Let us be humbly thankful that he has been spared; and
Damn his treacherous hide, I wish
Sally! For shame!
I dont care! retorted the angry man. Its the way you feel, and if you werent so immorally pious youd be honest and say so.
Aleck said, with wounded dignity:
I do not see how you can say such unkind and unjust things. There is no such thing as immoral piety.
Sally felt a pang, but tried to conceal it under a shuffling attempt to save his case by changing the form of it as if changing the form while retaining the juice could deceive the expert he was trying to placate. He said:
I didnt mean so bad as that, Aleck; I didnt really mean immoral piety, I only meant meant well, conventional piety, you know; er shop piety; the the why, you know what I mean. Aleck the well, where you put up that plated article and play it for solid, you know, without intending anything improper, but just out of trade habit, ancient policy, petrified custom, loyalty to to hang it, I cant find the right words, but you know what I mean, Aleck, and that there isnt any harm in it. Ill try again. You see, its this way. If a person
You have said quite enough, said Aleck, coldly; let the subject be dropped.
Im willing, fervently responded Sally, wiping the sweat from his forehead and looking the thankfulness he had no words for. Then, musingly, he apologized to himself. I certainly held threes I know it but I drew and didnt fill. Thats where Im so often weak in the game. If I had stood pat but I didnt. I never do. I dont know enough.
Confessedly defeated, he was properly tame now and subdued. Aleck forgave him with her eyes.
The grand interest, the supreme interest, came instantly to the front again; nothing could keep it in the background many minutes on a stretch. The couple took up the puzzle of the absence of Tilburys death-notice. They discussed it every which way, more or less hopefully, but they had to finish where they began, and concede that the only really sane explanation of the absence of the notice must be and without doubt was that Tilbury was not dead. There was something sad about it, something even a little unfair, maybe, but there it was, and had to be put up with. They were agreed as to that. To Sally it seemed a strangely inscrutable dispensation; more inscrutable than usual, he thought; one of the most unnecessary inscrutable he could call to mind, in fact and said so, with some feeling; but if he was hoping to draw Aleck he failed; she reserved her opinion, if she had one; she had not the habit of taking injudicious risks in any market, worldly or other.
The pair must wait for next weeks paper Tilbury had evidently postponed. That was their thought and their decision. So they put the subject away and went about their affairs again with as good heart as they could.
Now, if they had but known it, they had been wronging Tilbury all the time. Tilbury had kept faith, kept it to the letter; he was dead, he had died to schedule. He was dead more than four days now and used to it; entirely dead, perfectly dead, as dead as any other new person in the cemetery; dead in abundant time to get into that weeks Sagamore, too, and only shut out by an accident; an accident which could not happen to a metropolitan journal, but which happens easily to a poor little village rag like the Sagamore. On this occasion, just as the editorial page was being locked up, a gratis quart of strawberry ice-water arrived from Hostetters Ladies and Gents Ice-Cream Parlors, and the stickful of rather chilly regret over Tilburys translation got crowded out to make room for the editors frantic gratitude.
On its way to the standing-galley Tilburys notice got pied. Otherwise it would have gone into some future edition, for Weekly SAGAMORES do not waste live matter, and in their galleys live matter is immortal, unless a pi accident intervenes. But a thing that gets pied is dead, and for such there is no resurrection; its chance of seeing print is gone, forever and ever. And so, let Tilbury like it or not, let him rave in his grave to his fill, no matter no mention of his death would ever see the light in the Weekly Sagamore.
Chapter IV
Five weeks drifted tediously along. The Sagamore arrived regularly on the Saturdays, but never once contained a mention of Tilbury Foster. Sallys patience broke down at this point, and he said, resentfully:
Damn his livers, hes immortal!
Aleck give him a very severe rebuke, and added with icy solemnity:
How would you feel if you were suddenly cut out just after such an awful remark had escaped out of you?
Without sufficient reflection Sally responded:
Id feel I was lucky I hadnt got caught with it in me.
Pride had forced him to say something, and as he could not think of any rational thing to say he flung that out. Then he stole a base as he called it that is, slipped from the presence, to keep from being brayed in his wifes discussion-mortar.
Six months came and went. The Sagamore was still silent about Tilbury. Meantime, Sally had several times thrown out a feeler that is, a hint that he would like to know. Aleck had ignored the hints. Sally now resolved to brace up and risk a frontal attack. So he squarely proposed to disguise himself and go to Tilburys village and surreptitiously find out as to the prospects. Aleck put her foot on the dangerous project with energy and decision. She said:
What can you be thinking of? You do keep my hands full! You have to be watched all the time, like a little child, to keep you from walking into the fire. Youll stay right where you are!
Why, Aleck, I could do it and not be found out Im certain of it.
Sally Foster, dont you know you would have to inquire around?
Of course, but what of it? Nobody would suspect who I was.
Oh, listen to the man! Some day youve got to prove to the executors that you never inquired. What then?
He had forgotten that detail. He didnt reply; there wasnt anything to say. Aleck added:
Now then, drop that notion out of your mind, and dont ever meddle with it again. Tilbury set that trap for you. Dont you know its a trap? He is on the watch, and fully expecting you to blunder into it. Well, he is going to be disappointed at least while I am on deck. Sally!
Well?
As long as you live, if its a hundred years, dont you ever make an inquiry. Promise!
All right, with a sigh and reluctantly.
Then Aleck softened and said:
Dont be impatient. We are prospering; we can wait; there is no hurry. Our small dead-certain income increases all the time; and as to futures, I have not made a mistake yet they are piling up by the thousands and tens of thousands. There is not another family in the state with such prospects as ours. Already we are beginning to roll in eventual wealth. You know that, dont you?
Yes, Aleck, its certainly so.
Then be grateful for what God is doing for us and stop worrying. You do not believe we could have achieved these prodigious results without His special help and guidance, do you?
Hesitatingly, N-no, I suppose not. Then, with feeling and admiration, And yet, when it comes to judiciousness in watering a stock or putting up a hand to skin Wall Street I dont give in that you need any outside amateur help, if I do wish I
Oh, do shut up! I know you do not mean any harm or any irreverence, poor boy, but you cant seem to open your mouth without letting out things to make a person shudder. You keep me in constant dread. For you and for all of us. Once I had no fear of the thunder, but now when I hear it I
Her voice broke, and she began to cry, and could not finish. The sight of this smote Sally to the heart and he took her in his arms and petted her and comforted her and promised better conduct, and upbraided himself and remorsefully pleaded for forgiveness. And he was in earnest, and sorry for what he had done and ready for any sacrifice that could make up for it.
And so, in privacy, he thought long and deeply over the matter, resolving to do what should seem best. It was easy to promise reform; indeed he had already promised it. But would that do any real good, any permanent good? No, it would be but temporary he knew his weakness, and confessed it to himself with sorrow he could not keep the promise. Something surer and better must be devised; and he devised it. At cost of precious money which he had long been saving up, shilling by shilling, he put a lightning-rod on the house.
At a subsequent time he relapsed.
What miracles habit can do! and how quickly and how easily habits are acquired both trifling habits and habits which profoundly change us. If by accident we wake at two in the morning a couple of nights in succession, we have need to be uneasy, for another repetition can turn the accident into a habit; and a months dallying with whiskey but we all know these commonplace facts.
The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit how it grows! what a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment, how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies oh yes, and how soon and how easily our dream life and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together that we cant quite tell which is which, any more.
By and by Aleck subscribed to a Chicago daily and for the wall street Pointer. With an eye single to finance she studied these as diligently all the week as she studied her Bible Sundays. Sally was lost in admiration, to note with what swift and sure strides her genius and judgment developed and expanded in the forecasting and handling of the securities of both the material and spiritual markets. He was proud of her nerve and daring in exploiting worldly stocks, and just as proud of her conservative caution in working her spiritual deals. He noted that she never lost her head in either case; that with a splendid courage she often went short on worldly futures, but heedfully drew the line there she was always long on the others. Her policy was quite sane and simple, as she explained it to him: what she put into earthly futures was for speculation, what she put into spiritual futures was for investment; she was willing to go into the one on a margin, and take chances, but in the case of the other, margin her no marginsshe wanted to cash in a hundred cents per dollars worth, and have the stock transferred on the books.
It took but a very few months to educate Alecks imagination and Sallys. Each days training added something to the spread and effectiveness of the two machines. As a consequence, Aleck made imaginary money much faster than at first she had dreamed of making it, and Sallys competency in spending the overflow of it kept pace with the strain put upon it, right along. In the beginning, Aleck had given the coal speculation a twelvemonth in which to materialize, and had been loath to grant that this term might possibly be shortened by nine months. But that was the feeble work, the nursery work, of a financial fancy that had had no teaching, no experience, no practice. These aids soon came, then that nine months vanished, and the imaginary ten-thousand-dollar investment came marching home with three hundred per cent profit on its back!
It was a great day for the pair of Fosters. They were speechless for joy. Also speechless for another reason: after much watching of the market, Aleck had lately, with fear and trembling, made her first flyer on a margin, using the remaining twenty thousand of the bequest in this risk. In her minds eye she had seen it climb, point by point always with a chance that the market would break until at last her anxieties were too great for further endurance she being new to the margin business and unhardened, as yet and she gave her imaginary broker an imaginary order by imaginary telegraph to sell. She said forty thousand dollars profit was enough. The sale was made on the very day that the coal venture had returned with its rich freight. As I have said, the couple were speechless, they sat dazed and blissful that night, trying to realize that they were actually worth a hundred thousand dollars in clean, imaginary cash. Yet so it was.
It was the last time that ever Aleck was afraid of a margin; at least afraid enough to let it break her sleep and pale her cheek to the extent that this first experience in that line had done.
Indeed it was a memorable night. Gradually the realization that they were rich sank securely home into the souls of the pair, then they began to place the money. If we could have looked out through the eyes of these dreamers, we should have seen their tidy little wooden house disappear, and two-story brick with a cast-iron fence in front of it take its place; we should have seen a three-globed gas-chandelier grow down from the parlor ceiling; we should have seen the homely rag carpet turn to noble Brussels, a dollar and a half a yard; we should have seen the plebeian fireplace vanish away and a recherche, big base-burner with isinglass windows take position and spread awe around. And we should have seen other things, too; among them the buggy, the lap-robe, the stove-pipe hat, and so on.
From that time forth, although the daughters and the neighbors saw only the same old wooden house there, it was a two-story brick to Aleck and Sally and not a night went by that Aleck did not worry about the imaginary gas-bills, and get for all comfort Sallys reckless retort: What of it? We can afford it.
Before the couple went to bed, that first night that they were rich, they had decided that they must celebrate. They must give a party that was the idea. But how to explain it to the daughters and the neighbors? They could not expose the fact that they were rich. Sally was willing, even anxious, to do it; but Aleck kept her head and would not allow it. She said that although the money was as good as in, it would be as well to wait until it was actually in. On that policy she took her stand, and would not budge. The great secret must be kept, she said kept from the daughters and everybody else.
The pair were puzzled. They must celebrate, they were determined to celebrate, but since the secret must be kept, what could they celebrate? No birthdays were due for three months. Tilbury wasnt available, evidently he was going to live forever; what the nation could they celebrate? That was Sallys way of putting it; and he was getting impatient, too, and harassed. But at last he hit it just by sheer inspiration, as it seemed to him and all their troubles were gone in a moment; they would celebrate the Discovery of America. A splendid idea!
Aleck was almost too proud of Sally for words she said she never would have thought of it. But Sally, although he was bursting with delight in the compliment and with wonder at himself, tried not to let on, and said it wasnt really anything, anybody could have done it. Whereat Aleck, with a prideful toss of her happy head, said: