A Poor Wise Man

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A POOR WISE MAN

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

CHAPTER I

The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened
walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over
all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often
beauty. Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges
rose above the river mist like fairy towers suspended between Heaven
and earth. And again the sun tipped the surrounding hills with gold,
while the city lay buried in its smoke shroud, and white ghosts of
river boats moved spectrally along.

Sometimes it was ugly, sometimes beautiful, but always the city was
powerful, significant, important. It was a vast melting pot. Through
its gates came alike the hopeful and the hopeless, the dreamers and
those who would destroy those dreams. From all over the world there
came men who sought a chance to labor. They came in groups, anxious
and dumb, carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded
by men with cunning eyes.

Raw material, for the crucible of the city, as potentially powerful
as the iron ore which entered the city by the same gate.

The city took them in, gave them sanctuary, and forgot them. But
the shepherds with the cunning eyes remembered.

Lily Cardew, standing in the train shed one morning early in March,
watched such a line go by. She watched it with interest. She had
developed a new interest in people during the year she had been
away. She had seen, in the army camp, similar shuffling lines of
men, transformed in a few hours into ranks of uniformed soldiers,
beginning already to be actuated by the same motive. These aliens,
going by, would become citizens. Very soon now they would appear
on the streets in new American clothes of extraordinary cut and
color, their hair cut with clippers almost to the crown, and
surmounted by derby hats always a size too small.

Lily smiled, and looked out for her mother. She was suddenly
unaccountably glad to be back again. She liked the smoke and the
noise, the movement, the sense of things doing. And the sight of
her mother, small, faultlessly tailored, wearing a great bunch of
violets, and incongruous in that work-a-day atmosphere, set her
smiling again.

How familiar it all was! And heavens, how young she looked! The
limousine was at the curb, and a footman as immaculately turned
out as her mother stood with a folded rug over his arm. On the
seat inside lay a purple box. Lily had known it would be there.
They would be ostensibly from her father, because he had not been
able to meet her, but she knew quite well that Grace Cardew had
stopped at the florist's on her way downtown and bought them.

A little surge of affection for her mother warmed the girl's eyes.
The small attentions which in the Cardew household took the place
of loving demonstrations had always touched her. As a family the
Cardews were rather loosely knitted together, but there was
something very lovable about her mother.

Grace Cardew kissed her, and then held her off and looked at her.

"Mercy, Lily!" she said, "you look as old as I do."

"Older, I hope," Lily retorted. "What a marvel you are, Grace dear."
Now and then she called her mother "Grace." It was by way of being
a small joke between them, but limited to their moments alone. Once
old Anthony, her grandfather, had overheard her, and there had been
rather a row about it.

"I feel horribly old, but I didn't think I looked it."

They got into the car and Grace held out the box to her. "From your
father, dear. He wanted so to come, but things are dreadful at the
mill. I suppose you've seen the papers." Lily opened the box, and
smiled at her mother.

"Yes, I know. But why the subterfuge about the flowers, mother dear?
Honestly, did he send them, or did you get them? But never mind
about that; I know he's worried, and you're sweet to do it. Have
you broken the news to grandfather that the last of the Cardews is
coming home?"

"He sent you all sorts of messages, and he'll see you at dinner."

Lily laughed out at that.

"You darling!" she said. "You know perfectly well that I am nothing
in grandfather's young life, but the Cardew women all have what he
likes to call savoir faire. What would they do, father and
grandfather, if you didn't go through life smoothing things for them?"

Grace looked rather stiffly ahead. This young daughter of hers,
with her directness and her smiling ignoring of the small subterfuges
of life, rather frightened her. The terrible honesty of youth! All
these years of ironing the wrinkles out of life, of smoothing the
difficulties between old Anthony and Howard, and now a third
generation to contend with. A pitilessly frank and unconsciously
cruel generation. She turned and eyed Lily uneasily.

"You look tired," she said, "and you need attention. I wish you had
let me send Castle to you."

But she thought that lily was even lovelier than she had remembered
her. Lovely rather than beautiful, perhaps. Her face was less
childish than when she had gone away; there was, in certain of her
expressions, an almost alarming maturity. But perhaps that was
fatigue.

"I couldn't have had Castle, mother. I didn't need anything. I've
been very happy, really, and very busy."

"You have been very vague lately about your work."

Lily faced her mother squarely.

"I didn't think you'd much like having me do it, and I thought it
would drive grandfather crazy."

"I thought you were in a canteen."

"Not lately. I've been looking after girls who had followed soldiers
to camps. Some of them were going to have babies, too. It was
rather awful. We married quite a lot of them, however."

The curious reserve that so often exists between mother and daughter
held Grace Cardew dumb. She nodded, but her eyes had slightly
hardened. So this was what war had done to her. She had had no son,
and had thanked God for it during the war, although old Anthony had
hated her all her married life for it. But she had given her
daughter, her clear-eyed daughter, and they had shown her the dregs
of life.

Her thoughts went back over the years. To Lily as a child, with
Mademoiselle always at her elbow, and life painted as a thing of
beauty. Love, marriage and birth were divine accidents. Death was
a quiet sleep, with heaven just beyond, a sleep which came only to
age, which had wearied and would rest. Then she remembered the day
when Elinor Cardew, poor unhappy Elinor, had fled back to Anthony's
roof to have a baby, and after a few rapturous weeks for Lily the
baby had died.

"But the baby isn't old," Lily had persisted, standing in front of
her mother with angry, accusing eyes.

Grace was not an imaginative woman, but she turned it rather neatly,
as she told Howard later.

"It was such a nice baby," she said, feeling for an idea. "I think
probably God was lonely without it, and sent an angel for it again."

"But it is still upstairs," Lily had insisted. She had had a
curious instinct for truth, even then. But there Grace's
imagination had failed her, and she sent for Mademoiselle.
Mademoiselle was a good Catholic, and very clear in her own mind,
but what she left in Lily's brain was a confused conviction that
every person was two persons, a body and a soul. Death was simply
a split-up, then. One part of you, the part that bathed every
morning and had its toe-nails cut, and went to dancing school in
a white frock and thin black silk stockings and carriage boots over
pumps, that part was buried and would only came up again at the
Resurrection. But the other part was all the time very happy, and
mostly singing.

Lily did not like to sing.

Then there was the matter of tears. People only cried when they
hurt themselves. She had been told that again and again when she
threatened tears over her music lesson. But when Aunt Elinor had
gone away she had found Mademoiselle, the deadly antagonist of
tears, weeping. And here again Grace remembered the child's wide,
insistent eyes.

"Why?"

"She is sorry for Aunt Elinor."

"Because her baby's gone to God? She ought to be glad, oughtn't
she?"

"Not that;" said Grace, and had brought a box of chocolates and
given her one, although they were not permitted save one after each
meal.

Then Lily had gone away to school. How carefully the school had
been selected! When she came back, however, there had been no more
questions, and Grace had sighed with relief. That bad time was over,
anyhow. But Lily was rather difficult those days. She seemed, in
some vague way, resentful. Her mother found her, now and then, in
a frowning, half-defiant mood. And once, when Mademoiselle had
ventured some jesting remark about young Alston Denslow, she was
stupefied to see the girl march out of the room, her chin high, not
to be seen again for hours.

Grace's mind was sub-consciously remembering those things even when
she spoke.

"I didn't know you were having to learn about that side of life,"
she said, after a brief silence.

"That side of life is life, mother," Lily said gravely. But Grace
did not reply to that. It was characteristic of her to follow her
own line of thought.

"I wish you wouldn't tell your grandfather. You know he feels
strongly about some things. And he hasn't forgiven me yet for
letting you go."

Rather diffidently Lily put her hand on her mother's. She gave her
rare caresses shyly, with averted eyes, and she was always more
diffident with her mother than with her father. Such spontaneous
bursts of affection as she sometimes showed had been lavished on
Mademoiselle. It was Mademoiselle she had hugged rapturously on
her small feast days, Mademoiselle who never demanded affection,
and so received it.

"Poor mother!" she said, "I have made it hard for you, haven't I?
Is he as bad as ever?"

She had not pinned on the violets, but sat holding them in her
hands, now and then taking a luxurious sniff. She did not seem to
expect a reply. Between Grace and herself it was quite understood
that old Anthony Cardew was always as bad as could be.

"There is some sort of trouble at the mill. Your father is worried."

And this time it was Lily who did not reply. She said,
inconsequentially:

"We're saved, and it's all over. But sometimes I wonder if we were
worth saving. It all seems such a mess, doesn't it?" She glanced
out. They were drawing up before the house, and she looked at her
mother whimsically.

"The last of the Cardews returning from the wars!" she said. "Only
she is unfortunately a she, and she hasn't been any nearer the war
than the State of Ohio."

Her voice was gay enough, but she had a quick vision of the grim old
house had she been the son they had wanted to carry on the name,
returning from France.

The Cardews had fighting traditions. They had fought in every war
from the Revolution on. There had been a Cardew in Mexico in '48,
and in that upper suite of rooms to which her grandfather had
retired in wrath on his son's marriage, she remembered her sense of
awe as a child on seeing on the wall the sword he had worn in the
Civil War. He was a small man, and the scabbard was badly worn at
the end, mute testimony to the long forced marches of his youth.
Her father had gone to Cuba in '98, and had almost died of typhoid
fever there, contracted in the marshes of Florida.

Yes, they had been a fighting family. And now--

Her mother was determinedly gay. There were flowers in the dark old
hall, and Grayson, the butler, evidently waiting inside the door,
greeted her with the familiarity of the old servant who had slipped
her sweets from the pantry after dinner parties in her little-girl
years.

"Welcome home, Miss Lily," he said.

Mademoiselle was lurking on the stairway, in a new lace collar over
her old black dress. Lily recognized in the collar a great occasion,
for Mademoiselle was French and thrifty. Suddenly a wave of warmth
and gladness flooded her. This was home. Dear, familiar home. She
had come back. She was the only young thing in the house. She would
bring them gladness and youth. She would try to make them happy.
Always before she had taken, but now she meant to give.

Not that she formulated such a thought. It was an emotion, rather.
She ran up the stairs and hugged Mademoiselle wildly.

"You darling old thing!" she cried. She lapsed into French. "I saw
the collar at once. And think, it is over! It is finished. And
all your nice French relatives are sitting on the boulevards in the
sun, and sipping their little glasses of wine, and rising and bowing
when a pretty girl passes. Is it not so?"

"It is so, God and the saints be praised!" said Mademoiselle, huskily.

Grace Cardew followed them up the staircase. Her French was
negligible, and she felt again, as in days gone by, shut from the
little world of two which held her daughter and governess. Old
Anthony's doing, that. He had never forgiven his son his plebeian
marriage, and an early conversation returned to her. It was on Lily's
first birthday and he had made one of his rare visits to the nursery.
He had brought with him a pearl in a velvet case.

"All our women have their own pearls," he had said. "She will have
her grandmother's also when she marries. I shall give her one the
first year, two the second, and so on." He had stood looking down at
the child critically. "She's a Cardew," he said at last. "Which
means that she will be obstinate and self-willed." He had paused
there, but Grace had not refuted the statement. He had grinned.
"As you know," he added. "Is she talking yet?"

"A word or two," Grace had said, with no more warmth in her tone
than was in his.

"Very well. Get her a French governess. She ought to speak French
before she does English. It is one of the accomplishments of a lady.
Get a good woman, and for heaven's sake arrange to serve her
breakfast in her room. I don't want to have to be pleasant to any
chattering French woman at eight in the morning."

"No, you wouldn't," Grace had said.

Anthony had stamped out, but in the hall he smiled grimly. He did
not like Howard's wife, but she was not afraid of him. He respected
her for that. He took good care to see that the Frenchwoman was
found, and at dinner, the only meal he took with the family, he
would now and then send for the governess and Lily to come in for
dessert. That, of course, was later on, when the child was nearly
ten. Then would follow a three-cornered conversation in rapid French,
Howard and Anthony and Lily, with Mademoiselle joining in timidly,
and with Grace, at the side of the table, pretending to eat and
feeling cut off, in a middle-class world of her own, at the side of
the table. Anthony Cardew had retained the head of his table, and
he had never asked her to take his dead wife's place.

After a time Grace realized the consummate cruelty of those hours,
the fact that Lily was sent for, not only because the old man cared
to see her, but to make Grace feel the outsider that she was. She
made desperate efforts to conquer the hated language, but her
accent was atrocious. Anthony would correct her suavely, and Lily
would laugh in childish, unthinking mirth. She gave it up at last.

She never told Howard about it. He had his own difficulties with
his father, and she would not add to them. She managed the house,
checked over the bills and sent them to the office, put up a
cheerful and courageous front, and after a time sheathed herself
in an armor of smiling indifference. But she thanked heaven when
the time came to send Lily away to school. The effort of
concealing the armed neutrality between Anthony and herself was
growing more wearing. The girl was observant. And Anthony had
been right, she was a Cardew. She would have fought her grandfather
out on it, defied him, accused him, hated him. And Grace wanted
peace.

Once again as she followed Lily and Mademoiselle up the stairs she
felt the barrier of language, and back of it the Cardew pride and
traditions that somehow cut her off.

But in Lily's rooms she was her sane and cheerful self again.
Inside the doorway the girl was standing, her eyes traveling over
her little domain ecstatically.

"How lovely of you not to change a thing, mother!" she said. "I was
so afraid--I know how you hate my stuff. But I might have known
you wouldn't. All the time I've been away, sleeping in a dormitory,
and taking turns at the bath, I have thought of my own little place."
She wandered around, touching her familiar possessions with caressing
hands. "I've a good notion," she declared, "to go to bed immediately,
just for the pleasure of lying in linen sheets again." Suddenly she
turned to her mother. "I'm afraid you'll find I've made some queer
friends, mother."

"What do you mean by 'queer'?"

"People no proper Cardew would care to know." She smiled. "Where's
Ellen? I want to tell her I met somebody she knows out there, the
nicest sort of a boy." She went to the doorway and called lustily:
"Ellen! Ellen!" The rustling of starched skirts answered her from
down the corridor.

"I wish you wouldn't call, dear." Grace looked anxious. "You know
how your grandfather--there's a bell for Ellen."

"What we need around here," said Lily, cheerfully, "is a little more
calling. And if grandfather thinks it is unbefitting the family
dignity he can put cotton in his ears. Come in, Ellen. Ellen, do
you know that I met Willy Cameron in the camp?"

"Willy!" squealed Ellen. "You met Willy? Isn't he a fine boy, Miss
Lily?"

"He's wonderful," said Lily. "I went to the movies with him every
Friday night." She turned to her mother. "You would like him,
mother. He couldn't get into the army. He is a little bit lame.
And--" she surveyed Grace with amused eyes, "you needn't think what
you are thinking. He is tall and thin and not at all good-looking.
Is he, Ellen?"

"He is a very fine young man," Ellen said rather stiffly. "He's
very highly thought of in the town I come from. His father was a
doctor, and his buggy used to go around day, and night. When he
found they wouldn't take him as a soldier he was like to break his
heart."

"Lame?" Grace repeated, ignoring Ellen.

"Just a little. You forget all about it when you know him. Don't
you, Ellen?"

But at Grace's tone Ellen had remembered. She stiffened, and became
again a housemaid in the Anthony Cardew house, a self-effacing,
rubber-heeled, pink-uniformed lower servant. She glanced at Mrs.
Cardew, whose eyebrows were slightly raised.

"Thank you, miss," she said. And went out, leaving Lily rather
chilled and openly perplexed.

"Well!" she said. Then she glanced at her mother. "I do believe
you are a little shocked, mother, because Ellen and I have a mutual
friend in Mr. William Wallace Cameron! Well, if you want the exact
truth, he hadn't an atom of use for me until he heard about Ellen."
She put an arm around Grace's shoulders. "Brace up, dear," she
said, smilingly. "Don't you cry. I'll be a Cardew bye-and-bye."

"Did you really go to the moving pictures with him?" Grace asked,
rather unhappily. She had never been inside a moving picture
theater. To her they meant something a step above the corner saloon,
and a degree below the burlesque houses. They were constituted of
bad air and unchaperoned young women accompanied by youths who
dangled cigarettes from a lower lip, all obviously of the lower
class, including the cigarette; and of other women, sometimes drab,
dragged of breast and carrying children who should have been in bed
hours before; or still others, wandering in pairs, young, painted
and predatory. She was not imaginative, or she could not have
lived so long in Anthony Cardew's house. She never saw, in the long
line waiting outside even the meanest of the little theaters that
had invaded the once sacred vicinity of the Cardew house, the cry of
every human heart for escape from the sordid, the lure of romance,
the call of adventure and the open road.

"I can't believe it," she added.

Lily made a little gesture of half-amused despair.

"Dearest," she said, "I did. And I liked it. Mother, things have
changed a lot in twenty years. Sometimes I think that here, in this
house, you don't realize that--" she struggled for a phrase--"that
things have changed," she ended, lamely. "The social order, and
that sort of thing. You know. Caste." She hesitated. She was
young and inarticulate, and when she saw Grace's face, somewhat
frightened. But she was not old Anthony's granddaughter for nothing.
"This idea of being a Cardew," she went on, "that's ridiculous, you
know. I'm only half Cardew, anyhow. The rest is you, dear, and
it's got being a Cardew beaten by quite a lot."

Mademoiselle was deftly opening the girl's dressing case, but she
paused now and turned. It was to Grace that she spoke, however.

"They come home like that, all of them," she said. "In France also.
But in time they see the wisdom of the old order, and return. It
is one of the fruits of war."

Grace hardly heard her.

"Lily," she asked, "you are not in love with this Cameron person,
are you?"

But Lily's easy laugh reassured her.

"No, indeed," she said. "I am not. I shall probably marry beneath
me, as you would call it, but not William Wallace Cameron. For one
thing, he wouldn't have grandfather in his family."

Some time later Mademoiselle tapped at Grace's door, and entered.
Grace was reclining on a chaise longue, towels tucked about her neck
and over her pillows, while Castle, her elderly English maid, was
applying ice in a soft cloth to her face. Grace sat up. The towel,
pinned around her hair like a coif, gave a placid, almost nun-like
appearance to her still lovely face.

"Well?" she demanded. "Go out for a minute, Castle."

Mademoiselle waited until the maid had gone.

"I have spoken to Ellen," she said, her voice cautious. "A young
man who does not care for women, a clerk in a country pharmacy.
What is that, Mrs. Cardew?"

"It would be so dreadful, Mademoiselle. Her grandfather--"

"But not handsome," insisted Mademoiselle, "and lame! Also, I know
the child. She is not in love. When that comes to her we shall
know it."

Grace lay back, relieved, but not entirely comforted.

"She is changed, isn't she, Mademoiselle?"

Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders.

"A phase," she said. She had got the word from old Anthony, who
regarded any mental attitude that did not conform with his own as
a condition that would pass. "A phase, only. Now that she is back
among familiar things, she will become again a daughter of the house."

"Then you think this talk about marrying beneath her--"

"She 'as had liberty," said Mademoiselle, who sometimes lost an
aspirate. "It is like wine to the young. It intoxicates. But it,
too, passes. In my country--"

But Grace had, for a number of years, heard a great deal of
Mademoiselle's country. She settled herself on her pillows.

"Call Castle, please," she said. "And--do warn her not to voice
those ideas of hers to her grandfather. In a country pharmacy, you
say?"

"And lame, and not fond of women," corroborated Mademoiselle. "Ca
ne pourrait pas etre mieux, n'est-ce pas?"

CHAPTER II

Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and
spent a year in finding a location for the investment of his small
capital. That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel.
The iron business had already laid the foundations of its future
greatness, but steel was still in its infancy.

Anthony's father had been an iron-master in a small way, with a
monthly pay-roll of a few hundred dollars, and an abiding faith in
the future of iron. But he had never dreamed of steel. But
"sixty-five" saw the first steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony
Cardew began to dream. He went to Chicago first, and from there to
Michigan, to see the first successful Bessemer converter. When he
started east again he knew what he was to make his life work.

He was very young and his capital was small. But he had an abiding
faith in the new industry. Not that he dreamed then of floating
steel battleships. But he did foresee steel in new and various uses.
Later on he was experimenting with steel cable at the very time
Roebling made it a commercial possibility, and with it the modern
suspension bridge and the elevator. He never quite forgave Roebling.
That failure of his, the difference only of a month or so, was one
of the few disappointments of his prosperous, self-centered, orderly
life. That, and Howard's marriage. And, at the height of his
prosperity, the realization that Howard's middle-class wife would
never bear a son.

The city he chose was a small city then, yet it already showed signs
of approaching greatness. On the east side, across the river, he
built his first plant, a small one, with the blast heated by passing
through cast iron pipes, with the furnaceman testing the temperature
with strips of lead and zinc, and the skip hoist a patient mule.

He had ore within easy hauling distance, and he had fuel, and he had,
as time went on, a rapidly increasing market. Labor was cheap and
plentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent.
Perhaps Anthony Cardew's sins of later years were due to a vast
impatience that the labor of the early seventies was no longer to be
had.

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