"Oh, I"m not afraid of you. I never was. That was the trouble, from the beginning."
"Well, then, that"s all that"s necessary. And it never was the least trouble to me!"
"It made me untrue to Irene."
"You mustn"t say that! You were always true to her."
"She cared for you first."
"Well, but I never cared for her at all!" he besought her.
"She thought you did."
"That was n.o.body"s fault, and I can"t let you make it yours. My dear----"
"Wait. We must understand each other," said Penelope, rising from her seat to prevent an advance he was making from his; "I want you to realise the whole affair. Should you want a girl who hadn"t a cent in the world, and felt different in your mother"s company, and had cheated and betrayed her own sister?"
"I want you!"
"Very well, then, you can"t have me. I should always despise myself.
I ought to give you up for all these reasons. Yes, I must." She looked at him intently, and there was a tentative quality in her affirmations.
"Is this your answer?" he said. "I must submit. If I asked too much of you, I was wrong. And--good-bye."
He held out his hand, and she put hers in it. "You think I"m capricious and fickle!" she said. "I can"t help it--I don"t know myself. I can"t keep to one thing for half a day at a time. But it"s right for us to part--yes, it must be. It must be," she repeated; "and I shall try to remember that. Good-bye! I will try to keep that in my mind, and you will too--you won"t care, very soon! I didn"t mean THAT--no; I know how true you are; but you will soon look at me differently; and see that even IF there hadn"t been this about Irene, I was not the one for you. You do think so, don"t you?" she pleaded, clinging to his hand. "I am not at all what they would like--your family; I felt that. I am little, and black, and homely, and they don"t understand my way of talking, and now that we"ve lost everything--No, I"m not fit. Good-bye. You"re quite right, not to have patience with me any longer. I"ve tried you enough. I ought to be willing to marry you against their wishes if you want me to, but I can"t make the sacrifice--I"m too selfish for that----" All at once she flung herself on his breast. "I can"t even give you up! I shall never dare look any one in the face again. Go, go! But take me with you! I tried to do without you! I gave it a fair trial, and it was a dead failure. O poor Irene! How could she give you up?"
Corey went back to Boston immediately, and left Penelope, as he must, to tell her sister that they were to be married. She was spared from the first advance toward this by an accident or a misunderstanding.
Irene came straight to her after Corey was gone, and demanded, "Penelope Lapham, have you been such a ninny as to send that man away on my account?"
Penelope recoiled from this terrible courage; she did not answer directly, and Irene went on, "Because if you did, I"ll thank you to bring him back again. I"m not going to have him thinking that I"m dying for a man that never cared for me. It"s insulting, and I"m not going to stand it. Now, you just send for him!"
"Oh, I will, "Rene," gasped Penelope. And then she added, shamed out of her prevarication by Irene"s haughty magnanimity, "I have. That is--he"s coming back----"
Irene looked at her a moment, and then, whatever thought was in her mind, said fiercely, "Well!" and left her to her dismay--her dismay and her relief, for they both knew that this was the last time they should ever speak of that again.
The marriage came after so much sorrow and trouble, and the fact was received with so much misgiving for the past and future, that it brought Lapham none of the triumph in which he had once exulted at the thought of an alliance with the Coreys. Adversity had so far been his friend that it had taken from him all hope of the social success for which people crawl and truckle, and restored him, through failure and doubt and heartache, the manhood which his prosperity had so nearly stolen from him. Neither he nor his wife thought now that their daughter was marrying a Corey; they thought only that she was giving herself to the man who loved her, and their acquiescence was sobered still further by the presence of Irene. Their hearts were far more with her.
Again and again Mrs. Lapham said she did not see how she could go through it. "I can"t make it seem right," she said.
"It IS right," steadily answered the Colonel.
"Yes, I know. But it don"t SEEM so."
It would be easy to point out traits in Penelope"s character which finally reconciled all her husband"s family and endeared her to them.
These things continually happen in novels; and the Coreys, as they had always promised themselves to do, made the best, and not the worst of Tom"s marriage.
They were people who could value Lapham"s behaviour as Tom reported it to them. They were proud of him, and Bromfield Corey, who found a delicate, aesthetic pleasure in the heroism with which Lapham had withstood Rogers and his temptations--something finely dramatic and unconsciously effective,--wrote him a letter which would once have flattered the rough soul almost to ecstasy, though now he affected to slight it in showing it. "It"s all right if it makes it more comfortable for Pen," he said to his wife.
But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between the Coreys and Tom Corey"s wife. "If he had only married the Colonel!"
subtly suggested Nanny Corey.
There was a brief season of civility and forbearance on both sides, when he brought her home before starting for Mexico, and her father-in-law made a sympathetic feint of liking Penelope"s way of talking, but it is questionable if even he found it so delightful as her husband did. Lily Corey made a little, ineffectual sketch of her, which she put by with other studies to finish up, sometime, and found her rather picturesque in some ways. Nanny got on with her better than the rest, and saw possibilities for her in the country to which she was going. "As she"s quite unformed, socially," she explained to her mother, "there is a chance that she will form herself on the Spanish manner, if she stays there long enough, and that when she comes back she will have the charm of, not olives, perhaps, but tortillas, whatever they are: something strange and foreign, even if it"s borrowed. I"m glad she"s going to Mexico. At that distance we can--correspond."
Her mother sighed, and said bravely that she was sure they all got on very pleasantly as it was, and that she was perfectly satisfied if Tom was.
There was, in fact, much truth in what she said of their harmony with Penelope. Having resolved, from the beginning, to make the best of the worst, it might almost be said that they were supported and consoled in their good intentions by a higher power. This marriage had not, thanks to an over-ruling Providence, brought the succession of Lapham teas upon Bromfield Corey which he had dreaded; the Laphams were far off in their native fastnesses, and neither Lily nor Nanny Corey was obliged to sacrifice herself to the conversation of Irene; they were not even called upon to make a social demonstration for Penelope at a time when, most people being still out of town, it would have been so easy; she and Tom had both begged that there might be nothing of that kind; and though none of the Coreys learned to know her very well in the week she spent with them, they did not find it hard to get on with her. There were even moments when Nanny Corey, like her father, had glimpses of what Tom had called her humour, but it was perhaps too unlike their own to be easily recognisable.
Whether Penelope, on her side, found it more difficult to harmonise, I cannot say. She had much more of the harmonising to do, since they were four to one; but then she had gone through so much greater trials before. When the door of their carriage closed and it drove off with her and her husband to the station, she fetched a long sigh.
"What is it?" asked Corey, who ought to have known better.
"Oh, nothing. I don"t think I shall feel strange amongst the Mexicans now."
He looked at her with a puzzled smile, which grew a little graver, and then he put his arm round her and drew her closer to him. This made her cry on his shoulder. "I only meant that I should have you all to myself." There is no proof that she meant more, but it is certain that our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The price that we pay for civilisation is the fine yet impa.s.sable differentiation of these. Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favour that this is so. They may be right; and at any rate, the blank misgiving, the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young people"s departure left the Coreys is to be considered. That was the end of their son and brother for them; they felt that; and they were not mean or unamiable people.
He remained three years away. Some changes took place in that time.
One of these was the purchase by the Kanawha Falls Company of the mines and works at Lapham. The transfer relieved Lapham of the load of debt which he was still labouring under, and gave him an interest in the vaster enterprise of the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to grasp all in his own hand. He began to tell of this coincidence as something very striking; and pushing on more actively the special branch of the business left to him, he bragged, quite in his old way, of its enormous extension. His son-in-law, he said, was pushing it in Mexico and Central America: an idea that they had originally had in common. Well, young blood was what was wanted in a thing of that kind.
Now, those fellows out in West Virginia: all young, and a perfect team!
For himself, he owned that he had made mistakes; he could see just where the mistakes were--put his finger right on them. But one thing he could say: he had been no man"s enemy but his own; every dollar, every cent had gone to pay his debts; he had come out with clean hands.
He said all this, and much more, to Mr. Sewell the summer after he sold out, when the minister and his wife stopped at Lapham on their way across from the White Mountains to Lake Champlain; Lapham had found them on the cars, and pressed them to stop off.
There were times when Mrs. Lapham had as great pride in the clean-handedness with which Lapham had come out as he had himself, but her satisfaction was not so constant. At those times, knowing the temptations he had resisted, she thought him the n.o.blest and grandest of men; but no woman could endure to live in the same house with a perfect hero, and there were other times when she reminded him that if he had kept his word to her about speculating in stocks, and had looked after the insurance of his property half as carefully as he had looked after a couple of worthless women who had no earthly claim on him, they would not be where they were now. He humbly admitted it all, and left her to think of Rogers herself. She did not fail to do so, and the thought did not fail to restore him to her tenderness again.
I do not know how it is that clergymen and physicians keep from telling their wives the secrets confided to them; perhaps they can trust their wives to find them out for themselves whenever they wish. Sewell had laid before his wife the case of the Laphams after they came to consult with him about Corey"s proposal to Penelope, for he wished to be confirmed in his belief that he had advised them soundly; but he had not given her their names, and he had not known Corey"s himself. Now he had no compunctions in talking the affair over with her without the veil of ignorance which she had hitherto a.s.sumed, for she declared that as soon as she heard of Corey"s engagement to Penelope, the whole thing had flashed upon her. "And that night at dinner I could have told the child that he was in love with her sister by the way he talked about her; I heard him; and if she had not been so blindly in love with him herself, she would have known it too. I must say, I can"t help feeling a sort of contempt for her sister."
"Oh, but you must not!" cried Sewell. "That is wrong, cruelly wrong.
I"m sure that"s out of your novel-reading, my dear, and not out of your heart. Come! It grieves me to hear you say such a thing as that."
"Oh, I dare say this pretty thing has got over it--how much character she has got!--and I suppose she"ll see somebody else."
Sewell had to content himself with this partial concession. As a matter of fact, unless it was the young West Virginian who had come on to arrange the purchase of the Works, Irene had not yet seen any one, and whether there was ever anything between them is a fact that would need a separate inquiry. It is certain that at the end of five years after the disappointment which she met so bravely, she was still unmarried. But she was even then still very young, and her life at Lapham had been varied by visits to the West. It had also been varied by an invitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey, to visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the same spirit.
Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham presented under his changed conditions. The Colonel, who was more the Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay, kept him and Mrs. Sewell over night at his house; and he showed the minister minutely round the Works and drove him all over his farm. For this expedition he employed a lively colt which had not yet come of age, and an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed of his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Milldam. He was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had fallen unkempt, after the country fashion, as to his hair and beard and boots. The house was plain, and was furnished with the simpler moveables out of the house in Nankeen Square. There were certainly all the necessaries, but no luxuries unless the statues of Prayer and Faith might be so considered. The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the Colonel complained of; but he said that as soon as the company got to paying dividends again,--he was evidently proud of the outlays that for the present prevented this,--he should put in steam heat and naphtha-gas.
He spoke freely of his failure, and with a confidence that seemed inspired by his former trust in Sewell, whom, indeed, he treated like an intimate friend, rather than an acquaintance of two or three meetings. He went back to his first connection with Rogers, and he put before Sewell hypothetically his own conclusions in regard to the matter.
"Sometimes," he said, "I get to thinking it all over, and it seems to me I done wrong about Rogers in the first place; that the whole trouble came from that. It was just like starting a row of bricks. I tried to catch up and stop "em from going, but they all tumbled, one after another. It wa"n"t in the nature of things that they could be stopped till the last brick went. I don"t talk much with my wife, any more about it; but I should like to know how it strikes you."
"We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world," replied the minister, "but I"m more and more puzzled about it in the moral world.
There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatever. And in your own case, as I understand, you don"t admit--you don"t feel sure--that you ever actually did wrong this man----"
"Well, no; I don"t. That is to say----"
He did not continue, and after a while Sewell said, with that subtle kindness of his, "I should be inclined to think--nothing can be thrown quite away; and it can"t be that our sins only weaken us--that your fear of having possibly behaved selfishly toward this man kept you on your guard, and strengthened you when you were brought face to face with a greater"--he was going to say temptation, but he saved Lapham"s pride, and said--"emergency."
"Do you think so?"