willing to talk with you from time to time. That's all you want. This
other thing is simply a sop with which to plaster an old wound. You
want my friendship and so far as I'm concerned you have that. I don't
hold any grudge against you. I won't."
Robert looked at him fixedly. He half smiled. He admired Lester in
spite of all that he had done to him--in spite of all that Lester
was doing to him now.
"I don't know but what you're right, Lester," he admitted finally.
"I didn't make this offer in any petty spirit though. I wanted to
patch up this matter of feeling between us. I won't say anything more
about it. You're not coming down to Cincinnati soon, are you?"
"I don't expect to," replied Lester.
"If you do I'd like to have you come and stay with us. Bring your
wife. We could talk over old times."
Lester smiled an enigmatic smile.
"I'll be glad to," he said, without emotion. But he remembered that
in the days of Jennie it was different. They would never have receded
from their position regarding her. "Well," he thought, "perhaps I
can't blame them. Let it go."
They talked on about other things. Finally Lester remembered an
appointment. "I'll have to leave you soon," he said, looking at his
watch.
"I ought to go, too," said Robert. They rose. "Well, anyhow," he
added, as they walked toward the cloakroom, "we won't be absolute
strangers in the future, will we?"
"Certainly not," said Lester. "I'll see you from time to time."
They shook hands and separated amicably. There was a sense of
unsatisfied obligation and some remorse in Robert's mind as he saw his
brother walking briskly away. Lester was an able man. Why was it that
there was so much feeling between them--had been even before
Jennie had appeared? Then he remembered his old thoughts about "snaky
deeds." That was what his brother lacked, and that only. He was not
crafty; not darkly cruel, hence. "What a world!" he thought.
On his part Lester went away feeling a slight sense of opposition
to, but also of sympathy for, his brother. He was not so terribly
bad--not different from other men. Why criticize? What would he
have done if he had been in Robert's place? Robert was getting along.
So was he. He could see now how it all came about--why he had
been made the victim, why his brother had been made the keeper of the
great fortune. "It's the way the world runs," he thought. "What
difference does it make? I have enough to live on. Why not let it go
at that?"
CHAPTER LXI
The days of man under the old dispensation, or, rather, according
to that supposedly biblical formula, which persists, are threescore
years and ten. It is so ingrained in the race-consciousness by
mouth-to-mouth utterance that it seems the profoundest of truths. As a
matter of fact, man, even under his mortal illusion, is organically
built to live five times the period of his maturity, and would do so
if he but knew that it is spirit which endures, that age is an
illusion, and that there is no death. Yet the race-thought, gained
from what dream of materialism we know not, persists, and the death of
man under the mathematical formula so fearfully accepted is daily
registered.
Lester was one of those who believed in this formula. He was
nearing sixty. He thought he had, say, twenty years more at the utmost
to live--perhaps not so long. Well, he had lived comfortably. He
felt that he could not complain. If death was coming, let it come. He
was ready at any time. No complaint or resistance would issue from
him. Life, in most of its aspects, was a silly show anyhow.
He admitted that it was mostly illusion--easily proved to be
so. That it might all be one he sometimes suspected. It was very much
like a dream in its composition truly--sometimes like a very bad
dream. All he had to sustain him in his acceptance of its reality from
hour to hour and day to day was apparent contact with this material
proposition and that--people, meetings of boards of directors,
individuals and organizations planning to do this and that, his wife's
social functions Letty loved him as a fine, grizzled example of a
philosopher. She admired, as Jennie had, his solid, determined,
phlegmatic attitude in the face of troubled circumstance. All the
winds of fortune or misfortune could not apparently excite or disturb
Lester. He refused to be frightened. He refused to budge from his
beliefs and feelings, and usually had to be pushed away from them,
still believing, if he were gotten away at all. He refused to do
anything save as he always said, "Look the facts in the face" and
fight. He could be made to fight easily enough if imposed upon, but
only in a stubborn, resisting way. His plan was to resist every effort
to coerce him to the last ditch. If he had to let go in the end he
would when compelled, but his views as to the value of not letting go
were quite the same even when he had let go under compulsion.
His views of living were still decidedly material, grounded in
creature comforts, and he had always insisted upon having the best of
everything. If the furnishings of his home became the least dingy he
was for having them torn out and sold and the house done over. If he
traveled, money must go ahead of him and smooth the way. He did not
want argument, useless talk, or silly palaver as he called it. Every
one must discuss interesting topics with him or not talk at all. Letty
understood him thoroughly. She would chuck him under the chin
mornings, or shake his solid head between her hands, telling him he
was a brute, but a nice kind of a brute. "Yes, yes," he would growl.
"I know. I'm an animal, I suppose. You're a seraphic suggestion of
attenuated thought."
"No; you hush," she would reply, for at times he could cut like a
knife without really meaning to be unkind. Then he would pet her a
little, for, in spite of her vigorous conception of life, he realized
that she was more or less dependent upon him. It was always so plain
to her that he could get along without her. For reasons of kindliness
he was trying to conceal this, to pretend the necessity of her
presence, but it was so obvious that he really could dispense with her
easily enough. Now Letty did depend upon Lester. It was something, in
so shifty and uncertain a world, to be near so fixed and determined a
quantity as this bear-man. It was like being close to a warmly glowing
lamp in the dark or a bright burning fire in the cold. Lester was not
afraid of anything. He felt that he knew how to live and to die.
It was natural that a temperament of this kind should have its
solid, material manifestation at every point. Having his financial
affairs well in hand, most of his holding being shares of big
companies, where boards of solemn directors merely approved the
strenuous efforts of ambitious executives to "make good," he had
leisure for living. He and Letty were fond of visiting the various
American and European watering-places. He gambled a little, for he
found that there was considerable diversion in risking interesting
sums on the spin of a wheel or the fortuitous roll of a ball; and he
took more and more to drinking, not in the sense that a drunkard takes
to it, but as a high liver, socially, and with all his friends. He was
inclined to drink the rich drinks when he did not take straight
whiskey--champagne, sparkling Burgundy, the expensive and
effervescent white wines. When he drank he could drink a great deal,
and he ate in proportion. Nothing must be served but the
best--soup, fish, entree, roast, game, dessert--everything
that made up a showy dinner and he had long since determined that only
a high-priced chef was worth while. They had found an old cordon
bleu, Louis Berdot, who had served in the house of one of the
great dry goods princes, and this man he engaged. He cost Lester a
hundred dollars a week, but his reply to any question was that he only
had one life to live.
The trouble with this attitude was that it adjusted nothing,
improved nothing, left everything to drift on toward an indefinite
end. If Lester had married Jennie and accepted the comparatively
meager income of ten thousand a year he would have maintained the same
attitude to the end. It would have led him to a stolid indifference to
the social world of which now necessarily he was a part. He would have
drifted on with a few mentally compatible cronies who would have
accepted him for what he was--a good fellow--and Jennie in
the end would not have been so much better off than she was now.
One of the changes which was interesting was that the Kanes
transferred their residence to New York. Mrs. Kane had become very
intimate with a group of clever women in the Eastern four hundred, or
nine hundred, and had been advised and urged to transfer the scene of
her activities to New York. She finally did so, leasing a house in
Seventy-eighth Street, near Madison Avenue. She installed a novelty
for her, a complete staff of liveried servants, after the English
fashion, and had the rooms of her house done in correlative periods.
Lester smiled at her vanity and love of show.
"You talk about your democracy," he grunted one day. "You have as
much democracy as I have religion, and that's none at all."
"Why, how you talk!" she denied. "I am democratic. We all run in
classes. You do. I'm merely accepting the logic of the situation."
"The logic of your grandmother! Do you call a butler and doorman in
red velvet a part of the necessity of the occasion?"
"I certainly do," she replied. "Maybe not the necessity exactly,
but the spirit surely. Why should you quarrel? You're the first one to
insist on perfection--to quarrel if there is any flaw in the
order of things."
"You never heard me quarrel."
"Oh, I don't mean that literally. But you demand
perfection--the exact spirit of the occasion, and you know
it."
"Maybe I do, but what has that to do with your democracy?"
"I am democratic. I insist on it. I'm as democratic in spirit as
any woman. Only I see things as they are, and conform as much as
possible for comfort's sake, and so do you. Don't you throw rocks at
my glass house, Mister Master. Yours is so transparent I can see every
move you make inside."
"I'm democratic and you're not," he teased; but he approved
thoroughly of everything she did. She was, he sometimes fancied, a
better executive in her world than he was in his.
Drifting in this fashion, wining, dining, drinking the waters of
this curative spring and that, traveling in luxurious ease and taking
no physical exercise, finally altered his body from a vigorous,
quick-moving, well-balanced organism into one where plethora of
substance was clogging every essential function. His liver, kidneys,
spleen, pancreas--every organ, in fact--had been overtaxed
for some time to keep up the process of digestion and elimination. In
the past seven years he had become uncomfortably heavy. His kidneys
were weak, and so were the arteries of his brain. By dieting, proper
exercise, the right mental attitude, he might have lived to be eighty
or ninety. As a matter of fact, he was allowing himself to drift into
a physical state in which even a slight malady might prove dangerous.
The result was inevitable, and it came.
It so happened that he and Letty had gone to the North Cape on a
cruise with a party of friends. Lester, in order to attend to some
important business, decided to return to Chicago late in November; he
arranged to have his wife meet him in New York just before the
Christmas holidays. He wrote Watson to expect him, and engaged rooms
at the Auditorium, for he had sold the Chicago residence some two
years before and was now living permanently in New York.
One late November day, after having attended to a number of details
and cleared up his affairs very materially, Lester was seized with
what the doctor who was called to attend him described as a cold in
the intestines--a disturbance usually symptomatic of some other
weakness, either of the blood or of some organ. He suffered great
pain, and the usual remedies in that case were applied. There were
bandages of red flannel with a mustard dressing, and specifics were
also administered. He experienced some relief, but he was troubled
with a sense of impending disaster. He had Watson cable his
wife--there was nothing serious about it, but he was ill. A
trained nurse was in attendance and his valet stood guard at the door
to prevent annoyance of any kind. It was plain that Letty could not
reach Chicago under three weeks. He had the feeling that he would not
see her again.
Curiously enough, not only because he was in Chicago, but because
he had never been spiritually separated from Jennie, he was thinking
about her constantly at this time. He had intended to go out and see
her just as soon as he was through with his business engagements and
before he left the city. He had asked Watson how she was getting
along, and had been informed that everything was well with her. She
was living quietly and looking in good health, so Watson said. Lester
wished he could see her.
This thought grew as the days passed and he grew no better. He was
suffering from time to time with severe attacks of griping pains that
seemed to tie his viscera into knots, and left him very weak. Several
times the physician administered cocaine with a needle in order to
relieve him of useless pain.
After one of the severe attacks he called Watson to his side, told
him to send the nurse away, and then said: "Watson, I'd like to have
you do me a favor. Ask Mrs. Stover if she won't come here to see me.
You'd better go and get her. Just send the nurse and Kozo (the valet)
away for the afternoon, or while she's here. If she comes at any other
time I'd like to have her admitted."
Watson understood. He liked this expression of sentiment. He was
sorry for Jennie. He was sorry for Lester. He wondered what the world
would think if it could know of this bit of romance in connection with
so prominent a man. Lester was decent. He had made Watson prosperous.
The latter was only too glad to serve him in any way.
He called a carriage and rode out to Jennie's residence. He found
her watering some plants; her face expressed her surprise at his
unusual presence.
"I come on a rather troublesome errand, Mrs. Stover," he said,
using her assumed name. "Your--that is, Mr. Kane is quite sick at
the Auditorium. His wife is in Europe, and he wanted to know if I
wouldn't come out here and ask you to come and see him. He wanted me
to bring you, if possible. Could you come with me now?"
"Why yes," said Jennie, her face a study. The children were in
school. An old Swedish housekeeper was in the kitchen. She could go as
well as not. But there was coming back to her in detail a dream she
had had several nights before. It had seemed to her that she was out
on a dark, mystic body of water over which was hanging something like
a fog, or a pall of smoke. She heard the water ripple, or stir
faintly, and then out of the surrounding darkness a boat appeared. It
was a little boat, oarless, or not visibly propelled, and in it were
her mother, and Vesta, and some one whom she could not make out. Her
mother's face was pale and sad, very much as she had often seen it in
life. She looked at Jennie solemnly, sympathetically, and then
suddenly Jennie realized that the third occupant of the boat was
Lester. He looked at her gloomily--an expression she had never
seen on his face before--and then her mother remarked, "Well, we
must go now." The boat began to move, a great sense of loss came over
her, and she cried, "Oh, don't leave me, mamma!"
But her mother only looked at her out of deep, sad, still eyes, and
the boat was gone.
She woke with a start, half fancying that Lester was beside her.
She stretched out her hand to touch his arm; then she drew herself up
in the dark and rubbed her eyes, realizing that she was alone. A great
sense of depression remained with her, and for two days it haunted
her. Then, when it seemed as if it were nothing, Mr. Watson appeared
with his ominous message.
She went to dress, and reappeared, looking as troubled as were her
thoughts. She was very pleasing in her appearance yet, a sweet, kindly
woman, well dressed and shapely. She had never been separated mentally
from Lester, just as he had never grown entirely away from her. She
was always with him in thought, just as in the years when they were
together. Her fondest memories were of the days when he first courted
her in Cleveland--the days when he had carried her off, much as
the cave-man seized his mate--by force. Now she longed to do what
she could for him. For this call was as much a testimony as a shock.
He loved her--he loved her, after all.
The carriage rolled briskly through the long streets into the smoky
down-town district. It arrived at the Auditorium, and Jennie was
escorted to Lester's room. Watson had been considerate. He had talked
little, leaving her to her thoughts. In this great hotel she felt
diffident after so long a period of complete retirement. As she
entered the room she looked at Lester with large, gray, sympathetic
eyes. He was lying propped up on two pillows, his solid head with its
growth of once dark brown hair slightly grayed. He looked at her
curiously out of his wise old eyes, a light of sympathy and affection
shining in them--weary as they were. Jennie was greatly
distressed. His pale face, slightly drawn from suffering, cut her like
a knife. She took his hand, which was outside the coverlet, and
pressed it. She leaned over and kissed his lips.
"I'm so sorry, Lester," she murmured. "I'm so sorry. You're not
very sick though, are you? You must get well, Lester--and soon!"
She patted his hand gently.
"Yes, Jennie, but I'm pretty bad," he said. "I don't feel right
about this business. I don't seem able to shake it off. But tell me,
how have you been?"
"Oh, just the same, dear," she replied. "I'm all right. You mustn't
talk like that, though. You're going to be all right very soon
now."
He smiled grimly. "Do you think so?" He shook his head, for he
thought differently. "Sit down, dear," he went on, "I'm not worrying
about that. I want to talk to you again. I want you near me." He
sighed and shut his eyes for a minute.
She drew up a chair close beside the bed, her face toward his, and
took his hand. It seemed such a beautiful thing that he should send
for her. Her eyes showed the mingled sympathy, affection, and
gratitude of her heart. At the same time fear gripped her; how ill he
looked!
"I can't tell what may happen," he went on. "Letty is in Europe.
I've wanted to see you again for some time. I was coming out this
trip. We are living in New York, you know. You're a little stouter,
Jennie."
"Yes, I'm getting old, Lester," she smiled.
"Oh, that doesn't make any difference," he replied, looking at her
fixedly. "Age doesn't count. We are all in that boat. It's how we feel
about life."
He stopped and stared at the ceiling. A slight twinge of pain
reminded him of the vigorous seizures he had been through. He couldn't
stand many more paroxysms like the last one.
"I couldn't go, Jennie, without seeing you again," he observed,
when the slight twinge ceased and he was free to think again. "I've
always wanted to say to you, Jennie," he went on, "that I haven't been
satisfied with the way we parted. It wasn't the right thing, after
all. I haven't been any happier. I'm sorry. I wish now, for my own
peace of mind, that I hadn't done it."
"Don't say that, Lester," she demurred, going over in her mind all
that had been between them. This was such a testimony to their real
union--their real spiritual compatibility. "It's all right. It
doesn't make any difference. You've been very good to me. I wouldn't
have been satisfied to have you lose your fortune. It couldn't be that
way. I've been a lot better satisfied as it is. It's been hard, but,
dear, everything is hard at times." She paused.
"No," he said. "It wasn't right. The thing wasn't worked out right
from the start; but that wasn't your fault. I'm sorry. I wanted to
tell you that. I'm glad I'm here to do it."
"Don't talk that way, Lester--please don't," she pleaded.
"It's all right. You needn't be sorry. There's nothing to be sorry
for. You have always been so good to me. Why, when I think--" she
stopped, for it was hard for her to speak. She was choking with
affection and sympathy. She pressed his hands. She was recalling the
house he took for her family in Cleveland, his generous treatment of
Gerhardt, all the long ago tokens of love and kindness.
"Well, I've told you now, and I feel better. You're a good woman,
Jennie, and you're kind to come to me this way." I loved you. I love
you now. I want to tell you that. It seems strange, but you're the
only woman I ever did love truly. We should never have parted.
Jennie caught her breath. It was the one thing she had waited for
all these years--this testimony. It was the one thing that could
make everything right--this confession of spiritual if not
material union. Now she could live happily. Now die so. "Oh, Lester,"
she exclaimed with a sob, and pressed his hand. He returned the
pressure. There was a little silence. Then he spoke again.
"How are the two orphans?" he asked.
"Oh, they're lovely," she answered, entering upon a detailed
description of their diminutive personalities. He listened
comfortably, for her voice was soothing to him. Her whole personality
was grateful to him. When it came time for her to go he seemed
desirous of keeping her.
"Going, Jennie?"
"I can stay just as well as not, Lester," she volunteered. "I'll
take a room. I can send a note out to Mrs. Swenson. It will be all
right."
"You needn't do that," he said, but she could see that he wanted
her, that he did not want to be alone.
From that time on until the hour of his death she was not out of
the hotel.
CHAPTER LXII
The end came after four days during which Jennie was by his bedside
almost constantly. The nurse in charge welcomed her at first as a
relief and company, but the physician was inclined to object. Lester,
however, was stubborn. "This is my death," he said, with a touch of
grim humor. "If I'm dying I ought to be allowed to die in my own
way."
Watson smiled at the man's unfaltering courage. He had never seen
anything like it before.
There were cards of sympathy, calls of inquiry, notices in the
newspaper. Robert saw an item in the Inquirer and decided to go
to Chicago. Imogene called with her husband, and they were admitted to
Lester's room for a few minutes after Jennie had gone to hers. Lester
had little to say. The nurse cautioned them that he was not to be
talked to much. When they were gone Lester said to Jennie, "Imogene
has changed a good deal." He made no other comment.
Mrs. Kane was on the Atlantic three days out from New York the
afternoon Lester died. He had been meditating whether anything more
could be done for Jennie, but he could not make up his mind about it.
Certainly it was useless to leave her more money. She did not want it.
He had been wondering where Letty was and how near her actual arrival
might be when he was seized with a tremendous paroxysm of pain. Before
relief could be administered in the shape of an anesthetic he was
dead. It developed afterward that it was not the intestinal trouble
which killed him, but a lesion of a major blood-vessel in the
brain.
Jennie, who had been strongly wrought up by watching and worrying,
was beside herself with grief. He had been a part of her thought and
feeling so long that it seemed now as though a part of herself had
died. She had loved him as she had fancied she could never love any
one, and he had always shown that he cared for her--at least in
some degree. She could not feel the emotion that expresses itself in
tears--only a dull ache, a numbness which seemed to make her
insensible to pain. He looked so strong--her Lester--lying
there still in death. His expression was unchanged--defiant,
determined, albeit peaceful. Word had come from Mrs. Kane that she
would arrive on the Wednesday following. It was decided to hold the
body. Jennie learned from Mr. Watson that it was to be transferred to
Cincinnati, where the Paces had a vault. Because of the arrival of
various members of the family, Jennie withdrew to her own home; she
could do nothing more.
The final ceremonies presented a peculiar commentary on the
anomalies of existence. It was arranged with Mrs. Kane by wire that
the body should be transferred to Imogene's residence, and the funeral
held from there. Robert, who arrived the night Lester died; Berry
Dodge, Imogene's husband; Mr. Midgely, and three other citizens of
prominence were selected as pall-bearers. Louise and her husband came
from Buffalo; Amy and her husband from Cincinnati. The house was full
to overflowing with citizens who either sincerely wished or felt it
expedient to call. Because of the fact that Lester and his family were
tentatively Catholic, a Catholic priest was called in and the ritual
Дата добавления: 2015-11-04; просмотров: 34 | Нарушение авторских прав
| <== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |