The Cost

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She wished Fanshaw were as rich as Leonora longed for him to be.
She was glad Dumont seemed to be putting him in the way of making
a fortune. He was distasteful to her, because she saw that he
was an ill-tempered sycophant under a pretense of manliness thick
enough to shield him from the unobservant eyes of a world of men
and women greedy of flattery and busy each with himself or
herself. But for Leonora's sake she invited him. And Leonora
was appreciative, was witty, never monotonous or commonplace,
most helpful in getting up entertainments, and good to look
at--always beautifully dressed and as fresh as if just from a
bath; sparkling green eyes, usually with good-humored mockery in
them; hard, smooth, glistening shoulders and arms; lips a crimson
line, at once cold and sensuous.

On a Friday in December Pauline came up from Dawn Hill and, after
two hours at the new house, went to the jeweler's to buy a
wedding present for Aurora Galloway. As she was passing the
counter where the superintendent had his office, his assistant
said: "Beg pardon, Mrs. Dumont. The necklace came in this
morning. Would you like to look at it?"

She paused, not clearly hearing him. He took a box from the safe
behind him and lifted from it a magnificent necklace of graduated
pearls with a huge solitaire diamond clasp. "It's one of the
finest we ever got together," he went on. "But you can see for
yourself." He was flushing in the excitement of his eagerness
to ingratiate himself with such a distinguished customer.

"Beautiful!" said Pauline, taking the necklace as he held it
out to her. "May I ask whom it's for?"

The clerk looked puzzled, then frightened, as the implications of
her obvious ignorance dawned upon him.

"Oh--I--I----" He almost snatched it from her, dropped it into
the box, put on the lid. And he stood with mouth ajar and
forehead beaded.

"Please give it to me again," said Pauline, coldly. "I had
not finished looking at it."

His uneasy eyes spied the superintendent approaching. He grew
scarlet, then white, and in an agony of terror blurted out:
"Here comes the superintendent. I beg you, Mrs. Dumont, don't
tell him I showed it to you. I've made some sort of a mistake.
You'll ruin me if you speak of it to any one. I never thought it
might be intended as a surprise to you. Indeed, I wasn't
supposed to know anything about it. Maybe I was mistaken----"

His look and voice were so pitiful that Pauline replied
reassuringly: "I understand--I'll say nothing. Please show me
those," and she pointed to a tray of unset rubies in the
show-case.

And when the superintendent, bowing obsequiously, came up himself
to take charge of this important customer, she was deep in the
rubies which the assistant was showing her with hands that shook
and fingers that blundered.

She did not permit her feelings to appear until she was in her
carriage again and secure from observation. The clerk's theory
she could not entertain for an instant, contradicted as it was by
the facts of eight years. She knew she had surprised Dumont.
She had learned nothing new; but it forced her to stare straight
into the face of that which she had been ignoring, that which she
must continue to ignore if she was to meet the ever heavier and
crueler exactions of the debt she had incurred when she betrayed
her father and mother and herself. At a time when her mind was
filled with bitter contrasts between what was and what might have
been, it brought bluntly to her the precise kind of life she was
leading, the precise kind of surroundings she was tolerating.

"Whom can he be giving such a gift?" she wondered. And she had
an impulse to confide in Leonora to the extent of encouraging her
to hint who it was. "She would certainly know. No doubt
everybody knows, except me."

She called for her, as she had promised, and took her to lunch at
Sherry's. But the impulse to confide died as Leonora talked--of
money, of ways of spending money; of people who had money, and
those who hadn't money; of people who were spending too much
money, of those who weren't spending enough money; of what she
would do if she had money, of what many did to get money. Money,
money, money--it was all of the web and most of the woof of her
talk. Now it ran boldly on the surface of the pattern; now it
was half hid under something about art or books or plays or
schemes for patronizing the poor and undermining their
self-respect--but it was always there.

For the first time Leonora jarred upon her fiercely--unendurably.
She listened until the sound grew indistinct, became mingled with
the chatter of that money-flaunting throng. And presently the
chatter seemed to her to be a maddening repetition of one word,
money--the central idea in all the thought and all the action of
these people. "I must get away," she thought, "or I shall cry
out." And she left abruptly, alleging that she must hurry to
catch her train.

Money-mad! her thoughts ran on. The only test of honor--money,
and ability and willingness to spend it. They must have money or
they're nobodies. And if they have money, who cares where it
came from? No one asks where the men get it--why should any one
ask where the women get it?

XVI.

CHOICE AMONG EVILS.

A few days afterward--it was a Wednesday--Pauline came up to town
early in the afternoon, as she had an appointment with the
dressmaker and was going to the opera in the evening. At the
dressmaker's, while she waited for a fitter to return from the
workroom, she glanced at a newspaper spread upon the table so
that its entire front page was in view. It was filled with an
account of how the Woolens Monopoly had, in that bitter winter,
advanced prices twenty to thirty-five per cent. all along the
line. From the center of the page stared a picture of John
Dumont--its expression peculiarly arrogant and sinister.

She read the head-lines only, then turned from the table. But on
the drive up-town she stopped the carriage at the Savoy and sent
the footman to the news-stand to get the paper. She read the
article through--parts of it several times.

She had Langdon and Honoria Longview at dinner that night; by
indirect questioning she drew him on to confirm the article, to
describe how the Woolens Monopoly was "giving the country an
old-fashioned winter." On the way to the opera she was ashamed
of her ermine wrap enfolding her from the slightest sense of the
icy air. She did not hear the singers, was hardly conscious of
her surroundings. As they left the Metropolitan she threw back
her wrap and sat with her neck bared to the intense cold.

"I say, don't do that!" protested Langdon.

She reluctantly drew the fur about her. But when she had dropped
him and then Honoria and was driving on up the avenue alone, she
bared her shoulders and arms again--"like a silly child," she
said. But it gave her a certain satisfaction, for she felt like
one who has a secret store of food in time of famine and feasts
upon it. And she sat unprotected.

"Is Mr. Dumont in?" she asked the butler as he closed the door
of their palace behind her.

"I think he is, ma'am."

"Please tell him I'd like to see him--in the library."

She had to wait only three or four minutes before he came--in
smoking jacket and slippers. It was long since she had looked at
him so carefully as she did then; and she noted how much grosser
he was, the puffs under his eyes, the lines of cruelty that were
coming out strongly with autocratic power and the custom of
receiving meek obedience. And her heart sank. "Useless," she
said to herself. "Utterly useless!" And the incident of the
necklace and its reminders of all she had suffered from him and
through him came trooping into her mind; and it seemed to her
that she could not speak, could not even remain in the room with
him.

He dropped into a chair before the open fire. "Horribly cold,
isn't it?"

She moved uneasily. He slowly lighted a cigar and began to smoke
it, his attitude one of waiting.

"I've been thinking," she began at last--she was looking
reflectively into the fire--"about your great talent for
business and finance. You formed your big combination, and
because you understand everything about wool you employ more men,
you pay higher wages, and you make the goods better than ever,
and at less cost."

"Between a third and a half cheaper," he said. "We employ
thirty thousand more men, and since we settled the last
strike"--a grim smile that would have meant a great deal to her
had she known the history of that strike and how hard he had
fought before he gave in--"we've paid thirty per cent. higher
wages. Yet the profits are--well, you can imagine."

"And you've made millions for yourself and for those in with
you."

"I haven't developed my ideas for nothing."

She paused again. It was several minutes before she went on:

"When a doctor or a man of science or a philosopher makes a
discovery that'll be a benefit to the world"--she looked at him
suddenly, earnest, appealing--"he gives it freely. And he gets
honor and fame. Why shouldn't you do that, John?" She had
forgotten herself in her subject.

He smiled into the fire--hardly a day passed that he did not have
presented to him some scheme for relieving him of the burden of
his riches; here was another, and from such an unexpected
quarter!

"You could be rich, too. We spend twenty, fifty times as much
as we can possibly enjoy; and you have more than we could
possibly spend. Why shouldn't a man with financial genius be
like men with other kinds of genius? Why should he be the only
one to stay down on the level with dull, money-grubbing, sordid
kinds of people? Why shouldn't he have ideals?"

He made no reply. Indeed, so earnest was she that she did not
give him time, but immediately went on:

"Just think, John! Instead of giving out in these charities and
philanthropies--I never did believe in them--they're bound to be
more or less degrading to the people that take, and when it's so
hard to help a friend with money without harming him, how much
harder it must be to help strangers. Instead of those things,
why not be really great? Just think, John, how the world would
honor you and how you would feel, if you used your genius to make
the necessaries cheap for all these fellow-beings of ours who
have such a hard time getting on. That would be real
superiority--and our life now is so vain, so empty. It's brutal,
John."

"What do you propose?" he asked, curious as always when a new
idea was presented to him. And this was certainly
new--apparently, philanthropy without expense.

"You are master. You can do as you please. Why not put your
great combine on such a basis that it would bring an honest, just
return to you and the others, and would pay the highest possible
wages, and would give the people the benefit of what your genius
for manufacturing and for finance has made possible? I think we
who are so comfortable and never have to think of the necessaries
of life forget how much a few cents here and there mean to most
people. And the things you control mean all the difference
between warmth and cold, between life and death, John!"

As she talked he settled back into his chair, and his face
hardened into its unyielding expression. A preposterous project!
Just like a good, sentimental woman. Not philanthropy without
expense, but philanthropy at the expense both, of his fortune and
of his position as a master. To use his brain and his life for
those ungrateful people who derided his benefactions as either
contributions to "the conscience fund" or as indirect attempts
at public bribery! He could not conceal his impatience--though
he did not venture to put it into words.

"If we--if you and I, John," she hurried on, leaning toward him
in her earnestness, "had something like that to live for, it
might come to be very different with us--and--I'm thinking of
Gardiner most of all. This'll ruin him some day. No one, NO
ONE, can lead this kind of life without being dragged down,
without becoming selfish and sordid and cruel."

"You don't understand," he said curtly, without looking at her.
"I never heard of such--such sentimentalism."

She winced and was silent, sat watching his bold, strong profile.
Presently she said in a changed, strange, strained voice: "What
I asked to see you for was--John, won't you put the prices--at
least where they were at the beginning of this dreadful winter?"

"Oh--I see!" he exclaimed. "You've been listening to the lies
about me."

"READING," she said, her eyes flashing at the insult in the
accusation that she had let people attack him to her.

"Well, reading then," he went on, wondering what he had said
that angered her. And he made an elaborate explanation--about
"the necessity of meeting fixed charges" which he himself had
fixed, about "fair share of prosperity," "everything more
expensive," "the country better able to pay," "every one
doing as we are," and so on.

She listened closely; she had not come ignorant of the subject,
and she penetrated his sophistries. When he saw her expression,
saw he had failed to convince her, into, his eyes came the look
she understood well--the look that told her she would only
infuriate him and bruise herself by flinging herself against the
iron of his resolve.

"You must let me attend to my own business," he ended, his tone
good-natured, his eyes hard.

She sat staring into the fire for several minutes--from her eyes
looked a will as strong as his. Then she rose and, her voice
lower than before but vibrating, said: "All round us--here in
New York--all over this country--away off in Europe--I can see
them--I can feel them--SUFFERING! As you yourself said, it's
HORRIBLY cold!" She drew herself up and faced him, a light in
her eyes before which he visibly shrank. "Yes, it's YOUR
business. But it shan't be mine or MY boy's!"

And she left the room. In the morning she returned to Dawn Hill
and arranged her affairs so that she would be free to go. Not
since the spring day, nearly nine years before, when she began
that Vergil lesson which ended in a lesson in the pitilessness of
consequences that was not yet finished, had her heart been so
light, so hopeful. In vain she reminded herself that the doing
of this larger duty, so imperative, nevertheless endangered her
father and mother. "They will be proud that I'm doing it," she
assured herself.

"For Gardiner's sake, as well as for mine, they'll be glad I
separated him and myself from this debased life. They will--they
MUST, since it is right!" And already she felt the easing of
the bonds that had never failed to cut deeper into the living
flesh whenever she had ventured to hope that she was at last
growing used to them.

"Free!" she said to herself exultantly. She dared to exult,
but she did not dare to express to herself the hopes, the wild,
incredible hopes, which the very thought of freedom set to
quivering deep down in her, as the first warmth makes the life
toss in its slumber in the planted seed.

On Friday she came up to New York late in the afternoon, and in
the evening went to the opera--for a last look round. As the
lights were lowering for the rise of the curtain on the second
act, Leonora and her husband entered the box. She had forgotten
inviting them. She gave Leonora the chair in front and took the
one behind--Millicent Rowland, whom she herself brought, had the
other front seat. As her chair was midway between the two, she
was seeing across Leonora's shoulders. Presently Dumont came in
and took the chair behind Leonora's and leaned forward, his chin
almost touching the slope of her neck as he talked to her in an
undertone, she greatly amused or pretending to be.

The light from the stage fell across Leonora's bosom, fell upon a
magnificent string of graduated pearls clasped with a huge
solitaire beyond question the string the jeweler's clerk had
blunderingly shown her. And there was Dumont's heavy, coarse
profile outlined against Leonora's cheek and throat, her cynical,
sensuous profile showing just beyond.

Open sprang a hundred doors of memory; into Pauline's mind was
discharged avalanche after avalanche of dreadful thoughts. "No!
No!" she protested. "How infamous to think such things of my
best friend!" But she tried in vain to thrust suspicions,
accusations, proofs, back into the closets. Instead, she sank
under the flood of them--sick and certain.

When the lights went up she said: "I'm feeling badly all at
once. I'm afraid I'll have to take you home, Milly."

"Are you ill, dear?" asked Leonora.

"Oh, no--just faint," she replied, in a voice which she
succeeded in making fairly natural.

"Please don't move. Stay on--you really must."

The other man--Shenstone--helped her and Millicent with their
wraps and accompanied them to their carriage. When she had set
Millicent down she drew a long breath of relief. For the first
time in seven years her course lay straight before her. "I must
be free!" she said. "I must be ENTIRELY free--free before the
whole world--I and my boy."

The next morning, in the midst of her preparations to take the
ten-o'clock limited for the West, her maid brought a note to
her--a copy of a National Woolens Company circular to the trade,
setting forth that "owing to a gratifying easing in the prices
for raw wool, the Company are able to announce and take great
pleasure in announcing a ten per cent. reduction." On the
margin Dumont had scrawled "To go out to-morrow and to be
followed in ten days by fifteen per cent. more. Couldn't resist
your appeal." Thus by the sheer luck that had so often
supplemented his skill and mitigated his mistakes, he had yielded
to her plea just in time to confuse the issue between her and
him.

She read the circular and the scrawl with a sinking heart.
"Nevertheless, I shall go!" she tried to protest. "True, he
won't send out this circular if I do. But what does it matter,
one infamy more or less in him? Besides, he will accomplish his
purpose in some other way of which I shall not know." But this
was only the beginning of the battle. Punishment on punishment
for an act which seemed right at the time had made her morbid,
distrustful of herself. And she could not conquer the dread lest
her longing to be free was blinding her, was luring her on to
fresh calamities, involving all whom she cared for, all who cared
for her. Whichever way she looked she could see only a choice
between wrongs. To stay under the same roof with him or at Dawn
Hill--self-respect put that out of the question. To free
herself--how could she, when it meant sacrificing her parents and
also the thousands shivering under the extortions of his
monopoly?

In the end she chose the course that seemed to combine the least
evil with the most good. She would go to the Eyrie, and the
world and her father and mother would think she was absenting
herself from her husband to attend to the bringing up of her boy.
She would see even less of Scarborough than she saw when she was
last at Saint X.

That afternoon she wrote to Dumont:

Since we had our talk I have found out about Leonora. It is
impossible for me to stay here. I shall go West to-morrow. But
I shall not go to my father's; because of your circular I shall
go to the Eyrie, instead--at least for the present.

PAULINE DUMONT.

Two weeks after she was again settled at the Eyrie, Langdon
appeared in Saint X, alleging business at the National Woolens'
factories there. He accepted her invitation to stay with her,
and devoted himself to Gladys, who took up her flirtation with
him precisely where she had dropped it when they bade each the
other a mock-mournful good-by five months before. They were so
realistic that Pauline came to the satisfying conclusion that her
sister-in-law was either in earnest with Langdon or not in
earnest with anybody. If she had not been avoiding Scarborough,
she would probably have seen Gladys' real game--to use Langdon as
a stalking horse for him.

"No doubt Scarborough, like all men, imagines he's above
jealousy," Gladys had said to herself, casting her keen eyes
over the situation. "But there never was a man who didn't race
better with a pace-maker than on an empty track."

Toward the end of Langdon's first week Pauline's suspicions as to
one of the objects of his winter trip West were confirmed by his
saying quite casually: "Dumont's dropped Fanshaw, and Leonora's
talking of the stage. In fact, she's gone abroad to study."

When he was leaving, after nearly three weeks, he asked her when
she was coming back East.

"Never--I hope," she said, her fingers playing with the
close-cropped curls of her boy standing beside her.

"I fancied so--I fancied so," replied Langdon, his eyes showing
that he understood her and that he knew she understood for whom
he had asked.

"You are going to stay on--at the Eyrie?"

"I think so, unless something--disquieting--occurs. I've not
made up my mind. Fate plays such queer tricks that I've stopped
guessing at to-morrow."

"What was it Miss Dumont's friend, Scarborough, quoted from
Spinoza at Atwater's the other night? `If a stone, on its way
from the sling through the air, could speak, it would say, "How
free I am!'" Is that the way you feel?"

There came into Pauline's eyes a look of pain so intense that he
glanced away.

"We choose a path blindfold," she said, her tone as light as
her look was dark, "and we must go where it goes--there's no
other ever afterward."

"But if it leads down?"

"All the PATHS lead up," she replied with a sad smile. "It's
the precipices that lead down."

Gladys joined them and Langdon said to her:

"Well, good-by, Miss Dumont--don't get married till you see
me." He patted the boy on the shoulder. "Good-by,
Gardiner--remember, we men must always be brave, and gentle with
the ladies. Good-by, Mrs. Dumont--keep away from the precipices.
And if you should want to come back to us you'll have no trouble
in finding us. We're a lot of slow old rotters, and we'll be
just where you left us--yawning, and shying at new people and at
all new ideas except about clothes, and gossiping about each
other." And he was in the auto and off for the station.

XVII

TWO AND THE BARRIER.

Scarborough often rode with Gladys and Pauline, sometimes with
Gladys alone. One afternoon in August he came expecting to go
out with both. But Gladys was not well that day. She had
examined her pale face and deeply circled eyes in her glass; she
had counseled with her maid--a discreetly and soothingly frank
French woman. Too late to telephone him, she had overruled her
longing to see him and had decided that at what she hoped was his
"critical stage" it would be wiser not to show herself to him
thus even in her most becoming tea-gown, which compelled the eyes
of the beholder to a fascinating game of hide and seek with her
neck and arms and the lines of her figure.

"And Mrs. Dumont?" inquired Scarborough of the servant who
brought Gladys' message and note.

"She's out walking, sir."

Scarborough rode away, taking the long drive through the grounds
of the Eyrie, as it would save him a mile of dusty and not
well-shaded highway. A few hundred yards and he was passing the
sloping meadows that lay golden bronze in the sun, beyond the
narrow fringe of wood skirting and shielding the drive. The
grass and clover had been cut. Part of it was spread where it
had fallen, part had been raked into little hillocks ready for
the wagons. At the edge of one of these hillocks far down the
slope he saw the tail of a pale blue skirt, a white parasol cast
upon the stubble beside it. He reined in his horse, hesitated,
dismounted, tied his bridle round a sapling. He strode across
the field toward the hillock that had betrayed its secret to him.

"Do I interrupt?" he called when he was still far enough away
not to be taking her by surprise.

There was no answer. He paused, debating whether to call again
or to turn back.

But soon she was rising--the lower part of her tall narrow figure
hid by the hillock, the upper part revealing to him the strong
stamp of that vivid individuality of hers which separated her at
once from no matter what company. She had on a big garden hat,
trimmed just a little with summer flowers, a blouse of some soft
white material, with even softer lace on the shoulders and in the
long, loose sleeves. She gave a friendly nod and glance in his
direction, and said: "Oh, no--not at all. I'm glad to have
help in enjoying this."

She was looking out toward the mists of the horizon hills. The
heat of the day had passed; the woods, the hillocks of hay were
casting long shadows on the pale-bronze fields. A breeze had
sprung up and was lifting from the dried and drying grass and
clover a keen, sweet, intoxicating perfume--like the odor which
classic zephyrs used to shake from the flowing hair of woodland
nymphs.

He stood beside her without speaking, looking intently at her.
It was the first time he had been alone with her since the
afternoon at Battle Field when she confessed her marriage and he
his love.

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