"Of course, Arthur, I can't be sure what I'd do," she replied gently; "but I hope I'd not be made altogether contemptible by inheriting a little money."
"But it wouldn't seem contemptible," he retorted. "It'd be legal and sensible, and it'd seem just. You'd only be obeying a dead father's last wishes and guarding the interests of your husband and your children. They come before brothers."
"But not before self-respect," she said very quietly. She put her arm around his neck and pressed her cheek against his. "Arthur—dear—dear—" she murmured, "please don't talk or think about this any more. It—it—hurts." And there were hot tears in her eyes, and at her heart a sense of sickness and of fright; for his presentation of the other side of the case made her afraid of what she might do, or be tempted to do, in the circumstances he pictured. She knew she wouldn't—at least, not so long as she remained the person she then was. But how long would that be? How many years of association with her new sort of friends—with the sort Ross had long been—with the sort she was becoming more and more like—how many, or, rather, how few years would it take to complete the process of making her over into a person who would do precisely what Arthur had pictured?
Arthur had said a great deal more than he intended—more, even, than he believed true. For a moment he felt ashamed of himself; then he reminded himself that he wasn't really to blame; that, but for his father's harshness toward him, he would never have had such sinister thoughts about him or Adelaide. Thus his apology took the form of an outburst against Hiram. "Father has brought out the worst there is in me!" he exclaimed. "He is goading me on to—"
He looked up; Hiram was in the doorway. He sprang to his feet. "Yes, I mean it!" he cried, his brain confused, his blood on fire. "I don't care what you do. Cut me off! Make me go to work like any common laborer! Crush out all the decency there is in me!"
The figure of the huge old man was like a storm-scarred statue. The tragedy of his countenance filled his son and daughter with awe and terror. Then, slowly, like a statue falling, he stiffly tilted forward, crashed at full length face downward on the floor. He lay as he had fallen, breathing heavily, hoarsely. And they, each tightly holding the other's hand like two little children, stood pale and shuddering, unable to move toward the stricken colossus.
CHAPTER V
THE WILL
When Hiram had so far improved that his period of isolation was obviously within a few days of its end, Adelaide suggested to Arthur, somewhat timidly, "Don't you think you ought to go to work at the mills?"
He frowned. It was bad enough to have the inward instinct to this, and to
fight it down anew each day as a temptation to weakness and cowardice.
That the traitor should get an ally in his sister—it was intolerable.
The frown deepened into a scowl.
But Del had been doing real thinking since she saw her father stricken down, and she was beginning clearly to see his point of view as to Arthur. That angry frown was discouraging, but she felt too strongly to be quite daunted. "It might help father toward getting well," she urged, "and make such a difference—in every way."
"No more hypocrisy. I was right; he was wrong," replied her brother. He had questioned Dr. Schulze anxiously about his father's seizure; and Schulze, who had taken a strong fancy to him and had wished to put him at ease, declared that the attack must have begun at the mills, and would probably have brought Hiram down before he could have reached home, had he not been so powerful of body and of will. And Arthur, easily reassured where he must be assured if he was to have peace of mind, now believed that his outburst had had no part whatever in causing his father's stroke. So he was all for firm stand against slavery. "If I yield an inch now," he went on to Adelaide, "he'll never stop until he has made me his slave. He has lorded it over those workingmen so long that the least opposition puts him in a frenzy."
Adelaide gave over, for the time, the combat against a stubbornness which was an inheritance from his father. "I've only made him more set by what I've said," thought she. "Now, he has committed himself. I ought not to have been so tactless."
Long after Hiram got back in part the power of speech, he spoke only when directly addressed, and then after a wait in which he seemed to have cast about for the fewest possible words. After a full week of this emphasized reticence, he said, "Where is Arthur?"
Arthur had kept away because—so he told himself and believed—while he was not in the least responsible for his father's illness, still seeing him and being thus reminded of their difference could not but have a bad effect. That particular day, as luck would have it, he for the first time since his father was stricken had left the grounds. "He's out driving," said his mother.
"In the tandem?" asked Hiram.
"Yes," replied Ellen, knowing nothing of the last development of the strained relations between her husband and her "boy."
"Then he hasn't gone to work?"
"He's stayed close to the house ever since you were taken sick, Hiram," said she, with gentle reproach. "He's been helping me nurse you."
Hiram did not need to inquire how little that meant. He knew that, when anyone Ellen Ranger loved was ill, she would permit no help in the nursing, neither by day nor by night. He relapsed into his brooding over the problem which was his sad companion each conscious moment, now that the warning "Put your house in order" had been so sternly emphasized.
The day Dr. Schulze let them bring him down to the first floor, Mrs. Hastings—"Mrs. Fred," to distinguish her from "Mrs. Val"—happened to call. Mrs. Ranger did not like her for two reasons—first, she had married her favorite cousin, Alfred Hastings, and had been the "ruination" of him; second, she had a way of running on and on to everyone and anyone about the most intimate family affairs, and close-mouthed Ellen Ranger thought this the quintessence of indiscretion and vulgarity. But Hiram liked her, was amused by her always interesting and at times witty thrusts at the various members of her family, including herself. So, Mrs. Ranger, clutching at anything that might lighten the gloom thick and black upon him, let her in and left them alone together. With so much to do, she took advantage of every moment which she could conscientiously spend out of his presence.
At sight of Henrietta, Hiram's face brightened; and well it might. In old-fashioned Saint X it was the custom for a married woman to "settle down" as soon as she returned from her honeymoon—to abandon all thoughts, pretensions, efforts toward an attractive exterior, and to become a "settled" woman, "settled" meaning purified of the last grain of the vanity of trying to please the eye or ear of the male. And conversation with any man, other than her husband—and even with him, if a woman were soundly virtuous, through and through—must be as clean shorn of allurement as a Quaker meetinghouse. Mrs. Fred had defied this ancient and sacred tradition of the "settled" woman. She had kept her looks; she frankly delighted in the admiration of men. And the fact that the most captious old maid in Saint X could not find a flaw in her character as a faithful wife, aggravated the offending. For, did not her devotion to her husband make dangerous her example of frivolity retained and flaunted, as a pure private life in an infidel made his heresies plausible and insidious? At "almost" forty, Mrs. Hastings looked "about" thirty and acted as if she were a girl or a widow. Each group of gods seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it. Saint X's set of gods of conventionality doubtless seems ridiculous