With the Procession Part 36

But, in truth, the poor soul was homesick, heartsick, as lost and forlorn as a shipwrecked sailor on the chill coast of Kamtchatka.

Mrs. Belden smoothed down her yellow locks and deplored, in her thickly sweet accents, the unfortunate condition of the business.

"My husband's own affairs are going very well," returned Eliza Marshall, looking forward with unblinking eyes. "My son has charge of them. There was a full account of his success in the Sunday paper."

Her tone was one of brazen triumph. Yet Eliza Marshall abhorred speculation with all the dread of the middle-aged female conservative.

One dollar through legitimate trade rather than ten through such paths as Roger had of late been so fearfully treading.

Mrs. Belden had heard something of Truesdale's intended departure for the Orient. "He finds Chicago uncongenial, no doubt."

"Truesdale is at home everywhere. He will have adventures everywhere. He is handsome. He is clever. He can interest wherever he chooses. Sometimes he interests too easily and too deeply; sometimes in spite of himself and to his own annoyance."

Eliza Marshall shot out these remarks like bullets from behind a breastwork. At the end she set her jaws firmly, and stared at Statira Belden with a proud defiance. Many a night had Truesdale's courses wet her pillow with tears of sorrow and shame; she now wondered if it were really she herself who had just celebrated his profligacy, and had seemed to glory in it at that. She had surmised her son's disdain for the importunities of Gladys McKenna, and she had joined with him in a ringing derision when the Beldens had accused him of encouraging her in her folly that he might employ her as a spy upon the happenings in their house. "My son," she concluded, "will return at his own pleasure, and will always be welcome under his father's roof."

Statira Belden's eyes sought the floor. It was she who had made it sure that knowledge of Truesdale's transgression should reach the ears of Susan Bates; yet her own son had just established relations with a "baroness" who still lingered behind on the scene of the late national festivities, and at the climax of an insane extravagance had been openly cast off by his family.

"And Rosy?" said Statira Belden, presently, with a reconquered sweetness.

"One would expect to find her home at such a time as this."

Eliza Marshall planted her standard upon her breastwork, and flaunted it with a firm and magnificent spirit.

"My daughter Rosamund will be with us inside of a week. She has been detained longer than she had expected among her husband's family." The old lady rose with a stiff, slow motion, and transferred a large panel photograph from the centre-table to Statira Belden's hands. "This reached us yesterday."

It was Rosamund. Her proud and splendid young beauty was set off by a court-train, an immense bouquet, and a nodding group of ostrich-tips.

"Presented at court!" exclaimed Statira Belden, involuntarily, and bit her tongue a second after.

Eliza Marshall answered neither yes nor no. She let the photograph speak for itself.

"Rosamund," she went on, presently, "may return a little too late for her first reception, but the others will be held here, and she will entertain a great deal during the winter."

Statira Belden was cowed at last, and Eliza Marshall's heart beat high to see it. This was her only compensation for the tears shed over the delayed return of a selfish and unfilial daughter, for the antic.i.p.ated ordeal of the gay social happenings which were to follow that return, for the besetting thought that some dread misfortune might displace all this future festivity by a worse alternative, and make the lightest diversion a black impossibility.

"She kissed the Queen's hand?" palpitated Statira Belden with an interest that she could not stifle; and again Eliza Marshall answered neither yes nor no.

Rosamund had not kissed the Queen's hand, but her husband's family had been so fascinated by her beauty, so amazed by her genius for dress, and so confounded by her boundless aplomb, that one of them had suggested that she attire herself in a costume which had served a daughter of the house at a Drawing-room some six months before, and others had demanded that she be photographed in it. This was the pleasantest impression that Rosy brought back of her husband's family--their generous and unbounded appreciation of herself.

Her other impressions were less acute. Boxton Park itself she had found comfortable, but not at all splendid; and as for its occupants, they were, in the main, staid and serious people who were doing what they could to justify the favors that fortune had bestowed upon them. Rosy sometimes felt that, in general terms, they might have appreciated Jane quite as fully as they had appreciated her. They were not gay, they were not lively, they were not like Arthur. Paston had truly described himself as the youngest, and he was by far the most jovial and blithesome.

Rosy had not delayed her return on account of any presentation at court--though the achievement of the photograph may have accounted for a few days more or less--but on account of the fox-hunting, which had completely fascinated her. Horse, habit, and country were all in perfect accord; her prosaic and hum-drum practice at home was now trans.m.u.ted into the purest poetry, and under the promptings of this new afflatus she developed a grace and a daring which accomplished the final and irrevocable conquest of all her husband's family.

Rosy's continued sojourn in England cost her husband his position and prospects in America, where he was not of enough importance to a.s.sume such liberties. But this mattered nothing to his wife. She had lived for more than a fortnight at the seat of a county family, she had breathed the air of deference that exists for the gentry of the shires, and she was far from any thought of a permanent submission to the rasping crudities of provincial America. She had already developed the fixed determination to return to London for the "season," to accomplish an actual presentation at court, and to make England her future home for the rest of her days.

One thing more was lost by Rosamund's delay in Ess.e.x--all chance of a last recognition from her father. When she finally reached home he was in a state of slight delirium, and when he pa.s.sed from that it was to enter into unconsciousness. His ideas ran incessantly on gifts, on philanthropic endeavor. To-day he built an asylum; to-morrow he endowed a hospital. He strewed promises over the counterpane with indefatigable hands, and babbled unending benefactions among his hot and hara.s.sing pillows. Jane, half mad with anguish and remorse, found an added pang in the recollection that during one of his conscious and least uncomfortable hours he had yielded to her solicitations and those of Susan Bates, and had set apart a certain portion of his estate, with the approval of Roger, for a collegiate building which was to bear his name. "He will be remembered now," said Jane, for all her poignant sorrow, and she was glad that Roger had co-operated to make this step a possibility. She tried not to see too plainly that her father had made no pretence of a keener sense of his duty towards the public, or of a kindlier disposition towards it.

Whatever he had done was on personal grounds--for the pleasure of a daughter and of an old friend.

One morning, a week after Rosamund's return, a bow of c.r.a.pe was hanging upon the door-bell, Susan Bates was busy with Eliza Marshall up-stairs over certain sombre-hued apparel, and Roger was writing down a list of names and addresses for Theodore Brower upon the dining-room table.

"We must have eight out of this list," said Roger to Brower, "and we ought to know by night which of them can serve."

"Whose names have you put down?" asked Jane, reaching for the paper. She read them over. "Give me that pencil." She wrote down half a dozen more.

"There!" she said, with a sort of frenzied and towering pride, as she pa.s.sed the sheet on to Brower. "Those are men that my father knew, and they are men who must help us now." Roger glanced at the names; each was a household word to every soul throughout the city. "Try _them_," said Jane to Brower, "and if any of them refuse you, they will have to refuse me later." And she walked straight out of the room, without turning her head an inch to right or left.

"Shall I?" asked Brower, abashed.

"Why not?" demanded Roger, with a laconic severity.

Brower was a quiet, retiring fellow, and entered upon his day's work with a full consciousness of the ordeal. It meant to lean over the desks of bank presidents, to intrude upon the meetings of railway directors, to penetrate to the retiring-rooms of judges, to approach more than one of the magnates whom, with an imposing vagueness, we call "capitalists." But Brower, carrying the thought of Jane with him into all these presences, accomplished his task with modesty, tact, and discretion, and finally, from the few simple types of greatness that the town possesses, evolved a list which the pride of the dead man's daughter was willing to accept.

The list of occupants of the carriages Jane made out herself. "In the first one, mother and Roger and Alice and her husband. In the second, Arthur and Rosy and Truesdale and me. In the third, Aunt Lydia and the Bateses--it will be full if Lottie and William both come. I can do _that_ much for Aunt Lyddy," concluded Jane, with a rueful yet whimsical smile.

"Where do you put me?" asked Brower, with an inviolate sobriety. They were alone in the dining-room together.

"In the fourth. You and Mr. Bingham and--"

"I don't want to go in the carriage with Mr. Bingham," interrupted Brower.

"Why, Theodore, what do you mean? Mr. Bingham is one of our best and oldest friends. Who is there that has been kinder to poor dear pa, and to ma, and to me--?"

"Nor in any carriage occupied by--friends," he went on, in the same tense undertone. He took a firm grip on the back of the chair beside him; Jane saw the swelling veins of his hand and wondered what it all might mean.

"I want to go in one of the carriages for the family. I want to go in the carriage that _you_ go in. Do you understand me?"

A sudden consciousness had swept over him, with the mention of Bingham's name, that he himself, as well as any other, filled measurably the dead man's ideal of a husband for one of his daughters. He had waited too long already before making this discovery; he must not wait so long before declaring it.

She did not understand from his voice, which was strained and m.u.f.fled to conceal an emotion all unconcealable. But she understood from his eyes, which looked into hers with an immense and endless kindness, and from his hand, which had left its heroic clutch upon the chair to take a very human hold upon the hand which hung so limply by her side. "Do you understand me?" he asked again; and his voice was gentler than before.

"I do," answered Jane, feebly, and her head fell upon his shoulder.

Nothing ever seemed to happen to her as to anybody else; but if happiness chose to come to her swathed in mourning bands, none the less kindly and thankfully must it be welcomed. And as she reclined against him she breathed a sigh of thanks that not he, but Bingham, had been concerned in the laying of her ill-omened corner-stone.

He stood beside her at the open grave, and supported her there, too, as the rattling sand and gravel rained down upon the coffin. The grave had been set round with evergreen sprays, and the raw mound of earth beside it had been concealed in the same kindly fashion. But Jane, in a self-inflicted penance, would spare herself no pang; she clutched Brower's arm and stood there, motionless, until the grave had been filled in and the overplus of earth had been shaped above it. "Put those lilies at the head," she directed; "they were from Mrs. Bates." And then she walked away.

She read the next day, with a chastened satisfaction, the newspaper accounts of her father's career. A new and careless public was carried back once more to the early day whose revivification is always attempted for a preoccupied and unsympathetic community upon the pa.s.sing away of another old settler. Then the frontier village lifts once more its bedraggled forlornness from the slime of its humble beginnings, and the lingering presence of the red man is again made manifest upon the gra.s.sy horizon. Again the struggles of the early days are rehea.r.s.ed, again fire deals out its awful devastation, and once more the city grows from an Indian village to a metropolis of two millions within the lifetime of a single individual.

One morning, the second after the funeral, Truesdale stood at the front parlor window, while the first snow-storm of the season swirled over the long reach of the street and across the straggling paths that traversed the wide stretches of broken prairie land round about. On the chair beside him was a newspaper containing the statement that the affairs of the Marshall & Belden Company were to be wound up, all thought of continuing the business having been abandoned. And on the table beside him lay the cards which announced the marriage of Bertie Patterson.

"No business," he said; "no bride." He feigned to himself that he had really designed going into his father's office, and that he had had a serious intention of asking Bertie Patterson to become his wife. He looked out through the wide, clear pane, and thought of the view, of the weather, of the hideous hubbub of the whole town. "Ouf! What a prospect, what a climate, what a human hodge-podge! Everything unites for me in saying--j.a.pan."

David Marshall's will was opened this same day. It made j.a.pan possible for Truesdale, and England possible for Rosamund. A codicil, added in Roger's hand at the latest practicable moment, revoked the bequest for a collegiate building and transferred the whole amount of it directly to Jane.

"This mustn't make any difference," said Jane to Brower. "It shall go for that, after all. My father was a good man, and he deserves to be remembered."

Brower bowed quietly. He appreciated the gravity of this their joint sacrifice, but he would not dispute the justness of it.

THE END