The Cost

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THE COST
By DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I A FATHER INVITES DISASTER
II OLIVIA TO THE RESCUE
III AND SCARBOROUGH
IV A DUMONT TRIUMPH
V FOUR FRIENDS
VI "LIKE HIS FATHER"
VII PAULINE AWAKENS
VIII THE DECISION
IX A THOROUGHBRED RUNS AWAY
X MRS. JOHN DUMONT
XI YOUNG AMERICA
XII AFTER EIGHT YEARS
XIII "MY SISTER IN LAW, GLADYS
XIV STRAINING AT THE ANCHORS
XV GRADUATED PEARLS
XVI CHOICE AMONG EVILS
XVII TWO AND THE BARRIER
XVIII ON THE FARM
XIX PAULINE GOES INTO POLITICS
XX A MAN IN HIS MIGHT
XXI A COYOTE AT BAY
XXII STORMS IN THE WEST
XXIII A SEA SURPRISE
XXIV DUMONT BETRAYS DUMONT
XXV THE FALLEN KING
XXVI A DESPERATE RALLY
XXVII THE OTHER MAN'S MIGHT
XXVIII AFTER THE LONG WINTER

THE COST

I.

A FATHER INVITES DISASTER

Pauline Gardiner joined us on the day that we, the Second Reader
class, moved from the basement to the top story of the old
Central Public School. Her mother brought her and, leaving,
looked round at us, meeting for an instant each pair of curious
eyes with friendly appeal.

We knew well the enchanted house where she lived--stately,
retreated far into large grounds in Jefferson Street; a high
brick wall all round, and on top of the wall broken glass set in
cement. Behind that impassable barrier which so teased our young
audacity were flower-beds and "shrub" bushes, whose blossoms
were wonderfully sweet if held a while in the closed hand; grape
arbors and shade and fruit trees, haunted by bees; winding walks
strewn fresh each spring with tan-bark that has such a clean,
strong odor, especially just after a rain, and that is at once
firm and soft beneath the feet. And in the midst stood the only
apricot tree in Saint X. As few of us had tasted apricots, and
as those few pronounced them better far than oranges or even
bananas, that tree was the climax of tantalization.

The place had belonged to a childless old couple who hated
children--or did they bar them out and drive them away because
the sight and sound of them quickened the ache of empty old age
into a pain too keen to bear? The husband died, the widow went
away to her old maid sister at Madison; and the Gardiners, coming
from Cincinnati to live in the town where Colonel Gardiner was
born and had spent his youth, bought the place. On our way to
and from school in the first weeks of that term, pausing as
always to gaze in through the iron gates of the drive, we had
each day seen Pauline walking alone among the flowers. And she
would stop and smile at us; but she was apparently too shy to
come to the gates; and we, with the memory of the cross old
couple awing us, dared not attempt to make friends with her.

She was eight years old, tall for her age, slender but strong,
naturally graceful. Her hazel eyes were always dancing
mischievously. She liked boys' games better than girls'. In her
second week she induced several of the more daring girls to go
with her to the pond below town and there engage in a raft-race
with the boys. And when John Dumont, seeing that the girls' raft
was about to win, thrust the one he was piloting into it and
upset it, she was the only girl who did not scream at the shock
of the sudden tumble into the water or rise in tears from the
shallow, muddy bottom.

She tried going barefooted; she was always getting bruised or cut
in attempts--usually successful-- at boys' recklessness; yet her
voice was sweet and her manner toward others, gentle. She hid
her face when Miss Stone whipped any one-- more fearful far than
the rise and fall of Miss Stone's ferule was the soaring and
sinking of her broad, bristling eyebrows.

From the outset John Dumont took especial delight in teasing
her--John Dumont, the roughest boy in the school. He was seven
years older than she, but was only in the Fourth Reader--a
laggard in his studies because his mind was incurious about books
and the like, was absorbed in games, in playing soldier and
robber, in swimming and sledding, in orchard-looting and
fighting. He was impudent and domineering, a bully but not a
coward, good-natured when deferred to, the feared leader of a
boisterous, imitative clique. Until Pauline came he had rarely
noticed a girl--never except to play her some prank more or less
cruel.

After the adventure of the raft he watched Pauline afar off,
revolving plans for approaching her without impairing his
barbaric dignity, for subduing her without subduing himself to
her. But he knew only one way of making friends, the only kind
of friends he had or could conceive--loyal subjects, ruled
through their weaknesses and fears. And as that way was to give
the desired addition to his court a sound thrashing, he felt it
must be modified somewhat to help him in his present conquest.
He tied her hair to the back of her desk; he snowballed her and
his sister Gladys home from school. He raided her playhouse and
broke her dishes and--she giving desperate battle--fled with only
the parents of her doll family. With Gladys shrieking for their
mother, he shook her out of a tree in their yard, and it sprained
her ankle so severely that she had to stay away from school for a
month. The net result of a year's arduous efforts was that she
had singled him out for detestation--this when her conquest of
him was complete because she had never told on him, had never in
her worst encounters with him shown the white feather.

But he had acted more wisely than he knew, for she had at least
singled him out from the crowd of boys. And there was a certain
frank good-nature about him, a fearlessness--and she could not
help admiring his strength and leadership. Presently she
discovered his secret--that his persecutions were not through
hatred of her but through anger at her resistance, anger at his
own weakness in being fascinated by her. This discovery came
while she was shut in the house with her sprained ankle. As she
sat at her corner bay-window she saw him hovering in the
neighborhood, now in the alley at the side of the house, now
hurrying past, whistling loudly as if bent upon some gay and
remote errand, now skulking along as if he had stolen something,
again seated on the curbstone at the farthest crossing from which
he could see her window out of the corner of his eye. She
understood--and forthwith forgave the past. She was immensely
flattered that this big, audacious creature, so arrogant with the
boys, so contemptuous toward the girls, should be her captive.

When she was in her first year at the High School and he in his
last he walked home with her every day; and they regarded
themselves as engaged. Her once golden hair had darkened now to
a beautiful brown with red flashing from its waves; and her skin
was a clear olive pallid but healthy. And she had shot up into a
tall, slender young woman; her mother yielded to her pleadings,
let her put her hair into a long knot at the back of her neck and
wear skirts ALMOST to the ground.

When he came from Ann Arbor for his first Christmas holidays each
found the other grown into a new person. She thought him a
marvel of wisdom and worldly experience. He thought her a marvel
of ideal womanhood--gay, lively; not a bit "narrow" in judging
him, yet narrow to primness in her ideas of what she herself
could do, and withal charming physically. He would not have
cared to explain how he came by the capacity for such
sophisticated judgment of a young woman. They were to be married
as soon as he had his degree; and he was immediately to be
admitted to partnership in his father's woolen mills--the largest
in the state of Indiana.

He had been home three weeks of the long vacation between his
sophomore and junior years. There appeared on the town's big and
busy stream of gossip, stories of his life at Ann Arbor--of
drinking and gambling and wild "tears" in Detroit. And it was
noted that the fast young men of Saint X--so every one called
Saint Christopher--were going a more rapid gait. Those turbulent
fretters against the dam of dullness and stern repression of even
normal and harmless gaiety had long caused scandal. But never
before had they been so daring, so defiant.

One night after leaving Pauline he went to play poker in Charley
Braddock's rooms. Braddock, only son of the richest banker in
Saint X, had furnished the loft of his father's stable as
bachelor quarters and entertained his friends there without fear
that the noise would break the sleep and rouse the suspicions of
his father. That night, besides Braddock and Dumont, there were
Jim Cauldwell and his brother Will. As they played they drank;
and Dumont, winning steadily, became offensive in his raillery.
There was a quarrel, a fight; Will Cauldwell, accidently toppled
down a steep stairway by Dumont, was picked up with a broken arm
and leg.

By noon the next day the town was boiling with this outbreak of
deviltry in the leading young men, the sons and prospective
successors of the "bulwarks of religion and morality." The
Episcopalian and Methodist ministers preached against Dumont,
that "importer of Satan's ways into our peaceful midst," and
against Charley Braddock with his "ante-room to Sheol"--the
Reverend Sweetser had just learned the distinction between Sheol
and Hades. The Presbyterian preacher wrestled spiritually with
Will Cauldwell and so wrought upon his depression that he gave
out a solemn statement of confession, remorse and reform. In
painting himself in dark colors he painted Jack Dumont jet black.

Pauline had known that Dumont was "lively"--he was far too
proud of his wild oats wholly to conceal them from her. And she
had all the tolerance and fascinated admiration of feminine youth
for the friskiness of masculine freedom. Thus, though she did
not precisely approve what he and his friends had done, she took
no such serious view of it as did her parents and his. The most
she could do with her father was to persuade him to suspend
sentence pending the conclusion of an investigation into Jack's
doings at the University of Michigan and in Detroit. Colonel
Gardiner was not so narrow or so severe as Jack said or as
Pauline thought. He loved his daughter; so he inquired
thoroughly. He knew that his daughter loved Dumont; so he judged
liberally. When he had done he ordered the engagement broken and
forbade Dumont the house.

"He is not wild merely; he is--worse than you can imagine,"
said the colonel to his wife, in concluding his account of his
discoveries and of Dumont's evasive and reluctant admissions--an
account so carefully expurgated that it completely misled her.
"Tell Pauline as much as you can--enough to convince her."

This, when Mrs. Gardiner was not herself convinced. She regarded
the colonel as too high-minded to be a fit judge of human
frailty; and his over-caution in explanation had given her the
feeling that he had a standard for a husband for their daughter
which only another such rare man as himself could live up to.
Further, she had always been extremely reserved in
mother-and-daughter talk with Pauline, and thus could not now
give her a clear idea of what little she had been able to gather
from Colonel Gardiner's half-truths. This typical enacting of a
familiar domestic comedy-tragedy had the usual result: the girl
was confirmed in her original opinion and stand.

"Jack's been a little too lively," was her unexpressed
conclusion from her mother's dilution of her father's dilution of
the ugly truth. "He's sorry and won't do it again, and--well,
I'd hate a milksop. Father has forgotten that he was young
himself once."

Dumont's father and mother charged against Ann Arbor that which
they might have charged against their own alternations of tyranny
and license, had they not been humanly lenient in self-excuse.
"No more college!" said his father.

"The place for you, young man, is my office, where I can keep an
eye or two on you."

"That suits me," replied the son, indifferently--he made small
pretense of repentance at home.

"I never wanted to go to college."

"Yes, it was your mother's doing," said old Dumont. "Now
we'll try MY way of educating a boy."

So Jack entered the service of his father's god-of-the-six-days,
and immediately showed astonishing talent and
twelve-to-fourteen-hour assiduity. He did not try to talk with
Pauline. He went nowhere but to business; he avoided the young
men.

"It's a bad idea to let your home town know too much about
you," he reflected, and he resolved that his future gambols out
of bounds should be in the security of distant and large
cities--and they were. Seven months after he went to work he
amazed and delighted his father by informing him that he had
bought five hundred shares of stock in the mills--he had made the
money, fifty-odd thousand dollars, by a speculation in wool. He
was completely reestablished with his father and with all Saint X
except Colonel Gardiner.

"That young Jack Dumont's a wonder," said everybody. "He'll
make the biggest kind of a fortune or the biggest kind of a smash
before he gets through."

He felt that he was fully entitled to the rights of the
regenerate; he went to Colonel Gardiner's law office boldly to
claim them.

At sight of him the colonel's face hardened into an expression as
near to hate as its habit of kindliness would concede. "Well,
sir!" said he, sharply, eying the young man over the tops of his
glasses.

Dumont stiffened his strong, rather stocky figure and said, his
face a study of youthful frankness: "You know what I've come
for, sir. I want you to give me a trial."

"No!" Colonel Gardiner shut his lips firmly.

"Good morning, sir!" And he was writing again.

"You are very hard," said Dumont, bitterly.

"You are driving me to ruin."

"How DARE you!" The old man rose and went up to him, eyes
blazing scorn. "You deceive others, but not me with my
daughter's welfare as my first duty. It is an insult to her that
you presume to lift your eyes to her."

Dumont colored and haughtily raised his head. He met the
colonel's fiery gaze without flinching.

"I was no worse than other young men--"

"It's a slander upon young men for you to say that they--that
any of them with a spark of decency--would do as you have done,
as you DO! Leave my office at once, sir!"

"I've not only repented--I've shown that I was ashamed of--of
that," said Dumont. "Yet you refuse me a chance!"

The colonel was shaking with anger.

"You left here for New York last Thursday night," he said.
"Where and how did you spend Saturday night and Sunday and
Monday?"

Dumont's eyes shifted and sank.

"It's false," he muttered. "It's lies."

"I expected this call from you," continued Colonel Gardiner,
"and I prepared for it so that I could do what was right. I'd
rather see my daughter in her shroud than in a wedding-dress for
you."

Dumont left without speaking or looking up.

"The old fox!" he said to himself. "Spying on me--what an
idiot I was not to look out for that. The narrow old fool! He
doesn't know what `man of the world' means. But I'll marry her
in spite of him. I'll let nobody cheat me out of what I want,
what belongs to me."

A few nights afterward he went to a dance at Braddock's, hunted
out Pauline and seated himself beside her. In a year he had not
been so near her, though they had seen each other every few days
and he had written her many letters which she had read, had
treasured, but had been held from answering by her sense of
honor, unless her looks whenever their eyes met could be called
answers.

"You mustn't, Jack," she said, her breath coming fast, her eyes
fever-bright. "Father has forbidden me--and it'll only make him
the harder."

"You, too, Polly? Well, then, I don't care what becomes of
me."

He looked so desperate that she was frightened.

"It isn't that, Jack--you KNOW it isn't that."

"I've been to see your father. And he told me he'd never
consent--never! I don't deserve that--and I can't stand it to
lose you. No matter what I've done, God knows I love you,
Polly."

Pauline's face was pale. Her hands, in her lap, were gripping
her little handkerchief.

"You don't say that, too--you don't say `never'?"

She raised her eyes to his and their look thrilled through and
through him. "Yes, John, I say `never'--I'll NEVER give you
up."

All the decent instincts in his nature showed in his handsome
face, in which time had not as yet had the chance clearly to
write character. "No wonder I love you--there never was anybody
so brave and so true as you. But you must help me. I must see
you and talk to you--once in a while, anyhow."

Pauline flushed painfully.

"Not till--they--let me--or I'm older, John. They've always
trusted me and left me free. And I can't deceive them."

He liked this--it was another proof that she was, through and
through, the sort of woman who was worthy to be his wife.

"Well--we'll wait," he said. "And if they won't be fair to
us, why, we'll have a right to do the best we can." He gave her
a tragic look.

"I've set my heart on you, Polly, and I never can stand it not
to get what I've set my heart on. If I lost you, I'd go straight
to ruin."

She might have been a great deal older and wiser and still not
have seen in this a confirmation of her father's judgment of her
lover. And her parents had unconsciously driven her into a
mental state in which, if he had committed a crime, it would have
seemed to her their fault rather than his. The next day she
opened the subject with her mother--the subject that was never
out of their minds.

"I can't forget him, mother. I CAN'T give him up." With the
splendid confidence of youth, "I can save him--he'll do anything
for my sake." With the touching ignorance of youth, "He's done
nothing so very dreadful, I'm sure--I'd believe him against the
whole world."

And in the evening her mother approached her father. She was in
sympathy with Pauline, though her loyalty to her husband made her
careful not to show it. She had small confidence in a man's
judgments of men on their woman-side, great confidence in the
power of women to change and uplift men.

"Father," said she, when they were alone on the side porch
after supper, "have you noticed how hard Polly is taking IT?"

His eyes and the sudden deepening of the lines in his face
answered her.

"Don't you think maybe we've been a little--too--severe?"

"I've tried to think so, but--" He shook his head. "Maggie,
he's hopeless, hopeless."

"I don't know much about those things." This was a mere form
of speech. She thought she knew all there was to be known; and
as she was an intelligent woman who had lived a long time and had
a normal human curiosity she did know a great deal. But, after
the fashion of many of the women of the older generation, she had
left undisturbed his delusion that her goodness was the result
not of intelligence but of ignorance. "But I can't help fearing
it isn't right to condemn a young man forever because he was led
away as a boy."

"I can't discuss it with you, Maggie--it's a degradation even to
speak of him before a good woman. You must rely upon my
judgment. Polly must put him out of her head."

"But what am I to tell her? You can't make a woman like our
Pauline put a man out of her life when she loves him unless you
give her a reason that satisfies her. And if you don't give ME a
reason that satisfies me how can I give HER a reason that will
satisfy her?"

"I'll talk to her," said the colonel, after a long pause.
"She must--she shall give him up, mother."

"I've tried to persuade her to go to visit Olivia," continued
Mrs. Gardiner. "But she won't. And she doesn't want me to ask
Olivia here."

"I'll ask Olivia before I speak to her."

Mrs. Gardiner went up to her daughter's room--it had been her
play-room, then her study, and was now graduated into her
sitting-room. She was dreaming over a book--Tennyson's poems.
She looked up, eyes full of hope.

"He has some good reason, dear," began her mother.

"What is it?" demanded Pauline.

"I can't tell you any more than I've told you already," replied
her mother, trying not to show her feelings in her face.

"Why does he treat me--treat you--like two naughty little
children?" said Pauline, impatiently tossing the book on the
table.

"Pauline!" Her mother's voice was sharp in reproof. "How can
you place any one before your father!"

Pauline was silent--she had dropped the veil over herself.
"I--I--where did you place father--when--when--" Her eyes were
laughing again.

"You know he'd never oppose your happiness, Polly." Mrs.
Gardiner was smoothing her daughter's turbulent red-brown hair.
"You'll only have to wait under a little more trying
circumstances. And if he's right, the truth will come out. And
if he's mistaken and John's all you think him, then that will
come out."

Pauline knew her father was not opposing her through tyranny or
pride of opinion or sheer prejudice; but she felt that this was
another case of age's lack of sympathy with youth, felt it with
all the intensity of infatuated seventeen made doubly determined
by opposition and concealment. The next evening he and she were
walking together in the garden. He suddenly put his arm round
her and drew her close to him and kissed her.

"You know I shouldn't if I didn't think it the only
course--don't you, Pauline?" he said in a broken voice that went
straight to her heart.

"Yes, father." Then, after a silence: "But--we--we've been
sweethearts since we were children. And--I--father, I MUST stand
by him."

"Won't you trust me, child? Won't you believe ME rather than
him?"

Pauline's only answer was a sigh. They loved each the other; he
adored her, she reverenced him. But between them, thick and
high, rose the barrier of custom and training. Comradeship,
confidence were impossible.

II.

OLIVIA TO THE RESCUE.

With the first glance into Olivia's dark gray eyes Pauline ceased
to resent her as an intruder. And soon she was feeling that some
sort of dawn was assailing her night.

Olivia was the older by three years. She seemed--and for her
years, was--serious and wise because, as the eldest of a large
family, she was lieutenant-general to her mother. Further, she
had always had her own way--when it was the right way and did not
conflict with justice to her brothers and sisters. And often her
parents let her have her own way when it was the wrong way, nor
did they spoil the lesson by mitigating disagreeable
consequences.

"Do as you please," her mother used to say, when doing as she
pleased would involve less of mischief than of valuable
experience, "and perhaps you'll learn to please to do
sensibly." Again. her father would restrain her mother from
interference--"Oh, let the girl alone. She's got to teach
herself how to behave, and she can't begin a minute too young."
This training had produced a self-reliant and self-governing
Olivia.

She wondered at the change in Pauline--Pauline, the
light-hearted, the effervescent of laughter and life, now silent
and almost somber. It was two weeks before she, not easily won
to the confiding mood for all her frankness, let Olivia into her
secret. Of course, it was at night; of course, they were in the
same bed. And when Olivia had heard she came nearer to the truth
about Dumont than had Pauline's mother. But, while she felt sure
there was a way to cure Pauline, she knew that way was not the
one which had been pursued. "They've only made her obstinate,"
she thought, as she, lying with hands clasped behind her head,
watched Pauline, propped upon an elbow, staring with dreamful
determination into the moonlight.

"It'll come out all right," she said; her voice always
suggested that she knew what she was talking about. "Your
father'll give in sooner or later--if YOU don't change."

"But he's so bitter against Jack," replied Pauline. "He won't
listen to his side--to our side--of it."

"Anyhow, what's the use of anticipating trouble? You wouldn't
get married yet. And if he's worthwhile he'll wait."

Pauline had been even gentler than her own judgment in painting
her lover for her cousin's inspection. So, she could not explain
to her why there was necessity for haste, could not confess her
conviction that every month he lived away from her was a month of
peril to him.

"We want it settled," she said evasively.

"I haven't seen him around anywhere," went on Olivia. "Is he
here now?"

"He's in Chicago--in charge of his father's office there. He
may stay all winter."

"No, there's no hurry," went on Olivia. "Besides, you ought
to meet other men. It isn't a good idea for a girl to marry the
man she's been brought up with before she's had a chance to get
acquainted with other men." Olivia drew this maxim from
experience--she had been engaged to a school-days lover when she
went away to Battle Field to college; she broke it off when,
going home on vacation, she saw him again from the point of wider
view.

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