Chapter 2

A wave of rage and fear surged up within Frank Gower and crashed against the seat of his life. For days thereafter he was from time to time seized with violent spasms of trembling; years afterward he was attributing premature weaknesses of old age to the effects of that moment of horror. His uncle's words came as a sudden, high shot climax to weeks of exasperating peeping and prying and questioning, of sneer and insinuation. Conover had been only moderately successful at the law, had lost clients to Frank's father, had been beaten when they were on opposite sides. He hated the father with the secret, hypocritical hatred of the highly moral and religious man. He despised the son. It is not often that a Christian gentleman has such an opportunity to combine justice and revenge, to feed to bursting an ancient grudge, the while conscious that he is but doing his duty.

Said Frank, when he was able to speak: "You have been listening to the lies of some treacherous clerk here."

"Don't destroy that little book," proceeded Conover tranquilly. "We can prove that you took it."

Young Gower rose. "I must decline to have anything further to say to you, sir," said he. "You will leave this office, and you will not be admitted here again unless you come with proper papers as administrator."

Conover smiled with cold satisfaction and departed. There followed a series of quarrels--between Frank and his sister, between Frank and his mother, between Frank's wife and his mother, between Mildred and her mother, between the mother and Conover. Mrs. Gower was suspicious of her son; but she knew her brother for a pinchpenny, exacting the last drop of what he regarded as his own. And she discovered that, if she authorized him to act as administrator for her, he could--and beyond question would--take a large share of the estate. The upshot was that Frank paid over to his mother and sister forty-seven thousand dollars, and his mother and her brother stopped speaking to each other.

"I see that you have turned over all your money to mother," said Frank to Mildred a few days after the settlement.

"Of course," said Mildred. She was in a mood of high scorn for sordidness--a mood induced by the spectacle of the shameful manners of Conover, Frank, and his wife.

"Do you think that's wise?" suggested Frank.

"I think it's decent," said Mildred.

"Well, I hope you'll not live to regret it," said her brother.

Neither Mrs. Gower nor her daughter had ever had any experience in the care of money. To both forty-seven thousand dollars seemed a fortune--forty-seven thousand dollars in cash in the bank, ready to issue forth and do their bidding at the mere writing of a few figures and a signature on a piece of paper. In a sense they knew that for many years the family's annual expenses had ranged between forty and fifty thousand, but in the sense of actuality they knew nothing about it--a state of affairs common enough in families where the man is in absolute control and spends all he makes. Money always had been forthcoming; therefore money always would be forthcoming.

The mourning and the loss of the person who had filled and employed their lives caused the widow and the daughter to live very quietly during the succeeding year. They spent only half of their capital. For reasons of selfish and far-sighted prudence which need no detailing Frank moved away to New York within six months of his father's death and reduced communication between himself and wife and his mother and sister to a frigid and rapidly congealing minimum. He calculated that by the time their capital was consumed they would have left no feeling of claim upon him or he feeling of duty toward them.

It was not until eighteen months after her father's death, when the total capital was sunk to less than fifteen thousand dollars, that Mildred awakened to the truth of their plight. A few months at most, and they would have to give up that beautiful house which had been her home all her life. She tried to grasp the meaning of the facts as her intelligence presented them to her, but she could not. She had no practical training whatever. She had been brought up as a rich man's child, to be married to a rich man, and never to know anything of the material details of life beyond what was necessary in managing servants after the indifferent fashion of the usual American woman of the comfortable classes. She had always had a maid; she could not even dress herself properly without the maid's assistance. Life without a maid was inconceivable; life without servants was impossible.

She wandered through the house, through the grounds. She said to herself again and again: "We have got to give up all this, and be miserably poor--with not a servant, with less than the tenement people have." But the words conveyed no meaning to her. She said to herself again and again: "I must rouse myself. I must do something. I must--must--must!" But she did not rouse, because there was nothing to rouse. So far as practical life was concerned she was as devoid of ideas as a new-born baby.

There was but the one hope--marriage, a rich marriage. It is the habit of men who can take care of themselves and of women who are securely well taken care of to scorn the woman or the helpless-bred man who marries for money or even entertains that idea. How little imagination these scorners have! To marry for a mere living, hardly better than one could make for oneself, assuredly does show a pitiful lack of self-reliance, a melancholy lack of self-respect. But for men or women all their lives used to luxury and with no ability whatever at earning money--for such persons to marry money in order to save themselves from the misery and shame that poverty means to them is the most natural, the most human action conceivable. The man or the woman who says he or she would not do it, either is a hypocrite or is talking without thinking. You may in honesty criticize and condemn a social system that suffers men and women to be so crudely and criminally miseducated by being given luxury they did not earn. But to condemn the victims of that system for acting as its logic compels is sheer folly or sheer phariseeism.

Would Mildred Gower have married for money? As the weeks fled, as the bank account dwindled, she would have grasped eagerly at any rich man who might have offered himself--no matter how repellent he might have been. She did not want a bare living; she did not want what passes with the mass of middle-class people for comfort. She wanted what she had--the beautiful and spacious house, the costly and fashionable clothing, the servants, the carriages and motors, the thousand and one comforts, luxuries, and vanities to which she had always been used. In the brain of a young woman of poor or only comfortably off family the thoughts that seethed in Mildred Gower's brain would have been so many indications of depravity. In Mildred Gower's brain they were the natural, the inevitable, thoughts. They indicated everything as to her training, nothing as to her character. So, when she, thinking only of a rich marriage with no matter whom, and contrasting herself with the fine women portrayed in the novels and plays, condemned herself as shameless and degraded, she did herself grave injustice.

But no rich man, whether attractive or repulsive, offered. Indeed, no man of any kind offered. Instead, it was her mother who married.

A widower named James Presbury, elderly, with an income of five to six thousand a year from inherited wealth, stumbled into Hanging Rock to live, was impressed by the style the widow Gower maintained, believed the rumor that her husband had left her better off than was generally thought, proposed, and was accepted. And two years and a month after Henry Gower's death his widow became Mrs. James Presbury--and ceased to veil from her new husband the truth as to her affairs.

Mildred had thought that, than the family quarrels incident to settling her father's estate, human nature could no lower descend. She was now to be disillusioned. When a young man or a young woman blunders into a poor marriage in trying to make a rich one, he or she is usually withheld from immediate and frank expression by the timidity of youth. Not so the elderly man or woman. As we grow older, no matter how timidly conventional we are by nature, we become, through selfishness or through indifference to the opinion of others or through impatience of petty restraint, more and more outspoken. Old Presbury discovered how he had tricked himself four days after the wedding. He and his bride were at the Waldorf in New York, a-honeymooning.

The bride had never professed to be rich. She had simply continued in her lifelong way, had simply acted rich. She well knew the gaudy delusions her admirer was entertaining, and she saw to it that nothing was said or done to disturb him. She inquired into his affairs, made sure of the substantiality of the comparatively small income he possessed, decided to accept him as her best available chance to escape becoming a charge upon her anything but eager and generous relatives. She awaited the explosion with serenity. She cared not a flip for Presbury, who was a soft and silly old fool, full of antiquated compliments and so drearily the inferior of Henry Gower, physically and mentally, that even she could appreciate the difference, the descent. She rather enjoyed the prospect of a combat with him, of the end of dissimulating her contempt. She had thought out and had put in arsenal ready for use a variety of sneers, jeers, and insults that suggested themselves to her as she listened and simpered and responded while he was courting.

Had the opportunity offered earlier than the fourth day she would have seized it, but not until that fourth morning was she in just the right mood. She had eaten too much dinner the night before, and had followed it after two hours in a stuffy theater with an indigestible supper. He liked the bedroom windows open at night; she liked them closed. After she fell into a heavy sleep, he slipped out of bed and opened the windows wide--to teach her by the night's happy experience that she was entirely mistaken as to the harmfulness of fresh winter air. The result was that she awakened with a frightful cold and a splitting headache. And as the weather was about to change she had shooting pains like toothache through her toes the instant she thrust them into her shoes. The elderly groom, believing he had a rich bride, was all solicitude and infuriating attention. She waited until he had wrought her to the proper pitch of fury. Then she said--in reply to some remark of his:

"Yes, I shall rely upon you entirely. I want you to take absolute charge of my affairs."

The tears sprang to his eyes. His weak old mouth, rapidly falling to pieces, twisted and twitched with emotion. "I'll try to deserve your confidence, darling," said he. "I've had large business experience--in the way of investing carefully, I mean. I don't think your affairs will suffer in my hands."

"Oh, I'm sure they'll not trouble you," said she in a sweet, sure tone as the pains shot through her feet and her head. "You'll hardly notice my little mite in your property." She pretended to reflect. "Let me see--there's seven thousand left, but of course half of that is Millie's."

"It must be very well invested," said he. "Those seven thousand shares must be of the very best."

"Shares?" said she, with a gentle little laugh. "I mean dollars."

Presbury was about to lift a cup of cafe au lait to his lips. Instead, he turned it over into the platter of eggs and bacon.

"We--Mildred and I," pursued his bride, "were left with only forty-odd thousand between us. Of course, we had to live. So, naturally, there's very little left."

Presbury was shaking so violently that his head and arms waggled like a jumping-jack's. He wrapped his elegant white fingers about the arms of his chair to steady himself. In a suffocated voice he said: "Do you mean to say that you have only seven thousand dollars in the world?"

"Only half that," corrected she. "Oh, dear, how my head aches! Less than half that, for there are some debts."

She was impatient for the explosion; the agony of her feet and head needed outlet and relief. But he disappointed her. That was one of the situations in which one appeals in vain to the resources of language. He shrank and sank back in his chair, his jaw dropped, and he vented a strange, imbecile cackling laugh. It was not an expression of philosophic mirth, of sense of the grotesqueness of an anti-climax. It was not an expression of any emotion whatever. It was simply a signal from a mind temporarily dethroned.

"What are you laughing at?" she said sharply.

His answer was a repetition of the idiotic sound.

"What's the matter with you?" demanded she. "Please close your mouth."

It was a timely piece of advice; for his upper and false teeth had become partially dislodged and threatened to drop upon the shirt-bosom gayly showing between the lapels of his dark-blue silk house-coat. He slowly closed his mouth, moving his teeth back into place with his tongue--a gesture that made her face twitch with rage and disgust.

"Seven thousand dollars," he mumbled dazedly.

"I said less than half that," retorted she sharply.

"And I--thought you were--rich."

A peculiar rolling of the eyes and twisting of the lips gave her the idea that he was about to vent that repulsive sound again. "Don't you laugh!" she cried. "I can't bear your laugh--even at its best."

Suddenly he galvanized into fury. "This is an outrage!" he cried, waving his useless-looking white fists. "You have swindled me--SWINDLED me!"

Her head stopped aching. The pains in her feet either ceased or she forgot them. In a suspiciously calm voice she said: "What do you mean?"

"I mean that you are a swindler!" he shouted, banging one fist on the table and waving the other.

She acted as though his meaning were just dawning upon her. "Do you mean," said she tranquilly, "that you married me for money?"

"I mean that I thought you a substantial woman, and that I find you are an adventuress."

"Did you think," inquired she, "that any woman who had money would marry YOU?" She laughed very quietly. "You ARE a fool!"

He sat back to look at her. This mode of combat in such circumstances puzzled him.

"I knew that you were rich," she went on, "or you would not have dared offer yourself to me. All my friends were amazed at my stooping to accept you. Your father was an Irish Tammany contractor, wasn't he?--a sort of criminal? But I simply had to marry. So I gave you my family and position and name in exchange for your wealth--a good bargain for you, but a poor one for me."

These references to HIS wealth were most disconcerting, especially as they were accompanied by remarks about his origin, of which he was so ashamed that he had changed the spelling of his name in the effort to clear himself of it. However, some retort was imperative. He looked at her and said:

"Swindler and adventuress!"

"Don't repeat that lie," said she. "You are the adventurer--despite the fact that you are very rich."

"Don't say that again," cried he. "I never said or pretended I was rich. I have about five thousand a year--and you'll not get a cent of it, madam!"

She knew his income, but no one would have suspected it from her expression of horror. "What!" she gasped. "You dared to marry ME when you were a--beggar! Me--the widow of Henry Gower! You impudent old wreck! Why, you haven't enough to pay my servants. What are we to live on, pray?"

"I don't know what YOU'LL live on," replied he. "_I_ shall live as I always have."

"A beggar!" she exclaimed. "I--married to a beggar." She burst into tears. "How men take advantage of a woman alone! If my son had been near me! But there's surely some law to protect me. Yes, I'm sure there is. Oh, I'll punish you for having deceived me." Her eyes dried as she looked at him. "How dare you sit there? How dare you face me, you miserable fraud!"

Early in her acquaintance with him she had discovered that determining factors in his character were sensitiveness about his origin and sensitiveness about his social position. On this knowledge of his weaknesses was securely based her confidence that she could act as she pleased toward him. To ease her pains she proceeded to pour out her private opinion of him--all the disagreeable things, all the insults she had been storing up.

She watched him as only a woman can watch a man. She saw that his rage was not dangerous, that she was forcing him into a position where fear of her revenging herself by disgracing him would overcome anger at the collapse of his fatuous dreams of wealth. She did not despise him the more deeply for sitting there, for not flying from the room or trying to kill her or somehow compelling her to check that flow of insult. She already despised him utterly; also, she attached small importance to self-respect, having no knowledge of what that quality really is.

When she grew tired, she became quiet. They sat there a long time in silence. At last he ran up the white flag of abject surrender by saying:

"What'll we live on--that's what I'd like to know?"

An eavesdropper upon the preceding violence of upward of an hour would have assumed that at its end this pair must separate, never to see each other again voluntarily. But that idea, even as a possibility, had not entered the mind of either. They had lived a long time; they were practical people. They knew from the outset that somehow they must arrange to go on together. The alternative meant a mere pittance of alimony for her; meant for him social ostracism and the small income cut in half; meant for both scandal and confusion.

Said she fretfully: "Oh, I suppose we'll get along, somehow. I don't know anything about those things. I've always been looked after--kept from contact with the sordid side of life."

"That house you live in," he went on, "does it belong to you?"

She gave him a contemptuous glance. "Of course," said she. "What low people you must have been used to!"

"I thought perhaps you had rented it for your bunco game," retorted he. "The furniture, the horses, the motor--all those things--do they belong to you?"

"I shall leave the room if you insult me," said she.

"Did you include them in the seven thousand dollars?"

"The money is in the bank. It has nothing to do with our house and our property."

He reflected, presently said: "The horses and carriages must be sold at once--and all those servants dismissed except perhaps two. We can live in the house."

She grew purple with rage. "Sell MY carriages! Discharge MY servants! I'd like to see you try!"

"Who's to pay for keeping up that establishment?" demanded he.

She was silent. She saw what he had in mind.

"If you want to keep that house and live comfortably," he went on, "you've got to cut expenses to the bone. You see that, don't you?"

"I can't live any way but the way I've been used to all my life," wailed she.

He eyed her disgustedly. Was there anything equal to a woman for folly?

"We've got to make the most of what little we have," said he.

"I tell you I don't know anything about those things," repeated she. "You'll have to look after them. Mildred and I aren't like the women you've been used to. We are ladies."

Presbury's rage boiled over again at the mention of Mildred. "That daughter of yours!" he cried. "What's to be done about her? I've got no money to waste on her."

"You miserable Tammany THING!" exclaimed she. "Don't you dare SPEAK of my daughter except in the most respectful way."

And once more she opened out upon him, wreaking upon him all her wrath against fate, all the pent-up fury of two years--fury which had been denied such fury's usual and natural expression in denunciations of the dead bread-winner. The generous and ever-kind Henry Gower could not be to blame for her wretched plight; and, of course, she herself could not be to blame for it. So, until now there had been no scapegoat. Presbury therefore received the whole burden. He, alarmed lest a creature apparently so irrational, should in wild rage drive him away, ruin him socially, perhaps induce a sympathetic court to award her a large part of his income as alimony, said not a word in reply. He bade his wrath wait. Later on, when the peril was over, when he had a firm grip upon the situation--then he would take his revenge.

They gave up the expensive suite at the Waldorf that very day and returned to Hanging Rock. They alternated between silence and the coarsest, crudest quarrelings, for neither had the intelligence to quarrel wittily or the refinement to quarrel artistically. As soon as they arrived at the Gower house, Mildred was dragged into the wrangle.

"I married this terrible man for your sake," was the burden of her mother's wail. "And he is a beggar--wants to sell off everything and dismiss the servants."

"You are a pair of paupers," cried the old man. "You are shameless tricksters. Be careful how you goad me!"

Mildred had anticipated an unhappy ending to her mother's marriage, but she had not knowledge enough of life or of human nature to anticipate any such horrors as now began. Every day, all day long the vulgar fight raged. Her mother and her stepfather withdrew from each other's presence only to think up fresh insults to fling at each other. As soon as they were armed they hastened to give battle again. She avoided Presbury. Her mother she could not avoid; and when her mother was not in combat with him, she was weeping or wailing or railing to Mildred.

It was at Mildred's urging that her mother acquiesced in Presbury's plans for reducing expenses within income. At first the girl, even more ignorant than her mother of practical affairs, did not appreciate the wisdom, not to say the necessity, of what he wished to do, but soon she saw that he was right, that the servants must go, that the horses and carriages and the motors must be sold. When she was convinced and had convinced her mother, she still did not realize what the thing really meant. Not until she no longer had a maid did she comprehend. To a woman who has never had a maid, or who has taken on a maid as a luxury, it will seem an exaggeration to say that Mildred felt as helpless as a baby lying alone in a crib before it has learned to crawl. Yet that is rather an understatement of her plight. The maid left in the afternoon. Mildred, not without inconveniences that had in the novelty their amusing side, contrived to dress that evening for dinner and to get to bed; but when she awakened in the morning and was ready to dress, the loss of Therese became a tragedy. It took the girl nearly four hours to get herself together presentably--and then, never had she looked so unkempt. With her hair, thick and soft, she could do nothing.

"What a wonderful person Therese was!" thought she. "And I always regarded her as rather stupid." Her mother, who had not had a maid until she was about thirty and had never become completely dependent, fared somewhat better, though, hearing her moans, you would have thought she was faring worse.

Mildred's unhappiness increased from day to day, as her wardrobe fell into confusion and disrepair. She felt that she must rise to the situation, must teach herself, must save herself from impending dowdiness and slovenliness. But her brain seemed to be paralyzed. She did not know how or where to begin to learn. She often in secret gave way to the futility of tears.