Chapter XXI

The Ogdens, in their apartment, presented to their callers substantially the same aspect that they had offered in a complete house, save that the dining-room had been lopped off, along with the kitchen. They were a shade more compact and, if anything, a shade more luxurious.

Among the first of their callers here was the faithful Brower. As he lounged back in a familiar easy-chair he cast his eye around the drawingroom and the reception-hall; he recognized a number of things from the other house, and detected, too, a good many novel elegancies. In one corner of the room, in particular, there stood a delightful little tea-table; and he learned that the full paraphernalia of the delicate function known as "a tea" could be produced at a moment's notice.

On the purchase of this adjunct to polite living Jessie had brought all her insistence to bear. Life to her had now come merely to mean receiving and being received; and to receive at all she must receive correctly and elegantly.

"It's about all I feel equal to doing now--giving teas," she explained; "and that's all the more reason why I should do it properly. Now, Cecilia Ingles's table and china--"

"For Heaven's sake, Jessie, please to remember that you are not Mrs. Ingles and that I am not her husband. Can you expect me to compete with a man who has an income like his? Do you know what that building--that building alone--pays him a year?"

"Well, I only want things nice. I shall have to live quietly for a while--I don't feel as if I had any great strength; and I don't think I ought to be denied such a small thing as this."

Hence the charming little tea-table, the delicate and exquisite porcelain, and the beautifully burnished kettle; and hence, too, the cup for Brower, so that he might see how the whole thing went. But the hand that passed it to him was white and tremulous, and the graceful bit of lace over the wrist fluttered with a pitiful palpitation.

"I'm going to put another lump on your saucer; so sorry you have caught us without a lemon." She smiled at him as she spoke, and he could not but see that her lips had a bluish tinge. "So good of you to let me come in just as I was." She smoothed down the fall of lace along the front of her wrapper. "But I hardly felt equal to dressing this evening; besides, an old friend like you--"

The "old friend" went home and talked things over with his room-mate.

He lit the burners on both sides of his dressing-case mirror and slowly took off his coat. His room-mate was in his shirt-sleeves, too.

"I wonder if he is happy," said Brower, thoughtfully running his thumb-nail along the teeth of his tortoise-shell comb.

"He tried hard enough to be," answered his room-mate, running his thumb along the teeth of _his_ comb.

Brower sighed and looked with frank but troubled eyes into his friend's face. "Too hard, perhaps."

The other returned his glance in kind. "I'm afraid so," he breathed.

"He figured it all out beforehand," said Brower. "We talked a good deal on the subject generally."

"That sort of thing doesn't always pay."

"We considered the rich girl and the poor girl," Brower went on. "But there's another kind of girl that we both failed to take account of."

"What kind is that?"

"The girl in very moderate circumstances who has spent all her time in going about among wealthy relatives and friends."

"The poor princess who makes the grand chain of other people's castles?"

"Yes," assented Brower; "the grand chain of other people's castles. It's demoralizing."

"Is he a disappointed man?"

"Yes; I'm certain of it. Disappointed, and worried half to death. I'm sorry for him. I'm afraid for him."

He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to unlace his shoes. His room-mate wore shoes of the same size and laced them in the same way.

"I wonder," said he, "if he really loved her?"

"'Sh!" said Brower.

"Wasn't there another one that he _did_ love?"

"Not a word more!" cried Birower.

He undressed and got into bed. He took a book with him. It was "A Mistaken Marriage"--he read everything.

"What do you want to read for?" asked the other. "It's late."

"I read because I don't want to think." He opened at the mark and settled back on his pillow and started in.

"Where are you now?" demanded his double.

"Page 316; the castle's on fire."

"Do you want anything more about castles?"

"No."

"And haven't you had enough of fires?"

"Plenty."

"Well, then!"

Out went the gas, and sleep presently succeeded.

The Ogdens had other callers; among them was Frederick Pratt.

Frederick had left the Underground for the temple at the extreme end of the street, where he was engaged in an ardent study of puts and calls. The atmosphere of the Board of Trade is less sedate than that of the clearing-house association, and the new recruit had become still more volatile and giddy. He was skating on thinner ice and was putting more assurance into his movements.

Pratt, like Brower, made his own observations on the new status of the Ogdens; but unlike Brower, he did not keep his opinions and conjectures to himself. He gave the same currency to his reflections on this pair that he had given to those on the Viberts--and among others thus favored were the Floyds.

"What's the matter with George, anyhow?" he asked Walworth one evening. They were sitting again in Floyd's library, and a light haze of tobacco-smoke prompted to elegiac revery. "He looks old. And he has come to be as poky as the deuce. He seemed last night as if he was worried half to death."

"I guess he is," answered Walworth. "He's anxious about his wife, for one thing."

"Well, she does look pretty bad, that's a fact. I don't believe she will live the year out. The first cold weather will carry her off."

"Don't say that!" exclaimed Mrs. Floyd. "She's delicate, and she has got to take care of herself. But to talk about dying--that's another thing."

"I'm not so sure." And Walworth shook his head gravely.

"But there's something more than that," said Freddy. "It's money. Gad! how they are fixed up! How can he stand it?"

"He can't," answered Walworth; "he's falling behind. And there is that house of his empty yet. I'd take it off his hands myself if it wasn't for being left in the same fix too. Wish I could help him; he hasn't said anything, though."

"He won't, either," replied Pratt. "He ain't that kind."

"Well, I don't see that we need trouble ourselves about help," Ann broke in. "He harmed me, anyway, a great deal more than he helped me--with that precious brother-in-law of his."

"I imagine he knows all about the brother-in-law, too, by this time," rejoined Walworth. "Haven't you got almost tired of twanging that string?"

He wondered if Ogden's brother-in-law were really as trying as his own sister-in-law.

Still other callers favored the Ogdens. Among them was one that had not called at the other house--that had never before, indeed, called at any house whatever. About the first of August a little debutante appeared on the social scene and was "received" with all the care and flattering attention that the new apartment had at its disposal She was a pale and fragile little bud, like many of the exotics with which her mother was fond of decorating her rooms; she had the same slender fingers that set these flowers around, and the same large blue eyes that studied their effect.

A nurse came, and she stayed long after the time when a mere nurse-maid should have taken her place. Curtains were pulled down and kept so; the doctor's carriage (and sometimes more than one) stood waiting before the big doorway of the "Westmoreland"; bottles big and little accumulated on tables and shelves; and cautious tiptoeing became the habit of the whole household; until, at the end of a month, mother and child were doing as well--and only as well--as could be expected. This was not well at all. But both were out of immediate danger, and presently both appeared to mend.

The nurse-maid now arrived, and the carriage and the cap. The languid young mother was capable of taking but a tepid interest in most things, but she rallied her powers to enforce the cap, Cecilia Ingles was her model here as in other matters, and the model was followed closely. Not every girl would wear a cap, but at last a capable one was found who was willing to. The lace cover of the perambulator and the white frills of its propeller were a frequent sight on the streets for a little time; then the necessity developed for the transfer of mother, child, and nurse, during a few weeks, to the convenient sanatorium provided by nature in southern Wisconsin.

The little party was back again in town at the opening of the fall season. Jessie employed her dwindling powers in a partial resumption of the duties which she felt that "society" demanded of her, and the child taxed the energies and resources of the maid, who received little real assistance from its mother. There were small gusts and starts of maternal affection now and then, but they would quickly run their brief course and baby would be carried out of the room. Ogden wondered, from a curiously impersonal outside standpoint, whether he was to attribute this to his wife's waning vitality or to an inherent incapacity for deep and genuine feeling.

But this matter soon passed beyond the confines of discussion. The day came when the nurse was dismissed, the carriage was put away, and Brower went with the stricken father to select a lot in the cemetery. It came that the two stood together one forenoon before a wide and polished mahogany counter, and bent their heads over a handsome plat that was neatly lettered and numbered, and was shaded in pleasant tints of blue and green. A man stood on the other side of the counter and tapped the drawing here and there with the reversed end of a fat penholder.

"This is a good section," he said; he was pausing over a green oval which was intersected by four or five fine black lines. "You are right on a leading drive-way"--carrying the pen-holder along between the waving of two other and wider lines that ran parallel--"and just over here is the lake"--with his little finger on a tangled and shapeless patch of blue.

"That small lot could be made to do," said Brower, softly.

"This is the most fashionable part of the whole place," the man went on, with an indifferent loudness. "See here." He took down a large warped photograph from its place on a dusty shelf behind him, and gave it a dexterous wipe with his elbow. "This monument here is just across the drive-way, and it cost twenty thousand dollars. Put up this summer by Arthur J. Ingles--I guess you've heard of _him_?

"Good God!" groaned Ogden. "Have I got to compete with that man even in the graveyard?"

The next afternoon a sombre little procession took its way limits-ward to a tract outside, which was tenderly enclosed by great stretches of barbed wire, and was neighbored by the noise and glare of several stone-cutting yards. This little train traversed the raw and ragged edges of the town, and trailed across the succeeding reach of open prairie-land, over which led a long, straight, sandy road, dotted here and there with houses of refreshment for the occupants of mourning-coaches and for their drivers. There was the raw chill in the air which the north sometimes sends down into our early October days. The poor mother sobbed and coughed and shivered in her corner of the carriage; she returned to her home ill and exhausted, and entered it never to leave it alive.

It costs when a baby comes, it costs when a baby goes, it costs when a wife lies sick and dying, and Ogden now confessed himself almost driven to the wall.

"I know, George," his wife said, "that everything has been a great expense; but I'm sure papa would help us if you only spoke to him."

"What!" he cried, harshly.

She started, and presently was all a-tremble. Then she fell back weakly and coughed long and violently. "Oh, George, how could you?" she gasped.

"Forgive me, my poor child," he said, and took her hand. "But I could never do anything like that--never."

The next day he took the McDowell notes and spent what time he could spare among the brokers. They passed commendingly on the prompt payment of the interest as shown by the endorsements; but McDowell was pretty well known, and it was intimated that endorsements of another sort would be needed to make negotiation possible.

Then he got out the abstract of one of the McDowell tracts--the only one that he personally and individually had any right to use. "You've got considerably more than a pocketful there," the door-keeper of the Clifton Deposit Vaults said to him as he passed out. He left the abstract with a firm of mortgage brokers for examination. In the course of a week they advised him that a release had been over-looked--an instrument which must show of record before a loan could be effected on the property.

The tract had been put through a good many paces, and some of McDowell's work had been too hurried to be careful. The man to give the necessary release was a professional tax-buyer. He lived on the mistakes and misfortunes of other people--their sins of omission and commission; and such an act from such a man would cost something. It might be ten dollars, or fifty, or five hundred.

He waited in this harpy's outer office, while another caller, a woman, claimed attention in the inner one. It was Ann Wilde; he recognized her and she recognized him. She threw a scowling glance upon him, and her harsh and vindictive tones fell on his ears for several succeeding minutes. She knew his necessities; could she be making them known to another?

It seemed so when his turn came. The release would be given only on payment of a sum that, in his present circumstances, was simply impossible.

He seemed now to have exhausted all expedients--all legitimate ones. A bitter recollection of that Sunday drive in the country came over him; he had indeed given a free rein to his wife, and just how close he was to graze against ruin only the future could show. He spent a miserable, sleepless night, and at daybreak he had decided to tax the bank for his own necessities--relying upon the present maturing of his notes to set himself right within a month or two. Do not inquire as to his precise method--there are many ways to take: the actual appropriation of currency, the abstraction of securities, the overissue of certificates of stock, and so on and on. He chose the method which seemed liable to the lightest misconstruction and allowable of the promptest reparation. He avoided seeing himself in the aspect of a criminal by pleading his own cruel needs and by believing in his ability to make a prompt and complete restitution. Perhaps neither of these two reasons could have stood alone, but they leaned together and held each other up--a precarious poise that was not long to endure.