"He went over for a little rest, you said. And he always went every year about this time for a vacation and to buy pictures. Don"t you remember, John, what funny things he bought, and how the family laughed at him?"
"Yes,--I know." He also knew that the president of the Atlantic and Pacific had gone across the ocean "for his yearly vacation" just at the opening of the coal investigation to escape the scandal of the trial, and had not returned at the usual time, although the financial world was unsettled. And he knew other things; for already clubs and inner offices had been buzzing with rumors.
"I am afraid that it is worse than it seems," he said to his wife on his return from the city that afternoon. "Beals was terribly involved. I hear that a bank he was interested in has been closed.... He was tied up fast--in all sorts of ways!"
"John!" Isabelle cried, and paused. Did this old man"s death mean another scandal, ruin for another family, and one she had known well,--disgrace, scandal, possibly poverty?
"Beals was always in the market--and this panic hit him hard; he was on the wrong side lately."
It was an old story, not in every case with the same details, but horribly common,--a man of the finest possibilities, of st.u.r.dy character, rising up to the heights of ambition, then losing his head, playing the game wantonly for mere pride and habit in it,--his judgment giving way, but playing on, stumbling, grasping at this and that to stop his sliding feet, breaking the elementary laws! And finally, in the face of disaster, alone in a hotel room the lonely old man--no doubt mentally broken by the strain--putting the pistol to his head with his shaking hand. And, afterwards, the debris of his wreck would be swept aside to clear the road for others!
Farrington Beals was not a single case. In this time of money disturbance, suicide and dishonor were rife in the streets, revealing the rotten timber that could not stand the strain of modern life, lived as it had been lived the past ten years. It was not one blast that uprooted weak members of the forest, but the eating decay of the previous years, working at the heart of many lives. "The frantic egotism of the age!" Yes, and the divided souls, never at peace until death put an end to the strife at last,--too much for little bodies of nerve and tissue to stand,--the racking of divided wills, divided souls.
"John!" Isabelle cried that night, after they had again talked over the tragedy; "let us go--go out there--to a new land!" She rose from the lounge and swept across the room with the energy of clear purpose--of Vision. "Let us put ourselves as far as possible out of this sort of thing! .... It will kill us both. Do it for my sake, even if you can"t feel as I do!"
And then there poured forth all the story of these years, of their life apart, as she had come to see it the last months, in the remote and peaceful hills, in the court-room, in the plain pathos of Steve"s death and Alice"s heroism, and now in this suicide,--all that had given her insight and made her different from what she had been,--all that revealed the cheapness of her old ideals of freedom, intellectual development, self-satisfaction, that cult of the ego, which she had pursued in sympathy with the age. Now she wished to put it away, to remove herself and her husband, their lives together, outwardly as she had withdrawn herself inwardly. And her husband, moved in spite of himself by her tense desire, the energy of her words, listened and comprehended--in part.
"I have never been a real wife to you, John. I don"t mean just my love for that other man, when you were n.o.bly generous with me. But before that, in other ways, in almost all ways that make a woman a wife, a real wife....
Now I want to be a real wife. I want to be with you in all things.... You can"t see the importance of this step as I do. Men and women are different, always. But there is something within me, underneath, like an inner light that makes me see clearly now,--not conscience, but a kind of flame that guides. In the light of that I see what a petty fool I have been. It all had to be--I don"t regret because it all had to be--the terrible waste, the sacrifice," she whispered, thinking of Vickers. "Only now we must live, you and I together,--together live as we have never lived before!"
She held out her hands to him as she spoke, her head erect, and as he waited, still tied by years of self-repression, she went to him and put her arms about him, drawing her to him, to her breast, to her eyes. Ten years before he had adored her, desired her pa.s.sionately, and she had shrunk from him. Then life had come imperceptibly in between them; he had gone his way, she hers. Now she was offering herself to him. And she was more desirable than before, more woman,--at last whole. The appeal that had never been wholly stifled in the man still beat in his pulses for the woman. And the appeal never wholly roused in the woman by him reached out now for him; but an appeal not merely of the senses, higher than anything Cairy could rouse in a woman, an appeal, limitless, of comradeship, purpose, wills. He kissed her, holding her close to him, realizing that she too held him in the inner place of her being.
"We will begin again," he said.
"Our new life--together!"
And this is Influence, the work of one will upon another, sometimes apparent, dramatic, tragic; sometimes subtle, unknowable, speaking across dark gulfs. The meaning of that dead man"s austere face, the howl of journalists on his uncovered trail, the old man dead in his hotel room disgraced, the deep current of purpose in his new wife,--all these and much more sent messages into the man"s unyielding soul to change the atmosphere therein, to alter the values of things seen, to shape--at last--the will.
For what makes an act? Filaments of nerve, some shadowy unknown process in brain cells? These are but symbols for mystery! Life pressing multifariously its changing suggestions upon the sentient organism prompts, at last, the act. But there is something deeper than the known in all this wondrous complexity....
John Lane, the man of fact, the ordered efficient will, was dimly conscious of forces other than physical ones, beyond,--not recognizable as motives,--self-created and impelling, nevertheless; forces welling up from the tenebrous s.p.a.ces in the depths of his being, beneath conscious life.
And at last, something higher than Judgment swayed the man.
CHAPTER LXXIX
The private car Olympus had been switched for the day to a siding at the little town of Orano on the edge of the Texas upland. The party within--the Lanes, Margaret and her children, and several men interested in the new railroad--had been making a leisurely tour of inspection, pa.s.sing through the fertile prairies and woodlands of Oklahoma, stopping often at the little towns that were springing up along the road, aiming south until they had reached the Panhandle. These September days the harvests were rich and heavy, covered with a golden haze of heat,--the sweat of earth"s accomplishment. The new soil was laden with its fruit. The men had been amazed by the fertility, the force of the country. "Traffic, traffic," Lane had murmured enthusiastically, divining with his trained eye the enormous possibilities of the land, the future for the iron highroad he was pushing through it. Traffic,--in other words, growth, business, human effort and human life,--that is the cosmic song that sings itself along the iron road.
Margaret had said mockingly:--
"Wouldn"t it do our New York friends a world of good to get out here once a year and realize that life goes on, and very real life, outside the narrow sh.o.r.es of Manhattan!"
That was the illuminating thought which had come to them all in different ways during this slow progress from St. Louis south and west. This broad land of states had a vital existence, a life of its own, everywhere, not merely in the great centres, the glutted metropolitan points. Men lived and worked, happily, constructively, in thousands and thousands of small places, where the seaboard had sunk far beneath the eastern horizon. Life was real, to be lived vitally, as much here in prairie and plain as anywhere on the earth"s surface. The feeling which had come to Isabelle on her westward journey in March--the conviction that each one counted, had his own terrestrial struggle, his own celestial drama, differing very little in importance from his neighbor"s; each one--man, woman, or child--in all the wonderful completeness of life throughout the millions--swept over her again here where the race was sowing new land. And lying awake in the stillness of the autumn morning on the lofty plateau, as she listened to the colored servants chaffing at their work, there came to her the true meaning of that perplexing phrase, which had sounded with the mockery of empty poetry on the lips of the district attorney,--"All men born free and equal." Yes! in the realm of their spirits, in their souls,--the inner, moving part of them, "free and equal"! ...
"It"s the roof of the world!" Margaret said, as she jumped from the car platform and looked over the upland,--whimsically recalling the name of a popular play then running in New York.
An unawakened country, dry and untilled, awaiting the hand of the master, it lifted westward in colored billows of undulating land. Under the clear morning sun it was still and fresh, yet untouched, untamed.
"It _is_ the roof of the world," she repeated, "high and dry and extraordinarily vast,--leading your eyes onward and upward to the heavens, with all the rest of the earth below you in the fog. How I should like to live here always! If I were you, Isabelle, I should get your husband to give you a freight-car like those the gangs of track-layers use, with a little stovepipe sticking out of one corner, and just camp down in it here,--on the roof of the world."
She lifted her thin, delicate face to the sun, reaching out her arms to it hungrily.
"We must sleep out to-night under the stars, and talk--oh, much talk, out here under the stars!"
During the past year at Grosvenor her frail body had strengthened, revived; she was now firm and vigorous. Only the deep eyes and the lines above them and about the mouth, the curve of the nostril and chin, showed as on a finely chased coin the subtle chiselling of life. And here in the uplands, in the great s.p.a.ces of earth and sky, the elemental desire of her soul seemed at last wholly appeased, the longing for s.p.a.ce and height and light, the longing for deeds and beauty and Peace. At last, after the false roads, the fret and rebellion, she had emerged into the upper air....
"How well the little man rides!" Isabelle remarked as the children went by them on some ponies they had found.
Margaret"s face glowed with pride.
"Yes, Ned has improved very fast. He will go to school with the others now.... The doctor has really saved his life--and mine, too," she murmured.
So the two slept out under the stars, as Margaret wished, with dotted heavens close above and vague s.p.a.ce all about; and they talked into the morning of past years, of matters that meant too much to them both for daylight speech. Isabelle spoke of Vickers, of the apparent waste of his life. "I can see now," she said, "that in going away with that woman as he did he expressed the real soul of him, as he did in dying for me. He was born to love and to give, and the world broke him. But he escaped!" And she could not say even to Margaret what she felt,--that he had laid it on her to express his defeated life.
They spoke even of Conny. "You received the cards for her wedding?"
Margaret asked. "The man is a stockbroker. She is turning her talents to a new field,--money. I hear the wedding was very smart, and they are to live on Long Island, with a yacht and half a dozen motors."
"I thought she would marry--differently," Isabelle observed vaguely, recalling the last time she had seen Conny.
"No! Conny knows her world perfectly,--that"s her strength. And she knows exactly what to take from it to suit her. She is a bronze Cleopatra with modern variations. I think they ought to put her figure on the gold eagles as the American Woman Triumphant, ruling her world."
"And on the other side the figure of a Vampire, stacking at the souls of men." ...
And then they talked of the future, the New Life, as it would shape itself for Isabelle and her husband, talked as if the earth were fresh and life but in the opening.
"He may do something else than this," Isabelle said. "He has immense power.
But I hope it will always be something outside the main wheels of industry, as Mr. Gossom would say,--something with another kind of reward than the Wall Street crown."
"I wish he might find work here for Rob," Margaret said; "something out here where he belongs that will not pay him in fame or money. For he has that other thing in him, the love of beauty, of the ideal." She spoke with ease and naturally of her lover. "And there has been so little that is ideal in his life,--so little to feed his spirit."
And she added in a low voice, "I saw her in New York--his wife."
"Bessie!"
"Yes,--she was there with the girl,--Mildred.... I went to see her--I had to.... I went several times. She seemed to like me. Do you know, there is something very lovable in that woman; I can see why Rob married her. She has wrecked herself,--her own life. She would never submit to what the doctor calls the discipline of life. She liked herself just as she was; she wanted to be always a child of nature, to win the world with her charm, to have everything nice and pleasant and gay about her, and be petted into the bargain. Now she is gray and homely and in bad health--and bitter. It is pitiful to wake up at forty after you have been a child all your life, and realize that life was never what you thought it was.... I was very sorry for her."
"Will they ever come together again?"
"Perhaps! Who knows? The girl must bring them together; she will not be wholly satisfied with her mother, and Rob needs his daughter.... I hope so--for his sake. But it will be hard for them both,--hard for him to live with a spent woman, and hard for her to know that she has missed what she wanted and never quite to understand why.... But it may be better than we can see,--there is always so much of the unknown in every one. That is the great uplifting thought! We live in s.p.a.ce and above unseen depths. And voices rise sometimes from the depths."
And lying there under the stars Margaret thought what she could not speak,--of the voice that had risen within her and made her refuse the utmost of personal joy. She had kissed her lover and held him in her arms and sent him away from her. Without him she could not have lived; nor could she live keeping him....
At last they came to Renault, the one who had opened their eyes to life and to themselves.
"Still working," Margaret said, "burning up there in the hills like a steady flame! Some day he will go out,--not die, just wholly consume from within, like one of those old lamps that burn until there is nothing, no oil left, not even the dust of the wick."