The Common Lot

XXV

. . . HE had been lying there long hours close to the warm earth that was preparing for a new life. The thin branches of the trees rose bare and severe between him and the blue sky, mementos of the silent winter. The ground about their trunks was matted with dead leaves, through which nothing green had yet pushed its way. Nevertheless, the earth seemed yeasty with promise. The intense, unwonted heat of the April days had broken the crust of soil, and set the sap of life in motion once more. The air was heavy with earthy odors, — a fragrant forecast of Nature’s regeneration. Deep down in the little ravines, and among the pools of the raeadowland beyond, frogs were croaking harshly, filling the solitude of the still slumbering woods with the clamor of awakening life. And through the brown tree trunks, above the tracery of the topmost branches, over the flat fields, there swam the haze of earliest spring, — a vague atmosphere of renascence, the warm breath of mother earth.

The man lay there, empty of thought, feeling merely the mighty movement of things around him, — an inert mass in a vital world. The odors of the earth stirred in him old sensations of vivid springtimes in his youth. He saw again the morning mist swimming above the little Wisconsin lakes where he used to hunt, and felt the throb of joy for the incoming spring. And he remembered how this outer world had spoken to him one day while he was sitting over his work in Paris. Something imperceptible had crept into the room over the endless roofs, and called to him in a low, persistent voice. Then he had listened, joyously putting aside his task, and obeyed the invitation, wandering idly forth into the germinating fields, which in some mysterious way had purified his soul. In his youth that experience had come to him again and again, an impulse from beyond his world, which had led him forth from himself, from the soil of living, to fresh vigor and purity of soul. Latterly, there had come to him no call like this; he had known no abandonment of self in the enveloping force of Nature, no purification of spirit. The trees and the grass, the earth and the sky, all the multitudinous voices of unconscious life, had not spoken to him. Shut within himself, driven by the bitter furies of his own little heart, he had worked from season to season, forgetting the face of Nature. True, he had lived the outdoor life of the world, passed through the beautiful fields each season, just as he had gone to the theatre or the opera. But the earth had not spoken to him, alone, personally, out of her abundant wisdom, garnered through the limitless years. For all the period of his maturity he had forgotten the great mother of life!

Now, wrecked and bruised, he lay there on her breast, as a sick man might lie in the silent room of a hospital and listen to the large commotion of life without. He was content to rest there on the warm earth, listening and waiting for the voice which should come from beyond; content to forget himself, — a creature that had been industriously shaped for eight busy years, a creature of the city and of men, with a self that was his in part only, and was mixed with all those others whom he had touched. That figure of deformity, made in the strife of the city,he no longer recognized to be his. . . . The sun sank into the deepening blue haze of the heavens; the thin shadows of the trees faded from the brown earth; the south wind from the prairies began to rise, blowing strongly, scented by the breeding land over which it had come. As the day drew to its close, the murmuring voices of re-created life ascended from all parts of the earth with a strengthened note. The treetoads were chorusing in the damp hollows, and the spice of roots and mould sucked out by the hot sun was descending once more in damp fragrance to the earth. The moist, crumbling soil beneath the man’s body was opening itself, — stirring, awakening, preparing for the gigantic tasks of renewal, of re-creation, of conception, and birth. An immense, powerful, impersonal life, the greatest life of all, was going forward all about him. In the midst of this mystery he was but an atom, —an accident which counted for nothing.

Copyright, 1903, by ROBERT HERRICK.

That terrible vision of dying men and women no longer haunted the man’s mind. The catastrophe which had shaken him to the roots of his being sank into its place behind the long procession of his acts, which had made him what he was. Now, at last, he began to think coherently, to see lnmself in the whole, step by step, as he had come to be. He saw the old man’s funeral; he remembered his one restless preoccupation about the money which was soon to be his; he recalled his resentment over the will, and his growing lust for that money which had slipped from his grasp. Then he saw the thread of that devious course which he had followed in his efforts to make money. From the first day, in the struggle for success, there rose before his eyes the man Graves. The contractor’s fat, bearded face was the image of his sin, familiar in its cupidinous look. It was the image of that greed to which he had submitted himself, with which he had consented to do evil. From the very hour when he had caught the contractor’s eye in the Canostota, and the two had committed fraud over the weight of steel in an I-beam, there had set forth a long, long train of petty dishonesties, which had created in him the vitiating habit of insincerity. One by one he remembered the fraudulent buildings in which he had had a part, — the school from which he had tried to steal some of the money his uncle had denied him, and finally this hotel which had crumbled at the touch of fire. That was the strange, dramatic climax of the story, fated so to be from the first, petty lust for money, from the first fraud!

Greed, greed! The spirit of greed had eaten him through and through, the lust for money, the desire for the fat things of the world, the ambition to ride high among his fellows. In the world it had a dignified name; it. was called enterprise and ambition. But now he saw it for what it was, greed and lust, nothing more. It was in the air of the city which he had breathed for eight years. And he had justified knavery by Success. He had judged himself mean and small merely because he had failed to cheat and steal and trick “in a large way.” Only the little and the weak need be honest; to the strong all things were right,—he had said glibly. Now, for the first day since his manhood, he saw acts, not blurred by his own passions, not. shifting with the opinions of the day; but he saw them fixed and hard,— acts, living, human acts, each one in its own integrity, with its own irrevocable fate. Acts expressed in lowered eyelids of consent, in shrugs, in meaningful broken phrases, apparently innocent,but torturously deep; acts unprofessional, sharp, dishonest, criminal!

He lay in the gathering twilight, listened, and saw. And at last the soul of the man, which had been long in hiding, came back, and flowed into him once more. A deep, new longing filled his heart, a desire to be once again as he had been before, to rise from his debasement and become clean, to slough off this parasitic self into which he had grown all these years of his strife in the city, to be born anew like the springtime earth. For such longings come to men sickened with the surfeit of their passions.

. . , He knew now why his wife had left him. She had felt the leper taint, which had been growing all the years of their marriage, and had repudiated it. She had cried out against the mere getting and spending of money, to which point those lofty ambitions of his youth had descended. She had loved him as the creator, the builder; and he had given her no visions, but only the sensualities of modem wealth. “Let us begin again and live the common life,” she had cried out to him. “Let us live for work and not for money!” And he had put her aside with contempt. Now he knew that she had done well to leave him to his own day of judgment. And the first impulse in the man’s new soul was to go to her, humbly, and say to her: “You were right! I have sinned against myself, against you, against life, all along the way. Will you accept my repentance, and love me again from the beginning, knowing now the truth?” He desired wistfully to hear her answer; his heart left him in doubt as to what that answer might be. For he understood at last that he had never known this woman, who had been his wife for eight years.

Nevertheless, despite this hunger of his heart for the woman he loved, there rose in him slowly a purging sense of relief from crime and sin committed. It had passed away, was put off from himself. He was to come once more into peace! The upspringing life of the reincarnated earth chanted all about him but one song: “Here I leave my uncleanness. Life is strong and good. There is forgiveness and peace. Here I bury the filth of my deeds, and renew my hope.” Thus man rises again and again from the depths of his abasement; thus springs in him a new hope, a vital, imperishable element, the soul of his being, and he is prepared afresh for the struggle. Yet more, — blindly convinced of the power to rise, to renew himself!

Thus,after the tempest of debauch, little men wake from their carnal desires, and, leaving behind them the uncleanness of their flesh, go forth into the pure morning, subdued and ashamed, yet irresistibly sure that life is good and holds forgiveness and hope for them, too. With the new day they will become like their dreams, clean and pure. Thus, also, those larger men, not eaten by bodily lusts, those greater sinners who are caught on the whirling spikes of bolder passions, who are torn and twisted, — these return at certain hours to the soul within them, and renew there the pure fire of their natures, so that they may enter again the endless contest having hope and health. Thus, above all, the great heart of things, the abundant mother of life, the earth, renews herself eternally according to the laws of her being, and comes forth afresh and undiminished for the business of living.

So, the mere lump of man lying there inert upon the ground felt the great process of renewal all about him, and sucked in fresh life and health. In like manner, years before, in his youth, he had gone down to the ocean, and there had learned something of this mysterious sensation of renewal. When his body was plunged in the cool, black sea-water he had drawn through the pores of his flesh the elemental currents of life. He longed now to escape again from men, to go down to the sea and touch the waters washing in from their remote tidal courses up and down the earth. By such means Nature cleanses and teaches man ! Heedless of man, unconcerned with his follies and vices, impersonal, irresistible, majestic, she receives his head upon her breast, and renews within him his spirit, the power to battle, the power to live.

The fruitful earth holds in her bosom death and life, both together, and out of her comes health. In like manner there lie in the heart of man diverse instincts, — seeds of good and evil, ready to germinate. For long seasons seeds of one kind burst forth in the soil of a man’s nature and thrive. Accident, the intricate web of fate, gives them their fit soil, their heat,their germinating impulse. And the world, seeing the fruit of these seeds alone, calls the man good or bad, and thus makes its rude analysis of character, as something set and fixed, stamped upon the soul forever. But in their own time other seeds, perchance ripening late and slowly, come to their day of germination, seeds of unlike nature, with diverse fruit. Such sprout and send their life forth into the man, creating a new nature which the world will not recognize as his. Thus it was happening with this man: commingled in his heart and brain there had lain diverse seeds of many kinds,— seeds of decay and seeds of life. Impulses of creative purpose, of unselfish work, — these had been long dormant; impulses of lust and greed and deceit, — these had grown rankly in the feverish life of the city until they had flowered in crime. Now had come to him the time of fate: the first harvest of his acts was garnered, and the new seeds of his life were ready to wake from their inhibition in the depths of his being, and put forth their energies, their demands. Some great shock — the agony of dying men ana women — had quickened this new growth. So happens the miracle of rebirth, hidden far away from all human observation, revealing itself first in a consciousness of renewed health and purification.

The song of the springtime earth rose ever upward, calming and healing the man, who at last had caught its message. It said to him,— “Another sun, a new day, an earth ever fresh from the hand of God! Eternal hope — the burial of the corrupt body with its misdeeds; health, and not decay; life, and not death. For life is good! There is forgiveness and renewal for all those who heed.” . . . Through the misty heavens above the trees, the stars glimmered faintly. Over the prairie fields and woodland the night wind passed, — soft, odorous, charged with the breath of the earth in the conceiving time of life. . . .

Under the starlight of the spring night there might be seen the figure of a man walking steadily southwards toward the black horizon of the great city. He walked neither fast nor slow, but steadily, evenly, as if urged by one powerful purpose, some magnetic end that set his nerves and his muscles to the rhythm of action.

XXVI

The architect had a long time to wait in Wheeler’s office that morning. The lawyer rarely came in before ten, so the stenographer said, looking suspiciously into the man’s white, unshaven face. She knew Hart quite well, and she was wondering what was the matter with him, — whether he had been on a spree. He sat in one of the armchairs of the outer office provided for waiting clients, and, looking neither to the right nor to the left, stared at the square of green carpet beneath his feet. When the lawyer entered, with a glance at the seated figure, he said blankly,—

“Come in here!”

Wheeler opened the door to his little office, where he had confessed many a man, and without a word pointed to a chair beside his littered desk. Then he sat down and waited, examining the architect’s face with his dispassionate eyes.

“ Everett, I wanted to see you about — Hart began. Then he stopped, as though surprised by his own voice, which sounded far away, unfamiliar, and unused. The lawyer waited a moment for him to continue, and then he asked in his indifferent manner, —

“So you wanted to see me ?”

“Yes, I want to tell you something,” Jackson began again.

The lawyer wheeled toward his desk, and picked up a little silver letter-opener, which he fingered.

“ About that fire ? ” he asked.

“ Yes, — that and other things.”

Wheeler went to the door, closed it, and returning to his chair, wheeled his face away from his cousin.

“Well, what about it?”

“You know — you saw it in the papers — how the Glenmore burned? You know it was one of Graves’s buildings. I did the plans for him. Well, the newspapers were right: there was crooked work. The plans were all altered after they had been through the Building Department. Graves is in with the whole gang over there. He has all the inspectors in his pocket!”

Hart waited again. He was not saying what he came there to tell. His mind seemed strangely unreliant and confused. While he stumbled, the frown on his cousin’s face deepened into an ugly crease between the eyes. It said as plainly as words, “ What in hell do you come here for, blabbing this to me?” Jackson, reading his look, caught himself and continued more steadily: —

“But I did n’t come here to talk of the fire. It’s about the school. Pemberton was right about that. It was crooked, too! I want to tell you what I know about that.”

Wheeler put down the letter-opener, and rested his chin on the tips of his fingers. The architect told his story slowly, without excitement, trying to give all the details, and the exact figures, busying himself with being precise. The matter was complicated, and it led him to speak again of the hotel and of other affairs, of his entire connection with the contractor, — to tell the complete story of bis business career in the city. The lawyer did not try to stop him, although his face betrayed no interest or comment.

“Well, the upshot of the matter is,” Hart ended, “ that I am through with the whole business, Everett. I am going to get out of it, somehow. And first, I wanted you to know the truth about the school, and to take this for the trustees.”

1 Ie laid on the desk a large, fat envelope, which he had filled that morning from his safety deposit box.

“There’s about thirty thousand there, in stocks and bonds and some land. I thought I would n’t wait to put it into cash,” he explained. “It’s pretty nearly all I have got, Everett. Part of that stock in the Glenmore Graves gave me was for legitimate commission, but I have put that in, too. You can force Graves to make good the rest. I can figure out for you what he owes. And I ’ll do what I can to help you make him square the account. If you can’t get hold of Graves, why, I’m ready to give you my personal note for the rest and pay it as soon as I can.”

Wheeler poked the envelope on the desk without taking it up.

“Conscience money?” he remarked slowly. “I don’t want your wad. I wish you had chucked it in the river, done anything with it but brought it here! I fixed that matter up once.”

The architect was able to realize the contempt, the ironical humor with which Wheeler’s tone was charged, and his lips tightened. But he made no reply. After the experiences of the last two days he cared little for what his cousin might say or think. In some manner he had passed completely outside of the world where such matters counted. He was dulled to all but a few considerations.

“ Say! ” the lawyer iterated, “I thought we’d closed that little matter for good. But I can tell you there’s one person who’ll be tickled,” he laughed disgustedly. “And that’s old Pemberton. He thought you were a scamp from the word go. Now he’ll be well set up when the judge tells him this. He’ll take an irreligious pleasure in it!”

Hart said nothing, and the two men faced each other sombrely. Finally, the lawyer exclaimed, —

“So you lost your nerve!”

That was not what Hart thought, of it, and he winced perceptibly, as he replied : —

“Well, you can call it that! And I guess that if you had seen those people dropping into that burning building, and known what I knew — Well, what’s the use of talking! I [am done with the whole thing,— done with it for good.”

The lawyer eyed him sharply, unsympathetically, curious, in a cold manner, of the psychology of the man before him. Hart’s sturdy body, which was a trifle inclined to fleshiness, seemed to have shrunken and to be loose in his clothes. The bones of his jaw came out heavily in his unshaven face, and below his eyes the flesh was black, shading into gray. Ilis tweed office suit was rumpled out of shape, and there were signs of the muddy roads on his trousers and boots. Usually so careful and tidy in dress, he now seemed to have lost all consciousness of his appearance.

Wheeler had never felt much respect for his cousin as a young man. Then the lawyer considered him to be somewhat “light-weight,” given to feminine interests in art and literature, feeling himself to be above his homely American environment. But since their uncle’s death, the architect had won his approval by the practical ability he had shown in pushing his way in the Chicago world, in getting together a flourishing business, and making a success of his profession. Now that there was revealed to him the uncertain means by which this outward success had been obtained, he reverted easily to his earlier judgment. The man was really a light-weight, a weakling. The lawyer despised weaklings: they made the real troubles in this life. He could not see to its depth the tragedy before him, even as the stern Pemberton might have seen it. He merely saw another nasty mess, a scandal that would probably get about the city, even if his cousin and the contractor escaped the Grand Jury for this Glenmore affair. He had little use for men who went wrong and “lost their nerve” !

“Well,” he said at last, “you need n’t bother about that note just yet. You’ll have troubles enough for one while, I expect. I suppose I shall have to take this, though,” — he tapped the fat envelope,— “and lay the matter before the trustees. I ’ll let you know what they decide to do.”

“All right,” Hart answered. As he did not rise immediately from his chair, the lawyer turned to his desk with an air of dismissal. When the architect at last got wearily to his feet, Wheeler asked, without looking up, —

“Have you seen that man Graves this morning ?”

“No, I came here the first thing.”

“He was in here to see me late yesterday. He seemed afraid that you might split on him in this Glenmore business.”

Hart listened, his eyes looking over his cousin’s head far out through the office window, his mind concerned with other matters.

“Had n’t you better get out of here for a few weeks?” the lawyer suggested casually. “Take a vacation. You seem to need a rest, bad. The papers’ll quiet down after a while, — they always do,” he added explanatorily.

As a matter of fact,he had promised the contractor that he would do what he could to keep Hart from making any trouble. It was obviously best for the architect to be out of sight for the present, in some safe place where he could not be got at for awkward explanations.

“I’ve been thinking of going away for a few days,” Jackson replied slowly, a flush spreading over his pallid face. “I’m going on to the Falls to see Helen. But I’m not going to run away. They can find me when they want me. And I shall be back before long, anyway.”

Wheeler did not tell him that the coroner had already summoned his jury, and that the first inquiry was to begin the next day. If he were going to Vermont, it was just as well that he should get away before he was summoned by the coroner.

“Well,” he said, taking another look at Ids cousin, “whatever you do, get your nerve together. Men like you should n’t play with fire. They’d better stick to the straight game! ”

The architect knew what that meant! If he had been some cunning promoter who had had wit enough to swindle the public out of any sum of money that ran into the millions, or if he had been some banker who had known how to ruin the credit of an enterprise which he wished to buy cheaply, Wheeler would have extended to him a cynical tolerance, and if his honesty were questioned, would have admitted merely that “there were stories about, of course, —there always were stories when a man was smart enough to make some money quick!” But, unfortunately, he belonged to the category of unsuccessful,petty criminals, and he “had lost his nerve”!

He realized all this, and yet in the wreck which he had made of his life, he was indifferent to the world’s injustice. What men thought or said about him had marvelously little importance just now. This crisis had wonderfully simplified life for him: he saw a few things which must be done, and to these he was setting himself with a slow will. His face held new, grave lines, which gave it a sort of manliness that it had not possessed before.

“You’d better see Graves before you leave, and get together on this thing,” Wheeler remarked.

“I can’t see any use in that,” Jackson protested slowly. “I saw him yesterday and told him my views. He made me the treasurer of his company, and if they get me iip and ask me questions,—why, I shall tell what I know about it. That’s all there is to that!”

“Arc you going to tell Helen the whole story, too?” the lawyer asked bluntly.

“Yes! That’s why I’m going down there.” Jackson felt his face burn with humiliation for the first time since he had begun his story.

“I suppose she’ll have to know,” Wheeler admitted softly. “It will cut her pretty deep.”

He was wondering whether she could forgive tins weak fellow, crawling back to her now, his courage gone,broken for life, as he judged. He suspected that she might pardon him, even though she had left him inexplicably. She would forgive her husband when he was at the end of his rope; she was made that way. For the moment, the softness of character in such women irritated him. There were other women whom he liked and admired less than her, — Mrs. Phillips was one,—who woidd not tolerate a flabby sinner like this man. But to Helen, disgrace would make little difference. And hie was sorry for it all, because he loved the woman, and he could feel her tragedy, though he was impervious to the man’s.

“Women have bum luck sometimes,” he reflected aloud. “They have to take all the man’s troubles as well as their own.” Then he added not unkindly, “ You had better think well what it means to her and to the children before you do anything to make matters worse. I’ll keep an eye on what goes on here, and let you know if you’re needed, — if you can do any good.”

Neither offered to shake hands, and Hart went out of the office without replying to the last remark. At the street entrance he hesitated a moment, as if to get his bearings, and then slowly walked down the crowded street in the direction of his office. The city sights were strangelv foreign to him, as if he had come back to them after a long period of absence. The jostle of human beings on the pavement, the roar in the streets, were like the meaningless gyrations of a machine. With a repugnance that weighted his steps he turned in at the door of his building, and crowded into one of the cages that were swallowing and disgorging their human burdens in the mid-forenoon. In his office there had settled an air of listless idleness, now that Cook, the mainspring of the place, was no longer at his post. Without looking at the accumulated mail on his desk Hart called the stenographer, and dictated to her some instructions for his partner, Stewart, who had just landed in New York on his way home from a vacation in Europe, The girl received his dictation with an offish, impertinent glance in her eyes that said,

“Something’s wrong with this place, I guess!” When Hart had finished, she said,—

“Say, Graves was in here twice this morning, and wanted me to let him know as soon as you came in. He wanted to know where you were. What shall I say to him ?”

Hart thought a moment before replying. He did not wisli to see the contractor, that was very clear, and yet he was unwilling to seem to run away, to escape the man. Moreover, he realized vaguely a certain claim in complicity. There was trouble ahead for them both, surely, and Graves had his right to be considered.

“If Mr. Graves calls, bring him in here,” he said to the stenographer, and turned to his mail.

He had some final matters to attend to, and then he should take the train. If the contractor came back before he got off, he would see him. Half an hour later, while lie was still tearing open his letters and jotting notes for the answers, his door opened and Graves walked in. He had less assurance than on the afternoon before. The strain was beginning to tell even on his coarse fibre.

“So you’ve come to!” he exclaimed with an attempt to be at his ease, taking a chair beside the desk.

“What do you want?” the architect demanded sharply.

“ Say, did you see the papers this morning?” Graves asked, ignoring the question.

Hart shook his head; he had no curiosity to know what the newspapers were saying.

“They’re making an awful kick! It’s mostly politics, of course. They’ve got the mayor on the run. He’s suspended the head of the department. Bloom was a good friend of mine. That’ll scare the rest considerable. And then there’s talk of bringing civil suits against the hotel company, and the officers individually.”

He paused to see what impression this news might make on the architect.

“They can’t get much out of me!” Hart answered quietly. “I turned over to Wheeler pretty nearly every dollar I have got. That’s on account of the school business,” he added, thinking the contractor would not comprehend rightly his meaning.

Graves stared at him in disgust. He had some idea of getting the architect to pay part of the expense of “keeping the City Hall quiet.” Now the man had outwitted him and put his money beyond his reach.

“So you’ve seen Mr. Wheeler?”

“Just come from there.”

“He told you he’d help us out of this hole?”

“We did n’t discuss it.”

“ I’ve seen to Van Meyer myself. He’s where he can’t do no harm. And I guess it’s all right over there,” — he pointed with his thumb in the direction of the city hall, — “though it’ll cost a sight of money if those fellers lose their jobs! Now, if we keep quiet, they can’t do nothing but bring their suits for damages. I ain’t afraid of that!”

“I suppose not,” Hart replied dryly. “ It does n’t touch you. They ’re all straw names but mine, are n’t they ?”

“Just now, there’s this damned coroner,” Graves went on, ignoring the last remark. “ The inquest begins to-morrow. He’ll try to fix the blame, of course, and hold some one to the Grand Jury. He’s got to, to quiet the papers.”

“I suppose so,” Hart assented wearily.

“But they’ve got nothing to go on, if you only hold your tongue,” Graves ripped out incautiously. “And you’ve got to hold your jaw!”

The man’s dictatorial manner angered the architect. He rose hastily from his desk, gathering some papers and putting them into his bag.

“I told you yesterday, Graves, that I would have nothing more to do with you in this Glenmore business. I don’t see what you came in here for. Let them go ahead and do what they can. I’ll stand for my share of the trouble.”

“You —Graves burst out. “You” —

“I’ve got an engagement, Mr. Graves, and there’s no use in our talking this matter over any more.”

He reached for his coat and hat.

“But I tell you, Hart, that you can’t be a quitter in this business. Did n’t your cousin tell you that, too ?”

“It makes no difference what he might say,” Hart retorted doggedly, holding open the door into the hall.

“I’ll smash you, sure thing, if you do me up this dirty way!”

The contractor crossed the room to where Hart stood, as if he meant to strike then and there. Hart looked at him indifferently. The man disgusted and irritated him: he wondered how he could ever have submitted himself to him. He held the door open, and the contractor passed out into the hall, which was empty.

“I’ll smash you!” he repeated, less loudly.

“All right!” the architect muttered. “ I guess that won’t matter much now.”

Graves kept by his side in the elevator, and followed him out into the street.

“Say! Step over to Burke’s place with me,” he urged in a more conciliatory tone.

“See here!” the architect answered, stopping on the sidewalk. “It’s no use talking. I’ve done with you and your methods. Can’t you see that ? I don’t intend to get you into trouble if I can help it. But I don’t mean to sneak out of this or tell any lies to save your hide. I’m on my way out of the city now, to see my family, and shall be away for a few days. Wheeler knows where I shall be, and he’ll let me know when I am wanted. They won’t get around to me for some little time yet, probably. If they summon me, why, I suppose I shall come back!”

The contractor, hearing that Hart was about to leave the city, felt relieved. It would be easier to deal with his cousin, the lawyer, who might be able to keep the architect from making a fool of himself. So he walked on with Hart toward the station in a calmer frame of mind. As if he realized the mistake he had made in trying to bully his accomplice, he began to put forward his personal difficulties apologetically.

“This fire has hit me hard. Of course the Glenmore will be a dead loss, and the banks have begun to call my loans. Then it’ll take a lot of ready money to keep those fellers over there quiet. I was just getting where I could n’t be touched when this fire came, and now I shall have to begin over pretty nearly. You don’t know, Hart, what hard sledding it’s been to build up my business with nothing back of me to start on! ”

The architect realized that Graves was making an appeal to his sympathies, and although this confession of weakness roused his contempt, he began to see more dispassionately the contractor’s point of view. The man was fighting for his life, and there could be nothing reasonable to him in a determination to make a bad matter worse. No speaking out now could save those hapless victims of greed, who had lost their lives in the wretched building.

“I don’t want to ruin my family no more than you do, Mr. Hart,” the contractor persisted. “And you can’t make me so much trouble as you will yourself. You can sec that!” he added meaningly.

Hart turned on the man angrily.

“I have heard about enough, Graves! It’s no use your going on. I tell you I mean to come back, and stand my share of the trouble, — yes, — if it breaks me! Ho you hear? If it breaks me! Now good-day.”

The contractor turned away, scowling, like a dog that had been kicked into the street. Hart hurried into the station and bought his ticket. He had not looked up his eastern connections, remembering merely that Helen had left Chicago by this road, and he took the first train east in his overwhelming desire to get to her, to tell her all, to submit. . . . As the heavy train moved slowly out of the station, he felt strangely relieved from the perplexities of the morning. The unconscious physical influence of mere motion, of going somewhere, soothed his irritated nerves.

He had been goaded into his final declaration to the contractor, for lie had felt the ground slipping from his resolution under the persistent appeals of the man. But as the train shot out into the prairie he turned the thing over in his mind with all its varying aspects. Could he come back, as he had said, and bring on himself and his family the shame and disgrace of public exposure ? He comforted himself with the thought that he had the courage, that in leaving the city he was not merely running away to escape the consequences of his connivance with fraud. Yes, he could go back, — if it were necessary! While the train moved across the states, his heart grew calmer, stronger: whatever might be the outcome, he knew that his instinct had been right, — that he had done well to go first to his wife.

XXVII

The old Jackson homestead at Vernon Falls was a high, narrow, colonial house with three gables. Upon the broad terrace facing the south side there was a row of graceful, “ wineglass ’ ’ elms. Below the terrace reached a broad, level meadow, which was marked irregularly by a dark line where a little brook wandered, and beyond the meadow passed the white road to Vend am, the nearest station. From this highway a lane led through copses of alder and birch along the east side of the meadow to the old house, which was withdrawn nearly an eighth of a mile from the public road.

It was an austere, silent, lonely place. Powers Jackson during the last years of his life had built a great barn and sheds behind the house with the purpose of making a stock farm, but since his death these had been shut up. He had also built a broad veranda on the terrace along the south side, which contrasted strangely with the weather-beaten,hand-made clapboards of the old building. The gaunt, lofty house seemed to be drawing away from the frivolous addition at its base.

Hart had often spent his long vacations at the farm with his mother when he was at college. Yet that April afternoon, when he came upon it from the bend in the Verulam road, it seemed to him strange and unreal. His memories of the house and the meadow in front of it had grown and flowered, until in his imagination it was a spot of tender, aristocratic grace, a harmony of swaying elm branches and turfy lawn, lichencd stone walls and marvelous gray clapboards. To-day it rose bare and severe across the brown meadow, unrelieved by the leafless branches of the elms that crisscrossed the south front. The slanting sun struck the little panes of the upper windows, and made them blaze with a mysterious, intensely yellow fire. Involuntarily his pace slackened as he turned from the highroad into the lane. The place appeared silent, deserted. Was Helen there in the old house ? Could she understand ? Could she forgive him ? . . .

The northern spring had barely begun. It was cold, grudging, tentative, scarcely touching the brown meadow with faint green. Hiding its charm, like the delicate first beauty of Puritan women, it gave an uncertain promise of future performance, — of a hidden, reticent beauty!

The architect lingered in the lane, watching the sun fade from the windows of the house, until the air suddenly became chill and the scene was blank. Then, as he stepped on toward the house, he caught sight of a woman’s figure stooping in the thicket beside the road. His heart began suddenly to beat, telling him, almost before his eyes had recognized the bent figure, that this was his wife. She looked up at last, and seeing him coming toward her, rose and stood there, her hands filled with tendrils of some plant that she had been plucking up by its roots, her face troubled and disturbed.

“Nell!” he called as he came nearer, “Nell!” And then he stopped, baffled. For long hours on the train he had thought what he should say when he met her, but now his premeditated words seemed to him futile. Fie saw the gulf that might lie between them forever. He looked into her troubled face. She was wonderfully, newly beautiful! Her hair was parted in the middle, and rippled loosely over the temples to the ears, in the way she had worn it as a girl, a fashion which he had laughed her out of. She had grown larger, ampler, and in her linen dress, with its flat collar revealing the white neck, without ornament of any sort, her features came out strong and distinct. That curve of the upper lip, which had always made the face appealing, no longer trembled at the touch of emotion. There was a repression and mature self-command about her, as if, having been driven back upon her own heart, she had recovered possession of herself once more, and no longer belonged to a man. She was beautiful, wholly woman, and yet to the husband waiting there she was his no longer!

“Nell,” he began once more, still waiting at a little distance from her, “I have come here to you, as you said.”

Her arms hung limply at her sides, with the trailing plant drooping across her skirt, as though, thus taken by surprise, she were waiting for him to declare himself. He stepped nearer quickly, moved by a terrible fear that, after all, it was too late, that she had passed beyond his reach.

“You know what I mean! I have come to tell you that you were right when you went away. You were right all along, and I have been wrong!”

But as he spoke she reached out her arms to him, beseeching him, drawing him to her, in commiseration for him. She put her arms on his shoulders, clasping them behind his neck, thus drawing him and holding him from her at the same time. Her lips trembled, and her breath fluttered as she looked into his eyes. . . .

“Francis! Francis!” she murmured, holding him as he tried to take her in his arms. . . .

And by the murmur of his name he knew that she could forgive him ; but he felt strangely humble and little beside her. He saw himself in her eyes as he had never seen himself before. Slowly she drew him to her and kissed his lips, tenderly, unpassionately.

“Theboys are over there by the brook,” she pointed across the meadow.

They sat down on the crumbling stone wall to wait for them, and presently, seeing their father, they came tumbling over the wall with cries of, “Dad, it’s dad, — he’s come!” and together they went on to the house.

Mrs. Spellman received her son-in-law in her equable, unknowing manner, as if she had expected him to arrive on that day. After supper husband and wife sat in the west parlor, which the architect remembered just as it was this day, with the same faded drab carpet, the brass fireirons, and worn furniture. The highbacked walnut writing-table stood in the same corner beside the window. Outside, a drooping elm branch swept softly across the glass pane. Nothing here was altered, nothing added, save the new lives of the modern generation. When Mrs. Spellman had taken the boys away to bed, Jackson turned to his wife:—

“Now I must tell you the whole story, Nell!”

“Yes,” she answered.

And he began slowly to tell her the story as he had lived through it that night when he lay exhausted on the earth beneath the stars, — the story of his work in the city, of the acts which for eight years he had hidden from all, even himself. He explained as well as he could the tangled web of his dealings with the contractor from the day when he had met him in the Canostota until the time of the arrangement over the school and the hotel. When he came to the end, to the horrible fire which had licked up the fraudulent Glenmore before his own eyes, tears fell upon his hands, which his wife held tightly in hers, and he could feel her body tremble against his.

“And that was the end! It made me know — what it all meant! Of course, those men and women might have been caught anyway, no matter how well the building was put up, — there’s no telling, — and Graves would have done the same job whether I had been in with him or not. Still, that does n’t count. When I saw them there, trapped, fighting helplessly for their lives, I felt as if I had stood by and let them be murdered, — and made money by it, too!”

The horror of those minutes revived as he went over the story, and he paused wearily.

“ Somehow,” he resumed, “ it was all of a piece, — dirty work. Everything I had touched, pretty nearly, since I had started, seemed rotten. It made me sick all over. . . . Well, that was the end! I went to Everett and tried to square the school matter as well as I could. I gave him all I had made out of it and more,— about every dollar I had. It leaves us where we started. But, Nell, I knew you would want me to do that first before I came here!”

He was glad that he could give her this proof of his sincerity. She said nothing, but she raised her eyes, still filled with tears, to his face with a cairn, answering look.

“It’s a bad story, as bad as it could well be,” he resumed. “I see it clearly enough now. I wanted uncle’s money, wanted the easy time, and the good things, and all that. Then, when I did n’t get it, I went in to make a big success and get the stuff anyhow. I saw a lot of men, no more able than I, who were making a lot of money, and nothing seemed to count so long as somehow you made good. I wanted to make good. It was a pretty cheap ambition!”

“ Yes ! ” she exclaimed fervently, “cheap. Oh, so cheap!”

Yet, in these eight months that she had lived by herself she had come to see more justly the causes of things, — she had grown wiser. She held him now less rigidly, less remorselessly to her own ideal of life. For she had begun to understand that the poison which had eaten him was in the air he had breathed; it was the spirit of the city where he worked, of the country, of the day,— the spirit of greed. It presented itself to men in the struggle for existence at every turn of the road, insidiously and honorably disguised as ambition and courage. She saw the man’s temptation to strive with his competitors, as they strove, for the things which they held to be desirable. And she had come to know that to stand firmly against this current of the day demanded a heat of nature, a character, that the man she had married and worshiped had never possessed. lie was of his time, neither better nor wrorse than his fellows, with their appetite for pleasure, their pride, —that ancient childish pride of man in the consideration and envy of his kind. . . .

“So you have it all, and it’s bad enough, God knows! Nell, can you ever really forgive it, forget it, and love me again?”

For answer she kissed him understandingly. Now that her heart knew him utterly, with all his cowardice and common failings, she might still love him, even foreseeing the faltering and unideal way of his steps, giving him, like many women, her second love, the love that protects in place of the love that adores. And with that kiss there began a newT marriage with the man she had seen large in her dreams the man who had been her hero. . . .

The elms swayed softly in the night wind, brushing across the window by their side. The old house was very still with the subdued calm of age, and man and wife sat there together, without words, looking far beyond them toward the future that was to be theirs.

XXVIII

The next day and the next went by in the peace of the old house. Now that the event which had so wholly occupied Hart’s mind since the night when the Glenmore burned had come about; now that he was here in the old place, and had his wife and children once more, he began to consider the wreck of his affairs which had been left behind in Chicago. And he began to ask himself whether, after all, it was necessary for him to return to the city and make public his shame at the hearing before the coroner. He was not clear what service to justice or to the dead who had been sacrificed, as much through the corruption of civic government as by his own wrong-doing, his testimony would accomplish. That it would surely ruin him professionally was beyond the shadow of a doubt. lie could well picture to himself the ferocious glee with which the Thunderer would receive his evidence! Was it necessary to give his wife and his children into the Thunderer’s merciless hands ?

The evening mail of the second day brought a letter from Wheeler. The coroner’s inquest, the lawyer wrote, was likely to drag on for a week or more. The coroner was a Republican, and “had it in for the city administration.” He was trying to make all the personal and political capital that he could out of the affair. At present, as Jackson could see from the newspapers, they were engaged in examining minor witnesses,—the servants and employees of the Glenmore, the police and the firemen, — trying to account for the origin of the fire. So the architect could be of no use now, at any rate, and had better stay quietly where he was until the matter took more definite shape. In the meantime it was understood that he was ill at his summer home. Graves, so Wheeler added, had been in to see him again. It was foolish to irritate the contractor, and make the matter worse than it was already, etc.

Then Hart opened the bundle of newspapers, and glanced through their padded pages. His eye was caught by an editorial caption: —

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GLENMORE TRAGEDY ?

The article was a sarcastic summary of the results thus far of the inquest, done in the Thunderer s best maimer. So far, the editorial writer pointed out, the inquiry had been confined to examining chamber-maids, bell-boys, and the police, and to quarreling about the exact location of the fire when it started. The Thunderer hoped that before closing the inquest the coroner would have the courage to go higher, and to probe the Building Department, and to ascertain what Mr. Bloom’s connection with the matter was, and whether his inspectors had ever made a report on the Glenmore. Further, the coroner might to advantage summon the officers of the hotel company, who had erected this fire-trap, and the architect whose plans for a fire-proof structure had been so lamentably inadequate. The Thunderer understood that the Glenmore Hotel Corporation was one of those paper corporations, officered by clerks, behind which unscrupulous capitalists shielded themselves. Of the officers whose names appeared in the papers of incorporation, three were clerks in the employ of a contractor named Graves, and a fourth was a prominent young architect who had prepared the plans for the building. The people of Chicago wanted to hear what these men had to say about the Glenmore hotel,especially Bloom, Graves, and ITart. “Look higher, Mr, Coroner ! ” the Thunderer concluded solemnly.

When Helen came into the room a little later, she found her husband plunged in thought, the sheets of the newspaper scattered about him.

“What is it?” she asked quickly.

He picked up the paper and handed it to her. She read the article in the Thunderer, her brow wrinkling in puzzle as she went on. When she had finished it, she let it fall from her hands, and looked at her husband inquiringly.

“They want you to go out there and tell about the building of the hotel?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered dully. “I knew it would come. You see Graves made me the treasurer of the corporation. I was only a dummy like the others,” he explained. “The corporation was just Graves! But I told Everett that I should go back and tell what I knew. Only he does n’t think it necessary", now!”

“What would happen? What does it all mean ? ”

He explained to her what the legal results might be in case the coroner’s jury held him and others to the Grand Jury, as criminally liable for the disaster.

Then, if the Grand Jury found a true bill against him, whenever he returned to Chicago he could be tried for manslaughter. But even if in his absence he should be held to the Grand Jury, there were many steps in the complex machinery of legal justice, and he could probably escape without trial. Evidently Wheeler, who knew the involutions of the district attorney’s office, was counting on the probability that no one would be brought to trial in this hotel case, — that the disaster would be buried in that gulf of abortive justice where crimes against the people at large are smothered.

“And in that case,” Hart concluded, “there would be no use in letting them tear me to pieces in the papers!”

“But you must go back!” she exclaimed, brushing aside his reasoning. “You must tell all!”

“Everett doesn’t think so,” he protested, “and I can’t see the good of it. They won’t do anything. It’s just politics, the whole investigation. But the newspapers would hound me to a finish. It would be impossible for me to get work in Chicago for a long time, if ever. And it woidd cover you and the boys with disgrace. I have paid enough!”

“It must be done,” she repeated in a low voice.

She was not clear what good might come of his testimony: she was ignorant of the legal conditions. But she had a fundamental sense of justice: men must pay for the evil they do, — pay fully and pay publicly. A private repentance and a private penance were to her incomplete and trivial.

“I’ve got to earn our living,” he urged. “You must think of that! If I am shut out of Chicago, we must begin somewhere else at the bottom.”

She was not ready to consider that question.

“You must n’t think of us,” she answered. “Francis, you can’t really pay for all the wrong that has been done. But perhaps the truth will do some good. And unless you are ready to face the open disgrace, — why, you have done nothing! The money you gave back to the trustees is nothing. This is the only way!”

It was the only way for him, at least. With his buoyant, pliant nature, as she understood it, some final act, definite, done in the eyes of the world that knew him, was needed to strengthen the fibre of his being, to record in his own soul its best resolve.

He had been ready enough in the stress of his first feeling after the catastrophe to stand before the world and confess his share in the wrong that had been done. Then he was eager to free his mind of its intolerable burden. But now that his excitement had faded, leaving him to face the difficulties of his future, he saw in all its fatal detail what public disgrace woidd mean, and he drew back. It was folly to invite ruin!

Yet in the end the woman held him to her ideal. Late that night he consented to telegraph Wheeler of his immediate return, and to take the first train for the west, there to await the coroner’s summons.

“I shall goon with you, of course,” she said. “We will all go, — the boys, too. Mamma will stay and close the house. Perhaps you can’t get away very soon after it is over. I want to be there with you,” she answered to all his objections.

“You know what it will mean!” he exclaimed warningly, as the last log burst into ashes on the hearth. “Nell, it’s worst for you and the boys. It means ruin, nothing less!”

“Never!” she protested. “Ruin is in ourselves. It means that we shall have to do without friends, and society, and things, especially things. And I have come to hate things. They make one small and mean. I never thought we shouldhave them. And I don’twantthem for the boys, either. There is work! the best thing in life, — work for itself, without pay in things, without bribes! We’ll have that and bread, Francis!”

“But the public disgrace,” he still objected.

“Better even that than the disgrace between us,” she whispered. “No, no! There is no other way.”

At least there was no other way to her love, and that love he could not live without, cost him what it might.

“You are strong!” he confessed his admiration.

“And you, too!” she whispered back, her face illumined with the courage of her nature.

Little Powers, the younger boy, had not been well, and the next morning, when he was no better, Jackson urged that it would he unwise to take him, that he had best go back alone. But Helen would not consent, knowing that he made the most of the child’s illness to spare her the trial which was to come.

“It is nothing,” she said. “Mother thinks it will do no harm to take him. And if he is going to be sick, it would be better for us to be there in the city than here.”

So they drove over to Yerulam and took the train. After the boys had been put to bed for the night, Helen came back to the section where the architect was sitting, looking dully into the black fields.

“What do you think of this ?” she exclaimed, putting a letter into his hands. “I got it just as we were leaving. It’s from Yenetia, — read it!”

He took the thick envelope from her hands, remembering suddenly the girl as he had last seen her, when she had summed him up in one bitter, opprobrious word. The sting of that word had gone, effaced by the experience which he had suffered since, and he opened the letter listlessly.

MY DEAR MOTHER Superior,—Do you recognize the Forest Park postmark ? I am not going abroad after all. At least not just yet. Mother’s gone, sails this week. Now listen, and I’ll make your hair stand on end.

First mother! She’s had a grievous disappointment lately. Colonel Raymond,— you know him of course,— the little gray-whiskered railroad man, mother’s pet indulgence for I can’t say how long,—has at last been freed from the legal attachment of one wife and is about to take another at once. Whom do you think? The youngest Stewart girl! ! ! The wedding is for the 3d of June. We are not going, naturally. It was a crushing blow to poor mamma, — she put her sailing forward a whole week to escape from her friends. She was positively getting old under it.

I know you don’t like this, so I cut it very short. Now prepare! I am going to embrace the serious life, at last, — I mean matrimony. Really and truly, this time. Youknow the man, but you’d never think: he’s our doctor, Dr. Coburn. Yes! Yres! ! Yes! ! !

Mother threw a fit when I told her, and then, of course, I knew I was right. We are to be married any time, when he finishes up some work he has on hand, so that he can give me some attention. We might look in on you in your convent retirement, if sufficiently urged. Then 1 ’ll tell you all about it, and make him show you all the little tricks I have taught him. Mamma still calls him “that fellow,” but he’s by way of being a very distinguished man on account of some bug he’s discovered. The medical journals are taking off their hats to him. I read the notices,— don’t you believe I am fast enough in love ?

Well, I have had to send mamma abroad to recover her nerves, and I am out here fixing the place, which is to be rented to some awful people, whom you never heard of. By the way, the doctor is n’t going to let me use my money,— mother ought to thank him for that! — and he won’t promise to earn much money, either. He has no idea of keeping me in the state to which the Lord called me. He says if I want that, I can marry Stephen Lane or any other man. He means to earn enough for a sensible woman to live on, and if I am not conlent I can go out and learn how to earn some more for myself. Did you ever hear of a man who had the nerve to talk that way to the woman he wants to marry ? . . .

We are going to have a laboratory on the West Side, — that gave Mrs. P. another fit, — and over it we’ll have our rooms. Then when he’s made enough rabbits dotty with his bug, and has written his papers, maybe we’ll go abroad. . . .

There are lots of other things, your things, I want to talk over, but my pen is too blunt for them. Only, I hope, oh, so much, dear, that you are to be happy again. Mr. Wheeler told me that Jack was with you now. My love to the Prodigal Man. Good-by, dear. . . .

“Isn’t it good!” Helen exclaimed, with the readiness good women have to welcome a newcomer to that state which has brought them such doubtful happiness.

“I shouldn’t think he would have been the man to satisfy her,” Jackson answered. “I always thought she was ambitious, could n’t find any one out there to give her everything she was after.”

“ Perhaps Venetia has seen enough of that kind of thing !”

(To be continued.)