The Cost E-Book

David Graham Phillips

• Herausgeber: Skyline
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Pauline Gardiner joined us on the day that we, the Second Reader class, moved from the basement to the top story of the old Central Public School. Her mother brought her and, leaving, looked round at us, meeting for an instant each pair of curious eyes with friendly appeal. We knew well the enchanted house where she lived—stately, retreated far into large grounds in Jefferson Street; a high brick wall all round, and on top of the wall broken glass set in cement. Behind that impassable barrier which so teased our young audacity were flower-beds and "shrub" bushes, whose blossoms were wonderfully sweet if held a while in the closed hand; grape arbors and shade and fruit trees, haunted by bees; winding walks strewn fresh each spring with tan-bark that has such a clean, strong odor, especially just after a rain, and that is at once firm and soft beneath the feet. And in the midst stood the only apricot tree in Saint X. As few of us had tasted apricots, and as those few pronounced them better far than oranges or even bananas, that tree was the climax of tantalization.

Leseprobe

UUID: c02acfec-ae66-11e7-a3ce-49fbd00dc2aa

This ebook was created with StreetLib Writehttp://write.streetlib.com

Table of contents

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

I.

A FATHER INVITES DISASTERPauline Gardiner joined us on the day that we, the Second Reader class, moved from the basement to the top story of the old Central Public School. Her mother brought her and, leaving, looked round at us, meeting for an instant each pair of curious eyes with friendly appeal.We knew well the enchanted house where she lived—stately, retreated far into large grounds in Jefferson Street; a high brick wall all round, and on top of the wall broken glass set in cement. Behind that impassable barrier which so teased our young audacity were flower-beds and "shrub" bushes, whose blossoms were wonderfully sweet if held a while in the closed hand; grape arbors and shade and fruit trees, haunted by bees; winding walks strewn fresh each spring with tan-bark that has such a clean, strong odor, especially just after a rain, and that is at once firm and soft beneath the feet. And in the midst stood the only apricot tree in Saint X. As few of us had tasted apricots, and as those few pronounced them better far than oranges or even bananas, that tree was the climax of tantalization.The place had belonged to a childless old couple who hated children—or did they bar them out and drive them away because the sight and sound of them quickened the ache of empty old age into a pain too keen to bear? The husband died, the widow went away to her old maid sister at Madison; and the Gardiners, coming from Cincinnati to live in the town where Colonel Gardiner was born and had spent his youth, bought the place. On our way to and from school in the first weeks of that term, pausing as always to gaze in through the iron gates of the drive, we had each day seen Pauline walking alone among the flowers. And she would stop and smile at us; but she was apparently too shy to come to the gates; and we, with the memory of the cross old couple awing us, dared not attempt to make friends with her.She was eight years old, tall for her age, slender but strong, naturally graceful. Her hazel eyes were always dancing mischievously. She liked boys' games better than girls'. In her second week she induced several of the more daring girls to go with her to the pond below town and there engage in a raft-race with the boys. And when John Dumont, seeing that the girls' raft was about to win, thrust the one he was piloting into it and upset it, she was the only girl who did not scream at the shock of the sudden tumble into the water or rise in tears from the shallow, muddy bottom.She tried going barefooted; she was always getting bruised or cut in attempts—usually successful—at boys' recklessness; yet her voice was sweet and her manner toward others, gentle. She hid her face when Miss Stone whipped any one—more fearful far than the rise and fall of Miss Stone's ferule was the soaring and sinking of her broad, bristling eyebrows.From the outset John Dumont took especial delight in teasing her—John Dumont, the roughest boy in the school. He was seven years older than she, but was only in the Fourth Reader—a laggard in his studies because his mind was incurious about books and the like, was absorbed in games, in playing soldier and robber, in swimming and sledding, in orchard-looting and fighting. He was impudent and domineering, a bully but not a coward, good-natured when deferred to, the feared leader of a boisterous, imitative clique. Until Pauline came he had rarely noticed a girl—never except to play her some prank more or less cruel.After the adventure of the raft he watched Pauline afar off, revolving plans for approaching her without impairing his barbaric dignity, for subduing her without subduing himself to her. But he knew only one way of making friends, the only kind of friends he had or could conceive—loyal subjects, ruled through their weaknesses and fears. And as that way was to give the desired addition to his court a sound thrashing, he felt it must be modified somewhat to help him in his present conquest. He tied her hair to the back of her desk; he snowballed her and his sister Gladys home from school. He raided her playhouse and broke her dishes and—she giving desperate battle—fled with only the parents of her doll family. With Gladys shrieking for their mother, he shook her out of a tree in their yard, and it sprained her ankle so severely that she had to stay away from school for a month. The net result of a year's arduous efforts was that she had singled him out for detestation—this when her conquest of him was complete because she had never told on him, had never in her worst encounters with him shown the white feather.But he had acted more wisely than he knew, for she had at least singled him out from the crowd of boys. And there was a certain frank good-nature about him, a fearlessness—and she could not help admiring his strength and leadership. Presently she discovered his secret—that his persecutions were not through hatred of her but through anger at her resistance, anger at his own weakness in being fascinated by her. This discovery came while she was shut in the house with her sprained ankle. As she sat at her corner bay-window she saw him hovering in the neighborhood, now in the alley at the side of the house, now hurrying past, whistling loudly as if bent upon some gay and remote errand, now skulking along as if he had stolen something, again seated on the curbstone at the farthest crossing from which he could see her window out of the corner of his eye. She understood—and forthwith forgave the past. She was immensely flattered that this big, audacious creature, so arrogant with the boys, so contemptuous toward the girls, should be her captive.When she was in her first year at the High School and he in his last he walked home with her every day; and they regarded themselves as engaged. Her once golden hair had darkened now to a beautiful brown with red flashing from its waves; and her skin was a clear olive pallid but healthy. And she had shot up into a tall, slender young woman; her mother yielded to her pleadings, let her put her hair into a long knot at the back of her neck and wear skirts ALMOST to the ground.When he came from Ann Arbor for his first Christmas holidays each found the other grown into a new person. She thought him a marvel of wisdom and worldly experience. He thought her a marvel of ideal womanhood—gay, lively; not a bit "narrow" in judging him, yet narrow to primness in her ideas of what she herself could do, and withal charming physically. He would not have cared to explain how he came by the capacity for such sophisticated judgment of a young woman. They were to be married as soon as he had his degree; and he was immediately to be admitted to partnership in his father's woolen mills—the largest in the state of Indiana.He had been home three weeks of the long vacation between his sophomore and junior years. There appeared on the town's big and busy stream of gossip, stories of his life at Ann Arbor—of drinking and gambling and wild "tears" in Detroit. And it was noted that the fast young men of Saint X—so every one called Saint Christopher—were going a more rapid gait. Those turbulent fretters against the dam of dullness and stern repression of even normal and harmless gaiety had long caused scandal. But never before had they been so daring, so defiant.One night after leaving Pauline he went to play poker in Charley Braddock's rooms. Braddock, only son of the richest banker in Saint X, had furnished the loft of his father's stable as bachelor quarters and entertained his friends there without fear that the noise would break the sleep and rouse the suspicions of his father. That night, besides Braddock and Dumont, there were Jim Cauldwell and his brother Will. As they played they drank; and Dumont, winning steadily, became offensive in his raillery. There was a quarrel, a fight; Will Cauldwell, accidently toppled down a steep stairway by Dumont, was picked up with a broken arm and leg.By noon the next day the town was boiling with this outbreak of deviltry in the leading young men, the sons and prospective successors of the "bulwarks of religion and morality." The Episcopalian and Methodist ministers preached against Dumont, that "importer of Satan's ways into our peaceful midst," and against Charley Braddock with his "ante-room to Sheol"—the Reverend Sweetser had just learned the distinction between Sheol and Hades. The Presbyterian preacher wrestled spiritually with Will Cauldwell and so wrought upon his depression that he gave out a solemn statement of confession, remorse and reform. In painting himself in dark colors he painted Jack Dumont jet black.Pauline had known that Dumont was "lively"—he was far too proud of his wild oats wholly to conceal them from her. And she had all the tolerance and fascinated admiration of feminine youth for the friskiness of masculine freedom. Thus, though she did not precisely approve what he and his friends had done, she took no such serious view of it as did her parents and his. The most she could do with her father was to persuade him to suspend sentence pending the conclusion of an investigation into Jack's doings at the University of Michigan and in Detroit. Colonel Gardiner was not so narrow or so severe as Jack said or as Pauline thought. He loved his daughter; so he inquired thoroughly. He knew that his daughter loved Dumont; so he judged liberally. When he had done he ordered the engagement broken and forbade Dumont the house."He is not wild merely; he is—worse than you can imagine," said the colonel to his wife, in concluding his account of his discoveries and of Dumont's evasive and reluctant admissions—an account so carefully expurgated that it completely misled her. "Tell Pauline as much as you can—enough to convince her."This, when Mrs. Gardiner was not herself convinced. She regarded the colonel as too high-minded to be a fit judge of human frailty; and his over-caution in explanation had given her the feeling that he had a standard for a husband for their daughter which only another such rare man as himself could live up to. Further, she had always been extremely reserved in mother-and-daughter talk with Pauline, and thus could not now give her a clear idea of what little she had been able to gather from Colonel Gardiner's half-truths. This typical enacting of a familiar domestic comedy-tragedy had the usual result: the girl was confirmed in her original opinion and stand."Jack's been a little too lively," was her unexpressed conclusion from her mother's dilution of her father's dilution of the ugly truth. "He's sorry and won't do it again, and—well, I'd hate a milksop. Father has forgotten that he was young himself once."Dumont's father and mother charged against Ann Arbor that which they might have charged against their own alternations of tyranny and license, had they not been humanly lenient in self-excuse. "No more college!" said his father."The place for you, young man, is my office, where I can keep an eye or two on you.""That suits me," replied the son, indifferently—he made small pretense of repentance at home."I never wanted to go to college.""Yes, it was your mother's doing," said old Dumont. "Now we'll try MY way of educating a boy."So Jack entered the service of his father's god-of-the-six-days, and immediately showed astonishing talent and twelve-to-fourteen-hour assiduity. He did not try to talk with Pauline. He went nowhere but to business; he avoided the young men."It's a bad idea to let your home town know too much about you," he reflected, and he resolved that his future gambols out of bounds should be in the security of distant and large cities—and they were. Seven months after he went to work he amazed and delighted his father by informing him that he had bought five hundred shares of stock in the mills—he had made the money, fifty-odd thousand dollars, by a speculation in wool. He was completely reestablished with his father and with all Saint X except Colonel Gardiner."That young Jack Dumont's a wonder," said everybody. "He'll make the biggest kind of a fortune or the biggest kind of a smash before he gets through."He felt that he was fully entitled to the rights of the regenerate; he went to Colonel Gardiner's law office boldly to claim them.At sight of him the colonel's face hardened into an expression as near to hate as its habit of kindliness would concede. "Well, sir!" said he, sharply, eying the young man over the tops of his glasses.Dumont stiffened his strong, rather stocky figure and said, his face a study of youthful frankness: "You know what I've come for, sir. I want you to give me a trial.""No!" Colonel Gardiner shut his lips firmly."Good morning, sir!" And he was writing again."You are very hard," said Dumont, bitterly."You are driving me to ruin.""How DARE you!" The old man rose and went up to him, eyes blazing scorn. "You deceive others, but not me with my daughter's welfare as my first duty. It is an insult to her that you presume to lift your eyes to her."Dumont colored and haughtily raised his head. He met the colonel's fiery gaze without flinching."I was no worse than other young men—""It's a slander upon young men for you to say that they—that any of them with a spark of decency—would do as you have done, as you DO! Leave my office at once, sir!""I've not only repented—I've shown that I was ashamed of—of that," said Dumont. "Yet you refuse me a chance!"The colonel was shaking with anger."You left here for New York last Thursday night," he said. "Where and how did you spend Saturday night and Sunday and Monday?"Dumont's eyes shifted and sank."It's false," he muttered. "It's lies.""I expected this call from you," continued Colonel Gardiner, "and I prepared for it so that I could do what was right. I'd rather see my daughter in her shroud than in a wedding-dress for you."Dumont left without speaking or looking up."The old fox!" he said to himself. "Spying on me—what an idiot I was not to look out for that. The narrow old fool! He doesn't know what 'man of the world' means. But I'll marry her in spite of him. I'll let nobody cheat me out of what I want, what belongs to me."A few nights afterward he went to a dance at Braddock's, hunted out Pauline and seated himself beside her. In a year he had not been so near her, though they had seen each other every few days and he had written her many letters which she had read, had treasured, but had been held from answering by her sense of honor, unless her looks whenever their eyes met could be called answers."You mustn't, Jack," she said, her breath coming fast, her eyes fever-bright. "Father has forbidden me—and it'll only make him the harder.""You, too, Polly? Well, then, I don't care what becomes of me."He looked so desperate that she was frightened."It isn't that, Jack—you KNOW it isn't that.""I've been to see your father. And he told me he'd never consent—never! I don't deserve that—and I can't stand it to lose you. No matter what I've done, God knows I love you, Polly."Pauline's face was pale. Her hands, in her lap, were gripping her little handkerchief."You don't say that, too—you don't say 'never'?"She raised her eyes to his and their look thrilled through and through him. "Yes, John, I say 'never'—I'll NEVER give you up."All the decent instincts in his nature showed in his handsome face, in which time had not as yet had the chance clearly to write character. "No wonder I love you—there never was anybody so brave and so true as you. But you must help me. I must see you and talk to you—once in a while, anyhow."Pauline flushed painfully."Not till—they—let me—or I'm older, John. They've always trusted me and left me free. And I can't deceive them."He liked this—it was another proof that she was, through and through, the sort of woman who was worthy to be his wife."Well—we'll wait," he said. "And if they won't be fair to us, why, we'll have a right to do the best we can." He gave her a tragic look."I've set my heart on you, Polly, and I never can stand it not to get what I've set my heart on. If I lost you, I'd go straight to ruin."She might have been a great deal older and wiser and still not have seen in this a confirmation of her father's judgment of her lover. And her parents had unconsciously driven her into a mental state in which, if he had committed a crime, it would have seemed to her their fault rather than his. The next day she opened the subject with her mother—the subject that was never out of their minds."I can't forget him, mother. I CAN'T give him up." With the splendid confidence of youth, "I can save him—he'll do anything for my sake." With the touching ignorance of youth, "He's done nothing so very dreadful, I'm sure—I'd believe him against the whole world."And in the evening her mother approached her father. She was in sympathy with Pauline, though her loyalty to her husband made her careful not to show it. She had small confidence in a man's judgments of men on their woman-side, great confidence in the power of women to change and uplift men."Father," said she, when they were alone on the side porch after supper, "have you noticed how hard Polly is taking IT?"His eyes and the sudden deepening of the lines in his face answered her."Don't you think maybe we've been a little—too—severe?""I've tried to think so, but—" He shook his head. "Maggie, he's hopeless, hopeless.""I don't know much about those things." This was a mere form of speech. She thought she knew all there was to be known; and as she was an intelligent woman who had lived a long time and had a normal human curiosity she did know a great deal. But, after the fashion of many of the women of the older generation, she had left undisturbed his delusion that her goodness was the result not of intelligence but of ignorance. "But I can't help fearing it isn't right to condemn a young man forever because he was led away as a boy.""I can't discuss it with you, Maggie—it's a degradation even to speak of him before a good woman. You must rely upon my judgment. Polly must put him out of her head.""But what am I to tell her? You can't make a woman like our Pauline put a man out of her life when she loves him unless you give her a reason that satisfies her. And if you don't give ME a reason that satisfies me how can I give HER a reason that will satisfy her?""I'll talk to her," said the colonel, after a long pause. "She must—she shall give him up, mother.""I've tried to persuade her to go to visit Olivia," continued Mrs. Gardiner. "But she won't. And she doesn't want me to ask Olivia here.""I'll ask Olivia before I speak to her."Mrs. Gardiner went up to her daughter's room—it had been her play-room, then her study, and was now graduated into her sitting-room. She was dreaming over a book—Tennyson's poems. She looked up, eyes full of hope."He has some good reason, dear," began her mother."What is it?" demanded Pauline."I can't tell you any more than I've told you already," replied her mother, trying not to show her feelings in her face."Why does he treat me—treat you—like two naughty little children?" said Pauline, impatiently tossing the book on the table."Pauline!" Her mother's voice was sharp in reproof. "How can you place any one before your father!"Pauline was silent—she had dropped the veil over herself. "I—I—where did you place father—when—when—" Her eyes were laughing again."You know he'd never oppose your happiness, Polly." Mrs. Gardiner was smoothing her daughter's turbulent red-brown hair. "You'll only have to wait under a little more trying circumstances. And if he's right, the truth will come out. And if he's mistaken and John's all you think him, then that will come out."Pauline knew her father was not opposing her through tyranny or pride of opinion or sheer prejudice; but she felt that this was another case of age's lack of sympathy with youth, felt it with all the intensity of infatuated seventeen made doubly determined by opposition and concealment. The next evening he and she were walking together in the garden. He suddenly put his arm round her and drew her close to him and kissed her."You know I shouldn't if I didn't think it the only course—don't you, Pauline?" he said in a broken voice that went straight to her heart."Yes, father." Then, after a silence: "But—we—we've been sweethearts since we were children. And—I—father, I MUST stand by him.""Won't you trust me, child? Won't you believe ME rather than him?"Pauline's only answer was a sigh. They loved each the other; he adored her, she reverenced him. But between them, thick and high, rose the barrier of custom and training. Comradeship, confidence were impossible.

II.

OLIVIA TO THE RESCUE.

With the first glance into Olivia's dark gray eyes Pauline ceased to resent her as an intruder. And soon she was feeling that some sort of dawn was assailing her night.

Olivia was the older by three years. She seemed—and for her years, was—serious and wise because, as the eldest of a large family, she was lieutenant-general to her mother. Further, she had always had her own way—when it was the right way and did not conflict with justice to her brothers and sisters. And often her parents let her have her own way when it was the wrong way, nor did they spoil the lesson by mitigating disagreeable consequences.

"Do as you please," her mother used to say, when doing as she pleased would involve less of mischief than of valuable experience, "and perhaps you'll learn to please to do sensibly." Again, her father would restrain her mother from interference—"Oh, let the girl alone. She's got to teach herself how to behave, and she can't begin a minute too young." This training had produced a self-reliant and self-governing Olivia.

She wondered at the change in Pauline—Pauline, the light-hearted, the effervescent of laughter and life, now silent and almost somber. It was two weeks before she, not easily won to the confiding mood for all her frankness, let Olivia into her secret. Of course, it was at night; of course, they were in the same bed. And when Olivia had heard she came nearer to the truth about Dumont than had Pauline's mother. But, while she felt sure there was a way to cure Pauline, she knew that way was not the one which had been pursued. "They've only made her obstinate," she thought, as she, lying with hands clasped behind her head, watched Pauline, propped upon an elbow, staring with dreamful determination into the moonlight.

"It'll come out all right," she said; her voice always suggested that she knew what she was talking about. "Your father'll give in sooner or later—if YOU don't change."

"But he's so bitter against Jack," replied Pauline. "He won't listen to his side—to our side—of it."

"Anyhow, what's the use of anticipating trouble? You wouldn't get married yet. And if he's worthwhile he'll wait."

Pauline had been even gentler than her own judgment in painting her lover for her cousin's inspection. So, she could not explain to her why there was necessity for haste, could not confess her conviction that every month he lived away from her was a month of peril to him.

"We want it settled," she said evasively.

"I haven't seen him around anywhere," went on Olivia. "Is he here now?"

"He's in Chicago—in charge of his father's office there. He may stay all winter."

"No, there's no hurry," went on Olivia. "Besides, you ought to meet other men. It isn't a good idea for a girl to marry the man she's been brought up with before she's had a chance to get acquainted with other men." Olivia drew this maxim from experience—she had been engaged to a school-days lover when she went away to Battle Field to college; she broke it off when, going home on vacation, she saw him again from the point of wider view.

But Pauline scorned this theory; if Olivia had confessed the broken engagement she would have thought her shallow and untrustworthy. She was confident, with inexperience's sublime incapacity for self-doubt, that in all the wide world there was only one man whom she could have loved or could love.

"Oh, I shan't change," she said in a tone that warned her cousin against discussion.

"At any rate," replied Olivia, "a little experience would do you no harm." She suddenly sat up in bed. "A splendid idea!" she exclaimed. "Why not come to Battle Field with me?"

"I'd like it," said Pauline, always eager for self-improvement and roused by Olivia's stories of her college experiences. "But father'd never let me go to Battle Field College."

"Battle Field UNIVERSITY," corrected Olivia. "It has classical courses and scientific courses and a preparatory school—and a military department for men and a music department for women. And it's going to have lots and lots of real university schools—when it gets the money. And there's a healthy, middle-aged wagon-maker who's said to be thinking of leaving it a million or so—if he should ever die and if they should change its name to his."

"But it's coeducation, isn't it? Father would never consent. It was all mother could do to persuade him to let me go to public school."

"But maybe he'd let you go with me, where he wouldn't let you go all alone."

And so it turned out. Colonel Gardiner, anxious to get his daughter away from Saint X and into new scenes where Dumont might grow dim, consented as soon as Olivia explained her plan.

Instead of entering "senior prep", Pauline was able to make freshman with only three conditions. In the first week she was initiated into Olivia's fraternity, the Kappa Alpha Kappa, joined the woman's literary and debating society, and was fascinated and absorbed by crowding new events, associations, occupations, thoughts. In spite of herself her old-time high spirits came flooding back. She caught herself humming—and checked herself reproachfully. She caught herself singing—and lowered it to humming. She caught herself whistling—and decided that she might as well be cheerful while she waited for fate to befriend her and Jack. And she found that she thought about him none the less steadfastly for thinking hopefully.

Battle Field put no more restraint upon its young women than it put upon its young men—and it put no restraint upon the young men. In theory and practice it was democratic, American, western—an outgrowth of that pioneer life in which the men and the women had fought and toiled and enjoyed, side by side, in absolute equality, with absolute freedom of association. It recognized that its students had been brought up in the free, simple, frank way, that all came from a region where individualism was a religion, with self-reliance as the cardinal principle of faith and self-development as the goal.

There were no dormitories at Battle Field then. Olivia and Pauline lived in one of the hundred or more boarding-houses—a big, square, white "frame," kept by a Mrs. Trent, the widow of a "hero of two wars."

Her hero had won her with his uniform when he returned from the Mexican War. His conduct was so irregular and his income so uncertain that it had been a relief to her when he departed for his second war. From it he had brought home a broken constitution, a maimed body and confirmed habits of shiftlessness and drunkenness. His country took his character and his health and paid him in exchange a pension which just about kept him in whisky and tobacco. So long as he was alive Mrs. Trent hated him as vigorously as her Christianity permitted. When he was safely in his grave she canonized him; she put his picture and his sword, belt and epaulets in the conspicuous place in the parlor; she used his record for gallantry to get herself social position and a place of honor at public gatherings.

Her house stood back from the highway in a grove of elms and walnuts. Its angularity was relieved by a porch with a flat roof that had a railing about it and served as a balcony for the second-story lodgers. There were broad halls through the middle of the house down-stairs and up. Olivia and Pauline had the three large rooms in the second story on the south side. They used the front room as a study and Pauline's bedroom was next to it.

Late one afternoon she was seated at the study window watching a cherry-red sun drop through the purple haze of the autumn. She became conscious that some one was on the balcony before the window of the front room across the hall. She leaned so that she could see without being seen. Sharp against the darkening sky was the profile of a young man. Olivia joined her and followed her glance. The profile remained fixed and the two girls watched it, fascinated. It certainly was a powerful outline, proud and stern, but with a mouth that was sweet in its kindliness and gentleness.

"I wonder what he's thinking about," said Olivia, in an undertone; he was not fifteen feet from them. "I suppose, some scheme for conquering the world."

Most of Battle Field's youth came from the farms of that western country, the young men with bodies and brains that were strong but awkward. Almost all were working their way through—as were not a few of the women. They felt that life was a large, serious business impatiently waiting for them to come and attend to it in a large, serious way better than it had ever been attended to before. They studied hard; they practised oratory and debating. Their talk was of history and philosophy, religion and politics. They slept little; they thought—or tried to think—even more than they talked.

At a glance this man was one of them, a fine type.

"He's handsome, isn't he?" said Pauline.

"But—" She did not finish; indeed it was not clear to her what the rest of her protest was. He reminded her of Dumont—there was the same look of superiority, of the "born to lead." But his face seemed to, have some quality which Dumont's lacked—or was it only the idealizing effect of the open sky and the evening light?

When the bell rang for supper he apparently did not hear it. The two girls went down and had talked to the others a few minutes and all had seated themselves before he entered. An inch or so above six feet, powerful in the chest and shoulders, he moved with a large grace until he became self-conscious or approached the, by comparison, frail pieces of furniture. He had penetrating, candid eyes that looked dark in the gaslight but were steel-blue. His face now wore the typical western-American expression—shrewd, easy-going good humor. Mrs. Trent, intrenched in state behind a huge, silver-plated coffee-urn with ivory-trimmed faucet, introduced him—Mr. Scarborough—to Olivia, to Pauline, to Sadie McIntosh, to Pierson and Howe and Thiebaud (pronounced Cay-bo). Scarborough sat directly opposite Olivia. But whenever he lifted his eyes from his plate he looked at Pauline, who was next to her. When she caught him he blushed and stirred in his chair so uneasily that it creaked and crackled; and his normal difficulties with his large hands and the small knife and fork were distressingly increased.

Pauline was disappointed in him—his clothes were ill-fitting and gave him the appearance of being in danger of bursting from them; his hair was too long, suggesting a shaggy, tawny mane; though his hands were well-shaped they had the recent scars of hard manual labor. Thus, when Olivia spoke enthusiastically of him after supper, she made no reply. She would have been ashamed to acknowledge the reasons for her lack of admiration, even had she been conscious of them.

But the next morning at breakfast she revised her opinion somewhat. He talked, and he had a remarkable voice—clear, musical, with a quality which made it seem to penetrate through all the nerves instead of through the auditory nerve only. Further, he talked straight to Pauline, without embarrassment and with a quaint, satiric humor. She was forgetting for the moment his almost uncouth hair and dress when, in making a sweeping gesture, he upset a glass of water and sent a plate of hot bread flying from the waitress' hand.

"He'd do well in the open air," thought she, "but he's out of place in a house."

Still, she found him interesting and original. And he persistently sought her—his persistence was little short of heroism in view of the never-wholly-concealed sufferings which the contrast between her grace and style and his lack of both caused him.

"He looks like a king who had been kidnapped as a child and brought up in the wilds," said Olivia. "I wonder who he is."

"I'll ask him," replied Pauline. And Olivia was slyly amused by her cousin's unconscious pride in her power with this large, untamed person.

III.

AND SCARBOROUGH.

His name was Hampden Scarborough and he came from a farm about twenty miles east of Saint X. He was descended from men who had learned to hate kings in Holland in the sixteenth century, had learned to despise them in England in the seventeenth century, had learned to laugh at them in America in the eighteenth century, had learned to exalt themselves into kings—the kings of the new democracy—in the free West in the nineteenth century.

When any one asked his father, Bladen Scarborough, who the family ancestors were, Bladen usually did not answer at all. It was his habit thus to treat a question he did not fancy, and, if the question was repeated, to supplement silence with a piercing look from under his aggressive eyebrows. But sometimes he would answer it. Once, for example, he looked coldly at the man who, with a covert sneer, had asked it, said, "You're impudent, sir. You insinuate I'm not enough by myself to command your consideration," and struck him a staggering blow across the mouth. Again—he was in a playful mood that day and the questioner was a woman—he replied, "I'm descended from murderers, ma'am—murderers."

And in a sense it was the truth.

In 1568 the Scarboroughs were seated obscurely in an east county of England. They were tenant farmers on the estates of the Earl of Ashford and had been strongly infected with "leveling" ideas by the refugees then fleeing to England to escape the fury of continental prince and priest. John Scarborough was trudging along the highway with his sister Kate. On horseback came Aubrey Walton, youngest son of the Earl of Ashford. He admired the rosy, pretty face of Kate Scarborough. He dismounted and, without so much as a glance at her brother, put his arm round her. John snatched her free. Young Walton, all amazement and wrath at the hind who did not appreciate the favor he was condescending to bestow upon a humble maiden, ripped out an insult and drew his sword. John wrenched it from him and ran it through his body.

That night, with four gold pieces in his pocket, John Scarborough left England in a smuggler and was presently fighting Philip of Spain in the army of the Dutch people.

In 1653 Zachariah Scarborough, great grandson of the preceding, was a soldier in Cromwell's army. On the night of April twentieth he was in an ale-house off Fleet Street with three brother officers. That day Cromwell had driven out Parliament and had dissolved the Council of State. Three of the officers were of Cromwell's party; the fourth, Captain Zachariah Scarborough, was a "leveler"—a hater of kings, a Dutch-bred pioneer of Dutch-bred democracy. The discussion began hot—and they poured ale on it.

"He's a tyrant!" shouted Zachariah Scarborough, bringing his huge fist down on the table and upsetting a mug. "He has set up for king. Down with all kings, say I! His head must come off!"

At this knives were drawn, and when Zachariah Scarborough staggered into the darkness of filthy Fleet Street with a cut down his cheek from temple to jaw-bone, his knife was dripping the life of a cousin of Ireton's.

He fled to the Virginia plantations and drifted thence to North Carolina.

His great-grandson, Gaston Scarborough, was one of Marion's men in his boyhood—a fierce spirit made arrogant by isolated freedom, where every man of character owned his land and could conceive of no superior between him and Almighty God. One autumn day in 1794 Gaston was out shooting with his youngest brother, John, their father's favorite. Gaston's gun was caught by a creeper, was torn from him; and his hand, reaching for it, exploded the charge into his brother's neck. His brother fell backward into the swamp and disappeared.

Gaston plunged into the wilderness—to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to Indiana.

"And it's my turn," said Hampden Scarborough as he ended a brief recital of the ancestral murders which Pauline had drawn from him—they were out for a walk together.

"Your turn?" she inquired.

"Yes—I'm the great-grandson—the only one. It's always a great-grandson."

"You DO look dangerous," said Pauline, and the smile and the glance she sent with the words might have been misunderstood by a young man entertaining the ideas which were then filling that young man's brain.

Again, he told her how he had been sent to college—she was always leading him to talk of himself, and her imagination more than supplied that which his unaffected modesty, sometimes deliberately, more often unconsciously, kept out of his stories.

Ever since he could remember, his strongest passion had been for books, for reading. Before he was born the wilderness was subdued and the cruel toil of his parents' early life was mitigated by the growth of towns, the spread of civilization. There was a chance for some leisure, for the higher gratification of the intense American passion for education. A small library had sprung up in one corner of the general room of the old farm-house—from the seeds of a Bible, an almanac, Milton's Paradise Lost, Baxter's Saint's Rest and a Government report on cattle. But the art collection had stood still for years—a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, another of the Emancipation Proclamation, pictures of Washington, Lincoln and Napoleon, the last held in that household second only to Washington in all history as a "leveler."

The only daughter, Arabella, had been sent to boarding-school in Cincinnati. She married a rich man, lived in the city and, under the inspiration of English novels and the tutelage of a woman friend who visited in New York and often went abroad, was developing ideas of family and class and rank. She talked feelingly of the "lower classes" and of the duty of the "upper class" toward them. Her "goings-on" created an acid prejudice against higher education in her father's mind. As she was unfolding to him a plan for sending Hampden to Harvard he interrupted with, "No MORE idiots in my family at my expense," and started out to feed the pigs. The best terms Hampden's mother could make were that he should not be disinherited and cast off if he went to Battle Field and paid his own way.

He did not tell Pauline all of this, nor did he repeat to her the conversation between himself and his father a few days before he left home.

"Is 'Bella going to pay your way through?" asked his father, looking at him severely—but he looked severely at every one except Hampden's gentle-voiced mother.

"No, sir." The son's voice was clear.

"Is your mother?"

"No, sir."

"Have you got money put by?"

"Four hundred dollars."

"Is that enough?"

"It'll give me time for a long look around."

The old man drew a big, rusty pocketbook from the inside pocket of the old-fashioned, flowered-velvet waistcoat he wore even when he fed the pigs. He counted out upon his knee ten one-hundred-dollar bills. He held them toward his son. "That'll have to do you," he said. "That's all you'll get."

"No, thank you," replied Hampden. "I wish no favors from anybody."

"You've earned it over and above your keep," retorted his father. "It belongs to you."

"If I need it I'll send for it," said Hampden, that being the easiest way quickly to end the matter.

But he did tell Pauline that he purposed to pay his own way through college.

"My father has a notion," said he, "that the things one works for and earns are the only things worth having. And I think one can't begin to act on that notion too early. If one is trying to get an education, why not an all-round education, instead of only lessons out of books?"

From that moment Pauline ceased to regard dress or any other external feature as a factor in her estimate of Hampden Scarborough.

"But your plan might make a man too late in getting a start—some men, at least," she suggested.

"A start—for what?" he asked.

"For fame or fortune or success of any kind."

Scarborough's eyes, fixed on the distance, had a curious look in them—he was again exactly like that first view she had had of him.

"But suppose one isn't after any of those things," he said. "Suppose he thinks of life as simply an opportunity for self-development. He starts at it when he's born, and the more of it he does the more he has to do. And—he can't possibly fail, and every moment is a triumph—and——" He came back from his excursion and smiled apologetically at her.

But she was evidently interested.

"Don't you think a man ought to have ambition?" she asked. She was thinking of her lover and his audacious schemes for making himself powerful.

"Oh—a man is what he is. Ambition means so many different things."

"But shouldn't you like to be rich and famous and—all that?"

"It depends——" Scarborough felt that if he said what was in his mind it might sound like cant. So he changed the subject. "Just now my ambition is to get off that zoology condition."

IV.

A DUMONT TRIUMPH.

But in the first week of her second month Pauline's interest in her surroundings vanished. She was corresponding with Jennie Atwater and Jennie began to write of Dumont—he had returned to Saint X; Caroline Sylvester, of Cleveland, was visiting his mother; it was all but certain that Jack and Caroline would marry. "Her people want it," Jennie went on—she pretended to believe that Jack and Pauline had given each the other up—"and Jack's father is determined on it. They're together morning, noon and evening. She's really very swell, thoughIdon't think she's such a raving beauty." Following this came the Saint X News-Bulletin with a broad hint that the engagement was about to be announced.

"It's ridiculously false," said Pauline to herself; but she tossed for hours each night, trying to soothe the sick pain in her heart. And while she scouted the possibility of losing him, she was for the first time entertaining it—a cloud in the great horizon of her faith in the future; a small cloud, but black and bold against the blue. And she had no suspicion that he had returned from Chicago deliberately to raise that cloud.

A few days later another letter from Jennie, full of gossip about Jack and Caroline, a News-Bulletin with a long article about Caroline, ending with an even broader hint of her approaching marriage—and Dumont sent Pauline a note from the hotel in Vill [...]