Part 3

"Then send for him yourself, Frank," said Mildred, "and give him charge of the whole matter."

Frank eyed her furiously. "How ashamed father would be!" exclaimed he.

But this solemn invoking of the dead man's spirit was uneffectual. The specter of poverty was too insistent, too terrible. Said the widow:

"I'm sure, in the circumstances, my dear dead husband would want me to get help from someone older and more experienced."

And Frank, guilty of conscience and an expert in the ways of conventional and highly moral rascality, ceased to resist. His wife, scenting danger to their getting the share that "rightfully belongs to the son, especially when he has been the brains of the firm for several years," made angry and indiscreet battle for no outside interference. The longer she talked the firmer the widow and the daughter became, not only because she clarified suspicions that had been too hazy to take form, but also because they disliked her intensely. The following day Wharton Conover became unofficial administrator. He had no difficulty in baffling Frank Gower's half-hearted and clumsy efforts to hide two large fees due the dead man's estate. He discovered clear assets amounting in all to sixty-three thousand dollars, most of it available within a few months.

"As you have the good-will of the firm and as your mother and sister have only what can be realized in cash," said he to Frank, "no doubt you won't insist on your third."

"I've got to consider my wife," said Frank. "I can't do as I'd like."

"You are going to insist on your third?" said Conover, with an accent that made Frank quiver.

"I can't do otherwise," said he in a dogged, shamed way.

"Um," said Conover. "Then, on behalf of my sister and her daughter I'll have to insist on a more detailed accounting than you have been willing to give--and on the production of that small book bound in red leather which disappeared from my brother-in-law's desk the afternoon of his death."

A wave of rage and fear surged up within Frank Gower and crashed against the seat of his life. For days thereafter he was from time to time seized with violent spasms of trembling; years afterward he was attributing premature weaknesses of old age to the effects of that moment of horror. His uncle's words came as a sudden, high shot climax to weeks of exasperating peeping and prying and questioning, of sneer and insinuation. Conover had been only moderately successful at the law, had lost clients to Frank's father, had been beaten when they were on opposite sides. He hated the father with the secret, hypocritical hatred of the highly moral and religious man. He despised the son. It is not often that a Christian gentleman has such an opportunity to combine justice and revenge, to feed to bursting an ancient grudge, the while conscious that he is but doing his duty.

Said Frank, when he was able to speak: "You have been listening to the lies of some treacherous clerk here."

"Don't destroy that little book," proceeded Conover tranquilly. "We can prove that you took it."

Young Gower rose. "I must decline to have anything further to say to you, sir," said he. "You will leave this office, and you will not be admitted here again unless you come with proper papers as administrator."

Conover smiled with cold satisfaction and departed. There followed a series of quarrels--between Frank and his sister, between Frank and his mother, between Frank's wife and his mother, between Mildred and her mother, between the mother and Conover. Mrs. Gower was suspicious of her son; but she knew her brother for a pinchpenny, exacting the last drop of what he regarded as his own. And she discovered that, if she authorized him to act as administrator for her, he could--and beyond question would--take a large share of the estate. The upshot was that Frank paid over to his mother and sister forty-seven thousand dollars, and his mother and her brother stopped speaking to each other.

"I see that you have turned over all your money to mother," said Frank to Mildred a few days after the settlement.

"Of course," said Mildred. She was in a mood of high scorn for sordidness--a mood induced by the spectacle of the shameful manners of Conover, Frank, and his wife.

"Do you think that's wise?" suggested Frank.

"I think it's decent," said Mildred.

"Well, I hope you'll not live to regret it," said her brother.

Neither Mrs. Gower nor her daughter had ever had any experience in the care of money. To both forty-seven thousand dollars seemed a fortune--forty-seven thousand dollars in cash in the bank, ready to issue forth and do their bidding at the mere writing of a few figures and a signature on a piece of paper. In a sense they knew that for many years the family's annual expenses had ranged between forty and fifty thousand, but in the sense of actuality they knew nothing about it--a state of affairs common enough in families where the man is in absolute control and spends all he makes. Money always had been forthcoming; therefore money always would be forthcoming.

The mourning and the loss of the person who had filled and employed their lives caused the widow and the daughter to live very quietly during the succeeding year. They spent only half of their capital. For reasons of selfish and far-sighted prudence which need no detailing Frank moved away to New York within six months of his father's death and reduced communication between himself and wife and his mother and sister to a frigid and rapidly congealing minimum. He calculated that by the time their capital was consumed they would have left no feeling of claim upon him or he feeling of duty toward them.

It was not until eighteen months after her father's death, when the total capital was sunk to less than fifteen thousand dollars, that Mildred awakened to the truth of their plight. A few months at most, and they would have to give up that beautiful house which had been her home all her life. She tried to grasp the meaning of the facts as her intelligence presented them to her, but she could not. She had no practical training whatever. She had been brought up as a rich man's child, to be married to a rich man, and never to know anything of the material details of life beyond what was necessary in managing servants after the indifferent fashion of the usual American woman of the comfortable classes. She had always had a maid; she could not even dress herself properly without the maid's assistance. Life without a maid was inconceivable; life without servants was impossible.

She wandered through the house, through the grounds. She said to herself again and again: "We have got to give up all this, and be miserably poor--with not a servant, with less than the tenement people have." But the words conveyed no meaning to her. She said to herself again and again: "I must rouse myself. I must do something. I must--must--must!" But she did not rouse, because there was nothing to rouse. So far as practical life was concerned she was as devoid of ideas as a new-born baby.

There was but the one hope--marriage, a rich marriage. It is the habit of men who can take care of themselves and of women who are securely well taken care of to scorn the woman or the helpless-bred man who marries for money or even entertains that idea. How little imagination these scorners have! To marry for a mere living, hardly better than one could make for oneself, assuredly does show a pitiful lack of self-reliance, a melancholy lack of self-respect. But for men or women all their lives used to luxury and with no ability whatever at earning money--for such persons to marry money in order to save themselves from the misery and shame that poverty means to them is the most natural, the most human action conceivable. The man or the woman who says he or she would not do it, either is a hypocrite or is talking without thinking. You may in honesty criticize and condemn a social system that suffers men and women to be so crudely and criminally miseducated by being given luxury they did not earn. But to condemn the victims of that system for acting as its logic compels is sheer folly or sheer phariseeism.

Would Mildred Gower have married for money? As the weeks fled, as the bank account dwindled, she would have grasped eagerly at any rich man who might have offered himself--no matter how repellent he might have been. She did not want a bare living; she did not want what passes with the mass of middle-class people for comfort. She wanted what she had--the beautiful and spacious house, the costly and fashionable clothing, the servants, the carriages and motors, the thousand and one comforts, luxuries, and vanities to which she had always been used. In the brain of a young woman of poor or only comfortably off family the thoughts that seethed in Mildred Gower's brain would have been so many indications of depravity. In Mildred Gower's brain they were the natural, the inevitable, thoughts. They indicated everything as to her training, nothing as to her character. So, when she, thinking only of a rich marriage with no matter whom, and contrasting herself with the fine women portrayed in the novels and plays, condemned herself as shameless and degraded, she did herself grave injustice.

But no rich man, whether attractive or repulsive, offered. Indeed, no man of any kind offered. Instead, it was her mother who married.

A widower named James Presbury, elderly, with an income of five to six thousand a year from inherited wealth, stumbled into Hanging Rock to live, was impressed by the style the widow Gower maintained, believed the rumor that her husband had left her better off than was generally thought, proposed, and was accepted. And two years and a month after Henry Gower's death his widow became Mrs. James Presbury--and ceased to veil from her new husband the truth as to her affairs.