Part 21 (2/2)

”Oh, it isn't any tone in me, my dear Miss Forsythe,” Carmen continued, sweetly. ”Society is a great deal pleasanter when you are not anxious and don't expect too much.”

Miss Forsythe told Margaret that she thought Miss Esch.e.l.le was a dangerous woman. Margaret did not defend her, but she did not join, either, in condemning her; she appeared to have accepted her as a part of her world. And there were other things that Margaret seemed to have accepted without that vigorous protest which she used to raise at whatever crossed her conscience. To her aunt she was never more affectionate, never more solicitous about her comfort and her pleasure, and it was almost enough to see Margaret happy, radiant, expanding day by day in the prosperity that was illimitable, only there was to her a note of unreality in all the whirl and hurry of the busy life. She liked to escape to her room with a book, and be out of it all, and the two weeks away from her country life seemed long to her. She couldn't reconcile Margaret's love of the world, her tolerance of Carmen, and other men and women whose lives seemed to be based on Carmen's philosophy, with her devotion to the church services, to the city missions, and the dozens of charities that absorb so much of the time of the leaders of society.

”You are too young, dear, to be so good and devout,” was Carmen's comment on the situation.

To Miss Forsythe's wonder, Margaret did not resent this impertinence, but only said that no acc.u.mulation of years was likely to bring Carmen into either of these dangers. And the reply was no more satisfactory to Miss Forsythe than the remark that provoked it.

That she had had a delightful visit, that Margaret was more lovely than ever, that Henderson was a delightful host, was the report of Miss Forsythe when she returned to us. In a confidential talk with my wife she confessed, however, that she couldn't tell whither Margaret was going.

One of the worries of modern life is the perplexity where to spend the summer. The restless spirit of change affects those who dwell in the country, as well as those who live in the city. No matter how charming the residence is, one can stay in it only a part of the year. He actually needs a house in town, a villa by the sea, and a cottage in the hills. When these are secured--each one an establishment more luxurious year by year--then the family is ready to travel about, and is in a greater perplexity than before whether to spend the summer in Europe or in America, the novelties of which are beginning to excite the imagination. This nomadism, which is nothing less than society on wheels, cannot be satirized as a whim of fas.h.i.+on; it has a serious cause in--the discovery of the disease called nervous prostration, which demands for its cure constant change of scene, without any occupation.

Henderson recognized it, but he said that personally he had no time to indulge in it. His summer was to be a very busy one. It was impossible to take Margaret with him on his sudden and tedious journeys from one end of the country to the other, but she needed a change. It was therefore arranged that after a visit to Brandon she should pa.s.s the warm months with the Arbusers in their summer home at Lenox, with a month--the right month--in the Esch.e.l.le villa at Newport; and he hoped never to be long absent from one place or the other.

Margaret came to Brandon at the beginning of June, just at the season when the region was at its loveliest, and just when its society was making preparations to get away from it to the sea, or the mountains, or to any place that was not home. I could never understand why a people who have been grumbling about snow and frost for six months, and longing for genial weather, should flee from it as soon as it comes. I had made the discovery, quite by chance--and it was so novel that I might have taken out a patent on it--that if one has a comfortable home in our northern lat.i.tude, he cannot do better than to stay in it when the hum of the mosquito is heard in the land, and the mercury is racing up and down the scale between fifty and ninety. This opinion, however, did not extend beyond our little neighborhood, and we may be said to have had the summer to ourselves.

I fancied that the neighborhood had not changed, but the coming of Margaret showed me that this was a delusion. No one can keep in the same place in life simply by standing still, and the events of the past two years had wrought a subtle change in our quiet. Nothing had been changed to the eye, yet something had been taken away, or something had been added, a door had been opened into the world. Margaret had come home, yet I fancied it was not the home to her that she had been thinking about. Had she changed?

She was more beautiful. She had the air--I should hesitate to call it that of the fine lady--of a.s.sured position, something the manner of that greater world in which the possession of wealth has supreme importance, but it was scarcely a change of manner so much as of ideas about life and of the things valuable in it gradually showing itself. Her delight at being again with her old friends was perfectly genuine, and she had never appeared more unselfish or more affectionate. If there was a subtle difference, it might very well be in us, though I found it impossible to conceive of her in her former role of teacher and simple maiden, with her heart in the little concerns of our daily life. And why should she be expected to go back to that stage? Must we not all live our lives? Miss Forsythe's solicitude about Margaret was mingled with a curious deference, as to one who had a larger experience of life than her own. The girl of a year ago was now the married woman, and was invested with something of the dignity that Miss Forsythe in her pure imagination attached to that position. Without yielding any of her opinions, this idea somehow changed her relations to Margaret; a little, I thought, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of Mrs. Fletcher and the other ladies, to whom marriage took on a less mysterious aspect. It arose doubtless from a renewed sense of the incompleteness of her single life, long as it had been, and enriched as it was by observation.

In that June there were vexatious strikes in various parts of the country, formidable combinations of laboring-men, demonstrations of trades-unions, and the exhibition of a spirit that sharply called attention to the unequal distribution of wealth. The discontent was attributed in some quarters to the exhibition of extreme luxury and reckless living by those who had been fortunate. It was even said that the strikes, unreasonable and futile as they were, and most injurious to those who indulged in them, were indirectly caused by the railway manipulation, in the attempt not only to crush out compet.i.tion, but to exact excessive revenues on fict.i.tious values. Resistance to this could be shown to be blind, and the strikers technically in the wrong, yet the impression gained ground that there was something monstrously wrong in the way great fortunes were acc.u.mulated, in total disregard of individual rights, and in a materialistic spirit that did not take into account ordinary humanity. For it was not alone the laboring cla.s.s that was discontented, but all over the country those who lived upon small invested savings, widows and minors, found their income imperiled by the trickery of rival operators and speculators in railways and securities, who treated the little private acc.u.mulations as mere counters in the games they were playing. The loss of dividends to them was poorly compensated by reflections upon the development of the country, and the advantage to trade of great consolidations, which inured to the benefit of half a dozen insolent men.

In discussing these things in our little parliament we were not altogether unprejudiced, it must be confessed. For, to say nothing of interests of Mr. Morgan and my own, which seemed in some danger of disappearing for the ”public good,” Mrs. Fletcher's little fortune was nearly all invested in that sound ”rock-bed” railway in the Southwest that Mr. Jerry Hollowell had recently taken under his paternal care. She was a.s.sured, indeed, that dividends were only reserved pending some sort of reorganization, which would ultimately be of great benefit to all the parties concerned; but this was much like telling a hungry man that if he would possess his appet.i.te in patience, he would very likely have a splendid dinner next year. Women are not const.i.tuted to understand this sort of reasoning. It is needless to say that in our general talks on the situation these personalities were not referred to, for although Margaret was silent, it was plain to see that she was uneasy.

Morgan liked to raise questions of casuistry, such as that whether money dishonestly come by could be accepted for good purposes.

”I had this question referred to me the other day,” he said. ”A gambler--not a petty cheater in cards, but a man who has a splendid establishment in which he has ama.s.sed a fortune, a man known for his liberality and good-fellows.h.i.+p and his interest in politics--offered the president of a leading college a hundred thousand dollars to endow a professors.h.i.+p. Ought the president to take the money, knowing how it was made?”

”Wouldn't the money do good--as much good as any other hundred thousand dollars?” asked Margaret.

”Perhaps. But the professors.h.i.+p was to bear his name, and what would be the moral effect of that?”

”Did you recommend the president to take the money, if he could get it without using the gambler's name?”

”I am not saying yet what I advised. I am trying to get your views on a general principle.”

”But wouldn't it be a sneaking thing to take a man's money, and refuse him the credit of his generosity?”

”But was it generosity? Was not his object, probably, to get a reputation which his whole life belied, and to get it by obliterating the distinction between right and wrong?”

”But isn't it a compromising distinction,” my wife asked, ”to take his money without his name? The president knows that it is money fraudulently got, that really belongs to somebody else; and the gambler would feel that if the president takes it, he cannot think very disapprovingly of the manner in which it was acquired. I think it would be more honest and straightforward to take his name with the money.”

”The public effect of connecting the gambler's name with the college would be debasing,” said Morgan; ”but, on the contrary, is every charity or educational inst.i.tution bound to scrutinize the source of every benefaction? Isn't it better that money, however acquired, should be used for a good purpose than a bad one?”

”That is a question,” I said, ”that is a vital one in our present situation, and the sophistry of it puzzles the public. What would you say to this case? A man notoriously dishonest, but within the law, and very rich, offered a princely endowment to a college very much in need of it. The sum would have enabled it to do a great work in education.

But it was intimated that the man would expect, after a while, to be made one of the trustees. His object, of course, was social position.”

”I suppose, of course,” Margaret replied, ”that the college couldn't afford that. It would look like bribery.”

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