He could detect concern in the shrewd countenance4 and tones of Samuel Cryble, a hard-headed Yankee from a Scotch5 Protestant valley in New Hampshire, who had risen to the position of his chief assistant and, in a small way, copartner. They sat together in the dingy6 office on the public road and silently, grimly, went over invoices7 and payments, debts and debtors8. It was on such an occasion that Alexander had word of the death of Doctor Veneada.
Hulings' involuntary concern, the stirred memories of the dead man's liberal spirit and mind—he had been the only person Alexander Hulings could call friend—speedily gave place to a growing anxiety as to how Veneada might have left his affairs. He had been largely a careless man in practical matters.
Alexander had never satisfied the mortgage he had granted Veneada on the timber properties purchased with the other man's money. He had tried to settle the indebtedness when it had first fallen due, but the doctor had begged him to let the money remain as it was.
"I'll only throw it away on some confounded soft-witted scheme, Alex," he had insisted. "With you, I know where it is; it's a good investment."
Now Hulings recalled that the second extension had expired only a few weeks before Veneada's death, incurring9 an obligation the settlement of which he had been impatiently deferring10 until he saw the other.
He had had a feeling that Veneada, with no near or highly regarded relatives, would will him the timber about the valleys; yet he was anxious to have the thing settled. The Alexander Hulings Company was short of available funds. He returned to Eastlake for Veneada's funeral; and there, for the first time, he saw the cousins to whom the doctor had occasionally and lightly alluded12. They were, he decided13, a lean and rapacious14 crew.
He remained in Eastlake for another twenty-four hours, but was forced to leave with nothing discovered; and it was not until a week later that, again in his office, he learned that Veneada had made no will. This, it seemed, had been shown beyond any doubt. He rose, walked to a dusty window, and gazed out unseeingly at an eddy15 of dead leaves and dry metallic16 snow in a bleak17 November wind.
After a vague, disconcerted moment he shrewdly divined exactly what would occur. He said nothing to Cryble, seated with his back toward him; and even Gisela looked with silent inquiry18 at his absorption throughout supper. She never questioned him now about any abstraction that might be concerned with affairs outside their pleasant life together.
The inevitable19 letter at last arrived, announcing the fact that, in a partition settlement of Veneada's estate by his heirs, it was necessary to settle the expired mortgage. It could not have come, he realized, at a more inconvenient20 time.
He was forced to discuss the position with Cryble; and the latter heard him to the end with a narrowed, searching vision.
"That money out of the business now might leave us on the bank," he asserted. "As I see it, there's but one thing to do—go over all the timber, judge what we actually will need for coaling, buy that—or, if we must, put another mortgage on it—and let the rest, a good two-thirds, go."
This, Alexander acknowledged to himself, was the logical if not the only course. And then John Wooddrop would purchase the remainder; he would have enough charcoal21 to keep up his local industries beyond his own life and another. All his—Alexander's—planning, aspirations22, sacrifice, would have been for nothing. He would never, like John Wooddrop, be a great industrial despot, or command, as he had so often pictured, the iron situation of the state. To do that, he would have to control all the iron the fumes23 of whose manufacture stained the sky for miles about Harmony. If Wooddrop recovered an adequate fuel supply Alexander Hulings would never occupy a position of more than secondary importance.
There was a bare possibility of his retaining all the tracts24 again by a second mortgage; but as he examined that, it sank from a potentiality to a thing without substance. It would invite an investigation25, a public gleaning26 of facts, that he must now avoid. His pride could not contemplate27 the publication of the undeniable truth—that what he had so laboriously28 built up stood on an insecure foundation.
"It is necessary," he said stiffly, "in order to realize on my calculations, that I continue to hold all the timber at present in my name."
"And that's where you make a misjudgment," Cryble declared, with an equal bluntness. "I can see clear enough that you are letting your personal feeling affect your business sense. There is room enough in Pennsylvania for both you and old Wood-drop. Anyhow, there's got to be somebody second in the parade, and that is a whole lot better than tail end."
Alexander Hillings nodded absently; Cryble's philosophy was correct for a clerk, an assistant, but Alexander Hillings felt the tyranny of a wider necessity. He wondered where he could get the money to satisfy the claim of the doctor's heirs. His manufacturing interests in West Virginia, depreciated29 as they were at present, would about cover the debt. Ordinarily they were worth a third more; and in ten years they would double in value. He relentlessly31 crushed all regret at parting with what was now his best property and promptly32 made arrangements to secure permanently33 the timberland.
Soon, he felt, John Wooddrop must feel the pinch of fuel shortage; and Alexander awaited such development with keen attention. As he had anticipated, when driving from the canal, he saw that the Blue Lump Furnace had gone out of blast, its workmen dispersed34. Gisela, the day before, had been to see her father; and he was curious to hear what she might report. A feeling of coming triumph, of inevitable worldly expansion, settled comfortably over him, and he regarded his wife pleasantly through a curtain of cigar smoke.
They were seated in a parlor35, already shadowy with an early February dusk; coals were burning brightly in a polished open stove, by which Gisela was embroidering36 in brightly colored wool on a frame. She had the intent, placid37 expression of a woman absorbed in a small, familiar duty. As he watched her Alexander Hulings' satisfaction deepened—young and fine and vigorous, she was preeminently a wife for his importance and position. She gazed at him vacantly, her eyes crinkled at the comers, her lips soundlessly counting stitches, and a faint smile rose to his lips.
He was anxious to hear what she might say about John Wooddrop, and yet a feeling of propriety39 restrained him from a direct question. He had not had a line, a word or message, from Wood-drop since he had married the other's daughter. The aging man, he knew, idolized Gisela; and her desertion—for so John Wooddrop would hold it—must have torn the Ironmaster. She had, however, been justified40 in her choice, he contentedly41 continued his train of thought. Gisela had everything a woman could wish for. He had been a thoughtful husband. Her clothes, of the most beautiful texture42 and design, were pinned with jewels; her deftly43 moving fingers flashed with rings; the symbol of his success, his——
"My father looks badly, Alexander," she said suddenly. "I wish you would see him, and that he would talk to you. But you won't and he won't. He is very nearly as stubborn as yourself. I wish you could make a move; after all, you are younger.... But then, you would make each other furious in a second." She sighed deeply.
"Has he shown any desire to see me?"
"No," she admitted. "You must know he thinks you married me only to get his furnaces; he is ridiculous about it—just as if you needed any more! He has been fuming44 and planning a hundred things since his charcoal has been getting low."
She stopped and scrutinized45 her embroidery46, a na飗e pattern of rose and urn11 and motto. He drew a long breath; that was the first tangible47 indication he had had of the working out of his planning, the justification48 of his sacrifice.
"I admire father," she went on once more, conversationally49; "my love for you hasn't blinded me to his qualities. He has a surprising courage and vigor38 for an—— Why, he must be nearly seventy! And now he has the most extraordinary plan for what he calls 'getting the better of you.' He was as nice with me as possible, but I could see that he thinks you're lost this time.... No, the darker green. Alexander, don't you think the words would be sweet in magenta50?"
"Well," he demanded harshly, leaning forward, "what is this plan?"
She looked up, surprised at his hard impatience51.
"How queer you are! And that's your iron expression; you know it's expressly forbidden in the house, after hours. His plan? I'm certain there's no disloyalty in telling you. Isn't it mad, at his age? And it will cost him an outrageous52 amount of money. He is going to change the entire system of all his forges and furnaces. It seems stone coal has been found on his slopes; and he is going to blow in with that, and use a hot blast in his smelting53."
Alexander Hulings sat rigid54, motionless; the cigar in his hand cast up an unbroken blue ribbon of smoke. Twice he started to speak, to exclaim incredulously; but he uttered no sound. It seemed that all his planning had been utterly55 overthrown56, ruined; in a manner which he—anyone—could not have foreseen. The blowing in of furnaces with hard coal had developed since his entrance into the iron field. It had not been generally declared successful; the pig produced had been so impure57 that, with working in an ordinary or even puddling forge, it had often to be subjected to a third, finery fire. But he had been conscious of a slow improvement in the newer working; he had vaguely acknowledged that sometime anthracite would displace charcoal for manufacturing purposes; in future years he might adopt it himself.
But John Wooddrop had done it before him; all the square miles of timber that he had acquired with such difficulty, that he had retained at the sacrifice of his best property, would be worthless. The greater part of it could not be teamed across Wooddrop's private roads or hauled advantageously over a hundred intervening streams and miles. It was all wasted, lapsed—his money and dreams!
"It will take over a year," she went on. "I don't understand it at all; but it seems that sending a hot blast into a furnace, instead of the cold, keeps the metal at a more even temperature. Father's so interested you'd think he was just starting out in life—though, really, he is an old man." She laughed. "Competition has been good for him."
All thrown away; in vain! Alexander Hulings wondered what acidulous58 comment Cryble would make. There were no coal deposits on his land, its nature forbade that; besides, he had no money to change the principal of his drafts. He gazed about at the luxury that surrounded Gisela and himself; there was no lien59 on the house, but there still remained some thousands of dollars to pay on the carpets and fixtures60. His credit, at least, was unimpeachable61; decorators, tradespeople of all sorts, had been glad to have him in their debt. But if any whisper of financial stringency62 escaped, a horde63 would be howling about his gate, demanding the settlement of their picayune accounts.
The twilight64 had deepened; the fire made a ruddy area in the gloom, into the heart of which he flung his cigar. His wife embroidered65 serenely66. As he watched her, noting her firm, well-modeled features, realizing her utter unconsciousness of all that he essentially67 at that moment was, he felt a strange sensation of loneliness, of isolation68.
Alexander Hulings had a sudden impulse to take her into his confidence; to explain everything to her—the disaster that had overtaken his project of ultimate power, the loss of the West Virginia interest, the tightness of money. He had a feeling that she would not be a negligible adviser—he had been a witness of her efficient management of his house—and he felt a craving69 for the sympathy she would instantly extend.
Alexander parted his lips to inform her of all that had occurred; but the habit of years, the innate70 fiber71 of his being, prevented. A wife, he reminded himself, a woman, had no part in the bitter struggle for existence; it was not becoming for her to mingle72 with the affairs of men. She should be purely73 a creature of elegance74, of solace75, and, dressed in India muslin or vaporous silk, ornament76 a divan77, sing French or Italian songs at a piano. The other was manifestly improper78.
This, illogically, made him irritable79 with Gisela; she appeared, contentedly sewing, a peculiarly useless appendage80 in his present stress of mind. He was glum81 again at supper, and afterward82 retired83 into an office he had had arranged on the ground floor of the mansion84. There he got out a number of papers, accounts and pass books; but he spent little actual time on them. He sat back in his chair, with his head sunk low, and mind thronged85 with memories of the past, of his long, uphill struggle against oblivion and ill health.
Veneada was gone; yes, and Conrad Wishon too—the supporters and confidants of his beginning. He himself was fifty years old. At that age a man should be firmly established, successful, and not deviled by a thousand unexpected mishaps86. By fifty a man's mind should be reasonably at rest, his accomplishment87 and future secure; yet there was nothing of security, but only combat, before him.
Wooddrop had been a rich man from the start, when he, Alexander Hulings, at the humiliating failure of the law, had had to face life with a few paltry88 hundreds. No wonder he had been obliged to contract debts, to enter into impossibly onerous89 agreements! Nothing but struggle ahead, a relentless30 continuation of the past years; and he had reached, passed, his prime!
There, for a day, he had thought himself safe, moving smoothly90 toward the highest pinnacles91; when, without warning, at a few words casually92 pronounced over an embroidery frame, the entire fabric93 of his existence had been rent! It was not alone the fact of John Wooddrop's progressive spirit that he faced, but now a rapidly accumulating mass of difficulties. He was dully amazed at the treacherous94 shifting of life, at the unheralded change of apparently95 solid ground for quicksand.
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1
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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allied
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| adj.协约国的；同盟国的 | |
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countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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scotch
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| n.伤口，刻痕；苏格兰威士忌酒；v.粉碎，消灭，阻止；adj.苏格兰(人)的 | |
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dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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invoices
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| 发票( invoice的名词复数 )； （发货或服务）费用清单； 清单上货物的装运； 货物的托运 | |
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debtors
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| n.债务人，借方( debtor的名词复数 ) | |
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incurring
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| 遭受，招致，引起( incur的现在分词 ) | |
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deferring
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| v.拖延，延缓，推迟( defer的现在分词 )；服从某人的意愿，遵从 | |
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urn
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| n.（有座脚的）瓮；坟墓；骨灰瓮 | |
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alluded
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| 提及，暗指( allude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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rapacious
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| adj.贪婪的，强夺的 | |
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eddy
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| n.漩涡，涡流 | |
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metallic
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| adj.金属的；金属制的；含金属的；产金属的；像金属的 | |
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bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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inconvenient
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| adj.不方便的，令人感到麻烦的 | |
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charcoal
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| n.炭，木炭，生物炭 | |
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aspirations
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| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
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fumes
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| n.(强烈而刺激的)气味，气体 | |
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tracts
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| 大片土地( tract的名词复数 )； 地带； （体内的）道； （尤指宣扬宗教、伦理或政治的）短文 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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gleaning
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| n.拾落穗，拾遗，落穗v.一点点地收集（资料、事实）( glean的现在分词 )；（收割后）拾穗 | |
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contemplate
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| vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视 | |
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laboriously
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| adv.艰苦地；费力地；辛勤地；（文体等）佶屈聱牙地 | |
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depreciated
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| v.贬值，跌价，减价( depreciate的过去式和过去分词 )；贬低，蔑视，轻视 | |
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relentless
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| adj.残酷的，不留情的，无怜悯心的 | |
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relentlessly
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| adv.不屈不挠地；残酷地；不间断 | |
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promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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dispersed
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| adj. 被驱散的, 被分散的, 散布的 | |
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parlor
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| n.店铺，营业室；会客室，客厅 | |
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embroidering
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| v.（在织物上）绣花( embroider的现在分词 )；刺绣；对…加以渲染（或修饰）；给…添枝加叶 | |
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placid
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| adj.安静的，平和的 | |
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vigor
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| n.活力，精力，元气 | |
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propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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contentedly
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| adv.心满意足地 | |
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texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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deftly
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| adv.灵巧地，熟练地，敏捷地 | |
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fuming
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| 愤怒( fume的现在分词 )； 大怒； 发怒； 冒烟 | |
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scrutinized
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| v.仔细检查，详审( scrutinize的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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embroidery
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| n.绣花，刺绣；绣制品 | |
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tangible
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| adj.有形的，可触摸的，确凿的，实际的 | |
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justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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conversationally
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| adv.会话地 | |
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magenta
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| n..紫红色（的染料）；adj.紫红色的 | |
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51
impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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52
outrageous
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| adj.无理的，令人不能容忍的 | |
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53
smelting
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| n.熔炼v.熔炼，提炼（矿石）( smelt的现在分词 ) | |
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54
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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55
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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56
overthrown
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| adj. 打翻的，推倒的，倾覆的 动词overthrow的过去分词 | |
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57
impure
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| adj.不纯净的，不洁的；不道德的，下流的 | |
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acidulous
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| adj.微酸的；苛薄的 | |
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lien
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| n.扣押权，留置权 | |
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fixtures
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| （房屋等的）固定装置( fixture的名词复数 )； 如（浴盆、抽水马桶）； 固定在某位置的人或物； （定期定点举行的）体育活动 | |
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unimpeachable
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| adj.无可指责的；adv.无可怀疑地 | |
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stringency
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| n.严格，紧迫，说服力；严格性；强度 | |
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horde
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| n.群众，一大群 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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65
embroidered
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| adj．绣花的 | |
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serenely
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| adv.安详地，宁静地，平静地 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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68
isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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craving
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| n.渴望,热望 | |
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innate
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| adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的 | |
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fiber
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| n.纤维，纤维质 | |
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mingle
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| vt.使混合，使相混；vi.混合起来；相交往 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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elegance
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| n.优雅；优美，雅致；精致，巧妙 | |
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solace
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| n.安慰；v.使快乐；vt.安慰(物)，缓和 | |
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ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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77
divan
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| n.长沙发；（波斯或其他东方诗人的）诗集 | |
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78
improper
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| adj.不适当的，不合适的，不正确的，不合礼仪的 | |
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79
irritable
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| adj.急躁的；过敏的；易怒的 | |
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80
appendage
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| n.附加物 | |
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81
glum
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| adj.闷闷不乐的，阴郁的 | |
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82
afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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83
retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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84
mansion
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| n.大厦，大楼；宅第 | |
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85
thronged
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| v.成群，挤满( throng的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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86
mishaps
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| n.轻微的事故，小的意外( mishap的名词复数 ) | |
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87
accomplishment
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| n.完成，成就，（pl.）造诣，技能 | |
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88
paltry
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| adj.无价值的，微不足道的 | |
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89
onerous
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| adj.繁重的 | |
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90
smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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91
pinnacles
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| 顶峰( pinnacle的名词复数 )； 顶点； 尖顶； 小尖塔 | |
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92
casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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treacherous
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| adj.不可靠的，有暗藏的危险的；adj.背叛的，背信弃义的 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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