The Happy Average

CHAPTER VII

AN UNNECESSARY OPPOSITION

Marley heard on Monday evening that Judge Blair had gone to Cincinnati, and the news filled him with a high if somewhat culpable joy. He found Lavinia and her mother on the veranda, and Lavinia said, with a grave simplicity:

“Mama, this is Glenn.”

“I’m very glad to have you come,” said Mrs. Blair, trying instantly to rob the situation of the embarrassment she felt it must have for the young man.

Marley could not say a word, but he put all his gratitude in the pressure he gave Mrs. Blair’s hand. The light that came from the hall was dim, and though Mrs. Blair could see that Marley was straight and carried himself well, his face was blurred by the shadows. She turned to Lavinia.

“Will you bring out another chair, dear, or would you prefer to go indoors?”

Then, seeing an advantage in this latter alternative, she decided for them:

“Perhaps we’d better go in, I fear it’s cool out here.”

She held back the screen door and Lavinia whisked excitedly into the hall. Mrs. Blair led the way to the parlor and sent Lavinia for a match. Then, turning to Marley, waiting there in the darkness, she said:

“She has told me, Glenn.”

Marley felt something tender, maternal in her voice; the way she spoke his name affected him.

“But she is young, very young; she is just a girl. We wish, of course, for nothing but her happiness, and you must be patient, very patient. It must not be, if it is to be, for a long time. What does your own mother think of it?”

“I haven’t told her.”

“You haven’t!”

“No. I felt I hardly had the right yet—not before I spoke to Judge Blair, you know. I think I shall speak to him just as soon as he gets home.” He spoke impulsively; until that moment he had been thrusting the thought from him, but Mrs. Blair’s manner led him into confidences. In the immediate fear that he had been precipitant, he looked to her for help; she seemed the sort of woman to wish to save others all the trouble she could, one whose life was full of sacrifices, none the less noble, perhaps, because she made so little of them herself. But a perplexity showed in her eyes and before she could reply, Lavinia was back. With an intimate, domestic impulse Lavinia pressed the match into Marley’s hand, and said:

“You do it; I can’t reach.”

Marley groped with his upheld hand, and when Lavinia guided him to the middle of the room, he lighted the gas. Mrs. Blair looked at him for a moment and Lavinia, standing by, as if awaiting her decision, glowed with happiness. Mrs. Blair’s smile completed the fond, maternal impression Marley had somehow felt when she was standing by him in the darkness. Her full matronly figure, even in the tendency to corpulence of her middle years, had preserved its graceful lines; and Marley regretted the disappearance of this wholesome, cheerful woman as she passed out of the room.

Judge Blair got home from Cincinnati on Sunday morning, worn by his work, and maddened by the din of the city to which he was so unaccustomed. Walking up the familiar streets, he had been glad of their shade and that pervading sense of a Sunday that still remains a Sabbath in Macochee. He had been a little piqued, at first, because his wife had not met him at the train, though she had not, to be sure, known that he was coming. She had gone to Sunday-school, and Connie gave him his breakfast—that is, she sat at the table with him, watching him eat and answering the questions he put to her about the happenings in Macochee while he had been away.

It was not strange that Connie should talk mostly, after she yielded to the gnawing temptation to tell him at all, of the nightly visits Marley had made to the house. She did this in a certain resentment she felt with Lavinia, a resentment that came from an annoying jealousy she was beginning to have of Marley, as if, in installing himself in her sister’s heart, he had evicted all other affections from it.

The judge, with his constant affectation of what he considered the judicial attitude of mind, tried to weigh Connie’s somewhat prejudiced evidence impartially, but he was troubled and annoyed that the peace he had been looking forward to all the week should be jeopardized immediately on his coming home.

It was not until afternoon that he had an opportunity to question his wife, and he began with a severity in his attitude that had as its fundamental cause, as much as anything else, her failure to meet him at the train that morning, and her remaining to church after Sunday-school.

“What do you know about this business between Lavinia and that young Marley?” he asked. “It seems to have developed rapidly during my absence.”

“Oh, Connie has been talking to you, I suppose!” laughed Mrs. Blair. “You know that Connie is apt to be sensational.”

Judge Blair eyed his wife narrowly. Connie was his favorite child, though he would not, of course, admit as much, and he was ever ready to spring to her defense.

“She has very bright eyes,” he said.

“Oh, now, dear,” said Mrs. Blair, “don’t overestimate this thing. Lavinia’s nothing but a child.”

“That’s just the point. Has the young man been here much?”

“Yes, he was here quite often—several evenings, in fact.”

“Humph! He seems to have taken advantage of the sunshine of my absence to make his hay.”

“Don’t do him an injustice. He didn’t meet Lavinia until just about the time you went away.”

“Well, we’ll see about it,” said the judge, darkly.

“Now see here, Will, don’t make the matter serious by an unnecessary opposition; don’t drive the children into a position where they will consider themselves persecuted lovers.”

Mrs. Blair had not until that instant thought of this argument, and she was so pleased with it, as justifying her own course with the children, as she had artfully called them, that she pressed it.

“No, don’t do that. Just let them alone. They’re as likely as not to outgrow it; that is, if there is anything between them to outgrow. They’ll probably imagine themselves in love a dozen times before either of them is married.”

“Don’t talk of marriage!” said the judge, with a little shudder.

Mrs. Blair, who had so well dispelled her own fears, could laugh at her husband’s.

“Just let them alone,” she said; “or leave it to me.”

“Yes,” said the judge peevishly, “leave it to you. You’d probably aid and abet them.” And then, instantly regretting his ill humor, he added hastily: “You’re so kind-hearted.”

Mrs. Blair kissed his white hair gently and gave his cheek a little pat.

“You’d better take a nap,” she said.

CHAPTER VIII

A JUDICIAL DECISION

The judge refused to take a nap, though when he sat down on the veranda he did take one, lying back in his chair with one of the many sections of the Sunday paper spread over his face. It was from this somewhat undignified posture that he was aroused by a step; he started up hastily.

“I beg your pardon,” said the young man, who stood on the steps twirling his straw hat round and round in his hands. The young man went on with an anxious smile:

“This is Judge Blair, I presume? My name is Marley—Glenn Marley.”

If Marley had known that there were men then in the Ohio penitentiary serving terms that were longer by years than they would have been had Judge Blair digested his breakfast, or been allowed to finish his afternoon nap, he would have chosen another hour to press his suit. But he had youth’s sublime confidence, and its abiding faith in the abstract quality of justice. He had dreaded this moment, but it had forced itself upon his keen conscience as a duty, and when he heard that morning that Judge Blair had returned he resolved to have it out at once.

“May I have a word with you?” he asked, advancing a little.

The judge nodded, but slightly, as if it were necessary for him, as a fattening man advanced in middle life, to conserve his energies. His nod seemed to include not only an assent, however reluctant, but a permission as well, to take the other chair that stood, all ready to rock comfortably, on the veranda. Marley took the chair but he did not rock, nor did he yield himself to it, but sat somewhat tensely on its very edge.

“It’s warm this afternoon, isn’t it?” he said, trying to keep up his smile. He felt hopeless about it, but the thought, darting through his mind, that Lavinia was near, braced his purpose. The judge sat hunched in his chair, with his short white hair tumbled rather picturesquely, and his chin low in his collar. His lips were set firmly, his brows contracted. He breathed heavily, and on his strong aquiline nose, Marley could see tiny drops of perspiration.

“I have come,” said Marley, “to speak to you, Judge Blair, on a matter of, that is, importance. That is, I have come to ask you if I might—ah—pay my addresses to your daughter.”

Marley thought this form of putting it rather fine, and he was glad that that much of it, at least, was over. And yet, much as he liked this old-fashioned formula about paying his addresses, he instantly felt its inadequacy, and so nerved himself to do it all over.

“I mean Lavinia,” he said hurriedly, as if to correct any error of identification he might have led the judge into. “I want to marry her.”

The judge, still breathing heavily, looked at Marley out of his narrowed eyes.

“You know,” Marley said, in an explanatory way, “I love her.”

He waited then, but the judge was motionless, even to the hand that hung at his side over the arm of his chair, still holding his paper. Now and then, at what seemed to be long, unequal intervals, his eyelids fell slowly in heavy winks.

“How long have you and Lavinia known each other?” he asked finally.

“I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain Carter’s. But I did not see her again, that is to speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way I have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I feel that I have known her a long time, always, in fact. I—I—well, I loved her at first sight.” Marley dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed that he had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling that the judge so regarded it. He sat and picked at the braids of straw in his hat.

“And have you spoken to her?” asked the judge.

“Oh yes!” said Marley, looking up quickly.

“And she—?”

“She loves me.”

The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then he stirred, the paper dropped from his fingers, and he drew himself up in his chair, as if to deal with the matter.

“How old are you, Mr. Marley?” he inquired.

“I am twenty-two,” said Marley, confidently, as if this maturity must incline the judge in his favor. “I cast my first vote for McKinley.” He thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly it did.

“You have completed your education?”

“I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan.”

“And what are you doing now, or proposing to do?”

“Just now, I am studying law,” he announced. “I’m going to make the law my profession.”

Marley looked up with a high faith in this final appeal, but even that did not impress the judge as Marley felt a tribute thus delicately implied should affect him.

“You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?”

“Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell’s office.”

Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding what to do with him. After he had looked a while he gazed off across the street, drumming with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently, without turning, and still gazing abstractedly into the distance—and in that instant Marley remembered that he had seen the judge stare at the ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way while sentencing a culprit—he began to speak.

“Lavinia is yet very young, Mr. Marley,” he said, “with no knowledge of the world, and, perhaps, little of the state of her own mind. You too, are young, very young, and as yet without an occupation. You are, it is true, studying law, but it will be three years before you can be admitted, and many years after that before you can command a practice that would warrant you in marrying. In this day, the outlook for the young lawyer is not encouraging. I do not think I would wish a son of mine to choose that profession; the great changes that have transpired, and are transpiring in our industrial development, have greatly reduced the chances of the young lawyer’s success. The practice in the smaller county-seats, like our own, for instance, has almost entirely vanished. The settlement of titles to real estate, so lucrative a branch of the law in the early days of my own practice, has deprived the later practitioners of that source of revenue; the field of criminal law has become narrowed, unremunerative and almost disreputable. The corporation work can be handled by one or two firms in each town, and all that seems to be left is the prosecution of personal injury suits, and that is a work that hardly appeals to the man of dignity and self-respect. The large cities have a wider, I might say, the only field, but there the young lawyer must spend years of the hardest, most unremitting toil before he can come to anything like success.”

The judge paused. He had not intended to speak at such length, but the habit of the courts was on him, and once started, he found his own didacticism so pleasing to himself, that it was with reluctance that he paused at all. He might not have stopped when he did, but gone on almost indefinitely, as he did when he delivered what were always spoken of as his beautiful charges to juries, had he not recalled, with something like a pang of resentment, that the happiness of his own, instead of another’s child, lay at the bottom of all this. He turned then to face Marley. The young man was sitting there, his eyes wide, and his face long. The color that flamed in it when he first appeared, was now quite gone. It was gray and cold instead.

“You will see, Mr. Marley,” the judge resumed, “that you are hardly in a position to ask for my daughter’s hand. Of course,” the judge allowed a smile to soften somewhat the fixity of his lips, “I appreciate your manliness in coming to me, and I do not want to be understood as making any reflections upon, or in the least questioning, your character, your worth, or the honor of your intentions. But in view of your youth and of Lavinia’s, and in view of your own, as yet, unsettled position in life, you must see how impossible it is that anything like an engagement should subsist between you. I say this because I wish only for Lavinia’s happiness. I may say that I am not unmindful of your happiness, too, and I esteem it my duty to reach the conclusions I have just presented to you.”

“And I—I can not even see her?” stammered Marley, in his despair.

“I have not said that,” the judge said. “I shall always be pleased to extend to you the hospitality of my house, of course; but I would not consider it necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately, and I certainly would not want you to monopolize her society to the exclusion of other young men with whom she has been in the habit of associating.”

Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with his head downcast. He sat and turned his hat round and round. At last he did look up with an appeal in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting there, as he had at first, sunk in his chair, breathing heavily and looking at him out of those sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and looked off across the street somewhere, anywhere. Then he smote one hand lightly into the other, turned, and said:

“Well—good afternoon, Judge Blair.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Marley,” the judge replied. He watched Marley go down the walk and out of the gate.

CHAPTER IX

A FILIAL REBUKE

“Father!”

Judge Blair turned and saw Lavinia standing in the wide front door. Her face was red, her eyes were flashing, her arms hung straight and tense at her sides.