 CHAPTER 12 Cornelia McNabb's campaign against the tenants of the Clifton proceeded apace. Such as pleased her fancy or promised adventure to her future, she attacked one by one. She made quite a succession of engagements, dropping here, and picking up there, until she reached the point where, for as many hours of the day as she chose, her time was occupied, and occupied to her taste. We have already seen her in the office of the Underground National, and we may now see her in the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company. She did good work within the limits she had set for herself. She was accurate and fairly rapid, and therefore was in considerable request. I had a good deal rather work around like this, she expounded to Ogden one day, then put in all my time in one place, lots more variety to begin with, and lots more pay. Most everyone gives me half as much as I could get in any single office, and then I can skip around and have more of a show. You can talk about your rolling stone, that's all bosh. Cornelia was now doing a daily stint of an hour or so in the office of the Brass Company. This hour came in the middle of the forenoon, and the work was often or performed under the severe eye of Mrs. Floyd than our young eminuensis could have wished. Mrs. Floyd's presence in the office had always been rather frequent, and her prejudice against female stenographers did not operate to make it any the less so. She bestowed considerable scrutiny on Cornelia, and Cornelia returned the interest in kind. She recognized in Mrs. Floyd one of the minor lights of society, and she became more deeply indebted to her for points in costume, speech, and behavior than either perhaps realized. Mrs. Floyd was generally accompanied by Mrs. Wilde. This provided Cornelia with a double course of instruction. She learned what to do and what to avoid. Mrs. Wilde was generally accompanied by her handbag, and that receptacle was capable of an endless yield of documents calculated to irritate and perplex her brother-in-law. Mrs. Floyd encouraged this. Who indeed should take an interest in the affairs of her own sister if not her own husband? One morning Anne produced a memorandum that stunned him. As he studied it she stood above him like the spirit of bankruptcy. For heaven's sake, Walworth, tell me what it means. Am I a ruined woman, or what? Floyd glanced at some total, the figures mounted high. They have struck you pretty hard, that's a fact. It was a bill for special assessments levied on the possessions of Anne E. Wilde in one of McDowell's subdivisions. Paving so much. Sewers and water mains so much. Stone sidewalk so much. And eighteen dollars and a half for a quarter of a lamppost, welled Anne. Why, Walworth, I haven't got the money on hand for all this. I never anticipated such a thing. What's a quarter of a lamppost good for? asked her sister. I suppose the cost is levied on four property owners, said her husband. And who's going to see by it when it's up? asked the disconsulate investor. Nobody ever goes past. Not this year perhaps, but there'll be plenty next year. You've no idea how the town is spreading about. Why don't you step upstairs and see McDowell? Who starts these things going? asked Anne. Who fixes the amounts? I guess it's done sometimes on the petition of other owners about, according to the frontage. And who's the principal owner all about there? demanded Anne. Ain't it McDowell himself? Well, I don't suppose he's sold off very much yet. And so he's taxing me to make his own property more valuable. I like that. I'm glad I went to him. And you're young Ogden. I suppose I can thank him for this. Good gracious, Anne. McDowell is taxed, too. The town's growing, and all outlying property is subject to such things. And don't blame poor Ogden. What more can you expect, Anne, in such a half-baked place as this? queried his sister. Go up and see McDowell, repeated Walworth. He can tell you all about it when it's payable, and how, and whether there's a rebate or anything. He passed the papers back to Anne with the definitive air that closes the matter. Jesse didn't come with you, then? He inquired, turning toward his wife. No, poor thing. She is away down this morning. Why, what do you think, Walworth? They've been asking her if she can't testify. Testify, fiddle-sticks. What could she say? They don't need her. They've got a clear enough case as it is. But think of her in court. Don't think of her in court. She may be a thousand miles away by the time the thing comes up. Has anything more been seen or heard of that interesting vocalist? Nothing. He left the poor child all alone in that big place, with not three days' supplies, and that she looked sharply over towards Cornelia. The girl's hour was ended, but she had engaged in a pretense of tidying up the desk. Anne creased her papers thoughtfully between her fingers. I had no idea that curb stones cost so much, she sighed. If I had only sold out on that offer last month. Cornelia was now engaged in complicating her apron strings. Her interest in the underground people, while becoming no less professional, had become a good deal more personal. She would have given anything for a decent pretext to remain. It was hard indeed to tear herself away from this discussion of the affairs of Burton Brainard's sister. In the gas turned off, Mrs. Floyd finished as the door closed on the reluctant girl. And thus the state Jesse found her in, everything just about as bad as it could be. Well, no, Floyd dissented thoughtfully. There's one important consolation. This suit could be brought. Oh, yes, answered his wife quickly. This Canadian woman doesn't claim to be his wife, only that she ought to be, and that he promised to make her so. Interesting family, murmured Walworth. Should like to be related to him. She knew him in Toronto. She found him here before she had been in town a week. Small world remarked Walworth negligently. He played with his pen-holders. Mrs. Floyd became silent. Gossip seemed out of the question with an indifferent husband and a preoccupied sister. Viberic's detection by the girl he had betrayed and discarded, and his desertion of his young wife, were immediately followed by the proper steps on the part of Brainard's attorneys. The old man had received the intelligence of Viberic's double misdeed with a tremendous outburst of wrath and vituperation. His indignation revived in him all the crude violence of his youth. He drew out from the disused corners of his memory such a vocabulary and such turns of phrase as are possible only to one whose boyhood has been spent on the crass and barbaric frontier. He towered and swayed like a rank plant that has sprung rapidly from the earth and has brought up the slime and mold on its sheath and stalk. His prodigal and picturesque indecencies were heard but half understandingly by his son and were lost as to everything saved their animus on his advisers. The equilibrium of the scales whose mathematical poise he had once proven to his own satisfaction was now destroyed. This outrage on his daughter and himself and all his belongings put another and a different face on the matter. The girl was received back into her father's house. It was the understanding that she was to remain there until the legal undoing of all this mischief had been accomplished and that afterwards she must prepare herself for an indefinite exile among certain of her father's relatives still resident in Centralia. During this interval, Braynard allowed himself only the minimum of communication with his daughter. His mother's fluttering sympathies were too tenuous and too faded to furnish anything very definite or vivid in the way of consolation. Her brother did not readily abandon himself to the softer feelings. Particularly when work of so much sterner character was before them and but for her sister this crushed and unfortunate child would have received but slender support and comfort. Abby was not only sister but mother and family circle too. She found a use for all the pent-up tenderness and domesticity of her nature. The bill in the case of Vibert v. Vibert was filed without receiving any undue attention from the press. Some exertions were taken, some influence was used, and the matter merely made a cold official numerical appearance in the legal columns of such of the dailies as affect complete court reports. The relations between Vibert and Jane Donne, however, made too good a story to be ignored in every quarter. Some brief mention of it appeared in a new and struggling one-cent evening paper. The friends and well-wishers of the Braynards were surprised by the extent of that paper circulation. A good many people appeared to have seen it. The case of Vibert v. Vibert had its place near the head of a short docket and was reached with much less than the usual delay. It was tried quietly and privately rather late one afternoon at a sitting which might have been termed either a prolongation of the regular session or a supplement to it. Perhaps only a legal mind could have distinguished probably the legal mind that dominated the occasion did not attempt the distinction. The matter was adjusted in a small and compact courtroom high up in a certain vast and pillard pile, a room which differed little in size and not greatly in furnishings from an ordinary office. The court reporters and the crowd of court loungers had withdrawn. Nobody remained behind to save the clerk and a bailiff or two. Yet the specter of publicity seemed hovering there. It hurled a flood of glaring light in through the high and curtain-less windows. It shimmered on the staring yellow oak furnishings of bench and bar, and it searched out the darkest corner of the yawning jury box. Abby Brainard, standing beside her sister, peopled all this void with jargoning lawyers and callous constables and malicious witnesses, and indifferent jurymen and sharp-witted reporters and trivial time-killing spectators. And then she set her unveiled sister in that revolving witness chair and brought to bear upon her the searching glare from the lofty windows and the more pitiless glare of the thousand-eyed crowd. She shuddered and thanked heaven without going too deeply beneath the surface of things that present conditions were so favorable. For they involved none of the ordinary phenomenon of a trial. There was no wrangling, no eloquence, no auditory. There was no humiliation beyond that which was inevitable. It was hardly more than a conference. The judge, with a quiet gravity, took a simple conversational tone, a keynote to which the indignation of Bert, the mortification of his sister, the sorrow of Jane Doane, and the juvenility of Freddie Pratt all came to be attuned. There was a simple recital of uncombatted facts. The separation was decreed, and Mary Vibair was presently at liberty to resume her maiden name. It was considered best that she be known henceforth as Mrs. Mary Brainard. There was no report in the next day's papers, nor the next. On the third day things took a different turn. One or two of the newspapers had sacrificed the Vibair Doane's story with considerable reluctance. They felt a certain degree of martyrdom, too, in withholding their hand from Brainard, who had been a standard subject of attack throughout the careers of all the younger writers. Nor were they at all sure that their position as guardians of the public morals justified any such suppression of the truth. They learned of the clandestine trial of the Vibair case, and that decided them. Their virtue was strengthened. The whole affair was reopened and thoroughly ventilated. The encroachments of wealth and privilege were held up before the alarmed eyes of the public. The entire episode, with everything leading up to it, was minutely rehearsed. A good many people were interviewed. A few who knew something of the circumstances, a good many who did not. Repertorial requisitions were also made on the bank and the house. Some persons contributed facts relating to the matter in hand. Others, facts relating to matters whose connection was not so close. Still others volunteered opinions on the method of procedure that made the trial noteworthy. Vox Populi and Rueck Colum wrote letters to the editor. Rough cuts from sketches and photographs made their appearance. The whole career of Breynard was reviewed with merciless detail, and the issue of one edition of a particular publication was attended with the shouting of his name through the streets. Certain sheets whose existence is unknown to the majority of reputable people, and whose circulation is in accordance therewith, gave their clients a scarehead full of exclamation points, and one pink publication whose single connection with respectability is through the barbershops, devoted its whole front page to the illustration of the case. The wronged girl claimed her surpliced betrayer at the altar rail, while the equally wronged wife swooned in the front pew. There was an appropriate gothic background while one corner of the foreground, peaking touch of innocence, was filled in by an open-eyed choir boy. All these manifestations of public interest caused Ogden a keen personal distress that surprised him. He heard the names of Breynard and Viber bald in the streets. He became familiar, for the first time, with the salient points in Breynard's career. He heard himself referred to once or twice as a clerk in Breynard's bank, as he handled that pink sheet in the Clifton Barbershop while awaiting his turn. He half expected some acquaintance to brand him as a caller at Breynard's house. As he lay lathered and defenseless in his chair, he almost dreaded lest some pitiless friend might happen in and stamp him as a suitor for the hand of Breynard's daughter. He paused and blushed under the Barber's eye. He saw now the reason for his personal distress over these odious domestic entanglements. His surprise passed away, but it left behind it a distress greater still. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. To what was this to be attributed? To his consciousness of the overshadowing majesty of the law? No, for the law had turned it softest and most silken side outward. The little party had taken up its informal grouping at the judge's elbow and had replied conversationally to the interrogations of the judge himself and to the prompting inquiries of Breynard's attorney. Justicia had appeared in her most sympathetic and domestic aspect. Was the youth disappointed as to his performance of a beau role? There is no doubt that he had anticipated with some relish his first appearance in the witness box. He would have been obliged, it is true, to confess himself a minor and he might have been exposed to the humiliating necessity of declaring that he understood the nature of an oath. But after that all would have been smooth sailing. Only to be for full fifteen minutes the observed of all observers to be able to lift up his voice and tell all he knew. Yet to be balked in this called for exasperation rather than deep dejection and deep dejection after all was what he chiefly showed. Was this dejection the sign of sympathetic sorrow for the woes of his former friend and playmate? Not quite. His sympathy, while real enough, was largely the sprightly product of novelty, curiosity, and conscious self-importance, unentangled with other considerations it would have shown itself in a nervous and volatile locacity. But Freddie in court was not loquacious. He gave his testimony after a benumbed and backward fashion that indicated other and deeper troubles. The boy, in fact, was under a cloud, an issue of some importance had arisen between the underground national bank and its youngest messenger. It involved no less a question than that of meum and teum. Freddie Pratt, as messenger, had been in the habit of making two or three daily trips through the business district during which the notes and acceptances that filled his big official wallet came to be exchanged for checks and greenbacks that represented corresponding values. One or two discrepancies had developed that called for attention. The boy's father came down to the underground to contribute his share of this attention. He was a grave, repressive, saturnine person who might have been set down as possessed of far greater means to meet the requirements of a growing boy in the midst of a circle of well-to-do urban acquaintances than of inclination to study those requirements. He was received in Braynard's own private room and the affairs of the penitent and sobbing boy were discussed over his head by his parent and his employer. "'You foolish child,' said the elder Pratt to his son in the self-conscious tone by which we address age through youth, "'if you wanted anything, why didn't you ask me for it?' This father, seriously handicapped as he was by his own temperament, was attempting to treat the matter as something rather slight and trivial. The pettiness of the amount involved, the perfect ease of restitution, the youth of the offender, the utter simplicity and primitiveness of his method, all these he touched upon with a faint of light-handed ease. Another might have blown an airy bubble like this even in the face of Braynard's ominous and taciturn frown, but Pratt was not the man to do it. He soon left the upper air of informal jugularity for the firmer ground of argument and expostulation, and this ground, before he ended, was almost pressed by the knees of entreaty. "'It's plain enough,' said Braynard at length. He took it, and he kept it. Each one from his own point of view cast his eye on the culprit. "'But it can't be that you mean to ruin a boy's future in any such way as this,' snarled the boy's father with a rasping expostulation. Braynard turned a look on him from under his overhanging brows. "'Um,' he merely said in a voice which might have meant anything. But the affair presently came to adjustment, a treaty with several clauses. Braynard wished to use the boy in court to dispose of the v-bear matter in the cursory fashion that he hoped to follow, permitted scant margin for the plea of desertion, and he was depending on young Pratt for the recital of certain occurrences which, in a cumulative way, might have their bearings on the plea of cruelty. Pratt Jr. was to testify in court. Pratt Sr. was to reimburse the bank, and the boy's final dismissal from the underground would then be timed in a way so disassociated from any particular cause as to excite no comment and to occasion no injury. But all this was scant and nominal payment for Braynard's clemency. A larger one followed. Braynard owned a number of woe-begone tenements scattered here and there over that unattractive part of the west side, which is most affected by manufacturers of furniture. One of these tumble-down dwellings adjoined a large lot owned by Ingalls. Took out one corner, in fact, in such a way as to interfere seriously with its value for building purposes. Ingalls, in treaty with the furniture firm for the putting up of a building, had made an offer for this corner. Braynard, informed as to the circumstances, had put a price on it that was excessive, exorbitant. Ingalls had taken time for consideration and at the very moment of Pratt's call a letter from him lay on Braynard's desk to the effect that he was looking elsewhere. Evidently on principle he was drawing off. Braynard had no use for the property and it was hardly paying taxes. He wanted to sell it at his own figure and he had expected to. Ingalls's tactics meddled him. He solaced himself by a step that reached Ingalls and Pratt at the same time. He sardonically raised his price a peg higher and offered the property to Pratt with an intimation that refusal would not be entertained. He put his lot still further beyond the reach of Ingalls's possible necessities and he made it realize even more than Ingalls had declined to pay. Pratt swallowed this mouthful with such grace as he could command and with the solidarity possible to a perfected system of land transfer when supplemented by the guarantee of a title company, Norval H. Pratt in a day or two became the owner at an excessive price of a piece of property for which he had no use and for which so far as he knew no one else had any use either. This transaction was at once noted by McDowell who's study of the daily transfers as reported in the real estate publications was minute and whose attention had been fixed for some time on this particular piece of ground. He knew something of Ingalls's intentions through the people whom Ingalls was endeavouring to accommodate and he saw here the entering wedge that he had waited for so long. He had approached Brainard unsuccessfully. He now tried Pratt. Pratt who figured himself justly enough as a lamb led to the shearing made no effort to evade the role. He promptly made an agreement for the transfer of the Brainard lot to McDowell. He let it go at a decided sacrifice. He sold it at a possible shade under its actual value. McDowell whose eagerness had committed him to an out and out purchase was now in a position to approach Ingalls. He was willing to sell the ground for simply what it had cost him. His profits would come later through that open door between 1262 and 1263. Ingalls received him coldly. He had disposed, he said, of his holdings in that neighbourhood and was using the proceeds to build for his new tenants in another quarter. He bowed McDowell out with a faintly cynical contempt and this enterprising person was left with an unpromising piece of ground on his hands to dispose of as best he might. He tried the new purchasers of Ingalls's lot. His own was not necessary to their purposes. McDowell was seriously embarrassed. This bit of ground was a trifle in itself. To Ingalls or to Pratt it mattered little either way. But to McDowell, who was of a considerably smaller caliber, the thing came as a kind of last straw. In expectation of great activity in acres he had loaded himself down with outside property. Everything of his own was invested in that way. Everything that was his wife's and something to tell the truth that was neither his nor his wife's. He was in up to his chin and at this moment came Ogden asking him in set terms for an accounting and a settlement. McDowell met this demand with a promise of figures and he renewed this promise several times. The intervals between gave opportunity for a slow insinuation of the truth for a graduated confession that a considerable part of old Mr. Ogden's estate was tied up in the operations of his son-in-law. This confession was followed by his statement but it was some time before the account opened at the underground by George received any great enlargement through the agent of the Administratrix. It's all right though, McDowell said. You don't need to worry and there's no use in stirring things up. There's big money ahead and you'll stand in. But the statement was the ground and a sufficient one for a rupture. McDowell, in order to diminish his indebtedness to the estate, had charged it with various fees and percentages of his own and with numerous items that properly concerned his individual and household expenses. He charged the estate with a new porch on the front of his own house and with the full expense of railway travel which had been undertaken in great part for his own interests. He even made a hearty attempt to force the brain-hard lot upon the indignant widow. Mrs. Ogden immediately left his house in spite of the good offices of her bewildered daughter. George himself, forecasting the future, beheld a long succession of wrangling days in the law courts and in the offices of attorneys days that threatened to surpass and worry, loss, expense, and nerve-ware anything that his family had experienced yet. He felt himself on the threshold of a struggle for which he was but scantily equipped and in which he was certain to be seriously handicapped through consideration for Kitty. Absorbed in these moody reflections he was crossing the court of the Clifton on a Saturday afternoon when a pencil tap on one of the great glass panes took his attention. The tap was sounded on the court frontage of Daryl and Bradley's branch and George started from his reverie to see the face of Bradley himself looking out at him over the rulers, mucilage bottles, and memorandum books that formed symmetrical piles within. Bradley hastened to throw open the narrow glass door adjoining the shop window and motioned George in with a friendly and quizzical grimace. "'Let Jones walk,' he said, crinkling up his eyes and laying his fat hand on Ogden's shoulder. "'He is walking,' responded George with a wanned smile. Bradley drew him in and closed the door. "'Well, let him walk in a different path, then. "'Let him come out to Hinsdale tomorrow and try the primrose walk.' "'Of Dalyans?' asked George with a doleful attempt to meet halfway the cheery facetiousness of the other. "'Well, I don't think a little Dalyans would hurt him.' Bradley made it seem quite absurd that a young fellow of twenty-five should have any real cares and annoyances. "'I'll work and no play, you know.' "'I'm afraid so,' admitted George with the pathos that the elder man found amusing. Bradley stepped back to a snug office that was stowed away behind a tall piece of shelving piled with newly-bound account books to pick up his hat. "'I'm glad to have caught sight of you,' he proceeded with the friendliness of an elder brother. "'I've just taken an hour or so to overhaul things here a little. "'If you're going north, I'll walk a block or two with you.' They passed out into the street and picked their way along through the splashing, slumping, and dripping that marks the spring break-up. They elbowed other pedestrians over myery-flaggings and they dodged the muddy spray that bumping trucks sent up from the street-car tracks at almost every crossing. "'My wife's wondering what has become of you,' Bradley popped out, among many other things, as he tried to keep up with Ogden's supple and light-footed gate. "'And Jesse, too, she's home tomorrow. "'Just back from Evanston. "'You come out on the eleven-fifty-five and we'll have an early dinner, and that will leave enough of the afternoon to make things worthwhile, and we'll show you that spring is a little nearer at hand than you'd suspect in town. "'Your first spring here? Yes. Pretty bad, ain't it?' "'Worse than Boston,' said George in a tone implying that nothing further could be added. At the next corner Bradley paused, detaining him for a moment with a friendly hand. "'Sunday noon, then. You provide the dalliance and we'll see to the primroses. "'For them?' "'Oh, yes, indeed. "'Good thing, can't have chrysanthemums all the year round. "'Well, goodbye. Jesse will drive down for you in the buggy. "'I'll be there,' called Ogden, as they drifted apart in the thickening crowd. He had reached the point where he felt it would be a relief to cut away from town and everything in it—the bustle, the uproar, the filth, the routine of the bank, the complications of the brain-ards, the entanglements of the Ogdens. It was a simple thing to do, with many miles of flimsy and shabby shanties and back views of sheds and stables, of grimy, cindered switchyards, with the long flanks of freight-houses and interminable strings of loaded or empty cars, of dingy viaducts and groggy lamp-posts, and dilapidated fences whose scanty remains called to remembrance lotions and tonics that had long passed their vogue, of groups of Sunday loungers before saloons, and gangs of unclassifiable foreigners picking up bits of coal along the tracks, of muddy crossings over roads whose bordering ditches were filled with flocks of geese, of wide prairies cut up by endless tracks dotted with pools of water and rustling with the dead grasses of last summer. Then, suburbs new and old, some in the fresh promise of sidewalks and trees and nothing else, others unkempt, shabby, gone to seed, then a high passage over a marshy plain, a range of low, wooded hills, emancipation from the dubious body known as the Cook County Commissioners, and Hinsdale. At the station, Jesse Bradley sat drawn up in a buggy. She had her place in a small convention of fatens, carioles, and express wagons. She tossed her head brightly and waved her whip. I could have walked as well as not, said Ogden, climbing in. What's half a mile? Three-quarters almost, she corrected. She gathered up the lines and secured the approved hold on the whip. Unless you care to drive, she suggested. Not particular, replied Ogden, leaning back easily, quite willing to be a passenger. He took a look at her sideways from behind. She wore a pert little flat-brimmed, flat-crowned hat set straight on the top of her head. A stray lock of hair brushed across her ear in the breeze. She had a bunch of pale purple pimm roses at her throat. You may, if you want to, she said, with a sudden turn in his direction. Her eyes snapped and sparkled. I'd as soon see you unless you don't care to. Oh, as far as that goes. Just hold on tight, though. Get up, John. She drew a taut rain and flicked the horse over the ear. He was a meddlesome five-year-old, and he rushed into his best gate at once. Here we go, she cried. Sunday or no Sunday, I hate to poke. She rushed him through the outskirts of the town. She bumped over the cumbrous plank crossings. She grazed one or two of the wooden posts that held up oil lamps. She charged a flock on its homeward way from church and cut it into two frightened and indignant halves. She was on her native heath. She felt it, she showed it. George grasped the buggy cover with his left hand and held his right in readiness to seize the reins. The buggy, with many a bump and sudden wrench, sped on over the stones and ruts and puddles and rough crossings of an indifferent country road, and presently it turned into a yard with a rasping graze on one of the two painted white posts that made the entrance way. On the side porch of the house stood the girl's parents. They were laughing. Jesse jumped out briskly. She struck a masculine attitude on the carriage block, her right hand resting on the stock of her whip, her left arm a kimbo. I was to get your through on time. Then was my orders, and here ye are. George climbed out carefully. Poor Horace! chuckled Bradley coming down. He's here all right, but is he able to give his lecture? Mrs. Bradley followed to shake hands. She wore a black silk dress, and there was a bit of lace over her thin hair, an adornment which her consciousness seemed to put forth as a modest novelty. Her wrinkles all flowed together in a companionable smile. He may have lost his voice on the way, she joked, but we hope he saved his appetite. They're both all right, said George, laughing in turn. Bradley was at the horse's head. The voice is there anyway, he said, in cautious acknowledgment, and we'll see about the appetite as soon as you've got enough spare breath to say amen to our grace. The Bradley house was a mere box of a building set in an acre lot. They had built for themselves on finally breaking with the city two years before, and they had accepted the gables and dormers and shingles in the brown and yellow paint that the most suburban house of the period finds it so difficult to evade. They stood on high, rolling ground. There were half hints of considerable vistas here and there, and they were surrounded by groves and copes through which today the first faint colors of the spring were hurdling. Bradley, after dinner, walked Ogden around the house. Previous visits had been confined to the parlor. He dwelt on the swirling of the lilac buds, and he drew attention, with an impartial interest, to the first sproutings of his peonies and of his rhubarb. The back of the place was littered with the debris of a second greenhouse in an advanced stage of construction, and through this disorder he picked his way, along with his daughter and his guest, towards the door of the first. Hop in, said Bradley, lifting his own foot over the perpendicular threshold. The air within was but a few degrees warmer than the air without, yet closer. On either side stretched fragmental beds of young plants, with frequent breaks between. It's late for prims, after all, and a good many of them are outside anyway. He waved his hand over a few patches of color on the left. There were white, pink, cherry, pale purple, such as Jesse was wearing, and a few belated clumps of young and indeterminate green. Ogden passed to and fro, with the o's and o's that accompany the exposition of any host's pet hobby, however partial and trifling the exhibit may be. He had done the same last autumn with the chrysanthemums. Bradley took this tribute with a customary complacency, and presently drifted to one side for a word with his man about a small matter of glazing. He had quite an eye for broken pains. Ogden leaned against a damp ledge. Jesse had seated herself on one of the steps of a rude flower stand, she brushed aside two or three small pots that had been left standing on it. She showed an air of lassitude. It had been stealing over her all through dinner, and now it had completely overtaken her in the languid atmosphere of the flowers. Her slender arms hung limply, and she moved her back as if to find a comfortable rest for it. Her face, under the pallor of the painted glass, looked rather colorless and a little drawn, and the languorous apathy seemed to have taken the sparkle from her eyes. She looked up at him as she dropped the petals of a primrose one by one. You didn't care to drive then? Did you want me to? I'm sorry not to have understood. You drove down, and so I thought, was it too much for you both ways? Oh no, it only struck me that you might want to. You were not, that is, you understand horses? Certainly I drive on occasion. He smiled serenely, not in the least disturbed by her perfectly obvious thought. However, a wise man never goes out of his way to handle a strange horse. Perhaps that isn't one of Solomon's proverbs, but it ought to be. You are all fully cautious. She rose undecidedly, and presently she sat down again with a little sigh. I have to be. That is my business, from half past eight till four. Perhaps it's growing on me. I don't mean that. You're born cautions. You'd be cautions anyway. I'm a down-easter, you know. Look before you leap. Perhaps I shall learn the offhand western ways in time. I'll try to. I'll make myself over. I wonder if you can, she said, half to herself. Then allowed. But I don't believe all down-easters are as careful as you are. There must be lots of them who would have just laid the whip on that horse and run over a boy or two and knocked our gatepost to pieces and come up to the door with a wheel just ready to break to flinders. Why couldn't you have done it? I shouldn't have minded it. I should have liked it first rate. She spoke with a kind of lingering drawl and there was a half-smile in her lackluster eye. Your father would have minded it, though, and so should I. Never begin to dance without arranging about the fiddler. Good rule, don't you think? She threw a bare stem to the ground. Oh yes, but tiresome. Close in here, isn't it? Let's go outside. End of Chapter 13 She chatted with him in a string of smart jocularities with the manner which sometimes assures a doubtful caller that he has not made a mistake in coming and that he has not remained too long after coming. But between these up-tilted strata of facetiousness there came now and then a layer of greater seriousness and in one of these intervals she trenched on the domestic affairs of the brain-arts. Poor Mamie went south the other day, didn't she? I hardly suppose you could call it a visit. She looked at him soberly with her eyebrows slightly raised. George winced to visit her uncle's family, he answered. He half-wondered why he reiterated her word and even emphasized it. Her sister was going down there with her. I heard so. You see Abby occasionally? Occasionally. I suppose she is at the bank a good deal. Not often. She fixed his eye on the last bickering of the coals and lapsed into silence. It was not so easy now as once before to discuss Abby Brainard with Jesse Bradley. Mrs. Bradley came in brisk and refreshed about half an hour before train time. The young people were chatting amusedly enough on indifferent subjects and she urged Ogden to stay to tea with the clinging insistency of the suburban housekeeper. You can go home by moonlight. I've arranged it all for you. Go aside a window curtain and showed him a pale white disc in a bluish sky. It's full, you see. We just have cold meat and tea and biscuits. I don't want to keep you under false pretenses. The moon kept faith with his hostess, lighting him to the station and following him into town and keeping him in sight through a mile of noisy and glaring streets. From the car window, now and then, as the train passed back through a string of scattered suburbs the fat reaches of prairie land between, he was conscious of her bland incipidity and as he traversed the downtown business district she raked the long parallels of the east and west streets with an indiscriminating indifference that a mind less preoccupied might have found irritating. It was all the same to that big, foolish face. Town and country were one. It had its vacuous smile for trees and fields and it had the same smile for the vibrant lights of the streetcars for the clamorous cab drivers around the depots for the flaring jeweled guidepost of the theaters for the gaudy fronts of sample rooms for the cheap dishevelment of occasional strayed revelers for the signs of chiroporists and the swinging shingles of justices of the peace and for a certain meditative young man whether he was traversing the rustic roads of Hinsdale or the sophisticated planks of the state street bridge. Ogden's thoughts flowed along with a quiet and grateful sense of the friendliness of the Bradleys and with many a ripple wave and eddy to correspond with the changing moods of their daughter he made a careful rehearsal of some of their bits of talk. Why had she said this? What had she meant by that? Why had she done the other? He dwelt on these matters with an absorbed speculation was but the first step on the way to love. The spring trailed along slowly with all its discomforts of latitude and locality and then came the long fresh evenings of early June when domesticity brings out its rugs and drugettes and invites its friends and neighbors to sit with it on its front steps. The Brainards had these appendages to local housekeeping lingering reminders of a quick growth from village to city. There was a large rug made of two breaths of Brussels carpeting and surrounded on all four sides with a narrow border of pink and blue flowers on a moss-colored background. This rug covered the greater part of the long flight of limestone steps. In the beautiful coolness of these fresh June evenings Abby frequently sat there on the topmost step under the jigsaw lacework of the balcony-like canopy over the front door while her mother occupied a carpet festival and languidly allowed the long twilight to overtake her neglected chessboard. They sat out now, only after dark. Ogden called at intervals and was not flattered that the poor girl brightened at his coming. It seemed as if she must brighten at the coming of almost anybody. One evening he elected to tell off their long street on foot the street whose ornamental lamp posts and infrequent spindling elms had partly decided him the direction of his first quarters. When within a few streets of the brainard corner he passed a house one of a long row on whose front steps, as with its neighbors right and left, were camped a large and merry party whose exaggerated domesticity made it plain that they were all fellow borders. They occupied two rugs as well as two chairs and a footstool at the head of the steps. Through their light-minded hubbub came dominatingly a voice unrecognized, and he threw up his head to meet the frank but overdone bow of Cornelia McNabb. Beside Cornelia sat a young man who bowed at the same time with a somewhat forced and conscious smile. It was Burton Brainard. Cornelia had returned to the neighborhood of her early trials. She considered herself now on a distinctly fashionable street. She put Washington Boulevard on her cards and thought her eight dollars a week was none too much. She had had a plate engraved and a hundred cards printed. She had not found it easy to dispose of many of them. Sometimes she gave them in shops when she was asked to what address the goods were to be sent. But just wait till I order my next plate, she would say to herself. She had left one of her cards with Mrs. Gore. The poor good soul, come in from her baking, was quite taken aback. Then Cornelia, conscious of too stiff an application of sexual code, kissed her on coming away and made herself more intelligible. Yes, Abby was saying to Ogden a few minutes later, Cornelia is a pretty smart girl. Father has come to be quite taken with her. He noticed that she said, Cornelia. She takes down some of his letters now, too, she continued. I never learned, she added, in a tone of slight self-reproach. Good, Peter exclaimed Ogden with a protesting admiration. You can do almost everything else. She waved aside this ardent apology and looked rather shyly through the rusty ironwork of the handrail. The syringas were emblazom. The asphalt path had stopped its afternoon running and had solidified since sundown. I think he likes her because she isn't afraid of him. Neither are you, she added in a low tone as if on an afterthought. She did not look his way. Ogden appreciated this appreciation of his behaviour. He had always been prompt and respectful with brain-art, but he had never knuckled down. He gives her letters almost every day. She corrects his mistakes. And he corrects hers? He says she doesn't make many. When she does, she sticks it out. She talks back. That's where she's bright. It kind of irritates him, I think, to have his clerks, his employees, seem afraid. It pleases him, though, when other businessmen are. This piece of analysis fell softly and slowly on the thickening darkness. The lamp-lighter was zigzagging across the wide roadway with his kerosene torch and the voices of talkative neighbours on the other side of the street were brought over by the breeze along with the fumes of burning oil. Ogden was pleased with this touch of gilding that the daughter's devotion applied to the father's clay. Perhaps the old man was not hopelessly beyond the reach of idealization's hand after all. There were many people on other steps around, many clattered by over the asphalt pavement, and others promenaded slowly along the sidewalk. These moved in couples towards the park, whose scant clumps of acidified foliage appeared a few hundred yards away under the light of a waning moon and a half-bemisted sprinkling of stars, many of them issued from basement doors. Presently another couple came sauntering along, and they paused at the foot of the brain-hard steps. These were Burt and Cornelia. Cornelia came up and found a space on the rug that suited her and greeted Mrs. Brainard in a familiar and masterful manner, before which the good woman soon boxed up her chestmen and retired. Cornelia then turned on Ogden. Stiff or bashful? Hmm? Why didn't you stop and say a word as you passed by? Oh! Yes! Bashful! Too many people! Too bad about you! He turned to Burton. He had seated himself on a lower step with his back to the others. His hat was on the back of his head and his chin was propped up by his knees and elbows. He was looking thoughtfully at the curb-stone. Come up and be sociable, she called. Burt rose and ascended a step or two. Oh! How are you, Ogden? He said rather absently. George felt that he should have said more and said it sooner and said it differently. Cornelia passed a cushion down to Burt. There, take that and be comfortable. She regarded him studiously. It was dark, but he was all there. The short, thick, yellow mustache. The virile chin, lately shaved and powdered. The dense hair that rose in a leveled line from the top of his forehead. Cornelia would have seen all these things in darkness that was Egyptian. She felt her fingers working towards them. Cornelia was dressed with a trim and subdued modestness. She had taken a good many cues from Mrs. Floyd, and she had not been above cultivating an intimacy with a girl who worked for the excessively dear and fashionable house that dressed Mrs. Ingalls. Mrs. Floyd had had no need to teach Cornelia anything about grammar, but she had shown her, all unconsciously, the advantage of a regulated use of sling. Her fingers, debarred by the cold conventions of society from any entanglement in the hair just before her, smoothed and padded the folds in her own skirt. She further relieved herself by a high sniffling toss of the head and a long deep respiration. Well, isn't this a great night, she said, addressing the little party generally? Isn't the air splendid? I declare, I could just ramble about till morning. And yet I suppose your mother, to Abby, has checkmated herself and gone to bed. Dear me, if there wasn't any city and no clatter-clatter on that machine, seems as if I might just make a break for the country before long, just get up home and hop into my little boat and paddle all around that whole blessed lake. Why don't you, asked Ogden, can't you give yourself a vacation? He spoke a little wistfully. There was none ahead for him. No underground man ever had an outing during his first year. I don't see how. They say you can't serve two masters. Five. Four too many. At least, she tacked on, as if a closer calculation would further increase the number of these superfluities. Can I go all over the building and tell each one of them that my services are going to be demanded exclusively for several days by some other one of them? Or shall I be sick just for a day at first and keep adding days one at a time until I've had a week? I don't know what to do. Drop the whole business, said Burt running around. And leave all my poor people in the lurch, she cried, as if her employers were her most poignant concern. They can get somebody else. Oh yes, cried Cornelia with mock humility. I'm nobody. I can be easily replaced. She cast her humility aside lightly. I'll tell you what I would do, though, if I was up at Piwaki this eve. I'd paddle down to Lakeside and back by the light of that moon. She pointed down the street towards the park foliage. The moon that guilds those fruit tree tops, Shakespeare, and it would be a good deal brighter up there than it is in this smoky old place. Can you row? asked Ogden. Can I? I guess. A pair of oars made to order and I can feather with them, too. Speaking of Lakeside, I know who's going to be there the last of this month. That Miss Bradley, Mrs. Floyd's niece, Cousin, corrected George. Is it? Cousin, then. She's a lively girl. She and I would make a pair. Only she don't look very strong. I thought, said he, that she was going to Ocon... Ocon... Cornelia gave an encouraging ha ha. That's right. Take time and you'll get it. Mo, then. Okono, Okano, Moak. Moak. Okono, Moak. Easy enough when you have it. Accent on second syllable. The only trouble is when you write it. Stop. Well, so she is going to Ocon... Moak later to stay through July. They're only twelve miles apart. You know Miss Bradley, then? Abby asked Ogden. She was over here once or twice to see Mamie. She seemed like a real nice girl. Ogden bowed ascent. He found himself as unwilling to discuss Jesse Bradley with Abby Brainard, as he had been to discuss Abby Brainard with Jesse Bradley. Whenever he debated them, there was a silent debate in which he himself took both sides. She's a high stepper, volunteered Cornelia, filling in Ogden's silence. Good deal of style, too. Yet they say her father isn't so extra well off. She's a great contriver, I expect. Well, gumption goes a long ways. It's wriggled me off my back a good many times. She turned to Bert. Now, then, young man, do you want to walk me along to the park? Haven't we roosted about long enough? All right, said he, getting up promptly. He seemed to be smiling appreciatively at her pertness. Taw, cried Cornelia, dabbing her hand to Ogden and Abby, and off she went. Perhaps you'll see us later, if you're good. A big bulky figure came stamping along the walk and reached the foot of the steps just as Bert and Cornelia started off. I guess they'll be good, a heavy voice said. The voice was not greatly disguised by its assumption of unaccustomed George with a flush recognized it as Brainard's. Well, Abby, he said, lumbering up the steps, and, how are you, Ogden, he said to George as he passed on and seated himself with a loud grunt on his wife's chair. George bit his lip. The old man had no business to misuse other people's pronouns in that way. Cornelia's you might have met one person. If it meant more than one, still it might have meant them separately. But Brainard's perverting they companion in a fashion utterly unwarranted. Brainard lingered a few moments above their heads. He made one or two clumsy attempts at facetiousness, and George surmised that this was his way of showing a friendliness. But his joking was much more painful than any hectoring could have been, and George was greatly relieved when he presently rose and retired unceremoniously into the house. End of Chapter 14 Recording by Lynette Calkins Colorado Chapter 15 of the Cliff Dwellers This is a LibriVox recording while LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Cliff Dwellers by Henry Blake Fuller Chapter 15 After Brainard's withdrawal Abby inogged and sat for some time in silence The moon sank. The clatter of hoofs on the asphalt sounded less frequently. Some of the neighbors over the way had pulled in their rugs and were now seen by newly-lighted cast jets at upper windows pulling down their shades. The breeze freshened. It rustled the lilacs and syragas in the side yard and it swayed the stringy mass of wild cucumbers that had taken it upon themselves by the red hideousness of the barn. Suddenly Ogden spoke. There, I knew I should forget it and I have. I laid it on my bureau the last thing too. What? Why a false start? You haven't wanted it, have you? No, keep it if you like. I've read it. She meant it. Keep it, please do. Keep it for my sake. It's a pretty good book. Didn't you think so, he asked? Yes, I liked it ever so much. He married the right one after all, didn't he? Might have done it before, Ogden commented. No earthly reason, why not? Only you know how they spin these things out. It was a sudden shutting down of windows over their heads. Ogden drew out his watch and turned it so as to profit by the lamp post on the corner. Well, I had no idea. Burton Cordelia had not returned from the park or if so had passed on the other side of the street. Good night. It isn't late, is it? Only for a north-sider. Good night, she said slowly and sat alone on the steps until her father came down and called her in. On the first of July, Brainerd summoned George into his own private room. We have about decided to have an assistant cashier, he said. His voice was gruff, but his glance was a little sheepish. Mr. Fairchild thinks it will be convenient about signatures and a good many other things. Bird's out a good deal and likely to be off all through August and I don't like to have drafts signed in advance. You could make up the reports too and swear to them besides it's elective. Put you in the bankers' almanac for one thing. As to salary, I suppose we could stand an extra 500 or six. He looked at George with some constraint, but his intention appeared to be friendly. We might expect you to go on helping with the teller's work on occasion, vacation time for instance. Now about your own vacation, George bowed with an additional acknowledgement of the favor. He'd expect it to pass an unbroken summer in town. Thursday's the fourth. Put five or six days with it if you like to get accustomed to the new deal. He turned to his desk. That's all right, talk to Fairchild. It seemed that anything beyond the nearest words of thanks would be distasteful. And George withdrew. He accepted his elevation and his vacation with unfamed pleasure. He attributed his advance to the old man's softened mood occasioned by his son's engagement to Cornelia McNabb. Bird a few mornings back was suddenly improperly that it was his intention to marry Cornelia and soon the old man however made no difficulties. Cornelia had certain qualities that he appreciated and he knew that Bird had a strong and a strengthening will. Besides, a son-in-law was one thing and a daughter-in-law another. The daughter's husband must come as an ally offensive and defensive. He must contribute money than abilities. There must be abilities in actual exercise or there must be the certain promise of their development and the pursuit of some such career as would be recognized and endorsed by businessmen of his own sort. That ten dollar a weak man that anthem singer his fist clenched and his eye glared at the very thought of him. But a son's wife could be molded if not molded and coerced. There was to be no breaking away from such two wills as his and Bird's. He liked Vim. He recognized Snot. He was prepared to welcome Cornelia as a vital force. O'Connor Mulock murmured gorge to himself. He was bending over his bureau drawer sorting out his collars. The glass flame reflected itself in the mirror and threw a double glare upon his face. They said Brower sitting cross-legged on his trunk. He laid the book down across two of the top slats. It was David Grieve. He read everything. They were still in the Bush Street house. Mrs. Ogden had a room on the floor below. Did I speak? asked George. Tun said, O'Connor Mulock, is that where you were going? Queer name, isn't it? What's the place like? You've got a chance to go, there you go. The oracle spoke and retired into his book. George went. The train made its rapid run up to Milwaukee, took its shortstop and turned westward on its way towards La Crosse. At Piwaki there was the usual halt. It lengthened to an unusual halt. George paced the long platform impatiently. His mind had projected itself through Naga Wukka and Nishoda to O'Connor Mulock, and his body was eager to follow. What's the trouble? he asked the breakman. St. Paul Express, late, passes us here. The platform was swarming with passengers and townspeople. A figure rushed through the crowd and grasped George by the hand. So you're gallivanting too, and I bet a nickel you've been aboard all the way up. Parler car? No, haven't you? The voice sounded a trumpet note in a long triumph. It was Cornelius. Her cheeks blazed and her eyes burned with the magnificence of conscious conquest. Her glory spread about her the same secession of flowing circles that a stone spreads over a pond. It seemed as if her expassiveness must crowd the train from its track and the station from its foundations. Ma, she called back into the crowd. Come here. Do. Mr. Ogden. He's one of my most particular friends. But I guess you don't need to be told that. You've heard enough about him. Mr. Ogden, this is my mother, and she's about the best mother that ever lived. Mrs. McNabb smile bravely and took Ogden's slender palm in her large, capable grasp. She wore a sedate black bonnet. Her gray hair was parted in the middle and fell right and left in two wide, crinkly folds. And I want Pa to come, too. No dodging. An elderly man came forward reluctantly in his loose short trousers and his thick boots with broad square toes. He seemed to find Ogden and his modified tourist guys a disconcerting object. He lifted up his shrewd but retiring eyes, placing one embarrassed hand on his grizzled chin whiskers and giving George the other. And the nails were broken. George took hands with the old fellow who went well enough with the other features of the Wisconsin landscape. The shaggy tamarack swamps, the gashed sides of gravelly hogbacks, the long stretches of disordered barbed wire fences, the rusty reds of depots and storehouses, and the marshy ponds edged by the ragged scantlings of gigantic ice houses. Cornelia did not perceive this harmony or ignored it. Yes, she declared, Ma's the best Ma, and Pa ain't far behind. Now don't shy, Pa. Mr. Ogden is more scary than you are. He's been trying for near three months to ask me to go to the theater with him. When along came Bert and plumped out and asked me inside of a week. Bert's enterprising, no mistake. The old people smiled at each other, half embarrassed by Cornelia's frankness. But we won't shut out George. Oh dear, I mean Mr. Ogden altogether. Bear witness, both of you. I asked him to be one of my ushers. George stared. Was the girl meaning to be married in church after everything? Then he bowed on Abby's account, if at all he thought. Going to Cooney for the fourth, I suppose, Cornelia continued. Cooney? Oh well, Conomwalk, if you must have it all. Well, we're on the move too. Goodbye. But meaningly, you'd find us all again in town pretty soon, and if Pa and Ma don't see the whole place from the tip top of the Clifton, my name is McMudd. On a clear day too, when you can tell where the smoke ends and the land begins, goodbye, our house is on the right, a mile farther, watch out for it. But Conomwalk, from Ogden's point of view, appeared as one wide street running between two small lakes that were only a few hundred feet asunder. The business part of the street was built neatly and compactly of the cream-colored brick of Milwaukee, and the rest of it was a thickly shaded stretch bordering with a double string of summer cottages, which fronted on the street and backed on the water. In the midst of the cottages stood a big hotel of yellow brick. It was faced with a lofty row of seven immense white columns, and above the maples before it there rose a steep roof set with a series of dormer windows. George was given a room which one of these dormers lighted and presently stepped down the street to inquire at one of the cottages for Jesse Bradley. He soon stepped back again. She was not expected for two days yet. He thanked Brainerd again for his full week and threw himself into one of the chairs under the big colonnade. The town was at the beginning of its annual patriotic flurry. After the fourth it settles down, and the real season begins a week or two later. Good many young people were scurrying about. Many of them in aquatic attire. Those who did not carry rackets carried banjos. Nobody noticed him except the young wife of the proprietor. She stood in the doorway the black eyebrows were contracted in a study of him. She wore her raven hair in a Japan-esque fashion but she corrected the plump dumpiness of the Japanese maiden by a tall and slender grace of her own. She's all right, she said to herself and sank down in a chair beside him. You poor lonesome man she began with a graceful audacity that was her peculiar possession. Let me talk to you. Do answer George smilingly. He seemed to have known her for a week. That is, if you're not just married or not just going to be, are you? No. We see so much of that sort of thing. May is dreadful. This year we had five couples in a week. It's so pleasant and quiet here then. The fifth was from Detroit. They stayed quite a while and when they went away they thanked us all over. We hadn't done a thing for them. We simply left them alone and let them go about. But they were just chucked full of it. They had been in glory anywhere. What do you think of our columns? Two men could hardly expand their fluted shafts. George cast his eyes up to their capitals on a level with the third-story windows. They're great. Aren't they? They've only been on two or three years. We call them the seven bridegrooms. The seven bridegrooms? Is each the gift of a happy man? Not quite. One happy man gave them all. He was here a week. He gave us one every day. Think how happy he must have been. She smiled at his inquiring glance. He wanted things his own way and could afford it, she said. His name was Engels. Ogden did some lodging up and down the street. He crossed a bridge where one lake fell into the other over a mill-dam and found himself in another cluster of cottages. They stood on a bluff and looked down the three miles of the lower lake. Both shores were diversified by promontories and islands, and the red roofs of other cottages showed everywhere over the tufted foliage of the shores. How it balances, how it composes, he said of the view, as he recrossed the bridge, and how it's kept, he said of the town that he traced his steps to the hotel. Really, with unconscious patronage, it's the only thing west so far that is tone and finish. He took a boat and the next day the same. The town was full but was lined back quietly for the excitement of the morrow. He had the water almost to himself. Sloops and cat boats were being rigged for a coming ricotta. A scowl for fireworks was being anchored two or three yards from shore. He paddled about with a trolling line, but the line was neglected. He had a good deal to think about. Here was place and time to do it. His future was assured he could now marry. He wanted to marry. There was only the question. Which? He had surrendered his primitive theory that marriage was a matter which concerned only the two principals, Kitty's marriage, which concerned in it than he. He thought of Abby Brainerd and he thought of her family, a divorced sister, this reputable brother whose future was to sound perhaps depths yet undreamed of, another brother whose coming marriage was but conclusive evidence of the coarseness of the family grain. And the father, his scandalous success, his tainted millions, his name a byword, those ballings in the street, those disgraceful and degrading pictures, the stench of the whole scandal. His oars dropped idly and he sat with eyes fixed on the bottom of the boat. But the old man would die. Yes, and then would come the division of the spoil. There had been so much trouble in a poor sixty or eighty thousand. How much more might there be in all these millions? If he had found such difficulty in getting restitution from McDowell, a restitution so incomplete as to be even yet largely in the future, what might there be to expect from other brothers-in-law and from other new relations that so much money would be sure to bring? He ran his troubled eyes over the shore. A party of children were waiting and splashing at the foot of a high wooded point. The talk of the bank that Burt on his wedding day was to have five hundred thousand dollars as an out-and-out gift. And of Burt, why not Abbey in the proper degree? Those shameful and decent millions, millions that would be a disgrace to receive, to handle. Bote ahoy! A sloop swept by. He dodged its bow sprit and was tossed by its wake. The husband of a rich wife, another valentine, my house, my furniture. Then, he had meant to get on in business and society. Was he to marry a reckless, a girl inexperienced in the ways of his world, perhaps incapable of adapting herself to them, surely careless of them? Abbey was before him in her tender and steadfast affinity, in her staunch and genuine capability. He said his teeth and took up his oars again and rode about a half a mile with a furious figure. He stopped, panting and exhausted in a clump of reeds off a sedgy shore near a group of linden trees. He had left Abbey behind. An elderly couple were standing among the rashes. They regarded him with a friendly and companionable smile. They seemed to offer him the middling lot that the sage and poet have called the best and safest. No hazardous and complicated relationships, they seemed to say. No struggle over dead men's dollars, no swamping of self-respect and ill-got gains, only our daughter. George pressed his forehead confusedly and raised his eyes to get his bearings. The late afternoon sun dazzled him with its level beams. He saw a house set high among the trees and on its porch a misty tangle of bittersweet, a girl was standing. He shaded his eyes. It was if she waved a handkerchief for him. Presently she strolled to the brow of the bank. Glad to see you, she called. We have just driven over. It was Jesse Bradley. End of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Of The Cliff, Dwellers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Cliff, Dwellers by Henry Blake Fuller Chapter 16 Cornelia McNabb became Mrs. Barton Brunard during the first week in August. Neither of the pair was inclined to wait and neither had such a circle of friends as to make a Midsummer wedding less preferable than a later one. The wedding took place in church as Cornelia had intimated to Ogden. She was not disposed to let false telekessy clog the heels of success and she had her way. They were married in the daytime as a partial concession to the social inexperience of one father and the social indifference of the other. The young men of the bank were drawn on freely. Ogden served as an usher as Cornelia had requested. Adrien Valentine supported Bert at the Chancel Trail and gave some friendly counsel as to details at Port Church and House. Cornelia's circle of girlfriends yielded nothing suitable in the way of Bright's maid but there was the groom's sister and one maiden attendant was enough. Evie therefore took this part for the first time. She walked up the long aisle with a bashful modesty. She had a dozen opportunities to meet Ogden's eye but her embarrassed shyness prevented her from once looking into his face. Mary Brunard was still in exile and her mother was confined to her room by one of her nervous attacks but in one of the back pews in the twilight under the gallery a dark meagre and desolute looking young man had taken his post and as Bert with a proud and prosperous smile let Cornelia down the aisle tears of indignant rage started from the eyes of his band and mistreated brother. The Brunard marriage was celebrated in print just as the Brunard divorce had been. Some of the cuts that had illustrated the one were also used to illustrate the other. Mr and Mrs Bert in Brunard went to California and were absent a month. On their return, they took up their quarters in the Brunard house while Bert considered the question of building. Cornelia had made up her own mind where this building should be done. They returned to town in accordance with mandate can wait by certain cuts that had been sent out directed by the serviceable Abbey during their absence. These cuts announced that Mr and Mrs Bertin telling his Brunard would be at home on the Thursdays in September. Cornelia had loaded over these cuts on their arrival from the stationers. Mrs Bertin telling his Brunard she read with a vigorous hitch off her shoulder hmm now we are ready to knock out your smiths and your johns she tossed her head and then bring on your floydes and your floydes. Before going away she had wrung Ogden's hand and had committed her parents to him during the concluding days of their stay, especially was he enjoined to take them up to the top of the Clifton on the very first clear day. A clear day came. He conducted them up to the roof observatory and showed them the city and they numbered the towers thereof. The old people tiptoed gingerly around the parapet while Ogden waved his hand over the prospect, the mouth of the river, with its elevators and its sprawling miles of railway track, the weakish blue of the lake, with the coming and going of schooners and propellers and the cribs that stood on the faint horizon. That's where our water comes from, George explained. The tower of the water works itself and the darlin' distant green of Lincoln Park. The towering bulk of other great sky scrappers and the creamy spindling of a thousand surrounding chimneys, the lumber laden bricks that were tugged slowly through the drawbridges, while long strings of tray and puggies and street cars accumulated during the wait. My, don't they look little? cried Mrs. McNabb. George smiled with all the gratified vanity of a native and that, he said, pointing southward down the street, is the board of trade, where he was the other day. The old man reminded his wife, and the guilt-tang on the top of it is a ship I swan and wasn't they noisy though well. Now, Josephin ain't it handsome? A simple soul found to admire the tower of the board of trade. Let it be put on record. George and McNabb had caught on very well. The old country man had felt rather frostbitten on seeing George in full social regalia, but seeming to find him more human and approachable in a simple business suit he had thawed out again. Mrs. McNabb had taken to him kindly from the start. Most women did, though he appeared never to have observed it. She joined with her husband in rethaying him in an atmosphere of simple friendliness. The other father concerned in the festivities had also thawed towards George, though it would be a mistake to attribute simplicity to any friendliness shown by the head of the underground. At one stage of the proceeding, Erastus Emperor had laid his hand on Orton's shoulder, and the young man had asked himself with restressful circumception what it meant. It might have been to his advantage if he had found an answer. George's engagement to Jesse Bradley was now an accomplished fact. The nail was driven. Only a formal announcement was required to clinch it. He had preferred to withhold this until his affair with McDowell were more accurately adjusted. Freeze and freeze had put on a pretty positive pressure, and an arrangement had been contrived that some of the externals, at least of an adjustment. McDowell's affairs had not been taking a very favourable turn. Some of his ventures had been too rank for even gullibility itself, and his hope of relations with Engels was not completely at an end. Engels, in fact, had signified to him that an accounting for off-the-sent easy funds was desired by himself and the other contributing members of the formal committee that remittance in accordance therewith was looked for and that his resignation of the financial guidance of the court would receive prompt consideration. This communication might have been made by Engels personally, or it might have been sent by his office boy, or it might even as a physical possibility have been pushed in under the crack of the door between them. As a matter of fact, it came through the mail. So, formal transmission of so formidable a communication was conclusive. McDowell felt at once that all possibility of personal relations between himself and Engels was at an end. That door in the wall between them was as good as brick up. Kitty came around late one afternoon to see her mother. Do you know, George? She said to her brother, that Eugene is going to give up our at St. Asif's. Can you imagine why? He had heard and read a good deal in his lifetime about the fine penetration of feminine intuition. He wondered why feminine intuition always failed when it came up for application to business matters. The pretty high health female heads that would droop in shame if they could come to learn the how and where for of their own costly bedkinks poor innocent kitty sitting there and twirling in unsuspecting surprise the sparkling novelties that encircled her fingers and never caring or thinking about the means by which they had come to be there. The principal instruments in McDowell's settlement with the Orkton estate was certain promissory notes and certain warranty deeds, warranty. After quit claims had been refused and Orkton found himself in possession of his father-in-law's signature on several bits of paper which he hoped might realise their full value when the time came and also of two or three largest tracts of sub-open property in which the general public interest seemed rather diminishing than increasing. McDowell saved the best here just as he had managed to secure the best of his father-in-law's estate for his wife in the original division fair according to appraised values knowledge of tendencies of growth had put into his wife's third almost everything that was likely to show a quick increase in price. George took his notes and his lands and the task of turning them into money and he left to Kitty an unimpaired trust and confidence in her own husband. The matter of a house shared his thoughts along with the McDowell business on October wedding, a week for a trip and then the beginning of keeping on the first of November in a home of their own. You want to see Mrs. Cass? Floyd had told him. She picked us up when we first came out here. Who is she? A clever little woman who makes a sort of speciality of north side houses. She has got desk room somewhere upstairs, 16th or 17th. She married badly, her husband doesn't do anything. She began by renting friends' houses to other friends and has kept on until she has worked up quite a business. In such a big town, as this has got to be, you need to go to a specialist for almost everything. You might take in the whole lot of those big house renting agencies and never get satisfied. The office of the Massachusetts Brass Company was as much a social exchange as ever. Jesse frequently came down with Mrs. Floyd and Anne and Claudia and George would sometimes step up to see her for a few minutes during his noonings. Mrs. Floyd looked upon the meetings indulgingly enough but Anne seemed to hold against Orton a deeply seated grudge. She had been considerably embarrassed in the matter of her special assessments and she had as much feeling against George as against Macdowell himself. Her efforts to fortify and to recoup herself had led her into other fields of business and she was now spending a good part of every forenoon in the neighborhood of the board of trade. Thus far she had not been so successful as to lessen the grudge. The particular institution in which Anne was interested bore some external resemblance to its great prototype across the street. It was smaller and if possible uglier but it too had its quadrangular arcade, its big square skylight, its ladies' gallery. In this gallery Anne sat daily for several hours along with other women of a light turn of mind and kept an eye on the proceedings generally. After a few sessions, she became accustomed to the mere externals of the place, the endless shuffle of feet on the creamy floor, the sharp mops of raw and eager voices, the flinching afloat of excited arms, the little tangles of noise and passion that were instantly around every newcomer with an offer to buy or to sell. She looked over this top easy across to the promised land that was being portrayed on the opposite blackboard. The artist paced to and fro on long high narrow platform and worked in the uncertainty of a single droplet. He frequently changed his mind and his alterations usually had a deep and sometimes a discouraging effect upon Anne and her associates. Every now and then one would retire into the hallway and consult with her agent and then there would be the rustle of greenbacks and the agent would take the elevator down and presently be seen among the crowd of men on the floor. The agent was likely to be a gallant fellow only too happy to be of service to a lady. Anne was now a member of Floyd's household in good and regular standing. She felt herself very much at home. What was her brother-in-law's was her sister's and what was her sister's was hers. She was usually the first to unfold the morning paper. She preempted the bathroom with little regard to Walworth's established habits and if the idea of some trifling delicacy occurred to her she would order it from the grocery and after it had appeared on Walworth's table it appeared again in his bill. She did not stand on ceremony she waved all stiff formality gozily and frankly she was quite one of the family as such she used Walworth's office quite freely and in the same capacity she joined in the conferences which the Floyd's were now beginning to hold with Addwater up under his great skylight in the roof. Addwater's little house for Claudia had given great satisfaction and he was now about to do a larger one for Claudia's parents who had begun to look upon their punishment to the west as a perpetual fact. Claudia's house had been delivered with its stairs, its windows its red chimney and its chandeliers which last overcomposed by a pushing young drought's man who was as anxious to make interest with Addwater as Addwater had perhaps been to make interest with Floyd. Addwater was accustomed to people who didn't know their own minds to people who knew their own mind too well to people who had too many minds to really have any mind at all and to people who had so much money that they didn't need to have any mind he was impeccably soft and unruffled but he had immense advantage of being able to impress the unduly brusque and capricious and exasperating among his clients with the fact that they were dealing with a gentleman and an artist. He also put a good deal of presence into the rendering and collecting of his accounts. There was no more disputing his charges than his taste. He took equally with his urban impertability the anxious scarpings of Mrs Floyd and the easy joking of her husband and he quietly ignored and Walworth thanked him for his sister-in-law's interest in the new house was becoming personal. As for Claudia, he always saw that she had out of his sample cabinet all the bits of tilling and scraps of marketeer that she needed and if she fancied a promenade among the boards and dress tilts of his drawing room her fame was gratified. Ogden and Jesse who sometimes came too he welcomed pleasantly the guests of the present were the clients of the future. Ogden admired his beautiful manners and his whitened hair one day he amusedly recalled Jesse's determination to make her husband's hair like it. He looked at Atwater who was explaining his preliminary sketches to the Floyds and was trying to fix the general bearings of Hall, stairway and closets. His hair looked whiter still under the diffused glare from the skylight George turned to Jesse with his hand on his own head so smooth and shining brown this is the hair you are to whiten he said and he lifted his eyebrow in a smile. I never saw such a boy she murmured in a repressed ecstasy. Do you remember everything I have said? No one was looking and she placed her own hand on his other temple wouldn't powder or do? he asked lightly. Only for girls couldn't it be bleached? Not and get that colour. Must I suffer then? With his hand still on his brow. I'm afraid that's the only way. She lowered his hand in her own and give it a tender pressure on its descent. Must it be lingering or something sharp and sudden? She pressed his hand again and looked affectionately into his eyes both perhaps will it be fair or anxiety or shame, wait and see Atwater rolled up his sketches and threw them into a draw then he went to his cabinet and took out a few small strips and squares of encaustic styling in yellow and grey. And now I wonder if our little Colleen wouldn't like to take some of these home to play with. He turned courteously to Mrs. Floyd while his hand reached out for a sheet of brown paper. They are not too heavy too heavy she asked cautiously. Not too easily broken the child opened wide her brown eyes in one of her little ecstasies. Oh please mama oh let me have them. Do often turn to Jesse mutely asking her to share his appreciation of this but she did not seem especially amused. He remembered then that to himself he had frequently called her treatment of Claudia uneven. Sometimes the child entertained her sometimes she annoyed her Jesse seemed to regard her and he felt now and then that she so regarded children generally as a doll to be played with until wariness came and then to be carelessly thrust away. Oh let her have them said Anne with an air of authority. Very good of you I'm sure said Floyd to at water. Not at all I am sampled to death there my child he gave her a neat little package I'm sure they'll understand you when you get to Paris. End Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of The Cliff Dwellers This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Cliff Dwellers by Henry Blake Fuller Chapter 17 George Ogden and Jesse Bradley were married during the third week in October. The wedding took place at Saint Isis with the participation of a small section of the choir and the Floyd's opened their house for the reception that followed. Walworth even gave George a small lunch at his club. For some weeks previous Ogden had watched for the right opportunity to make a formal announcement of his plans to the head of the bank and to ask for a week's leave. For nearly a month now Pranad had not looked at him had not spoken to him and when he entered the old man's office to make his request Pranad still refrained from looking at him and in speaking to him was as cut as possible. We need all our men right here. You must give up any idea of going off blow hot blow cold thought George and asked Jesse what she preferred to do under the circumstances. She had planned a long and rapid and lavish tour and the tears of disappointment started to her eyes. Go anyway she cried go do you know what he is and do you know what business is he almost added. She lapsed into a silent silence. We could arrange the wedding for a Saturday he suggested and spent Sunday in Wisconsin. This proposition stuck in her throat but presently she cut it down. Only don't call it a wedding trip she said totally. Well she went on. We'll settle that. We must because the cuts have got to be started out pretty soon. All those people who have entertained me have got to be remembered. There is some in Providence and in Detroit and in St. Paul and don't let me forget those Lewis well people that took me to Old Point. They spent their Sunday in Oknomah Walk along with the seven bright rooms. The day was wet and gloomy and most of the time they sat indoors over a great fire mist stalled the blazing red of the maples and a thick fall of leaves was churned into the mud before the house by the wheels of farm wagons returning home from church. Only at sunset did the clouds clear away and the full moon rose over one lake while the sun sank below the other. George recalled this many times in after years. They had taken a house in Walton Place for the year and a half from November 1st. The house had been vacant some little time and the landlord made no account of an introductory fortnight. Mrs. Bradley had come in from Hindsdale and had superintendent of most of the furnishing and fitting up. She saw the window shades put into place and told the men where to set the refrigerator and Jesse had looked on with the gay irresponsibility of a child who watches puppets being strong. On their return from Wisconsin they found the house decorated almost throughout with chrysanthemums. The new green house at Hindsdale had devoted the whole to this speciality. Jesse sank down into one of her big new easy chairs. Nothing to do but to be happy. She sighed with a long and delicious expiration. She had her days but those dates were of course overridden by her intimates. Among the first to call were the Floyds. Woolworth came over with a pocket full of cigars to Kristen the new wallpaper he said have you got any closets? Was one of his questions plenty replied George then I don't see but what you are all right just as well off in a house that you rent as we are going to be in a house meet to order if ever I turn architect with the clans towards his wife I should begin every house with a dozen closets and then pour in the various rooms around them four drawers in every one and two rows of hooks how stuff does accumulate yes the inside is rather nice Jesse acknowledged but the outside might be improved I have my own notion about the porch and the front door George turned to her as if to ask what that notion might be other friends followed Brower among them he went about rather shyly looking at the drip yours and grills and mirrors in the semi gloom of the dining room he threw his arm over Opton's shoulder and looked into his eye with a friendly and affectionate smile I never expected you to do it he said you have left me as lonesome as the deuce how it why not because you are so careful you always think things out regular old Puritan Sage oh well began George with the air proper to launching out into a broad and easy generalization aren't we new England Puritans the cream of the Anglo-Saxon race and why does the Anglo-Saxon race rule the globe except because the individual Anglo-Saxon can rule himself oh I know said Brower discontentedly that's all right up to a certain point others came among them the Valentine's and how do you like your new house asked Mrs. Valentine effusively she addressed Jesse exclusively with her everything went in the female line we are new converts too you know just over from the west side we are very much pleased aren't we Adrian her husband gave his corroborative little bore we were being left rather aside over there he admitted and take the south side for that matter business is walking right over them and the whole section is in a state of mild panic from the courts to awkward Bollywood yes we are safe and quiet and settled to stay still others came among them Carnelia Tillingis-Prenoid she called frequently she usually brought her husband with her and she never failed to walk him all around the Orkton's neighborhood her favorite time was Sunday afternoon then she took him along the Lakeshore Drive and through all the adjacent streets with the full benefit of daylight Carnelia now had command over a good $700,000 and she was arming for the social fray she meant to bank her shield against the shields of other Amazons the gladiator must come to the arena and the center of the arena seemed to be somewhere near the Waterworks Tower if Burton was going to put $70 or $80,000 into a house the site of it must not be too far away from this point I expect I shall cut a pretty white SWAT Carnelia acknowledged to herself Jessie had her receptions through November her intimates appeared at these as well and so did many of her more acquaintances on one of these occasions George having left the bank early after the daylight hurried home dressed himself and he sent down to the parlor its contracted space was be flowered and belighted and quite a little throng of ladies were circulating and chatting there Mrs. Floyd and Mrs. Wilde were among them so were Mrs. Orkton and Kitty so were Mrs. Valentine and Mrs. Atwater his wife hurried up to him her cheeks were flushed and her large eyes burnt brightly if you had only been three minutes sooner she has just gone she was telling me why she hadn't been able to come to the wedding I wanted you to meet her so much who is this Cecilia Ingalls there is such a person then why George what do you mean of course there is nice to me as she could be why shouldn't she have been I see you call her Cecilia are you as intimate as that everybody calls her Cecilia see Mrs. Atwater is trying to catch your eye a tall and rather stately woman of 35 was standing in the doorway she seemed finished in profile figure and carriage how well it's done she said to him who is the presiding genius my wife's mother I fancy he turned and drew her attention to the rustling of Mrs. Bradley's black silk ah she said indifferently and turned away he had been unable to apprehend the simple costliness of his questioners dress and he only half wondered how in a dozen quite words she had conveyed the impression of an expert addressing a beginner but he could not refrain from asking himself if there was a slight here on Mrs. Bradley he looked at the old lady again she was moving about with the greatest show of confidence and goodwill no thought of anything called differences had entered her head she did not believe that anybody would want to slight her or that anybody could she had come on the ground in the early days of simple friendliness and perhaps she was too old to apprehend that anything different had developed in the meanwhile she certainly seemed to need no defense and George was assuredly in no position to offer any Cecilia has gone off and left me Mrs. Atwater resumed careless girl they were half sisters and Mrs. Atwater was several years the elder the Atwaters and the Inglises and the Foreign Hand the rich sister had married a poor man and the poor sister had married a rich man and they all went along at the same pace it was a somewhat rapid pace I am going to see what Mrs. Floyd can do for me I dare say she has a spare seat his wife caught at Mrs. Atwater and bade her adieu with effusion did Jessie regard it as a feat and a triumph to have secured her presence so it seemed to Jessie's husband the last of these literal receptions was disposed of and the honeymoon drew to its close quite succeeded this introductory furry to married life and George now took occasion to lay a steady hand upon the throbbing of the pocket nerve his apprehension of any suffering in this part of his financial anatomy was indeed largely anticipatory it was not that the nerve had been roughly touched but that it soon might be he had no tendency towards a retrospective study of the journal and ledger aspects of his courtship he had been spared the expense of the wedding journey that Jessie had planned by the unaccountable countable veto of Brenard and the remuneration of St. Asif's call and kindred matters had fallen to his wife's father to arrange many small indications arose to make it worthwhile for him to remember that he was a young man on a moderate salary and that most of his available means were badly tied up he noticed that his wife was developing a disdain of the public convinces a carriage was sometimes required of afternoons and invariably of evenings when dances or theater going might be the matter in hand she was also cultivating her taste for flowers she had employed them rather lavishly at her receptions in conjunction with her mandolin players and her appreciation of them kept equal pace with the advancing coldness of the weather and their own advancing cost she also betrayed a rabneous taste for the exasperating superfluities of house furnishing and his bills for things needful were attended by a train of little accounts for things quite worse than useless oh well we shall be fitted out pretty soon he sighed and he saw his studious face reflected from among the cluttered biblioths of his mantelpiece the point of completion as regarded the interior was finally reached and his wife's intentions as to the exterior presently developed she accompanied him out into the vestibule one morning and stood at the head of the steps to bid him goodbye these doors are awfully shabby and old fashioned she declared don't you suppose the landlord would put in new ones? I'm quite sure he wouldn't I wouldn't in his place well we have taken this house for a year and a half and are likely to take it again for a year or two longer why couldn't we fix things up for ourselves? the entrance counts more really than anything else that might be thought about yes indeed, if Mary Munson is coming to see me I want things as nice as they have everything Mary Munson was of the Louisville family that had entertained Jesse Bradley at Old Point Comfort it presently transpired that she was under like obligations to many other quintances of a girlhood she came up she explained besides I need company all alone here during the day and mama away off there in the country the succession of Mary Munson's lasted indeed through into spring blowers, carriages and matinee tickets doubled up finally and the hideous mean of the caterer was seen in connection with frequent lunches I spoke to Mr. Atwater today about the front of the house she said to him one evening towards the close of dinner Maggie didn't quite get around to pudding today she went on as the desert came in so I sent out for this ice cream take some of these lady fingers with it to add water yes, Francis wanted me to go up with her and see the drawings for the front of their house it's going to be lovely he had some special little drawings for the outside doors just like that he's got beautiful taste I know he has I asked him to design some doors for us you did? yes he said he had a new idea that he'd like to try you must get your landlord to pass on that he might not like the new idea think not he might object it would all come on his hands in the end we'd better go on with it don't you think? he understood generally charged a commission on the cost of the work so much %5 he had heard we don't want to go in too deep they left the table and sauntered slowly into the parlour the drawing room, Jesse called it the standing lamp sent out a broad glare from under its shade of crinkled yellow paper and the floor of the room burnt with a dull and accustomed red the red of a handsome turkish rug what's this? exclaimed George I picked it up today she said it was so pretty and just a thing for this room Cecilia called it a great bargain she knows all about rugs then you have been shopping with Mrs Engels while she was getting a few things she said that $60 was little enough for it $60? did you pay for it? I had it charged charged? yes wasn't that right? why George even poor mama, a way out there in Hinsley has her account at fields End of Chapter 17 Recording by Harshatha