Chapter 2

The next morning he plunged again into a stress of work with his old swing and intensity, as if single-handed at one spurt he was to make his way to the close of his labors. He ate his hurried meals at a little restaurant near the laboratory, and came back to his rooms late at night, unexhausted, nervously eager to begin again.

IV

Ten days went by. One morning he woke late, listless and unprepared for the usual tussle. The June sun was pouring into his rooms, the old portières shaking gently in the soft breeze. Outside the world was flooded with sunlight. The new green grass, the full bushes along the paths, the warm blue of the sky seemed to mock his petty ardors, his foolish boyish designs of making prodigious strides. Life was not accomplished that way. One made a little, a very little step, then came lassitude; later, one must go over the same ground again. There were no great strides in nature. All was accomplished by subtle change. He dressed leisurely and looked about for a comfortable breakfast. There was something stronger than work in the world, especially to-day. He longed to meet the sunlight and earthly blessedness; it was such a small thing to fag one's self out at the laboratory. Half unconsciously he strolled toward the livery stable where he kept his nag. And then a quarter of an hour later he found himself on the turnpike, trotting along the fresh-water meadows, sniffing the air and the scented brooks. He laughed at himself. His horse plunged, freakish from his long rest in the stable. Suddenly he spurred on and rode furiously over the country roads, as if mad to reach a certain end. A little later, he cantered up the gravelled drive of the Four Corners, his horse wet and trembling, and he with a craving unexplained, a desire that had found a swift, brutal expression.

"You took a long time to think about it," she was looking up at him reproachfully, cool and fresh, with a morning blitheness about her, a physical calm that he had not felt before. The horse shivered and poked his head around to look at her.

He flung himself off the horse, and took her hands; she reached him two as if one for a handshake would be inexpressive.

"But it is splendid now that you have come! We have a whole, long, quiet day!" Her tones were calm and slow, full of the summer peace and warmth. He felt straightway content with himself. "Come," she continued, smiling. "I will make you a cool drink. Mamma has gone to town and Ruby is off somewhere in the pony cart." When she had left him on the veranda he laughed at his prudish fancies that had pestered him a fortnight ago. This June morning she had exactly the necessary amount of animation and health. All was well with her, and at peace.

They had much gentle desultory conversation. She took him about the place, showed him the old orchard where her great-grandmother's pupils had played--one end was now made into a tennis-court, and the stable with its traces of the old barn where the Rev. Roper Ellwell had kept his horse and cow. Then there were little pigs and chickens, the various gardens that were all dear to her, where she patted and caressed the plants as if they had been alive. She took him to her own den, a little room where the grandfatherly sermons had once been written, and where hung a copy of that oil portrait which Thornton had seen in the Camberton Hall.

"Am I not like him?" she asked suddenly, placing herself in the same light as the portrait.

"Yes," Thornton answered, "with a difference."

"What is it?" she pressed him anxiously.

"I don't know, the something that has come in with the three generations," he answered, slowly.

"Tell me honestly," she persisted, with all the egotism of youth aroused over a personal verdict.

"Shall I?" he said, seriously. She grew grave, but nodded. Thornton watched the color leave and a trace of helplessness cross her face.

"The old fellow," he kept looking from the portrait to the woman before him, "in spite of his stiff board costume and the manner he's painted in, was a great lump of fire. It burned hard in him, burned away flesh and common passions; he must have been a restless, fervent man. You are calmer," he ended, stupidly.

"Yes, you mean that his fire has burnt out; that I am weak as water, when he was strong."

"No, not that, exactly," Thornton protested.

"Yes, you did," she reiterated, sadly. "And it is so, too. I am generally so tired. There are only hours like these, when something flows in and I forget things and am happy. But it fades away, it fades away."

They stood silent before the portrait. Suddenly she remembered herself.

"Luncheon must be ready."

Ruby came in for luncheon and made amusing talk. She had been into the village and was full of the farmers.

"I should think they would go crazy," she ended, scornfully. "What have they got to live for? I don't wonder that the girls go into the mills and do anything rather than sit about this little hole."

Later they set out for the fields as the afternoon sun was quietly going down behind the fringe of pines that skirted the horizon. The atmosphere of the day had changed and become like the still calm of perfected life. The little aspirations of the morning, the fascinations of nature, had given place to a content full of warmth. Miss Ellwell took a winding wood-road that led first across the meadow, then over the pine-needles to a little pond. As they sauntered along Thornton watched his companion draw in the saturated air of the summer afternoon, as if consciously living thereon. She seemed to him detached, like a plant that drew its best power away from man, in fields and woods, a kind of parasite.

"You love this?" he said, idly.

"Love it! I live on it. I come out here and sit down under the trees and close my eyes. Then the odor from the earth seems to enter me and make me over. Do you suppose grandfather Roper ever had such desires, such coarse joys in nature?"

"No, his ancestors had lived that for him. He had it stored up in him, and he gave it out in moral passion."

"And--they have gone on giving it out in passion----"

She raised her heavy lids questioningly, dreamily.

"So I must be planted again, for I am exhausted. Ah, well, she is a kindly mother, is old nature, and I like to lie down in her arms."

A little brook flowed sluggishly about big tufts of meadow-grass. The late violets and swamp pinks sent up heavy odors, mixed with a strong earthy smell. They seemed to be in the midst of nature's housekeeping and walked lightly as unannounced guests. They wandered on to an open patch in the woods and sat down, sinking into the dry, heated wood-moss. Thornton had no desire to talk; she, who had listened to him the other time, now took him in charge.

"You are so far away, here, in the heat and the earth; so far away from the world. One gets tired always trying to catch up, and always being tired."

As she talked he felt his limbs heavy in obedience to her words. His mind became tranquil as under the influence of a narcotic; it seemed such a little thing what he did over there in Camberton, and so far removed from the strong pulse that beat beneath his body deep down in the earth.

"Why are men so foolish," she whispered on. "We want really a few things only; quiet, rest, peace, tranquil bodies, and this great earth to shimmer and change forever." His eyes followed her face. Her skin was so transparent that each word seemed to make a dot of flashing color; her bosom gently moved in rhythm to her words, and her eyes with the heavy falling lids smiled at him in conspiracy with the mouth.

"But that is not all the story--repose!" his words sounded hollow, like a lesson he had learned by rote and propriety had obliged him to repeat.

"No!" her voice was lower yet than ever; "then comes love, and with love will flow in the passion and energy of life!"

The words moved her body. What she said seemed to him intensely true for the moment. Again propriety offered protest.

"And the other things--success and reputation and the good that the world needs."

She moved her hands carelessly.

"You would not need them." There was great scorn in that _them_. They lay quietly for several minutes while the earth murmured about. She had drawn him passively into her net. Like some parasitic growth she was taking her strength from him. But it was a new side to him, this yielding, and so in a few moments he remembered that hard, angular self that went about the week in his clothes. He jumped up.

"I must ride back."

She followed without protest. She seemed to swim beside him, happy in elemental, very simple thoughts, a thin color flushing over her face.

"We have been so happy. It has been such a long, full day. Will you ever come again?" They stood in the shadows on the lawn. He was minded to say, _no_, but as he took her hand the Ellwell carriage drove up the country road. After glancing at it she blanched. Ellwell got out of the carriage unsteadily, with his large handsome face flushed and distorted. He was half drunk, and in a great passion. Seizing the carriage whip in one hand and taking the bridle of the horse by the other, he lashed the trembling beast for some seconds. Mrs. Ellwell slipped out of the rear seat and half ran into the house. Bradley got out of the carriage slowly, with a sneer on his face, and nodded to Thornton. He smiled, as if to say: "Badly jagged, old fool."

"Go, there is Pete with your horse!" Miss Ellwell whispered. He was about to put his foot in the stirrup, and get away from the uncomfortable scene, when old Ellwell turned toward him.

"Don't let me scare you, young man," he said, with his regulation courtesy, the air of the old Ellwells. Thornton shook hands with him, noticing his bloodshot eyes, the puffy folds under the eyelids, the general bloat of an ill-regulated human animal. "Are you going before dinner?" Ellwell continued. Thornton murmured something about duties and engagements. Ellwell bowed and lifted his hat. Miss Ellwell advanced as if to say good-by, then stopped. Her face was sad. Thornton's horse wheeled impatiently. He grasped the saddle, and a moment later he was down the road out into the self-respecting fields and woods, where all had the sanctified peace of a starlight night.

"She did not like to ask me again, poor girl," he murmured.

V

Whether Jarvis Thornton would have yielded again of his own accord to the impulse to travel Four Corners-ward remained unsolved. He had on hand some experiments that he was undertaking for a paper which he had to deliver at the close of the month. His day of dissipation seemed to spur him on once more along the accustomed path, and only in the few lazy moments at the end of the day did his mind recur to the still meadows baked in the June sun, and to the woman who had tempted him into a dangerous world. One evening, when he was speculating luxuriously on that day of impulse, Roper Ellwell knocked at his door and entered.

Ellwell had never been there before. Jarvis Thornton had seen him from time to time at the A. Ô.; but a fast set, the Roper-Ellwell crowd, having made the club over into a drinking and poker-playing establishment, he had ceased to go there frequently. Ellwell was considerably battered, Thornton noticed, as he invited him, coolly, to take a seat and help himself to a cigar. He had come to pour himself out, and a dirty enough story there was to tell. He had been dropped from Camberton for general inadequacy; but that was the least of his troubles.

"I could go to the old man and tell him that," he explained, "his own record at Camberton wasn't any too fine, and he has a grudge against the old place. I am in here for a lot of money, which he will have to stand. But----"

Thornton looked at him unsympathetically, without commenting on his story. Why should he be troubled with the Ellwell excesses in the fourth generation? He failed yet to see the point to all these confidences.

"Your break-up is fairly complete," he said at last, coldly. "Many go down here, make a slip and bark their shins, but you have used two years in doing for yourself altogether."

Roper Ellwell hung his head.

"So the Dean said; and there's something else." Jarvis Thornton ceased to smoke as he went on. "I am married; the old man will never stand that, and it will break up the mater and my sisters fearfully." In short, he had come to Thornton, with the confidence that an acquaintance with an older man inspires, to beg him to break the news to his people. Imbeciles gravitate to the strong.

"Why don't you go yourself?" Thornton inquired, sick of the foolish affair. But one glance at the drooping, disjointed, miserable figure before him answered his question. He sat for some minutes debating the point with himself. He could make a conventional excuse, and play the man of the world, who did not involve himself with unpleasant people. But his imagination presented the picture of the two sad women; their last hope knocked away by this cropping out of the family blight. Perhaps he could put it to them in a better light than either Roper or his father. He saw again the girl's face standing on the lawn in the summer twilight--a face that must be constantly sad.

"Well," he said, "is she a bad lot, the woman you have induced to share your future?"

Young Ellwell was too miserable to take fire at this brutality.

"No, she isn't their sort though; she is a Swedish girl; she is a nurse in a hospital."

"You were forced to marry her?" the older man asked.

Ellwell nodded assent.

"And now she is making it uncomfortable for you."

"I am trying to find something to do," the young fellow protested. "Then I won't trouble them; but if I go down there the old man will fling me out of the house."

In short, Jarvis Thornton rose early the next morning, and before the sun had heated the road, was on his way to the Four Corners. There was not much that he could do, after all, in his pitiful errand; at least, for the mother. One more insult for her to accept, to be borne in stupid passivity. But for the daughter who had to live, it would be a different question; and by the time he had reached Middleton, he had not made up his mind how the tale was to be told.

It was warm when he walked his horse over the gravelled drive at the Four Corners. Mrs. Ellwell and her elder daughter were sitting on the piazza sewing. Pete was washing carriages; the dogs were asleep in the grass. The place was quiet and in peace. The women received him cordially; a bright color spread over the girl's face with a contented smile that seemed to speak intimately to him. He plunged into his business quickly, putting the case sympathetically before them. They listened without a word, the girl's face trembling and twitching slightly. Ruby had joined them, and Thornton interrupted his story, but Mrs. Ellwell motioned him to go ahead. While he was talking he hunted about for some bit of light to throw on the situation at the end. "He wants to go away, and it might be best, if we can find something for him. I have an uncle in Minnesota on a railroad. He might find a little place to transplant him to." He stopped.

"You have an uncle in Minnesota," Mrs. Ellwell repeated, mechanically, her dry eyes staring idealess at him. "You are very, very kind." She rose and walked into the house.

"Fool," Ruby muttered; her dark face flamed up angrily. Thornton noticed how much she resembled her handsome father. She had more fire in her than Roper second. "I suppose he hadn't pluck enough to come home with his own story. Father will be pretty mad. What did he _marry_ that woman for!"

"Well," Thornton answered, calmly. "Perhaps we can build on that, the fact that he _did_ marry her. That seems to me the most promising part of it."

The young girl cast a contemptuous glance at him and rustled into the house after her mother. Miss Ellwell had not uttered a word; her face was bent over her work; and he noticed a few suspicious spots on the dark linen cloth she was hemming. He turned his face away to the sunny lawn and the dark, full-leaved trees that lay beyond the road. A flock of sparrows were rowing in sharp tones among the leaves. The house-dog picked himself up lazily and walked over to Thornton, placing a wet muzzle on his trousers. The place was so peaceful, such a nest of an old Puritan! And here were the demons that the divine had warred against holding his home as their arsenal. When he permitted himself to turn his face to the girl at his side, she was grave and pale, and somehow exhausted. All the weariness of the struggle between flesh and will seated itself in her heavy-lidded, sad eyes.

"You must be a brave woman and help him," Thornton said, feeling the conventionality and silliness of any remark. "He mustn't be hounded out of here like a dog, but made to feel that he can make a decent future." She nodded. "It isn't the money," she said at last. "Though I can't see where it will come from. Nor the marriage, but the perpetual disgrace. It goes on increasing. We are all bad, worn out; dear old grandpapa was the last good one. It is what you call a curse, a disintegration. Why struggle? If we could all go to sleep and sleep it off? There is nothing ahead, nothing ahead!"

"That is folly," Thornton explained. "We have all been held in thrall by this curse of heredity. It has been talked at us, and written at us, and proved to us, until it makes us cowards!"

She looked at him sadly.

"'The sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation,'" she repeated.

"Damn!" He rose excitedly. "That is the most awful doctrine in the Bible, and we have believed it like sheep until we really make it true. When a weak man wants to go to thunder, he thinks of an uncle who was a drunkard, or a father who was a thief, and he goes and does likewise. Naturally! And now science comes along and says it isn't so, or at any rate there is strong doubt about it. In a few years we may prove that it isn't so and free mankind from that superstitious curse."

The girl comprehended him but half. "Why, I think that old grandfather Roper must have been a very passionate man, who fought against himself and conquered."

"Yes," Thornton admitted, "there was a lot of vice bottled up among the Puritan saints. It has been spilling out ever since, but that makes no difference," he went on vehemently to explain his theories. Somehow, now that his heart was touched, he put passion and conviction into what his sober reason held as speculation. He made clear to her the newest theories from Germany. He had come out as a diplomat in a distasteful cause; he became a pleader full of conviction. His imagination woke into a flame, and he saw anew, vitally, all the old problems that he had handled coldly in the laboratory. The woman sat dumbly, sucking in his statements and arguments. Then, as they stood on the grass waiting for Pete to bring up his nag, she said:

"We are free, you think." Her mind was laboring with his words.

"In a large measure, we can start fresh: the die is not cast beforehand." He added less warmly.

"But we copy what is about us. If we can't escape from what you call the current of ideals we are born in, what difference does it make? It amounts to the same thing!"

She, the woman, pleaded with him, the man, to free her, to take her away. He answered, tenderly:

"We can; each one can live his own life as a stranger to his shipmates. You have done so."

"It means a sacrifice. Some one must lift us. From some other life we could get the strength, and that other one loses--just so much as he gives."

Thornton's brows contracted. She read the comment of reason that ran beside his text.

"Who knows? Everything can't be weighed in scales."

She did not ask him if he would return; she knew in her heart that he would.

VI

Certain natural results followed from Jarvis Thornton's first interference in the Ellwell family troubles. He felt bound to do what he could with the Minnesota uncle to secure some kind of a berth for young Roper. In a few weeks he was able to make another journey to the Four Corners, with the definite offer of a small agency in a little frontier town. He found the family conditions troubled, but temporarily quiet. Old Ellwell, after a passionate and violent attack, had lapsed into a glum silence. The son kept out of his way; hung about the premises during the day-time, and took himself off as often as the mother and sisters could find money for him to spend. After several visits to the Four Corners, in such times of family stress, Thornton found himself on the most intimate terms with the young woman who seemed to realize the suffering most.

He made up his mind that, come what might, he should, in justice to his father, tell him the story. Thornton's father was an elderly man whom most good Boston people were glad to know. He had a little fortune; he owned a comfortable little brick box on Marlboro' Street; he had cultivated enough tastes to keep him reasonably occupied ever since his wife's sudden death years ago. Jarvis Thornton enjoyed his father, and the enjoyment was reciprocal. The two had put their heads together and planned out the younger man's life-work, and each felt an equal interest and responsibility for the success of their speculation. What the father's career had lacked in effectiveness, they now determined should be supplied by Jarvis. So the son felt already some compunctions when he realized how far he had gone in this important matter without putting his father in the way of criticizing it.

It was a stifling July evening that Jarvis took to open the matter to his father. The old man had been unusually silent, almost preoccupied during the dinner they had eaten together in the little back dining-room. The son noticed that the heat had told on his father, and he blamed himself for keeping him in this dusty, deserted town, while he completed his laboratory work. The electric cars made a great whirr, just around the corner, every few moments, and the little strip of park behind the house was full of the poor people who had crawled out of their hot holes to get some breathable air in the green spots abandoned by the rich. Jarvis Thornton cast his eyes lazily over the dusty library where they had gone for their smoke. Among its tall rows of sober-looking books he had got his first taste for the life he was beginning to lead, the life on the whole that seemed to him the most satisfactory of any he had looked at. There was a gulf between him and this passion-ridden mob which swarmed about the public parks in a hot summer; there was, also, a gulf between him and his neighbors in the contiguous brick boxes, who strove merely to make the boxes comfortable. And to his father who sat opposite to him, his fine thin face with the short gray beard occasionally lighted by the red coal of his cigar, he owed it all. Somehow to-night he felt that he was about to propose a raid across that gulf, a voluntary abandonment of the calm, effective position that he had been blessed with.

He had no difficulty in broaching the affair. To discuss a matter with his father was like talking to a more experienced and patient self.