“Thee married young. I shall not marry young, and perhaps not at all,” said Ruth, with a look of vast experience.
“Perhaps thee doesn’t know thee own mind; I have known persons of thy age who did not. Did thee see anybody whom thee would like to live with always in Fallkill?”
“Not always,” replied Ruth with a little laugh. “Mother, I think I wouldn’t say ‘always’ to any one until I have a profession and am as independent as he is. Then my love would be a free act, and not in any way a necessity.”
Margaret Bolton smiled at this new-fangled philosophy. “Thee will find that love, Ruth, is a thing thee won’t reason about, when it comes, nor make any bargains about. Thee wrote that Philip Sterling was at Fallkill.”
“Yes, and Henry Brierly, a friend of his; a very amusing young fellow and not so serious-minded as Philip, but a bit of a fop maybe.”
“And thee preferred the fop to the serious-minded?”
“I didn’t prefer anybody; but Henry Brierly was good company, which Philip wasn’t always.”
“Did thee know thee father had been in correspondence with Philip?”
Ruth looked up surprised and with a plain question in her eyes.
“Oh, it’s not about thee.”
“What then?” and if there was any shade of disappointment in her tone, probably Ruth herself did not know it.
“It’s about some land up in the country. That man Bigler has got father into another speculation.”
“That odious man! Why will father have anything to do with him? Is it that railroad?”
“Yes. Father advanced money and took land as security, and whatever has gone with the money and the bonds, he has on his hands a large tract of wild land.”
“And what has Philip to do with that?”
“It has good timber, if it could ever be got out, and father says that there must be coal in it; it’s in a coal region. He wants Philip to survey it, and examine it for indications of coal.”
“It’s another of father’s fortunes, I suppose,” said Ruth. “He has put away so many fortunes for us that I’m afraid we never shall find them.”
Ruth was interested in it nevertheless, and perhaps mainly because Philip was to be connected with the enterprise. Mr. Bigler came to dinner with her father next day, and talked a great deal about Mr. Bolton’s magnificent tract of land, extolled the sagacity that led him to secure such a property, and led the talk along to another railroad which would open a northern communication to this very land.
“Pennybacker says it’s full of coal, he’s no doubt of it, and a railroad to strike the Erie would make it a fortune.”
“Suppose you take the land and work the thing up, Mr. Bigler; you may have the tract for three dollars an acre.”
“You’d throw it away, then,” replied Mr. Bigler, “and I’m not the man to take advantage of a friend. But if you’ll put a mortgage on it for the northern road, I wouldn’t mind taking an interest, if Pennybacker is willing; but Pennybacker, you know, don’t go much on land, he sticks to the legislature.” And Mr. Bigler laughed.
When Mr. Bigler had gone, Ruth asked her father about Philip’s connection with the land scheme.
“There’s nothing definite,” said Mr. Bolton. “Philip is showing aptitude for his profession. I hear the best reports of him in New York, though those sharpers don’t intend to do anything but use him. I’ve written and offered him employment in surveying and examining the land. We want to know what it is. And if there is anything in it that his enterprise can dig out, he shall have an interest. I should be glad to give the young fellow a lift.”
All his life Eli Bolton had been giving young fellows a lift, and shouldering the loses when things turned out unfortunately. His ledger, take-it-altogether, would not show a balance on the right side; but perhaps the losses on his books will turn out to be credits in a world where accounts are kept on a different basis. The left hand of the ledger will appear the right, looked at from the other side.
Philip, wrote to Ruth rather a comical account of the bursting up of the city of Napoleon and the navigation improvement scheme, of Harry’s flight and the Colonel’s discomfiture. Harry left in such a hurry that he hadn’t even time to bid Miss Laura Hawkins goodbye, but he had no doubt that Harry would console himself with the next pretty face he saw — a remark which was thrown in for Ruth’s benefit. Col. Sellers had in all probability, by this time, some other equally brilliant speculation in his brain.
As to the railroad, Philip had made up his mind that it was merely kept on foot for speculative purposes in Wall street, and he was about to quit it. Would Ruth be glad to hear, he wondered, that he was coming East? For he was coming, in spite of a letter from Harry in New York, advising him to hold on until he had made some arrangements in regard to contracts, he to be a little careful about Sellers, who was somewhat visionary, Harry said.
The summer went on without much excitement for Ruth. She kept up a correspondence with Alice, who promised a visit in the fall, she read, she earnestly tried to interest herself in home affairs and such people as came to the house; but she found herself falling more and more into reveries, and growing weary of things as they were. She felt that everybody might become in time like two relatives from a Shaker establishment in Ohio, who visited the Boltons about this time, a father and son, clad exactly alike, and alike in manners. The son; however, who was not of age, was more unworldly and sanctimonious than his father; he always addressed his parent as “Brother Plum,” and bore himself, altogether in such a superior manner that Ruth longed to put bent pins in his chair. Both father and son wore the long, single breasted collarless coats of their society, without buttons, before or behind, but with a row of hooks and eyes on either side in front. It was Ruth’s suggestion that the coats would be improved by a single hook and eye sewed on in the small of the back where the buttons usually are.
Amusing as this Shaker caricature of the Friends was, it oppressed Ruth beyond measure; and increased her feeling of being stifled.
It was a most unreasonable feeling. No home could be pleasanter than Ruth’s. The house, a little out of the city; was one of those elegant country residences which so much charm visitors to the suburbs of Philadelphia. A modern dwelling and luxurious in everything that wealth could suggest for comfort, it stood in the midst of exquisitely kept lawns, with groups of trees, parterres of flowers massed in colors, with greenhouse, grapery and garden; and on one side, the garden sloped away in undulations to a shallow brook that ran over a pebbly bottom and sang under forest trees. The country about was the perfection of cultivated landscape, dotted with cottages, and stately mansions of Revolutionary date, and sweet as an English countryside, whether seen in the soft bloom of May or in the mellow ripeness of late October.
It needed only the peace of the mind within, to make it a paradise. One riding by on the Old Germantown road, and seeing a young girl swinging in the hammock on the piazza and, intent upon some volume of old poetry or the latest novel, would no doubt have envied a life so idyllic. He could not have imagined that the young girl was reading a volume of reports of clinics and longing to be elsewhere.
Ruth could not have been more discontented if all the wealth about her had been as unsubstantial as a dream. Perhaps she so thought it.
“I feel,” she once said to her father, “as if I were living in a house of cards.”
“And thee would like to turn it into a hospital?”
“No. But tell me father,” continued Ruth, not to be put off, “is thee still going on with that Bigler and those other men who come here and entice thee?”
Mr. Bolton smiled, as men