Part 15

"I guess he is," answered Walworth. "He's anxious about his wife, for one thing."

"Well, she does look pretty bad, that's a fact. I don't believe she will live the year out. The first cold weather will carry her off."

"Don't say that!" exclaimed Mrs. Floyd. "She's delicate, and she has got to take care of herself. But to talk about dying--that's another thing."

"I'm not so sure." And Walworth shook his head gravely.

"But there's something more than that," said Freddy. "It's money. Gad! how they are fixed up! How can he stand it?"

"He can't," answered Walworth; "he's falling behind. And there is that house of his empty yet. I'd take it off his hands myself if it wasn't for being left in the same fix too. Wish I could help him; he hasn't said anything, though."

"He won't, either," replied Pratt. "He ain't that kind."

"Well, I don't see that we need trouble ourselves about help," Ann broke in. "He harmed me, anyway, a great deal more than he helped me--with that precious brother-in-law of his."

"I imagine he knows all about the brother-in-law, too, by this time," rejoined Walworth. "Haven't you got almost tired of twanging that string?"

He wondered if Ogden's brother-in-law were really as trying as his own sister-in-law.

Still other callers favored the Ogdens. Among them was one that had not called at the other house--that had never before, indeed, called at any house whatever. About the first of August a little debutante appeared on the social scene and was "received" with all the care and flattering attention that the new apartment had at its disposal She was a pale and fragile little bud, like many of the exotics with which her mother was fond of decorating her rooms; she had the same slender fingers that set these flowers around, and the same large blue eyes that studied their effect.

A nurse came, and she stayed long after the time when a mere nurse-maid should have taken her place. Curtains were pulled down and kept so; the doctor's carriage (and sometimes more than one) stood waiting before the big doorway of the "Westmoreland"; bottles big and little accumulated on tables and shelves; and cautious tiptoeing became the habit of the whole household; until, at the end of a month, mother and child were doing as well--and only as well--as could be expected. This was not well at all. But both were out of immediate danger, and presently both appeared to mend.

The nurse-maid now arrived, and the carriage and the cap. The languid young mother was capable of taking but a tepid interest in most things, but she rallied her powers to enforce the cap, Cecilia Ingles was her model here as in other matters, and the model was followed closely. Not every girl would wear a cap, but at last a capable one was found who was willing to. The lace cover of the perambulator and the white frills of its propeller were a frequent sight on the streets for a little time; then the necessity developed for the transfer of mother, child, and nurse, during a few weeks, to the convenient sanatorium provided by nature in southern Wisconsin.

The little party was back again in town at the opening of the fall season. Jessie employed her dwindling powers in a partial resumption of the duties which she felt that "society" demanded of her, and the child taxed the energies and resources of the maid, who received little real assistance from its mother. There were small gusts and starts of maternal affection now and then, but they would quickly run their brief course and baby would be carried out of the room. Ogden wondered, from a curiously impersonal outside standpoint, whether he was to attribute this to his wife's waning vitality or to an inherent incapacity for deep and genuine feeling.

But this matter soon passed beyond the confines of discussion. The day came when the nurse was dismissed, the carriage was put away, and Brower went with the stricken father to select a lot in the cemetery. It came that the two stood together one forenoon before a wide and polished mahogany counter, and bent their heads over a handsome plat that was neatly lettered and numbered, and was shaded in pleasant tints of blue and green. A man stood on the other side of the counter and tapped the drawing here and there with the reversed end of a fat penholder.

"This is a good section," he said; he was pausing over a green oval which was intersected by four or five fine black lines. "You are right on a leading drive-way"--carrying the pen-holder along between the waving of two other and wider lines that ran parallel--"and just over here is the lake"--with his little finger on a tangled and shapeless patch of blue.

"That small lot could be made to do," said Brower, softly.

"This is the most fashionable part of the whole place," the man went on, with an indifferent loudness. "See here." He took down a large warped photograph from its place on a dusty shelf behind him, and gave it a dexterous wipe with his elbow. "This monument here is just across the drive-way, and it cost twenty thousand dollars. Put up this summer by Arthur J. Ingles--I guess you've heard of _him_?

"Good God!" groaned Ogden. "Have I got to compete with that man even in the graveyard?"

The next afternoon a sombre little procession took its way limits-ward to a tract outside, which was tenderly enclosed by great stretches of barbed wire, and was neighbored by the noise and glare of several stone-cutting yards. This little train traversed the raw and ragged edges of the town, and trailed across the succeeding reach of open prairie-land, over which led a long, straight, sandy road, dotted here and there with houses of refreshment for the occupants of mourning-coaches and for their drivers. There was the raw chill in the air which the north sometimes sends down into our early October days. The poor mother sobbed and coughed and shivered in her corner of the carriage; she returned to her home ill and exhausted, and entered it never to leave it alive.

It costs when a baby comes, it costs when a baby goes, it costs when a wife lies sick and dying, and Ogden now confessed himself almost driven to the wall.

"I know, George," his wife said, "that everything has been a great expense; but I'm sure papa would help us if you only spoke to him."

"What!" he cried, harshly.

She started, and presently was all a-tremble. Then she fell back weakly and coughed long and violently. "Oh, George, how could you?" she gasped.

"Forgive me, my poor child," he said, and took her hand. "But I could never do anything like that--never."

The next day he took the McDowell notes and spent what time he could spare among the brokers. They passed commendingly on the prompt payment of the interest as shown by the endorsements; but McDowell was pretty well known, and it was intimated that endorsements of another sort would be needed to make negotiation possible.

Then he got out the abstract of one of the McDowell tracts--the only one that he personally and individually had any right to use. "You've got considerably more than a pocketful there," the door-keeper of the Clifton Deposit Vaults said to him as he passed out. He left the abstract with a firm of mortgage brokers for examination. In the course of a week they advised him that a release had been over-looked--an instrument which must show of record before a loan could be effected on the property.

The tract had been put through a good many paces, and some of McDowell's work had been too hurried to be careful. The man to give the necessary release was a professional tax-buyer. He lived on the mistakes and misfortunes of other people--their sins of omission and commission; and such an act from such a man would cost something. It might be ten dollars, or fifty, or five hundred.

He waited in this harpy's outer office, while another caller, a woman, claimed attention in the inner one. It was Ann Wilde; he recognized her and she recognized him. She threw a scowling glance upon him, and her harsh and vindictive tones fell on his ears for several succeeding minutes. She knew his necessities; could she be making them known to another?

It seemed so when his turn came. The release would be given only on payment of a sum that, in his present circumstances, was simply impossible.

He seemed now to have exhausted all expedients--all legitimate ones. A bitter recollection of that Sunday drive in the country came over him; he had indeed given a free rein to his wife, and just how close he was to graze against ruin only the future could show. He spent a miserable, sleepless night, and at daybreak he had decided to tax the bank for his own necessities--relying upon the present maturing of his notes to set himself right within a month or two. Do not inquire as to his precise method--there are many ways to take: the actual appropriation of currency, the abstraction of securities, the overissue of certificates of stock, and so on and on. He chose the method which seemed liable to the lightest misconstruction and allowable of the promptest reparation. He avoided seeing himself in the aspect of a criminal by pleading his own cruel needs and by believing in his ability to make a prompt and complete restitution. Perhaps neither of these two reasons could have stood alone, but they leaned together and held each other up--a precarious poise that was not long to endure.

XXII

It endured, in fact, scarcely a fortnight. It lapsed at the close of a dull October day--a day that was within one of the first anniversary of his marriage. Let the means by which he was detected be asked no more than the means through which he transgressed. The delicate mechanism of a bank's accounts responds sensitively to the slightest and most ingenious variation; and it may be, too, that some one in this particular bank was watching for the slip and was waiting for the chance to expose and punish it.

The smoky dusk of the short afternoon was falling outside, while within, under the illumination made by a single electric light, a mother, in the same room where one of Brainard's daughters had plead for the other, was now pleading with him for her son.

No taint had ever fallen before on any of her family or connections. She was crushed and dazed at the thought that anything like this had happened, could have happened, had had the slightest need of happening. And she was dumfounded that all explanation fell upon heedless ears, and that all offers of restitution encountered such, stubborn, brutish, and determined opposition.

"We have lands," she cried, with the tears coursing down her anxious face. "We can make this good, twice and three times over. What more can you want?"

But Brainard _did_ want something more. He wanted the ruin of her son.

"A bank can't deal in real estate," he said doggedly.

He sent a malevolent glance across the table on whose far edge Ogden's bowed head was resting. Beside Ogden stood Fairchild; there was a look of sympathetic distress upon his kindly face.

"It is true," he said, in a low and quiet tone, "that it is not allowable for us to make a loan upon real property; but it would not be amiss for us to take it in payment of this--this--"

"Theft!" cried Brainard loudly. Ogden winced and shuddered; his mother sank into a chair with a low moan.

"Look here, Fairchild," the old man went on, holding up his forefinger with an offensively masterful effect of caution, "it will pay you to go pretty slow just about here. This"--he wagged his head contemptuously towards the bowed: head of the culprit--"was _your_ man. You took his letters; you put him in here. Just stop and think of that!"

Fairchild bit his lip.

"And the other man, before him, was yours. Don't forget that, either." His face showed a cruel and malignant grin.

Fairchild flushed, and lowered his eyes to the floor in silence. Ogden half raised his head to look at him; what could these words mean? He looked at his mother, too; she was lying back with her face in her hands.

The young man's own dace was mapped with the lines of a worry that goads one on to desperation, and it was painted with the blended hue that comes from shame and anxiety and fear and the exhausting struggles carried on through long and sleepless nights. It was hard to face these other faces; it was hard to face even the light of day, thick and dulling though it might be. His head drooped again to the friendly dusk of the table-top before him.

"By Heaven," Brainard went on, "not another man comes into this bank except under a guarantee; and he'll pay the premium for it if he don't stay more than a week. You might think, in a small bank like this, that some kind of eye could be kept on things; but it seems not. It's pick and steal, all the time; first one, then another. No sooner is young Pratt rooted out than this fellow comes up. One steady string of flea-bites--I can't stand it; I won't stand it. Do you think I am going to have Shayne and Cutter and all the rest of 'em go around and tell how Brainard's always got somebody else's hand in his pants pocket and never finds it out? Not very much. I do find it out and I'm going to punish it. You needn't ask me to hold off--it's no use. There's a law for this, and that law is going to take its course."

His white hair stood up in a stiff shock over his forehead, and the gray gristle sprouting on his lip moved up and down forbiddingly as the lip itself worked over the broken row of his teeth. The red veins in his nose showed more redly yet, and his fists were clenched at the ends of his down-hung arms with the straightened tension of an inexorable will.

"My poor boy! My poor boy!" his mother cried. She came over to him and bowed her head on his.

Fairchild looked at Brainard--a look that called for all his self-control and fortitude. "This is too hard," he said. "There was provocation for him, and there are means to make everything good."

"See here, Fairchild," cried the enraged old man, "you have got to keep out of this, if you want to stay friends with me. We've pulled together a good while, but we shall pull apart after five seconds more of this. That young man there has fooled along with us a little too far. He has had his fun, and now he shall pay for it. He shall; by God, I say he shall!"

His voice rose to a harsh and strident cry, and his great fist fell with a ponderous thud on the table before him.

A second later another hand was heard--on the other side of the door. It was faint, but it was audible. It had been preparing for five long and hesitating minutes. To the heart that guided this hand the five seemed five-and-twenty.

Fairchild moved swiftly towards the door and laid his hand upon the knob to prevent any intrusion.

The knock was repeated. He opened the door to a narrow crack. Then he opened it wider.

Abbie Brainard stood on the threshold.

She stepped in swiftly and softly. She shut the door behind her quickly and then leaned her back against its shining panels.

Her face was pale; her bosom was heaving; but her gray eyes gave out the strong and steady light of courage and resolution.

Ogden saw her. He locked his jaws, and took a firm hold on the two arms of his chair, and raised himself and stood erect before her. Had not she herself, on this very spot, once done the same for him? However it might be, or might have been, with others, here, at least, was one who should not see him humbled.

There was no salutation of any kind on either side. She saw him, but seemed to be looking beyond him rather than at him; and in his eyes she stood there with the remote inaccessibility of some distant snow-peak.

Her father turned towards her.

"Abbie! You here? What do you want? What do you mean by coming in like this? Go out again!"

She looked at him with a cool and quiet inflexibility. But her voice was low and trembling as she said,

"I shall stay."

"You can't; you mustn't. You don't want to mix up in this business--you don't understand."

He laid one hand on her arm, and with the other he reached out towards the door-knob.

She withdrew her arm from the hold of his fingers.

"I understand," she said, immovably.

He drew back. "You do? Well, stay then, if you will, and understand better. Learn what kind of a man he really is."

He thrust out his arm towards Ogden, with a cruel and contemptuous smile.

"He came here with letters," he began. "We gave him a chance. Nobody really knew what he was--"

Ogden stood there straight before him. He ground his teeth together to keep his face composed; behind him his nails dug into the palms of his hands, as he held himself back from springing forward and fastening them around the throat of Abbie Brainard's father. There was a ringing in his ears, and through it there sounded faintly the fine tones of Fairchild, speaking to Mary Brainard:

"Nobody really knows who he is, or who his people are, or where he is from ... a town full to overflowing with single young men ... from everywhere. They are taken on faith. Most of them are all right, no doubt; but others--"

He was now one of the "others"; his "people," whom no one had known, were to be known now, after years of probity, as the relatives of a--

"Nobody really knew who he was," Brainard repeated; "but he was taken right in and given a good place. Hasn't he ever wondered why? Is it so easy to go into a new town, and get a good job in a bank the very first thing? Wasn't there any other men to jump at the chance of a position half as good--ain't the city full of 'em? Wasn't there any of 'em in the bank itself who was waiting for the place themselves--and had a right to it, too? Why was there a vacant place to fill, anyhow? Because, a week before, another man had done just what this man has done. He was your man, Fairchild, too. And why did this one here come stepping in ahead of all the old ones? You fixed it, Fairchild; you liked his looks and his talk, you said. Another bad guess for you."

Fairchild studied the carpet with abashed eyes, as were he himself the culprit.

"Yes," Brainard continued, "he was put in a good place and he was pushed right along. Hasn't he ever guessed why? Does a new man come into an office like this, and get as far along inside of a year as he has, without there being any reason for it 2 I'll tell him the reason for it. I did it because my girl here--"

"Father!" cried Abbie, with face aflame. "No! No!"

"You say you understand," he said, turning towards her. "Now, let _him_ understand, too. I advanced him to this position," he went on shamelessly, "because my girl here asked me to."

"No, father! No!" the poor child cried. She threw her shamefaced head on Mrs. Ogden's bosom. She had never seen her before, but under such circumstances the only place for a woman's face was on another woman's breast.

"Yes, you did, too--ask me," he went on, with increased hardihood. "Or just the same as asked--I knew what you meant, well enough. And I said to myself I'd do it. One girl went wrong," he continued, with a choking in his throat, "and I wanted to do what I could to--I wanted Abbie to do different; I wasn't going to have her carried off by another infernal scoundrel."

Ogden flushed and paled and sank down into his chair. His head dropped into his hands; there was no possibility of his holding it up before anything like this.

"And so I helped him on. I said, 'If I do the right thing by him, he will do the right thing by--her; he will act like a man.' I _did_ do the right thing by him--and what then? He had been hanging around all the spring--taking walks and sitting out in front and borrowing books. But the moment I put him on his legs what did he do?"

He was addressing the young man's mother now, whose tear-stained face showed over Abbie's black hat, and whose poor old hand was laid tenderly on Abbie's shoulder. It was plain to every one now that the question was not one of money. Ogden saw clearly enough at last why he had suffered wreck when so many others had ridden the waves. Pratt had filched and had escaped. McDowell had plundered right and left and had never been brought down. Brainard himself had piled up a scandalous fortune and yet had contrived to evade the law. But none of them had come athwart the mortified rage of a father--a father who had humbled his inborn savageness and pride for a daughter's sake and had humbled himself in vain.

Ogden glanced across towards Abbie. She rested on his mother's shoulder as once, almost, and in this very room, she had rested on his. He knew why she had come; he recognized her devotion and her bravery. She had overlooked his pitiful palterings; she had forgiven the final slight to which they had led; she had imperilled her modesty and mortified her self-love' by coming here that she might save him from her father's vengeance.

Her father looked at her now and took a softer tone.

"She's the best girl there ever was in the world," he declared, with a choking voice and a moistened glimmer in his eyes; "and the smartest--she knows how to do everything; she's the only real comfort I've ever had. She would be a credit to any man, I don't care who. And what does he pass her over for? For another," he went on, with a recrudescence of his insane and primitive jealousy, "who can't care for her house, who couldn't be a mother to his child, who has ruined him by her extravagance--"

"Stop!" cried Ogden. He rose and approached Brainard. There was a threatening glitter in his eyes, and convulsive twitches played among his fingers.

"Yes, stop, for Heaven's sake," said Fairchild, laying an expostulatory hand on the old man's arm. "Stop," he murmured again; "his wife is dying."

Abbie rushed between Ogden and her father. "George! George!" she cried. "Don't! Be patient!"

"What if his wife _is_ dying?" called out the infuriated old wretch. "Is that any reason for lying down when he has slighted my daughter and robbed me!"

"For shame, father! For shame!" She hid her face in her hands, and her tears gushed through them.

Ogden paused, stung and quivering. His hands dropped; his fingers relaxed. His wife was dying! Nobody had told him that before, and he had never dared to tell it to himself. But it was true, and he knew it.

Abbie rose again and confronted her father. The tears were still in her eyes and a wide blush suffused her cheeks.

"Father, you shall not punish him. He may have done wrong, but there was reason for it. And any wrong he _has_ done can be set right."

Ogden's eyes were bedimmed, but through the moisture he seemed to see again the sight that closed the evening of his one-day wedding journey towards the north; again he stood on the bridge, and the sun set over one lake while the moon rose over the other. Only now, with Abbie Brainard's blushes before his body's eye and his wife's pale face before his mind's eye, a confusion came alike over his thought and his vision; it was now the sun rising on him at the moment that the pallid moon was going down. He looked at her and she looked at him, and in the eyes of both there was read the confession of a great mistake. Then her eyes drooped for shame and his for disloyalty, and neither one was able to look into the other's face again.

"Do you defend _him_?" her father cried. "Can you forgive _her_? I can't do either. No quarter; don't ask it, Abbie. He has chosen his course--he is responsible for his acts. And he shall answer for them, as any other man must who crosses me."

He flung open the door and passed out. Fairchild stood anxiously over the chair in which Abbie lay back panting for breath. Ogden pressed her hand and turned towards his mother.

"Come, let us go," he said, and the two passed out into the great vestibule of the Clifton. He signalled the elevator.