Chapter XV

After Brainard's withdrawal Abbie and Ogden sat for some time in silence. The moon sank; the clatter of hoofs on the asphalt sounded less frequently; some of the neighbors over the way had pulled in their rugs, and were now seen, by new-lighted gas-jets, at upper windows pulling down their shades. The breeze freshened; it rustled the lilacs and syringas in the side yard, and it swayed the stringy mass of wild cucumbers that had taken it upon themselves to hide the red hideousness of the barn.

Suddenly Ogden spoke.

"There! I knew I should forget it, and I have. I laid it on my bureau the last thing, too!"

"What?"

"Why--'A False Start.' You haven't wanted it, have you?"

"No; keep it if you like. I've read it."

She meant, "Keep it; please do. Keep it, for my sake."

"It's a pretty good book; didn't you think so?" he asked.

"Yes; I liked it ever so much. He married the right one, after all, didn't he?"

"Might have done it before," Ogden commented. "No earthly reason why not. Only you know how they spin these things out."

There was a sudden shutting down of windows over their heads. Ogden drew out his watch, and turned it so as to profit by the lamp-post on the corner. "Why, I'd no idea!" Burt and Cornelia had not returned from the park, or, if so, had passed on the other side of the street. "Good-night."

"It isn't late, is it?"

"Only for a North-sider."

"Good-night," she said, slowly, and sat alone on the steps until her father came down and called her in.

On the first of July Brainard summoned George into his own private room.

"We have about decided to have an assistant cashier here," he said. His voice was gruff, but his glance was a little sheepish. "Mr. Fairchild thinks it will be convenient about signatures and a good many other things. Burt's out a good deal and likely to be off all through August, and I don't like to have drafts signed in advance. You could make up the reports, too, and swear to 'em. Besides, it's elective--puts you in the Bankers' Almanac, for one thing. As to salary, I suppose we could stand an extra five hundred--or six."

He looked at George with some constraint, but his intention appeared to be friendly.

"We might expect you to go on helping with the tellers' work on occasion--vacation-time, for instance. Now, about your own vacation--"

George bowed with an additional acknowledgment of the favor; he had expected to pass an unbroken summer in town.

"Thursday's the Fourth. Put five or six days with it, if you like--to get accustomed to the new deal."

He turned to his desk. "That's all right; talk to Fairchild." It seemed that anything beyond the merest word of thanks would be distasteful, and George withdrew.

He accepted his elevation and his vacation with unfeigned pleasure; he attributed his advance to the old man's softened mood occasioned by his son's engagement to Cornelia McNabb. Burt, a few mornings back, had told his father, plainly and promptly, that it was his intention to marry Cornelia--and soon. He had prepared himself for remonstrance--even for opposition, and he had braced himself to demonstrate to his father that he was going to have his own way. The old man, however, made no difficulties; Cornelia had certain qualities that he appreciated, and he knew that Burt had a strong and a strengthening will. Besides, a son-in-law was one thing, and a daughter-in-law another. A daughter's husband must come as an ally, offensive and defensive; he must contribute money, and if not money, then abilities. There must he abilities in actual exercise, or there must be the certain promise of their development in the pursuit of some such career as would be recognized and endorsed by business men of his own sort. That ten-dollar-a-week man--that anthem singer! His fist clenched and his eye glared at the very thought of him. But a son's wife could be moulded--if not moulded, then coerced. There was to be no breaking away from two such wills as his and Burt's. He liked vim; he recognized snap; he was prepared to welcome Cornelia as a vital force.

"Oconomowoc," murmured George to himself. He was bending over his bureau drawer, sorting out his collars. The gas-flame reflected itself in the mirror and threw a doubled glare upon his face.

"Eh!" said Brower, sitting cross-legged on his trunk. He laid the book down across two of the top slats; it was "David Grieve"--he read everything.

They were still in the Bush Street house. Mrs. Ogden had a room on the floor below.

"Did I speak?" asked George.

"Ton said--Oconomowoc. Is that where you are going?"

"Queer name, isn't it? What's the place like?"

"If you've got a chance to go there, you go." The oracle spoke and retired into his book.

George went. The train made its rapid run up to Milwaukee, took its short stop, and turned westward on its way towards La Crosse. At Pewaukee there was the usual halt; it lengthened to an unusual halt. George paced the long platform impatiently; his mind had projected itself through Nagowicka and Nashotah and Okauchee to Oconomowoc, and his body was eager to follow.

"What's the trouble?" he asked the brakeman.

"St. Paul express late--passes us here."

The platform was swarming with passengers and townspeople. A figure rushed through the crowd and grasped George by the hand.

"So you're gallivanting, too? And I'll bet a nickel you've been aboard all the way up--parlor-car. Now, haven't you?" The voice sounded a trumpet-note of wide-flung triumph. It was Cornelia's.

Her cheeks blazed and her eyes burned with the magnificence of conscious conquest. Her glory spread about her the same succession of flowing circles that a stone spreads over a pond. It seemed as if her expansiveness must crowd the train from its track and the station from its foundations.

"Ma," she called back into the crowd, "come here--do! I want you to meet Mr. Ogden. He's one of my most particular friends; but I guess you don't need to be told that--you've heard enough about him. Mr. Ogden, this is my mother, and she's about the best mother that ever lived."

Mrs. McNabb smiled bravely and took Ogden's slender palm in her large, capable grasp. She wore a sedate black bonnet; her gray hair was parted in the middle and fell right and left in two wide, crinkly folds.

"And I want pa to come, too; no dodging." An elderly man came forward reluctantly, in his loose, short trousers and his thick boots with broad, square toes; he seemed to find Ogden, in his modified tourist guise, a disconcerting object. He lifted up his shrewd but retiring eyes, placing one embarrassed hand on his grizzled chin whiskers and giving George the other; it was rough, and the nails were broken.

George shook hands with the old fellow--who went well enough with other features of the Wisconsin landscape: the shaggy tamarack swamps, the gashed sides of gravelly "hog-backs," the long stretches of disordered barbed-wire fences, the rusty reds of depots and storehouses, and the marshy ponds, edged by the ragged scantlings of gigantic ice-houses.

Cornelia did not perceive this harmony--or ignored it.

"Yes," she declared, "ma's the best ma, and pa ain't far behind. Now don't shy, pa; Mr. Ogden is more scary than you are. He'd been trying for near three months to ask me to go to the theatre with him, when along came Burt and plumped out and asked me inside of a week. Burt's enterprising; no mistake."

The old people smiled at each other, half embarrassed by Cornelia's frankness.

"But we won't shut out George--oh, dear! I mean Mr. Ogden--altogether. Bear witness, both of you: I ask him to be one of my ushers." George stared. Was the girl meaning to be married in church after--everything? Then he bowed. "On Abbie's account--if at all," he thought.

"Going to Coonie for the Fourth, I suppose?" Cornelia continued.

"Coonie?"

"Oh, well--'Con'm'woc, if you must have it all. Well, we're on the move, too. Good-by. But"--meaningly--"you'd find us all again in town pretty soon; and if pa and ma don't see the whole place from the tip-top of the Clifton, my name is McMudd. On a clear day, too--when you can tell where the smoke ends and the land begins. Good-by. Our house is on the right, a mile farther; watch out for it."

Oconomowoc, from Ogden's point of view, appeared as one wide street running between two small lakes that were only a few hundred feet asunder. The business part of the street was built neatly and compactly of the cream-colored brick of Milwaukee, and the rest of it was a thickly shaded stretch bordered with a double string of summer cottages, which fronted on the street and backed on the water. In the midst of the cottages stood a big hotel of yellow brick; it was faced with a lofty row of seven immense white columns, and above the maples before it there rose a steep roof set with a series of dormer-windows. George was given a room which one of these dormers lighted, and presently stepped down the street to inquire at one of the cottages for Jessie Bradley. He soon stepped back again; she was not expected for two days yet. He thanked Brainard again for his full week, and threw himself into one of the chairs under the big colonnade.

The town was at the beginning of its annual patriotic flurry; after the Fourth it settles down, and the real season begins a week or two later. A good many young people were scurrying about, many of them in aquatic attire; those who did not carry rackets carried banjos. Nobody noticed him except the young wife of the proprietor. She stood in the doorway; her black eyebrows were contracted in a study of him. She wore her raven hair in a Japanesque fashion, but she corrected the plump dumpiness of the Japanese maiden by a tall and slender grace of her own. "He's all right," she said to herself, and sank down in a chair beside him.

"You poor, lonesome man," she began, with a graceful audacity that was her peculiar possession, "let me talk to you."

"Do," answered George, smilingly. He seemed to have known her a week.

"That is, if you're not just married or not just going to be. Are you?"

"N--no."

"We see so much of that sort of thing. May is dreadful; this year we had five couples in a week--it's so pleasant and quiet here then. The fifth was from Detroit; they stayed quite a while, and when they went away they thanked us all over. We hadn't done a thing for them--we simply left them alone and let them go about. But they were just chuck full of it--they'd have been in glory anywhere. What do you think of our columns?"

Two men could hardly have spanned their fluted shafts. George cast his eye up to their capitals, on a level with the third-story windows. "They're great."

"Aren't they? They've only been on two or three years. We call them the Seven Bridegrooms."

"The Seven Bridegrooms? Is each the gift of a happy man?"

"Hot quite; one happy man gave them all. He was here a week; he gave us one every day. Think how happy he must have been."

She smiled at his inquiring glance.

"He wanted things his own way, and could afford it," she said. "His name was Ingles."

Ogden did some lounging up and down the street. He crossed a bridge where one lake fell into the other over a mill-dam, and found himself in another cluster of cottages. They stood on a bluff and looked down the three miles of the lower lake. Both shores were diversified by promontories and islands, and the red roofs of other cottages showed everywhere over the tufted foliage of the shores.

"How it balances--how it composes!" he said of the view, as he recrossed the bridge. "And how it's kept!" he said of the town, as he retraced his steps to the hotel. "Really"--with unconscious patronage--"it's the only thing West, so far, that has tone and finish."

He took a boat. The next day, the same. The town was full, but was lying back quietly for the excitement of the morrow; he had the water almost to himself.

Sloops and cat-boats were being rigged for a coming regatta. A scow for fireworks was being anchored two or three hundred yards from shore. He paddled about with a trolling-line. But the line was neglected. He had a good deal to think about; here was place and time to do it.

His future was assured. He could now marry. He wanted to marry. There was only the question--which?

He had surrendered his primitive theory that marriage was a matter which concerned only the two principals. Kittie's marriage--who had come to be more deeply concerned in it than he?

He thought of Abbie Brainard, and he thought of her family--a divorced sister; a disreputable brother, whose future was to sound, perhaps, depths yet undreamed of; another brother, whose coming marriage was but conclusive evidence of the coarseness of the family grain.

And the father--his scandalous success; his tainted millions; his name a byword. Those bawlings in the streets; those disgraceful and degrading pictures; the stench of the whole scandal.

His oars dropped idly, and he sat with his eyes fixed on the bottom of the boat.

But the old man would die. Yes; and then would come the division of the spoil. If there had been so much trouble in a poor sixty or eighty thousand, how much more might there be in all these millions? If he had found such difficulty in getting restitution from McDowell--a restitution so incomplete as to be even yet largely in the future--what might there be to expect from other brothers-in-law and from other new relations that so much money would be sure to bring?

He ran his troubled eyes along the shore. A party of children were wading and splashing at the foot of a high, wooded point.

That money--those millions! It was the talk of the bank that Burt, on his wedding-day, was to have five hundred thousand dollars as an out-and-out gift. And if Burt, why not Abbie--in the proper degree? Those shameful, indecent millions--millions that it would be a disgrace to receive, to handle.

"Boat ahoy!" A sloop swept by. He dodged its bowsprit and was tossed by its wake. He threw out his oars to steady himself.

The husband of a rich wife--another Valentine. My house--my furniture!

Then, he had meant to get on--in business, in society. Was he to marry a recluse?--a girl inexperienced in the ways of his world--perhaps incapable of adapting herself to them--surely careless of them.

Abbie was before him in her tender and steadfast serenity, in her stanch and genuine capability. He set his teeth, and took up his oars again, and rowed half a mile with a furious vigor. He stopped, panting and exhausted, in a clump of reeds off a sedgy shore, near a group of linden-trees. He had left Abbie behind.

An elderly couple were standing among the rashes. They regarded him with a friendly and companionable smile. They seemed to offer him the "middling lot" that the sage and poet have called the best and safest. "No hazardous and complicated relationships," they seemed to say; "no struggle over dead men's dollars, no swamping of self-respect in ill-got gains; only our daughter--"

George pressed his forehead confusedly and raised his eyes to get his bearings; the late afternoon sun dazzled him with its level beams. He saw a house set high among the trees; and on its porch, amidst a tangle of bittersweet, a girl was standing. He shaded his eyes; it was as if she waved a handkerchief at him. Presently she strolled to the brow of the bank.

"Glad to see you," she called; "we have just driven over."

It was Jessie Bradley.