There was her poor father. He had given up now; Doctor Thornton saw that his wife"s parents did not starve. Ellwell was a melancholy skeleton to meet on the streets, bent, walking stiffly at all his joints, his fleshy cheeks fallen in as if after a severe fever. He was shabby, too, though the allowance was a liberal one. Fine mornings he would crawl down Tremont Street to one of the hotels, and lounge away some hours in the bar-room, on the chance of meeting an old acquaintance. Frequently the doctor would hear his husky cough in the hall outside his office door, but the old man slunk away sullenly whenever the door opened. Thornton suspected that on such occasions drains were made upon his wife"s allowance. Where else did it go to?
He was minded at times to mention this degrading beggary, but always refrained. He would have to build his wife"s character over from the foundations in order to make her appreciate his disgust, and he was not sure that he desired such an essential change in her, at least, now. She would confuse the issue: he would seem to be rebuking her pity and natural tenderness. So it mattered little if the old wreck wasted a few hundreds more on the pleasures he was capable of getting.
The doctor"s wife had wavered between invalidism and delicate health for some years, and had settled into retirement until her daughter brought her out once more, first at Wolf Head, then in Beacon Street.
The household, in spite of the fact that there were only three members, was known as an expensive establishment. But the doctor was supposed to be well off, and his practice was good for more than he spent. If he worked hard all the winter, he was not idle in the vacation months; his fawn-colored horse could be seen jogging about for miles up and down the coast. It was generally well into the evening before his dark face and burning cigar were seen on the path of the cottage.
The summer when his daughter was seventeen, had been particularly busy. They had had a stream of guests as usual, staying for a week or a fortnight, and the busy doctor had not paid much attention whether Ruby Bradley with her young son had come or gone, or whether the second cousins had yet arrived. The house was generally full. He liked that, although he chose to dine alone, quite frequently. His daughter, whom he had watched shrewdly, demanded people, and the safer plan, he thought, was in mult.i.tudes. She was a restless young person, tall like him, with fair skin like her mother, dark hair, and nervous, active arms.
"She will always have some man on hand to exercise her egotism on,"
the doctor reflected, impartially. So he fed her young men. The father and daughter went about a good deal together, and people made pleasant remarks over their intimacy. This summer the doctor thought about her on his long drives, and scrutinized the young men who lounged about his veranda. Most of them were boys in the calf stage, college youths, who were spoiling with vacation. These the doctor called the puppies, and treated indulgently. There were others who came to the hotel for short fortnights, impecunious young business men or lawyers who were looking about for suitable a.s.sistance in life. Such candidates were submitted to a close scrutiny, but nothing to warrant active measures had yet occurred.
He had made up his mind precisely about his future son-in-law. For two years he had studied his daughter, and nothing could shake his conviction that he had found the only safe conclusion to a difficult problem--a certain kind of husband. He must be rich, for Maud had inherited the Ellwell dependence upon luxury. And he must be able to devote himself pretty steadily to her whims, subordinate himself good-naturedly, and obtain for her whatever she might fancy for the time.
"She will want to express herself badly," was the doctor"s comment.
"If they should try to express themselves both at the same time, there would be explosions--rows and divorce and scandal--unhappy children."
Once he said to his wife, forlornly, "She is too clever, poor child.
She has been talking to me like a marchioness of forty for the last half hour. If this keeps on I shall have to domesticate her great aunts in order to have some children about the house."
The desirable husband must be able to place her well socially, for she had already shown herself keen in making distinctions. It gave her father a wicked pleasure to see her snub young Roper Bradley when he came with his mother to make their annual summer visit. She never mentioned her uncle Roper, and she extended compa.s.sion to the doctor on the subject of her grandfather Ellwell.
The doctor was fond of her in spite of his a.n.a.lysis. He thought with pride that she was thoroughbred, capable of masterly strokes. Yet, alas! the opportunities for masterly strokes would come so rarely; meanwhile she was a dangerous, febrile, nervous, chemical compound--something to be isolated. With her five-day enthusiasms, her quick wit, her restlessness, her sense of dress, she would be fascinating.
"If she will only fascinate the right sort!" the doctor prayed. He smiled savagely at the picture he drew of the right sort, which, it is needless to add, was not a congenial type.
"An acquiescent fool for a son-in-law, a kind of gentlemanly valet!"
And, "That, I trust, will be the end. Maud as a mother would be atrocious."
His daughter gave the doctor a certain kind of scientific interest.
She harked back, so to speak, to former generations, perverting their simple instincts. Her devotion to the Salvation Army for one winter, he pointed out to his wife, was a recrudescence of the old Puritan pastor in his revivalist days. This manifestation would not be permanent, for there were so many other desires crowding each other in her brain. Just now she had developed a longing for art. The doctor had been obliged to exert himself to prevent her sudden departure for Paris, where she pictured herself living on two francs a day at the top of a very dirty flight of stairs.
"Perhaps she will elope," the doctor said to his wife, humorously.
"But she won"t elope with a mere man: she will go off with an idea and then come around to the front door to be taken back."
"I don"t think she is very considerate," Mrs. Thornton hinted. Maud treated her at times with toleration. The doctor understood what that meant--her lack of sympathy with her mother"s clinging to her family; deluging the Thornton house with Ellwells and their affairs.
"If she would only cultivate some serious interests, yours, and take the place of a son," thus Mrs. Thornton referred to her husband"s youth and its sacrifices.
"I haven"t any use for women doctors," Thornton replied; "and Maud as a nurse scrubbing floors would be more absurd than Maud in an Army Rescue Post."
For the art fever, however, the doctor felt to some extent responsible. He had allowed young Addington Long a certain right of way in the house. Long was the son of an old friend, a Camberton man, who had wrecked himself early in his career. Doctor Thornton had taken the boy out of his squalid home, sent him to a boarding-school, and then, as he promised well, paid his way at Camberton. The young fellow had not done anything remarkable, merely grown into a nice gentlemanly manhood, with a taste for ill.u.s.trating, by which he picked up a few dollars for spending-money, and placed himself pleasantly in Camberton circles. When he graduated, Dr. Thornton fell in with his suggestions that he should like to try his fortunes as an artist. So Long had spent several years in a studio at Paris, and had done solid work. The doctor had felt encouraged with his experiment and treated him liberally.
This was only one of a number of similar experiments in young life that the doctor carried on silently. Earlier in life than most men, he had had the yearning to see others go where fate had forbidden him. A number of young doctors, studying in Berlin or Vienna, and some young scientists scattered over the country owed their freedom to his liberality. He selected his material here and there, without much apparent discrimination, but one test existed, known only to the doctor, a test that was strangely sentimental, and yet shrewd.
Long"s interests had been outside his field, but the tenderness he had felt for the father caused him to make this exception. He had not made a mistake, however. Long had exhibited at Berlin and Munich, and had begun to sell his work a little. He was already spoken of by the international press as a promising young American artist. This summer he was at home, sketching in a village not far away, and the end of the day found him quite frequently at the doctor"s dinner-table.
The doctor liked him. He had bought Long"s first picture in the Salon and had procured him patrons. He took him off on his yacht whenever he had a chance, and the more he saw of the young man the more he was ready to bet on his future. "There is so much that is clean and wholesome in him," he observed to his wife. "He has managed to live over there without catching their cheap bohemianism." Mrs. Thornton felt at liberty to encourage Addington Long"s intimacy at the house.
But he would not do for a son-in-law; there would be two tragedies instead of one. So when Mrs. Thornton suggested that he should be asked for a visit during September, the doctor put the question off with irrelevant excuses; they had had too many people; September was his time for a rest; young Long should be getting down to hard work, not loafing in a comfortable cottage.
One evening toward the middle of the summer the doctor came home later than usual, and, wearied with his day"s driving, he got out of his carriage and let himself into his grounds by the sh.o.r.e path. The evening wind was puffing casually across the bay; in the cottage above the lamps were being lit. The doctor walked slowly, thoughtfully, picking his way in and out of the shrubbery, thinking vaguely of the day"s work, the cases visited, the cases to be visited on the morrow, the routine he had established. As his eyes rested on the cottage nestled in its little domain that commanded several miles of the sh.o.r.e-line, he reflected complacently on his business sense which had led him to develop Wolf Head. He had managed, so far, skilfully, and this matter of a daughter that would come to a crisis during the next five years should be handled successfully. No one could be said to have the confidence of the doctor; one would not look to him for confidences of any sort. Did he ever betray any doubts as to the desirability of his career? Indeed, he never put the question to himself. Fate had caught him in a vice; he had spent eighteen active years in padding that vice. Yet he mused as a man will at the close of a busy day, wondering what compelling power drives him over the wonted round.
Suddenly he heard voices on his lawn, and instinctively stepped from the gravel path to the gra.s.s. There was a long murmur of a low voice; he wondered at his own intensity in listening. Something in the timbre of the voice, some suppressed emotional quality, struck his experienced ear. When the sound ceased he advanced carefully along the hedge until he came to an opening that gave a view to the lawn. The voice was his daughter"s, as he had guessed; beside her was stretched a man"s figure in flannels, probably Long"s. It was simple enough: tired after their tennis they had flung themselves down where the hedge sheltered them from the evening breeze and were talking. But their att.i.tude arrested him; he felt an undue strain in the air.
Presently Long spoke with a low, slow utterance, as if ordering his words. His face was turned away from the doctor, looking up steadily at the girl.
"Yes," he said, and the doctor felt he ought to walk on, "it"s hard on a man. You see so many fellows who have failed who are just as good as you are----"
"No, no; not just as good," the girl interrupted, "there is _something_ different."
"Well, as far as you can see they are just as good; they have worked terribly hard. Then you shut your teeth and go in again, working desperately from the first light to the last peep until you are plugged out."
"Then?" his companion said, eagerly.
"Perhaps you crawl out to Lavenue"s and sit there in the evening watching the people sip and talk, the girls sauntering home, or the students who are ga.s.sing forever. It doesn"t seem to make any difference what you do then, whether you go on a loaf for a month and fool with those who play, or go home to bed and back to work in the morning. You think the idea will come some day whenever it gets ready, and that there is precious little use in slaving away on a one franc fifty dejeuner."
"Don"t you think of home, America, and us who are anxious for you?"
"It seems so far away; and do you care unless I make a strike?"
The girl was silent; her face was turned away while she played with his answer.
"You know we do," shielding herself with a neutral plural.
"There"s the other side," the young man"s voice sounded out more buoyantly.
"You go around to some friends" studio and see what they are up to, and get ideas and go home with more spirit; or something good comes along, a picture is accepted, an order comes in. You think you have got there all right and it"s only the question of a little patience.
There"s a good dinner or a little trip in the country--it"s fine around Paris you know. Then I think of coming home with some kind of a rep., and how all of you will be glad--_you_ at any rate, Miss Thornton?"
The doctor sighed and crept away.
"The condition for the fever," he muttered.
X
When he had entered his study he sat down to think. His man announced a patient, but the doctor made no reply. Suddenly he glanced up at the waiting servant.
"Will you tell Mr. Long as he leaves that I wish to speak to him."
Then he went on thinking. Soon there was a knock, and Long came into his study. The doctor motioned to the chair he had just left, and, reaching for a box of cigars, took one and lit it. Long watched him expectantly.
"Shall you stay on here much longer?" the doctor asked at last, in his usual composed manner.
"Oh, I don"t much know. I want to get back to Paris in the winter if----"
"Don"t bother about that," the doctor interrupted him, hastily. "You can trust me to find the amount, you know, until you are squarely on your feet; only," his voice grew sharper, "you won"t do much here. You should go at once."
The young man stared.