The Cost Part 15

I tell you, he'll teach them more in the next three months than they'll learn of the whole faculty. And this summer he'll get every man and woman of them enough to pay their way through college next year."

"What did he do to-day?" asked Olivia. Of the many qualities she loved in Pierson, the one she loved most was his unbounded, unselfish admiration for his friend.

"He took each man separately, the others watching and listening. First he'd play the part of book agent with his pupil as a reluctant customer. Then he'd reverse, and the pupil as agent would try to sell him the book, he pretending to be an ignorant, obstinate, ill-natured, close-fisted farmer or farmer's wife. It was a liberal education in the art of persuasion. If his pupils had his brains and his personality, Peaks of Progress would be on the center-table in half the farm parlors of Wisconsin and Minnesota by September."

"IF they had his personality, and IF they had his brains," said Olivia.

"Well, as it is, he'll make the dumbest a.s.s in the lot bray to some purpose."

In September, when Scarborough closed his headquarters at Milwaukee and set out for Indianapolis, he found that the average earnings of his agents were two hundred and seventy-five dollars, and that he himself had made forty-three hundred. Mills came and offered him a place in the publis.h.i.+ng house at ten thousand a year and a commission. He instantly rejected it. He had already arranged to spend a year with one of the best law firms in Indianapolis before opening an office in Saint X, the largest town in the congressional district in which his farm lay.

"But there's no hurry about deciding," said Mills. "Remember we'll make you rich in a few years."

"My road happens not to lie in that direction," replied Scarborough, carelessly. "I've no desire to be rich. It's too easy, if one will consent to give money-making his exclusive attention."

Mills looked amused--had he not known Scarborough's ability, he would have felt derisive.

"Money's power," said he. "And there are only two ambitions for a wide-awake man--money and power."

"Money can't buy the kind of power I'd care for," answered Scarborough.

"If I were to seek power, it'd be the power that comes through ability to persuade."

"Money talks," said Mills, laughing.

"Money bellows," retorted Scarborough, "and bribes and browbeats, bully and coward that it is. But it never persuades."

"I'll admit it's a coward."

"And I hope I can always frighten enough of it into my service to satisfy my needs. But I'm not spending my life in its service--no, thank you!"

XII.

AFTER EIGHT YEARS.

While Scarborough was serving his clerks.h.i.+p at Indianapolis, Dumont was engaging in ever larger and more daring speculations with New York as his base. Thus it came about that when Scarborough established himself at Saint X, Dumont and Pauline were living in New York, in a big house in East Sixty-first Street.

And Pauline had welcomed the change. In Saint X she was constantly on guard, always afraid her father and mother would see below that smiling surface of her domestic life which made them happy. In New York she was free from the crus.h.i.+ng sense of peril and restraint, as their delusions about her were secure. There, after she and he found their living basis of "let alone," they got on smoothly, rarely meeting except in the presence of servants or guests, never inquiring either into the other's life, carrying on all negotiations about money and other household matters through their secretaries. He thought her cold by nature--therefore absolutely to be trusted. And what other man with the pomp and circ.u.mstance of a great and growing fortune to maintain had so admirable an instrument? "An ideal wife," he often said to himself. And he was not the man to speculate as to what was going on in her head. He had no interest in what others thought; how they were filling the places he had a.s.signed them--that was his only concern.

In one of those days of pause which come now and then in the busiest lives she chanced upon his letters from Europe in her winter at Battle Field. She took one of them from its envelope and began to read--carelessly, with a languid curiosity to measure thus exactly the change in herself. But soon she was absorbed, her mind groping through letter after letter for the clue to a mystery. The Dumont she now knew stood out so plainly in those letters that she could not understand how she, inexperienced and infatuated though she then was, had failed to see the perfect full-length portrait. How had she read romance and high-mindedness and intellect into the personality so frankly flaunting itself in all its narrow sordidness, in all its poverty of real thought and real feeling?

And there was Hampden Scarborough to contrast him with. With this thought the truth suddenly stared at her, made her drop the letter and visibly shrink. It was just because Scarborough was there that she had been tricked. The slight surface resemblance between the two men, hardly more than the "favor" found in all men of the family of strong and tenacious will, had led her on to deck the absent Dumont with the manhood of the present Scarborough. She had read Scarborough into Dumont's letters. Yes, and--the answers she addressed and mailed to Dumont had really been written to Scarborough.

She tossed the letters back into the box from which they had reappeared after four long years. She seated herself on the white bear-skin before the open fire; and with hands clasped round her knees she rocked herself slowly to and fro like one trying to ease an intolerable pain.

Until custom dulled the edge of that pain, the days and the nights were the cruelest in her apprentices.h.i.+p up to that time.

When her boy, Gardiner, was five years old, she got her father and mother to keep him at Saint X with them.

"New York's no place, I think, to bring up and educate a boy in the right way," she explained. And it was the truth, though not the whole truth. The concealed part was that she would have made an open break with her husband had there been no other way of safeguarding their all-seeing, all-noting boy from his example.

Before Gardiner went to live with his grandparents she stayed in the East, making six or eight brief visits "home" each year. When he went she resolved to divide her year between her pleasure as a mother and her obligation to her son's father, to her parents' son-in-law--her devotions at the shrine of Appearances.

It was in the fall of the year she was twenty-five--eight years and a half after she left Battle Field--that Hampden Scarborough reappeared upon the surface of her life.

On a September afternoon in that year Olivia, descending from the train at Saint X, was almost as much embarra.s.sed as pleased by her changed young cousin rus.h.i.+ng at her with great energy--"Dear, dear Olivia! And hardly any different--how's the baby? No--not Fred, but Fred Junior, I mean. In some ways you positively look younger. You know, you were SO serious at college!"

"But you--I don't quite understand how any one can be so changed, yet--recognizable. I guess it's the plumage. You're in a new edition--an edition deluxe."

Pauline's dressmakers were bringing out the full value of her height and slender, graceful strength. Her eyes, full of the same old frankness and courage, now had experience in them, too. She was wearing her hair so that it fell from her brow in two sweeping curves reflecting the light in sparkles and flashes. Her manner was still simple and genuine--the simplicity and genuineness of knowledge now, not of innocence. Extremes meet--but they remain extremes. Her "plumage" was a fas.h.i.+onable dress of pale blue cloth, a big beplumed hat to match, a chiffon parasol like an azure cloud, at her throat a sapphire pendant, about her neck and swinging far below her waist a chain of sapphires.

"And the plumage just suits her," thought Olivia. For it seemed to her that her cousin had more than ever the quality she most admired--the quality of individuality, of distinction. Even in her way of looking clean and fresh she was different, as if those prime feminine essentials were in her not matters of frequent reacquirement but inherent and inalienable, like her brilliance of eyes and smoothness of skin.

Olivia felt a slight tugging at the bag she was carrying. She looked--an English groom in spotless summer livery was touching his hat in respectful appeal to her to let go. "Give Albert your checks, too,"

said Pauline, putting her arm around her cousin's waist to escort her down the platform. At the entrance, with a group of station loungers gaping at it, was a phaeton-victoria lined with some cream-colored stuff like silk, the horses and liveried coachman rigid. "She's giving Saint X a good deal to talk about," thought Olivia.

"Home, please, by the long road," said Pauline to the groom, and he sprang to the box beside the coachman, and they were instantly in rapid motion. "That'll let us have twenty minutes more together," she went on to Olivia. "There are several people stopping at the house."

The way led through Munroe Avenue, the main street of Saint X. Olivia was astonished at the changes--the town of nine years before spread and remade into an energetic city of twenty-five thousand.

"Fred told me I'd hardly recognize it," said she, "but I didn't expect this. It's another proof how far-sighted Hampden Scarborough is.

Everybody advised him against coming here, but he would come. And the town has grown, and at the same time he's had a clear field to make a big reputation as a lawyer in a few years, not to speak of the power he's got in politics."

"But wouldn't he have won no matter where he was?" suggested Pauline.

"Sooner or later--but not so soon," replied Olivia.

"No--a tree doesn't have to grow so tall among a lot of bushes before it's noticed as it does in a forest."

"And you've never seen him since Battle Field?" As Olivia put this question she watched her cousin narrowly without seeming to do so.

"But," replied Pauline--and Olivia thought that both her face and her tone were a shade off the easy and the natural--"since he came I've been living in New York and haven't stayed here longer than a few days until this summer. And he's been in Europe since April. No," she went on, "I've not seen a soul from Battle Field. It's been like a painting, finished and hanging on the wall one looks toward oftenest, and influencing one's life every day."

They talked on of Battle Field, of the boys and girls they had known--how Thiebaud was dead and Mollie Crittenden had married the man who was governor of California; what Howe was not doing, the novels Chamberlayne was writing; the big women's college in Kansas that Grace Wharton was vice-president of. Then of Pierson--in the state senate and in a fair way to get to Congress the next year. Then Scarborough again--how he had distanced all the others; how he might have the largest practice in the state if he would take the sort of clients most lawyers courted a.s.siduously; how strong he was in politics in spite of the opposition of the professionals--strong because he had a genius for organization and also had the ear and the confidence of the people and the enthusiastic personal devotion of the young men throughout the state. Olivia, more of a politician than Fred even, knew the whole story; and Pauline listened appreciatively. Few indeed are the homes in strenuously political Indiana where politics is not the chief subject of conversation, and Pauline had known about parties and campaigns as early as she had known about dolls and dresses.

"But you must have heard most of this," said Olivia, "from people here in Saint X."

"Some of it--from father and mother," Pauline answered. "They're the only people I've seen really to talk to on my little visits. They know him very well indeed. I think mother admires him almost as much as you do. Here's our place," she added, the warmth fading from her face as from a spring landscape when the shadow of the dusk begins to creep over it.

They were in the grounds of the Eyrie--the elder Dumont was just completing it when he died early in the previous spring. His widow went abroad to live with her daughter and her sister in Paris; so her son and his wife had taken it. It was a great rambling stone house that hung upon and in a lofty bluff. From its windows and verandas and balconies could be seen the panorama of Saint Christopher. To the left lay the town, its ugly part--its factories and railway yards--hidden by the jut of a hill. Beneath and beyond to the right, the s.h.i.+ning river wound among fields brown where the harvests had been gathered, green and white where myriads of graceful ta.s.sels waved above acres on acres of Indian corn. And the broad leaves sent up through the murmur of the river a rhythmic rustling like a sigh of content. Once in a while a pa.s.sing steamboat made the sonorous cry of its whistle and the melodious beat of its paddles echo from hill to hill. Between the house and the hilltop, highway lay several hundred acres of lawn and garden and wood.

The rooms of the Eyrie and its well-screened verandas were in a cool twilight, though the September sun was hot.

"They're all out, or asleep," said Pauline, as she and Olivia entered the wide reception hall. "Let's have tea on the east veranda. Its view isn't so good, but we'll be cooler. You'd like to go to your room first?"

Olivia said she was comfortable as she was and needed the tea. So they went on through the splendidly-furnished drawing-room and were going through the library when Olivia paused before a portrait--"Your husband, isn't it?"

"Yes," replied Pauline, standing behind her cousin. "We each had one done in Paris."