The Second Generation Part 32

"And who believes because she knows." She drew away to look at him. "You _are_ like your father!" she exclaimed. "Oh, my dear, my love, how rich he made you--and me!"

At breakfast, the next morning, he broke the news to his mother. Instead of returning his serene and delighted look she kept her eyes on her plate and was ominously silent. "When you are well acquainted with her, mother, you'll love her," he said. He knew what she was thinking--Dr. Schulze's "unorthodox" views, to put it gently; the notorious fact that his daughters did not frown on them; the family's absolute lack of standing from the point of view of reputable Saint X.

"Well," said his mother finally, and without looking at her big, handsome son, "I suppose you're set on it."

"Set--that's precisely the word," replied Arthur. "We're only waiting for your consent and her father's."

"_I_ ain't got anything to do with it," said she, with a pathetic attempt at a smile. "Nor the old doctor, either, judging by the look of the young lady's eyes and chin. I never thought you'd take to a strong-minded woman."

"You wouldn't have her _weak_-minded, would you, mother?"

"There's something between."

"Yes," said he. "There's the woman whose mind is weak when it ought to be strong, and strong when it ought to be weak. I decided for one like you, mother dear--one that would cure me of foolishness and keep me cured."

"A female doctor!"

Arthur laughed. "And she's going to practice, mother. We shouldn't have enough to live on with only what I'd make--or am likely to make anyway soon."

Mrs. Ranger lifted her drooping head in sudden panic.

"Why, you'll live _here_, won't you?"

"Of course," replied Arthur, though, as a matter of fact, he hadn't thought where they would live. He hastened to add, "Only we've got to pay board."

"I guess we won't quarrel about that," said the old woman, so immensely relieved that she was almost resigned to the prospect of a Schulze, a strong-minded Schulze and a practicing female doctor, as a daughter-in-law.

"Madelene is coming up to see you this morning," continued Arthur. "I know you'll make her--welcome." This wistfully, for he was now awake to the prejudices his mother must be fighting.

"I'll have the horses. .h.i.tched up, and go and see her," said Ellen, promptly. "She's a good girl. n.o.body could ever say a word against her character, and that's the main thing." She began to contrast Madelene and Janet, and the situation brightened. At least, she was getting a daughter-in-law whom she could feel at ease with, and for whom she could have respect, possibly even liking of a certain reserved kind.

"I suggested that you'd come," Arthur was replying. "But Madelene said she'd prefer to come to you. She thinks it's her place, whether it's etiquette or not. We're not going to go in for etiquette--Madelene and I."

Mrs. Ranger looked amused. This from the young man who had for years been "picking" at her because she was unconventional! "People will misunderstand you, mother," had been his oft-repeated polite phrase. She couldn't resist a mild revenge. "People'll misunderstand, if she comes.

They'll think she's running after me."

Like all renegades, the renegades from the religion of conventionality are happiest when they are showing their contempt for that before which they once knelt. "Let 'em think," retorted Arthur cheerfully. "I'll telephone her it's all right," he said, as he rose from the table, "and she'll be up here about eleven."

And exactly at eleven she came, not a bit self-conscious or confused.

Mrs. Ranger looked up at her--she was more than a head the taller--and found a pair of eyes she thought finest of all for their honesty looking down into hers. "I reckon we've got--to kiss," said she, with a nervous laugh.

"I reckon so," said Madelene, kissing her, and then, after a glance and an irresistible smile, kissing her again. "You were awfully put out when Arthur told you, weren't you?"

"Well, you know, the saying is 'A bad beginning makes a good ending,'"

said Ellen. "Since there was only Arthur left to me, I hadn't been calculating on a daughter-in-law to come and take him away."

Madelene felt what lay behind that timid, subtle statement of the case. Her face shadowed. She had been picturing a life, a home, with just Arthur and herself; here was a far different prospect opening up.

But Mrs. Ranger was waiting, expectant; she must be answered. "I couldn't take him away from you," Madelene said. "I'd only lose him myself if I tried."

Tears came into Ellen's eyes and her hands clasped in her lap to steady their trembling. "I know how it is," she said. "I'm an old woman, and"--with an appeal for contradiction that went straight to Madelene's heart--"I'm afraid I'd be in the way?"

"In the way!" cried Madelene. "Why, you're the only one that can teach me how to take care of him. He says you've always taken care of him, and I suppose he's too old now to learn how to look after himself."

"You wouldn't mind coming here to live?" asked Ellen humbly. She hardly dared speak out thus plainly; but she felt that never again would there be such a good chance of success.

It was full a minute before Madelene could trust her voice to make reply, not because she hesitated to commit herself, but because she was moved to the depths of her tender heart by this her first experience of about the most tragic of the everyday tragedies in human life--a lone old woman pleading with a young one for a little corner to sit in and wait for death. "I wish it weren't quite such a grand house," she said at last with a look at the old woman--how old she seemed just then!--a look that was like light. "We're too poor to have the right to make any such start.

But, if you'd let me--if you're sure you wouldn't think me an intruder--I'd be glad to come."

"Then that's settled," said Mrs. Ranger, with a deep sigh of relief.

But her head and her hands were still trembling from the nervous shock of the suspense, the danger that she would be left childless and alone.

"We'll get along once you're used to the idea of having me about. I know my place. I never was a great hand at meddling. You'll hardly know I'm around."

Again Madelene had the choke in her throat, the ache at the heart. "But you wouldn't throw the care of this house on my hands!" she exclaimed in well-pretended dismay. "Oh, no, you've simply got to look after things!

Why, I was even counting on your helping me with my practice."

Ellen Ranger thrilled with a delight such as she had not had in many a year--the matchless delight of a new interest. Her mother had been famous throughout those regions in the pioneer days for skill at "yarbs" and at nursing, and had taught her a great deal. But she had had small chance to practice, she and her husband and her children being all and always so healthy. All those years she had had to content herself with thinking and talking of hypothetical cases and with commenting, usually rather severely, upon the conduct of every case in the town of which she heard.

Now, in her old age, just as she was feeling that she had no longer an excuse for being alive, here, into her very house, was coming a career for her, and it the career of which she had always dreamed!

She forgot about the marriage and its problems, and plunged at once into an exposition of her views of medicine--her hostility to the allopaths, with their huge, fierce doses of dreadful poisons that had ruined most of the teeth and stomachs in the town; her disdain of the homeopaths, with their petty pills and their silly notion that the hair of the dog would cure its bite. She was all for the medicine of nature and common sense; and Madelene, able honestly to a.s.sent, rose in her esteem by leaps and bounds. Before the end of that conversation Mrs. Ranger was convinced that she had always believed the doctors should be women. "Who understands a woman but a woman? Who understands a child but a woman? And what's a man when he's sick but a child?" She was impatient for the marriage. And when Madelene asked if she'd object to having a small doctor's sign somewhere on the front fence, she looked astounded at the question. "We must do better than that," she said. "I'll have you an office--just two or three rooms--built down by the street so as to save people coming clear up here. That'd lose you many a customer."

"Yes, it might lose us a good many," said Madelene, and you'd never have thought the "us" deliberate.

That capped the climax. Mrs. Ranger was her new daughter's thenceforth.

And Madelene went away, if possible happier than when she and Arthur had straightened it all out between themselves the night before. Had she not lifted that fine old woman up from the grave upon which she was wearily lying, waiting for death? Had she not made her happy by giving her something to live for? Something to live for! "She looked years younger immediately," thought Madelene. "That's the secret of happiness--something to live for, something real and useful."

"I never thought you'd find anybody good enough for you," said Mrs.

Ranger to her son that evening. "But you have. She's got a heart and a head both--and most of the women nowadays ain't got much of either."

And it was that night as Ellen was saying her prayers, that she asked G.o.d to forgive her the sin of secret protest she had let live deep in a dark corner of her heart--reproach of Hiram for having cut off their son. "It was for the best," she said. "I see it now."

CHAPTER XX

LORRY'S ROMANCE

When Charles Whitney heard Arthur was about to be married, he offered him a place on the office staff of the Ranger-Whitney Company at fifteen hundred a year. "It is less than you deserve on your record," he wrote, "but there is no vacancy just now, and you shall go up rapidly. I take this opportunity to say that I regard your father's will as the finest act of the finest man I ever knew, and that your conduct, since he left us, is a vindication of his wisdom. America has gone stark mad on the subject of money. The day is not far distant when it has got to decide whether property shall rule work or work shall rule property. Your father was a courageous pioneer. All right-thinking men honor him."

This, a fortnight after his return from Europe, from marrying Janet to Aristide, Viscount Brunais. He had yielded to his secret sn.o.bbishness--Matilda thought it was her diplomacy--and had given Janet a dowry so extravagant that when old Saint Berthe heard the figures, he took advantage of the fact that only the family lawyer was present to permit a gleam of nature to show through his mask of elegant indifference to the "coa.r.s.e side of life." Whitney had the American good sense to despise his wife, his daughter, and himself for the transaction. For years furious had been his protestations to his family, to his acquaintances, and to himself against "society," and especially against the incursions of that "worm-eaten t.i.tled crowd from the other side." So often had he repeated those protests that certain phrases had become fixedly part of his conversation, to make the most noise when he was violently agitated, as do the dead leaves of a long-withered but still firmly attached bough. Thus he was regarded in Chicago as an American of the old type; but being human, his strength had not been strong enough to resist the taint in the atmosphere he had breathed ever since he began to be very rich and to keep the company of the pretentious. His originally sound const.i.tution had been gradually undermined, just as "doing like everybody else"--that is, everybody in his set of pirates disguised under merchant flag and with a few deceptive bales of goods piled on deck--had undermined his originally sound business honor.

Arthur answered, thanking him for the offered position, but declining it.

"What you say about my work," he wrote, "encourages me to ask a favor. I wish to be transferred from one mechanical department to another until I have made the round. Then, perhaps, I may venture to ask you to renew your offer."

Whitney showed this to Ross. "Now, _there's_ the sort of son I'd be proud of!" he exclaimed.