't last till fall," replied Henrietta; "but he'll last another winter, maybe ten. He's having more and more fun all the time. He has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he happens to be sleeping badly--and that's pretty often--he bangs on the anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then, maybe he'll set 'em all to work mending his fishing tackle--right in the dead of night."

"Are they all there still?" asked Hiram. "The Thomases, the Wilsons, the Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?"

"Everyone--except Miss Frisbie. She's gone back home to Rushville, but she's sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow. I saw Dory Hargrave in the street a while ago. You know his mother was a first cousin of old John's. I told him he ought not to let strangers get the old man's money, that he ought to shy _his_ castor into the ring."

"And what did Dory say?" asked Hiram.

"He came back at me good and hard," said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored laugh. "He said there'd been enough people in Saint X ruined by inheritances and by expecting inheritances. You know the creek that flows through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the reservoir. Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any graveyard creek, yet n.o.body talked of stopping it."

The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over the other--a certain sign that he was thinking intently.

"There's a good deal of truth in what he said," she went on. "Look at our family, for instance. We've been living on an allowance from Grandfather Fuller in Chicago for forty years. None of us has ever done a stroke of work; we've simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his millions. Look at us! Bill and Tom drunkards, d.i.c.k a loafer without even the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep alive. Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our family they began to loaf and wait. We've been waiting in decent, or I should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we're still waiting.

We're a lot of paupers. We're on a level with the Wilmots."

"Yes--there are the Wilmots, too," said Hiram absently.

"That's another form of the same disease," Henrietta went on. "Did you know General Wilmot?"

"He was a fine man," said Hiram, "one of the founders of this town, and he made a fortune out of it. He got overbearing, and what he thought was proud, toward the end of his life. But he had a good heart and worked for all he had--honest work."

"And he brought his family up to be real down-East gentlemen and ladies," resumed Henrietta. "And look at 'em. They lost the money, because they were too gentlemanly and too ladylike to work to hold on to it. And there they live in the big house, half-starved. Why, really, Mr.

Ranger, they don't have enough to eat. And they dress in clothes that have been in the family for a generation. They make their underclothes out of old bed linen. And the gra.s.s on their front lawns is three feet high, and the moss and weeds cover and pry up the bricks of their walks.

They're too 'proud' to work and too poor to hire. How much have they borrowed from you?"

"I don't know," said Hiram. "Not much."

"I know better--and you oughtn't to have lent them a cent. Yesterday old Wilmot was hawking two of his grandfather's watches about. And all the Wilmots have got brains, just as our family has. Nothing wrong with either of us, but that stream Dory Hargrave was talking about."

"There's John Dumont," mused Ranger.

"Yes--_he_ is an exception. But what's he doing with what his father left him? I don't let them throw dust in my eyes with his philanthropy as they call it. The plain truth is he's a gambler and a thief, and he uses what his father left him to be gambler and thief on the big scale, and so keep out of the penitentiary--'finance,' they call it. If he'd been poor, he'd have been in jail long ago--no, he wouldn't--he'd have done differently.

It was the money that started him wrong."

"A great deal of good can be done with money," said Hiram.

"Can it?" demanded Mrs. Fred. "It don't look that way to me. I'm full of this, for I was hauling my Alfred over the coals this very morning"--she laughed--"for being what I've made him, for doing what I'd do in his place--for being like my father and my brothers. It seems to me, precious little of the alleged good that's done with wealth is really good; and what little isn't downright bad hides the truth from people. Talk about the good money does! What does it amount to--the good that's good, and the good that's rotten bad? What does it all amount to beside the good that having to work does? People that have to work hard are usually honest and have sympathy and affection and try to amount to something.

And if they are bad, why at least they can't hurt anybody but themselves very much, where a John Dumont or a Skeffington can injure hundreds--thousands. Take your own case, Mr. Ranger. Your money has never done you any good. It was your hard work. All your money has ever done has been--Do you think your boy and girl will be as good a man and woman, as useful and creditable to the community, as you and Cousin Ellen?"

Hiram said nothing; he continued to slide his great, strong, useful-looking hands one over the other.

"A fortune makes a man stumble along if he's in the right road, makes him race along if he's in the wrong road," concluded Henrietta.

"You must have been talking a great deal to young Hargrave lately," said Hiram shrewdly.

She blushed. "That's true," she admitted, with a laugh. "But I'm not altogether parroting what he said. I do my own thinking." She rose. "I'm afraid I haven't cheered you up much."

"I'm glad you came," replied Hiram earnestly; then, with an admiring look, "It's a pity some of the men of your family haven't got your energy."

She laughed. "They have," said she. "Every one of us is a first-rate talker--and that's all the energy I've got--energy to wag my tongue.

Still--You didn't know I'd gone into business?"

"Business?"

"That is, I'm backing Stella Wilmot in opening a little shop--to sell millinery."

"A Wilmot at work!" exclaimed Hiram.

"A Wilmot at work," affirmed Henrietta. "She's more like her great grandfather; you know how a bad trait will skip several generations and then show again. The Wilmots have been cultivating the commonness of work out of their blood for three generations, but it has burst in again. She made a declaration of independence last week. She told the family she was tired of being a pauper and beggar. And when I heard she wanted to do something I offered to go in with her in a business. She's got a lot of taste in tr.i.m.m.i.n.g hats. She certainly has had experience enough."

"She always looks well," said Hiram.

"And you'd wonder at it, if you were a woman and knew what she's had to work on. So I took four hundred dollars grandfather sent me as a birthday present, and we're going to open up in a small way. She's to put her name out--my family won't let me put mine out, too. 'Wilmot & Hastings' would sound well, don't you think? But it's got to be 'Wilmot & Co.' We've hired a store--No. 263 Monroe Street. We have our opening in August."

"Do you need any--" began Hiram.

"No, thank you," she cut in, with a laugh. "This is a close corporation.

No stock for sale. We want to hold on to every cent of the profits."

"Well," said Hiram, "if you ever do need to borrow, you know where to come."

"Where the whole town comes when it's hard up," said Henrietta; and she astonished the old man by giving him a shy, darting kiss on the brow.

"Now, don't you tell your wife!" she exclaimed, laughing and blushing furiously and making for the door.

When Adelaide, sent by her mother, came to sit with him, he said: "Draw the blinds, child, and leave me alone. I want to rest." She obeyed him.

At intervals of half an hour she opened the door softly, looked in at him, thought he was asleep, and went softly away. But he had never been further from sleep in his life. Henrietta Hastings's harum-scarum gossiping and philosophizing happened to be just what his troubled mind needed to precipitate its clouds into a solid ma.s.s that could be clearly seen and carefully examined. Heretofore he had accepted the conventional explanations of all the ultimate problems, had regarded philosophers as time wasters, own brothers to the debaters who whittled on dry-goods boxes at the sidewalk's edge in summer and about the stoves in the rear of stores in winter, settling all affairs save their own. But now, sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, half of his mind.

Even as Henrietta was talking, he began to see what seemed to him the hidden meaning in the mysterious "Put your house in order" that would give him no rest. But he was not the man to make an important decision in haste, was the last man in the world to inflict discomfort, much less pain, upon anyone, unless the command to do it came unmistakably in the one voice he dared not disobey. Day after day he brooded; night after night he fought to escape. But, slowly, inexorably, his iron inheritance from Covenanter on one side and Puritan on the other a.s.serted itself.

Heartsick, and all but crying out in anguish, he advanced toward the stern task which he could no longer deny or doubt that the Most High G.o.d had set for him.

He sent for Dory Hargrave's father.

Mark Hargrave was president of the Tec.u.mseh Agricultural and Cla.s.sical University, to give it its full legal ent.i.tlements. It consisted in a faculty of six, including Dr. Hargrave, and in two meager and modest, almost mean "halls," and two hundred acres of land. There were at that time just under four hundred students, all but about fifty working their way through. So poor was the college that it was kept going only by efforts, the success of which seemed miraculous interventions of Providence. They were so regarded by Dr. Hargrave, and the stubbornest infidel must have conceded that he was not unjustified.

As Hargrave, tall and spare, his strong features illumined by life-long unselfish service to his fellow-men, came into Hiram Ranger's presence, Hiram shrank and grew gray as his hair. Hargrave might have been the officer come to lead him forth to execution.

"If you had not sent for me, Mr. Ranger," he began, after the greetings, "I should have come of my own accord within a day or two. Latterly G.o.d has been strongly moving me to lay before you the claims of my boys--of the college."

This was to Hiram direct confirmation of his own convictions. He tried to force his lips to say so, but they would not move.

"You and Mrs. Ranger," Hargrave went on, "have had a long life, full of the consciousness of useful work well done. Your industry, your fitness for the just use of G.o.d's treasure, has been demonstrated, and He has made you stewards of much of it. And now approaches the final test, the greatest test, of your fitness to do His work. In His name, my old friend, what are you going to do with His treasure?"

Hiram Ranger's face lighted up. The peace that was entering his soul lay upon the tragedy of his mental and physical suffering soft and serene and sweet as moonlight beautifying a ruin. "That's why I sent for you, Mark," he said.

"Hiram, are you going to leave your wealth so that it may continue to do good in the world? Or, are you going to leave it so that it may tempt your children to vanity and selfishness, to lives of idleness and folly, to bring up their children to be even less useful to mankind than they, even more out of sympathy with the ideals which G.o.d has implanted? All of those ideals are attainable only through shoulder-to-shoulder work such as you have done all your life."

"G.o.d help me!" muttered Hiram. The sweat was beading his forehead and his hands were clasped and wrenching each at the other, typical of the two forces contending in final battle within him. "G.o.d help me!"

"Have you ever looked about you in this town and thought of the meaning of its steady decay, moral and physical? G.o.d prospered the hard-working men who founded it; but, instead of appreciating His blessings, they regarded the wealth He gave them as their own; and they left it to their children. And see how their sin is being visited upon the third and fourth generations! Industry has been slowly paralyzing. The young people, whose wealth gave them the best opportunities, are leading idle lives, are full of vanity of cla.s.s and caste, are steeped in the sins that ever follow in the wake of idleness--the sins of selfishness and indulgence. Instead of being workers, leading in the march upward, instead of taking the position for which their superior opportunities should have fitted them, they set an example of idleness and indolence.

They despise their ancestry of toil which should be their pride. They pride themselves upon the parasitism which is their shame. And they set before the young an example of contempt for work, of looking on it as a curse and a disgrace."