The Proof of the Pudding by Meredith Nicholson - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXVII
 “JUST HELPING; JUST BEING KIND!”

NAN crossed a pasture, whistling. The Holsteins, nibbling the young grass, lifted their heads and bent their slow, meditative gaze upon her. She paused to pat one of them on the nose. Nan was growing wise in dairy lore and knew at sight the heaviest producers of the herd. She resumed her whistling and went on toward the house, with a pair of robins hopping before her. June had come and summer sounds and scents filled the air.

As she neared the bungalow a motor swept into the driveway and discharged Eaton and Thurston.

“A child of the pastures! The daughter of Cincinnatus tripping in from the fields!” observed Eaton, as he shook hands.

“Just been tinkering an incubator, if you want the facts—counting chickens before they’re hatched,” laughed Nan, brushing a straw from her skirt.

“We have a small business matter to discuss with you, Nan. We’ll fall upon it at once if you’re agreeable.”

“Business!” Nan mocked. “I hoped you’d come to look at the dairy.”

This was a very different Nan, Eaton reflected, from the Nan of a year ago. Exposure to wind and sun had already given her a becoming tan. Her old listlessness, the defiant air she had sometimes worn, had vanished; she had become alert, self-reliant, resolute. Within the bounds of her self-respect she meant that the world should like her. A democratic young person—this new Nan, on good terms with truck farmers, humble drivers of grocers’ wagons, motormen, and market-house policemen. In her short skirt and plain blue blouse, she looked less than her years to-day.

“We can sit on the veranda if you gentlemen are not afraid of the country air.”

“I wouldn’t dare go in after that,” remarked Thurston dryly; “Eaton already refers to me as his learned senior.”

“Mr. Eaton is the youngest and the oldest man in the world!” Nan declared.

“Well, Miss Farley,” Thurston began, as they gathered about a wicker table and he drew a formidable bundle of papers from a leathern pouch, “as we telephoned you yesterday, the opposition of Mr. Farley’s relatives has been disposed of and your adoption was upheld by the court. To prevent an appeal, and get rid of them for good, we’ve agreed on your behalf to pay the two cousins ten thousand dollars apiece. Mr. Eaton would have preferred to fight it clear through, but I prevailed on him not to make Brother Harlowe work too hard. You may not know it, but Eaton is a remarkably belligerent person. There’s no compromise in him. He’d fight to the last ditch.”

He looked from Eaton to Nan over his glasses with a twinkle in his eyes.

“I never saw a fellow I wanted to smash as badly as I do Harlowe,” Eaton remarked. “He’s the smoothest rascal I’ve ever known.”

“I don’t see that you’ve been very generous,” said Nan. “How much will he get as a fee?”

“About nine tenths of the twenty thousand,” replied Thurston grimly.

“Rather less than that,” said Eaton, with one of his elusive smiles. “I started the secretary of the White River Trust Company down to see the esteemed cousins before we signed the agreement; told him to persuade them to confide their ill-gotten gains to the company and advised them to cut off Harlowe with a niggardly ten per cent for his services. I was afraid to tell you that, Thurston. I knew you would scold me.”

“Eaton, for combined ingenuity and malevolence, you haven’t an equal!” declared Thurston, chuckling.

“I don’t believe it,” cried Nan, glad that the interview was progressing so cheerfully.

“Now, Miss Farley,” Thurston resumed, “if there’s anything a lawyer doesn’t like, it’s an ungrateful client. Mr. Eaton and I have a sneaking feeling that we’ve done pretty well with this case. The credit is chiefly his—and I take off my hat to him. We’ve come here in the hope that we shan’t have to argue with you, but just tell you. Your scruples against accepting any share in Mr. Farley’s estate, expressed after his death, did you credit—in a way. But now it’s all yours; there’s no escape. A considerable amount of income has already accumulated, and we can arrange payments necessary for your support to begin at once, though the estate can’t be closed till the year of administration is up. So far as your ability to earn your own living is concerned, you have demonstrated that. You have shown a plucky spirit, and I admire it. I will go further, and say that the community has supported you strongly, and that your attitude has made many friends for you. But now—now, we must have no more of this nonsense!”

He waved his hand to indicate the fields, and glanced meaningfully at Nan’s heavy walking-shoes, which were disgracefully muddy.

“But that was settled—once and for all!” Nan replied firmly. “You mustn’t think me ungrateful for what you’ve done; but I thought that all out before I came here, and I haven’t had a single regret. If it isn’t impolite, I’ll say that all I want is to be let alone!”

“Thurston and I are not sentimentalists,” said Eaton. “We’ve given you free rein to indulge your whims; but now we’ve come to a point where we’ve got to take a hand.”

“But you can’t make me, if I won’t!” laughed Nan. “Just think how humiliating it would be to back down now after I said I wouldn’t! Worse than that, think of the effect on these girls we have at work here; they’d lose their respect for me if they found I wasn’t really as poor as they are! And there are other reasons, too,” she went on soberly. “I don’t like to go over this again, but I never deserved anything of the Farleys. I’ve got my conscience to live with, and I could never get on with it if I allowed myself to take money which papa knew it was best for me not to have. I’m serious about this. He knew me better than I knew myself. You understand what I mean—”

“I don’t understand it in the way you mean, Nan,” Eaton answered; “but let’s not argue it. Let’s be practical. Has it occurred to you that something has to be done with this property? The lawful heir can’t just walk off and leave an estate like this. It will be confiscated by the State—thrown into the treasury and spent by a lot of politicians if you refuse it. Take the money and buy a lot of farms with it or spend it on working girls as much as you like—but please don’t talk any more about refusing it.”

Eaton had spoken lightly, but she saw that he was very much in earnest. The contingency he suggested had not, in fact, occurred to her. She had assumed from the beginning that the adoption would be nullified and that Farley’s money would be divided among the obscure and shadowy cousins; and this abrupt termination of the case brought her face to face with an unforeseen situation. Thurston was quick to take advantage of her silence.

“You have to consider, Miss Farley, what your foster-father’s feelings would be. He was a just man, and all the wills he considered from time to time prove that he never had the slightest intention of disinheriting you. Even in the last will creating the trusteeship, he made you his sole heir; it was really the most generous of all! Oh, yes,” he exclaimed hastily, as Nan colored deeply, “there was, I suppose, a certain bitterness behind that. I want to say to you again that I did my best to dissuade him from that step. I was confident he would change his mind about it, as he had about so many other things in his varying moods and tempers; and that he would realize its unkindness. We have no right to assume that when he hid that will behind his wife’s picture, he had any intention of executing it. It’s an open question and it’s only fair to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s true enough,” Nan assented; “but when I read that will and found how bitter he had been, I knew I had done the right thing in refusing to take anything!”

“I don’t agree with you,” Thurston continued patiently. “You must be just; you must remember that that was the act of a man near his death—nearer than any of us imagined. He didn’t have a chance to change his mind again. It’s unjust to his memory to leave him in the wrong utterly, as you will if you persist. There has already been a great deal of talk about this attack on the adoption—people have been blaming him for not guarding against the possibility of any such thing. You see public sentiment is behind you! And in spite of anything you may say, your act would have the appearance of pique; it would be like slapping a dead man in the face!”

“Mr. Thurston is right, Nan,” said Eaton. “There is not only Mr. Farley’s memory as a kind and just man to protect, but you must guard yourself against even the appearance of resentment. The only thing you have to consider is Mr. Farley’s conscientious desire to provide for you, which was manifest at all times. As Mr. Thurston says, that last will gave you absolutely everything, cutting out all the bequests he had made at other times to benevolence and charity. My dear Nan, your scruples are absurd! You haven’t any case at all! The idea of letting the property Timothy Farley spent a laborious lifetime accumulating go to the State is horrible. I can readily imagine what his feelings would be! Why, my dear Nan, rather than let that happen, Thurston and I will steal the whole thing ourselves!”

She received this with a grudging smile. What they said about the injustice to Farley of a refusal impressed her, but her resolution was still unshaken. And there was a stubborn strain in her of which she had only lately been aware.

She reached for a pencil, and Eaton pushed a pad of paper toward her. She began jotting down Farley’s various bequests to charity, as provided in the series of wills, pausing now and then to refer to Thurston for items she only imperfectly remembered.

The total was three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She tapped the paper reflectively.

“Of course,” remarked Thurston anxiously, as he saw what was in her mind, “you are not bound by any of the legacies in those unsigned wills. Not one of the wills contained all those bequests, so your total doesn’t represent what he meant to dispose of in that way. And his last will is evidence that he had wholly changed his mind about them.”

“We are bound to accept that last will as convincing proof of his very great confidence in Miss Farley,” said Eaton quickly, “rather than as an expression of distrust.”

“We all know perfectly well what he meant by that,” Nan replied. “But I don’t want you to think I have any feeling about it.”

They nodded gravely as she glanced at them appealingly.

“I can see,” she went on hurriedly, “that my refusal to accept anything at all might look like resentment; that it would be in a way unjust to him.” She turned for a glance over the fields, as though seeking their counsel. “Papa really wanted to help people who hadn’t a chance; he was only hard on the idle and shiftless. If he hadn’t been big-hearted and generous, he never would have taken me up as he did. And mamma was like him. I feel strongly that even if he did change his mind sometimes, his wish to help these things—the Boys’ Club, the Home for Aged Women, and all the rest—should be respected.”

“That can’t be done unless you take the whole,” said Eaton quickly. “But you needn’t decide about it now.”

“Yes; you should wait a few years at least!” added Thurston, crossing his legs nervously.

“And since I’ve been out here and have learned about the girls Mrs. Copeland is training to take care of themselves, I’ve thought of some other things that might be done,” said Nan, ignoring their manifest unwillingness to acquiesce in the recognition of Farley’s vacillating benefactions. “There ought to be, in a town like this, a home and training school for girls who start the wrong way, or make mistakes. We haven’t anything that quite fills that need, and there are a good many such girls. A hundred thousand dollars would provide such a place, and it ought to have another hundred thousand for endowment. Mrs. Copeland and I have talked of the need for such a school. It would be fine to start something like that! And you know,” she added, “I might have been just such a girl myself!”

Thurston turned to Eaton helplessly.

“It’s as plain as daylight,” Eaton remarked, amused by the despair in his associate’s face, “that you will soon pauperize yourself at this rate. It’s only fair to tell you that the estate shrank on a rigid appraisement of Mr. Farley’s property. The million the newspapers mentioned has dwindled to about eight hundred thousand. If you give away all that’s mentioned in those wills and start this girls’ home, you won’t be able to keep more than three automobiles for yourself.”

“Oh, the proof of the pudding is in the eating—and I know it’s good!” Nan laughed. “I stuffed myself so long without thinking about my hungry neighbors that it won’t hurt me to pass the plate down the table!”

“Well, the main thing,” said Thurston, “is to get your assurance that you’ll accept the estate under your rights as Mr. Farley’s adopted daughter. I suppose we can’t prevent your giving it away without having you declared insane!”

“I dare you to try it!” Then, more serious than at any time during the interview, she said: “You’ll have to let me reason it out my own way. It was only a piece of luck that I wasn’t thrown into an orphan asylum or left to die on the river bank when the Farleys gave me a home. I shall never forget that—never again,” she added with deep feeling. “The least I can do is to pass my good luck on. I’ve thought all that out, so please don’t make me talk of it any more!”

Then, as the men rose to leave, Fanny appeared, and urged them to remain to dinner. Thurston pleaded an engagement in town; Eaton said he would stay.

“You’ve broken that man’s heart, Nan,” Eaton remarked, as Thurston rolled away in his machine.

“What did you do to him, Nancy?” asked Fanny.

“She scared him to death! He’s convinced that she’s headed for an insane asylum—that’s all,” chuckled Eaton. “Mere altruism doesn’t interest Thurston; he thinks it just a sign of weak character—worse than a weak chin.”

“I’ve always thought,” said Fanny, as her arm stole around Nan, “that Nancy has a very nice chin.”

“I might go further,” Eaton remarked daringly, “and say that the face in its entirety is pleasant and inspiring to look at!”

“Stop teasing me!” cried Nan, “or I’ll run out to the barn and cry.”

They were still talking in this strain when Copeland’s machine appeared in the driveway.

“I didn’t tell you that we’re having a party to-night,” said Fanny. “Unless I’m mistaken, Mr. Amidon is driving that machine.”

She walked to the veranda rail and looked expectantly toward the approaching car. Though Billy had lately paid a visit to the farm, Nan had not met him. Fanny, with her usual frankness, had warned Nan of the expected visit, and Nan had carefully kept out of the way. She had not seen Billy since the night he proposed the destruction of Farley’s will.

Copeland jumped from the machine and ran up the steps, while Jerry disposed of the car. He shook hands with Fanny, and then turned toward Nan inquiringly.

She was already walking toward him.

“I’m glad to see you, Billy.”

“I’m glad to see you, Nan,” he said, and added in a slightly lower tone, “I’m glad to see you here.”

“And I’m glad to see you—here!”

Both knew what was in the other’s thoughts. Copeland bowed slightly, and crossed to Eaton, who was gazing fixedly at the gathering glories of the sunset.

Jerry, in a gray suit, and the very tallest collar he could buy, now added himself to the group. He bent over Mrs. Copeland’s hand with his best imitation of Eaton’s manner, and then, as he raised his head, looked around furtively to see whether his mentor was watching him.

The laughter that greeted this had the effect of putting them all at ease.

“I knew Jerry could do it,” said Nan, “but I didn’t suppose he would dare try it in his Cecil’s presence.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” remarked Eaton, feigning indignation at their treatment of his protégé. “If you’re not satisfied with Jeremiah’s manners, we’ll both go home.”

Nan ran away to change her clothes and reappeared just as dinner was announced.

“Please sit wherever you happen to be,” said Fanny, as they reached the dining-room; and then, as they sat down, she bit her lip and colored, finding that it fell to Copeland’s lot to sit opposite her. Eaton, noticing her embarrassment, immediately charged Copeland Farms with responsibility for the high cost of living.

“You must watch Nan carefully, Mrs. Copeland. She’s grinding the face of the poor. I heard Mrs. Harrington complaining bitterly last night about the price she has to pay for such trifling necessities as eggs and butter. You’re going to bring a French Revolution on this country if you’re not careful. And there will be eggs thrown that don’t bear the Copeland Farm’s stamp.”

“I refuse to have this suit spoiled with any other kind,” Jerry protested. “Speaking of eggs—”

“No, you don’t!” Nan interrupted. “You can’t tell any of your country-hotel egg stories here. I refuse to hear them.”

“All right, then; we’ll drop the eggs. I was shaking hands with old friends on the lower Wabash last week and struck three slabs of cocoanut pie in three days. I’m going to make a map of the pie habits of the Hoosiers and send it out as a Copeland-Farley advertisement. I’ve been all over the State lately, and I’ve never found cocoanut pie north of Logansport, and you never find it east of Seymour going south. Down along the Ohio you can stand on hotel porches in the peach season and see thousands of acres of peaches spoiling on the trees, and you go inside and find dried-peach pie on the programme. And you have to eat it or take sliced bananas or hard chunks of canned pineapple. No wonder traveling men go wrong! I wonder at times at my own pure life!”

It was evident that they liked Jerry. They encouraged him to talk, and he passed lightly from Praxiteles, whom he had just discovered in a magazine article, to the sinfulness of the cut-price drug store, which he pronounced the greatest of commercial iniquities.

After coffee on the veranda, Eaton quietly disappeared. Then Jerry and Nan went off for a stroll, leaving Copeland and Fanny together.

“I guess that’s coming out all right,” remarked Jerry, indicating the veranda with a wave of his straw hat. “But it’s tough on Cecil. I’ve been wondering whether she knows how it’s going to hit him.”

“Oh, I hope not! But that’s something we’ll never know.”

“Of course, Cecil needn’t have done all the things he did to bring them together again. He might have let the boss go by the board. It wasn’t just money that saved the boss! it was John Cecil’s strong right arm!”

“And yours, too, Jerry! Oh, yes; I know more about it than you think I do. You helped—you did a lot to save him.”

“Well, if I did,” he admitted grudgingly, “that was Cecil, too. I’d been busy rustling for myself—never caring a hang for the other fellow—till Cecil got hold of me. I’ve wondered a good deal how he did it—a scrub like me!”

“Don’t be foolish, Jerry; it had to be in you first. But he does make people want to be different. He’s certainly affected me that way.”

“Oh, you!” he exclaimed disdainfully.

“Well, don’t you ever think I’m proud of myself, Jeremiah Amidon!” She paused abruptly at the edge of a brook that tinkled musically on its way to the river. “I’m only just beginning to try to be self-respecting and decent and useful; I think it’s going to be a lot of fun if I ever get started.”

“Well, I hope to see you on the cars sometimes. I’ve got the same ticket, but I’m not sure it’s good on the limited. I’m likely to be chucked at the first tank.”

They jumped the brook and followed a cow path across a broad pasture, talking of old times on the Ohio, and of Farley, of whom Jerry always spoke in highest reverence, and then of his own prospects.

Both were subdued by the influences of the night. The stars hung near; it seemed to Jerry that they had stolen closer to earth to enfold Nan in their soft radiance. A new idea had possessed him of late. His heart throbbed with it to-night.

“In a place like this,” he began slowly, “you think a lot of things that wouldn’t strike you anywhere else.”

“It’s just the dear country lonesomeness. I come out here often in the evenings; used to in the winter, when the snow was deepest. I love all this—” She stretched out her arms with a quick gesture comprehensive of the star-hung fields.

Jerry’s dejection increased. The more he saw of Nan the less he seemed to count in her affairs. A Nan who tramped snowy fields and took counsel of the heavens was beyond his reach—immeasurably beyond.

“I don’t take hold of things the way you do, Nan. Being out here just makes me lonesome, that’s all. I’ve got to be where I can see electric signs spelling words on tall buildings. Just hearing that trolley tooting away over there helps some; must be because it’s going toward the lights.”

“If you feel so terribly, maybe we’d better go back!” she said tauntingly and took a step downward.

“Don’t do that again! If you leave me here in the dark I’ll be scared to death.”

“That would be a blow to the human race,” she mocked.

“Well, I’ve had blows enough!”

“You hide the scars well—I can say that!” she flung back.

“Listen, Nan—”

“I thought John Cecil had broken you of the ‘listen’ habit.”

“Forget it! You know perfectly well what I want to tell you!”

“Then, why do we linger? We really must go!”

“My business is selling goods and it’s a rule of the game never to let a customer turn his back on you.”

“All right; you go first!”

“Nan”—he drew nearer and planted himself in her path—“you can’t go—not till I’ve promised to marry you!”

This reversal of the established formula evoked a gay laugh; but she did not attempt to pass him.

“I never meant to ask you; I was afraid you’d marry me for my money and I want to be loved for myself alone! And don’t think I’d be mentioning it now if I wasn’t so lonesome I could cry! If you’re going to take that money, it’s all off, anyhow. I can’t afford to have anybody questioning my motives. As far as loving you’s concerned, I started full time that first day we met on the river bank, when you pulled my fly out of the tree. I might just as well have told you then—and I wish I had!”

“Well, you needn’t scold me about it now!”

“I’m not scolding. I’m just telling you what you missed!”

“Why don’t you give me another chance? I know I’m only a poor working girl—”

“Nan, I wish you were that!” he cried earnestly. “But all that money’s coming to you now. I wouldn’t have the nerve—”

“It would be the first time your nerve ever failed!” Then, fearing she had wounded him, she added quickly, “Of course, I didn’t mean that.”

“Nan!”

“Well, don’t cry, little boy!”

“Nan!”

“Yes, Jerry.”

“I love you, Nan!” he said gently. “I wish you cared even a little bit.”

“It’s a good deal more than that, Jerry.”

He took her hands and kissed them. There was a great awe in his heart.

“Nan, this doesn’t seem right, you being you; and you know what I am!”

“I think I know what you are, Jerry,—you’re fine and loyal and good!”

“I’m going to try to be,” he said humbly.

“And you’ve helped me more than I could make you understand, from that very first day we met, when I hated myself so! You brought back the old days; everything that has happened since has made me think of you. You were the only person around here who really knew all about me—just what I came from, and all that. And it helped me to see how bravely you were fighting your own way up. I had the chance forced on me that you made for yourself. And I made a mess of everything! Oh, Jerry!”

She clung to him, crying. As he kissed away her tears, the touch of her wet cheek thrilled him....

“We mustn’t be so happy we can’t remember other people,” she said as they loitered hand in hand toward the house.

“I guess that’s the only way, Nan. That’s what Cecil’s always saying. And I guess he’s about right about everything.”

Eaton passed them, unconscious of their nearness. He walked with head erect, as one who has fought and won a good fight. A sense of all his victory had cost him was in both their hearts. There was an infinite pathos in his figure as he strode through the dusk, returning to the woman he loved and to the man he had saved and given back to her.

“It’s tough on Cecil,” said Jerry chokingly. “It doesn’t seem quite square, some way—I mean the Copelands hitting it off again.”

“Well, we may be sure he doesn’t feel that way,” Nan answered. “It’s all come out the way he wanted it to. He brought them together.”

THE TOUCH OF HER WET CHEEK THRILLED HIM

“It’s funny, Nan; but I’m never dead sure I catch Cecil’s drift—the scheme or whatever it is he works by. I can’t find it in the books he gives me to read.”

“It isn’t in books, Jerry; it’s in his heart—just helping; just being kind!”

THE END