WENTWORTH Bromfield was mourned by his widow and daughter with a depth that would have amazed him.
For twenty-one years he had been an assistant secretary in the Department of State at Washington—a rather conspicuous position, with a salary of four thousand a year. Influential relatives representing Massachusetts in the House or in the Senate, and often in both, had enabled him to persist through changes of administration and of party control, and to prevail against the “pull” of many an unplaced patriot. Perhaps he might have been a person of consequence had he exercised his talents in some less insidiously lazy occupation. He had begun well at the law; but in return for valuable local services to the party, he got the offer of this political office, and, in what he came to regard as a fatal moment, he accepted it. His wife—he had just married—said that he was “going in for a diplomatic career.” He faintly hoped so himself, but the warnings of his common sense were soon verified. “Diplomatic career” proved to be a sonorous name for a decent burial of energy and prospects.
He had drawn his salary year after year. He had gone languidly through his brief daily routine at the Department. He had been mildly fluttered at each Presidential election, and again after each inauguration. He had indulged in futile impulses to self-resurrection, in severe attacks of despondency. Then, at thirty-seven, he had grasped the truth—that he would remain an assistant secretary to the end of his days. Thenceforth aspirations and depressions had ceased, and his life had set to a cynical sourness. He read, he sneered, he ate, and slept.
The Bromfields had a small additional income—Mrs. Bromfield’s twelve hundred a year from her father’s estate. This was most important, as it represented a margin above comfort and necessity, a margin for luxury and for temptation to extravagance. Mr. Bromfield was fond of good dinners and good wines, and he could not enjoy them at the expense of his friends without an occasional return. Mrs. Bromfield had been an invalid after the birth of Emily, long enough to form the habit of invalidism. After Emily passed the period when dress is not a serious item, they went ever more deeply into debt.
While Mrs. Bromfield’s craze for doctors and drugs was in one view as much an extravagance as Mr. Bromfield’s club, in another view it was a valuable economy. It made entertaining impossible; it enabled Emily to go everywhere without the necessity for return hospitalities, and to “keep up appearances” generally. Many of their friends gave Mrs. Bromfield undeserved credit for shrewdness and calculation in her hypochondria.
Emily had admirers, and, in her first season, one fairly good chance to marry. The matchmakers who were interested in her—“for her mother’s sake,” they said, but in fact from the matchmaking mania,—were exasperated by her refusal. They remonstrated with her mother in vain.
“I know, I know,” sighed Mrs. Bromfield. “But what can I do? Emily is so headstrong and I am in such feeble health. I am forbidden the agitation of a discussion. I’ve told Emily that a girl without money, and with nothing but family, must be careful. But she won’t listen to me.”
Mrs. Ainslie, the most genuinely friendly of all the women who insured their own welcome by chaperoning a clever, pretty, popular girl, pressed the matter upon Emily with what seemed to her an impertinence to be resented.
“Don’t be offended, child,” said Mrs. Ainslie, replying to Emily’s haughty coldness. “You ought to thank me. I only hope you will never regret it. A girl without a dot can’t afford to trifle. A second season is dangerous, especially here in Washington, where they bring the babies out of the nursery to marry them off.”
“Why, you yourself used to call Bob Fulton one of nature’s poor jokes,” Emily retorted. “You overlooked these wonderful good qualities in him until he began to annoy me.”
“Sarcasm does not change the facts.” Mrs. Ainslie was irritated in her even-tempered, indifferent fashion. “You think you’ll wait and look about you. But let me tell you, my dear, precious few girls, even the most eligible of them, have more than one really good chance to marry. Oh, I know what they say. But they exaggerate flirtations into proposals. This business—yes, business—of marrying isn’t so serious a matter with the men as it is with us. And we can’t hunt; we must sit and wait. In this day the stupidest men are crafty enough to see through the subtlest kind of stalking.”
Emily had no reply. She could think of no arguments except those of the heart. And she felt that it would be ridiculous to bring them into the battering and bruising of this discussion.
It was in May that she refused her “good chance.” In June her father fell sick. In mid-July they buried him and drove back from the cemetery to face ruin.
Ruin, in domestic finance, has meanings that range from the borderland of comedy to the blackness beyond tragedy.
The tenement family, thrust into the street and stripped of their goods for non-payment of rent, find in ruin an old acquaintance. They take a certain pleasure in the noise and confusion which their uproarious bewailing and beratings create throughout the neighbourhood. They enjoy the passers-by pausing to pity them, a ragged and squalid group, homeless on the curb. They have been ruined many times, will be ruined many times. They are sustained by the knowledge that there are other tenements, other “easy-payment” merchants. A few hours, a day or two at most, and they are completely reëstablished and are busy making new friends among their new neighbours, exchanging reminiscences of misfortune and rumours of ideal “steady jobs.”
The rich family suddenly ruined has greater shock and sorrow. But usually there are breaks in the fall. A son or a daughter has married well; the head of the family gets business opportunities through rich friends; there is wreckage enough to build up a certain comfort, to make the descent into poverty gradual, almost gentle.
But to such people as the Bromfields the word ruin meant—ruin. They had not had enough to lose to make their catastrophe seem important to others; indeed, the fact that a little was saved made their friends feel like congratulating them. But the ruin was none the less thorough. They were shorn of all their best belongings—all the luxury that was through habit necessity. They must give up the comfortable house in Connecticut Avenue, where they had lived for twenty years. They must leave their associations, their friends. They must go to a New England factory village. And there they would have a tiny income, to be increased only by the exertions of two women, one a helpless hypochondriac, both ignorant of anything for which any one would give pay. And this cataclysm was wrought within a week.
“Fate will surely strike the finishing blow,” thought Emily, as she wandered drearily through the dismantling house. “We shall certainly lose the little we have left.” And this spectre haunted her wakeful nights for weeks.
Mr. Bromfield was not a “family man.” He had left his wife and home first to the neglect of servants, and afterward to the care of his daughter. As Emily grew older and able to judge his life-failure, his vanity, his selfishness—the weaknesses of which he was keenly conscious, he saw or fancied he saw in her clear eyes a look that irritated him against himself, against her, and against his home. He was there so rarely that the women never took him into account. Yet instead of bearing his death with that resigned fortitude which usually characterises the practical, self-absorbed human race in its dealings with the inevitable, they mourned him day and night.
After one of his visits of business and consolation, General Ainslie returned home with tears in his eyes.
“It is wonderful, wonderful!” he said in his “sentimental” voice—a tone which his wife understood and prepared to combat. She liked his sentimental side, but she had only too good reason to deplore its influence upon his judgment.
“What now?” she inquired.
“I’ve been to see Wentworth’s widow and daughter. It was most touching, Abigail. He always neglected them, yet they mourn him in a way that a better man might envy.”
“Mourn him? Why, he was never at home. They hardly knew him.”
“Yet I have never seen such grief.”
“Grief? Of course. But not for him. They don’t miss him; they miss his salary—his four thousand a year. And that’s the kind of grief you can’t soothe. The real house of mourning is the house that’s lost its breadwinner.”
General Ainslie looked uncomfortable.
“Do you remember that Chinese funeral we saw at Pekin, George?” his wife continued. “Do you remember the widows in covered cages dragging along behind the corpse—and the big fellow with the prod walking behind each cage? And whenever the widows stopped howling, don’t you remember how those prods were worked until the response from inside was satisfactory?”
“Yes, but—really, I must say, Abbie——”
“Well, George—poverty is the prod. No wonder they mourn Wentworth.”
General Ainslie looked foolish. “I guess I won’t confess,” he said to himself, “that it was this afternoon I told the Bromfields they had only five hundred a year and the house in Stoughton. It would encourage her in her cynicism.”