Besides, when no customer was in the shop he spent the time at the back window, doctoring tags—as the King of France negotiated the hill—by marking up prices, then marking them down.
But when he took his hat from the peg and set it on his head, he put on his private conscience. Whatever else he did, he never lied or cheated to his own advantage.
And so everybody in town liked William Rudd, and nobody admired him. He was treated with the affectionate contempt of an old family servant. But he had his ambitions and great ones, ambitions that reached past himself into the future of another generation. He felt the thrill that stirs the acorn, fallen into the ground and hidden there, but destined to father an oak. His was the ambition beyond ambition that glorifies the seed in the loam and ennobles the roots of trees thrusting themselves downward and gripping obscurity in order that trunks and branches, flowers and fruits, pods and cones, may flourish aloft.
Eventually old Clay Kittredge died, and the son chopped the "Jr." curlicue from the end of his name and began a new régime. The old Kittredge had sought only his own aggrandizement, and his son was his son. The new Clay Kittredge had gone to public school with Rudd and they continued to be "Clay" and "Will" to each other; no one would ever have called Rudd by so demonstrative a name as "Bill."
When Clay second stepped into his father's boots—and shoes—he began to enlarge the business, hoping to efface his father's achievements by his own. The shop gradually expanded to a department store for covering all portions of the anatomy and supplying inner wants as well.
Rudd was so overjoyed at not being uprooted and flung aside to die that he never observed the shrewd irony of Kittredge's phrase, "You may remain, Will, with no reduction of salary."
To have lost his humble position would have frustrated his dream, for he was doing his best to build for himself and for Her a home where they could fulfil their destinies. He cherished no hope, hardly even a desire, to be a great or rich man himself. He was one of the nest-weavers, the cave-burrowers, the home-makers, who prepare the way for the greater than themselves who shall spring from themselves.
He was of those who become the unknown fathers of great men. And so, on a salary that would have meant penury to a man of self-seeking tastes, he managed to save always the major part of his earning. At the bank he was a modest but regular visitor to the receiving-teller, and almost a total stranger to the paying-teller.
His wildest dissipation being a second pipeful of tobacco before he went to bed—or "retired," as he would more gently have said it—he eventually heaped up enough money and courage to ask Martha Kellogg to marry him. Martha, who was the plainest woman in plain Hillsdale, accepted William, and they were made one by the parson. The wedding was accounted "plain" even in Hillsdale.
The groomy bridegroom and the unbridy bride spent together all the time that Rudd could spare from the store. He bought for her a little frame house with a porch about as big as an upper berth, a patch of grass with a path through it to the back door, some hollyhocks of startling color, and a highly unimportant woodshed. It spelled HOME to them, and they were as happy as people usually are. He did all he could to please her. At her desire he even gave up his pipe without missing it—much.