"I hope you will find the lumber business all you want it to suit your conscience, Steve. Come in and have some lunch!"
The heavy man refused,--he was in no mood for one of Isabelle"s luncheons, and he had but one more day of vacation. Gathering up his brood, he retraced his way across the meadow, the four small boys following in his track.
"Well!" exclaimed Isabelle to her husband. "What was your business all about? Luncheon has been waiting half an hour. It was as good as a play watching you two out there. Steve looked really awake."
"He was awake all right," Lane replied.
"Tell us all about it--there, Vick, see if he doesn"t put me off with "Just business, my dear"!"
"It _was_ just business. Steve has declined a good position I made for him, at nearly twice the salary he has ever earned."
"And all those boys to put through college!"
"What was it?" Vickers asked.
Something made Lane unusually communicative,--his irritation with Steve or his wife"s taunt.
"Did you ever hear of the Interstate Commerce Commission?" he asked his brother-in-law, in a slightly ironical tone. And he began to state the situation, and stated it remarkably well from his point of view, explaining the spirit of interference that had been growing throughout the country with railroad management, corporation management in general,--its disastrous effect if persisted in, and also "emotionalism" in the press. He talked very ably, and held his wife"s attention. Isabelle said:--
"But it was rather fine of Steve, if he felt that way!"
"He"s kept his mouth shut fifteen years."
"He"s slow, is Steve, but when he sees--he acts!"
Vickers said nothing, but a warm sense of comfort spread through his heart, as he thought, "Splendid!--she did that for him, Alice."
"I hope he won"t come to grief in the lumber business," Lane concluded.
"Steve is not fitted for general business. And he can"t have much capital.
Only their savings."
Then he yawned and went to the library for a cigar, dismissing Steve and his scruples and the railroad business altogether from his mind, in the manner of a well-trained man of affairs, who has learned that it is a useless waste of energy to speculate on what has been done and to wonder why men should feel and act as they do feel and act.
And Isabelle, with a "It will come hard on Alice!"--went off to cut some flowers for the vases, still light-hearted, humming a gay little French song that Tom had taught her.
If it were hard for Alice Johnston, the large woman did not betray it when Vickers saw her a few days later. With the help of her oldest boy she was unharnessing the horse from the Concord buggy.
"You see," she explained, as Vickers tried to put the head halter on the horse, "we are economizing on Joe, who used to do the ch.o.r.es when he did not forget them, which was every other day!"
When Vickers referred to Steve"s new business, she said cheerfully:--
"I think there is a good chance of success. The men Steve is going in with have bought a large tract of land in the southern part of Missouri. They have experience in the lumber business, and Steve is to look after the city end,--he"s well known in St. Louis."
"I do so hope it will go right," Vickers remarked, wishing that in some way he could help in this brave venture.
"Yes!" Alice smiled. "It had to be, this risk,--you know there come times when there is only one thing to do. If Steve hadn"t taken the step, left the railroad, I think that neither of us would have been happy afterwards.
But these are anxious days for us. We have put all the money in our stocking into it,--seven thousand dollars; all we have in the world but this old farm, which the Colonel gave me. I wanted to mortgage the farm, but Steve wouldn"t let me. So all our eggs are in one basket. Not so many eggs, but we can"t spare one!"
She laughed serenely, with a broad sense of humor over the family venture, yet with a full realization of its risk. Vickers marvelled at her strong faith in Steve, in the future, in life. As he had said to Isabelle, this was Woman, one who had learned the deeper lessons of life from her children, from her birth-pangs.
She took him into the vegetable garden which she and the children had planted. "We are truck-farmers," she explained. "I have the potatoes, little Steve the corn, Ezra the peas, and so on to Tot, who looks after the carrots and beets because they are close to the ground and don"t need much attention. The family is cultivating on shares."
They walked through the rows of green vegetables that were growing l.u.s.tily in the June weather, and then turned back to the house. Alice stopped to fasten up a riotous branch of woodbine that had poked its way through a screen.
"If the worst comes to the worst, I shall turn farmer in earnest and raise vegetables for my wealthy neighbors. And there is the orchard! We have been poor so much of the time that we know what it means.... I have no doubt it will come out all right,--and we don"t worry, Steve and I. We aren"t ambitious enough to worry."
It was a pleasant place, the Price farm, tucked away in a fold of gentle hills, at the end of a gra.s.sy lane. The bees hummed in the apple trees, and the June breeze swayed through the house, where all the windows and doors were open. Vickers, looking at the calm, healthy woman sitting beside him on the porch, did not pity the Johnstons, nor fear for them. Alice, surely, was the kind that no great misfortune could live with long.
"I am really a farmer,--it"s all the blood in my veins," Alice remarked.
"And when I get back here summers, the soil seems to speak to me. I"ve known horses and cows and pigs and crops and seasons for centuries. It"s only skin deep, the city coating, and is easily sc.r.a.ped off.... Your father, Vickers, was a wise man. He gave me the exact thing that was best for me when he died,--this old farm of my people. Just as he had given me the best thing in my life,--my education. If he had done more, I should be less able to get along now."
They had dinner, a noisy meal at which the children served in turns, Alice sitting like a queen bee at the head of the table, governing the brood.
Vickers liked these midday meals with the chattering, chirping youngsters.
"And how has it been with the music?" Alice asked. "Have you been able to work? You spent most of the winter up here, didn"t you?"
"I have done some things," Vickers said; "not much. I am not at home yet, and what seems familiar is this, the past. But I shall get broken in, no doubt. And," he added thoughtfully, "I have come to see that this is the place for me--for the present."
"I am glad," she said softly.
CHAPTER LI
As Vickers crossed the village on his way back from the Johnstons", Lane emerged from the telegraph office and joined him. On the rare occasions when they were thrown together alone like this, John Lane"s taciturnity reached to positive dumbness. Vickers supposed that his brother-in-law disliked him, possibly despised him. It was, however, a case of absolute non-understanding. It must remain forever a problem to the man with a firm grasp on concrete fact how any one could do what Vickers had done, except through "woman-weakness," for which Lane had no tolerance. Moreover, the quiet little man, with his dull eyes, who moved about as if his faculties had been forgotten in the morning when he got up, who could sit for hours dawdling at the piano striking chords, or staring at the keys, seemed merely queer to the man of action. "I wish he would do something," Isabelle had said of Vickers, using his own words of her, and her husband had replied, "Do? ... What could he do!"
"I"ve just been to see Alice," Vickers remarked timidly. "She takes Steve"s change of business very calmly."
"She doesn"t know," Lane answered curtly. "And I am afraid he doesn"t either."
He let the topic drop, and they walked on in silence, turning off at the stile into an old by-path that led up to the new house through a small grove of beeches, which Isabelle had saved at her brother"s plea from the destructive hand of the landscape artist. Vickers was thinking about Lane.
He understood his brother-in-law as little as the latter comprehended him.
He had often wondered these past months: "Doesn"t he _see_ what is happening to Isabelle? Doesn"t he care! It isn"t surely helpless yet,--they aren"t so wholly incompatible, and Isabelle is frank, is honest!" But if Lane saw the state of affairs in his house, he never showed that he perceived it. His manner with his wife was placid,--although, as Isabelle often said, he was very little with her. But that state of separation in which the two lived seemed less due to incompatibility than to the accident of the way they lived. Lane was a very busy man with much on his mind; he had no time for emotional tribulations.
Since his return from the West--these five days which he had allowed himself as vacation--he had been irritable at times, easily disturbed, as he had been with Steve Johnston, but never short with his wife. Vickers supposed that some business affair was weighing on him, and as was his habit he locked it up tight within....
And Lane would never have told what it was that gnawed at him, last of all to Vickers. It was pride that made him seem not to see, not to know the change that had come into his house. And something more, which might be found only in this kind of American gentleman,--a deep well of loyalty to his wife, a feeling of: "What she wishes, no matter what it may be to me!"
"I shall trust her to the last, and if she fails me, I will still trust her to be true to herself." A chivalry this, unsuspected by Vickers! Something of that old admiration for his wife which made him feel that he should provide her with the opportunities she craved, that somehow she had stooped in marrying him, still survived in spite of his successful career. And love? To define the sort of sentiment Lane at forty-two had for his wife, modified by his activities, by his lack of children, by her evident lack of pa.s.sion for him, would not be an easy matter. But that he loved her more deeply than mere pride, than habit would account for, was sure. In that afterglow between men and women which comes when the storms of life have been lived through, Lane might be found a sufficient lover....
As they entered the narrow path that led through the beechwood, Lane stepped aside to allow Vickers to precede him. The afternoon sun falling on the glossy new leaves made a pleasant light. They had come to a point in the path where the western wing of the house was visible through the trees when suddenly Vickers stopped, hesitated, as if he would turn back, and said aloud hastily: "I always like this side of the house best,--don"t you?
It is quieter, less open than the south facade, more _intime_--" He talked on aimlessly, blocking the path, staring at the house, gesticulating. When he moved, he glanced at Lane"s face....
Just below in a hollow where a stone bench had been placed, Isabelle was sitting with Cairy, his arm about her, her eyes looking up at him, something gay and happy in the face like that little French song she was singing these days, as if a voice had stilled the restless craving in her, had touched to life that dead pulse, which had refused to beat for her husband.... This was what Vickers had seen, and it was on his lips to say, "When did Cairy come? Isabelle did not tell me." But instead he had faltered out nonsense, while the two, hearing his voice, betook themselves to the upper terrace. Had her husband seen them? Vickers wondered.
Something in the man"s perfect control, his manner of listening to Vickers"s phrases, made him feel that he had seen--all. But Lane in his ordinary monosyllabic manner pointed to a nest of ground sparrows beside the path. "Guess we had better move this establishment to a safer place,"
he remarked, as he carefully put the nest into the thicket.