The Conflict Part 44

"Do you mind my sitting with you, father?"

He did not answer. She went to him, touched him. He was dead.

As a rule death is not without mitigations, consolations even. Where it is preceded by a long and troublesome illness, disrupting the routine of the family and keeping everybody from doing the things he or she wishes, it comes as a relief. In this particular case not only was the death a relief, but also the estate of the dead man provided all the chief mourners with instant and absorbing occupation. If he had left a will, the acrimony of the heirs would have been caused by dissatisfaction with his way of distributing the property. Leaving no will, he plunged the three heirs--or, rather, the five heirs, for the husband of Martha and the wife of the son were most important factors--he plunged the five heirs into a ferment of furious dispute as to who was to have what. Martha and her husband and the daughter-in-law were people of exceedingly small mind. Trifles, therefore, agitated them to the exclusion of larger matters. The three fell to quarreling violently over the division of silverware, jewelry and furniture. Jane was so enraged by the "disgusting spectacle" that she proceeded to take part in it and to demand everything which she thought it would irritate Martha Galland or Irene Hastings to have to give up.

The three women and Hugo--for Hugo loved petty wrangling--spent day after day in the bitterest quarrels. Each morning Jane, ashamed overnight, would issue from her room resolved to have no part in the vulgar rowdyism. Before an hour had pa.s.sed she would be the angriest of the disputants. Except her own unquestioned belongings there wasn't a thing in the house or stables about which she cared in the least.

But there was a principle at stake--and for principle she would fight in the last ditch.

None of them wished to call in arbitrators or executors; why go to that expense? So, the bickering and wrangling, the insults and tears and sneers went on from day to day. At last they settled the whole matter by lot--and by a series of easily arranged exchanges where the results of the drawings were unsatisfactory. Peace was restored, but not liking. Each of the three groups--Hugo and Martha, Will and Irene, Jane in a group by herself--detested the other two. They felt that they had found each other out. As Martha said to Hugo, "It takes a thing of this kind to show people up in their true colors." Or, as Jane said to Doctor Charlton, "What beasts human beings are!"

Said he: "What beasts circ.u.mstance makes of some of them sometimes."

"You are charitable," said Jane.

"I am scientific," replied he. "It's very intelligent to go about distributing praise and blame. To do that is to obey a slightly higher development of the instinct that leads one to scowl at and curse the stone he stumps his toe on. The sensible thing to do is to look at the causes of things--of brutishness in human beings, for example--and to remove those causes."

"It was wonderful, the way you dragged father back to life and almost saved him. That reminds me. Wait a second, please."

She went up to her room and got the envelope addressed to Charlton which she had found in the drawer, as her father directed. Charlton opened it, took out five bank notes each of a thousand dollars. She glanced at the money, then at his face. It did not express the emotion she was expecting. On the contrary, its look was of pleased curiosity.

"Five thousand dollars," he said, reflectively. "Your father certainly was a queer mixture of surprises and contradictions. Now, who would have suspected him of a piece of sentiment like this? Pure sentiment.

He must have felt that I'd not be able to save him, and he knew my bill wouldn't be one-tenth this sum."

"He liked you, and admired you," said Jane.

"He was very generous where he liked and admired."

Charlton put the money back in the envelope, put the envelope in his pocket. "I'll give the money to the Children's Hospital," said he.

"About six months ago I completed the sum I had fixed on as necessary to my independence; so, I've no further use for money--except to use it up as it comes in."

"You may marry some day," suggested Jane.

"Not a woman who wishes to be left richer than independent," replied he. "As for the children, they'll be brought up to earn their own independence. I'll leave only incubators and keepsakes when I die.

But no estate. I'm not that foolish and inconsiderate."

"What a queer idea!" exclaimed Jane.

"On the contrary, it's simplest common sense. The idea of giving people something they haven't earned--that's the queer idea."

"You are SO like Victor Dorn!"

"That reminds me!" exclaimed Charlton. "It was very negligent of me to forget. The day your father died I dropped in on Victor and told him--him and Selma Gordon--about it. And both asked me to take you their sympathy. They said a great deal about your love for your father, and how sad it was to lose him. They were really distressed."

Jane's face almost brightened. "I've been rather hurt because I hadn't received a word of sympathy from--them," she said.

"They'd have come, themselves, except that politics has made a very ugly feeling against them--and Galland's your brother-in-law."

"I understand," said Jane. "But I'm not Galland--and not of that party."

"Oh, yes, you are of that party," replied Charlton. "You draw your income from it, and one belongs to whatever he draws his income from.

Civilization means property--as yet. And it doesn't mean men and women--as yet. So, to know the man or the woman we look at the property."

"That's hideously unjust," cried Jane.

"Don't be utterly egotistical," said Charlton. "Don't attach so much importance to your little, mortal, WEAK personality. Try to realize that you're a mere chip in the great game of chance. You're a chip with the letter P on it--which stands for Plutocracy. And you'll be played as you're labeled."

"You make it very hard for any one to like you."

"Well--good-by, then."

And ignoring her hasty, half-laughing, half-serious protests he took himself away. She was intensely irritated. A rapid change in her outward character had been going forward since her father's death--a change in the direction of intensifying the traits that had always been really dominant, but had been less apparent because softened by other traits now rapidly whithering.

The cause of the change was her inheritance.

Martin Hastings, remaining all his life in utter ignorance of the showy uses of wealth and looking on it with the eyes of a farm hand, had remained the enriched man of the lower cla.s.ses, at heart a member of his original cla.s.s to the end. The effect of this upon Jane had been to keep in check all the showy and arrogant, all the upper cla.s.s, tendencies which education and travel among the upper cla.s.ses of the East and of Europe had implanted in her. So long as plain old Martin lived, she could not FEEL the position she had--or, rather, would some day have--in the modern social system. But just as soon as he pa.s.sed away, just as soon as she became a great heiress, actually in possession of that which made the world adore, that which would buy servility, flattery, awe--just so soon did she begin to be an upper-cla.s.s lady.

She had acquired a superficial knowledge of business--enough to enable her to understand what the various items in the long, long schedule of her holdings meant. Symbols of her importance, of her power. She had studied the "great ladies" she had met in her travels and visitings.

She had been impressed by the charm of the artistic, carefully cultivated air of simplicity and equality affected by the greatest of these great ladies as those born to wealth and position. To be gentle and natural, to be gracious--that was the "proper thing." So, she now adopted a manner that was if anything too kindly. Her pose, her mask, behind which she was concealing her swollen and still swelling pride and sense of superiority, as yet fitted badly. She "overacted," as youth is apt to do. She would have given a shrewd observer--one not dazzled by her wealth beyond the power of clear sight--the impression that she was pitying the rest of mankind, much as we all pity and forbear with a hopeless cripple.

But the average observer would simply have said: "What a sweet, natural girl, so unspoiled by her wealth!"--just as the hopeless cripple says, "What a polite person," as he gets the benefit of effusive good manners that would, if he were shrewd, painfully remind him that he was an unfortunate creature.

Of all the weeds that infest the human garden sn.o.bbishness, the commonest, is the most prolific, and it is a mighty cross breeder, too--modifying every flower in the garden, changing colors from rich to glaring, changing odors from perfumes to sickening-sweet or to stenches. The dead hands of Martin Hastings scattered showers of s.h.i.+ning gold upon his daughter's garden; and from these seeds was springing a heavy crop of that most prolific of weeds.

She was beginning to resent Charlton's manner--bluff, unceremonious, candid, at times rude. He treated women exactly as he treated men, and he treated all men as intimates, free and easy fellow travelers afoot upon a dusty, vulgar highway. She had found charm in that manner, so natural to the man of no pretense, of splendid physical proportions, of the health of a fine tree. She was beginning to get into the state of mind at which practically all very rich people in a civilized society sooner or later arrive--a state of mind that makes it impossible for any to live with or near them except hirelings and dependents. The habit of power of any kind breeds intolerance of equality of level intercourse. This is held in check, often held entirely in check, where the power is based upon mental superiority; for the very superiority of the mind keeps alive the sense of humor and the sense of proportion. Not so the habit of money power. For money power is brutal, mindless. And as it is the only real power in any and all aristocracies, aristocracies are inevitably brutal and brutalizing.

If Jane had been poor, or had remained a few years longer--until her character was better set--under the restraining influence of her unfrilled and unfrillable father, her pa.s.sion for power, for superiority would probably have impelled her to develop her mind into a source of power and position. Fate abruptly gave her the speediest and easiest means to power known in our plutocratic civilization. She would have had to be superhuman in beauty of character or a genius in mind to have rejected the short and easy way to her goal and struggled on in the long and hard--and doubtful--way.

She did not herself appreciate the change within herself. She fancied she was still what she had been two weeks before. For as yet nothing had occurred to enable her to realize her changed direction, her changed view of life. Thus, she was still thinking of Victor Dorn as she had thought of him; and she was impatient to see him. She was now free FREE! She could, without consulting anybody, have what she wanted. And she wanted Victor Dorn.

She had dropped from her horse and with her arm through the bridle was strolling along one of the quieter roads which Victor often took in his rambles. It was a tonic October day, with floods of suns.h.i.+ne upon the gorgeous autumnal foliage, never more gorgeous than in that fall of the happiest alternations of frost and warmth. She heard the pleasant rustle of quick steps in the fallen leaves that carpeted the byroad.

She knew it was he before she glanced; and his first view of her face was of its beauty enhanced by a color as delicate and charming as that in the leaves about them.

She looked at his hands in which he was holding something half concealed. "What is it?" she said, to cover her agitation.

He opened his hands a little wider. "A bird," said he. "Some hunter has broken its wing. I'm taking it to Charlton for repairs and a fair start for its winter down South."

His eyes noted for an instant significantly her sombre riding costume, then sought her eyes with an expression of simple and friendly sympathy. The tears came to her eyes, and she turned her face away.

She for the first time had a sense of loss, a moving memory of her father's goodness to her, of an element of tenderness that had pa.s.sed out of her life forever. And she felt abjectly ashamed--ashamed of her relief at the lifting of the burden of his long struggle against death, ashamed of her miserable wranglings with Martha and Billy's wife, ashamed of her forgetfulness of her father in the exultation over her wealth, ashamed of the elaborately fas.h.i.+onable mourning she was wearing--and of the black horse she had bought to match. She hoped he would not observe these last flauntings of the purely formal character of a grief that was being utilized to make a display of fas.h.i.+onableness.

"You always bring out the best there is in me," said she.

He stood silently before her--not in embarra.s.sment, for he was rarely self-conscious enough to be embarra.s.sed, but refraining from speech simply because there was nothing to say.

"I haven't heard any of the details of the election," she went on.

"Did you come out as well as you hoped?"

"Better," said he. "As a result of the election the members.h.i.+p of the League has already a little more than doubled. We could have quadrupled it, but we are somewhat strict in our requirements. We want only those who will stay members as long as they stay citizens of Remsen City.

But I must go on to Charlton or he'll be out on his rounds."