Part 17

Ogden saw nothing of them, heard nothing of them. He merely went around in a quiet way among a few old friends, and he dropped in at frequent intervals on the faithful Brower. Brower was sometimes at home and sometimes away; the fire-fiend still kept him on the move. One late September evening, after an interval of a month or more, Ogden repaired again to the house which had once been their common home, and found Brower just back from Minnesota.

He was seated on his trunk, the rigors of whose cover he had softened by the doubled folds of a striped travelling-wrap. He had his brier-wood pipe in his mouth and a book in his hand. It was a paper-bound volume; the back cover was missing, and there was exposed to view the fine, close tabulation of the books composing a well-known "library."

"Well, my dear fellow," cried Brower, rising and grasping his hand, "how are you? Say, I believe you're looking better. Here; put yourself in the light where I can have more of a chance at you."

George stood immovable, and Brower jerked out the elbowed gas-jet, so as to make the light fall upon his visitor's face. It fell on his visitor's head, too, and the whole brown head was sprinkled with silver.

Ogden put his two palms on his temples and spread out his hands until the finger-tips met over the part in his hair.

"There are more," he said, with a smile of quiet sadness; "don't count them again."

"I won't," said Brower. He drew away his eyes, but threw his arm over the other's shoulder.

"I've had quite a trip, this time," he went on, in the tone which we employ when contriving a light diversion. "Been away out into Dakota--Bismarck, Mandan, Yankton, Sioux Falls. I was at the Falls one Sunday."

"Is that any great place to spend Sunday?"

"Lots of folks go there to spend a few Sundays--twelve or fourteen Sundays, and the week-days between. On the evening of _my_ Sunday I went to church."

"I've known you to go to church on Sunday evenings before. Service any different from any other?"

"It was a song service. Don't you suppose the poor creatures waiting along out there in Sioux Falls have got to have their little consolations? Ain't music the great consoler?"

"They _were_ consoled, then?"

"Oh, yes, indeed; the principal consoler had been there himself. He sang tenor."

"Better tenor than the average?"

"Good deal better. The most touching, pathetic tones I ever heard. He sang the 'Angel's Serenade,' with another man playing the violin. It was affecting. One poor lady near me, with a sort of Eastern look about her, just caught up the child in the pew by her side and burst right out crying. I was all broke up, myself."

"That's a good song," declared Ogden. "I always like to hear it."

"You've heard it before, then? At St. Asaph's, perhaps?"

"At St. Asaph's; yes."

"Well," said Brower, "the man you heard sing it at St. Asaph's was the man I heard sing it at Sioux Falls."

"Vibert!"

"Vibert."

George dropped his eyes; he had no wish to pursue the theme further. "What have you there?" he asked. He indicated the book that Brower had left lying on top of the trunk.

"Oh, nothing special. It's just one of those cheap novels. I was merely running it through to see if he really did marry the right one in the end. Might have done it in the first place as well as not." He passed the book to Ogden wrong side up. "I guess it's yours, by rights--one you left behind when you moved out." Ogden turned the book over and read the title. It was--"A False Start."

He started. He blushed. "Yes, perhaps it is," he stammered. He held it awkwardly in his hand for a moment. Brower watched him curiously, yet sympathetically. "Yes," Ogden repeated, in a bold, firm voice, "it _is_ mine." He put it in his inside pocket and buttoned his coat.

"Oh, come," cried Brower, trying to throw a veil of jocularity over his earnestness, "that isn't fair! I've got to finish it. I've got to know whether he did or didn't. Anyway, let me see the end."

"There is no end," said Ogden, soberly. "Or if there is, it has come."

"Then I can only guess." Brower looked at him, with a studious anxiety in his brown eyes. "He made a mistake, sure enough, but I think he sets it right. Yes, I think he sets it right." Ogden's eyes sought the floor.

"Ho; he abides by it."

"He _can_ set it right," said Brower, gravely; "and if he can he ought."'

"Not now; not after--everything. Let bad enough alone."

"Make bad enough better," cried Brower. "Is he the only one to be considered? Upon my word," he went on, with a nervous attempt at lightness, "we are getting these great truths down finer and finer. A couple of years ago we agreed that marriage concerned but two people; now we are finding that it concerns only one. The question simply is--which one?"

"The one who would be most exposed to injury," said Ogden, with a distant mournfulness in his face and voice.

"There are different kinds of injury; there is the injury of commission, and there is the injury of omission. Sometimes the last is harder--on a woman. Why not let the victim choose her own particular woe? Why not be generous enough to give her an opportunity?"

"Not now," groaned Ogden. "You don't know. Not after all--that's happened."

"Well, then," continued Brower, with kindly perseverance, "out goes generosity. Now bring in selfishness and give _that_ a chance. What is our hero going to do? Must there be more sorrow for him, more suffering, more self-punishment, and everlasting dissatisfaction generally? What is he made of? Can he stand it? If so, how long? And if he does, why should he?"

"Brower, Brower!" Ogden cried; "not another word if you care for me--if you care anything at all for me!" He crossed his arms on the table and bowed his head upon them.

Brower passed his hand softly over this head and said no more. He was a patient husbandman; he would sow the good seed and wait for the harvest.

Ogden took the book home with him. He fluttered its leaves a few times; then he sat down on the edge of his bed and read the title-page for an hour. The next night he read it some more and dreamed about it. The next night he was reading it still, and he lay awake thinking of it until daylight.

On the following evening he took the old, familiar way to the West Side.

He found Abbie Brainard at home alone. Mary and her husband had gone out, and the baby had been put to bed.

Abbie was sitting in the half-gloom of one small lamp; the parlor was a little room, and a rather cheap and ugly one. But the lamp, thanks to its beflowered shade, was discreet and reticent in the disclosure of unprepossessing detail; besides, twenty lamps would not have had power to divert his thoughts from the channel through which they were now coursing.

On his entrance she started up to light the gas. She looked pale and worn, and older than he would have believed possible. But he looked older, too, and felt much older than he looked. The light beat down upon his silvered hair, and heightened the glance of pitying surprise that shone from her eyes.

In this increased illumination he saw that fortune had left her, as well as her youth and beauty, as well as the father whose life he had felt to make their union impossible, and whose memory might still keep it so. But she herself, in her own essence, was before him--the same courage, the same resolution, the same tenderness and fidelity. And in him she saw the only man she had ever seen, or had ever cared to see.

To her, he came as a messenger of pity to heal the wounds that knavery and scandal and violence had hacked upon her quivering heart. A messenger of pity, yes; but could he, by any possible chance, find her worthy of the pity that was akin to love?

To him, she appeared as the victim of his own faint-heartedness and faithlessness. After all that he had done to wring her heart, could he venture upon the crowning indignity of offering her his tarnished name?

To her, he stood there as a tower of refuge--a tower from whose summit the swathing fogs might be cleared away by the warm breath of trust and confidence, and whose smirched walls--if smirched indeed they were--might be purified by the tears of love and the fingers of forgetfulness.

To himself, he lay before her as a heap of crumbling and smoke-stained ruin. Every stone cried out for the cleansing power of pity and for the firm and friendly hand that was to rear them all again to their pristine use and comeliness.

The clock had struck eight as he entered; it was striking eleven as he rose to go.

"Not yet," she said, softly. She pressed him back into the depths of his great easy-chair, and, leaning upon its rounded and padded arm, she looked down upon him.

"You take me, then, as I am?" he asked her, soberly.

"How else do you take _me_?"

He raised his hand to his head. "There will be more of them," he said. "They tell me I shall be white at forty."

"How many of them are mine?"

He pressed her hand.

"Not one, not one! Or, no," he continued, with a stronger pressure, "they are all yours--do with them as you please."

He felt something warm drop on his head and trickle down his temples.

"Yes, that is the best thing to do," he said. "To think," he added, with a tender seriousness, "that you might have saved me from them--from every one!"

They were married within a month, and they began their married life in the same house in which he had begun his Western life as a bachelor. Mrs. Gore's kindliness still survived, after the hard rubs of three years of city life, and she spread her sympathetic interest over her new couple with an unstinted hand.

Their wedding involved no social celebration, unless we note their participation in one of a series of great public functions that sometimes mark the early winter. This took place in a vast hall that was luminous in ivory and gold. They sat before a wide curved frame brilliant with a myriad points of light, and listened to the united endeavors of many voices and instruments to please the four thousand people about them. Ogden and his wife had taken places in the balcony. They had toned down existence to a quiet gray; they recognized the middlingness of their lot. Cornelia and her husband, unknown to the Ogdens, had seats on the floor beneath.

One box in the two long, parallel rows remained vacant during the first and second acts. As the prelude to the third act began among the violins the box was claimed. A party of four entered.

"There she is," said Cornelia to herself, in her place on the main floor. "Just you wait. Burt's smart and I'm careful, and we shall catch up to you yet!"

"Who are those people?" asked Abbie, turning towards her husband. "Who is the gentleman with gray hair?" She was beginning to admire her husband's own.

The two ladies of the party had seated themselves; the two gentlemen were busy with their own and their companions' wraps in the back of the box.

"That is Mr. Atwater, the architect. The lady in yellow is his wife. The tall, brownish man, just handing the glass, is Mr. Ingles; he owns the--the Clifton."

"And the other lady?" his wife continued. She indicated a radiant, magnificent young creature, splendid, like all her mates, with the new and eager splendor of a long-awaited opportunity. This new-comer had nodded smilingly to many people on entering--to her neighbors on either side, to a large dinner-party that filled three boxes across the house. She seemed pleased to have so many persons to bow to so publicly; and everybody whom she favored seemed equally glad of an opportunity to return her attention.

Ogden looked at her and turned his eyes away.

"I--I have never seen her before," he said. "I don't know who she is," he appeared to imply.

But he knew perfectly well who she was. He knew that she was Cecilia Ingles, and his heart was constricted by the sight of her. It is for such a woman that one man builds a Clifton and that a hundred others are martyred in it.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Cliff-Dwellers, by Henry Blake Fuller