Old Ebenezer Part 18

"I am glad you have begun to think," he said, smiling at her. "I knew the time would come, and, as it has come, let me ask you a question.

Did you request this Mr. Lyman to sign the pet.i.tion?"

"I mentioned it to him."

"You did. That ought to have been sufficient. What did he say?"

"He said that he would--under certain conditions." McElwin winced in memory of his and Sawyer's visit to Lyman.

"Conditions? How does he dare enforce conditions? What were they?"

"That I must avow my love for Zeb--Mr. Sawyer."

"Well, is that all?"

"All! Isn't it enough?"

"You can do that, my daughter," Mrs. McElwin said meekly.

"Yes, I could, if the time should ever come."

"What time?" the banker asked.

"The time when I can say that I love him."

McElwin crossed his legs with a sudden flounce. "You put too serious an estimate upon love," he said. "You expect it to be the grand, over-mastering pa.s.sion we read about. That was all well enough for the age of poetry, but this is the age of prose. You can go to that man and tell him that--"

"That I have a Nineteenth century love for Mr. Sawyer," she interrupted.

"Well, yes."

"And he would laugh at me."

"Laugh at you," he frowned. "No gentleman can laugh at a lady's distress."

"But he might not regard it as distress. It might seem ridiculous to him."

"Hump," he grunted. "Well, it's undignified, it is almost outrageous to be forced to do such a thing, but you must go to him. Your mother will go with you."

"No, James," his wife gently protested, looking at him in mild appeal.

"I don't really think I can muster the courage for so awkward an undertaking. Please leave me out."

"Leave you out of so important an arrangement, an arrangement that involves the future of your daughter!"

"Then, why should not all three of us go?" she asked.

"I have trampled my own pride under my feet by going once," he replied. "Yes, and he treated me with cool impudence. And if I should go again something might happen. That man has humiliated me more than any man I ever met, and once is enough; I couldn't bear an insult in the presence of my wife and daughter. Eva, do you know what that man tried to do? He gained admission to my private office, and actually strove to bunco me out of a hundred dollars."

"He may have tried to borrow it, father, but I don't think he tried to get it dishonestly."

"Didn't I tell you that he tried to beat me out of the money? Why do you set up a mere opinion against my experience? And why are you so much inclined to take his part? Tell me that. You can't be interested in him?"

"I don't want injustice done him."

"Oh, no; but you would submit to the injustice he does you. He has robbed you of the society of your younger acquaintances--he compels you to sit almost excluded in a town where you are an acknowledged belle. Young gentlemen are afraid to call on you."

"Well, I don't know that it would be exactly proper," she replied.

"And," he went on, lifting his voice, "the strangest part of it is that you quietly submit to this treatment when there is a way to free yourself. And I request you to make use of it."

He got up, went to the mantel-piece, took up a sea-sh.e.l.l, put it down, turned his back to the fire place, stood there a moment and strode out.

"You must do as he commands," said the mother.

"I can't."

"Don't say that. You must. I have thought it over, and I know it's for the best."

"You have permitted him to think it over, and you hope it is for the best," the daughter replied.

CHAPTER XV.

MUST LEAVE THE TOWN.

At eleven o'clock the next day, Zeb Sawyer was to meet McElwin at the bank. The hour was tolled off by a grim old clock standing high in a corner, a rare old time piece with a history, or at least a past, of interest to McElwin, for it had been bought at the forced sale of fixtures belonging to a defunct bank. It struck with solemn self-importance, as if proclaiming the hour to foreclose a mortgage; and though not given to this sort of reflective speculation, McElwin must have been vaguely influenced by its knell-like stroke, for he nearly always glanced up as if a tribute were due to its promptness. A few minutes later Zeb Sawyer was shown into the room. The banker had been sitting in deep thought, with his legs stretched forth, and with his hands in his pockets, but he turned about when the clock struck, and as Sawyer entered the office he was busy with papers on a table in front of him.

"Good morning, Zeb; sit down."

"Hard at it, I see," said the young man, taking a seat at the opposite side of the table.

"Yes, day and night. No rest for the wicked, you know."

"I don't know as to that," Sawyer replied, "but I do know that there is mighty little rest for the man that wants to do anything in the world."

"You are right. The gospel of content builds poor houses. I never knew a happy man who wasn't lazy."

"You ought to go to Congress, McElwin; they need such talk there."

"They need a good many qualities that they are not likely to get." He put his papers aside, and leaning with his arms on the table looked into the eyes of his visitor. "My daughter has developed into a thinking woman, Zeb."

The over-confident young money-maker's face brightened, as if the banker had given him a piece of encouraging news.

"Yes, sir," McElwin went on, "and no cause is lost so long as thinking is going on. Why, sir, it took my wife years and years to learn how to think. It was not expected that a young woman in this part of the country should think. Men were the necessities and women the adornments of society when I was a young fellow."

"But you said your daughter had become a thinking woman," Sawyer hastened to remark, to bring him back from his wanderings.