A Spoil of Office Part 15

The poor girl had just heard that he was going away and she met him with a white, scared face. He sat down without speaking, for he had no defence, except silence, for things of that nature. The girl's fury of grief appalled him. She came over and flung herself sobbing upon his lap, her arms about his neck.

"Oh, Brad! Is it true? Are you going away?"

"I expect to," he replied coldly.

"You mustn't! You sha'n't! I won't let you!" she cried, tightening her arms about him, as if that would detain him. From that on, there was nothing but sobs on her side, and explanations on his--explanations to which her love, direct and selfish, would not listen for a moment. The unreserve and unreason of her pa.s.sion at last disgusted him. His tone grew sharper.

"I can't stay here," he said. "You've no business to ask me to. I can't always be a lawyer's hack. I want to study and go higher. I've got to leave this town, if I ever amount to anything in the world."

"Then take me with you!" she cried.

"I can't do that! I can't any more'n make a livin' for myself. Besides, I've got to study."

"I'll make father give you some money," she said.

He closed his lips sternly, and said nothing further. Her agony wore itself out after a time, and she was content to sit up and look at him and listen to him at last while he explained. And her suppressed sobs and the tears that stood in her big childish eyes moved him more than her unrestrained sorrow. It was thus she conquered him.

He promised her he would come home often, and he promised to write every day, and by implication, though not in words, he promised to marry her--that is to say, he acquiesced in her plans for housekeeping when he returned and was established in the office. He ended it all by walking home with her and promising to see her every day before he went, and as he kissed her good-night at the gate, she was smiling again and quite happy, although a little catching of the breath (even in her laughter) showed that she was not yet out of the ground-swell of her emotion.

Mrs. Brown was waiting for him when he returned, and as he sat down in the sitting-room, where she was busy at her sewing, she looked at him in her slow way, and at last arose and came over near his chair.

"Have you promised her anything, Bradley?" she asked, laying her thimbled hand upon his shoulder, as his own mother might have done.

Bradley lifted his gloomy eyes and colored a little.

"I don't know what I've said," he answered, from the depth of his swift reaction. "More'n I had any business to say, probably."

"I thought likely. You can't afford to marry a girl out of pity for her, Bradley--it won't do. I've seen how things stood for some time, but I thought I wouldn't say anything." She paused and considered a moment, standing there by his side. "It's a good thing for both of you that you're going away. You hadn't ought to have let it go on so long."

"I couldn't help it," he replied with more sharpness in his voice than he had ever used in speaking to her.

Her hand dropped from his shoulder. "No, I don't s'pose you could. It aint natural for young people to stop an' think about these things. I don't suppose you knew y'rself just where it was all leading to. Well, now, don't worry, and don't let it interfere with your plans. She'll outgrow it. Girls often go through two or three such attacks. Just go on with your studies, and when you come back, if you find her unmarried, why, then decide what to do."

Her touch of cynicism was accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that she had never had a daughter.

XIII.

BRADLEY SEES IDA AGAIN.

Bradley felt that the world was widening for him, as he took the train for Iowa City a few days later. He was now very nearly thirty years of age, and was maturing more rapidly than his friends and neighbors knew, for the processes of his mind, like those of an intricate coil of machinery, were hidden deep away from the casual acquaintance.

He had secured, in the two years at the seminary, a fairly good groundwork of the common English branches, and his occasional reading, and especially his attendance upon law-suits, had given him a really creditable understanding of common law. The Judge always insisted that law was simple, but it wasn't as profitable as--chicanery.

"Any man, from his fund of common sense, can settle nine tenths of all law-suits, but that aint what we're here for. A successful lawyer is the fellow who tangles things up and keeps common law and common sense subordinated to chicanery and precedent. d.a.m.n precedent, anyway. It means referring to a past that didn't know, and didn't want to know, what justice was."

In the atmosphere of lectures like these, Bradley had unconsciously absorbed a great deal of radical thought about law-codes, and now went about the study of the history of enactments and change of statutes without any servile awe of the past. The Judge's irreverence had its uses, for it put a law on its merits before the young student.

He found the law-school a very congenial place to study. He pa.s.sed the examinations quite decently.

His life there was quiet and studious, for he felt that he had less time than the younger men. His age seemed excessive to him, by contrast. He was very generally respected as a quiet, decent fellow, who might be a fine consulting lawyer, but not a good man in the courts. They changed this opinion very suddenly upon hearing him present his first plea.

His life consisted for the most part of pa.s.sing to and fro from his boarding-place to his recitation-room, or to long hours of digging in the library. He saw from time to time notices of Miss Wilbur's lectures in the interests of the grange and upon literary topics. He determined to hear her if she came into any neighboring city. There was no one to spy upon him, if he made an expedition of that sort.

One beautiful winter day he read in the weekly paper of the town that she was about to appear at the Congregational church in a lecture ent.i.tled, "The Real Woman-question." He had an impulse to sing, which he wisely repressed, for he couldn't sing--that is, nothing which the hearer would recognize as singing. The Fates seemed working in his favor.

He had preserved a marked sweetness and purity of thought through all his hard life that made him a good type of man. His clear, steady eyes never gave offence to any woman, for nothing but sympathy and admiration ever looked out of them. The very thought that she was coming so near brought a curious numbness into his muscles and a tremor into his hands. He looked forward now to the evening of the lecture with the keenest interest he had ever felt.

The dazzling winter day seemed more radiant than ever before, when he heard some ladies in the post-office say Ida was in town. The blue shadows lay on the new-fallen snow vivid as steel. The warm sun showered down through the clear air a peculiar warmth that made the eaves begin to drop in the early morning. Sleighs were moving to and fro in the streets, and bright bits of color on the girls' hoods and in the broad knit scarfs which the young men wore, formed pleasing reliefs from the dazzling blue and white. Bells filled the air with jocund music.

Bradley walked straight away into the country. He wanted to be alone.

It seemed so strange and sweet to be thus shaken by the coming of a woman. In the first few minutes he gave himself up to the thought that she was near and that he was going to hear her speak again. It made his hand shake and his heart beat quick.

He wondered if she would be changed. She would be older a little, but she would look just the same. He saw her stand again under the waving branches of the oaks, the flickering shadow on her brown hair, speaking again the words which had become the measure of his ambition, the prophecy of a social condition:

"I want to have everything I do to help us all on toward that time when the country will be filled with happy young people, and hale and hearty old people, when the moon will be brighter, and the stars thicker in the skies."

This was his thought. He had not risen yet to the conception of the real barrenness and squalor of the life he had lived.

His studies had made him a little more self-a.n.a.lytical, but there were inner deeps where he did not penetrate and there was one sacred place which he dared not enter. A whirl of thought confused him, but out of it all he returned constantly to the thought that he should hear her speak again.

That evening he dressed himself with as much care as if he were to call upon her alone, and he dressed very well now. His clothes were substantial and fitted him well. His year's immunity from hard work had left his large hands supple and delicate of touch, and his face had attained refinement and mobility. His eyes had become more introspective and had lost entirely the ox-like roll of the country-born man. He was a handsome and dignified young man. His bearing on the street was noticeably manly and unaffected.

The lecture was in the church and the seats were all filled. It gratified him, at the same time that it hopelessly abased him to observe all this evidence of her power. As he waited for her to appear that tremor came into his hands again, and that breathlessness, and curiously enough he felt that horrible familiar sinking of the heart which he always felt just before he himself rose to speak.

Somebody started to clap hands, and the rest joined in, as two or three ladies entered the back part of the church and pa.s.sed up the aisle. He looked up as they went by him, and caught a glimpse of a stately head of brown hair, modestly bent in acknowledgment of the applause, and he caught a whiff of the delicate odor of violets. His eyes followed the strong, firm steps of the young woman who walked between the two older women. There was something fine and dignified in her walk, and the odor of her dress as she pa.s.sed lingered with him, but he did not feel that this was the same woman, till she turned and faced him on the platform.

He sat impa.s.sively, but his pulse leaped when her clear brown eyes running calmly over the audience seemed to fall upon him. She was the same woman, his ideal and more. She was fuller of form and the poise of her head was more womanly, but she was the same spirit that had come to be such a power and inspiration in his life.

As a matter of fact she had grown also. If she had not, she would have seemed girlish to him now; growing as he grew, she seemed the same distance beyond him. Her self-possession in the face of the audience appealed to him strongly. Something in her manner of dress pleased him, it was so individual, so like her simple, dignified, beautiful self in every line.

She spoke more quietly, more conversationally than when he heard her before, but her voice made him shudder with a.s.sociated emotions. Its cadences reached deep, and the words she spoke opened long vistas in his mind. She was defending the right of women to live as human beings, to act as human beings, and to develop as freely as men.

"I claim the right to be an individual human being first and a woman afterward. Why should the accident of my s.e.x surround me with conventional and arbitrary limitations? I claim the same right to find out what I can do and can't do that a man has. Who is to determine what my sphere is--men and men's laws or my own nature? These are vital questions. I deny the right of any man to mark out the path in which I shall walk. I claim the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that men are demanding.

"It is not a question of suffrage merely--suffrage is the smaller part of the woman-question--it is a question of equal rights. It is a question of whether the law of liberty applies to humanity or to men only. Absolute liberty bounded only by the equal liberties of the rest of humanity is the real goal of the race--not of man only, but woman too."

The ladies dimly feeling that liberty was a safe thing to cheer, clapped their hands softly under the cover of the nosier clapping of a few radicals who knew what the speaker was really saying. Bradley did not cheer--he was thinking too deeply.

"The woman question is not a political one merely, it is an economic one. The real problem is the wage problem, the industrial problem. The real question is woman's dependence upon man as the bread-winner. So long as that dependence exists there will be weakness. No individual can stand at their strongest and best while leaning upon some other. I believe with Browning and Ruskin that the development of personality is the goal of the race."

The ladies took it for granted that this was true as it was bolstered by two great names. A few, however, sat with wrinkled brows scenting something heretical in all that.

"The time is surely coming when women can no longer bear to be dependent, to be pitied or abused by men. They will want to stand upright and independent by their husbands, claiming the same rights to freedom of action, and demanding equal pay for equal work. She must be able to earn her own living in an _honorable_ way at a moment's notice.

Then she will be a free woman even if she never leaves her kitchen."

It was trite enough to a few of the audience, but, to others, it was new, and to many it was revolutionary. She was destined to again set a stake in Bradley's mental horizon. The woman question had not engaged his attention; at least not in any serious way. He had not thought of woman as having any active part in living. In the thoughtless way of the average man, he had ignored or idealized women according as they appealed to his eye. He had not risen to the point of pitying or condemning, or in any way consciously placing them in the social economy.