"What do you mean, Si?" she persisted, tenderly.
"I"ve got to the end of my string. To-morrow I shall call a meeting of my creditors, and put myself in their hands. If there"s enough left to satisfy them, I"m satisfied." His voice dropped in his throat; he swallowed once or twice, and then did not speak.
"Do you mean that it"s all over with you?" she asked fearfully.
He bowed his big head, wrinkled and grizzled; and after awhile he said, "It"s hard to realise it; but I guess there ain"t any doubt about it."
He drew a long breath, and then he explained to her about the West Virginia people, and how he had got an extension of the first time they had given him, and had got a man to go up to Lapham with him and look at the works,--a man that had turned up in New York, and wanted to put money in the business. His money would have enabled Lapham to close with the West Virginians. "The devil was in it, right straight along,"
said Lapham. "All I had to do was to keep quiet about that other company. It was Rogers and his property right over again. He liked the look of things, and he wanted to go into the business, and he had the money--plenty; it would have saved me with those West Virginia folks. But I had to tell him how I stood. I had to tell him all about it, and what I wanted to do. He began to back water in a minute, and the next morning I saw that it was up with him. He"s gone back to New York. I"ve lost my last chance. Now all I"ve got to do is to save the pieces."
"Will--will--everything go?" she asked.
"I can"t tell, yet. But they shall have a chance at everything--every dollar, every cent. I"m sorry for you, Persis--and the girls."
"Oh, don"t talk of US!" She was trying to realise that the simple, rude soul to which her heart clove in her youth, but which she had put to such cruel proof, with her unsparing conscience and her unsparing tongue, had been equal to its ordeals, and had come out unscathed and unstained. He was able in his talk to make so little of them; he hardly seemed to see what they were; he was apparently not proud of them, and certainly not glad; if they were victories of any sort, he bore them with the patience of defeat. His wife wished to praise him, but she did not know how; so she offered him a little reproach, in which alone she touched the cause of her behaviour at parting.
"Silas," she asked, after a long gaze at him, "why didn"t you tell me you had Jim Millon"s girl there?"
"I didn"t suppose you"d like it, Persis," he answered. "I did intend to tell you at first, but then I put--I put it off. I thought you"d come round some day, and find it out for yourself."
"I"m punished," said his wife, "for not taking enough interest in your business to even come near it. If we"re brought back to the day of small things, I guess it"s a lesson for me, Silas."
"Oh, I don"t know about the lesson," he said wearily.
That night she showed him the anonymous scrawl which had kindled her fury against him. He turned it listlessly over in his hand. "I guess I know who it"s from," he said, giving it back to her, "and I guess you do too, Persis."
"But how--how could he----"
"Mebbe he believed it," said Lapham, with patience that cut her more keenly than any reproach. "YOU did."
Perhaps because the process of his ruin had been so gradual, perhaps because the excitement of preceding events had exhausted their capacity for emotion, the actual consummation of his bankruptcy brought a relief, a repose to Lapham and his family, rather than a fresh sensation of calamity. In the shadow of his disaster they returned to something like their old, united life; they were at least all together again; and it will be intelligible to those whom life has blessed with vicissitude, that Lapham should come home the evening after he had given up everything, to his creditors, and should sit down to his supper so cheerful that Penelope could joke him in the old way, and tell him that she thought from his looks they had concluded to pay him a hundred cents on every dollar he owed them.
As James Bellingham had taken so much interest in his troubles from the first, Lapham thought he ought to tell him, before taking the final step, just how things stood with him, and what ho meant to do.
Bellingham made some futile inquiries about his negotiations with the West Virginians, and Lapham told him they had come to nothing. He spoke of the New York man, and the chance that he might have sold out half his business to him. "But, of course, I had to let him know how it was about those fellows."
"Of course," said Bellingham, not seeing till afterwards the full significance of Lapham"s action.
Lapham said nothing about Rogers and the Englishmen. He believed that he had acted right in that matter, and he was satisfied; but he did not care to have Bellingham, or anybody, perhaps, think he had been a fool.
All those who were concerned in his affairs said he behaved well, and even more than well, when it came to the worst. The prudence, the good sense, which he had shown in the first years of his success, and of which his great prosperity seemed to have bereft him, came back, and these qualities, used in his own behalf, commended him as much to his creditors as the anxiety he showed that no one should suffer by him; this even made some of them doubtful of his sincerity. They gave him time, and there would have been no trouble in his resuming on the old basis, if the ground had not been cut from under him by the compet.i.tion of the West Virginia company. He saw himself that it was useless to try to go on in the old way, and he preferred to go back and begin the world anew where he had first begun it, in the hills at Lapham. He put the house at Nankeen Square, with everything else he had, into the payment of his debts, and Mrs. Lapham found it easier to leave it for the old farmstead in Vermont than it would have been to go from that home of many years to the new house on the water side of Beacon. This thing and that is embittered to us, so that we may be willing to relinquish it; the world, life itself, is embittered to most of us, so that we are glad to have done with them at last; and this home was haunted with such memories to each of those who abandoned it that to go was less exile than escape. Mrs. Lapham could not look into Irene"s room without seeing the girl there before her gla.s.s, tearing the poor little keep-sakes of her hapless fancy from their hiding-places to take them and fling them in pa.s.sionate renunciation upon her sister; she could not come into the sitting-room, where her little ones had grown up, without starting at the thought of her husband sitting so many weary nights at his desk there, trying to fight his way back to hope out of the ruin into which he was slipping. When she remembered that night when Rogers came, she hated the place. Irene accepted her release from the house eagerly, and was glad to go before and prepare for the family at Lapham. Penelope was always ashamed of her engagement there; it must seem better somewhere else and she was glad to go too. No one but Lapham in fact, felt the pang of parting in all its keenness. Whatever regret the others had was softened to them by the likeness of their flitting to many of those removals for the summer which they made in the late spring when they left Nankeen Square; they were going directly into the country instead of to the seaside first; but Lapham, who usually remained in town long after they had gone, knew all the difference. For his nerves there was no mechanical sense of coming back; this was as much the end of his proud, prosperous life as death itself could have been. He was returning to begin life anew, but he knew as well as he knew that he should not find his vanished youth in his native hills, that it could never again be the triumph that it had been. That was impossible, not only in his stiffened and weakened forces, but in the very nature of things. He was going back, by grace of the man whom he owed money, to make what he could out of the one chance which his successful rivals had left him.
In one phase his paint had held its own against bad times and ruinous compet.i.tion, and it was with the hope of doing still more with the Persis Brand that he now set himself to work. The West Virginia people confessed that they could not produce those fine grades, and they willingly left the field to him. A strange, not ign.o.ble friendliness existed between Lapham and the three brothers; they had used him fairly; it was their facilities that had conquered him, not their ill-will; and he recognised in them without enmity the necessity to which he had yielded. If he succeeded in his efforts to develop his paint in this direction, it must be for a long time on a small scale compared with his former business, which it could never equal, and he brought to them the flagging energies of an elderly man. He was more broken than he knew by his failure; it did not kill, as it often does, but it weakened the spring once so strong and elastic. He lapsed more and more into acquiescence with his changed condition, and that bragging note of his was rarely sounded. He worked faithfully enough in his enterprise, but sometimes he failed to seize occasions that in his younger days he would have turned to golden account. His wife saw in him a daunted look that made her heart ache for him.
One result of his friendly relations with the West Virginia people was that Corey went in with them, and the fact that he did so solely upon Lapham"s advice, and by means of his recommendation, was perhaps the Colonel"s proudest consolation. Corey knew the business thoroughly, and after half a year at Kanawha Falls and in the office at New York, he went out to Mexico and Central America, to see what could be done for them upon the ground which he had theoretically studied with Lapham.
Before he went he came up to Vermont, and urged Penelope to go with him. He was to be first in the city of Mexico, and if his mission was successful he was to be kept there and in South America several years, watching the new railroad enterprises and the development of mechanical agriculture and whatever other undertakings offered an opening for the introduction of the paint. They were all young men together, and Corey, who had put his money into the company, had a proprietary interest in the success which they were eager to achieve.
"There"s no more reason now and no less than ever there was," mused Penelope, in counsel with her mother, "why I should say Yes, or why I should say No. Everything else changes, but this is just where it was a year ago. It don"t go backward, and it don"t go forward. Mother, I believe I shall take the bit in my teeth--if anybody will put it there!"
"It isn"t the same as it was," suggested her mother. "You can see that Irene"s all over it."
"That"s no credit to me," said Penelope. "I ought to be just as much ashamed as ever."
"You no need ever to be ashamed."
"That"s true, too," said the girl. "And I can sneak off to Mexico with a good conscience if I could make up my mind to it." She laughed.
"Well, if I could be SENTENCED to be married, or somebody would up and forbid the banns! I don"t know what to do about it."
Her mother left her to carry her hesitation back to Corey, and she said now, they had better go all over it and try to reason it out. "And I hope that whatever I do, it won"t be for my own sake, but for--others!"
Corey said he was sure of that, and looked at her with eyes of patient tenderness.
"I don"t say it is wrong," she proceeded, rather aimlessly, "but I can"t make it seem right. I don"t know whether I can make you understand, but the idea of being happy, when everybody else is so miserable, is more than I can endure. It makes me wretched."
"Then perhaps that"s your share of the common suffering," suggested Corey, smiling.
"Oh, you know it isn"t! You know it"s nothing. Oh! One of the reasons is what I told you once before, that as long as father is in trouble I can"t let you think of me. Now that he"s lost everything--?" She bent her eyes inquiringly upon him, as if for the effect of this argument.
"I don"t think that"s a very good reason," he answered seriously, but smiling still. "Do you believe me when I tell you that I love you?"
"Why, I suppose I must," she said, dropping her eyes.
"Then why shouldn"t I think all the more of you on account of your father"s loss? You didn"t suppose I cared for you because he was prosperous?"
There was a shade of reproach, ever so delicate and gentle, in his smiling question, which she felt.
"No, I couldn"t think such a thing of you. I--I don"t know what I meant. I meant that----" She could not go on and say that she had felt herself more worthy of him because of her father"s money; it would not have been true; yet there was no other explanation. She stopped, and cast a helpless glance at him.
He came to her aid. "I understand why you shouldn"t wish me to suffer by your father"s misfortunes."
"Yes, that was it; and there is too great a difference every way. We ought to look at that again. You mustn"t pretend that you don"t know it, for that wouldn"t be true. Your mother will never like me, and perhaps--perhaps I shall not like her."
"Well," said Corey, a little daunted, "you won"t have to marry my family."
"Ah, that isn"t the point!"
"I know it," he admitted. "I won"t pretend that I don"t see what you mean; but I"m sure that all the differences would disappear when you came to know my family better. I"m not afraid but you and my mother will like each other--she can"t help it!" he exclaimed, less judicially than he had hitherto spoken, and he went on to urge some points of doubtful tenability. "We have our ways, and you have yours; and while I don"t say but what you and my mother and sisters would be a little strange together at first, it would soon wear off, on both sides.
There can"t be anything hopelessly different in you all, and if there were it wouldn"t be any difference to me."
"Do you think it would be pleasant to have you on my side against your mother?"
"There won"t be any sides. Tell me just what it is you"re afraid of."
"Afraid?"
"Thinking of, then."
"I don"t know. It isn"t anything they say or do," she explained, with her eyes intent on his. "It"s what they are. I couldn"t be natural with them, and if I can"t be natural with people, I"m disagreeable."
"Can you be natural with me?"