Chapter XII Gorham Page’s Commission
A few days afterward a bell-boy brought Gorham Page’s card to Mrs. Van Tassel’s parlor. It was followed shortly by the young man himself, who felicitated himself upon his good fortune in finding her at home.
“My stay in Chicago will be so short, that had you been out I fear I should not have met you again,” he said. “I am happy to see, Mrs. Van Tassel,” Gorham inspected her with kindly, short-sighted eyes, “that travel has done all for you Miss Bryant hoped. Your face has quite a new color and contour.”
“No, just my old one,” she answered lightly, indicating a seat near her own. “I am sorry my sister is out; but she is a gay girl,” with a little smiling sigh. “Wherever she is, somehow a number of engagements seem to crop up.”
“Yes. One can see that she is a leader by nature. I should like to have seen Miss Bryant. However, my errand is with you especially to-day.”
“Oh, it is an errand that has brought you? How unflattering!”
“Not necessarily. It argued nothing unflattering when John Alden performed his famous errand to Priscilla.”
Page looked argumentatively into his hostess’s amused eyes.
“Haven’t you gone a long way afield for a simile?” she asked.
“No, I think not. I was quite as reluctant as poor John to accept the mission.”
“Then decline it even at this late hour. I am the least curious of women.”
“Impossible.” Page shook his head. “Miles Standish is waiting for me over there at the Northern, and he is in a great state of mind.”
“You tempt me to wish I had been out when your card came up. Perfunctory visits are very uncomfortable. I think you had better return to your friend, and tell him that Priscilla would not allow you to speak.”
“I’m not making you uncomfortable, am I?” asked Gorham looking up and half laughing. “You see it is this way. I wanted to come to see you, and as soon as Jack learned my intention, he burdened me with this business. He told me to be eloquent, and not being in the least so, I am overwhelmed by my responsibilities. I had a presentiment, and told him so, that I should make a mess of the whole affair; but he insisted upon trusting his messenger as blindly as the Puritan captain of old.”
Page had a way of lapsing, as he talked, into a meditative manner.
“And do you insist upon refusing to be warned by John Alden’s failure?” asked Mrs. Van Tassel.
“Oh, I mustn’t fail,” he returned with prompt simplicity. “That is, if I do I shall take a room here in the Auditorium for the remainder of my stay. We all make rather a pet of Jack,” he explained. “The thought of denying him or contradicting him presents itself somewhat in the light of a catastrophe. What do you think, Mrs. Van Tassel, of the effect on the average character of a habit of success?”
Really, Clover thought this was one of the oddest men she had ever met; but his question was so serious that she felt constrained to express an opinion.
“I am afraid I am no student of character, but I should say it would have a genial, developing effect.”
“Yes, one thinks so at the first blush, and that continued failure would dwarf the faculties. One can hardly lay down a rule where exceptions are so numerous; and of course success and failure are never accidents.”
“I think they seem to be so very often.”
“No,” Page shook his head. “Everything is the result of law.”
“Then the character that dominates and commands success must grow by what it feeds upon, and expand in its own sunlight. I was right.”
“Yes; but the flowers and fruits of a tropical sun are heavy in scent and often coarse of flavor: while the flower that struggles for life and develops in meagre warmth is like the New England arbutus, both strong and delicate.”
“People have such varying standards by which they measure success and failure,” said Clover. “That sort of scanty, hard-won success which might be typified by the arbutus would scarcely be counted success by many.”
“True,” said Page, nodding his head at her thoughtfully. “There ought to be some reliable touchstone which we could apply to every case.”
“Surely there is,” replied Clover.
Her guest brightened. “You mean we should judge according to our best education in right and wrong?”
She nodded. “It amounts to that. It seems to me that all that comes to us is important only according to its effect on character.”
Page looked at her with admiring approval. Here was a woman, a girl in years, who had thought.
“Are your beliefs simply ethical,” he asked, “or are you religious in the usual acceptation of the word?”
“I suppose I understand you,” she replied. “I think if I could not say that I am religious I should not be here to say anything. I have stood in places where ethical culture and humanitarianism would not have saved me.”
“Such testimony interests me very much,” he answered, “especially from a young and beautiful woman.”
Clover colored with surprise at this bluntness. She need not have shrunk. Page was as usual making an impersonal statement as nearly accurate as possible.
“I have not a particle of doubt,” he continued, “that there is a world of causes, and that ours is a world of effects. Why should not the universe have a soul as well as the human body?”
“Yes; only you do not state it well,” returned Clover, entering into his spirit of analysis. “It is not the body that has the soul, but the soul that has the body and will be through with it after a while.”
Page bowed. “I agree to that. I believe in immortality. We have been sent upon this plane of existence; and to find out why is a problem of daily interest.”
“Yes. Our wishes were not consulted when we came, and will not be consulted when we go. It seems evident enough to me that we are being sent to school.”
“Some of us appear to learn very little, though,” remarked Page.
“Some of us are set one lesson many times,” answered Clover slowly, “until we learn it. The hand must be unclasped many times before we learn to relax our rigid hold on what we have considered our own. It is one great lesson of life, I have found, to learn to be relaxed. You know how much is said now by physical culturists on the subject of letting go abnormal tension of the muscles of the body. Isn’t the correspondence interesting? We can only have spiritual self-possession when we relax the tension of our own wills and let the divine will sway us.”
“We are free agents, though,” objected Page, “and we must behave as if our own wills were all-powerful; else we should never accomplish anything.”
“Oh yes,” agreed Clover; “but if one is firmly convinced that the higher Power is omniscient, there is all the time an undercurrent of acknowledgment that one is being directed, and it becomes second nature to ask for the direction in all sorts of wordless ways.”
“You believe in that sort of Providence, then?” asked Gorham curiously. “I believe every one has a God—his own God.”
“Yes; my God is a Father who thought it worth while to create me, and therefore, I am sure, thinks it worth while to lead me through all the ways I am to traverse. He is close to me all the time. Whether I feel that I am close to Him, depends entirely on myself.”
Page regarded the speaker a moment in silence. Her face looked near to heaven then, he thought. “Such faith comes more easily to women than to men, apparently,” he said at last.
“Why should it? How strangely people behave and talk, or rather avoid talking of spiritual things as if such subjects were superstitious. I suppose perhaps it is because I have had so many dear ones slip away into the other world that it seems so real to me. It has often been said that death is the only certain event which we can count on; but people will cease to shrink from it only when they cease to think of it as death. No wonder the love of life is strongly implanted. It is all we need look forward to. The loneliness we have to suffer here,” Clover paused a moment, “is a part of the schooling.”
“You have made good use of your experiences,” observed Page.
“Not always,” returned the other. “Nevertheless, I believe that is the chief thing we have to do,—to learn something above worldly wisdom from our experiences little and great.”
“So your theory regarding success and failure would simply be to decide its real nature by its spiritual effect on a man.”
“Yes,” Clover smiled. “You have thought of that before or you would not have grasped so quickly what I meant.”
Her visitor nodded. “Yes, I have had a similar thought. The greatest apparent success may amount to a failure if it make a man more arrogant and selfish than before; and the most dismal failure is a success if only it brings with it an interior humility and willingness to be taught.”
They talked another quarter of an hour before Page arose and took his leave. He left his compliments and farewell for Miss Bryant, shook hands with Clover, and reached the door of the room before he started and turned back with sudden recollection.
“Why didn’t you remind me?” he said reproachfully. “I haven’t done my errand.”
Mrs. Van Tassel smiled. “Priscilla’s part was a passive one, if I recollect rightly.”
“But you also recollect the rough temper of Captain Standish. I think you are rather cruel.”
“Oh, failure might have given you true humility.”
“I make plenty of failures, thank you. Please don’t let this be one of them, and don’t judge Jack’s intensity of interest by my own. May I sit down once more?” Page knotted his brow reminiscently. “Jack outlined a plan for me. He suggested a number of arguments with which I was to lead up to the main idea, but they are pretty well muddled in my brain now.” Gorham gave a short, desperate laugh. “After this confession of weakness, Mrs. Van Tassel, you will be obliged, if only out of generosity, to send me back with a ‘yes.’ Now, let me see; I’m confident this ought not to come first, but Jack wanted me to say that he was certain that Uncle Richard left the homestead to him instead of to you, at your own instigation.”
Clover, who had not been able to imagine what was coming, acquiesced gravely. “Mr. Van Tassel would probably have acted as he did in any case, but I wanted to make certain that Jack’s dear old home should be secured to him.”
“It humiliates Jack to feel that you avoid the place for fear he might go there.”
“This is an unpleasant errand for you, Mr. Page.”
“Please don’t use that tone. Jack means so well, I couldn’t refuse to be the go-between. He asks, he even begs, that if you intend to remain in Chicago now, you will go back to your home. It is comfortable. All your belongings are there. His father made every arrangement for you. Jack feels sure he would be grieved to have you leave it. He himself is going back to Boston. The housekeeper is alone there and is pining for you; I forget whether that was to be an argument, but the fact remains. Jack thinks it would save a lot of talking among your friends if you were to go on in the old way. Naturally, he has no use for such a big place. It would be too lonely to endure under the circumstances, and it is hardly the thing to leave the house tenantless year after year. Of course all this is under Jack’s supposition that you have no prejudice against the home as a home. If that is false”—
“No. I have a strong attachment for the locality and the house itself. Mildred has also.”
“Then you will say yes; and I will promise to take my success as meekly as you could desire.”
“Shall I do it, Mr. Page?” asked Clover, looking perplexed.
“By all means, if you ask me. Here is the Fair coming on, and the difficulties of suiting one’s self in a home in Chicago are going to be many, I fancy.”
“I don’t want to think of that. We should be able to find a comfortable place.”
“Then consider that suggestion unmade, and let me take your consent to Jack. Do you still hesitate?”
“Yes. I had quite made up my mind to do without Jack, and this would change all that.”
“Jack does not at all wish to be dispensed with.”
“I consider,” said Clover with grave gentleness, “that I owe him any favor he chooses to claim; but it seems quixotic on his part to call this one.”
“And yet he does. We cannot always understand the vagaries of youth, Mrs. Van Tassel.”
“Jack was always willful,” she returned, smiling sadly. “Tell him I thank him, Mr. Page, and that Mildred and I will talk it over.”
An hour after Gorham’s departure, a note was brought to Clover. It was from Jack. He said:—
I thank you for considering my proposition. I have a feeling that in the end you will not refuse me. I have suffered for every unjust word I ever said to you, Clover, and now the only peace possible for me is to be in friendly relations with those my father loved. Only when you are living again under his roof shall I feel that I have won his forgiveness as well as yours. The selfish jealousy of you which has made my heart sore has gone, and gratitude has taken its place. We have both lived long in two years, and suffered much. We can feel for each other.
Forgive your old comrade, JACK.
Clover’s tears fell upon this abrupt note, and her heart went out to her friend. She did not need now to talk the matter over with Mildred. She had decided to return to the home by the lake.
Jack went back to Boston without seeing her again; for although he called, the sisters were both away.