The Second Generation Part 24

"And that for you," he said. "At least, _you've_ got a small income."

"But I haven't," she replied. "Dory made me turn it over to mother."

Arthur stared. "Dory!"

"Yes," she answered, with a nod and a smile. It would have given Dory a surprise, a vastly different notion as to what she thought of him, had he seen her unawares just then.

"_Made_ you?"

"Made," she repeated.

"And you did it?"

"I've promised I will."

"Why?"

"I don't just know," was her slow reply.

"Because he was afraid it might make bad blood between you and me?"

"That was one of the reasons he urged," she admitted. "But he thought, too, it would be bad for him and me."

A long silence. Then Arthur: "Del, I almost think you're not making such a mistake as I feared, in marrying him."

"So do I--sometimes," was his sister's, to him, astonishing answer, in an absent, speculative tone.

Arthur withheld the question that was on his lips. He looked curiously at the small graceful head, barely visible in the deepening twilight. "She's a strange one," he reflected. "I don't understand her--and I doubt if she understands herself."

And that last was very near to the truth. Everyone has a reason for everything he does; but it by no means follows that he always knows that reason, or even could extricate it from the tangle of motives, real and reputed, behind any given act. This self-ignorance is less common among men than among women, with their deliberate training to self-consciousness and to duplicity; it is most common among those--men as well as women--who think about themselves chiefly. And Adelaide, having little to think about when all her thinking was hired out, had of necessity thought chiefly about herself.

"You guessed that Janet has thrown me over?" Arthur said, to open the way for relieving his mind.

Adelaide made a gallant effort, and her desire to console him conquered her vanity. "Just as Ross threw me over," she replied, with a successful imitation of indifference.

Instead of being astonished at the news, Arthur was astonished at his not having guessed it. His first sensation was the very human one of pleasure--the feeling that he had companionship in humiliation. He moved closer to her. Then came an instinct, perhaps true, perhaps false, that she was suffering, that Ross had wounded her cruelly, that she was not so calm as her slim, erect figure seemed in the deep dusk. He burst out in quiet, intense fury: "Del, I'll make those two wish to G.o.d they hadn't!"

"You can't do it, Artie," she replied. "The only power on earth that can do them up is themselves." She paused to vent the laugh that was as natural in the circ.u.mstances as it was unpleasant to hear. "And I think they'll do it," she went on, "without any effort on your part--or mine."

"You do not hate them as I do," said he.

"I'm afraid I'm not a good hater," she answered. "I admit I've got a sore spot where he--struck me. But as far as he's concerned, I honestly believe I'm already feeling a little bit obliged to him."

"Naturally," said he in a tone that solicited confidences. "Haven't you got what you really wanted?"

But his sister made no reply.

"Look here, Del," he said after waiting in vain, "if you don't want to marry, there's no reason why you should. You'll soon see I'm not as good-for-nothing as some people imagine."

"What makes you think I don't want to marry?" asked Adelaide, her face completely hid by the darkness, her voice betraying nothing.

"Why, what you've been saying--or, rather, what you've _not_ been saying."

A very long silence, then out of the darkness came Adelaide's voice, even, but puzzling. "Well, Artie, I've made up my mind to marry. I've got to _do_ something, and Dory'll give me something to do. If I sat about waiting, waiting, and thinking, thinking, I should do--something desperate. I've got to get away from myself. I've got to forget myself.

I've got to get a new self."

"Just as I have," said Arthur.

Presently he sat on the arm of her chair and reached out for her hand which was seeking his.

When Hiram was first stricken, Adelaide's Simeon had installed himself as attendant-in-chief. The others took turns at nursing; Simeon was on duty every hour of every twenty-four. He lost all interest in Adelaide, in everything except the sick man. Most of the time he sat quietly, gazing at the huge, helpless object of his admiration as if fascinated. Whenever Hiram deigned to look at him, he chattered softly, timidly approached, retreated, went through all his tricks, watching the while for some sign of approval. The first week or so, Hiram simply tolerated the pathetic remembrancer to human humility because he did not wish to chagrin his daughter. But it is not in nature to resist a suit so meek, so persistent, and so unasking as Simeon's. Soon Hiram liked to have his adorer on his knee, on the arm of his chair, on the table beside him; occasionally he moved his unsteady hand slowly to Simeon's head to give it a pat. And in the long night hours of wakefulness there came to be a soothing companionship in the sound of Simeon's gentle breathing in the little bed at the head of his bed; for Simeon would sleep nowhere else.

The shy races of mankind, those that hide their affections and rarely give them expression, are fondest of domestic animals, because to them they can show themselves without fear of being laughed at or repulsed.

But it happened that Hiram had never formed a friendship with a dog. In his sickness and loneliness, he was soon accepting and returning Simeon's fondness in kind. And at the time when a man must re-value everything in life and put a proper estimate upon it, this unselfish, incessant, wholly disinterested love of poor Simeon's gave him keen pleasure and content.

After the stroke that entombed him, some subtle instinct seemed to guide Simeon when to sit and sympathize at a distance, when to approach and give a gentle caress, with tears running from his eyes. But the death Simeon did not understand at all. Those who came to make the last arrangements excited him to fury. Adelaide had to lock him in her dressing room until the funeral was over. When she released him, he flew to the room where he had been accustomed to sit with his great and good friend. No Hiram! He ran from room to room, chattering wildly, made the tour of gardens and outbuildings, returned to the room in which his quest had started. He seemed dumb with despair. He had always looked ludicrously old and shriveled; his appearance now became tragic. He would start up from hours of trancelike motionlessness, would make a tour of house and grounds; scrambling and shambling from place to place; chattering at doors he could not open, then pausing to listen; racing to the front fence and leaping to its top to crane up and down the street; always back in the old room in a few minutes, to resume his watch and wait. He would let no one but Adelaide touch him, and he merely endured her; good and loving though she seemed to be, he felt that she was somehow responsible for the mysterious vanishing of his G.o.d while she had him shut away.

Sometimes in the dead of night, Adelaide or Arthur or Mrs. Ranger, waking, would hear him hurrying softly, like a ghost, along the halls or up and down the stairs. They, with the crowding interests that compel the mind, no matter how fiercely the bereaved heart may fight against intrusion, would forget for an hour now and then the cause of the black shadow over them and all the house and all the world; and as the weeks pa.s.sed their grief softened and their memories of the dead man began to give them that consoling illusion of his real presence. But not Simeon; he could think only that his friend had been there and was gone.

At last the truth in some form must have come to him. For he gave up the search and the hope, and lay down to die. Food he would not touch; he neither moved nor made a sound. When Adelaide took him up, he lifted dim tragic eyes to her for an instant, then sank back as if asleep. One morning, they found him in Hiram's great arm chair, huddled in its depths, his head upon his knees, his hairy hands stiff against his cheeks. They buried him in the clump of lilac bushes of which Hiram had been especially fond.

Stronger than any other one influence for good upon Adelaide and Arthur at that critical time, was this object lesson Simeon gave--Simeon with his single-hearted sorrow and single-minded love.

CHAPTER XV

EARLY ADVENTURES OF A 'PRENTICE

Arthur, about to issue forth at a quarter to seven on Monday morning to begin work as a cooper's apprentice, felt as if he would find all Saint X lined up to watch him make the journey in working clothes. He had a bold front as he descended the lawn toward the gates; but at the risk of opening him to those with no sympathy for weaknesses other than their own, and for their own only in themselves, it must be set down that he seemed to himself to be shaking and skulking. He set his teeth together, gave himself a final savage cut with the lash of "What a d.a.m.ned coward I am!" and closed the gate behind him and was in the street--a workingman.

He did not realize it, but he had shown his mettle; for, no man with any real cowardice anywhere in him would have pa.s.sed through that gate and faced a world that loves to sneer.

From the other big houses of that prosperous neighborhood were coming, also in working clothes, the fathers, and occasionally the sons, of families he was accustomed to regard as "all right--for Saint X." At the corner of Cherry Lane, old Bolingbroke, many times a millionaire thanks to a thriving woolen factory, came up behind him and cried out, "_Well_, young man! _This_ is something like." In his enthusiasm he put his arm through Arthur's. "As soon as I read your father's will, I made one myself," he continued as they hurried along at Bolingbroke's always furious speed. "I always did have my boys at work; I send 'em down half an hour before me every morning. But it occurred to me they might bury their enthusiasm in the cemetery along with me." He gave his crackling, snapping laugh that was strange and even startling in itself, but seemed the natural expression of his snapping eyes and tight-curling, wiry whiskers and hair. "So I fixed up my will. No pack of worthless heirs to make a mockery of my life and teachings after I'm gone. No, sir-ee!"

Arthur was more at ease. "Appearances" were no longer against him--distinctly the reverse. He wondered that his vanity could have made him overlook the fact that what he was about to do was as much the regular order in prosperous Saint X, throughout the West for that matter, as posing as a European gentleman was the regular order of the "upper cla.s.ses" of New York and Boston--and that even there the European gentleman was a recent and rather rare importation. And Bolingbroke's hearty admiration, undeserved though Arthur felt it to be, put what he thought was nerve into him and stimulated what he then regarded as pride.

"After all, I'm not really a common workman," reflected he. "It's like mother helping Mary." And he felt still better when, pa.s.sing the little millinery shop of "Wilmot & Company" arm in arm with the great woolen manufacturer, he saw Estelle Wilmot--sweeping out. Estelle would have looked like a storybook princess about royal business, had she been down on her knees scrubbing a sidewalk. He was glad she didn't happen to see him, but he was gladder that he had seen her. Clearly, toil was beginning to take on the appearance of "good form."

He thought pretty well of himself all that day. Howells treated him like the proprietor's son; Pat Waugh, foreman of the cooperage, put "Mr.

Arthur" or "Mr. Ranger" into every sentence; the workingmen addressed him as "sir," and seemed to appreciate his talking as affably with them as if he were unaware of the precipice of caste which stretched from him down to them. He was in a pleasant frame of mind as he went home and bathed and dressed for dinner. And, while he knew he had really been in the way at the cooperage and had earned nothing, yet--his ease about his social status permitting--he felt a sense of self-respect which was of an entirely new kind, and had the taste of the fresh air of a keen, clear winter day.

This, however, could not last. The estate was settled up; the fiction that he was of the proprietorship slowly yielded to the reality; the men, not only those over him but also those on whose level he was supposed to be, began to judge him as a man. "The boys say," growled Waugh to Howells, "that he acts like one of them d.a.m.n spying dude sons proprietors sometimes puts in among the men to learn how to work 'em harder for less. He don't seem to catch on that he's got to get his money out of his own hands."

"Touch him up a bit," said Howells, who had worshiped Hiram Ranger and in a measure understood what had been in his mind when he dedicated his son to a life of labor. "If it becomes absolutely necessary I'll talk to him.

But maybe you can do the trick."

Waugh, who had the useful man's disdain of deliberately useless men and the rough man's way of feeling it and showing it, was not slow to act on Howells's license. That very day he found Arthur unconsciously and even patronizingly shirking the tending of a planer so that his teacher, Bud Rollins, had to do double work. Waugh watched this until it had "riled"

him sufficiently to loosen his temper and his language. "Hi, there, Ranger!" he shouted. "What the h.e.l.l! You've been here goin' on six months now, and you're more in the way than you was the first day."