Perhaps because the process of his ruin had been so gradual, perhaps because the excitement of preceding events had exhausted their capacity for emotion, the actual consummation of his bankruptcy brought a relief, a repose, to Lapham and his family, rather than a fresh sensation of calamity. In the shadow of his disaster they returned to something like their old, united life; they were at least all together again; and it will be intelligible to those whom life has blessed with vicissitude, that Lapham should come home the evening after he had given up everything to his creditors, and should sit down to his supper so cheerful that Penelope could joke him in the old way, and tell him that she thought from his looks they had concluded to pay him a hundred cents on every dollar he owed them.
As James Bellingham had taken so much interest in his troubles from the first, Lapham thought he ought to tell him, before taking the final step, just how things stood with him, and what he meant to do. Bellingham made some futile inquiries about his negotiations with the West Virginians, and Lapham told him they had come to nothing. He spoke of the New York man, and the chance that he might have sold out half his business to him. “But, of course, I had to let him know how it was about those fellows.”
“Of course,” said Bellingham, not seeing till afterward the full significance of Lapham’s action.
Lapham said nothing about Rogers and the Englishmen. He believed that he had acted right in that matter, and he was satisfied; but he did not care to have Bellingham, or anybody, perhaps, think he had been a fool.
All those who were concerned in his affairs said he behaved well, and even more than well, when it came to the worst. The prudence, the good sense, which he had shown in the first years of his success, and of which his great prosperity seemed to have bereft him, came back, and these qualities, used in his own behalf, commended him as much to his creditors as the anxiety he showed that no one should suffer by him; this even made some of them doubtful of his sincerity. They gave him time, and there would have been no trouble in his resuming on the old basis, if the ground had not been cut from under him by the competition of the West Virginia company. He saw himself that it was useless to try to go on in the old way, and he preferred to go back and begin the world anew where he had first begun it, in the hills at Lapham. He put the house at Nankeen Square, with everything else he had, into the payment of his debts, and Mrs. Lapham found it easier to leave it for the old farmstead in Vermont than it would have been to go from that home of many years to the new house on the water side of Beacon. This thing and that is embittered to us, so that we may be willing to relinquish it; the world, life itself, is embittered to most of us, so that we are glad to have done with them at last; and this home was haunted with such memories to each of those who abandoned it that to go was less exile than escape. Mrs. Lapham could not look into Irene’s room without seeing the girl there before her glass, tearing the poor little keepsakes of her hapless fancy from their hiding places to take them and fling them in passionate renunciation upon her sister; she could not come into the sitting room, where her little ones had grown up, without starting at the thought of her husband sitting so many weary nights at his desk there, trying to fight his way back to hope out of the ruin into which he was slipping. When she remembered that night when Rogers came, she hated the place. Irene accepted her release from the house eagerly, and was glad to go before and prepare for the family at Lapham. Penelope was always ashamed of her engagement there; it must seem better somewhere else, and she was glad to go too. No one but Lapham, in fact, felt the pang of parting in all its keenness. Whatever regret the others had was softened to them by the likeness of their flitting to many of those removals for the summer, which they made in the late spring, when they left Nankeen Square; they were going directly into the country instead of to the seaside first; but Lapham, who usually remained in town long after they had gone, knew all the difference. For his nerves there was no mechanical sense of coming back; this was as much the end of his proud, prosperous life as death itself could have been. He was returning to begin life anew, but he knew as well as he knew that he should not find his vanished youth in his native hills, that it could never again be the triumph that it had been. That was impossible, not only in his stiffened and weakened forces, but in the very nature of things. He was going back, by grace of the man whom he owed money, to make what he could out of the one chance which his successful rivals had left him.
In one phase his paint had held its own against bad times and ruinous competition, and it was with the hope of doing still more with the Persis Brand that he now set himself to work. The West Virginia people confessed that they could not produce those fine grades, and they willingly left the field to him. A strange, not ignoble friendliness existed between Lapham and the three brothers; they had used him fairly; it was their facilities that had conquered him, not their ill will; and he recognized in them without enmity the necessity in which he had yielded. If he succeeded in his efforts to develop his paint in this direction, it must be for a long time on a small scale compared with his former business, which it could never equal, and he brought to them the flagging energies of an elderly man. He was more broken than he knew by his failure; it did not kill, as it often does, but it weakened the spring once so strong and elastic. He lapsed more and more into acquiescence with his changed condition, and that bragging note of his was rarely sounded. He worked faithfully enough in his enterprise, but sometimes he failed to seize occasions that in his younger days he would have turned to golden account. His wife saw in him a daunted look that made her heart ache for him.
One result of his friendly relations with the West Virginia people was that Corey went in with them, and the fact that he did so solely upon Lapham’s advice, and by means of his recommendation, was perhaps the Colonel’s proudest consolation. Corey knew the business thoroughly, and after half a year at Kanawha Falls and in the office at New York, he went out to Mexico and Central America, to see what could be done for them upon the ground which he had theoretically studied with Lapham.
Before he went he came up to Vermont, and urged Penelope to go with him. He was to be first in the city of Mexico, and if his mission was successful he was to be kept there and in South America several years, watching the new railroad enterprises and the development of mechanical agriculture and whatever other undertakings offered an opening for the introduction of the paint. They were all young men together, and Corey, who had put his money into the company, had a proprietary interest in the success which they were eager to achieve.
“There’s no more reason now and no less than ever there was,” mused Penelope, in counsel with her mother, “why I should say yes, or why I should say no. Everything else changes, but this is just where it was a year ago. It don’t go backward, and it don’t go forward. Mother, I believe I shall take the bit in my teeth—if anybody will put it there!”
“It isn’t the same as it was,” suggested her mother. “You can see that Irene’s all over it.”
“That’s no credit to me,” said Penelope. “I ought to be just as much ashamed as ever.”
“You no need ever to be ashamed.”
“That’s true, too,” said the girl. “And I can sneak off to Mexico with a good conscience if I could make up my mind to it.” She laughed. “Well, if I could be sentenced to be married, or somebody would up and forbid the banns! I don’t know what to do about it.”
Her mother left her to carry her hesitation back to Corey, and she said now they had better go all over it and try to reason it out. “And I hope that whatever I do, it won’t be for my own sake, but for—others!”
Corey said he was sure of that, and looked at her with eyes of patient tenderness.
“I don’t say it is wrong,” she proceeded, rather aimlessly, “but I can’t make it seem right. I don’t know whether I can make you understand, but the idea of being happy, when everybody else is so miserable, is more than I can endure. It makes me wretched.”
“Then perhaps that’s your share of the common suffering,” suggested Corey, smiling.
“Oh, you know it isn’t! You know it’s nothing. Oh! One of the reasons is what I told you once before, that as long as Father is in trouble I can’t let you think of me. Now that he’s lost everything?” She bent her eyes inquiringly upon him, as if for the effect of this argument.
“I don’t think that’s a very good reason,” he answered seriously, but smiling still. “Do you believe me when I tell you that I love you?”
“Why, I suppose I must,” she said, dropping her eyes.
“Then why shouldn’t I think all the more of you on account of your father’s loss? You didn’t suppose I cared for you because he was prosperous?” There was a shade of reproach, ever so delicate and gentle, in his smiling question, which she felt.
“No, I couldn’t think such a thing of you. I—I don’t know what I meant. I meant that—” She could not go on and say that she had felt herself more worthy of him because of her father’s money; it would not have been true; yet there was no other explanation. She stopped, and cast a helpless glance at him.
He came to her aid. “I understand why you shouldn’t wish me to suffer by your father’s misfortunes.”
“Yes, that was it; and there is too great a difference every way. We ought to look at that again. You mustn’t pretend that you don’t know it, for that wouldn’t be true. Your mother will never like me, and perhaps—perhaps I shall not like her.”
“Well,” said Corey, a little daunted, “you won’t have to marry my family.”
“Ah, that isn’t the point!”
“I know it,” he admitted. “I won’t pretend that I don’t see what you mean; but I’m sure that all the differences would disappear when you came to know my family better. I’m not afraid but you and my mother will like each other—she can’t help it!” he exclaimed, less judicially than he had hitherto spoken, and he went on to urge some points of doubtful tenability. “We have our ways, and you have yours; and while I don’t say but what you and my mother and sisters would be a little strange together at first, it would soon wear off, on both sides. There can’t be anything hopelessly different in you all, and if there were it wouldn’t be any difference to me.”
“Do you think it would be pleasant to have you on my side against your mother?”
“There won’t be any sides. Tell me just what it is you’re afraid of.”
“Afraid?”
“Thinking of, then.”
“I don’t know. It isn’t anything they say or do,” she explained, with her eyes intent on his. “It’s what they are. I couldn’t be natural with them, and if I can’t be natural with people, I’m disagreeable.”
“Can you be natural with me?”
“Oh, I’m not afraid of you. I never was. That was the trouble, from the beginning.”
“Well, then, that’s all that’s necessary. And it never was the least trouble to me!”
“It made me untrue to Irene.”
“You mustn’t say that! You were always true to her.”
“She cared for you first.”
“Well, but I never cared for her at all!” he besought her.
“She thought you did.”
“That was nobody’s fault, and I can’t let you make it yours. My dear—”
“Wait. We must understand each other,” said Penelope, rising from her seat to prevent an advance he was making from his; “I want you to realize the whole affair. Should you want a girl who hadn’t a cent in the world, and felt different in your mother’s company, and had cheated and betrayed her own sister?”
“I want you!”
“Very well, then, you can’t have me. I should always despise myself. I ought to give you up for all these reasons. Yes, I must.” She looked at him intently, and there was a tentative quality in her affirmations.
“Is this your answer?” he said. “I must submit. If I asked too much of you, I was wrong. And—good-bye.”
He held out his hand, and she put hers in it. “You think I’m capricious and fickle!” she said. “I can’t help it—I don’t know myself. I can’t keep to one thing for half a day at a time. But it’s right for us to part—yes, it must be. It must be,” she repeated; “and I shall try to remember that. Good-bye! I will try to keep that in my mind, and you will too—you won’t care, very soon! I didn’t mean that—no; I know how true you are; but you will soon look at me differently; and see that even if there hadn’t been this about Irene, I was not the one for you. You do think so, don’t you?” she pleaded, clinging to his hand. “I am not at all what they would like—your family; I felt that. I am little, and black, and homely, and they don’t understand my way of talking, and now that we’ve lost everything— No, I’m not fit. Good-bye. You’re quite right not to have patience with me any longer. I’ve tried you enough. I ought to be willing to marry you against their wishes if you want me to, but I can’t make the sacrifice—I’m too selfish for that—” All at once she flung herself on his breast. “I can’t even give you up! I shall never dare look anyone in the face again. Go, go! But take me with you! I tried to do without you! I gave it a fair trial, and it was a dead failure. Oh, poor Irene! How could she give you up?”
Corey went back to Boston immediately, and left Penelope, as he must, to tell her sister that they were to be married. She was spared from the first advance toward this by an accident or a misunderstanding. Irene came straight to her after Corey was gone, and demanded, “Penelope Lapham, have you been such a ninny as to send that man away on my account?”
Penelope recoiled from this terrible courage; she did not answer directly, and Irene went on. “Because if you did, I’ll thank you to bring him back again. I’m not going to have him thinking that I’m dying for a man that never cared for me. It’s insulting, and I’m not going to stand it. Now, you just send for him!”
“Oh, I will, ’Rene,” gasped Penelope. And then she added, shamed out of her prevarication by Irene’s haughty magnanimity, “I have. That is—he’s coming back—”
Irene looked at her a moment, and then, whatever thought was in her mind, said fiercely, “Well!” and left her to her dismay—her dismay and her relief, for they both knew that this was the last time they should ever speak of that again.
The marriage came after so much sorrow and trouble, and the fact was received with so much misgiving for the past and future, that it brought Lapham none of the triumph in which he had once exulted at the thought of an alliance with the Coreys. Adversity had so far been his friend that it had taken from him all hope of the social success for which people crawl and truckle, and restored him, through failure and doubt and heartache, the manhood which his prosperity had so nearly stolen from him. Neither he nor his wife thought now that their daughter was marrying a Corey; they thought only that she was giving herself to the man who loved her, and their acquiescence was sobered still further by the presence of Irene. Their hearts were far more with her.
Again and again Mrs. Lapham said she did not see how she could go through it. “I can’t make it seem right,” she said.
“It is right,” steadily answered the Colonel.
“Yes, I know. But it don’t seem so.”
* * *
It would be easy to point out traits in Penelope’s character which finally reconciled all her husband’s family and endeared her to them. These things continually happen in novels; and the Coreys, as they had always promised themselves to do, made the best, and not the worst, of Tom’s marriage.
They were people who could value Lapham’s behavior as Tom reported it to them. They were proud of him, and Bromfield Corey, who found a delicate, aesthetic pleasure in the heroism with which Lapham had withstood Rogers and his temptations—something finely dramatic and unconsciously effective—wrote him a letter which would once have flattered the rough soul almo
st to ecstasy, though now he affected to slight it in showing it. “It’s all right if it makes it more comfortable for Pen,” he said to his wife.
But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between the Coreys and Tom Corey’s wife. “If he had only married the Colonel!” subtly suggested Nanny Corey.
There was a brief season of civility and forbearance on both sides, when he brought her home before starting for Mexico, and her father-in-law made a sympathetic feint of liking Penelope’s way of talking, but it is questionable if even he found it so delightful as her husband did. Lily Corey made a little, ineffectual sketch of her, which she put by with other studies to finish up, sometime, and found her rather picturesque in some ways. Nanny got on with her better than the rest, and saw possibilities for her in the country to which she was going. “As she’s quite unformed, socially,” she explained to her mother, “there is a chance that she will form herself on the Spanish manner, if she stays there long enough, and that when she comes back she will have the charm of, not olives, perhaps, but tortillas, whatever they are: something strange and foreign, even if it’s borrowed. I’m glad she’s going to Mexico. At that distance we can—correspond.”
Her mother sighed, and said bravely that she was sure they all got on very pleasantly as it was, and that she was perfectly satisfied if Tom was.
There was, in fact, much truth in what she said of their harmony with Penelope. Having resolved, from the beginning, to make the best of the worst, it might almost be said that they were supported and consoled in their good intentions by a higher power. This marriage had not, thanks to an overruling Providence, brought the succession of Lapham teas upon Bromfield Corey which he had dreaded; the Laphams were far off in their native fastnesses, and neither Lily nor Nanny Corey was obliged to sacrifice herself to the conversation of Irene; they were not even called upon to make a social demonstration for Penelope at a time when, most people being still out of town, it would have been so easy; she and Tom had both begged that there might be nothing of that kind; and though none of the Coreys learned to know her very well in the week she spent with them, they did not find it hard to get on with her. There were even moments when Nanny Corey, like her father, had glimpses of what Tom had called her humor, but it was perhaps too unlike their own to be easily recognizable.
The Rise of Silas Lapham Page 39