"Yes," Thornton admitted, "there was a lot of vice bottled up among the Puritan saints. It has been spilling out ever since, but that makes no difference," he went on vehemently to explain his theories.

Somehow, now that his heart was touched, he put pa.s.sion and conviction into what his sober reason held as speculation. He made clear to her the newest theories from Germany. He had come out as a diplomat in a distasteful cause; he became a pleader full of conviction. His imagination woke into a flame, and he saw anew, vitally, all the old problems that he had handled coldly in the laboratory. The woman sat dumbly, sucking in his statements and arguments. Then, as they stood on the gra.s.s waiting for Pete to bring up his nag, she said:

"We are free, you think." Her mind was laboring with his words.

"In a large measure, we can start fresh: the die is not cast beforehand." He added less warmly.

"But we copy what is about us. If we can't escape from what you call the current of ideals we are born in, what difference does it make? It amounts to the same thing!"

She, the woman, pleaded with him, the man, to free her, to take her away. He answered, tenderly:

"We can; each one can live his own life as a stranger to his shipmates. You have done so."

"It means a sacrifice. Some one must lift us. From some other life we could get the strength, and that other one loses--just so much as he gives."

Thornton's brows contracted. She read the comment of reason that ran beside his text.

"Who knows? Everything can't be weighed in scales."

She did not ask him if he would return; she knew in her heart that he would.

VI

Certain natural results followed from Jarvis Thornton's first interference in the Ellwell family troubles. He felt bound to do what he could with the Minnesota uncle to secure some kind of a berth for young Roper. In a few weeks he was able to make another journey to the Four Corners, with the definite offer of a small agency in a little frontier town. He found the family conditions troubled, but temporarily quiet. Old Ellwell, after a pa.s.sionate and violent attack, had lapsed into a glum silence. The son kept out of his way; hung about the premises during the day-time, and took himself off as often as the mother and sisters could find money for him to spend. After several visits to the Four Corners, in such times of family stress, Thornton found himself on the most intimate terms with the young woman who seemed to realize the suffering most.

He made up his mind that, come what might, he should, in justice to his father, tell him the story. Thornton's father was an elderly man whom most good Boston people were glad to know. He had a little fortune; he owned a comfortable little brick box on Marlboro' Street; he had cultivated enough tastes to keep him reasonably occupied ever since his wife's sudden death years ago. Jarvis Thornton enjoyed his father, and the enjoyment was reciprocal. The two had put their heads together and planned out the younger man's life-work, and each felt an equal interest and responsibility for the success of their speculation. What the father's career had lacked in effectiveness, they now determined should be supplied by Jarvis. So the son felt already some compunctions when he realized how far he had gone in this important matter without putting his father in the way of criticizing it.

It was a stifling July evening that Jarvis took to open the matter to his father. The old man had been unusually silent, almost preoccupied during the dinner they had eaten together in the little back dining-room. The son noticed that the heat had told on his father, and he blamed himself for keeping him in this dusty, deserted town, while he completed his laboratory work. The electric cars made a great whirr, just around the corner, every few moments, and the little strip of park behind the house was full of the poor people who had crawled out of their hot holes to get some breathable air in the green spots abandoned by the rich. Jarvis Thornton cast his eyes lazily over the dusty library where they had gone for their smoke. Among its tall rows of sober-looking books he had got his first taste for the life he was beginning to lead, the life on the whole that seemed to him the most satisfactory of any he had looked at. There was a gulf between him and this pa.s.sion-ridden mob which swarmed about the public parks in a hot summer; there was, also, a gulf between him and his neighbors in the contiguous brick boxes, who strove merely to make the boxes comfortable. And to his father who sat opposite to him, his fine thin face with the short gray beard occasionally lighted by the red coal of his cigar, he owed it all. Somehow to-night he felt that he was about to propose a raid across that gulf, a voluntary abandonment of the calm, effective position that he had been blessed with.

He had no difficulty in broaching the affair. To discuss a matter with his father was like talking to a more experienced and patient self.

"Did you ever know the Ellwells?" he began, simply. "One of them was the old pastor in the Second Church, and his grandson is on the stock board now." The older man nodded. Then he continued, describing his first introduction to the family, his impression of the Four Corners, his first visit there, with clear, simple portraits of the various Ellwells of this generation. When he came to the slump of Roper Ellwell, second, he found it less easy to explain how it had involved him. His last visits to the Four Corners he pa.s.sed over hastily, and after a few broken remarks about the woman who had drawn him there, he came to an awkward silence. His father kept on smoking, as if waiting for a final statement. As it did not come, he spoke, in a clear, impartial voice.

"Yes, I have known all the Ellwells except these young people. I was just out of Camberton when the war broke out. John Ellwell shirked then; it was not much to do to go to the front. It was in the air to fight." He paused to let this aspect of the case sink in. "Later I was chairman of the committee that requested him to leave the Tremont Club. And still later, when his swindle on the exchange came to light, I helped his father hush the matter up. He was a bad lot."

"Yes," his son answered slowly. "An unusually bad lot. He is rotten!"

"Of course, besides the scandals we have mentioned there were, probably are, others with women. What you say about the children shows how impoverished is the blood. The son could hardly end otherwise. You have given him a new soil to grow in, but the end must be there!"

The old man pointed stiffly to the street. Jarvis Thornton made no reply. Presently his father continued:

"They were not transplanted in time. They are degenerate Puritans.

There are a great many like them, who have petered out on the stony farms, or in little clerkships, or in asylums of one sort or another.

The stock was too finely bred in and in, over and over, for three hundred years nearly. Insanity and vice have been h.o.a.rded and repressed and pa.s.sed on." He seemed to speak with personal bitterness.

"We have the taint of scrofula, of drink, of insanity, all covered up.

Those were wisest who scattered themselves forty years ago into new lands. Then the magnificent old stock took a new life. It would not be too much to say that wherever we find good life, hope, joy, or prosperity in our broad country, you may trace it all back to New England."

The son listened wonderingly to this essay on the Puritan stock.

"But I don't believe in it," the young man protested. "I don't believe that it is good science or good morals to hang about our necks this horrid millstone of heredity."

His father continued in his impartial tone. "You know how much of that rotten stuff is in our family. You remember the Sharps, and the Dingleys, and the Abraham Clarkes. You know your mother died from sheer exhaustion," the old man trembled, "and I have been spared for a fairly useless life by constant patching up. The war didn't knock me up only----"

"I will not believe it!" Jarvis Thornton uttered, in intense tones.

His father sighed.

"And by some fortune you were spared; you have grown up strong and sound and equable. I led your interests to the line of work you have chosen, for a purpose----"

He paused again. "In order that s.e.x, mere s.e.x, might have no special unhealthy fascination for you; that you might meet these problems and treat them as judiciously as you would a matter of banking--without sentiment, without pa.s.sion, without an ignorant, liquorish hallucination----"

The son raised his hand.

"And now it has come in a new way," he said, quietly, "through your pity and your generosity and your faith. But it has come."

What Jarvis Thornton replied was neither coherent nor weighty. He flung aside the idea of pity or generosity as absurd. He loved this woman for herself, because, because he loved her. His father smiled a sad, kind smile.

"The mother does not seem to have added much to the blood." He threw this out in order to get the subject back into more reasonable channels.

"No, she is a weak woman. But what of it? I don't marry the family. We shall leave them and build a new life, and break the curse." He smiled, slightly.

"Granting your beliefs that no harm would come to your children, that it is all chance about these matters," persisted the father, "still you _cannot_ escape the family. You marry the conditions; they will remain with you. _They_, if nothing else, will ruin your life."

The younger man rose as if to shake off a physical bandage. For the first time in his life he felt conscious of a rebellion with the elemental conditions of existence.

"What if it does mean corruption and misery! I want my joy, my life, even if they write 'Failure' at the bottom of my page."

"No, no!" his father protested. "You will take the pain all right and the consequences like a man, but you will never believe that swinish statement you have just made."

This brought the younger man to his calmer mood.

"I hate them," he said, bitterly, "more than you can; but her I love."

"And to her you will sacrifice all?"

His father looked at him searchingly, longingly.

"Yes, if need be, _all_, but you!"

The old man smiled coolly.

"I shall not count long, and you are independent, anyway. But I don't care to put the matter on such a footing. We have not lived that way."

"I will do whatever you desire," the son said, "except----"