The Second Generation Part 23

"I know you think I am not unprejudiced about this will," Dory went on.

"But I ask you to have a talk with Judge Torrey. While he made the will, it was at your father's command, and he didn't and doesn't approve it. He knows all the circ.u.mstances. Before you go any further, wouldn't it be well to see him? You know there isn't an abler lawyer, and you also know he's honest. If there's any way of breaking the will, he'll tell you about it."

Hiram Ranger's son now had the look of his real self emerging from the subsiding fumes of his debauch of folly and fury. "Thank you, Hargrave,"

he said. "You are right."

"Go straight off," advised Dory. "Go before you've said anything to your mother about what you intend to do. And please let me say one thing more.

Suppose you do finally decide to make this contest. It means a year, two years, three years, perhaps five or six, perhaps ten or more, of suspense, of degrading litigation, with the best of you shriveling, with your abilities to do for yourself paralyzed. If you finally lose--you'll owe those Chicago sharks an enormous sum of money, and you'll be embittered and blighted for life. If you win, they and their pals will have most of the estate; you will have little but the barren victory; and you will have lost your mother. For, Arthur, if you try to prove that your father was insane, and cut off his family in insane anger, you know it will kill her."

A long silence; then Arthur moved toward the steps leading down to the drive. "I'll think it over," he said, in a tone very different from any he had used before.

Dory watched him depart with an expression of friendship and admiration.

"He's going to Judge Torrey," he said to himself. "Scratch that veneer of his, and you find his mother and father."

The old judge received Arthur like a son, listened sympathetically as the young man gave him in detail the interview with Dawson. Even as Arthur recalled and related, he himself saw Dawson's duplicity; for, that past master of craft had blundered into the commonest error of craft of all degrees--he had underestimated the intelligence of the man he was trying to cozen. He, rough in dress and manners and regarding "dudishness" as unfailing proof of weak-mindedness, had set down the fashionable Arthur, with his Harvard accent and his ignorance of affairs, as an unmitigated a.s.s. He had overlooked the excellent natural mind which false education and foolish a.s.sociations had tricked out in the motley, bells and bauble of "culture"; and so, he had taken no pains to cozen artistically. Also, as he thought greediness the strongest and hardiest pa.s.sion in all human beings, because it was so in himself, he had not the slightest fear that anyone or anything could deflect his client from pursuing the fortune which dangled, or seemed to dangle, tantalizingly near.

Arthur, recalling the whole interview, was accurate where he had been visionary, intelligent where he had been dazed. He saw it all, before he was half done; he did not need Torrey's e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed summary: "The swindling scoundrel!" to confirm him.

"You signed the note?" said the judge.

"Yes," replied Arthur. He laughed with the frankness of self-derision that augurs so well for a man's teachableness.

"He must have guessed," continued the judge, "that a contest is useless."

At that last word Arthur changed expression, changed color--or, rather, lost all color. "Useless?" he repeated, so overwhelmed that he clean forgot pride of appearances and let his feelings have full play in his face. Useless! A contest useless. Then--

"I did have some hopes," interrupted Judge Torrey's deliberate, judicial tones, "but I had to give them up after I talked with Schulze and President Hargrave. Your father may have been somewhat precipitate, Arthur, but he was sane when he made that will. He believed his wealth would be a curse to his children. And--I ain't at all sure he wasn't right. As I look round this town, this whole country, and see how the second generation of the rich is rotten with the money-cancer, I feel that your grand, wise father had one of the visions that come only to those who are about to leave the world and have their eyes cleared of the dust of the combat, and their minds cooled of its pa.s.sions." Here the old man leaned forward and laid his hand on the knee of the white, haggard youth. "Arthur," he went on, "your father's mind may have been befogged by his affections in the years when he was letting his children do as they pleased, do like most children of the rich. And his mind may have been befogged by his affections again, _after_ he made that will and went down into the Dark Valley. But, I tell you, boy, he was sane _when_ he made that will. He was saner than most men have the strength of mind to be on the best day of their whole lives."

Arthur was sitting with elbows on the desk; his face stared out, somber and gaunt, from between his hands. "How much he favors his father,"

thought the old judge. "What a pity it don't go any deeper than looks."

But the effect of the resemblance was sufficient to make it impossible for him to offer any empty phrases of cheer and consolation. After a long time the hopeless, dazed expression slowly faded from the young man's face; in its place came a calm, inscrutable look. The irresponsible boy was dead; the man had been born--in rancorous bitterness, but in strength and decision.

It was the man who said, as he rose to depart, "I'll write Dawson that I've decided to abandon the contest."

"Ask him to return the note," advised Torrey. "But," he added, "I doubt if he will."

"He won't," said Arthur. "And I'll not ask him. Anyhow, a few dollars would be of no use to me. I'd only prolong the agony of getting down to where I've got to go."

"Five thousand dollars is right smart of money," protested the judge. "On second thought, I guess you'd better let me negotiate with him." The old man's eyes were sparkling with satisfaction in the phrases that were forming in his mind for the first letter to Dawson.

"Thank you," said Arthur. But it was evident that he was not interested. "I must put the past behind me," he went on presently. "I mustn't think of it."

"After all," suggested Torrey, "you're not as bad off as more than ninety-nine per cent of the young men. You're just where they are--on bed rock. And you've got the advantage of your education."

Arthur smiled satirically. "The tools I learned to use at college," said he, "aren't the tools for the Crusoe Island I've been cast away on."

"Well, I reckon a college don't ruin a young chap with the right stuff in him, even if it don't do him any great sight of good." He looked uneasily at Arthur, then began: "If you'd like to study law"--as if he feared the offer would be accepted, should he make it outright.

"No; thank you, I've another plan," replied Arthur, though "plan" would have seemed to Judge Torrey a pretentious name for the hazy possibilities that were beginning to gather in the remote corners of his mind.

"I supposed you wouldn't care for the law," said Torrey, relieved that his faint hint of a possible offer had not got him into trouble. He liked Arthur, but estimated him by his accent and his dress, and so thought him probably handicapped out of the running by those years of training for a career of polite uselessness. "That East!" he said to himself, looking pityingly at the big, stalwart youth in the elaborate fopperies of fashionable mourning. "That _d.a.m.ned_ East! We send it most of our money and our best young men; and what do we get from it in return? Why, sneers and sn.o.b-ideas." However, he tried to change his expression to one less discouraging; but his face could not wholly conceal his forebodings.

"It's lucky for the boy," he reflected, "that Hiram left him a good home as long as his mother's alive. After she's gone--and the five thousand, if I get it back--I suppose he'll drop down and down, and end by clerking it somewhere." With a survey of Arthur's fashionable attire, "I should say he might do fairly well in a gent's furnishing store in one of those d.a.m.n cities." The old man was not unfeeling--far from it; he had simply been educated by long years of experience out of any disposition to exaggerate the unimportant in the facts of life. "He'll be better off and more useful as a clerk than he would be as a pattern of d.a.m.nfoolishness and sn.o.bbishness. So, Hiram was right anyway I look at it, and no matter how it comes out. But--it did take courage to make that will!"

"Well, good day, judge," Arthur was saying, to end both their reveries.

"I must," he laughed curtly, "'get a move on.'"

"Good day, and G.o.d bless you, boy," said the old man, with a hearty earnestness that, for the moment, made Arthur's eyes less hard. "Take your time, settling on what to do. Don't be in a hurry."

"On the contrary," said Arthur. "I'm going to make up my mind at once.

Nothing stales so quickly as a good resolution."

CHAPTER XIV

SIMEON

A crisis does not create character, but is simply its test. The young man who entered the gates of No. 64 Jefferson Street at five that afternoon was in all respects he who left them at a quarter before four, though he seemed very different to himself. He went direct to his own room and did not descend until the supper bell sounded--that funny little old jangling bell he and Del had striven to have abolished in the interests of fashionable progress, until they learned that in many of the best English houses it is a custom as sacredly part of the ghostly British Const.i.tution as the bathless bath of the basin, as the jokeless joke of the pun, as the entertainment that entertains not, as the ruler that rules not and the freedom that frees not. When he appeared in the dining-room door, his mother and Del were already seated. His mother, her white face a shade whiter, said: "I expect you'd better sit--there." She neither pointed nor looked, but they understood that she meant Hiram's place. It was her formal announcement of her forgiveness and of her recognition of the new head of the family. With that in his face that gave Adelaide a sense of the ending of a tension within her, he seated himself where his father had always sat.

It was a silent supper, each one absorbed in thoughts which could not have been uttered, no one able to find any subject that would not make overwhelming the awful sense of the one that was not there and never again would be. Mrs. Ranger spoke once. "How did you find Janet?" she said to Arthur.

His face grew red, with gray underneath. After a pause he answered: "Very well." Another pause, then: "Our engagement is broken off."

Mrs. Ranger winced and shrank. She knew how her question and the effort of that answer must have hurt the boy; but she did not make matters worse with words. Indeed, she would have been unable to say anything, for sympathy would have been hypocritical, and hypocrisy was with her impossible. She thought Arthur loved Janet; she realized, too, the savage wound to his pride in losing her just at this time. But she had never liked her, and now felt justified in that secret and, so she had often reproached herself, unreasonable dislike; and she proceeded to hate her, the first time she had ever hated anybody--to hate her as a mother can hate one who has made her child suffer.

After supper, Mrs. Ranger plunged into the household duties that were saving her from insanity. Adelaide and Arthur went to the side veranda.

When Arthur had lighted a cigarette, he looked at it with a grim smile--it was astonishing how much stronger and manlier his face was, all in a few hours. "I'm on my last thousand of these," said he. "After them, no more cigarettes."

"Oh, it isn't so bad as all that!" said Adelaide. "We're still comfortable, and long before you could feel any change, you'll be making plenty of money."

"I'm going to work--next Monday--at the mills."

Adelaide caught her breath, beamed on him. "I knew you would!" she exclaimed. "I knew you were brave."

"Brave!" He laughed disagreeably. "Like the fellow that faces the fight because a bayonet's p.r.i.c.king his back. I can't go away somewhere and get a job, for there's nothing I can do. I've got to stay right here. I've got to stare this town out of countenance. I've got to get it used to the idea of me as a common workingman with overalls and a dinner pail."

She saw beneath his attempt to make light of the situation a deep and cruel humiliation. He was looking forward to the keenest torture to which a man trained in vanity to false ideals can be subjected; and the thing itself, so Adelaide was thinking, would be more cruel than his writhing antic.i.p.ation of it.

"Still," she insisted to him, "you are brave. You might have borrowed of mother and gone off to make one failure after another in gentlemanly attempts. You might have"--she was going to say, "tried to make a rich marriage," but stopped herself in time. "Oh, I forgot," she said, instead, "there's the five thousand dollars. Why not spend it in studying law--or something?"

"I've lost my five thousand," he replied. "I paid it for a lesson that was cheap at the price." Then, thoughtfully, "I've dropped out of the cla.s.s 'gentleman' for good and all."

"Or into it," suggested she.

He disregarded this; he knew it was an insincerity--one of the many he and Del were now trying to make themselves believe against the almost hopeless handicap of the unbelief they had acquired as part of their "Eastern culture." He went on: "There's one redeeming feature of the--the situation."

"Only one?"