Part 14

"Danny owns near that whole block," Jennie quickly informed her, though Margaret's persistent indifference to such facts was a constant irritation to her and Sadie.

"I've been getting one hundred dollars a month rent for that store," Daniel stated, while his sisters listened breathlessly to such fascinating statistics. "Three months ago, George Trout, the renter, came to me and said he'd have to have more storeroom for his growing business and wanted me to extend the room back into the lot. He laid it off to me how I ought to do this for him because he had rented that room from me for the past fifteen years and had never been a day late with his rent, not even when I had suddenly and unexpectedly raised his rent two years ago from seventy-five to one hundred dollars a month; and he argued that he himself had paid for the repairs and the upkeep of his storeroom for the past eight years; that his successful leather shop had increased the value of my property; and that I certainly owed it to him to extend the floor space. Well, I simply told him that if the place was too small for him, he was perfectly welcome to move; that I certainly wouldn't incur the expense of enlarging the store when I could so easily rent it any time as it was. He argued and fussed 'round my office and said he'd been my faithful tenant for fifteen years and I had never done a thing for him and that I knew perfectly well he couldn't move his business, for there wasn't another vacant storeroom in the town in a location that wouldn't kill his business dead. Yes, I said I knew that all right. 'And,' said he, 'I absolutely require more floor space.' 'Yes, I know that, too,' I said, 'but it's no concern of mine; _I_ have no stock in your business, Mr. Trout. I'm your landlord, and you know business is always strictly business with me. I can rent that storeroom the very hour you move out of it.' He tried to tell me again about his keeping up the repairs, but I cut that short and said he'd got my answer and now I was busy. Well, I certainly was amused to see how mad he looked as he flung himself out of my office. But," said Daniel, his eyes narrowing to the look of cunning from which Margaret was learning to wince as from a touch on a bared nerve, "the affair has turned out just as I foresaw it would! That's the secret of my success, Margaret, as Jennie and Sadie can tell you. I look at every proposition, no matter how small a one, to find in it the main chance--the chance for _me_. I saw there'd be only one thing for Trout to do: enlarge the store at his own expense. No more than right that he should. No least reason why _I_ should do it."

"Of course not!" exclaimed Jennie and Sadie in one breath, while Margaret, looking rather wan, did not raise her eyes from her plate, for the self-complacency of her husband's countenance, as he told his yarn, was more than she could stand.

"So, last week," Daniel went on, "when the changes in the storeroom were completed, I went in and took a look around. Trout spent about eight hundred dollars on the job. Of course this enlargement increases the value of the property and demands higher rent. So, yesterday," Daniel smiled, "I notified him that his rent was raised twenty-five dollars a month. He came storming into my office and said the bills for the repairs should be sent to me. I pointed out to him that I couldn't be held legally responsible for them, as I had not had them made; and that he could take his choice: pay the increased rent or get out. Well, you see, there was nothing else for him to do but pay the higher rent. Anything else spelt ruin for him. He knew that as well as I did. He had to swallow the pill," grinned Daniel, "though it did go down hard! Yes, that's the way I turn things, even little things, right around to my profit, Margaret. Pretty cute, isn't it?"

"If I were Mr. Trout," Margaret returned, looking white, "I'd set fire to your damned store and burn it to the ground!"

There was an instant's silent, awful consternation, when Margaret suddenly laid down her napkin and rushed from the room, every nerve in her sick and quivering with the physical and moral disgust she felt.

When before returning to his office Daniel went to their bedroom, where Margaret, weak and despairing, lay prone upon the bed, he found the door locked against him.

"I insist upon coming in, Margaret!"

"Go away!" she faintly called.

"Open the door!" he commanded.

"I won't! I can't! I don't dare to! I'm dangerous! Go away from me!"

"Get up and open this door!"

"If I did, I'd--I'd scratch you! Keep away from me!"

Daniel telephoned for the doctor.

"My gracious!" exclaimed Jennie, as they all awaited the coming of the physician in the sitting-room, "Hiram's Lizzie never carried on like _this_ when she was expecting!"

"No, she certainly didn't," echoed Sadie; "for all she might have had a little more right to; while Margaret, here, coming to Danny without nothing at all, up and sasses him like what she did at dinner yet! Don't it wonder you?"

Daniel, lounging in his own big chair before the fire, pouted like a thwarted, spoiled child.

"What got into her, anyhow, to act so hystericky all of a sudden?" Sadie speculated.

"Saying she'd set fire to Danny's store!" exclaimed Jennie indignantly. "And _swearing_ yet! My gracious!"

"It certainly does, now, beat all!" said Sadie mournfully.

"I certainly didn't think she'd turn out like _this_!" scolded Jennie. "You hadn't ought to have picked out a wife, Danny, without me looking her over for you first."

"I can't do anything with her!" snapped Daniel spitefully. "Nothing I can say will make her stop running with Catherine Hamilton. She tells me to my face she won't give her up. And she won't, either!"

"Och, Danny, I wouldn't _take_ it off of her!" said Jennie harshly.

"Well, what can a man do?" he fretfully demanded.

"Discharge Miss Hamilton."

"She's invaluable to me. She's in my confidence in a business way. I _can't_ discharge her. It wouldn't matter to her anyway. Every lawyer in town that has any practice would like to employ her. What I'm afraid of is that she'll _resign_. Oh, if she were afraid of losing her job, then I could easily fix Margaret!"

"It looks, Danny, as if Margaret took up with your clerk just to spite and worry you; for what else _would_ she run with her for?"

"Well, if you'd hear them talking together once!" Daniel sullenly responded.

"Well, if we did?" questioned Jennie curiously.

"You wouldn't understand a word they were saying!" snapped her brother.

"Do they talk so dumb?" asked Sadie wonderingly.

"They seem to think it means something--the stuff they get off to each other!"

"It certainly does spite me, Danny," said Jennie with sympathetic indignation, "to have your wife use you like this! And when I think how you could have married most anybody!"

"Here comes the doctor," announced Sadie. "Supposing she won't leave _him_ in her room?"

"Och, but that would make talk!" exclaimed Jennie. "I'll go up and tell her she _has_ to open!"

Margaret, meantime, her sudden gust of passion subsided, realized how foolishly she was acting.

"I can't say I didn't marry him with my eyes open," she prodded herself. "_I_ have no right to scorn him and fly out at him. I see that well enough, alas! I owe him everything I can reasonably give him to make up for my lack of love."

Her sense of her obligation to Daniel did not, however, and never could, include the denial of such fundamental principles as her friendship with Catherine Hamilton, or her own personal freedom in so far as it did not clash with his just rights.

Margaret was not so stupid as to suppose for a moment that she could, by any utmost effort on her part, lead Daniel to see a case like that of George Trout's store rent as _she_ saw it. That he could flaunt and boast of such "deals" proved him too hopelessly obsessed.

"If he were ashamed of it and tried to hide it, there might be some hope of redeeming him. As it is, I certainly shan't waste myself in any such futile endeavour. But if I outlive Daniel, I shall pay to George Trout or his heirs that eight hundred dollars on the very day that I get possession of my widow's third. Or, if I have a son, _he_ shall discharge that debt!"

However, by the time Jennie knocked on her door demanding admission for the doctor, she was in a sufficiently chastened frame of mind to receive both him and her husband with all the outward semblance of a dutifully happy wife.

XIX

Accustomed as Margaret was to the Southern ideal of the chivalry due to a pregnant wife; reared in a state where a fundamental principle of marriage is that the husband's share in the burden and sacrifice of bringing a child into being shall consist in cherishing the mother of his child with reverence and tenderness, so that her difficult ordeal be made as bearable as unselfish love can make it, and that she be upheld throughout her trial by the man's strength and devotion; and that the husband who did not so regard his wife was a cur to be horsewhipped--Margaret had to learn, during her weary, waiting months, that this attitude of the Southern gentleman would have seemed to the average Pennsylvania German ridiculous sentimentality, his view being that woman was created, in the Providence of God, to be a breeder and that was all there was to it; that in merely fulfilling her natural function she was in no more need of sympathy or help or compassion than a cow in the same condition; that her inclination during pregnancy to tears, tantrums, fretfulness, indolence, a muddy complexion, a phlegmatic indifference to everything except the making of baby clothes, not even her husband getting, at this time, any consideration to speak of at her hands--these things were recognized by him as burdens to be borne either with stoicism, or, for the sake of the child, peremptorily prohibited.

So, it was a matter of wonder to Margaret, rather than of distress, that Daniel should be so extremely moderate in his expression of concern or sympathy for her condition. So used as he was to being taken care of by his sisters, it would have been a wholly unnatural attitude on his part, she saw, to be actively solicitous for a woman. He would have felt he lowered his dignity and made himself absurd if he had put himself out for her comfort in the many little ways he might have done and which she had at first looked to see him do.

But, as Daniel told her one day when she expressed some of the wonder she felt at his lack of chivalry toward her, he had never seen Hiram bother about Lizzie when she was in that condition, and it was after all only Nature.

"A baby's teething is only Nature, but we help and comfort it, don't we? I did expect you'd get a _little_ bit excited over my health! It would all be so much easier to bear," she spoke rather to herself than to him, knowing his impenetrability, "if one were treated as a _woman_!"

"As a woman?" Daniel inquired, puzzled.

"Yes, instead of as a cow."

"A cow?"

"Treated as a _Southerner_ treats a woman."

"Now I should think," was Daniel's complacent reply, "that when a husband acts toward his wife as I saw your brother-in-law act toward your sister, like a butler or a porter, she wouldn't _respect_ him."

"The mediæval peasant idea that if her husband doesn't beat her, he doesn't love her," said Margaret.

But the dreariness of mind Daniel's attitude caused her she, with a sort of mediæval superstition, almost welcomed as being at least some expiation for the sin of her loveless marriage.

Margaret was disappointed to find, as the days passed over her head, that because of her inability to ride on the cars without great physical distress, she was obliged to postpone the promised visit to her mother-in-law; and at last, when her appearance made the little trip no longer possible, she wrote to Mrs. Leitzel and explained the reason for her not keeping her promise.

"But just as soon as your grandchild is able to travel," she concluded her letter, "I shall bring it (not knowing its gender) out to see you."

It seemed to Margaret that, unaggressive though she was, the weeks before her confinement were constantly marked by contentions, apparently inevitable, between her and Daniel about the many things of life which they viewed from diametrically opposed standpoints. Her monthly account of her expenditures with her ten dollars allowance was one of these points of difference. The first time Daniel asked her to produce the little account book he had given her she took it from her desk, scribbled a few words in it, and cheerfully handed it to him, and he read on one page, "Daniel gave me ten dollars," and on the opposite page, "All spent. Balances exactly."

Daniel looked up from the book inquiringly.

"That's as much of an account as you'll ever get from me, Daniel, as to what I did with ten dollars in a whole month! Did you actually suppose I'd give you the items, like a little school-girl?"

And no amount of persuasion, or of fretting and fuming on his part, could induce her to submit to him an itemized account of her allowance.

Her South Carolina property was another bone of contention.

"I can't get a word from that brother-in-law of yours in reply to my letter to him!" Daniel complained one September evening when they were alone in their bedroom just after supper, Margaret, in a pink silk negligé, lying on a couch at the foot of the bed and Daniel seated in an armchair beside her. "The slipshod business ways of those Southerners! What does the man mean?"

"He's such a procrastinator! I must admit Walter's rather lazy. Clever, though. He's considered a mighty intelligent lawyer."

"A clever lawyer has some sense of business, which he does not seem to have!"

"Don't you be so sure of that!"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Well, he does seem to have enough sense of business about him to defraud you out of what belongs to you!" snapped Daniel.

"Walter is an honourable gentleman," Margaret quietly affirmed, "with a sense of honour, Daniel, that to you would be as incomprehensible as a Sanscrit manuscript, or a page of Henry James."

"The quixotic 'sense of honour' of a South Carolinian!" scoffed Daniel. "Oh, I know all about that. Impracticable moonshine! Nothing in it, Margaret. Has no market value."

"No, thank God, it has no market value."

"You're a little simpleton, my dear, about 'values' of any kind, and I wish you wouldn't swear!"

"Can't one thank God except in church and at the vulgar hour of feeding?"

"Be reverent!" Daniel, looking shocked, reproved her. "And I don't see where his sense of honour comes in in his behaviour as to your property!"

"Don't bother about my property, Daniel," Margaret wearily advised. "It's not worth bothering about."

"It's all you have, though," Daniel ruefully retorted.

Margaret offered no reply to this.

"I want you to write to Walter, Margaret, and see whether _you_ can get an answer out of him."

"What about?"

"What _about_? Haven't I just been telling you? You write and demand of him why I receive no answer from him to my repeated inquiries as to your property."

"But I have told you all there is to know about it, Daniel."

"Margaret," Daniel patiently answered, "I have already explained to you how I can make that estate yield you a handsome income."

"By depriving my sister of a home? No, thank you."

"Naturally your sister would also profit by what I would do for the estate."

"Profit at your expense? Not if you could help it, Daniel."

Daniel laughed appreciatively at this flattering tribute to his business acumen.

"I think I see, Daniel, how you would manage the 'deal.' You'd improve the estate, rent it at a high figure, and keep the rent (at least my share, if not my sister's) to pay you for what you had spent."

"Pretty good, my dear! You have some business cleverness yourself, I see, after all! Sufficient, at any rate, to recognize that you ought to be getting your share of your uncle's bequest. Just inform your brother-in-law, in your letter, that you are going to sign over to me the power of attorney to manage your affairs. _That_ will bring him to time and fetch an answer!"

"But I'm not."

"Not what?"

"Not going to sign away any 'power' I may have. I didn't know I had any. It's a pleasant surprise. I shall certainly hold on to it. I need it, whatever it is."

"Without power of attorney to act for you, Margaret, I can't help you. You'll _have_ to give it to me," said Daniel firmly. "I'll bring up a paper from the office on Monday and Jennie and Sadie will witness your signature. Can't you get up and write to Walter now? I'll dictate the letter."

"I wouldn't rise from this comfortable couch, Daniel, if the house were on fire."

"It's very bad, very bad indeed, I'm sure, for you to lie about so much."

"If you were carrying a weight of several tons, I guess you wouldn't be on your feet when you didn't have to."

"'Several tons?' That's a gross exaggeration, Margaret."

"I never was strong on figures or statistics," Margaret admitted.

"Won't you _try_ to get up and write the letter? I very much wish you to," urged Daniel, still quite unable to credit the fact which in these days frequently confronted him, that any feminine member of his household could fail to jump at his least bidding.

"What do you want me to write?" Margaret parried.

"Great heavens!" Daniel cried, exasperated. "I've told you only about a dozen times!"

"A dozen? A gross exaggeration, I'm sure. And to call upon the heavens is irreverent. There, there, I won't tease you," she patted his hand; and he immediately clasped and held it, for he still adored her. "But as I've told you, Daniel, that I won't sign over to you the power of attorney, there's nothing to write to Walter about."

"Is this your idea of not 'teasing' me? I've said that without the power of attorney, I can't help you."

"I don't want that kind of help, my dear, thank you very much."

"Will you write the letter before I go to the office to-morrow morning?"

"Telling Walter I'm not signing over to you the power of attorney? Is that necessary?"

"Very well, Margaret." Daniel rose with dignity and turned away from her. "I'll dictate to my stenographer what I wish you to say to Walter and I'll bring the letter up from the office for your signature."

"Daniel!" Margaret suddenly exclaimed at mention of his stenographer.

He turned about and looked at her.

"Did you _give_ Catherine the note I sent her this morning?"

"I certainly did _not_."

"_Why_ not?"

"You ask me to play the messenger boy to my own clerk! I read your silly note, my dear, and burned it."

Margaret, sinking a bit lower among the cushions of the couch, did not trust herself to answer.

"Now, my dear," said Daniel, "since you can no longer go out, you can take advantage of the chance that fact gives you, to _drop_ this unseemly intimacy, which no doubt by this time you find burdensome enough, especially as you have seen how exceedingly annoying it is to my sisters and to me. We are willing to overlook your having flouted our wishes if you'll now----"

"Has Miss Hamilton been to see me and been turned away?" demanded Margaret, who for the past two weeks had neither seen nor heard a word from her friend, her notes and telephone calls having both failed to bring any response. She had been deeply wounded and worried at Catherine's seeming unfaithfulness to her in her time of dire need; and she had suffered keenly from the deadly loneliness that had engulfed her; for she had, through almost daily association for many weeks, become so deeply bound to Catherine that she felt she could never again know happiness if she lost her. While she had indeed suspected that some treachery on the part of the Leitzels was keeping Catherine away, yet she did not understand how her friend could possibly have failed to receive at least some of the communications she had sent to her; letters which she would have supposed _must_ bring Catherine to her side, if she had to storm the house to get there.

"Have your sisters sent my friend away when she came to see me and kept it from me that she was here?" Margaret repeated in a tone so quiet that Daniel never suspected the volcano it covered.

"She has been told by Jennie every time she called that you wished to be excused. This unseemly intimacy is to _cease_! You will have to understand, Margaret, that I am not a man to be trifled with by a mere woman--a mere girl, I might say!"

"Brave and manly of you, Daniel, certainly."

"If you don't watch out, you will be the cause of my losing the most valuable clerk in New Munich and one to whom I have confided important _private_ business matters, for, if I must, I shall tell her _straight_ that I object to her running after my wife!"

"Oh!"

"I have already hinted to her that you are at last coming to your senses and getting over your silly infatuation for her. I intimated to her that it was only your appreciation of her valuable services to me which had led you to be very nice and friendly to her."

"Do you suppose for an instant, Daniel, that she was idiot enough to believe that?"

"Why shouldn't she believe it?"

"Because she knows me--and she also knows you."

But though Margaret assured herself many times in the course of the wakeful, restless night which followed that Catherine would not believe Daniel's absurd story nor let the family attitude toward her come between them, she really suffered an agony of doubt and fear lest the friendship so precious to her should not be able to stand under the pressure brought to bear upon it.

"Surely Catherine will think I am asking too much of her, to expect her to stick to me through all this! But oh! I can't give her up, I can't! I will not let them separate us!"

The next morning, as soon as Daniel had left the house for his office, she hurried to the telephone and called up Miss Hamilton, knowing that her only chance of getting Catherine was when Daniel was not in his office. She actually trembled with apprehension for fear she should be told that Miss Hamilton had not yet reached the office. But to her joy it was Catherine's own voice that answered her.

"Oh, Catherine! It's Margaret! Catherine, listen! I've been _wanting_ you so! I didn't know why you didn't come, and I only learned last night. Catherine, I'm coming right down to the office, now, in a taxicab, and I want you to come out with me for an hour, for I _must_ see you to straighten things out. Tell the powers that be that you've a headache or small-pox symptoms or something and just _come_. Will you?"

"I will, dear. I'll leave a note on my desk and walk out now, and meet you at the door when you get here."

"I'll be as quick as I can."

She hung up the receiver. But just as she was going to lift it again, to call the taxicab office, her eyes fell upon Jennie and Sadie congregated a few feet away from her, Sadie staring at her in consternation and Jennie in wrath and indignation.

"Margaret!" Jennie suddenly came to her and forcibly pushed her from the telephone. "You ain't to call a taxicab, so you ain't, Margaret! Our Danny ain't to be spited so when _I'm_ close by!"

"Very well," answered Margaret coolly, "I'll go next door and use Mrs. Kaufman's telephone."

"But," gasped Sadie, "that'll make talk yet!"

Margaret, not replying, started for the door.

"Margaret!" cried Jennie sharply, hurrying after her and catching her arm, "how that'll _look_ yet--you going into the neighbours' to 'phone! You _darsent_ go round to our neighbours' making talk!" she commanded. "I won't leave you do it.'"

"Then will you let me use the telephone here?"