Chapter 17. "Which Should Have The Gift Of Life?"

________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER XVII. "WHICH SHOULD HAVE THE GIFT OF LIFE?"

There was a chorus of admiration and praise from all over the country when Felix Brand's design for the capitol building was published. It was everywhere recognized as a signal achievement, far in advance of anything he had previously done, and he himself was acclaimed as one of the most promising architects of the time and the most gifted that America had yet produced. Other reproductions of his recent work, business buildings, country houses, a church and a memorial structure, were made public at about the same time and these and the capitol building aroused so much interest that newspapers and magazines published articles about him, with many illustrations of his work and criticisms of his art that praised his present accomplishment in glowing terms and prophesied he would do still greater things. In him, it was declared, had come at last a great American architect, a man of such originality, such skill and such sense of beauty and fitness that, if he continued to give such rich fulfillment of his early promise, he would soon create a distinctly American style of architecture, infused with the national spirit and expressive of the national ideals, worthy to take its place among the great architectures of the world.

His secretary collected these articles and kept them for him to see when he should return. For early in May, just before this round of praise began, when she went one morning to the office she found a letter from him saying that it had suddenly become necessary for him to go abroad at once and that, as he would be sailing in the early morning, he would have to leave affairs once more in her charge. There were some words of praise for her astuteness in the management of his business when he had been away at other times, a few directions concerning things he would like her to do or to leave undone, a brief regret that he should have to leave just now when it was most important for him to be on hand, and the hope that he would not be gone more than three or four weeks at most. But there was neither indication of where, in that large section of the world covered by "abroad," he might be reached by letter or cable, nor mention of which one of the several steamers sailing that day would bear him to his unnamed destination.

Henrietta put the letter down with a sigh of dismay. "It is too bad, too bad!" she exclaimed. "Just when everything is going nicely and he is doing wonderful work! Now things will begin to tangle up again and people will get impatient, and he will lose a lot of money. Well, I'll have to do the best I can until he comes back."

But notwithstanding her devotion to her employer's interests and the deep and genuine pleasure she felt in seeing them advance and in knowing that she was helping to put them forward--the delight of any honest worker in doing well and successfully the thing that he undertakes to do--she soon began to be conscious of a sense of relief at being rid for even a little while of Brand's physical presence. After his violent outburst against Mrs. Fenlow, Henrietta had felt her repugnance increase until it amounted to positive aversion. She did not know how great had been the nervous strain of trying constantly to suppress and ignore this feeling until she was relieved of it by his absence.

"I wonder," she said to herself on her way home a few days later, "if I can endure it long enough after he returns to get entirely rid of that mortgage. Well, I'll have to wait until he does return, anyway, and then I ought to give him, I suppose, two or three weeks' notice. Perhaps, when he comes home this time, he'll be more as he used to be and it won't be so difficult. I'll wait until then before I decide."

As she came to this conclusion she was entering the ticket gate of the ferry waiting room and, lifting her eyes from the dropping of her ticket in the box, she saw a young man of goodly figure, dressed in a loose fitting suit of gray, advancing toward her and lifting his soft felt hat. Even in the surprise of the moment she was conscious of a quick effort to keep out of her countenance the full measure of the joy she felt at this unexpected meeting with Hugh Gordon. But she was not successful enough to hide all signs of the pleasure that swept through her and shone in her smile of welcome.

"Will you let me cross the ferry with you?" he said as he guided her through the crowd to a vantage point near the gate. "I did not go to the office, and I shall not go there again, because I know what orders Felix gave concerning me and I will not subject you to any unpleasant experience with his violent temper."

Henrietta looked at him in surprise, wondering how, since there was evidently bitter enmity between the two men, this one should have such intimate knowledge of the characteristics that had but lately appeared in the other.

"But the ferry boat," he was saying, with one of the smiles that so rarely lighted his serious countenance, "is nobody's private property and you are the only one who can forbid me to ride across the bay in it at just the time when you are going home."

He must have read encouragement rather than objection in her manner, for the next evening he was waiting for her again, and by the end of the week it had become a tacit understanding between them that they should meet thus and take together the ride across the shining evening water. Golden red it glowed and sparkled all about them and spread a radiant path toward the red and gold of the May sunset. Behind them Manhattan reared its mighty, tawny-yellow walls and towers through the golden haze--Mammon rising from the waves, with feet lapped in the rose-gold waters and front ablaze with the diamond dazzle of a thousand sunset-lighted windows.

It was the month of May, nature's month of marvels, when with her magic wand she strikes upon earth, and tree, and plant, and human heart, and the indwelling, everlasting life and youth gush forth in countless streams of leaf and bloom and song and leaping spirit. All through the marvelous month these two rode back and forth every day across the enchanted waters. For it was not long until she began to find him waiting for her in the morning also, at the door of the ferry-house in St. George.

All the world was robed in the young beauty of the spring, but Henrietta Marne soon discovered that for her companion it had but slight appeal. If she, thrilled by the pageant of sunset colors, glowing in the sky and reflected in the waters of the bay, voiced her delight in it Gordon's response would be polite but perfunctory. He would look and make comment, but she knew that it left him cold. If she wore a flower at her belt or her throat, chosen with utmost care to make a tender little harmony of color with her waist or her tie or the faint pink of her cheeks, it nettled her a little that he did not even seem to see it.

"If I do that at the office when Mr. Brand is there," she said to herself, "it's the first thing he sees and he always speaks about it and looks at it with pleasure and he--doesn't care anything about me!"

"I know, it is a defect of my nature," he said one day in response to a little gentle rallying on her part because of his lack of interest in an evening panorama of unusual beauty. "I know I lose a great deal of the pleasure of living because of it, but I can't help it. Something seems to have been left out of my make-up. But I hope that some time I shall recover it. You are so sensitive to these things, perhaps you can teach me how to feel them, too."

Their talk verged soon into the more or less confidential themes of personal viewpoints, experiences and ambitions. Henrietta noticed that Gordon said nothing about his past life, about his relatives or friends or where he had grown up, or gone to school, or what he had done in his youth. But he was full of hopes and plans for the future. His brain was busy working out ideas for large industrial schemes that should prove the possibility of combining reasonable profit for their creators and managers with ample wages, comfortable homes and expanding lives for their workers. In his mind projects were taking form, though vague as yet, for renovating those noisome places of the city where human nature, undiluted by space, stews corrosion and corruption for its souls and bodies. Every day he would give her a glimpse of one or another of a multitude of half formed ideas, perhaps but just conceived, perhaps taking tentative form, which he was eager to work out and put to practical test. For the most part they seemed to her to be an unusual combination of business shrewdness, just feeling, and altruistic intent. Apparently his aim in them was to attain the end of social betterment by means of the co-operative and mutually profitable effort of all concerned in them.

He talked much and with enthusiasm of these things and Henrietta soon found that they and kindred hopes and plans were the purpose and the inspiration of his life.

"I have the business instinct," he told her one day. "It is easy to make money. It is a pleasure, too, to busy one's mind with large schemes and see them coming your way. But that is nothing to the pleasure it will be to set to work, as I shall soon be able to do, upon some of these schemes and see them coming out as I want them to."

"Your pleasure then will be a double one," she said, "the pleasure of creating something and that of doing good as well. Mr. Brand must have that double pleasure, too, when he feels all his faculties at work and knows that he is creating something that is beautiful, as you will feel that you are doing something good."

His face darkened and his eyes flashed at the sound of Brand's name. She felt that he stiffened, mind and body, into hostility.

"Pardon me," he said curtly, "if I am not pleased with the comparison. I consider Felix Brand, his ideas and principles and his mode of life, to be so thoroughly detestable that even the mention of his name rouses my contempt and disgust. I consider him," Gordon went on, his tones lower and more tense, "a plague spot, a source of evil that would be a menace to any community."

"Oh, Mr. Gordon!" she protested. "Aren't you exaggerating dreadfully? Aren't you prejudiced against him? Think of the beautiful buildings he creates and of the elevating and refining influence of such noble and beautiful architecture!"

"I know," he assented, "the man has genius, great genius. He has proved that already, and he might have gone farther in his line and done much finer and greater things, if he had lived a different life. But he is bringing his fate upon himself." He paused for an instant, and she, wondering what he meant by that last dark sentence, which he had spoken in a tone of the most serious significance, was about to ask him for an explanation when he turned upon her abruptly.

"Tell me," he demanded, "do you think that a man is to be pardoned for being a source of evil, for leading or forcing others into wrong-doing and misfortune, while he keeps himself prosperous and honored, just because he can create beautiful things in art, or architecture, or music, or literature? Is the world in greater need of being made more beautiful and more pleasurable for the few than it is of being made better for the many? Would you condone a man for deliberately making it worse because he was adding to its beauty?"

Gordon's intent gaze and the solemn, eager earnestness with which he spoke appalled his listener ever so little. It was as if he were asking these questions from his inmost, deepest heart.

"I--I don't know just what to say," she faltered. "I never thought of the matter in that way before. One doesn't like to answer so serious a question offhand. But--" she hesitated and felt herself being swept into agreement by his very forcefulness of character and intensity of feeling. "Why, yes--I suppose you are right. If the world were entirely wicked it would be a failure, no matter how beautiful it might be."

"I was sure you would agree with me," he responded with a look of pleased satisfaction. "But now I want you to tell me something else," he pursued in a gentler tone and with a humbler, softer manner. "I want to suppose the case of two possible men and I want you to tell me which of the two you think would be the more deserving of life."

He moved closer to her and, leaning against the deck rail, was looking into her face with an expression so different from any she had ever seen in his brown eyes before, wistful and beseeching instead of confident, alert and dauntless, that it set her heart a-flutter with a sudden, tantalizing half-memory. Where, when, had she seen brown eyes with that look in them?

She groped after the answer in the back of her mind while she listened to his voice, still with its impetuous tones unsubdued, though he seemed to be trying to state his hypothetical case in cool, bare terms.

"Suppose there were two men," he was saying, "and suppose that one of them possessed a genius for the creation of noble and beautiful works of art of any sort, which would afford great pleasure to many people and would refine and elevate their tastes. But suppose that at the same time he was living such a private, even secret, life as made him a source of wickedness and corruption, an endless influence for evil. Then would such a man, do you think--" his voice sank lower and thrilled with solemn earnestness--"deserve to live rather than the other one, who, though he had no genius for the creation of beauty, was using all his powers to make the world a better place for all men to live in? If both men could not have the gift of life, Miss Marne, which do you think ought to have it?"

She looked at him, glanced away, and hesitated, her mind still bent on that teasing memory. "You are putting strange riddles to me this morning, Mr. Gordon," she demurred.

Had she ever seen a wild creature expecting destruction at human hands? No, surely not, she told herself, and yet this wistful pleading expression might be just the look in the eyes of an animal facing death but dumbly begging for life.

Then, in a flash, it all came back--her own little parlor, Billikins whining and hiding in her skirts in mysterious terror, and Felix Brand gazing at her with all the usual soft, caressing look of his brown eyes curtained behind some absorbing anxiety and fear. But in these eyes into which she was looking now there was no fear, only a longing that her answer should be what he wished. She shivered as a half-sensed intuition of impending tragedy shot through her.

"You--you make me feel as if I were a judge and called upon to pronounce sentence upon some one," she said and tried to pass the situation off with a little laugh as she added, "Really, it isn't fair!"

But he would not have it so and with even greater earnestness and solemnity pressed his question farther: "Then we'll put it another way. Suppose a mother about to bear a man-child could choose its soul and the life it was to live. Which of those two men would a good, noble woman wish her son to be? Imagine yourself in such a woman's place, Miss Marne, and tell me, which would be your choice."

She felt the compelling force of his earnestness and she was moved by the intense feeling evident in his voice, look and manner. Her face blanched with the sudden conviction that some high consequence hung upon her answer. But she took counsel bravely with herself for a little space as her gaze wandered across the water.

"I think," she replied slowly, "yes, I'm quite sure, any good woman would wish her son to be good rather than great. I don't believe any good woman would hesitate at all, if it were possible for her to make such a choice."

He straightened up and a solemn joy overspread his eyes and face. "I thank you, Miss Marne," he said, barely resting for an instant one hand upon hers that lay on the rail. "I had little doubt what your answer would be, because you are a good woman. But I wanted to know for a certainty. It is my final warrant that I am right."

He said no more, and Henrietta, a little awed by the rapt, triumphant look with which, sitting upright with head thrown back, he gazed into the distance, kept silence also. And in a few moments their ship bumped into its berth and they joined silently the crowd that pressed forward.

After that she was conscious in his manner toward her of an increased air of guardianship. It gave her a warm sense of comfort and security and she found herself gradually confiding in it more and more. She even sought his advice, finally, upon the intimate personal problems that were troubling her so deeply. Did he think she ought to permit her sister to motor with Mr. Brand? Was it likely that she herself could find another situation that would carry her safely out of her financial difficulties if she should continue to find her work under Mr. Brand so disagreeable?

"I hesitate to say anything to you about these things, because I know how much you dislike him," she apologized, "but I feel so uncertain and so much worried about them, and there is nobody else to whom I can go who knows him as well as you do. His whole character has changed so much in the last few months that he hardly seems to be the same man. I have an uneasy feeling that it isn't wise for my sister to go with him, although it does seem the most innocent thing in the world, and the kindest, for him to stop at our house, when he has some business farther down the island, and take Isabella for a spin. She enjoys it so much and she has so few pleasures. And she and mother have such confidence in Mr. Brand that they feel sure he would never ask her to do anything that wasn't perfectly all right. I felt that way, too, at first, but I don't now."

"I am glad you have spoken of it," he replied with interest, "for I have been thinking I ought to give you some warning before Felix returns. He is simply serving a purpose of his own, an utterly selfish purpose, and he is using her to help him gain his end without the least compunction. Don't let her go again, Miss Marne, if you can help it. I know Felix Brand through and through, and he is not to be trusted."

Henrietta could only look at him speechless, her eyes wide with apprehension.

"Don't be alarmed," he hastened to assure her. "I don't think there is anything for you to be uneasy about, except that his influence is always evil--" he paused on a raised inflection and looked at her admiringly. "One of the reasons," he went on regardless of the abrupt change, "why I like you and feel so sure that you are sound and good and strong clear through is because you have not yielded in the least to the subtle influence he has over most people. You have held to your own ideas of what is right and wrong."

She blushed under his eyes and his words. "I'm afraid I don't deserve all that credit. I remember a time when I did have some ugly feelings and some tempestuous desires for pleasures that were out of my reach. But I had too many other things to do and to think about, and so I guess I outgrew them."

"And I guess, too, that they didn't find congenial soil in your heart to take root in," he added. "But you needn't be much worried about your sister, for I am sure it will not last much longer. At the best--or worst--there will not be many more opportunities--" again he straightened up and sent that triumphant glance of his alert, confident eyes out across the water--"in which it will be possible for him to work any evil. But he is so thoroughly base that if I were you I would not trust her with him again."

Henrietta wondered what he meant by that "not many more opportunities," but forebore to ask him lest she might unintentionally pry into some matter of which he did not wish to speak. Another enigmatical fragment from his secret thought came out when she asked his advice about her own relations with Brand. She told him how repugnant she was beginning to find her work because--and here she skipped lightly and diplomatically over her reasons, so that she might not do violence to her own sense of loyalty to her employer--she did not now feel in harmony with his methods of doing business and his ways of looking at a good many things.

"You don't need to put it in so roundabout a way," he told her impulsively. "I know all about that change in the man's character and how nearly he has lost all sense of truth and honesty. Luckily, he still controls his temper with you and treats you with respect----"

He stopped and his whole manner suddenly bristled with aggressiveness. In his voice as he spoke the next words there was a significant ring: "And I don't think he'll do otherwise. But of course you can't put up much longer with these developments in him. I would advise you to look for another position at once. In fact, I am sure you'd better, because it won't be long until Felix will not need you."

She gazed at him with such question and alarm in her eyes, that he returned her look with surprise. "Oh," he exclaimed, "I see. You are puzzled by what I said. I forgot for the moment,--perhaps I have before, too--that you do not know all that I do about Felix. But don't be troubled about it now. Some day you shall know--I shall tell you--the whole story. I dare say it will seem marvelous to you at first. But you will soon see how inevitable it has all been. Felix will return soon, I suppose."

"Oh, I hope so," Henrietta broke in. "He has been gone five weeks and his affairs are in an awful condition!"

Gordon nodded. "Yes, they must be. It is quite time for him to come back and put them in order. But I warn you, Miss Marne, that it will be wise for you not to mention my name to him when he does return. He hates me so furiously and he has so little control over that violent temper he has developed, that there is no telling what he will say or do if any one so much as speaks of me in his presence. You remember his outrageous conduct to Mrs. Fenlow?"

"Oh, did Mrs. Fenlow tell you about that?" Henrietta asked with a quick look of surprise that was reminiscent, too, of the shock the incident had given her. "I thought she mentioned your name. Was that what made him so angry?"

"That was what caused his final brutality. The trouble was about Mark Fenlow. You know how fond and proud of him his mother has been and what high expectations she has always had for him. Felix had got him into the way of gambling and the boy had developed a passion for it which he could not restrain. Ever since Felix has had money he has played a good deal, and for pretty high stakes, because of the pleasure he got out of it. But he knew when to stop, just as he did with all his vicious indulgences."

Gordon's eyes were flashing and his voice growing tense with hostile feeling. But Henrietta saw that he was making a strong effort to keep himself under control and to speak calmly about his enemy.

"That is," he went on, "he used to be able to stop before doing himself injury. He didn't care what happened to others. But he can't now. The gambler's mania has got hold of him in just the same way that he's lost control of his temper, and he's likely, if he keeps on, to gamble away everything he's got. He liked Mark Fenlow and led him into more evil than just the gambling. But it was that that proved the boy's ruin. It was the old story--playing, losing, borrowing, financial difficulties, the temptation of money in sight, the belief that he could pay it back the next day. His last filchings, which brought about discovery and confession of the whole business to his mother and father, were due to the fact that Felix was ruthlessly pressing him to pay back some borrowed money. That was why Mrs. Fenlow went up to Felix's office and told him what she thought of him. Weeks ago I went to the boy and tried to reason with him about the way he was going and persuade him to quit, short off. He told his mother about that, too, and that was how she happened to mention my name in their controversy."

"Poor Mrs. Fenlow!" said Henrietta. "I knew she must be in some great trouble that morning. But what has become of Mark?"

"His father made good his peculations and hushed the matter all up, and then they sent him out west to a cattle ranch." _

Read next: Chapter 18. Isabella Takes One More Ride

Read previous: Chapter 16. Mrs. Fenlow Is Angry

Table of content of Fate of Felix Brand


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book