She threw herself on his breast and burst into an agony of tears. "No, you never will," she sobbed; "he is dying. There is no hope; he won't live till morning."
The young man trembled like an aspen; tears rolled out of his dark and hollow eyes. He tried to speak, but no word came. Then he clasped his sister in his arms and withdrew as he had entered.
The night, laden with anxiety and fear, dragged out its weary length. In the early morning the house resounded with a great cry. The dying man, in a brief moment of consciousness, half raised himself and heard the sound and the tidings thus conveyed. The word was passed from man-servant to maid-servant, and came to their master through the voice of a Swedish girl whose mind was capable of dealing with emotions only in the most primitive way, and whose imperfect command of English made her communication come with a horrible and harrowing directness. One second before Erastus Brainard fell back dead he knew that his son had hanged himself; the 'last picture that rose before his fleeting vision was that of his boy pendulous from the rafters of the stable, his slight body swinging to and fro and his tongue protruding uglily from the purple-black of his face.
[XXIV]
The months passed by, and autumn came around once more.
Ogden's first year as a widower was lived with his mother; he used the same time to establish himself in the real-estate business, whose ins and outs he had now mastered in the bitter school of experience. He had left the Clifton altogether, and had established himself in another street and a different neighborhood. Every stone of the great pile seemed to have raised its tongue against him, and to have driven him out with the loud and insulting hubbub of its angry clamor. He had no wish ever to see again the room in which he had first met his wife, the room in which he had wrestled with his brother-in-law, the room in which disgrace had forced him to bow his head. Bradley lay in wait for him in the court, Jane Doane dogged him through the long corridors, Marcus Brainard rose up as a pallid spectre within the entrance-way. He left the building for once and for all. The placards that he placed on vacant tenements and the signs that he caused to be reared on open corners in the suburbs directed inquirers to a street and number quite different from any near his old neighborhood.
Within this year Cornelia Tillinghast Brainard had moved into her new house and had moved out again. For three poor months she occupied her French Renaissance château on the Lake Shore Drive, and then she gave it up forever. In vain her anxious plannings of chambers and stairways, her long waitings for the slow finishing of the carved oaks and walnuts of her vast interiors; in vain (for the present, at least) her lofty aims in the direction of social distinction. For Burt with his father was one man, and Burt without his father was another. He had relied upon the elder's advice more than he had realized, and he had felt the steadying and restraining power of his father's hand to a greater degree than he would have been willing to acknowledge. When he came to act for himself and by himself the difference soon became apparent. He operated in a variety of directions; he was confident and daring and ambitious, and one day he risked all and lost all.
His failure swept away everything of his and nearly everything of his sister's. Abbie had come into the new house along with Burt and Cornelia—no great urging had now been required to induce her to abandon the house on the West Side. She led the same retired and quiet life in the one quarter that she had led in the other, save that she never felt otherwise than utterly strange and forlorn. And as she had placed herself in her brother's house, so she put a great part of her share in her father's estate into her brother's hands when ruin came and every available resource was required. She had never used much money; she may not have realized the gravity of her sacrifice. Perhaps, too, she had hoped to rest her disappointed soul on something that money could not buy.
To Cornelia the failure came as a sudden and awful blow. Considering the brief time at her disposal, she had made a distinct impression on society. A great many people of consequence came to her house and invited her to theirs. They laughed at her freedoms and familiarities; they enjoyed her picturesque and untrammelled phraseology. Some of the more insatiable invited her twice. She encountered but one decided check; this was from Mrs. Floyd.