“Yes, I know,” mused the colonel; “and turn Tracy, the president, down—the one who gave him his start on his bucaneering career. Tracy declines to be his tool, being, I understand, a very decent sort of man, who has always run his road for his stock-holders and not for the stock-market. A capital crime, that, in these days. So Keatcham has, somehow, by one trick or another, got enough directors since Baneleigh died to give him the control; though he couldn’t get enough of the stock; and now he means to grab the road to use for himself. Poor Tracy, who loves the road as a child, they say, will have to stand by and see it turned into a Wall Street foot-ball; and the equipment run down as fast as its reputation. I think I’m sorry for Tracy. Besides, it’s a bad lookout, the power of such fellows; men who are not captains of industry, not a little bit; only inspired gamblers. Yet they are running the country. I wonder where is the class that will save us.”
“I don’t know. I don’t admire the present century, Bertie. We had people of quality in my day; we have only people of culture in this. I confess I prefer the quality. They had robuster nerves and really asked less of people, although they may have appeared to ask more. We used to be contented with respect from our inferiors and courtesy from our equals—”
“And what from your betters, Aunt Rebecca?” drawled the colonel.
“We had no betters, Rupert; we were the best. I think partly it was our assurance of our position, which nobody else doubted any more than we, that kept us so mannerly. Nowadays, nobody has a real position. He may have wealth and a servile following, who expect to make something out of him, but he hasn’t position. The newspapers can make fun of him. The common people watch him drive by and never think of removing their caps. Nobody takes him seriously except his toadies and himself. And as for the sentiments of reverence and loyalty, very useful sentiments in running a world, they seem to have clean disappeared, except”—she smiled a half-reluctant smile—“except with youngsters like Archie, who would find it agreeable to be chopped into bits for you, and the women who have not lived in the world, like Janet, who makes a heroine out of me—upon my word, Bertie, je t’ai fait rougir!”
“Not at all,” said the colonel; “an illusion of the sunset; but what do you mean when you say people of quality required less than people of culture?”
“Oh, simply this; all we demanded was deference; but your cultivated gang wants admiration and submission, and will not let us possess our secret souls, even, in peace. And, then, the quality despised no one, but the cultivated despise every one. Ah, well—
‘Those good old times are past and gone,
I sigh for them in vain,—’
Janet, I wish Archie would fish his mandolin out and you would sing to me; I like to hear the songs of my youth. Not rag-time, or coon-songs, but dear old Foster’s melodies; Old Kentucky Home, and Massa’s in the Col’, Col’ Ground, and Nellie Was a Lady—what makes that so sad, I wonder?—‘Nellie was a lady, las’ night she died;’ it’s all in that single line; I think it is because it represents the pathetic idealization of love; Nellie was that black lover’s ideal of all that was lovely, and she was dead. Is the orchestra ready—and the choir? Yes, shut the door; we are for art’s sake only, not for the applause of the cold world in the car.”
Afterward, when he was angry over his own folly, his own blind, dogged, trustfulness against all the odds of evidence, Rupert Winter laid his weakness to that hour; to a woman’s sweet, untrained, tender voice singing the simple melodies of his youth. They sang one song after another while the sun sank lower and stained the western sky. Through the snow-sheds they could catch glimpses of a wild and strange nature; austere, yet not repelling; vistas of foot-hills bathed in the evening glow; rank on rank of firs, tall, straight, beautiful, not wind-tortured and maimed, like the woeful dwarfs of Colorado; and wonderful snow-capped mountain peaks, with violet shadows and glinting streaks of silver. Snow everywhere: on the hillsides; on the close thatch of the firs; on the ice-locked rivers; snow freshly fallen, softly tinted, infinitely, awesomely pure.