Chapter XI The Dedication
Gorham Page thought he perceived a change for the better in the spirits of his cousin, after that visit to Pearfield, but Jack said little about the event. It was well into the New Year, when the two happened to be alone in the office one afternoon, that Jack mentioned his father’s widow voluntarily for the first time since his return.
“Did I understand you to say, Gorham, that Clover sent word to me that she should not return to the Hyde Park house?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it was because she felt enmity, or because she feared it?”
“Why, it is your house,” said Page. “It was left to you, as it turns out.”
“Yes, but what difference does that make?” returned the other, with a tinge of impatience, the unreasonableness of which made his cousin smile.
“She wished you to feel full liberty in coming back,” said the latter. “She broke down when she spoke of it, I remember.”
“I don’t like that,” asserted Jack, turning over the pages of Blackstone. “I don’t like to have Clover exiled from a comfortable place, where she would like to be. It is a dog-in-the-manger business that doesn’t suit me in the least.”
“I guess you needn’t worry about the matter,” remarked Page. “Mrs. Van Tassel is in no condition to bear a Chicago winter.”
“Do you mean she is ill?” asked the other, shutting the heavy book suddenly.
“I don’t know. She looks like alabaster, or something that would be easily broken. Miss Bryant was evidently much distressed about her.”
Jack fell into a brown study. It sounded strange to hear his cousin speak of these old schoolmates by such names. The idea of Clover, jolly, laughing Clover, with her sunburned cheeks and dancing blue eyes,—the idea that any one should speak of her as looking like alabaster. And Miss Bryant! It was a jest in itself to hear his serious cousin refer in that tone, and by such a dignified title, to Mildred. It was more than two years since Jack had seen the romping girl, whose heavy hair would never remain in its braid, and who, it seemed, would never cease outgrowing her clothes.
He thought of the sisters for some time, while Page went on with his work. He recalled the little boy and girl who had loved him, and gentle Mrs. Bryant, whose mother-heart had always made him welcome equally with her own children. They had all gone now to that world which had lately gained definite interest for him. Had Clover and Mildred suffered yearning and loss comparable to his? The mere thought, tolerantly admitted, gave him a new feeling toward his old comrades.
At last he spoke again. “Where did Mrs. Van Tassel say they were going?”
It was the first time he had given his friend her title. Page observed it.
“California,” he answered sententiously.
“That doesn’t tell anything.”
Page smiled slightly. “Perhaps that is just what she considered,” he returned, and Jack thought that Gorham was a provoking, dry sort of fellow.
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” he said, rising. “I’m going to Chicago.”
“Are you? Well, you are that favored species of individual who can control his own movements.”
“Yes. They’ve ceased pulling hair out there, and have decided to locate the Fair in Jackson Park, quite near our house, you remember.”
“So I observed. They have lost a good deal of time in controversy, it strikes me. They will have to scratch gravel now.”
And this, if Mr. Page had only known it, was literally what had begun to be done out there in Chicago, in the unreclaimed district which bordered Jackson Park on the south.
Sand-dunes, and marshes, woodland and slough, had all to be effaced, for a new earth must be offered in time to be the foundation for those castles in the air, which were already creating in men’s brains.
As the scope of the proposed work unfolded and became clear, the time began to seem nigh to hopelessly short for its accomplishment. Of public opinion in the East, the kindest expression continued patronizing, amused, and skeptical; the average, contemptuous and hostile.
But Chicago, which had formed a habit of making stepping-stones of obstacles, now said “I will” with greater doggedness of purpose than ever before, and sending steam dredges to invade the wilderness, began the patient, laborious grubbing, which was necessary to excavate in one place, and fill in in another. Meanwhile the oldest inhabitant wandered about, looking on, wondering and fascinated. The maiden, going in advance of the feller of trees, caught with her kodak a farewell glimpse of the wood-road, that had furnished a foothold amid the sand for the spring violets of her childhood. The small boy looked longingly at the sloughs, which had been first to freeze in autumn, and thought it a thousand pities that Chicago had been so brave as to deserve the Fair. The Eastern papers thought so too, and still exercised the virtue of frankness to the fullest extent; but Chicago, with all her reputation for talking, now had no time for such indulgence; but emulated Uncle Remus’s famous tar-baby, who, it will be remembered, when Brer Rabbit jeered at her once and again, still “ain’t sayin’ nothin’.” She only grubbed away, and her citizens prepared themselves for the long pull, the strong pull, and the pull all together, which should win ultimate triumph.
When Jack arrived there, he found his city in all the excitement of work and plans and anticipation. His father’s Scotch housekeeper, Jeanie, was in possession as of old when he reached home, and gave him a reception in which tears mingled with cordiality. “It’s all different without your father, Mr. Jack,” she mourned, “but we must bear it,—we must bear it.”
Jack went through the house, finding changes in every room but his own. In that one, every object was familiar.
Jeanie had nothing but good words for her young mistress. She was ready to praise her as long as Jack would have patience to listen. Miss Bryant, too, came in for a share of her voluble encomiums; but she did not know where they were, for though Mrs. Van Tassel wrote her an occasional note, she said they were moving about from place to place.
The upshot of Jack’s trip was, that he went back to Boston and his cousin’s office, and waited for destiny to show him some natural way of communicating his generous impulses to Clover.
So he lived through the winter, keeping up some interests in common with certain of his classmates, and gaining a reputation for touchiness regarding his native city, with whose exertions he felt a loyal and filial sympathy. It made him hot to read and hear frequent allusions to prove that the public was still holding its sides with merriment over the exquisite humor of the idea that upstart, pork-packing Chicago should undertake to conceive and carry out a true World’s Fair, one fit to follow the great similar achievements of the Old World nations, and to be an adequate embodiment of the high ideas which gave birth to the enterprise.
It was little mollifying to him to perceive that much of the sneering had at least the merit of genuineness; that there was much sincere incredulity of Chicago’s ability to rise to an occasion so remote from her habits and experience. With his Cambridge training, his youth, and his years of absence from home, he might have sympathized in all this, more with than against the Eastern element, but for his father’s active labors, and his own knowledge of the men who had the matter in hand.
Only once Jack heard of Clover and Mildred during the summer that followed. He visited Miss Berry again, and heard from her that Mrs. Van Tassel’s health was reëstablished, and that the sisters had taken a trip to Alaska. He asked her to convey to them, for him, an earnest invitation to return to the homestead, whenever they pleased.
Once again, in the winter, he learned from the same source of information that they had gone to Europe. In June, Van Tassel and Page took a trip through the English and Scottish lakes together. Clover and Mildred evidently wished to live a life apart. Very well, it should be as they pleased; but Jack could not help looking for them at each little inn where his and Page’s horses stopped. His father’s memory was still a living, ever-present one, and persons so strongly associated with him could not be forgotten.
In the autumn the young men came home to find the country absorbed in Columbian celebrations. Red and yellow was as popular a combination as red, white, and blue. Columbus was pictured on every hand. There was no sameness, no fear of monotony about these representations. He was shown thin and stout, old and young, fair and dark, narrow-visaged and rotund of countenance. Meanwhile, the dedication in his honor drew on apace.
The twentieth of October, Chicago was to be clothed in bunting, and the great men of the country were to be drawn by prancing steeds through her streets. On the twenty-first, the Exposition buildings were to be dedicated to their splendid use, and Jack Van Tassel told his cousin that they must both be present at the ceremonies. Page demurred, but Van Tassel had his way, and ten o’clock of that sunshiny, clear, Friday morning found the two men entering the grounds, where a sense of roominess was the first sensation, after struggling in the city’s crowd.
Jack felt his breast swell with pride in the fair scene, incomplete, yet already inspiring; but he forbore from being the first to comment. Let the Boston man speak; and he finally did. Page’s eyes slowly took in an overwhelming impression of the general scheme,—of what had already been, and what would be accomplished. Then he spoke:—
“This is great—so far.”
The words were balm to his companion.
Page went on.
“But Eastern men designed these palaces. Eastern art”—
“Now look here,” burst forth Jack. “Don’t try to apologize for Chicago’s achievement. She hasn’t got there yet, quite, of course, but she is arriving. She had sense enough to make this Fair a national and not a local business. You’re surely not surprised at that? She understood it that way from the first. They are not all Chicago men who have done this work, but be kind enough to remember that they are Chicago men who have laid the brains of this country under contribution, and whose indomitable energy has been the steam which has actuated the vast machinery of construction from the beginning, and will do so to the end. Don’t explain it, my friend; just say it is stupendous, and pass on.”
Page, as he silently obeyed, remembered Mildred Bryant’s prophetic words in the Portland train:—
“It is very fortunate for the country that we have taken the Fair.”
It began to look that way; still herculean tasks remained.
Jack had received an invitation to witness the parade from the loggia of the Mining building, and the cousins bent their steps thither, between the lines of waiting spectators. At present, the building was used as barracks for troops. The two glanced down the neat perspective of soldier beds, as they ran up the broad flight of steps leading to the gallery, then they came out upon the balcony that faces north, and looked with interest upon the scene. Flags in great numbers were flying from every roof. The waterways and Wooded Island lay before them in the October sunlight.
They were talking of the names of buildings, and discussing the fabulous measurements of the mountain called Manufactures and Liberal Arts, when a new party appeared from the gallery doorway. The new-comers advanced to an arch a couple of rods from where the young men were standing, and Jack, who was profoundly interested in his subject, merely received an impression of beauty and fashion as he glanced at them, and then, looking back, returned to his statistics.
“If they can only have good weather the coming winter,” he went on, “the thing will be ready May 1st, in spite of the croakers.”
Soft laughter and happy voices came from beyond the massive masonry, which half concealed their neighbors.
“Jack,” said Page, in a low tone, “Mrs. Van Tassel and Miss Bryant are with that party.”
“No! Why, I didn’t see them.”
“Yes. Mrs. Van Tassel has some kind of a gray and white dress on, and Miss Bryant”—
“I want to get out of here, then.”
Page answered him sharply.
“Is it your intention to play the role of Indian toward those ladies the rest of your life?”
“No, nothing of the kind,” returned Van Tassel uncomfortably. “I am more willing to see them than they probably are to see me. I don’t blame Clover, if she chooses never to meet me again. I suppose she remembers as clearly as I do some of the last things I said to her. Whew!” for in changing their positions one member of the party had stepped back into plain sight, “what a stunning girl they have with them!”
“That was Miss Bryant,” said Page.
“No, no. You didn’t see the one I meant. Splendid creature; carried her head as though the Fair was built expressly for her.”
“Yes, that was Miss Bryant. I have met her a number of times. Perhaps I had better go over and speak to her.”
“Don’t think of it till I am out of the way,” and Jack grasped his cousin’s arm. “That, Mildred? Milly Bryant?” he added incredulously, looking reminiscently into that young woman’s past, and seeing a combination of tanned countenance, rough hair, and old clothes revealing surplus wrist and ankle; a picture which refused to have relation to the trim and elegant young creature who had caught his eye.
This revelation increased to a panic Jack’s desire not to intrude upon these friends. As though to enlighten him still further, Mildred insisted that her sister should step back also, and see some vista, which her own movement had brought into range.
Jack instinctively shrank more closely into the shadow of his pillar, while Page sympathetically followed his example, and both stole glances at Clover’s pleased, unconscious face; a changed face from that which either of the men knew as hers. Jack saw in it the signs of a greater maturity and life-experience, as well as the subtle charm which exists in a lovely woman whose advantages are set off by tasteful and fashionable attire. Page saw what still seemed to him an angelic countenance, only made earthly by the tints of healthy youth, alert with interest; these smiling lips were but distantly related to the rigid, delicate mouth he remembered.
Clover vanished again, recalled by her companions’ interest in a company of cavalry who galloped in golden glory across a distant bridge.
“I wish I was out of this,” exclaimed Jack. “They may all take it into their heads to come over here any minute. If the girls were alone, I shouldn’t mind it. They could behave as they pleased then; but with mutual friends it would be very awkward for them. Dick Ogden is in the party. I can hear his laugh this minute. I’m going, Gorham.”
“Very well, I too, then. Here comes some governor and his staff.”
“Yes, it is Russell. The crowd is safe to cheer now and wave handkerchiefs for live minutes. It is our chance. We sha’n’t be noticed. Come.”
Jack started across the loggia with Page beside him. As ill luck would have it, the only one of the party by the balcony who turned idly curious eyes to look after the pair was his friend Ogden.
“Why there’s—it is Van Tassel!” ejaculated the latter. “Oh, Van.”
How Jack anathematized the cheerful, loud voice. He turned a deaf ear and hastened on.
“Van Tassel!” bawled the other. “Here, what’s the matter with you? They’re here, old fellow.”
There is no creature so difficult to escape as the man who is convinced he is doing you a favor.
Jack could hear the legs of his persecutor’s chair grate on the flooring as he sprang to his feet. He paused and turned around, knowing that if he persisted, his misguided friend would not hesitate to pursue and capture him in his zeal.
“They’re right here,” repeated Ogden explanatorily, his ingenuous florid face beaming. “Wasn’t it curious you should have passed by, so near and yet so far?”
Van Tassel and Page advanced, the former with a rigidly impassive countenance. It seemed long to him that he was crossing the ten feet of balcony which lay between him and the young women whose reception he feared sensitively.
Ogden, and doubtless their other friends, supposed them united by ties of intimacy. Much as he disliked to obtrude himself upon them, to permit strangers to suppose that he was not pleased to meet these ladies would set many tongues wagging and was not to be considered. Better to risk a snub than to appear disloyal to those his father had honored.
But he need not have feared. Clover and Mildred were not the inexperienced girls of his acquaintance. They had taken in the situation as keenly as he had done, and when he reached them were ready to greet him and Mr. Page in a matter-of-course manner, calculated to divert suspicion had any existed. The circumstances, moreover, were favorable. The common interest of the parade at once claimed the attention of all, and after Page had been introduced to the strangers of the party, Jack drew a breath of relief that at any rate the ice was broken.
He stood near Mildred, looking down upon the gay plumes, uniforms, and prancing steeds of the procession, and wished she would address him. Was this the girl who had always been eagerly ready to act as crew of his boat, whose strong arms had not been of contemptible assistance in bailing her out? who had received his invitations to sail in a thankful spirit, being thereby richly repaid for her physical exertions? She had sometimes needed to be snubbed out of too energetic participation in his own and Clover’s plans. She had been a good fellow always, Jack remembered, even if occasionally inconveniently effervescent in the matter of animal spirits; had been an honest, fair antagonist, with a brave love of sport.
It struck Van Tassel as very curious that he should be so meekly desirous now of a crumb of friendly notice from one who had looked up to him so long and loyally.
He wished he could forget some of those heated things he had said to Clover on that miserable afternoon. Of course she had repeated them to her sister, and he felt uncomfortably sure that the memory of them was even now seething beneath the jetted crown of Miss Bryant’s hat.
He envied Page the unconsciousness with which he could lean toward either sister, making and receiving comments. Clover’s sweet face moved him with a tide of thought that gave his eyes a sad expression, which she caught on the only occasion when she looked up into his face.
On the whole, it was an uncomfortable half-hour which Jack spent in that loggia. The talk and laughter of the others gave him a feeling of remoteness and isolation. He wanted Clover or Mildred to speak to him, and they did not. He could not address them without a bit of encouragement. It was a relief to him when it was proposed to forsake the interminable lines of militia which were filing by the Transportation Building, and adjourn in search of luncheon.
Page seemed determined to accept Dick Ogden’s urgent invitation that the cousins should continue of the party, and indeed Gorham started off gayly with Mildred, as though it were a matter of course that Jack should follow. The consequence was that, feeling a good deal as though the whole experience were a dream of the Thanksgiving variety, Van Tassel found himself after a while placed next Clover at table. On her other side sat Dick’s mother, a lady remarkable for an imposing figure and a fluffy pompadour of curling white hair. As this personage declared that the morning in the open air had given her an alarming appetite and proceeded to apply her full attention to its demands, conversation with her languished. Jack observed this, and renouncing the nightmare idea with an effort, endeavored to make necessity serve him.
“You have been abroad all summer, I believe,” he remarked to his neighbor.
“Yes, longer than that,” returned Clover. Her self-possession seemed untroubled; but in reality she suffered, too, from mingled emotions. She pitied Jack, but resented the fact that circumstances had forced them together, and his presence evoked memories overwhelmingly bitter and tender.
“Gorham Page and I did the lake regions of England and Scotland this year,” he went on. “Did you happen to be in that vicinity?”
“No, we stayed in Switzerland during the summer months.”
“You have seen much of the world in the last two years.”
“Yes. Mildred and I feel ourselves quite experienced travelers.”
“Shall you be satisfied to settle down now for a time?”
“I can hardly tell. We have formed a dangerous habit.”
“Are you”—Jack looked busily into his plate—“Are you stopping at home—at the old house?”
“We have no home yet. We mean to settle down some day and make one.”
“Why, have you parted with that dear old place, Mrs. Van Tassel?” asked Mrs. Ogden sonorously, helping herself again to chicken salad.
“Mrs. Van Tassel finds it rather large for her purposes, I fancy,” answered Jack quickly, “and our old housekeeper mourns her defection; but we haven’t parted with the place. I was there in January, Clover, and Jeanie shed a few tears in her homesickness for you. I haven’t seen her yet this time. Page and I only got in yesterday, and we went to the Great Northern.”
Jack did not add that this unusual step was taken because he hoped that Clover and her sister might have returned and taken advantage of the invitation he sent them long ago through Miss Berry.
“Do you know how steadily I have clung to Boston of late?” he continued.
“Aunt Love wrote me you were there with your cousin. Are you going to adopt it as your home?”
“No indeed. You will think, Mrs. Ogden,” leaning forward to speak across Clover to her neighbor, “that Mrs. Van Tassel and I are very poor correspondents. Here we have both been roving about for the past year and waiting to meet in order to learn details about one another’s movements.”
“You can’t tell me anything about young men as correspondents,” replied Mrs. Ogden feelingly. “When Dick is away, the most I ever expect from him is a telegram every day or two.”
“We’re a bad lot,” admitted Jack. “No,” speaking again to Clover, “I am a Chicagoan, and just now prouder than ever of the fact. I fancy that we shall all come home like straying chickens on May 1, ’93. Of course you intend to be here during the Fair?”
“Yes. Mildred and I both anticipate it highly.”
“I tell you, Mrs. Van Tassel,” put in Mrs. Ogden, “if you don’t want to use your house next summer, you can make a fortune renting it. In that situation, within walking distance of the grounds, you can get anything you like to ask for it.”
Clover for a second time was about to disclaim any right or title to the homestead, but Jack besought her with a glance.
“I think we shall find it too convenient to be dispensed with,” he said hastily.
After luncheon the party separated; their invitations to the dedicatory exercises in the Liberal Arts Building admitting them to different situations.
The scene was such as one is glad to have assisted in for its uniqueness if nothing more. Even seeing scarcely made it possible to grasp the vastness of an auditorium covering forty acres; through whose outer corridors companies of cavalry passed now and then without making a noticeable sound within. Theodore Thomas’s orchestra with its attendant singers, a company of six thousand in all, made but a little bright bouquet in one spot, and the leader was obliged to telephone to the platform half way down the hall in order to be informed when a speech had ceased and a musical number might take its turn.
At the end of the building opposite from Thomas, the Mexican band enlivened the meditations of the few thousands, fifteen or so, who were hear enough to enjoy their martial strains. Mammoth banners and flags made gay the grand arches that supported the roof, and each tassel on those which were so decorated weighed as much as a woman.
Only a Brobdingnagian could have felt at ease in such surroundings, yet wonderful order was maintained amid this largest audience ever gathered together under one roof.
Clover and Mildred were near enough to the singers to hear the pièce de résistance, Chadwick’s inspiring, moving ode, and as she listened Clover’s eyes grew moist under the stress of the day’s emotions.
“Jack is evidently very friendly,” she said that night to her sister, when they were alone in their room at the Auditorium.
“He ought to be,” returned Mildred shortly.
“He behaved very well and kindly,” continued Clover. “The situation was odious.”
“Odious. I should think so,” remarked Mildred. “I never disliked that bawling Dick Ogden as I did when he kept on calling Jack like that. Don’t begin to praise him to me,” added the girl, turning toward her elder a glowing face. “After Jack Van Tassel has dragged around on his knees a good long time I am going to forgive him. Not before.”
Clover looked troubled. “But it might all have been so awkward for us had he chosen to behave differently,” she protested. “It is much easier for us to lock injuries in our breasts that the world knows nothing of, than it would be to have a gossiping set of people wondering and staring. Jack has grasped the bunch of nettles and saved us from those stings. You can feel as you please about it, but I am grateful.”
“I wish he would go away. I wish he’d go to Kamschatka,” exclaimed Mildred hotly. “I can’t rid myself, when he is present, of the idea that he is considering how very differently we should be situated now if it weren’t for dear Mr. Van Tassel.”
“Well, it is true.”
“Don’t be tiresome, Clover. Of course it is true; but Jack has grown so grave and quietly observing, I feel that I shall not be able to endure having him about. I like fine clothes and fashionable life generally, and when I am soaring in my natural element, if Jack is going to give me those meditative, suggestive stares, it will ruin my pleasure. It is just as if one had a string about a bird’s ankle and could twitch it down whenever he liked.”
“I think you feel so because you haven’t talked with him yet, Mildred. You know Jack was always generous.”
“Was he?” the young girl faced her sister. “Was he when he accused you and insulted you?”
“Oh, I’ve forgiven him, Milly,” returned the other gently, making a repressive gesture. “I have considered his standpoint a great deal since then; and we enjoyed his father and benefited by him when the only son was far away. We even had the priceless privilege of serving him in his last days, while Jack was unwittingly defrauded. Oh, I should not have been at all surprised if he had been unable to take me by the hand to-day. Don’t be hard on Jack.”