It had been Martin’s intention not to restrict the hospital to patients from the Company’s shops, and their families, but to admit any one in Windsor who needed hospitalization. In discussing it with Father Dominick, he said: “Of course, those who can afford it must be charged a fee in accordance with their means, and those who have nothing must receive equally good care without charge.” But in two years only eight patients from the “outside” were admitted and treated, and only three of these could pay the modest charge.
Quite incidentally, he was the reason for increased wages among the laborers of the Kinsolving shops, and even for the increase given to other laborers in the other shops all over the city. For Barbour & Bouchard were forced to raise wages as an inducement to their better employees. They had kept these men without any increases for years, for very few of them were able to accumulate sufficient funds to take them elsewhere. But now Martin had deposited a fund for discharged and quitting workmen, and to keep the better class, wages had to be raised.
He went about his work, grave and absorbed, returning to the farm at night so exhausted that he could barely smile at his wife and children. The two youngest, he hardly knew at all. He was unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that he had become a storm center; that arguments about him, debates, quarrels, even fist-fights, took place in Windsor. He was a fool or a maniac, or a hero and an angel, according to the convictions of friend or antagonist. He did not hear the furies of laughter, the exclamations of contempt, the words of friendship and admiration, of which he was the cause. All he saw was his work. It gave him a joy beyond anything he had experienced to see a man’s life saved, to see a child eased, a woman’s agony decreased.
The farm, run by the Heckls, was self-supporting, which was a great mercy, for Martin had begun inroads upon his wife’s income, and even the principal. This aroused such apprehension in Gregory, made him so aghast at its possibilities, that he came post-haste to see Amy, and in a great rage threatened that not another cent of his or Nicholas’ money would go to her if the depredations upon her small fortune were not curtailed. He was seriously frightened; he saw Amy and her children, whom he loved, reduced to dire circumstances, to mere farm laborers sinking into the mud of monotony and poverty and hardship. He saw that Amy was pale and thin, smiling as if it were a difficulty, that she was already overburdened by the care of four children and a household, with only two women, and one of those an old woman, to help her. Remembering her guarded childhood and girlhood, the money, schools, jewelry, clothing and care he had given her, it infuriated him to see how careworn she had become, how roughened her delicate small hands, how drooping and tired she was when he caught her off guard. But to his shouts, oaths, accusations and epithets, she said with dignity: “You may leave your money to any one you please, Uncle Gregory. That does not interest me at all. But if Martin needs my own money, I shall give him as much of it as he wishes, even to the last cent.”
“And what of your children, ma’am? Will your wifely devotion be enough to let you contentedly watch them starve?”
In spite of her effort to speak, Amy was silent and white with sudden fear. She looked at her children playing on the hearth, at the baby in his cradle, and involuntarily her worn hands clasped tightly together in the lap of her dull woollen dress. It was evident that she had considered this very thing very often, thought Gregory with grim satisfaction. With more pain than he would admit even to himself, he studied her profile against the fire, saw how pinched it was, how patient and wearily sweet her mouth, how heavy her eyes. And yet, in some way, her girlish prettiness had given way to beauty, and though she looked older than her twenty-seven or eight years, much older than May who was her senior by almost two years, there was a dignity about her, a chiselled-down and refined quality, that was infinitely moving and lovely. Gregory remembered a spiteful remark that May had once made of her cousin, that she would be old and fat at thirty, and he smiled bitterly to himself. May was well on the way to fatness, if not to age, and Amy was growing more serene and beautiful, more transparent and finer, as she grew older. She is a great lady, as her mother was, and my mother, he thought.
“Amy, my love, bring your children and come home, just for a little while,” he said impulsively. She smiled, sighed, kissed him, shook her head.
That night she said quietly to Martin: “Dearest, Uncle Gregory was here today, and threatens to cut me entirely out of his will if any more money is taken from my principal for the hospital. Please, Martin, let me finish. I knew you would say it does not matter, but it does. After all, if Uncle Gregory leaves me considerable money, that will give you more for your work, also.”
The result of this was that Amy’s income was also swallowed up into the voracity of the hospital and the bank funds, though the principal remained untouched. The little family, in order to preserve the principal, was forced to curtail its expenses even more stringently, and the cook was therefore dismissed, leaving Amy with the entire household of children and work upon her hands. Mrs. Heckl, though strong and wiry, had her own work of butter-making, cow-milking, garden tending, preserving, chicken care, sewing and cooking, in her own small house, and could give Amy only one or two hours’ assistance a day. Gregory, visiting his niece two months later, was overwhelmed at the sight of her. She looked extremely ill and exhausted, and the children were casually dressed and none too immaculate; the house, itself, had a film of gray dust upon it. Amy had her arms deep in a tub of gritty suds when her uncle arrived, and her thin face flushed scarlet at the sight of him.
This was too much for Gregory. In a cold grim voice he gave Amy two choices: either she would return home with her children until Martin could be brought to a decent regard for his family, or he, Gregory, would wipe his hands clean of her, never visit her again, and she and her children could go to perdition, or starve, for all of him. His voice was harsh, almost brutal, as he spoke to her, but inside he was aghast, full of rage and hatred for Martin, as he looked at her bedraggled skirts, her ill-combed hair, her sunken cheeks, her brown eyes grown cavernous, her lips a faint purplish outline in her gray drawn face. But though she cried silently at his ultimatum, she said with quiet majesty: “I’m sorry, Uncle Gregory, but I can’t do as you wish. I can’t leave Martin: how could I? I love him. I can’t take his children from him. I can’t destroy his belief in himself. He thinks that I am better than I am, that I am willing to sacrifice myself for a principle and an ideal, and how can I tell him that his wife is just a greedy woman who wants comforts and luxuries and silks and jewels for herself? More than anything else in the world I want his love and respect, I want him to feel that he has one person at least who stands with him.”
“Amy, my God! I never thought you would begin to mouth silly platitudes! I never thought that you were a fool! Don’t you remember how we used to laugh at Nicholas, have contempt for his hypocrisies and high-sounding periods that meant nothing at all? Have you lost your sense of humor? Or do you think that you have to stand by a bad bargain, for pride’s sake?”
She was silent for some minutes, then she said in a low voice: “Uncle Gregory, vicious people and hypocrites have brought platitudes into disrepute. But it’s not the fault of the platitudes. They remain. They’re true. False people make virtue sound disgusting and contemptible to intelligent men, but we are just as bad if we can’t pick the false people off virtue just as we pick bugs off plants.” She smiled sadly. “I’m not really platitudinous, Uncle Gregory. And I wouldn’t stand by a bad bargain; life is too short for that. Pride doesn’t enter into it. The only thing that matters is that I love Martin.”
A nasty sneer lifted Gregory’s upper lip. “Aren’t you protesting just a little too much, Amy? If you have said that once the last five minutes, you’ve said it at least three times.” He added with cold meaning: “You are a hypocrite.”
But sneers and arguments could not budge Amy, and Gregory went off, swearing that he would never come to see her again, and that if she wished to see him it wo
uld be in her old home. Amy watched him go, tears running down her impassive face. She was too tired to resume her work. The children were crying in the frowsy yard, and the baby was screaming upstairs. But she could not leave her chair yet. She stared mournfully and emptily before her, seeing the order and luxury and quiet and peace and spaciousness of the Sessions house, remembering her pretty dresses and the glossiness of her well-kept ringlets and the whiteness of her hands. Now she looked at her hands, and sighed, felt her hair, and noted its unkempt roughness. But finally her soft mouth set itself rigidly, as it had a habit of doing lately, and she rose heavily and started to work again.
Gregory had heretofore told May and Ernest little of Amy’s condition, but this night he could not contain himself. He was flaming with hate and grief and fear. May listened, horrified, looking from him to her husband and back again. Ernest said nothing, but faint bluish dents appeared about his lips. However, he finally said calmly: “It is Amy’s affair. Apparently she knows what she is doing. She is a grown woman, after all.”
But May quietly went out to see her cousin, taking with her one of her own maids. Conditions were even worse than she suspected, but being a young matron of resource and little given to useless exclamations, she lifted her hoops a little higher, tucked up her wine-colored merino skirts over her petticoats, wrapped a towel about her dark-red curls, rolled up her sleeves above her white plump elbows, and set to work with the maid, over Amy’s feebly laughing protests. Within a few hours the house was gleaming, if shabby at the corners and edges, the babies were scrubbed, fed and asleep, Amy was resting on the worn sofa in the parlor, and May and the maid were busily mending clothing, while Mrs. Heckl worked over the stove and the pots in the kitchen.
May did not reproach her cousin. She talked placidly of their children, of the latest fashions, of the imminent threat of war. When she spoke of their husbands, it was with ease and indifference, and then only casually.
“When the weather is better,” she said, “I will bring my babies out to see their little cousins. It will do Gertrude good, this fresh country air. She is not a strong child, you know, and is so wild and dark and thin, like a little gypsy.” She sighed a little. “How strong and rosy and noisy your children are, Amy! I only wish mine were. Often I think mine are not normal, Godfrey James being so frail and timid. The child becomes sick whenever Ernest scolds him; he has such a delicate stomach, anyway. He actually runs from his father; I found him under the bed one day. And as for Reggie: he’s only a baby, but what tantrums! Sometimes I think he will have a fit!” Then she added with pride: “But, did I tell you? Godfrey James is a real little musician, even if he is hardly six. He won’t go out to play unless I drive him out; he likes to stay in the drawing room and strum on the piano. He can pick out little tunes, and he can even make them up! Ernest pooh-poohs it all, and frowns like a graven image, and says the boy is a mollycoddle and ought to be out fighting with other little boys; I am afraid Ernest has little regard for music, or any other of the arts. But he shall not frighten Frey out of his music!” She looked at Amy with a sudden obstinate grave face, and repeated, as though she were vowing to herself:
“No, he shall not frighten him out of his music!”
CHAPTER XLV
Like an abscess beginning to “point,” all things were drawing to a focus as it was rapidly being conceded, even by the most conservative, that armed conflict between the States could hardly be avoided much longer.
The financial panic of 1857 had not blotted out the memory of the “war” between Pro-slavery and Anti-slavery settlers in Kansas. Even the Mountain Meadow Massacre in Utah stirred only a brief and violent horror, that soon subsided to the fearful and intense contemplation of the dark storm that began to mount into the national skies. When Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis was published, a sort of dim frenzy fell upon Washington, in which all lesser issues of the day were obscured.
Then in 1859 John Brown raided Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, captured the United States Arsenal, and killed five men. The effect on the country was as though two opposite factions had been gathered in a great arena, watching a conflict between opposing gladiators; everyone was tense, pinch-faced and breathless, though the conflict seemed more or less formal and unexciting. Then suddenly one gladiator made a thrust, a deadly thrust: confusion fell upon the opposing gladiators, and they fell back. The spectators, already at a high pitch, rose in their seats with a great cry, standing aghast, but ready for violence. From them emanated disorder, fear, bewilderment, hatred and confusion; they looked about them with red eyes, waiting a signal to fall upon their neighbors. But the moment was not yet ready, and the spectators sat down again, trembling, on the edge of their seats, watching once more the gladiators resume their formal and prosaic fencing.
Ernest Barbour and the other members of the Companies knew that war was coming. They thought of their military contracts, and though they shook grave heads at each other, they gloated in secret. As far as Ernest was concerned, he was not interested in the causes of the impending war, nor was Raoul or Eugene. But Armand, remembering the bloody days in France, was uneasy. He had, he said querulously to his sons, seen enough dead men to last him all the rest of his life. He was mildly against slavery, but, he said, he did not believe all the black men in the country were worth a drop of a white American’s blood. When, a short time after Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, South Carolina seceded from the Union, Armand declared that this State was only acting in accordance with her constitutional rights, if she considered the Union detrimental to her interests. For this opinion of his, he was ostracized from the society of his friends both in Oldtown and Newtown, a condition which he found reminiscent of his youth in France. Ernest, who considered Armand’s expressed opinions very bad indeed for the prospect of continued military contracts, impatiently and angrily took the old man to task. But to his amazement, Armand suddenly flared back at him with brittle savagery and cried that he was now old enough to think less of money and more of truth and justice. “When I go out of the world,” he said contemptuously, “I want to have a good taste in my mouth, instead of a sour.” He added: “Let me feel virtuous once more, my Ernest, for the last time,” and smiled with more bitterness than Ernest thought appropriate to his words.
“I cannot see how a debated question, on which many good men are divided, has anything to do with virtue,” he said.
“But if it were a matter of money, you would soon see where the virtue lay, would you not?” asked Armand, with a cunning sidelong grin that revealed his yellowed teeth through his beard.
Ernest was not disturbed. He merely smiled. “That is not hard to see even now,” he answered. “If there is a war, we shall have some fat military contracts. We are in the business, and have nothing to do with questions.”
He was pleased about many things. The first petroleum well had been opened in Titusville, and he had been one of the first businessmen to take an option on the surrounding property. Already men were drilling on the properties, very slowly, to be sure, for Pennsylvania ground is rocky and grim, but Ernest felt that they would bring in vast amounts of oil. He had spent several days out there, watching the painful drilling, the rumble and steaming of the engines, the rhythmic rise and fall of the “bits.” His shops were already developing a high explosive to “shoot” the well when it was ready.
Now that the rumor of the approaching conflict had burst in the air, Ernest went to see Senator Nicholas Sessions in Washington. Nicholas was more cordial and effusive than ever. He admired the young man, often told him it was too bad that he was born in England, that he was a born politician, and might have been President some day. He had acquired the mechanical gratitude of the politician, and did not forget that Ernest had been more than lavish with party and campaign funds, and that he had, in fact, dragged Sessions Steel from desuetude and dry rot, had bolstered its weakening timbers with the strong iron clamps of his genius. Ernest, he remembered, was responsibl
e for his own increased power and luxury, his own immense fortune. Moreover, Nicholas was fond of his cousin May, appreciated her frank realism and witty candor. He had also acquired something of Ernest’s passion for little Gertrude, and had secretly left a large share of his fortune to her.
Ernest was brief about his visit. A new armaments company had sprung up during the past five years, which, while it did not as yet seriously threaten the strength of Barbour & Bouchard, was reputed to possess very formidable patents. The president of the company was one Angus MacIlvain, a Scotsman, who had British patents, one of which, it was rumored, was a seven-chamber repeating rifle. He was trying to get this rifle patented in the United States, and if he were successful, Barbour & Bouchard would certainly have something to worry about, especially if a war should actually come.
“You want me to keep The MacIlvain Arms from bidding, eh?” asked Nicholas. “And how am I to manage that, pray?”
“Easily,” replied Ernest smoothly. “You see, old MacIlvain’s son, Robert, is running for State Senator on the Democratic ticket. Now, you see, it is very simple: he’s old Angus’ only son, and the apple of his eye. You, Senator, are a Democrat also, and due to the peculiar circumstance that you support Lincoln, and stand behind him, according to the papers, in spite of being a Democrat yourself, this gives you strength with both parties. So, I am wondering—”
“If it could be arranged to swap old Angus’ son’s election, through my support in a State gone Republican, for the patent for the repeating rifle?” Nicholas’ smile was sour but admiring. “What makes you think old Angus will agree to this swap?”
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