The Cost Part 10

It was midday six weeks later, and Pauline and Dumont were landing at Liverpool, when Scarborough read in the college-news column of the Battle Field Banner that she had "married the only son of Henry Dumont, of Saint Christopher, one of the richest men in our state, and has departed for an extended foreign tour." Olivia--and Pierson naturally--had known, but neither had had the courage to tell him.

Scarborough was in Pierson's room. He lowered the paper from in front of his face after a few minutes.

"I see Pauline has married and gone abroad," he said.

"Yes, so I heard from Olivia," replied Pierson, avoiding Scarborough's eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me?" continued Scarborough, tranquil so far as Pierson could judge. "I'd have liked to send her a note."

Pierson was silent.

"I thought it would cut him horribly," he was thinking. "And he's taking it as if he had only a friendly interest." Scarborough's face was again behind the newspaper. When he had finished it he sauntered toward the door. He paused there to glance idly at the t.i.tles of the top row in the book-case. Pierson was watching him. "No--it's all right," he concluded. Scarborough was too straight and calm just to have received such a blow as that news would have been had HE cared for Pauline. Pierson liked his look better than ever before--the tall, powerful figure; the fair hair growing above his wide and lofty brow, with the one defiant lock; and in his aquiline nose and blue-gray eyes and almost perfect mouth and chin the stamp of one who would move forward irresistibly, moving others to his will.

"How old are you, Scarborough?" he asked.

"Twenty-three-nearly twenty-four. I ought to be ashamed to be only a freshman, oughtn't I?" He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm tired of it all." And he strolled out.

He avoided Pierson and Olivia and all his friends for several days, went much into the woods alone, took long walks at night. Olivia would have it that he had been hard hit, and almost convinced Pierson.

"He's the sort of person that suffers the most," she said. "I've a brother like him--won't have sympathy, keeps a wound covered up so that it can't heal."

"But what shall I do for him?" asked Pierson.

"Don't do anything--he'd hate you if you did."

After a week or ten days he called on Pierson and, seating himself at the table, began to shuffle a pack of cards. He looked tired.

"I never saw cards until I was fifteen," he said.

"At home they thought them one of the devil's worst devices--we had a real devil in our house."

"So did we," said Pierson.

"But not a rip-snorter like ours--they don't have him in cities, or even in towns, any more. I've seen ours lots of times after the lights were out--saw him long after I'd convinced myself in daylight that he didn't exist. But I never saw him so close as the night of the day I learned to play casino."

"Did you learn in the stable?" asked Pierson.

"That's where I learned, and mother slipped up behind me--I didn't know what was coming till I saw the look in the other boy's face. Then--"

Pierson left the rest to imagination.

"I learned in the hay-loft--my sister and my cousin Ed and I. One of the farm-hands taught us. The cards were so stained we could hardly see the faces. That made them look the more devilish. And a thunder-storm came up and the lightning struck a tree a few rods from the barn."

"Horrible!" exclaimed Pierson. "I'll bet you fell to praying."

"Not I. I'd just finished Tom Paine's Age of Reason--a preacher's son down the pike stole it from a locked closet in his father's library and loaned it to me. But I'll admit the thunderbolt staggered me. I said to them--pretty shakily, I guess: 'Come on, let's begin again.' But the farm-hand said: 'I reckon I'll get on the safe side,' and began to pray--how he roared! And I laughed--how wicked and reckless and brave that laugh did sound to me. 'Bella and Ed didn't know which to be more afraid of--my ridicule or the lightning. They compromised--they didn't pray and they didn't play."

"And so you've never touched a card since."

"We played again the next afternoon--let's have a game of poker. I'm bored to death today."

This was Scarborough's first move toward the fast set of which Pierson was leader. It was a small fast set--there were not many spoiled sons at Battle Field. But its pace was rapid; for every member of it had a const.i.tution that was a huge reservoir of animal spirits and western energy. They "cribbed" their way through recitations and examinations--as the faculty did not put the students on honor but watched them, they reasoned that cribbing was not dishonorable provided one did barely enough of it to pull him through. They drank a great deal--usually whisky, which they disliked but poured down raw, because it was the "manly" drink and to take it undiluted was the "manly" way.

They made brief excursions to Indianapolis and Chicago for the sort of carousals that appeal to the strong appet.i.tes and undiscriminating tastes of robust and curious youth.

Scarborough at once began to reap the reward of his advantages--a naturally bold spirit, an unnaturally reckless mood. In two weeks he won three hundred dollars, half of it from Pierson. He went to Chicago and in three nights' play increased this to twenty-nine hundred. The noise of the unprecedented achievement echoed through the college. In its constellation of bad examples a new star had blazed out, a star of the first magnitude.

Bladen Scarborough had used his surplus to improve and extend his original farm. But farms were now practically unsalable, and Hampden and Arabella were glad to let their cousin Ed--Ed Warfield--stay on, rent free, because with him there they were certain that the place would be well kept up. Hampden, poor in cash, had intended to spend the summer as a book agent. Instead, he put by a thousand dollars of his winnings to insure next year's expenses and visited Pierson at his family's cottage in the summer colony at Mackinac. He won at poker there and went on East, taking Pierson. He lost all he had with him, all Pierson could lend him, telegraphed to Battle Field for half his thousand dollars, won back all he had lost and two thousand besides.

When he reappeared at Battle Field in September he was dazzling to behold. His clothes were many and had been imported for him by the Chicago agent of a London tailor. His s.h.i.+rts and ties were in patterns and styles that startled Battle Field. He had taken on manners and personal habits befitting a "man of the world"--but he had not lost that simplicity and directness which were as unchangeably a part of him as the outlines of his face or the force which forbade him to be idle for a moment. He and Pierson--Pierson was pupil, now--took a suite of rooms over a shop in the town and furnished them luxuriously. They had brought from New York to look after them and their belongings the first English manservant Battle Field had seen.

Scarborough kept up his college work; he continued regularly to attend the Literary Society and to be its most promising orator and debater; he committed no overt act--others might break the college rules, might be publicly intoxicated and noisy, but he was always master of himself and of the situation. Some of the fanatical among the religious students believed and said that he had sold himself to the devil. He would have been expelled summarily but for Pierson--Pierson's father was one of the two large contributors to the support of the college, and it was expected that he would will it a generous endowment. To entrap Scarborough was to entrap Pierson. To entrap Pierson-- The faculty strove to hear and see as little as possible of their doings.

In the college Y.M.C.A. prayers were offered for Scarborough--his name was not spoken, but every one understood. A delegation of the religious among his faithful fellow barbs called upon him to pray and to exhort. They came away more charmed than ever with their champion, and convinced that he was the victim of slander and envy. Not that he had deliberately deceived them, for he hadn't; he was simply courteous and respectful of their sincerity.

"The fraternities are in this somewhere," the barbs decided. "They're trying to destroy him by lying about him." And they liked it that their leader was the brilliant, the talked-about, the sought-after person in the college. When he stood up to speak in the a.s.sembly hall or the Literary Society they always greeted him with several rounds of applause.

To the chagrin of the faculty and the irritation of the fraternities a jury of alumni selected him to represent Battle Field at the oratorical contest among the colleges of the state. And he not only won there but also at the interstate contest--a victory over the orators of the colleges of seven western states in which public speaking was, and is, an essential part of higher education. His oratory lacked style, they thought at Battle Field. It was the same then, essentially, as it was a few years later when the whole western country was discussing it. He seemed to depend entirely upon the inherent carrying power of his ably constructed sentences--like so many arrows, some flying gracefully, others straight and swift, all reaching the mark at which they were aimed. In those days, as afterward, he stood upon the platform almost motionless; his voice was clear and sweet, never noisy, but subtly penetrating and, when the sense demanded it, full of that mysterious quality which makes the blood run more swiftly and the nerves tingle.

"Merely a talker, not an orator," declared the professor of elocution, and few of those who saw him every day appreciated his genius then. It was on the subject-matter of his oration, not on his "delivery," that the judges decided for him--so they said and thought.

In February of this resplendent soph.o.m.ore year there came in his mail a letter postmarked Battle Field and addressed in printed handwriting.

The envelope contained only a newspaper cutting--from the St.

Christopher Republic:

At four o'clock yesterday afternoon a boy was born to Mr. and Mrs. John Dumont. It is their first child, the first grandchild of the Dumont and Gardiner families. Mother and son are reported as doing well.

Scarborough spent little time in the futile effort to guess what coward enemy had sped this anonymous shaft on the chance of its. .h.i.tting him.

His only enemies that interested him were those within himself. He destroyed envelope and clipping, then said to Pierson: "I neglected to celebrate an important event not long ago." He paused to laugh--so queerly that Pierson looked at him uneasily. "We must go to Chicago to celebrate it."

"Very good," said Fred. "We'll get Chalmers to go with us to-morrow."

"No-to-day--the four-o'clock train--we've got an hour and a half. And we'll have four clear days."

"But there's the ball to-night and I'm down for several dances."

"We'll dance them in Chicago. I've never been really free to dance before." He poured out a huge drink. "I'm impatient for the ball to begin." He lifted his gla.s.s. "To our ancestors," he said, "who repressed themselves, denied themselves, who h.o.a.rded health and strength and capacity for joy, and transmitted them in great oceans to us--to drown our sorrows in!"

He won six hundred dollars at faro in a club not far from the Auditorium, Pierson won two hundred at roulette, Chalmers lost seventy--they had about fourteen hundred dollars for their four days'

"dance." When they took the train for Battle Field they had spent all they had with them--had flung it away for dinners, for drives, for theaters, for suppers, for champagne. All the return journey Scarborough stared moodily out of the car window. And at every movement that disturbed his clothing there rose to nauseate him, to fill him with self-loathing, the odors of strong, sickening-sweet perfumes.

The next day but one, as he was in the woods near Indian Rock, he saw Olivia coming toward him. They had hardly spoken for several months.

He turned to avoid her but she came on after him.

"I wish to talk with you a few minutes, Mr. Scarborough," she said coldly, storm in her brave eyes.

"At your service," he answered with strained courtesy. And he walked beside her.

"I happen to know," she began, "that they're going to expel you and Fred Pierson the next time you leave here without permission."