Lydia did not speak for a few moments. Her face had grown hot, and there were tears in her eyes. Then she said, “Cornelia’s only seven years old. I must stay awhile.”
He knocked his pipe on a stone. He turned toward her, and she saw his enormous face and the piercing scrutiny of his tiny eyes. “That isn’t the only reason, Lydia. There’s old Steve. You’re watchin’ to see that Red Rufe doesn’t do him in? Right, old girl?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“H’m. But Rufe will do it, y’know. Maybe any day. He’s a clever one, that Rufe. The panic’s on, and it doesn’t seem to be passin’, and Rufe’s busy. I’ve been watchin’ him, myself, trying to guess what he’s up to. But he’s like a fast and expert dancer, and I just lumber a few feet behind. Well, anyway, he’s movin’ fast, now. He’s not sayin’ anythin’; didn’t say anythin’ even when old Steve went right on payin’ the workers’ wages when there isn’t much movin’ on the railroads these days. But there he is, smilin’ like a cat what’s got its paws into the cream, and he’s lickin’ them.” He added reflectively, “Interstate passed the last three dividends, and Rufe just goes on smilin’. He’s been down to New York six times in the past two months, talkin’ to Gunther.”
“Why?” cried Lydia in desperate alarm.
Purcell shrugged. “Now, Lydia, that’s somethin’ I’d like to know, too. But Gunther’s a big feller; he’s not tellin’ anybody anythin’.”
Lydia wrung her hands together. “What can we do, Jim? Tell me what we can do?”
He put his hand on her bare shoulder, and in spite of her fear she could feel fire running down her arm, striking at her heart. “Lydia, old girl, you can’t do anythin’ for Steve. What could you do? And me? I can only wait around to pick up the pieces. You know old Steve. He wouldn’t listen to anybody. He trusts Red Rufus, and that’s like trustin’ a tiger. I’ve tried to warn him, and he looked at me like I was dirt. Haven’t seen him for weeks; he won’t speak to me.”
He lifted his hand from Lydia’s shoulder, and studied the palm as if in wonder.
“You could talk with Mr. Gunther,” suggested Lydia in her despair.
He laughed loudly and hoarsely. “Gunther? He knows what I’d be tryin’ to do. He’s with Rufe in this. Besides, Gunther’s got an old score to settle with me. I can’t get anythin’ on him, if you know what I mean. Besides, it would do no good. Old Steve’s the problem. You can’t get around him. He’s just got a conscience.”
Lydia could only wring her hands over and over. Her beautiful profile was tense and wretched in the frail light.
“Steve, because he’s Steve, and things in this country are too big for him, and he’s got too many bad enemies, is going to be hurt, hurt bad, Lydia. So we just stand by when the inevitable happens. You can’t help him by stayin’ in that house. You might as well leave.”
But she cried, “Jim! You can do something, I know you can!” She turned to him and the moonlight struck her face.
“Thanks, Lydia, for believin’ that. I told you I’m tryin’ somethin’. It’s indirect. Look, old girl, I never asked nobody to trust me before. Never did care a damn, because, perhaps, nobody could trust me. But I’m askin’ you to trust me now.”
“Oh, I do, I do, Jim!” She spoke passionately. “I always did. I think I never trusted anyone at all, except you.”
Purcell watched her in a deep silence, and an odd expression touched his muddy eyes so that they quickened with a stern tenderness. Lydia ran distracted hands through the masses of her black hair, and thick tendrils spilled over her cheeks and neck. Purcell picked up one of the tendrils and rubbed it slowly and strongly through his fingers. She became quiet then, her hands dropping to her knees.
He spoke as if nothing had happened, and dully, “It may take Rufe a longer time than he expects. Impatient feller, but somehow he’s learned how to wait. And I’ve got to wait until he makes a move. Doubt if I’ll be able to do anythin’ then. But I’ll do what I can.”
Lydia spoke in the loud but toneless voice of a sleepwalker: “I’ve come to hate Rufus, because of Stephen, and because of all that he is.”
“Well, now, Lydia, that’s bein’ kind of extravagant. That’s the woman’s way of talking. Rufe and I and Gunther would just call it all ‘business.’ Rufe’s getting to be the better man, better than old Steve. Don’t hold it against him. But Steve’s not suited to the tear-and-eat school, though he’s been doin’ fine in an honorable kind of way. He’s, well, I think they’d call him an ‘anachronism’ these days.”
Lydia began to cry silently, and then in the most natural way possible Purcell took his handkerchief, dabbed at her cheeks gently, then put the handkerchief in her hand. “Stephen’s such a fool!” she wept. “Such a fool.”
Purcell became very grave. “People think I haven’t had much schoolin’, but I have, in an uneven sort of way. I remember something that Pliny the Elder said, and I’ve always remembered it: ‘I have studied much the philosophies of the old sages, and their dream of Demos and universal liberty and the brotherhood of man. But still, laboring wearily in my mind, I am not convinced that such a dream shall ever emerge from the darkness of men’s souls. Rather would I believe it possible that the sun should rise in the West, contrary to his custom, than that ever a single man should extend into reality a philosophy so at variance with all his instincts.’
”Lydia had hardly listened at the beginning, but as Purcell had gone on quoting she had straightened, listening intently, and a bitter look had hardened the contours of her face.
“The old feller was very bright, Lydia. You can’t make the sun rise west. People bein’ what they are, and what they’ll always be. Got to deal with things as they are.”
Lydia sighed. “How terrible it all is, Jim. It isn’t only Rufus and Stephen. Portersville is changing, too. There’s something ugly in the air, for the first time.”
“Guess I can’t be too romantic about that either, Lydia. Let’s say that Portersville was a sort of friendly and pleasant place, up to the last few years, because it was small-townish, and it was kind of in the family. Now there’s all these immigrants comin’ in, and nobody knows them, and they’re queer to the folks in town, and the town’s drawn together against them. Old human nature, to hate the stranger. That’s how social castes are built up. What would you want to do, Lydia? Remake the whole damned world and damned human nature? You can just save yourself.”
“I can’t leave,” replied Lydia. “There is Cornelia, and there is Stephen. And Laura, too. Too many to desert.”
“H’m,” commented Purcell. He examined one of his great boots in the diminishing moonlight. “Quixotic.”
“And you despise me for it?” cried Lydia with some anger.
Purcell rubbed the mud from his boots. “No, ma’am, can’t say that I do.” He picked up his pipe. “I like to know it’s there, though it seems damn foolishness to me. You don’t understand me, eh?”
“Yes,” said Lydia almost inaudibly. “I think I do, Jim.”
He gave her his hand and helped her to her feet, and had stood looking down at her, smiling.
“You’ll come again to this place, won’t you, Lydia? I haven’t frightened you away?”
She tried to smile in answer. “I’ll come, Jim. I’ll come.”
Since that time they had met often, these past two years, from the first of spring until autumn. They had met casually and distantly in the homes of acquaintances. The fact that Jim Purcell was almost invariably present on these occasions was not even commented upon as coincidental, and no one noticed the sudden swift exchange of glances between him and Lydia or the sudden touch of hands in passing.
When spring would return, Lydia would come to the glade. She did not always meet Jim Purcell there, nor did he meet her. There was never, between them, any appointment for any particular night, never a promise given or received. There was never any love-making, except for a light pressure of hands, though at rare intervals Lydia would lay her head o
n Purcell’s shoulder in a gesture of exhaustion or in seeking for wordless consolation. More often than not, they would just sit side by side, listening to the cries of the night birds, watching the drifting of clouds over moon or stars, and sometimes they would part from each other after an hour or two with only a few words spoken.
It was in the early spring of 1876, when the tragic panic was developing into acute and bloody violence all over America, that Purcell suggested to Lydia that she obtain a divorce from Rufus.
“I can’t, dearest,” said Lydia, with misery. “You know I can’t leave Cornelia and Stephen and Laura. I know, as you have said, that there is nothing I can really do to protect any of them, but I’m like someone watching a man painting a steeple. You have the feeling that if you look away the man will fall.” She continued faintly: “And in a way, I remain because of Rufus, vaguely believing that he needs me, too, and that but for me he might be worse.”
Purcell considered this with some wryness. Red Rufus was fast coming to his planned climax, and bringing those associated with him into tragedy and despair. But Purcell, after some thought, decided not to tell Lydia.
He said, “You think you’ll have to leave your girl. But you won’t. You can get a divorce, and her custody.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket, and by straining her eyes in the spring darkness and star-shine, Lydia could see that the sheaf was corded and sealed. “I’ve been havin’ Red Rufe investigated—quietly, of course—over the past two years. Here are the names of all his lady friends, and their addresses, and where they meet. We can bring the whole business into court.”
She said, “Oh, yes, I’ve known all about this for a long time. But it isn’t Rufus’s fault, entirely. He isn’t guilty because he isn’t what I thought he was when I married him. The delusion was mine, and I made him suffer for it.”
“So you want to make him keep on sufferin’, eh, Lydia? You won’t let him go, and let him marry another woman who’ll give him children? You won’t marry me?”
Lydia moved a little from him, and half turned her back. “It’s also Rufus,” she murmured. “Perhaps I’m a fool, but I think he refrains from some things because of me.”
Purcell put his enormous hands on her shoulders and swung her fiercely toward him. “Lydia! You are a fool. He isn’t ‘refraining’ from a damn thing, as you’ll find out soon. What then, Lydia? Don’t you think I’m a man? Think I’m satisfied just sittin’ here, year after year, holdin’ hands with you like a kid at school? I want you in my house, in my bed. How old are you, Lydia? You’re thirty-four, aren’t you? Not too old for children. I want our children, Lydia.”
But Lydia had caught only a few terrifying words from this rough diatribe. “What do you mean, Jim? Is Rufus—”
“I can’t tell you things you wouldn’t understand. And I can’t stop them, either. But the day’s almost here when Rufus will have the damned railroad in his hands. And the house, too, which Steve owns. And every goddamned cent. What then, Lydia? What then?”
“Stephen? Stephen?” Lydia’s cry deepened to a groan. Purcell nodded grimly. “It’ll be all up with him, Lydia. He’ll find out, and it may kill him, findin’ out. Steve’s been ruined because he trusted; you’d call it bein’ victimized, and maybe it is. Well. There it is. What I could do now would be throwin’ good money after bad. Besides, Steve doesn’t know that the walls are about to fall on him.”
Lydia seized his arm. “Jim, why don’t you tell him?”
“He wouldn’t believe it. He won’t believe it until he sees it for himself. That’s the kind of a fool he is. And you know it.”
Lydia began to tremble, and after a moment’s resistance, Purcell put his arms about her and held her against his giant’s chest. He kissed her hair and her cheek and finally her cold lips. She clung to him and cried helplessly. “There, there, love,” he mumbled. “Sweet love. My Lydia. There’s some things you can’t help; men kind of bring their destiny on themselves.”
When she could speak, out of her pain and despair, she said, “If it happens, then I’ll divorce Rufus. If I didn’t, I think I should kill him.”
18
It is not true that one forgets sorrow, Stephen would think. No, there was no surcease of sorrow for him. The day of Alice’s death ten years ago was as vivid and as terrible as though it had occurred only today. Her face and her voice, her sweet childish smiles, her gestures and her pretty figure and tender actions, never faded or blurred in his memory. They were always there immediately remembered. To this day, if a door opened into his room, he turned expectantly. At night, he reached for her in his lonely bed. Sometimes, in his anguish, he pressed the knuckles of his hand tightly against his teeth and endured the waves of grief as a man, committing suicide, endures the waves of the sea into which he has deliberately walked. All the joy of the hours had gone for him, all the dreams he had ever had. He sometimes told himself that he lived for his little daughter Laura, now ten years old, but in truth he lived only for the day when she would no longer need him and he could die.
He did not believe that he would ever “meet” Alice again after death. The sorrow of his existence, and the blows which had been inflicted upon him by man, had obliterated any faith he had had in God and immortality. Despair had come to abide with him as a black presence which colored all his days and his nights, and there was no hope to take its place and oust it from the stark and empty caverns of his soul.
The love he felt for his young daughter was, in truth, mostly constant anxiety for her welfare. He worked to conserve her holdings and her fortune in order to buy security for her, to make her safe from a ravening world. There was nothing in the child which reminded him of Alice. He never regarded her as needing him for any other reason except worldly security, and though he was invariably tender with her—for tenderness was part of his nature—and though he held her on his knees lovingly and stroked her dusky ringlets with a gentle hand, he never approached the farthest outskirts of her spirit.
There was only one member of his household who could provoke his rare smile or faint laughter, and that was Cornelia, his niece. Pert, saucy, and witty, and instinctively amiable toward everyone, she would climb unasked on his knee, as little Laura never did. She would smack him heartily, and then immediately ask him for some money. It gave him pleasure to put gold certificates in her grasping little hands, though Lydia objected. Her burnished young beauty, her consuming zest for life, her unabashed passion for living, warmed his cold hands and sometimes halted the constant chill shivering of his soul. Reticent himself, respecting all individual privacy, and bewildered, as always, by the mystery of other human beings, he never speculated on Cornelia’s character or busied himself, with monkey curiosity, as to what lay behind her loud and husky voice, her boisterous and demanding, if endearing, ways.
Sorrow and misery did not, however, free Stephen from his conviction that he was morally bound to relieve the sorrow and misery of others. In fact, his own despair drove him to excesses which ten years ago would have been unthinkable or which would have sensibly given him pause. His charities had risen to enormous heights, arousing both the wonder and the derision of the recipients, whether individuals or organizations. Stephen gradually came to be suspected of siphoning off money, in reality belonging to his “wronged” brother, for his own uses, and his charities seemed only a small sop to whatever meager conscience he possessed. As an evidence of this, they pointed to Rufus’s insignificant donations to local charities. A man so warm, so kind, so amiable and sympathetic as Rufus deWitt, would have been only too delighted to contribute largely—had he the means.
No one but Rufus and the directors of the board knew that Stephen drew no more from the Interstate Railroad Company than his very respectable salary, and it was to their interest that this matter not be given publicity. His coal acreage near Scranton was adding, as yet, little to his income. He could have developed it had he not invested the greater part of his money in trust funds for Laura, and in charities. The trus
t funds were irrevocable, and no one spoke of the charities. Of course, he retained the fifty-one per cent of the railroad stocks and bonds, but he hardly regarded them as his own property. And he had not received any dividends from them for over two years.
So it was that on a hot August Sunday, as he went over his accounts, the first stirrings of anxiety for himself came to him.
The panic, which had begun in 1873, and which showed, in 1876, little signs of vanishing, had hit the Baynes Locals very severely. Joseph Baynes now owed Stephen deWitt twenty four thousand dollars. Virtuously, Joseph had insisted upon giving Stephen notes for this large sum of money. Once the notes had been given to the “affluent” Stephen, Joseph was rarely disturbed by the memory of them. He felt completely safe. Tom Orville, running into difficulty during the panic, might have lost his lumber business to the Interstate Railroad Company, had not Stephen given him ten thousand dollars, also secured by notes righteously thrust upon Stephen.
Stephen sat at his desk in the library, his haggard face sweating and gray with mingled heat and fear. His personal bank balance was less than twelve thousand dollars in cash. Rufus and Sophia did not contribute any money whatever to the upkeep of the great white mansion on the mountain. Stephen had refused Rufus’s casual offer; it was all he, Stephen, could do, “under the circumstances.” It never occurred to Sophia to suggest an equitable sum out of her own sound income, and it never occurred to Stephen either. Servants, food, household expenses, upkeep, and the support of the family came to at least seven hundred dollars a month. Stephen footed the bills for all the elaborate entertainment on which Sophia insisted. His mother had no intention of spending a penny of her own—all of which was bequeathed in her will to Rufus and Cornelia—even for her personal expenses and grand wardrobe. She would say to herself grimly: He’s got to pay for what he did. Never a particularly extravagant woman while Aaron was building up his fortune, nor until the time of his death, she now was a prodigal. All bills coming to the house were addressed exclusively to “Stephen deWitt, Esquire,” whether the bills were for the music lessons given to both Cornelia and Laura, medical bills for the entire family, or bills for clothing, coal, wood, or carriages. No bill was too small or too large to be placed on Stephen’s desk.
Never Victorious, Never Defeated Page 20