The Second Generation Part 19

With many a pause and stammer the old lawyer made it clear: the house and its contents and appurtenances, and seven thousand a year to the widow for life; two thousand a year to Adelaide; five thousand in cash to Arthur and the chance to earn the mill and factory; the rest, practically the whole estate, to Tec.u.mseh University.

"Any further questions?" he asked, breaking the silence that followed his explanation.

No one spoke.

Still without looking at anyone, he put away his gla.s.ses? "Then I guess I'll be going. It won't be necessary to do anything further for a day or two."

And, with face like that of criminal slinking from scene of crime, he got himself to the door by a series of embarra.s.sed bows and shuffling steps. Outside, he wiped the streaming sweat from his forehead. "It wasn't my fault," he muttered, as if some one were accusing him. Then, a little further from the house, "I ain't sure Hiram hasn't done right.

But, G.o.d help me, I couldn't never save _my_ children at such a price."

He was clear of the grounds before Adelaide, the first to move, cast a furtive glance at her brother. Her own disaster was swallowed up for her in the thought of how he had been struck down. But she could read nothing in his face. He was simply gazing straight ahead, and looking _so_ like his father at his most unfathomable. As soon as he had fully realized what the will meant, his nerves had stopped feeling and his brain had stopped thinking. Adelaide next noted Dory, and grew cold from head to foot. All in a rush it came over her how much she had relied upon her prospective inheritance, how little upon herself. What would Dory think of her _now_? And Ross--what a triumph for him, what a narrow escape! Had he suspected? Had others in the town known that of which they of the family were in complete ignorance? Oh, the horror of the descent--the horror of the rude s.n.a.t.c.hing away of the golden aureole! "Father, father, how could you do it? How could you hurt us so?" she muttered. Then, up before her rose his face with that frightful look in the eyes. "But how doing it made _him_ suffer!" she thought. And the memory of those hours on hours she had spent with him, buried alive, flooded over her. "Doing it killed him!" she said to herself.

She felt cruel fingers grinding into her arm. With a sharp cry she sprang up. Her brother was facing her, his features ablaze with all the evil pa.s.sions in his untrained and unrestrained nature. "_You knew_!" he hissed. "You traitor! You knew he was doing this. You honeyfugled him.

And you and Hargrave get it all!"

Adelaide shrank as she would not have shrunk under a lash.

"O Arthur! Arthur!" she cried, clasping her hands and stretching them toward him.

"You admit it, do you?" he shouted, seizing her by the shoulders like a madman. "Yes, your guilty face admits it. But I'll undo your work. I'll break the will. Such an outrage as that, such a robbery, won't stand in court for a minute."

Dory had risen, was moving to fling the brother from the sister; but Mrs.

Ranger was before him. Starting up from the stupor into which Judge Torrey's explanation had thrown her, she thrust herself between her children. "Arthur!" she said, and her voice was quiet and solemn. "Your father is dead." She drew herself up, and facing her son in her widow's black, seemed taller than he. "If I had needed any proof that he was right about what he did with his own," she went on, "I'd have found it in your face and in what you just said to your sister. Go to the gla.s.s there, boy! Look at your face and remember your words!"

Young Hargrave left the room, went to the garden where they could see him from the windows and call him if they wished. Arthur hung his head before his mother's gaze. "It isn't _his_ will," he muttered. "Father in his right mind would never have made such a will."

"He never would have made such a will if his children had been in their right mind," replied his mother sternly; and sternness they had never before seen in those features or heard in that voice. "I know now what he was broodin' over for weeks. Yes--" and her voice, which rose shrill, was the shriek of the tempest within her--"and I know now what made him break so sudden. I noticed you both driftin' off into foolishness, ashamed of the ways of your parents, ashamed of your parents, too. But I didn't give no attention to it, because I thought it was the silliness of children and that you'd outgrow it. But _he_ always did have a good head on him, and he saw that you were ridin' loose-rein to ruin--to be like them Whitneys. Your pa not in his right mind? I see _G.o.d_ in that will."

She paused, but only for breath to resume: "And you, Arthur Ranger, what was in your head when you came here to-day? Grief and love and willingness to carry out your dead father's last wishes? No! You came thinking of how you were to benefit by his death. Don't deny! I saw your face when you found you weren't going to get your father's money."

"Mother!" exclaimed Arthur.

She waved him down imperiously; and he was afraid before her, before her outraged love for her outraged dead. "Take care how you stamp on my Hiram's grave, Arthur Ranger!"

"He didn't mean it--you know he didn't," pleaded Adelaide. At that moment she could not think of this woman as her mother, but only as the wife, the widow.

But Ellen's instinct told her that her son, though silent, was still in traitorous rebellion against her idol. And she kept on at him: "With Hiram hardly out of the house, you've forgot all he did for you, all he left you--his good name, his good example. You think only of his money.

I've heard you say children owe nothing to their parents, that parents owe everything to the children. Well, that's so. But it don't mean what you think. It don't mean that parents ought to _ruin_ their children.

And your pa didn't spare himself to do his duty by you--not even though it killed him. Yes, it killed him! You'd better go away and fall on your knees and ask G.o.d to forgive you for having shortened your father's life. And I tell you, Arthur Ranger, till you change your heart, you're no son of mine."

"Mother! Mother!" cried Arthur, rushing from the room.

Mrs. Ranger looked vacantly at the place where he had been, dropped into a chair and burst into a storm of tears.

"Call him back, mother," entreated Del.

"No! no!" sobbed Ellen Ranger. "He spoke agin' my dead! I'll not forgive him till his heart changes."

Adelaide knelt beside her mother and tried to put her arms around her.

But her mother shrank away. "Don't touch me!" she cried; "leave me alone. G.o.d forgive me for having bore children that trample on their father's grave. I'll put you both out of the house--" and she started up and her voice rose to a shriek. "Yes--I'll put you both out! Your foolishness has ate into you like a cancer, till you're both rotten. Go to the Whitneys. Go among the lepers where you belong. You ain't fit for decent people."

She pushed Adelaide aside, and with uncertain steps went into the hall and up toward her own room.

CHAPTER XI

"SO SENSITIVE"

Adelaide was about to go in search of her brother when he came hunting her. A good example perhaps excepted, there is no power for good equal to a bad example. Arthur's outburst before his mother and her, and in what seemed the very presence of the dead, had been almost as potent in turning Adelaide from bitterness as the influence her father's personality, her father's character had got over her in his last illness.

And now the very sight of her brother's face, freely expressing his thoughts, since Ellen was not there to shame him, gave double force to the feelings her mother's denunciations had roused in her. "We've got to fight it, Del," Arthur said, flinging himself down on the gra.s.s at her feet. "I'll see Torrey to-morrow morning."

Adelaide was silent.

He looked fiercely at her. "You're going to help me, aren't you?"

"I must have time to think," she replied, bent on not provoking him to greater fury.

He raised himself to a sitting posture. "What has that Hargrave fellow been saying to you?" he cried. "You'll have to break off with him. His father--the old scoundrel!--got at father and took advantage of his illness and his religious superst.i.tion. I know just how it was done.

We'll bring it all out."

Adelaide did not answer.

"What did Dory say to you?" repeated Arthur.

"He went as soon as I came out from mother," she replied. She thought it best not to tell him that Dory had stopped long enough to urge her to go to her brother, and to make and keep peace with him, no matter what he might say to anger her. "Don't you think," she continued, "that you ought to see Janet and talk with her?"

Artie sank back and stared somberly at the ground.

"When is she coming?" asked his sister.

"I don't know," he answered surlily. "Not at all, perhaps. The Whitneys won't especially care about having any of us in the family now." He looked furtively at Adelaide, as if he hoped she would protest that he was mistaken, would show him that Janet would be unchanged.

"Mrs. Whitney won't," said Adelaide. "But Janet--she's different, I think. She seems to be high-minded, and I believe she loves you."

Arthur looked relieved, though Adelaide was too honest to have been able to make her tone as emphatic as her words. Yes, Janet was indeed high-minded, he said to himself; did indeed love him. Her high-mindedness and the angel purity of her love had often made him uneasy, not to say uncomfortable. He hated to be at the trouble of pretenses; but Janet, living on a far higher plan than he, had simply compelled it. To let her see his human weaknesses, to let her suspect that he was not as high-minded as she told him he was, to strip from himself the saintly robes and the diadem with which she had adorned him--well, he would put it off until after marriage, he had always told himself, and perhaps by that time he would feel a little less like a sinner profaning a sanctuary when he kissed her. He had from time to time found in himself a sinful longing that she were just a little less of an angel, just a little more of a fellow sinner--not too much, of course, for a man wants a pure wife, a pure mother for his children. But, while the att.i.tudes of worship and of saintliness were cramped, often severely so, still on the whole Arthur had thought he was content with Janet just as she was.

"Why don't you go to Chicago and see her?" suggested Adelaide. "You ought to talk with her before anyone else has a chance. I wouldn't put _anything_ past her mother."

"That's a good idea!" exclaimed Arthur, his face clearing before the prospect of action. "I'll take the night train. Yes, I must be the one to tell her."

Adelaide had a sense of relief. Arthur would see Janet; Janet would pour balm upon his wounds, would lift him up to a higher, more generous view. Then, whatever he might do would be done in the right spirit, with respect for the memory of their father, with consideration for their mother.

"You had better not see mother again until you come back," she suggested.

His face shadowed and shame came into it that was from the real Arthur Ranger, the son of Hiram and Ellen. "I wish I hadn't burst out as I did, Del," he said. "I forgot everything in my own wrongs. I want to try to make it all right with mother. I can't believe that I said what I remember I did say before her who'd be glad to die for us."