I
AGAIN the spring had come to Illinois, spilling the prairie flowers over the pastures, and warming the pleasant smelling earth which the mold-boards of the plows rolled back in rich loamy waves to make ready for the corn. In the town the trees rustled their new leaves in the wind that blows forever across the miles of prairie land, and the lawns along Sangamon Avenue were of a tender green, as their blue grass sprouted again under rake and roller. The birds were as busy as men, and everywhere, under the high blue sky, were the sounds that come with the awakening world, the glad sounds of preparation for every new endeavor.
The windows of the Harkness home were open, their lace curtains blowing white and cool in the young winds. Yet there, all was still. Upstairs, on his bed, with his hands folded whitely under the sheet that was smoothed across his breast, Ethan Harkness lay dead.
They buried him at Oakwood, just outside the town, beside the wife who had gone there so many springs before; buried him by the bulky monument he had raised, in his methodical business way, long ago. Its broad base glimmered between the trees, and from afar, the raised letters of his name could be read. The directors of the bank where he had spent his life, the bank he had founded, testified a belated appreciation of his virtues by adopting a long series of resolutions in which they submissively ascribed to an all-wise and inscrutable Providence the dispensation which they had done their part to hasten. They ordered, too, that the curtains of the bank be pulled down on the day of his funeral, and the door placarded “Closed,” though old Morton was kept there to collect the notes and interest falling due that day.
Then some ancient citizen, who was spending his declining years in chronicling for his own satisfaction the insignificant happenings of each day, chiefly the temperature and the times and local effect of frost, reminded the city council that Harkness had once, long years before, sat as a member of that body, and it likewise adopted resolutions. The local lodge of Masons took charge of his funeral, after Doctor Abercrombie of St. James had read the service in his beautiful voice, and recited one of his little compositions.
And when Pusey had published an obituary in his best elegiac style, all the conventions were considered as having been duly observed, and the town turned from its tribute to the dead, to judge Harkness for his deeds to the living who remained behind.
His will was proffered for probate in the County Court some days after his funeral. It had been drawn ten years before, and as drawn originally, left all his property to Emily, save a small bequest to a sister who lived somewhere in far off New Hampshire. But a codicil, drawn two years before his death, altered this original provision. To Garwood, he directed that one thousand dollars in cash be paid by his executors, and the rest and residue of his property of every kind, nature and description, real, personal and mixed, he left in trust for his beloved daughter Emily during her lifetime, and at her death, to her children, heirs of her body, in equal shares. Garwood was not named as one of the trustees.
The will, of course, was not satisfactory to any one in Grand Prairie. There were many there who had pictured to themselves their young congressman in the rôle of a lawyer without a practice, but with a predilection for politics, and a young wife of independent means. They knew how well he could cut this eminently respectable figure, and they had some dim conception of the service he could render in theoretical reform, if he only had money enough to place him above the vulgar necessities of the common politician.
Garwood himself suffered keenly, though his pride was hardly touched as much as Emily’s. He had had dreams himself, but now—he closed his memory to them. He even told Emily that he would not touch the thousand dollars, but finally consented to do so in order to please her. And then he suddenly remembered that the mortgage he had placed on his mother’s house was due once more that fall and he could think of no more pious use than that to which to put the money. He was consoled, however, when the inventory of the estate revealed the fact that Harkness’s property had either been vastly overestimated, or had lately shrunk in values, and he learned in the court house gossip of the lawyers, that certain unprofitable investments Harkness made during the last years of his life, had excited the fears of the bank directors, and led them to remove him from his wonted sphere of activity.
Emily, in the delicacy that embarrasses refined natures in money matters, was glad when the business of settling the estate was so far under way as to require her own attention no longer. She thought it indeed concluded, though the executors, being old, and rich already, relished the two per cent. commissions allowed them by law and scented a possible extra allowance by the county judge as a reward for faithful services. So they dragged the settlement along, picked out the choicest notes from Harkness’s tin box for themselves and dreaded the time when they would have to turn over so meaty a carcass to the trustees, who were itching to take hold.
Emily’s grief at her father’s death was deep, but placid, as grief for the aged must always be. She and Jerome lived on at the old house, though he often bemoaned the expense of keeping up so large an establishment, and discussed taking a smaller place. But they stayed on there, and the summer passed, quickly, as summers do in the intemperate zone, where winter in one form or another rages nine months in the year.
And Emily tried to think of her husband in her old ideal of him, because she was soon to become a mother again.
It was late October and old Mrs. Garwood, who spent much of her time now with Emily, sat in the library with her. They had a fire in the grate, the first of the season, and it cheered the somber room.
Outside the rain fell, and the wet leaves fluttering down from the trees in the yard, brushed the window panes before settling into the damp masses that choked the walks and the gutters. They had sat a long time in the bliss of silent companionship, these two women, who, though of such a different training and tradition, understood each other very well. They had been talking of housekeeping and the increased expense of living. Old Mrs. Garwood had sighed.
“I wouldn’t mind nothing,” she said, “if my mortgage was only—”
“If your mortgage—?” Emily let the garment in her fingers fall with her hands into her lap, and looked up with the question written large in her wide eyes.
“Yes, it’s due, an’ Mr. Dawson’s pressin’ me. Tschk, tschk, tschk! I don’t know, unless Jerome—but I don’t like to bother him, poor boy.”
“I thought—” but Emily checked herself. She took up the little dress she had been working on. John Ethan, who had been writhing restlessly at her feet, looked suddenly into his mother’s face, and something there silenced him, so that he was very quiet.
The next morning, after breakfast, she and Jerome were alone.
“Jerome,” Emily said in the voice that made him lay down his paper, and look up with serious eyes, “Jerome, I thought you were going to pay off mother’s mortgage for her.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“Why so?”
“Why, you said so, at the time, you remember.”
“At what time?”
“Well, when you got your thousand dollars from—”
“Oh, am I never to hear the last of that thousand dollars!” Garwood exclaimed, dashing his paper to the floor. “Must I always have that thrown up to me! I wish I’d never seen it!”
“It isn’t that, Jerome, you told me you had paid mother’s mortgage with it, that’s all.”
Garwood looked at her angrily a moment.
“You’re mistaken there, I reckon, you must be mistaken. I said, perhaps, that I would pay it off with that, but not that I had. I did intend to, but I had to use the money in another place. I—” But he could proceed no further then. He was thinking of the big poker game in the Leland the night the state central committee met at Springfield.
Emily dropped the subject from her conversation, but she did not drop it from her thoughts. It was with her all that day, and it was the first thing in her mind the next morning, So incessantly did it recur to her, that, in search of relief, she went finally to the bank. She asked for old Morton, and when he shuffled up to the window, she made him go with her back to the directors’ room, haunted as it was with memories of her father.
“They sell mortgages sometimes, don’t they?” she asked as soon as they were alone.
“Yes, yes,” her father’s old clerk replied, delighted at being consulted confidentially in matters of finance.
“And could you get one for me, if I gave you the money, and told you the one?”
He smiled, as he had seen his superiors smile. It would be a treat for him to buy someone’s mortgage. She told him, and he scratched his head a moment. “I think,” he said, “that’s over’t the Polk National; I ain’t sure now, but it seems to me—”
“Well, find out,” said Emily, and the old man started.
“You spoke just like your father then,” he said, in a mild, reminiscent way that touched her.
He managed the matter for her in the end, and she bought the mortgage by borrowing the money of one of her trustees, who said he was glad to advance it to her, though he was careful to take out the interest for himself in advance.
Emily had the mortgage canceled, and took it herself to her mother-in-law that night.
“Here it is, mother,” she said, “Jerome had forgotten it. You know how neglectful he is!” And she smiled, as if she had named a virtue in the man.
“Law, yes!” said Mrs. Garwood, folding the mortgage in her trembling fingers. “Bless the boy! He always puts things off, but he never forgets his poor old mother in the end!”