They sat in silence after this until he had finished his cigar. There were many subjects that must be discussed between them, which thrust up their heads like sunken rocks in a channel; but both felt their danger. At last Isabelle, faint from the excitement of the day, with all its mutations of thought and feeling, went to her room. She did not sleep for hours, not until long after she heard her husband's step go by the door, and the click of the switches as he turned out the electric lights.
There was much to be done before their marriage could be recreated on a living principle. But where the man was strong and generous, and the woman was at last awakened to life, there was no reason to despair.
CHAPTER LXXIII
Isabelle did not go back to the court-room to listen to the remaining arguments, not even to hear Mr. Brinkerhoff's learned and ingenious plea in behalf of the rights of capital, the sacred privileges of property. She felt that John would rather not have her there. But Isabelle read every word of the newspaper report of the trial, which since the district attorney's impassioned and powerful plea had excited even greater public interest than before. Not only locally, but throughout the country, the trial of the People vs. the Atlantic and Pacific et al. was recognized as the first serious effort of the reform administration to enforce the laws against capital, by convicting not merely the irresponsible agents but also some of the men "higher up." It was John Lane's position in the railroad that gave these "coal cases" their significance.
Isabelle read the report of the trial with thoughtful care, but much of it was too technical for her untrained mind to grasp. All these arguments about admitting certain ledgers in evidence, all these exceptions to the rulings of the court, the dodges, fences, pitfalls, the dust created by the skilled counsel for the defence, confused her. What she gathered in a general way was that the road was fighting its case on technicalities, seeking to throw the suit out of court, without letting the one real matter at issue appear,—had they dealt illegally and unjustly with the public? To her emotional temperament this eminently modern method of tactics was irritating and prejudiced her against her husband's side. "But I don't understand," she reflected sadly, "so John would say. And they don't seem to want people to understand!"
With these thoughts on her mind, she took the cars to the little suburb north of the city, where the Johnstons lived. Bryn Mawr was one of the newer landscape-gardened of our city suburbs, with curving roads, grass-plots, an art nouveau railroad station, shrubs and poplar sticks set out along the cement sidewalks, in an effort to disguise the rawness of the prairie pancake that the contractors had parcelled into lots. Isabelle found some difficulty in tracing her way along the ingeniously twisted avenues to the Johnston house. But finally she reached the two-story-and-attic wooden box, which was set in a little grove of maple trees. Two other houses were going up across the street, and a trench for a new sewer had been opened obstructively. At this period of belated spring Bryn Mawr was not a charming spot. Unfinished edges left by the landscape gardener and the contractor showed pitilessly against the leafless, scrubby trees and the rolling muddy fields beyond. It was all covered with a chill mist. In the days when she lived in St. Louis she had never found time to go so far to see Alice, and she had shared Bessie's horror of the remote and cheerless existence in this suburb, had wondered how an intelligent and well-bred woman like Alice Johnston could endure its dull level of platitudinous existence. But now as she picked her way across the sewer excavation, she felt that the little wooden box ahead of her was home for this family,—they must not lose that! Place and circumstance had lessened in her estimates of life.
Alice opened the door herself, and with a radiant smile of hungry delight enveloped Isabelle in her arms.
"Where did you drop from, Belle?"
"Oh, I thought I'd come on," Isabelle replied vaguely, not liking to mention the trial.
"And you found your way out here, and navigated that ewer safely! The boys find it surpassingly attractive,—as a coal mine, or a canal in Mars, or the Panama ditch. I've tried to induce Mr. Jorgesson, the contractor, to hang out a lantern or two at night. But he evidently thinks well of the caution and sobriety of the Johnston family and prefers to take his chances of a suit for damages. So far the family has escaped."