CHAPTER VII
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON some time after this they were sailing
the summer seas in their dream yacht, and reclining in
lazy luxury under the awning of the after-deck. There was
silence, for each was busy with his own thoughts. These seasons
of silence had insensibly been growing more and more
frequent of late; the old nearness and cordiality were waning.
Sally’s terrible revelation had done its work; Aleck had
tried hard to drive the memory of it out of her mind, but it
would not go, and the shame and bitterness of it were poisoning
her gracious dream life. She could see now (on Sundays)
that her husband was becoming a bloated and repulsive
Thing. She could not close her eyes to this, and in these
days she no longer looked at him, Sundays, when she could
help it.
But she—was she herself without blemish? Alas, she knew
she was not. She was keeping a secret from him, she was
acting dishonorably toward him, and many a pang it was
costing her. She was breaking the compact, and concealing it
from him. Under strong temptation she had gone into business
again; she had risked their whole fortune in a purchase
of all the railway systems and coal and steel companies in the
country on a margin, and she was now trembling, every Sabbath
hour, lest through some chance word of hers he find it
out. In her misery and remorse for this treachery she could
not keep her heart from going out to him in pity; she was
filled with compunctions to see him lying there, drunk and
contented, and ever suspecting. Never suspecting—trusting
her with a perfect and pathetic trust, and she holding over
him by a thread a possible calamity of so devastating a—
“Say—Aleck?”
The interrupting words brought her suddenly to herself.
She was grateful to have that persecuting subject from her
thoughts, and she answered, with much of the old-time tenderness
in her tone:
“Yes, dear.”
“Do you know, Aleck, I think we are making a mistake—
that is, you are. I mean about the marriage business.” He sat
up, fat and froggy and benevolent, like a bronze Buddha,
and grew earnest. “Consider—it’s more than five years. You’ve
continued the same policy from the start: with every rise,always holding on for five points higher. Always when I think
we are going to have some weddings, you see a bigger thing
ahead, and I undergo another disappointment. I think you
are too hard to please. Some day we’ll get left. First, we turned
down the dentist and the lawyer. That was all right—
it was sound. Next, we turned down the banker’s son and
the pork-butcher’s heir—right again, and sound. Next, we
turned down the Congressman’s son and the Governor’s—
right as a trivet, I confess it. Next the Senator’s son and the
son of the Vice-President of the United States—perfectly
right, there’s no permanency about those little distinctions.
Then you went for the aristocracy; and I thought we had
struck oil at last—yes. We would make a plunge at the Four
Hundred, and pull in some ancient lineage, venerable, holy,
ineffable, mellow with the antiquity of a hundred and fifty
years, disinfected of the ancestral odors of salt-cod and pelts
all of a century ago, and unsmirched by a day’s work since,
and then! why, then the marriages, of course. But no, along
comes a pair a real aristocrats from Europe, and straightway
you throw over the half-breeds. It was awfully discouraging,
Aleck! Since then, what a procession! You turned down the
baronets for a pair of barons; you turned down the barons
for a pair of viscounts; the viscounts for a pair of earls; the
earls for a pair of marquises; the marquises for a brace of
dukes. Now, Aleck, cash in!—you’ve played the limit. You’ve
got a job lot of four dukes under the hammer; of four nationalities;
all sound in the wind and limb and pedigree, all
bankrupt and in debt up to the ears. They come high, but
we can afford it. Come, Aleck, don’t delay any longer, don’t
keep up the suspense: take the whole lay-out, and leave the
girls to choose!”
Aleck had been smiling blandly and contentedly all through
this arraignment of her marriage policy, a pleasant light, as
of triumph with perhaps a nice surprise peeping out through
it, rose in her eyes, and she said, as calmly as she could:
“Sally, what would you say to—royalty?”
Prodigious! Poor man, it knocked him silly, and he fell
over the garboard-strake and barked his shin on the cat-heads.
He was dizzy for a moment, then he gathered himself up
and limped over and sat down by his wife and beamed his
old-time admiration and affection upon her in floods, out of
his bleary eyes.“By George!” he said, fervently, “Aleck, you are great—the
greatest woman in the whole earth! I can’t ever learn the
whole size of you. I can’t ever learn the immeasurable deeps
of you. Here I’ve been considering myself qualified to criticize
your game. I! Why, if I had stopped to think, I’d have
known you had a lone hand up your sleeve. Now, dear heart,
I’m all red-hot impatience—tell me about it!”
The flattered and happy woman put her lips to his ear and
whispered a princely name. It made him catch his breath, it
lit his face with exultation.
“Land!” he said, “it’s a stunning catch! He’s got a gambling-
hall, and a graveyard, and a bishop, and a cathedral—
all his very own. And all gilt-edged five-hundred-per-cent.
stock, every detail of it; the tidiest little property in Europe.
and that graveyard—it’s the selectest in the world: none but
suicides admitted; yes, sir, and the free-list suspended, too,
all the time. There isn’t much land in the principality, but
there’s enough: eight hundred acres in the graveyard and
forty-two outside. It’s a sovereignty—that’s the main thing;
land’s nothing. There’s plenty land, Sahara’s drugged with
it.”
Aleck glowed; she was profoundly happy. She said:
“Think of it, Sally—it is a family that has never married
outside the Royal and Imperial Houses of Europe: our grandchildren
will sit upon thrones!”
“True as you live, Aleck—and bear scepters, too; and handle
them as naturally and nonchantly as I handle a yardstick. it’s
a grand catch, Aleck. He’s corralled, is he? Can’t get away?
You didn’t take him on a margin?”
“No. Trust me for that. He’s not a liability, he’s an asset. So
is the other one.”
“Who is it, Aleck?”
“His Royal Highness Sigismund-Siegfriend-Lauenfeld-
Dinkelspiel-Schwartzenberg Blutwurst, Hereditary Grant
Duke of Katzenyammer.”
“No! You can’t mean it!”
“It’s as true as I’m sitting here, I give you my word,” she
answered.
His cup was full, and he hugged her to his heart with
rapture, saying:
“How wonderful it all seems, and how beautiful! It’s one
of the oldest and noblest of the three hundred and sixty-four ancient German principalities, and one of the few that was
allowed to retain its royal estate when Bismarck got done
trimming them. I know that farm, I’ve been there. It’s got a
rope-walk and a candle-factory and an army. Standing army.
Infantry and cavalry. Three soldier and a horse. Aleck, it’s
been a long wait, and full of heartbreak and hope deferred,
but God knows I am happy now. Happy, and grateful to
you, my own, who have done it all. When is it to be?”
“Next Sunday.”
“Good. And we’ll want to do these weddings up in the
very regalest style that’s going. It’s properly due to the royal
quality of the parties of the first part. Now as I understand
it, there is only one kind of marriage that is sacred to royalty,
exclusive to royalty: it’s the morganatic.”
“What do they call it that for, Sally?”
“I don’t know; but anyway it’s royal, and royal only.”
“Then we will insist upon it. More—I will compel it. It is
morganatic marriage or none.”
“That settles it!” said Sally, rubbing his hands with delight.
“And it will be the very first in America. Aleck, it will
make Newport sick.”
Then they fell silent, and drifted away upon their dream
wings to the far regions of the earth to invite all the crowned
heads and their families and provide gratis transportation to
them.
CHAPTER VIII
DURING THREE DAYS the couple walked upon air, with their
heads in the clouds. They were but vaguely conscious of
their surroundings; they saw all things dimly, as through a
veil; they were steeped in dreams, often they did not hear
when they were spoken to; they often did not understand
when they heard; they answered confusedly or at random;
Sally sold molasses by weight, sugar by the yard, and furnished
soap when asked for candles, and Aleck put the cat in
the wash and fed milk to the soiled linen. Everybody was
stunned and amazed, and went about muttering, “What can
be the matter with the Fosters?”
Three days. Then came events! Things had taken a happy
turn, and for forty-eight hours Aleck’s imaginary corner had
been booming. Up—up—still up! Cost point was passed Still up—and up—and up! Cost point was passed. Still up—
and up—and up! Five points above cost—then ten—fifteen—
twenty! Twenty points cold profit on the vast venture,
now, and Aleck’s imaginary brokers were shouting frantically
by imaginary long-distance, “Sell! sell! for Heaven’s
sake sell!”
She broke the splendid news to Sally, and he, too, said,
“Sell! sell—oh, don’t make a blunder, now, you own the
earth!—sell, sell!” But she set her iron will and lashed it
amidships, and said she would hold on for five points more
if she died for it.
It was a fatal resolve. The very next day came the historic
crash, the record crash, the devastating crash, when the bottom
fell out of Wall Street, and the whole body of gilt-edged
stocks dropped ninety-five points in five hours, and the
multimillionaire was seen begging his bread in the Bowery.
Aleck sternly held her grip and “put up” ass long as she could,
but at last there came a call which she was powerless to meet,
and her imaginary brokers sold her out. Then, and not till
then, the man in her was vanished, and the woman in her
resumed sway. She put her arms about her husband’s neck
and wept, saying:
“I am to blame, do not forgive me, I cannot bear it. We are
paupers! Paupers, and I am so miserable. The weddings will
never come off; all that is past; we could not even buy the
dentist, now.”
A bitter reproach was on Sally’s tongue: “I begged you to
sell, but you—” He did not say it; he had not the heart to
add a hurt to that broken and repentant spirit. A nobler
thought came to him and he said:
“Bear up, my Aleck, all is not lost! You really never invested
a penny of my uncle’s bequest, but only its
unmaterialized future; what we have lost was only the
incremented harvest from that future by your incomparable
financial judgment and sagacity. Cheer up, banish these griefs;
we still have the thirty thousand untouched; and with the
experience which you have acquired, think what you will be
able to do with it in a couple years! The marriages are not
off, they are only postponed.”
These are blessed words. Aleck saw how true they were,
and their influence was electric; her tears ceased to flow, and
her great spirit rose to its full stature again. With flashing eye and grateful heart, and with hand uplifted in pledge and
prophecy, she said:
“Now and here I proclaim—”
But she was interrupted by a visitor. It was the editor and
proprietor of the Sagamore. He had happened into Lakeside
to pay a duty-call upon an obscure grandmother of his who
was nearing the end of her pilgrimage, and with the idea of
combining business with grief he had looked up the Fosters,
who had been so absorbed in other things for the past four
years that they neglected to pay up their subscription. Six
dollars due. No visitor could have been more welcome. He
would know all about Uncle Tilbury and what his chances
might be getting to be, cemeterywards. They could, of course,
ask no questions, for that would squelch the bequest, but
they could nibble around on the edge of the subject and
hope for results. The scheme did not work. The obtuse editor
did not know he was being nibbled at; but at last, chance
accomplished what art had failed in. In illustration of something
under discussion which required the help of metaphor,
the editor said:
“Land, it’s a tough as Tilbury Foster!—as we say.”
It was sudden, and it made the Fosters jump. The editor
noticed, and said, apologetically:
“No harm intended, I assure you. It’s just a saying; just a
joke, you know—nothing of it. Relation of yours?”
Sally crowded his burning eagerness down, and answered
with all the indifference he could assume:
“I—well, not that I know of, but we’ve heard of him.”
The editor was thankful, and resumed his composure. Sally
added: “Is he—is he—well?”
“Is he well? Why, bless you he’s in Sheol these five years!”
The Fosters were trembling with grief, though it felt like
joy. Sally said, non-committally—and tentatively:
“Ah, well, such is life, and none can escape—not even the
rich are spared.”
The editor laughed.
“If you are including Tilbury,” said he, “it don’t apply. He
hadn’t a cent; the town had to bury him.”
The Fosters sat petrified for two minutes; petrified and
cold. Then, white-faced and weak-voiced, Sally asked:
“Is it true? Do you know it to be true?”
“Well, I should say! I was one of the executors. He hadn’t anything to leave but a wheelbarrow, and he left that to me.
It hadn’t any wheel, and wasn’t any good. Still, it was something,
and so, to square up, I scribbled off a sort of a little
obituarial send-off for him, but it got crowded out.”
The Fosters were not listening—their cup was full, it could
contain no more. They sat with bowed heads, dead to all
things but the ache at their hearts.
An hour later. Still they sat there, bowed, motionless, silent,
the visitor long ago gone, they unaware.
Then they stirred, and lifted their heads wearily, and gazed
at each other wistfully, dreamily, dazed; then presently began
to twaddle to each other in a wandering and childish
way. At intervals they lapsed into silences, leaving a sentence
unfinished, seemingly either unaware of it or losing their
way. Sometimes, when they woke out of these silences they
had a dim and transient consciousness that something had
happened to their minds; then with a dumb and yearning
solicitude they would softly caress each other’s hands in
mutual compassion and support, as if they would say: “I am
near you, I will not forsake you, we will bear it together;
somewhere there is release and forgetfulness, somewhere there
is a grave and peace; be patient, it will not be long.”
They lived yet two years, in mental night, always brooding,
steeped in vague regrets and melancholy dreams, never
speaking; then release came to both on the same day.
Toward the end the darkness lifted from Sally’s ruined mind
for a moment, and he said:
“Vast wealth, acquired by sudden and unwholesome means,
is a snare. It did us no good, transient were its feverish pleasures;
yet for its sake we threw away our sweet and simple
and happy life—let others take warning by us.”
He lay silent awhile, with closed eyes; then as the chill of
death crept upward toward his heart, and consciousness was
fading from his brain, he muttered:
“Money had brought him misery, and he took his revenge
upon us, who had done him no harm. He had his desire:
with base and cunning calculation he left us but thirty thousand,
knowing we would try to increase it, and ruin our life
and break our hearts. Without added expense he could have
left us far above desire of increase, far above the temptation
to speculate, and a kinder soul would have done it; but in
him was no generous spirit, no pity, no—”
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