With the Procession Part 30

"Live!" cried Roger, with a sonorous contempt. "Who _does_ understand what it is to live, then--the man who has all his work and worry done for him by some one else?"

Truesdale smiled, serene and unabashed. "The world is wide," he said, with an exquisite tolerance. "It is a very comprehensive subject. You must take it up one of these days--you've hardly made a beginning on it yet."

"The world!" cried Roger again, with a vibrant indignation at this impertinence. "Who _are_ the world if not my father and I and all the other earnest men who work to make the frame of things and to hold it together? _We_ are the world, and you--you are only the rubbish strewn over the top of it!"

He collected this rubbish and constructed from it a Frankenstein monster, with a heart of cork, a brow of bra.s.s, and a triple-plating of self-conceit. Then with a harsh laugh and a wide-flung arm he scattered it apart again.

Perhaps Truesdale took these words and gestures merely as an example of Roger's forensic eloquence. For--

"My dear brother," he began, quietly, while Roger beat his foot upon the floor, stung to increased indignation by the conscious artificiality of such an address--"my dear brother," said Truesdale, "you don't quite get my position in this trifling episode. Every little _conte drolatique_ has its Monsieur X, of course--myself, in this instance, and rightfully enough. But is Monsieur X the only gentleman involved? Let us see. Who comes before Monsieur X? Why, Monsieur W, to be sure. And who before Monsieur W? Monsieur V, _n'est-ce pas?_ And there is somebody still in front of Monsieur V. And if we go far enough back, we may come at last even to Monsieur A. Now, why are all these worthy gentlemen pa.s.sed over in favor of _ce cher_ Monsieur X? Well, perhaps Monsieur W, for example, is a captain of dragoons and already mated. And maybe Monsieur V is a young baron whose family won't stand any nonsense about him--families are different. And as for Monsieur A--well, let us put him down for a poor devil of a student who cuts no figure at all. But Monsieur X--ah, that is different! he is pounced upon in the bosom of his family. It is Monsieur X who has the scrupulous and strait-laced mother--"

"Truesdale!"

"And the little coterie of lily-sisters who never--"

"Truesdale! For shame!"

"And the over-conscientious and supersensitive father with millions and millions stored away in bursting money-bags somewhere or other. Oh, those money-bags, those money-bags, those money-bags!"

"Truesdale, what do you mean? Are they adventurers? Are they after black-mail?"

Truesdale threw back his head, closing his eyes and twirling his thumbs.

"I knew them there; I know them here." Then he opened his eyes and gave his brother a glance of satirical approval. "_Complimenti_, Roger; you are ending where I should have expected you to begin."

"It is not the end," cried Roger, savagely. He saw that he had allowed his view of the matter to be wrongly colored by the impressions of his father and the representations of Belden; and Truesdale's comments lacerated his self-esteem as with griffins' claws. "Haven't I told you that they have taken legal advice, and that--"

"And that the whole grovelling tribe of Leppins, outnumbering the Van Horns, possibly, are ready with oral testimony and a shower of depositions, and what all besides. Ouf! not an inch do I yield. _J'y suis; j'y reste_. Not an inch should anybody else yield. Well, thank me, Roger, for having given you this little glimpse into the great big world.

It's full of interest." He rose suddenly, stiff and straight and slender as some young fir-tree. "Come, Roger, put on your hat and go with me to j.a.pan."

He looked over into the half-open drawer of his brother's desk. "More of those maps, I see."

"Other maps; another subdivision. I can do my work without trotting over the whole globe; Cook County is big enough for me."

"H'm; you seem to be branching out quite extensively. Only, don't get in too deep." Truesdale gave this valuable advice in a patronizing tone of which he alone was master. "Yes, I should think Cook County would do very well for you--until you have learned to spik something besides ze Engleesh." He picked up his hat and moved towards the door.

"English will do for _me_!" retorted Roger, savagely.

"Well, turn the thing over in this new light," continued his brother, pleasantly. "And one thing more--a little suggestion: you have some notion of the man who comes before Monsieur X; give a bit of attention, now, to the man who comes after. He could be of the greatest service to us--permanent service. _Comprenez-vous_? Find him; find Monsieur Y--and arrange it that he shall be the last!"

And Truesdale sauntered airily out of the room.

XVIII

"You might have thought it no great concern of his--you might have imagined all our efforts as only a part of a play, and his interest merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet."

David Marshall fixed an intent and anxious gaze on his son's face, and ran his hand tremulously along the arm of his chair. He knew about how Roger felt; Truesdale had more than once made him feel the same way himself.

The old man had remained at home throughout the day. Too ill and nervous for the store, and too resourceless for the house, he had worried through twelve hours as wearing as any he could recollect. He had never been more unfitted for business, yet never (as he made it seem) more demanded by it. He imagined himself as still the king-pin of the Marshall & Belden Company--indeed, he found in that belief some consolation for his difficulty in reconciling himself to the style and t.i.tle that the course of the business had finally evolved. He tormented himself with thoughts of odds and ends of work left over from yesterday or from last week, or with the apprehension of some fresh step taken, some new course entered upon by the younger and more ardent men of whom the company was largely composed. He had laughed more than once over the joke of business acquaintances who told him they had had to take young men into partners.h.i.+p because it was impossible to pay the salaries they demanded; yet something more radical had happened to himself: the young men had not only come in, but they were showing a disposition to get things into their own hands. Their former manager, their credit man, several heads of departments--all these had rallied under Belden, and together seemed to be tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the sails to as speculative a course as a craft essentially conservative in its nature could well be made to take.

Marshall had not formulated so clearly as this the practical primacy of Belden, but he felt the necessity of his own presence, and chafed under the temporary withdrawal of his own guiding hand.

But more than the course of affairs at the store, more than the avalanche of complicated minutiae involved in the progress of the new house, more than the dawning risks attendant upon Roger's widening operations in land, more than the amiable persecutions of friends whose ambitions for him were greater than his own, did the courses of his younger son and all their threatening consequences disturb his days and hara.s.s his nights--haunting alike the hours set apart for work and for sleep, and even the few brief intervals between. He would rise in the morning haggard and dry-eyed after a sleepless night; he would toil through the weary and perplexing hours of a dragging day; and he would spend his evenings, usually, in a miserable and solitary contemplation of all his thickening annoyances and ills.

"Poor pa," Jane would say to her mother, as she watched his bent and lagging steps moving towards the recess of the bay-window; "there he goes worrying, all off by himself again."

Her mother, over her sewing or the evening paper, perhaps, would check the girl's impulse to follow. "Don't chase after your father, Jane; he's got enough things to bother him already." So that, except for the occasional charitable moment when Jane, unimpeded, perched on the arm of his chair and attempted to divert his wearing thoughts from their ever-deepening channel, the old man spent his evenings largely--too largely--alone.

The rare visits of Roger, never highly ameliorative, were none the more so now; the grisly wrestling with realities does little to promote the exudation of balm. Roger was tough and technical and litigious; his was the hand to seize, not to soothe.

Roger had had a second and more explicit interview with Truesdale, before Truesdale had taken an airy and irresponsible flitting from town. He had also prosecuted various inquiries of his own in various directions, and these inquiries had resulted in his coming to look up Truesdale's frothy suggestion with more seriousness, and upon Truesdale himself with more consideration, if not with more respect--_that_ he still withheld.

"He isn't a complete fool, after all," admitted Roger.

"I never thought he was," responded his father, dully.

"He has some little sense, I acknowledge."

"If it were only common-sense," said the old man, with a mournful, dragged-out smile.

Roger looked forth streetward, pondering. A long pa.s.senger-train s.h.i.+fted its line of glimmering squares rapidly southward; two or three couples pa.s.sed by on the pavement, respiring the suave air of an early June evening.

"It means money," said Roger, presently.

"As much as is necessary," replied his father, tremulously; "though I never could spare it worse than now."

"And more--well, more dirty work for me." He thought of the Van Horn matter, now as good as abandoned. "Never mind, though; I'm getting used to it."

"You are the only help I have, Roger--the only one to save us from this disgrace."

There were tears in his eyes, and a feeble tremor ran through the fore-arm and fingers that he advanced towards Roger's shoulder.

"Father is not the man he used to be," thought Roger. He felt that his sympathy was largely qualified by the impatience and aversion which must always move a young man when he observes the first signs of physical and mental impairment in an older one, and he regretted that it was so. And he was almost ashamed to feel relieved when his father withdrew his hand.

Besides Roger and his father, only Mrs. Marshall and Jane were at home.

Rosamund was in Wisconsin, and no one was sorry to have her away. She was a guest of Mrs. Bates at Lake Geneva--the central figure of a house-party, in fact. Mrs. Bates's fondness for nature did not stop with flowers; it led her to the fields and woods where they grew. No sooner was the back of the winter fairly broken than she began to preach the gospel of country life. She took the cream of June, and left to later comers the skimmed milk of July and August. She always saw that her Wisconsin place was ready for her by the middle of May; then for the next five months she pa.s.sed back and forth between town and country, according to the nature of her engagements and the character of the weather.

Truesdale was in Wisconsin, too--but not of the house-party. "You know, my dear," Mrs. Bates said to Jane, "I had meant to have your brother, but--"

Jane bowed her head and never thought of venturing to ask her how she _knew_. That same night Jane slowly tore her plans for the working-girls'

home into long strips and burned them in the gas, one at a time. "Pa'll never listen to a word about anything like this now."

Truesdale left behind no precise indications of his movements. The only person to whom he announced anything like a programme was Arthur Fasten, who met him on the way to the station, with his bag in one hand and his kit in the other.

"Off, are you?" called Paston. "Don't you begin the season rather early?"

"Just for a few days," replied Truesdale; "a little sketching tour up North. Change of scene and air, you know."