CHAPTER I

TOO EASY MONEY

I

Regardless of the chagrin the reminder often cost its womenfolk, the foundation for the Ruggles family “Money” had been laid in the junk business. Junk. Exactly. Junk!

Jasper Ruggles, the grandfather, had started life as one of those peddlers who drove about New England in a cart resembling a small-sized circus wagon of flaming scarlet. He swapped tinware with farmers’ wives for rags and old metal and never got cheated. From gathering old metal was but a step to melting it. From melting was but another step to finding a manufactured product. So an iron works had flourished following the Civil War and canny investments had done the rest.

Amos Ruggles, Gordon’s father, called himself a barrister,—not a lawyer, but a barrister! He maintained an expensive suite of offices in one of the most prominent Springfield buildings, but no one had ever heard of his trying a case and among his fellow attorneys he was considered more or less of a joke. He looked after the family “investments” and dabbled in politics. Six months of the year he spent traveling, principally in Europe, where he demonstrated what Americans are not like at home, even at their worst.

In appearance, Amos Ruggles was a tall, ample-girthed immaculately clad man with a certain over-clean whiteness about him, a whiteness that looked unhealthy. He suggested he had been kept away from sunlight until his flesh had become bleached. His thin, silky-fine white hair was combed from the back of his head forward, and he had a perpetually surprised look in his eye as though forever startled at finding himself alive and asking, “Bless my stars! Where am I, anyhow?” He had another look on his face, a look of always being on the point of saying something tremendously important but never quite bringing himself to do it.

His political experience to date had been but a single term in the legislature. Certain questionable “interests” who wanted a “perfect dummy” in the place had been responsible, not Amos’s solicitude for the welfare of the laboring classes and his brilliant defense of the Constitution, as he had always assumed. During this single term, his Bills were versatile if not always feasible. Among those especially demonstrating the man’s brilliance may be cited (1) A Bill—to mitigate social conditions by making it a penal offense for laborers earning less than a thousand a year to have more than two children; (2) A Bill—making it a criminal violation to alight from moving street cars while facing in the wrong direction. His bills were quietly killed in committee. Still, they were good bills and if they had gone through, Amos felt that he would not have lived wholly in vain. His intentions were good, at any rate, even if the execution of his legislation may have presented difficulties insurmountable.

Margaret Ruggles, his wife, was a Theddon and even as a girl had been so wealthy she could afford to be homely. She came from “Boston and Rhode Island,” as the local society reporters quoted it, making it sound like a railroad.

In later life Margaret Ruggles’s nerve was iron and her _savoir faire_ flawless. Rumor had it that she instructed Amos how and when to do everything, from selling United Fruit Common to changing his waistcoat. And a local grocer had a yarn about having sent a special team out to the Ruggleses residence to deliver three lemons, and Margaret had ordered the man to wait and take back two of them because cook had discovered there were already two lemons in the house. She was a close buyer and a difficult customer and yet young Gordon—only child of these two—was allowed, from earliest boyhood, to spend money like a Monte Cristo in knickers. At three he cried for the moon but was given the earth instead, and found it so absorbing that he never gave it back. Not even when other people wanted it.

Gordon had never gone to school three consecutive years in his life. He had never shown interest in anything for two consecutive days, in his life,—except fighting. Yet he even refused to make fighting a business, or he might have turned out a notable pugilist or worked his bellicosities off to some good purpose in the Army.

Amos and Margaret absolutely refused to credit their son with faults. They looked at him and beheld that he had a body, a brain, a temperament and an appetite. But faults? Not a one! He committed indiscretions, irresponsibilities, sowed a few wild oats, perhaps! But that was to be expected. Why should he work when the Ruggleses already had more money than they could ever spend? Besides, why should he work when he wouldn’t work and they couldn’t make him work, even if they wanted? That he would ultimately “go in for something” as his father had “gone in” for law—and foreign travel—was vaguely understood. But the insinuation that Gordon was one whit worse than a million other boys they would not tolerate an instant. The Ruggleses—second generation—had a queer outlook on life, one which it is perhaps difficult for _hoi polloi_ to understand: The world was their personal bootjack and any one who essayed to question that fact was a “disturbing element” and “a menace against established institutions.”

Nevertheless, Gordon at twenty-six was giving Amos not a little anxiety. While a few wild oats were expected of a boy to show that he was a boy and virile—in fact, Amos had rolled in a wild oat or two himself when a boy or when his wife was occasionally elsewhere—it didn’t necessarily follow that the son should turn wholesale agriculturist and rear elevators with the family money in which to house his disturbing grain crops. Not that it offended Amos’s sense of decency—the things he had to pay for, from broken china to broken women—so much as it affected the family prestige. It was time the boy calmed down, and the boy gave no symptoms whatever of calming down. He had, in fact, calmed upward considerably of late and grown a little out of hand,—if indeed he ever was in hand. Thereat Amos, like most of his type, looking into his own experience for solution, hit upon the brilliant idea that what Gordon needed most of all to straighten him out was a brainy, strong-minded wife. The very thing. Gordon must have a wife. Then a baby or two. If a baby or two couldn’t tone Gordon down then nothing could tone Gordon down. Amos would speak to his son about it.

Which, on a winter’s evening in March, 1915, he did. Gordon was talking about going to France and “guttin’ Fritzies” for the fun of it, and that must be nipped at any cost. Why, the boy might get shot. Amos was especially peeved at the Germans and the war, anyhow—it was making a continental colander out of all his favorite watering places and spoiling his annual trips abroad by filling the seas with submarines that actually blew people up. Not that Gordon cared anything about the moral aspects of the war. Such a venture merely promised a new thrill.

Amos called his boy into the big Ruggles library, had a Scotch and soda with him, lighted a big cigar and assumed a place on the hearth rug with one hand behind his coat tails. There he rocked on his toes and heels and became the Declaiming Parent.

II

“Marry!” cried Gordon. “Who the devil will I marry? Those I might marry I don’t want—I can have ’em any old day. And those I do want I can’t have, because they won’t have me. So damn all women, anyhow.”

“Tut, tut, sir!” cried Amos. “Your mother is a woman, understand!”

“Gad, so she is! Well, well! We’ll make an exception of her. Damn all the others—excepting——”

“I’d like to know,” declaimed Amos grandly, as he had expounded his two-child-a-family bill before the legislature, “I’d like to know, sir, where the woman is you might want that you can’t have? Tut, tut, sir! Do not let us fritter away our time with nonsense.”

“If you want to know straight, Pop, there’s only one skirt in these whole United States I could ever care two hamstrings for. But she’s about as interested in me as that Frances Willard dame would be to sit in on a bock-beer convention.”

“Ah! Then you have felt the possibilities in the grand passion? And may I have the lady’s name, sir? We shall see what can be done about it.”

“It’s that girl of Aunt Grace’s—Madelaine!”

“What, sir? What? The brat from the orphanage?”

“Believe me, Pop, she’s a long throw from being a brat. I guess you haven’t seen her lately.”

“Not for half a dozen years, sir, I haven’t seen her. Went to college, didn’t she? To be a lady doctor, or something?”

“She’s in Medical School now. She graduated from Radcliffe this past June. And you can take it from me, Pop, she’s _there_!”

“But, my God, sir! Do you mean to sit there and insinuate that a brat from an orphanage—a Nobody!—refuses to look with favor on the suit of a Ruggles? She cannot understand who you are, sir! You cannot have asked her seriously. Have you asked her, by the way? Have you? Seriously?”

“No. And I haven’t asked the King of Belgium to come over here and take a job driving my Stutz, either. There are some things that simply aren’t done.”

“But what has she against you, especially? Doesn’t the girl realize she’s a Nobody? Doesn’t she see how she could improve her social position by marrying my son—a Ruggles?”

“She doesn’t give a hoot for anybody’s social position. Not even her own. She’s class, Pop, with a capital C. If you could see her as she’s grown up now, you’d understand and close the door softly as you go out. I’ve got as much chance of making a hit with her as the Czar of Russia stands of being elected recording secretary of the Forest Park Home Improvement and Loan Society.”

“Do I understand you to say, sir, you want this girl—that you’d marry her, and settle down if she’d have you?”

“Will a duck swim?”

“We are not discussing ducks, sir. We are discussing women! This is most interesting and enlightening. We will look into this matter. Yes, we certainly will look into the matter. At once!”

Which Amos Ruggles at once set about. As John Alden for his boy, he was one of the most efficient steam fitters who ever tackled a job and had to go back for his tools while a boiler exploded.

III

Having nothing of larger consequence to attend upon, that week, Amos took a mighty trip to Boston to interview the “brat from the Orphanage” on behalf of his beloved offspring.

Madelaine, strange as the statement may appear, had never met Amos Ruggles. Rising hastily now from her book-littered desk, she beheld her maid admit to her outer sitting room a very carefully groomed, white-faced, fastidiously caned and perfectly spatted elderly man who wore a red carnation in his buttonhole and a Facial Expression prepared for the worst.

But Madelaine’s interest was not to be compared with old “Am’s” stunned surprise when he raised his owlish eyes and saw “the brat from the Orphanage” confronting him from the opposite doorway. Subconsciously Amos had failed to conceive of that brat as anything but a brat. Certainly not a woman grown to maturity. Up to the moment of admittance he had looked vaguely forward to interviewing a knock-kneed child in pigtails and a gingham apron. He had once visited an orphanage while on a legislative committee. He had come away impressed that the crying need of the institution at the moment was to have its individual and collective nose wiped.

Instead of such a mite of parentless humanity whom he might pat on the head and suggest peanuts to, the man confronted a tall, perfectly poised, athletic young woman whose calm eyes made him wonder if he had rumpled himself anywhere in that hectic two-hour trip on the Boston and Albany.

For an instant Amos felt petulant. Persons unknown had tricked him. For Madge Theddon was grown into a “goddess.” The metaphor is Amos’s. And she “had a way with her.” Yes, she had very much of a way with her. One of her fellow students had described her: “Calm as a mountain thinking aloud; ineligible for analysis as moonlight playing on a nocturnal waterfall.”

“I am Madelaine, yes!” she announced in response to “Am’s” suggestion that there was a mistake somewhere. “You are my mother’s brother-in-law. I am very glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ruggles.” She moved forward, extending a lithe, cool, capable hand.

Amos took the hand and kissed it, or he believed he kissed it, at the same time annoyed that she had called him her mother’s brother-in-law instead of her own uncle.

“Madam, charmed!” And Amos made another bow. But he was not charmed. He was bumped. He was badly bumped! There was not a doubt about it.

With an amused smile, Madelaine’s maid withdrew. Amos produced a billowy silk handkerchief and began patting various exposed portions of his anatomy. He ran out of exposed portions and then accepted the chair Madelaine indicated, still in his imbecilic daze.

“Y-Y-You may think it strange that I have called, Miss Madel—Miss Madel—Miss Theddon—it is about my son. You two have become quite well acquainted in the past, I understand.”

“Quite,” returned the girl. Her tone was a trifle ironic.

Amos was at a loss.

“Yes, yes! True, true—very true.” Came another distressing pause while Amos considered. “You see, it’s like this, Miss Madel—Miss Madel—Miss Theddon—getting along famously, are we not?—nothing could please his mother and myself just now more than the knowledge that he is married and—safely in the hands of some good and firm-willed woman. And so—beautiful apartment you have here!—I decided I would come down and talk it over with you.”

“I see,” Madelaine responded. “You’ve come to enlist my aid, perhaps, in finding a wife for Gordon. Or my advice as to how to proceed; which is it?”

“Well—er—in fact, a little of both and none of either.” Amos was happily growing more at ease. He stored his handkerchief in his outside breast pocket, left a couple of inches exposed, put his pink, manicured finger tips precisely together between his knees.

“The idea is this, Miss Madelaine. The boy is—well—the boy is—deeply impressed by yourself and—purely as a father—with a father’s paternal interest, understand—I have called to appraise for myself the extent of the gulf between you and—get you to consider the matter for—er—early negotiation.”

“What matter? Just what do you mean?”

“The matter, Miss Madelaine, of—er—becoming his—wife!”

Amos breathed once more. The worst was over.

Madelaine could not control the flush that crept toward her temples.

“Did Gordon ask that you do this?” she demanded.

“Not at all! Not at all! The idea is my own entirely—absolutely my own!” Amos inferred that as an idea it certainly had its points and on the whole he was rather proud of it.

“Then Gordon knows nothing of it?”

“Not a whittle, Miss Madelaine, not a whittle.”

The girl sat for a time in silence. Her emotions were resentful. They wanted to riot. Her lips twitched once or twice. Then came a saving sense of humor.

“Just why should I consider a marriage with your son, Mr. Ruggles? On what basis do you rear that contention?”

“I—er—I——”

Madelaine pitied his sudden distress. For the first time in his life Amos Ruggles appreciated that any reference to the Ruggles wealth would be crude and insulting, before such a woman as he confronted now.

“He’s a—he’s a—mighty fine boy, Miss Madelaine!” was the father’s compromise.

“I apologize if I seem rude, Mr. Ruggles. But that must remain a matter of opinion.”

“You mean—he isn’t a mighty fine boy?”

“Must we discuss him—his good points and his bad?”

“But he has no bad points, my dear lady. Of course, during adolescence he has been virile and erratic and perhaps indulged himself in some few indiscretions common to all boys. Why, I have even passed through such a stage myself. But there’s nothing really bad about him—nothing but what a characterful wife could eventually eradicate.”

“Mr. Ruggles, has Gordon ever recounted how very ungentlemanly—in fact, grossly insulting—his conduct toward myself has been consistently—from the moment of our first meeting?”

Incredulity, a flick of exasperation, now passed over Amos Ruggles’s features. There was a certain trick of intonation in Madelaine’s voice which quashed irrevocably any argument that Gordon had not been ungentlemanly and insulting. And yet Amos was not quite willing to subscribe to that. And argument was cheapening.

“Just how has he acted—what has he done?”

“You really wish me to tell you?”

“I should consider it in the light of a very great favor, my dear lady.”

Madelaine considered. She leaned back in the chair and put two slender fingers of each hand at a temple, her dark eyes fixed appraisingly upon her foster-uncle.

Then she told him.

She began with Gordon’s conduct and language the day ten years before, when he had violated the privacy of her bedroom. That was insipid, however, beside the later indignities she had suffered. She gave a truthful account of each situation when he had taken her at a disadvantage, forced himself upon her, defiled her lips or tried to compromise her still more seriously. The night of the bogus auto accident became but an incident in that sordid recount. The most brazen piece of insult and effrontery had been a night in a Boston hotel when Gordon had followed her, secured a room next to her own and bought a mercenary night clerk to let him scratch the girl’s name from the register and substitute “Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Ruggles” instead. He then added the consecutive room numbers as a suite. Cheap witnesses had been procured to substantiate that Madelaine had apparently gone to Boston, met Gordon clandestinely and shared an apartment with him for a night. With his citadel of crazy folly thus garrisoned, the foster-nephew had brazenly offered the girl the alternative of marriage or exposure, and only an astute lawyer had contrived to squelch the scandal without publicity.

Amos was dumbfounded. She waited for him to comment. But he held his peace. Then Madelaine laughed good-naturedly.

“And after such persecution—I hope you’ll permit me to call it that, Mr. Ruggles—ten or twelve years of it!—you come to me and suggest I marry your son because he’s really ‘not such a bad fellow, after all!’”

“Don’t you believe—a good woman—can reform a man?” Amos demanded quickly.

“That all depends on the man. In some cases, absolutely not. The material must first be there to work upon. As a general proposition, I consider it thankless nonsense. There may be some good men who have been bruised and buffeted and almost wrecked by life’s cruellest vicissitudes. They may have lost their moorings and their faith in human nature. All they require is kind and loving care, and tenderness and proper ministration to bring them back to normal. In so far as that is ‘reform’, I believe it possible and admirable and well worth the effort. But taking a man who has never had a care or worry and whose career has been one long fling in self-indulgence, and endeavoring to make a man of him—the woman who will waste her time trying it displays evidences of imbecility.”

“Then I take it—there’s no hope—for Gordon?”

“I haven’t said so. I’ve said that Gordon, or any man who wants my respect and ministration, must prove to me first that, in popular language, he’s ‘got the stuff in him.’ I’ll say this much: When your son Gordon has proved to me he’s sincerely penitent and made of the material that perhaps hasn’t had a fair chance to develop, he stands as good a chance to gain my favor as any man. That’s all the ‘encouragement’ I can give. Just now I’ve too much to occupy my time to think of matrimony, anyway. It doesn’t enter into my plans. I’m studying to be a physician.”

“Yes, yes, I know! Very commendable. I wish Gordon had some interest in life—some——”

“I’ll even go further, Mr. Ruggles. I’ll say that all the vulgarity and insult which I’ve suffered consistently from your son will not handicap him if he turns over a new leaf and shows he’s really made of stuff worth while. In fact, I’d be inclined to count it in his favor, strange as it may sound. For it will be a criterion of what he has overcome.”

“Thank you,” said Amos. “Thank you very much!”

IV

All the week that call of Gordon’s father perturbed Madelaine. Or rather, it accentuated emotions which the nature of her activities and the demands upon her time were forcibly keeping latent.

She had reached twenty-four and was still heart-free. Yet there were times when she distrusted herself. She wanted to shed tears without exactly knowing why. She felt herself groping out for a Something she could not give a name? Was it love? It troubled her.

She had met men, all types and varieties and temperaments. She had golfed with them, danced with them, ridden with them, crossed social swords with them at house parties and on yacht cruises. She had looked at them frankly and fearlessly; assayed them; asked herself with a cold brain if she could think of herself as wife to any of them,—with all which wifehood, to a girl like herself, implied. The answer had always been negative, from repulsion or indifference. She mothered them, she sistered them, she heard their troubles, she even allowed a few of the elect to flirt with her,—in a harmless, blue-blooded way. But as for meeting a man in whose personality she could abandon herself, whom she could tolerate beside her always, in every situation that life might hold, most of all in its great privacies, there had never been such a man. She wondered at times if there would be.

The young architect had gone to the Argentine. For a time he had corresponded with her. She felt a queer little pang and breathed a sigh when news came back one autumn of his marriage to the daughter of an American consul. There had been a young artist whom she had met in Paris. He had grasped her roughly in his arms one night and covered her face and throat with kisses. Strange to relate, she had felt neither insult nor repulsion. But she had discovered him a week later doing the same with another woman. She had laughed a queer little laugh and considered herself the butt of a rather good jest.

She and her mother had completed their world trip; had come back across America; and she had begun her college studies. She had counseled other girls’ love affairs. She had been bridesmaid at many weddings. She had beheld love in all its wealth of tenderness and idealism; and she had seen it defiled and degraded to brutish lust. She knew what love could do, that it was very beautiful and much to be desired. Yet she had a feeling that when she loved, it would be with a force and passion that would melt down the world—her world—and recast it. She must proceed carefully and tolerate no blunders.

The name “Old Mother Hubbard” still clung to her. She could not always approach her medical studies in that cold, impersonal way she felt was necessary for professional success. Human beings were always human beings, never biological cases for the application of abstract logic or the working out of a theorem. At times she wondered if she were constituted to make a success of medicine, particularly obstetrics. She almost believed a course in nursing would have supplied that hunger in her heart to alleviate suffering. But there were so many nurses—the life was at times so proscribed and mechanical——

It was queer that Amos Ruggles had chosen that particular time to make his call. Because a month before, her roommate of the past year had suddenly abandoned her studies to become a wife, had written back from Japan how much her life had been changed and enriched, contending that the course which Madelaine had elected was unnatura