 CHAPTER 24 THE MONTHS PASSED BY AND AUDUM CAME AROUND ONCE MORE Ogden's first year as a widower was lived with his mother. He used the same time to establish himself in the real estate business whose ins and outs he had now mastered in the bitter school of experience. He had left the Clifton altogether and had established himself in another street and a different neighborhood. Every stone of the great pile seemed to have raised its tongue against him and to have driven him out with the loud and insulting hubbub of its angry clamor. He had no wish ever to see again the room in which he had first met his wife, the room in which he had wrestled with his brother-in-law, the room in which disgrace had forced him to bow his head. Bradley lay and wait for him in the court. Jane Doan dogged him through the long corridors. Marcus Brainard rose up as a pallid specter within the entranceway. He left the building for once and for all. The placards that he placed on vacant tenements and the signs that he caused to be reared on open corners in the suburbs directed inquirers to a street and number quite different from any near his old neighborhood. Within this year Cornelia Tillinghast Brainard had moved into her new house and had moved out again. For three poor months she occupied her French Renaissance chateau on the Lakeshore Drive and then she gave it up forever. In vain her anxious plannings of chamber and stairways, her long waitings for the slow finishing of the carved oaks and walnuts of her vast interiors, in vain, for the present at least, her lofty aims in the direction of social distinction. For Burt with his father was one man and Burt without his father was another. He had relied upon the elder's advice more than he had realized and he had felt the studying and restraining power of his father's hand to a greater degree than he would have been willing to acknowledge. When he came to act for himself and by himself the difference soon became apparent. He operated in a variety of directions. He was confident and daring and ambitious and one day he risked all and lost all. His failure swept away everything of his and nearly everything of his sisters. Abbey had come into the new house along with Burt and Cornelia. No great urging had now been required to induce her to abandon the house on the west side. She led the same retired and quiet life in the one quarter that she had led in the other, save that she never felt otherwise than utterly strange and forlorn. And as she had placed herself in her brother's house so she put a great part of her share in her father's estate into her brother's hands when ruin came and every available resource was required. She had never used much money. She may not have realized the gravity of her sacrifice. Perhaps too she had hoped to rest her disappointed soul on something that money could not buy. To Cornelia the failure came as a sudden and awful blow. Considering the brief time at her disposal she had made a distinct impression on society. A great many people of consequence came to her house and invited her to theirs. They laughed at her freedoms and familiarities. They enjoyed her picturesque and untrammeled phraseology. Some of the more insatiable invited her twice. She encountered but one decided check. This was from Mrs. Floyd. The ship of the Floyd household now navigating regardless of its customary dependence on the distant admiral of the whole Floyd fleet was tossing in shallow yet stormy waters. There were not lacking indications that it was occasionally grazing bottom and there was a notion abroad that it might presently beach or found her. Mrs. Floyd therefore manned the helm with more than her customary caution. For one thing she set the ship's chronometer by local time. That is to say her own watch which had now been giving the time of Boston for the last three years and she had become very expert in the deducting of the hour and some minutes of difference came to be set by the hour of Chicago. For another thing she must think twice before speaking every strange craft. Such a one for example as that propelled by the brain arts. She did think twice and concluded to remain silent. Ha! said Cornelia all because I worked in her husband's office and she met me there. Thank goodness I wasn't allowed to have my wish and work for Ingalls too. I'll fetch things around though. You see if I don't and I'll capture Cecilia Ingalls yet. Abby along with many other persons and things became a mere piece of driftwood in the general wreck of her brother's fortunes. She swirled and eddied about for some time through a succession of boarding houses and after a while she found refuge in the latest home that her sister had made. She found her new brother-in-law a good humored and well disposed fellow. Briggs had established his family in the old neighborhood on the west side and readily admitted Abby. He made no more objection to his sister-in-law than he had made to his sister-in-law's nephew. Ogden saw nothing of them, heard nothing of them. He merely went around in a quiet way among a few old friends and he dropped in at frequent intervals on the faithful Brower. Brower was sometimes at home and sometimes away. The fire-fiend still kept him on the move. One late September evening after an interval of a month or more, Ogden repaired again to the house which had once been their common home and found Brower just back from Minnesota. He was seated on his trunk, the rigors of whose cover he had softened by the double folds of a striped traveling wrap. He had his briar wood pipe in his mouth and a book in his hand. It was a paper-bound volume, the back cover was missing and there was exposed to view the fine, close tabulation of the books composing a well-known library. Well, my dear fellow, cried Brower, rising and grasping his hand, how are you? Say, I believe you're looking better. Here, put yourself in the light where I can have more of a chance at you. George stood immovable and Brower jerked out the elbowed gas jet so as to make the light fall upon his visitor's face. It fell on his visitor's head too and the whole brown head was sprinkled with silver. Ogden put his two palms on his temples and spread out his hands until the fingertips met over the part in his hair. There are more, he said, with a smile of quiet sadness. Don't count them again. I won't, said Brower. He drew away his eyes but threw his arm over the other's shoulder. I've had quite a trip this time, he went on, in the tone which we employ when contriving a light diversion. Been away out into Dakota, Bismarck, Mandan, Yankton, Sioux Falls. I was at the Falls one Sunday. Is that any great place to spend Sunday? Lots of folks go there to spend a few Sundays, twelve or fourteen Sundays and the weekdays between. On the evening of my Sunday I went to church. I've known you to go to church on Sunday evenings before. Service any different from any other? It was a song service. Don't you suppose the poor creatures wading along out there in Sioux Falls have got to have their little consolations? Ain't music the great consoler? They were consoled then? Oh yes, indeed. The principal consoler had been there himself. He sang tenor. Better tenor than the average? Good deal better. The most touching, pathetic tones I ever heard. He sang the angel's serenade with another man playing the violin. It was affecting. One poor lady near me with a sort of eastern look about her just caught up the child in the pew by her side and burst right out crying. I was all broke up myself. That's a good song, declared Ogden. I always like to hear it. You've heard it before then? At St. Assaf's perhaps? At St. Assaf's yes. Well, said Brower, the man you heard sing at St. Assaf's was the man I heard sing it at Sioux Falls. Vibert. Vibert. George dropped his eyes. He had no wish to pursue the theme further. What have you there, he asked. He indicated the book that Brower had left lying on top of the trunk. Oh, nothing special. It's just one of those cheap novels. I was merely running it through to see if he really did marry the right one in the end. Might have done it in the first place as well as not. He passed the book to Ogden wrong side up. I guess it's yours by rights, one you left behind when you moved out. Ogden turned the book over and read the title. It was a false start. He started. He blushed. Yes, perhaps it is, he stammered. He held it awkwardly in his hand for a moment. Brower watched him curiously, yet sympathetically. Yes, Ogden repeated, in a bold, firm voice. It is mine. He put it in his inside pocket and buttoned his coat. Oh, come! cried Brower, trying to throw a veil of jocularity over his earnestness. That isn't fair. I've got to finish it. I've got to know whether he did or didn't. Anyway, let me see the end. There is no end, said Ogden soberly. Or if there is, it has come. Then I can only guess, Brower looked at him with a studious anxiety in his brown eyes. He made a mistake, sure enough, but I think he sets it right. Yes, I think he sets it right. Ogden's eyes sought the floor. Oh, he abides by it. He can, said it right, said Brower gravely. And if he can, he ought. Not now, not after everything. Let bad enough alone. Make bad enough better. cried Brower. Is he the only one to be considered? Upon my word, he went on with a nervous attempt at lightness. We are getting these great truths down finer and finer. A couple of years ago we agreed that marriage concerned but two people. Now we are finding that it concerns only one. The question simply is, which one? The one who would be most exposed to injury, said Ogden, with a distant mournfulness in his face and voice. There are different kinds of injury. There is the injury of commission and there is the injury of omission. Sometimes the last is harder on a woman. Why not let the victim choose her own particular woe? Why not be generous enough to give her an opportunity? Not now, groaned Ogden. You don't know. Not after all that's happened. Well then, continued Brower with kindly perseverance. Out goes generosity. Now bring in selfishness and give that a chance. What is our hero going to do? Must there be more sorrow for him, more suffering, more self-punishment and everlasting dissatisfaction generally? What is he made of? Can he stand it? If so, how long? And if he does, why should he? Brower, Brower! Ogden cried. Not another word if you care for me. Anything at all for me. He crossed his arms on the table and bowed his head upon them. Brower passed his hand softly over this head and said no more. He was a patient husbandman. He would sow the good seed and wait for the harvest. Ogden took the book home with him. He fluttered its leaves a few times. Then he sat down on the edge of his bed and read the title page for an hour. The next night he read it some more and dreamed about it. The next night he was reading it still and he lay awake thinking of it until daylight. On the following evening he took the old familiar way to the west side. He found Abby Brainard at home alone. Mary and her husband had gone out and the baby had been put to bed. Abby was sitting in the half-gloom of one small lamp. The parlor was a little room and a rather cheap and ugly one. But the lamp, thanks to its beflowered shade, was discreet and reticent in the disclosure of unprepossessing detail. Besides, twenty lamps would not have had power to divert his thoughts from the channel through which they were now coursing. On his entrance she started up to light the gas. She looked pale and worn and older than he would have believed possible. But he looked older too and felt much older than he looked. The light beat down upon his silvered hair and heightened the glance of pitying surprise that shone from her eyes. In this increased illumination he saw that fortune had left her as well as her youth and beauty, as well as the father whose life he had felt to make their union impossible and whose memory might still keep it so. But she herself, in her own essence, was before him the same courage, the same resolution, the same tenderness and fidelity. And in him she saw the only man she had ever seen or had ever cared to see. To her he came as a messenger of pity to heal the wounds that navery and scandal and violence had hacked upon her quivering heart. A messenger of pity, yes, but could he, by any possible chance, find her worthy of the pity that was akin to love? To him she appeared as the victim of his own faint-heartedness and faithlessness. After all that he had done to ring her heart, could he venture upon the crowning indignity of offering her his tarnished name? To her he stood there as a tower of refuge, tower from whose summit the swathing fogs might be cleared away by the warm breath of trust and confidence, and whose smirched walls, if smirched indeed they were, might be purified by the tears of love and the fingers of forgetfulness. To himself he lay before her as a heap of crumbling and smoke-stained ruin. Every stone cried out for the cleansing power of pity and for the firm and friendly hand that was to rear them all again to their pristine use and comeliness. The clock had struck eight as he entered. It was striking eleven as he rose to go. Not yet, she said softly, she pressed him back into the depths of his great easy chair, and leaning upon its rounded and padded arm she looked down upon him. You take me then as I am, he asked her soberly. How else do you take me? He raised his hand to his head. There will be more of them, he said. They tell me I shall be white at forty. How many of them are mine? He pressed her hand. Not one, not one. Or no, he continued with a stronger pressure. They are all yours, do with them as you please. He felt something warm drop on his head and trickle down his temples. Yes, that is the best thing to do, he said. To think he added with a tender seriousness that you might have saved me from them, from every one. They were married within a month, and they began their married life in the same house in which he had begun his western life as a bachelor. Mrs. Gore's kindliness still survived after the hard rubs of three years of city life, and she spread her sympathetic interest over her new couple with an unstinted hand. Their wedding involved no social celebration unless we note their participation in one of a series of great public functions that sometimes mark the early winter. This took place in a vast hall that was luminous in ivory and gold. They sat before a wide curved frame, brilliant with a myriad points of light, and listened to the united endeavors of many voices and instruments to please the 4,000 people about them. Ogden and his wife had taken places in the balcony. They had toned down existence to a quiet gray. They recognized the middlingness of their lot. Cornelia and her husband, unknown to the Ogdens, had seats on the floor beneath. One box and the two long parallel rows remained vacant during the first and second acts. As the prelude to the third act began among the violins, the box was claimed. A party of four entered. There she is, said Cornelia to herself, in her place on the main floor. Just you wait, Bert's smart, and I'm careful, and we shall catch up to you yet. Who are those people? asked Abby, turning towards her husband. Who is the gentleman with gray hair? She was beginning to admire her husband's own. The two ladies of the party had seated themselves. The two gentlemen were busy with their own and their companions' wraps in the back of the box. That is Mr. Atwater, the architect. The lady in yellow is his wife. The tall brownish man, just handing the glass, is Mr. Ingles. He owns the Clifton. And the other lady, his wife continued. She indicated a radiant, magnificent young creature, splendid, like all her mates, with the new and eager splendor of a long-awaited opportunity. This newcomer had nodded smilingly to many people on entering, to her neighbors on either side, to a large dinner party that filled three boxes across the house. She seemed pleased to have so many persons to bow to so publicly, and everybody whom she favored seemed equally glad of an opportunity to return her attention. Ogden looked at her and turned his eyes away. I have never seen her before, he said. I don't know who she is, he appeared to imply. But he knew perfectly well who she was. He knew that she was Cecilia Ingles, and his heart was constricted by the sight of her. It is for such a woman that one man builds a Clifton, and that a hundred others are martyred in it. End of Chapter 24 End of The Clifftwellers by Henry Blake Fuller This has been a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Rita Boutros.