The Cardiff estate. A story

Front matter

Cliap!5!ZbGopyriglit No,

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

•1

Chapter I. Home?

“ Alas the slippery nature of tender youth !”

“ Youth holds no society with grief.*'

The place was the Union Station : time, ten o’clock on a hot June morning. A group of returning tourists stood, tired, warm and dusty — ill-tempered withal — on the platform. They had unawares drawn up into two divisions. A lad and lass of fifteen, twins, richly attired, and full of a roguish joy — formed one section, and the more numerous elders of the company, eight or ten of them, the other. From these latter, surprised and irritated exclamations — What ! no carriages for us !” “ Where ’s my

coachman? I sent especial word for him.” “Only those hideous, crowded street cars!” “ Ride in those hot herdics !” “ I can’t bear

those public hacks ; I know they are full of all manner of diseases 1” “ Where are our people !”

THE CARDIFF ESTATE.

Then John Cardiff the lad — exultant, “You’ll have to go in the hacks, there wont one of your carriages be here.” “Why not?” “ I wrote.” “We wrote.” “ I gave the orders.” “ But your letters were n’t sent, not one of ’m, for a week ! I kept the whole outfit until just as we left, last night, and mailed them all together ! I ’ve been mail-man, and that ’s how I did the business.” “Not mailed our letters!” “John Cardiff!” “You young reprobate!” “And did you keep our mail too ? for not one of us has had a letter since we left Bergs.”

“ That ’s because I telegraphed back to Berg to return all letters to the city, and send none on. We had concluded to go back. Did that more than a week ago !”

“ How could you !” “ How did you ?” “ I ’ve

a mind to prosecute you, you rascal !” “ It ’s an

actionable offence ” — this last from an editor, very excited and red in the face, who considered that all mundane affairs must have fallen into confusion since his Journal had not heard from him for a week.

“ Did n’t you say, Mr. Sartor, that you wished you could get where you would neither hear nor be heard from for a month ? I thought I ’d let you have your wish, for a week. How do you like it?” jeered John.

“ I shall communicate with your father about

HOMEf your conduct,” retorted Mr. Sartor, flinging himself into a herdic, and ordering the driver to get him to his office as soon as possible.

Communicate with their father ! The twins laughed aloud at the idea of their father paying any heed to their pranks.

“We might have known you ’d do something horrid,” said Miss Larrimore, whose love-letters were among the missing ; “ you two are too detestable for words. I wonder any of us put up with you,” and she signalled a hack.

Why were they put up with ? It had long been plain to them : they had money to lavish, time to waste, a big fortune back of them ; they were bright and handsome — the future comes on apace — rich boys and girls become rich young men and women. E'er this they had been tolerated. They understood that, also that some of their capers had been considered vastly amusing — by those that were not their victims. Now all their company had been victimized, and all were irate.

“ Come right along with me,” said Mrs. Fowler angrily, as she motioned for a carriage, “ I made myself responsible to your father for you, and I suppose I must take you home. I am shocked to think that you should go so far as to meddle with people’s mail-matter! Suppose some of us had been summoned home to a case

THE CARDIFF ESTATE.

of illness in our families, or even death ? What then?”

“ Pooh,” said the girl, shrugging her shoulders, “ what could happen in a week or ten days ! How much worse off are we than when there were no telegraphs, and the mail was carried on horseback? Folks didn’t hear once in two or three weeks from people then — and nothing happened. Have n’t you all said dozens of times you wished you could get out of reach of dispatches, letters, invitations, bills, business ? Now you have had your wish, thanks to us, and you ’re angry.”

Mr. Ball especially. When we saved him from duns for a week,” cried John.

“ No, thanks, Mrs. Fowler, Jean and I are not coming with you. We are going to ride in a herdic ; we have always wanted to, and now we ’ll do it.”

“ Yes, let us go home,” said Jean. It do n’t all seem so funny as I thought it would.”

There was a cloud over her dark sensitive face : a girl of great possibilities, no doubt of marked individuality, which hitherto had not asserted itself, for she was entirely devoted to following this lad’s lead, laughing when he laughed, mocking when he mocked, yielding to all his plans, not from inherent weakness, but from the very strength of her character, intense

HOME?

in its loving as in all things, and all her love being centered on him, its only offered object, since they were cradled together and had cooed to each other in the lap of one nurse.

“Take us to Joshua P. Cardiff’s,” said the lad to the herdic driver. “You know where Joshua P. Cardiff is.”

“ Oh yes, I know,” said the man, shaking his head doubtfully, and gathering up the lines, as Jean and John established themselves in his vehicle. Away they rolled ; the sun shone hotly upon the city streets, there was an odor of offal carts and of eating-houses, oppressive after the pure mountain air. The herdic bounced heavily upon the cobble-stones and across the car-tracks.

“What is wrong, Jean? What are you so dull for ?”

“I don’t know. I wish we hadn’t gone. I wish we had n’t come back. I wish we had not made them all angry by our tricks with the mail. It was mean, when they had all been so kind.”

“ Kind ? How kind, when we paid our way same as every one ! Yes, and I know I paid Ball’s share too ; he never has any money. Say, Jean, the reason we had no papers in our car was, I gave the newsboy two dollars to keep out. I wanted the city to burst on them with a surprise, like a strange land !”

lo THE CARDIFF ESTA TE.

They had passed through various streets and turned many corners, and now reached the last turning to their uptown home. A large black vehicle, hitherto unknown to their experiences, was before them, moving slowly, stopping, barring their way, the great plumed car and the plumed black horses nearly blocking the street — and men drew from it a long, black broadclothcovered coffin, heavily trimmed with silver, in studs, handles, plates, and raising it to their shoulders ascended the white marble steps. A door from which a great trailing scarf of black floated, was flung open and this ominous offering vanished within — their home ! Stunned into silence and pallor, the twins clasped hands and slowly followed up to that black-scarfed entrance. Again it was opened — they stood as aliens, mute, imploring.

“Oh, Master John and Miss Jean! Have you been found at last! and your father dead since last night !” said the butler, who was all in black, with a weed on his arm, instead of resplendent in his usual livery of green and orange. Then from the hall, amid the somewhat gaudy magnificence of marbles, plants, paintings, mosaics, and draperies, came a tall woman in deep mourning, her hair lightly sprinkled with gray, love and pity shining in her eyes, and holding out a hand to each of

HOME?

II the chilled, dazed pair, she said, “ Dear children, this is a sad welcome home. I am your aunt. Prudence Cardiff.”

She led them quietly up stairs to their rooms, rooms opposite each other, luxurious, where so much joyful mischief had been planned by these ungoverned two, mischief resulting in the ignominous rout of nurses, tutors, and governesses. On the bed in each room lay a suit of mourning, and as the twins closed their respective doors and faced their home-coming, they realized that they who had closed all avenues of communication with home, were the only ones whom letters, telegrams, and messengers had been vainly seeking, in whose home something had happened.”

It was an hour or two after, when the undertaker’s men had gone away and left Joshua Cardiff lying in state in his satin-lined coffin, flowers heaped about it, his butler seated near in solemn watch, that Miss Prudence Cardiff led her niece and nephew to look upon their father’s face. It was paler and more set than in life, but scarcely more indifferent to them, for he had always been so busy heaping up fortunes for those children, that he had had but little time to pay attention to the children themselves.

When any unusual outbreak had made it

THE CARDIFF ESTATE.

needful that they should be called to meet him in the library, the formula had been, “ Really, I am surprised that you should make me so much trouble, when I am so exceedingly busy. Do not let anything of this kind happen again.”

As they now stood looking at him who since their first year had been their only parent, they were trying to hark back and weave his personality, his love, into the fabric of their lives; they would make him out as some one loved, cherished, leaned on, now to be greatly missed. It was impossible! this had not been the fashion of his fatherhood- The boy stood troubled, awed, dumb; the girl wept violently. Their aunt was between them, her arm about Jean’s waist, her hand on the lad’s shoulder. “ He was struck with paralysis four days ago,” said Miss Cardiff ; it was evidently fatal from the first. They sent for me, and have been trying to find you. We wanted you here, but he never recovered consciousness. After I came here I found on his desk in the library a letter, which he had been writing to me the night before he was seized at his office with this fatal stroke. I will show it to you. It has been a great comfort to me.”

“ We can’t look at anything now,” said John, “ we want to be by ourselves ; come Jean,” and taking her hand, he pulled her somewhat has-

HOMEf tily towards the library. Miss Cardiff let them go. She counted for nothing in their lives, of course, she had not seen them since the week of their mother’s death.

When they left her she went back to a little morning parlor and sat down, taking a letter from her pocket and spreading it out upon her lap. That letter had been her companion and solace since her brother had drawn the last of those loud, heavy breaths, which for four days had been almost his sole sign of life. His dying had revived in her heart all that early affection, which in long and enforced absence seemed to have fallen asleep, and this letter had prevented her from being stung and torn and agonized to the extent of that loving — it was a letter so much beyond her hoping, but not beyond her daily praying. It is, however true, that so often we do not expect and hope up to the level of our most ardent prayers. In this letter God had been kinder than her fears ; it gave her

“ Some landing-place, to clasp and say ‘ Farewell, we lose ourselves in light.’ ”

She remembered how, nearly eighteen years before, she and he had parted, their life-paths lying so opposite, so apart, that they could not tread them together. She had been willing at any time to reunite her lot with his, if she might do so without trespassing on conscience.

THE CARDIFF ESTATE.

When her sister-in-law had died she had been summoned, for from the deadly contagion of that case of malignant scarlet-fever most of the household had fled. The twin babies escaped as by a miracle; perhaps it was the miracle of her judicious care. She had offered then to stay and rear them, as with mother love, but her brother had declined her offer. He and the children had gone away into the country, and after she had remained and given two months to seeing the house thoroughly disinfected, repainted, papered, carpetted and upholstered, she had departed almost unthanked. She had written regularly once a fortnight during all the following years. Her letters were but seldom answered ; it is so hard to forgive those whom we have injured ! Now at the last, as this letter told her, repentance and love toward her had suddenly awakened ; and it seemed repentance had perhaps been Godward also. Who knows ? It might have been. Suppose he had lived ? Would he have brought forth fruits meet for repentance? What useful lives she and he might then have led ! The gate to such usefulness now seemed open before her. It had been set wide by the hand of death.

Meanwhile in the library the twins had for a time faced each other ; then John had burst out, “ What is she here for ? Is she going to stay ?”

HOME?

“She seems very kind,” sobbed Jean.

“ Kind ? She ’s a crank — the crankiest kind of a Puritan, stiff-set in her ways as they make ’em ; wants her conscience to measure up everybody’s thinking. That ’s why she left. Father could n’t stand her. Oh, I know. I overheard a thing or two that father and Mr. Thomas Dysart were saying one night when I happened to have dropped into a doze in the bay-window here. Of course, as I overheard it that way, I did n’t mention it, even to you. I ’m a man of honor.”

“ But what was there here, in our house, to hurt any one’s conscience ?” demanded Jean angrily. “ Who could say we were not respectable people? If our father was not good enough to live with, what did she want?”

“Something about the way the money was made ; it was not clean enough to suit her. Any money that I can get any fun out of is clean enough for me. I do n’t believe in people setting up for Puritans.”

“ I should think money would be made dirty by the way it was used, not by the way it was gotten,” said Jean. We can’t help how money was made in the first place. But, John, I ’ve always wished I had been one of the Puritans. There seems to me something grand about them, among the storms and rocks and snows holding themselves above all these little luxuries most folks think they must have or die !”

Carriages and coachmen, for instance, like our crowd this morning. But I never set up for a Puritan, and you wouldn’t either, Jean, in most circumstances ; their rocks and snows only seem fine on a hot day.”

“ But I want to know more about Aunt Prudence,” urged Jean; where did she go? what did she do?”

What ’s the odds ? She has come here for the funeral ; she ’ll go in a few days. She went off and supported herself some way — writing, teaching, somehow; and then I suppose she thought her money was clean enough to suit her ladyship. O dear! I wish this all hadn’t happened !” and John drove his head into a heap of downy cushions, striving to bury himself. Jean stood alone in the center of the darkened room ; books and pictures lined the walls about her; the great desk was near; she looked a strong girl as she stood there, stronger than the lad twisting his slender graceful figure among the soft cushions. In some way that slight sketch of her aunt impressed and attracted her : the firm convictions, the strength for revolt, the capacity for self-support, the superiority to ease and luxury — there was in Jean the same blood that was in her Aunt Prudence, and it was tell-

HOME?

^7 ing. When she had stood just now by her father’s coffin, she had looked up at her aunt and had caught a strong resemblance between her and her father in some of the finest hours of his life. They had been hours when Jean dimly apprehended that the very best in him was uppermost. Once or twice when he had been in church with her, once when he listened with her to the Oratorio of the Messiah, once when he watched with the twins through a night of critical illness ; again, when an old friend, who seemed a holy man and not like the ordinary mortals of “ their set,” had spent a few days at their home. This remembered expression had come back to the face of her father as he lay calm in death ; and as Prudence Cardiff bent over her brother, Jean had seen the stamp of kindred between them.

The butler opened the library door : ‘‘ Mr. Dysart, Master John and Miss Jean !” John came out from the pillows, and Jean’s statuesque attitude relaxed. Mr. Dysart put his arm about Jean, and held out his hand to John. “This is a terrible blow to you, children — sudden — sudden to us all! I expected your father to live twenty or thirty years yet.” Then he sat down with the twins one on each side of him.

“What are we going to do, Mr. Dysart?” asked Jean, after the particulars of their father’s death had been explained, and their own absence owing to John’s foolish tricks accounted for.

'‘We’ll stay here, of course, and go on as usual,” said John.

“ Now, John, you know perfectly well we are not of age, and will need guardians and all that, like the Moores.”

“ I ’m your guardian,” announced Mr. Dysart.

“ Whew !” said John softly, and looked sideways at Mr. Dysart. He was one of his earliest remembrances, a familiar figure, and John felt that he had most distinctly respected him, al ways been on his best behavior before him ; that Mr. Dysart’s presence had been as a lens making moral affairs loom large.

“ Your aunt and I are the personal guardians, but your aunt is sole trustee and manager of the entire property. It was so ordered in your grandfather’s will. Your father had sole control during his life ; if he died leaving minor heirs your aunt had entire control during her life. Your father was to pay your aunt a certain share of income during his administration ; and she has the same charge toward you.”

“Did she accept her share?” asked John sneeringly.

“ It was paid into the bank in her name, and there it lies.”

HOME?

I think it is the meanest, wretchedest arrangement I ever heard of,” said John hotly. “ I don’t mean you, Mr. Dysart ; you have always been a friend — and you are a man, and you know what ’s what. A fellow has to have a guardian, it seems, if he is not of age. But to put Jean and me into the hands of that Puritan fanatic ! And we ’ll have to keep her in this house, I suppose !”

“ She is likely to keep herself in this house, as she belongs here,” said Mr. Dysart dryly, “ and she is one of the noblest women that ever lived. When your mother died of a terrible contagious disease, from which every one fled, your aunt came here unasked, and risked her life for you all.”

“How did my mother die, Mr. Dysart?” asked Jean, below her breath.

“She died of the most malignant form of scarlet-fever. It came to her, no doubt, from one of your father’s tenement-houses ; he brought it to her and escaped himself. Of course he did not know that he had been exposed to the infection.”

“That was the way John and I got diphtheria, when we came near dying with it,” said Jean.

“Why did he go near the horrid places?” said John. “ Why did n’t he send an agent, and keep where it was healthy ?”

THE CARDIFF ESTATE.

“ Why did n’t he make the tenements healthy ? People live in them,” said Jean; and here spoke the difference between these twins.

“Pooh, child!” said John, “you don’t know anything about business. Girls never do.”

“ Then how is Aunt Prudence going to manage all our father’s business ? She is only a girl grown up,” said Jean.

“ She ’ll run it into the ground and get us all into the poorhouse,” said John sulkily.

“You’ll find yourself much mistaken in her, my lad,” said Mr. Dysart. “ There are few like her.”

“ I wish there was none like her,” growled John.

Again the twins were left alone ; again John restlessly worried with the lounge-pillows ; and again Jean was silent, half dazed, half thoughtful. This entrance of Death into their surroundings irritated the lad ; he resented the stillness, the shadows, the crowding of solemn words and thoughts, the approach of change, the call of responsibility. To Jean the death angel came like the stately Ithuriel with his transforming spear, that dissipated all shams and evoked the true. John resolutely made up his mind to avoid that black-draped drawing-room and the still form under white flowers. Instead, all this drew Jean ; she crept back there. Miss Cardiff

HOME?

saw her from the little morning-room where she sat alone. Her niece and nephew seemed to avoid her, and she felt reluctant to thrust herself into those two lives from which she had always been so sedulously excluded. Deserted by her natural ally and twin, robed for the first time in those clinging black weeds, there was something so forlorn and pathetic in Jean’s young figure that Miss Cardiff instantly followed her.

Presently Jean lifted her head and spoke across the coffin : “ I am wondering why I was not more with him ; why I never thought he might be lonely, or might like me to sit with him and talk to him. John and I were always together, having our own amusement, you know, and father always seemed so busy and not to know what to say to young folks. Now it is too late. Now I have no one but John.”

“ And I have no one but you two !” cried Miss Cardiff impulsively. “ You are all of my kin left in the world, and I am growing old. Let me be something to you. I have always cared for you, although I was not allowed to see you. Love me, Jean, for I love you.” Miss Cardiff impulsively clasped the girl in her arms. Jean had known no mother; her governesses had been her natural enemies ; she had envied other girls’ mothers and aunts sometimes. She was ready to yield to this offered love, but felt

THE CARDIFF ESTATE.

instinctively that John, her leader and ally, had elected to be his aunt’s enemy. Thus it was, after all, but half-heartedly that she held her aunt’s hand and rested her cheek on her shoulder. Miss Cardiff’s eyes were something like those closed eyes in the coffin, and if she were really alone in the world, it was indeed hard to refuse her friendship.

The day wore away. The three mourners sat together making a pretence of eating the six o’clock dinner. Then John ostentatiously shut himself and his sister into the library. Aunt Prudence might as well know that she was not wanted. However about eight o’clock when it was growing dusk. Aunt Prudence came in. John rose and handed her a chair ; he meant to act the gentleman and the host in this house.

“I wanted to talk to you two, about your father,” said Miss Prudence. “ The night before he was struck with paralysis he wrote me here in the library a letter, and it was found lying sealed and directed on this table next day. I am glad that we may regard that letter as the latest expression of his feelings.”

“ Can’t you tell us first why you have never been here, and why you and father had so little to do with each other?” demanded John coldly.

“ I wrote to him frequently,” said the aunt humbly.

HOME?

“Letters don't count for much," said John brusquely; “he never spoke of you — did he, Jean ?"

“The explanation begins far back in your grandfather’s time, and you might as well have it fully," said his aunt.

“ Your grandfather, my father, inherited two blocks of houses in the lower part of the city ; you know the property, you have seen it."

“We know where it lies on the city map," said Jean, “but we know very little of it, for father never would allow us to go there ; he was afraid of our getting some disease ; he said it was pestilential."

“ One of these blocks had been used for business purposes, and one for the homes of well-todo people, when my grandfather bought them, but by the time my father inherited them the city business and comfortable homes had travelled far from them, into what had been little villages and farm lands in my grandfather’s boyhood ; and only the destitute, the swarms of poor foreigners, would occupy these two blocks. My father found them tenement-houses for daylaborers, and as the city still travelled fast and far from them, and the properties were yearly less respectable and more crowded, only the very poor inhabited them when your father and I were about the age of you two. Until then

THE CARDIFF ESTATE.

we had been an entirely irreligious family. We occasionally went to church, we had a Bible, as we had a dictionary ; but no thought of our duty to God or to our neighbors seemed ever to enter our minds. Just then a very godly, fervent minister came to the church nearest us. He began a house-to-house visitation ; he preached the gospel most powerfully, and the Spirit of God attended all his labors. Scores were converted. My mother and I were among these. Your father and grandfather were of those who cared for none of these things. It came true as is said in the gospel, we were a divided house, all our opinions and our plans of life, our convictions of duty were different. Our amusements and our business were divided ; they became matters of conscience. Your grandmother and I felt that those terrible tenement-houses, the slums from which the family luxury and ease were drawn, were too terrible for endurance. The places were most unsanitary, disease rioted there, rents were exorbitant for the accomodation given ; they were crowded beyond all decency ; they were hotbeds of physical and moral ruin ; and many of the cellars and rooms were rented for grogshops and dens of the most shameless description. Our money all came from this defiance of the good of our neighbor, and to us it seemed unclean, wages of iniquity.”

HOME?

“I don’t see how it was any affair of yours,” said John hotly ; “ you could not help it ; you did not run the business.”

“We tried to help it ; we plead and we gave, but we could neither influence my father nor help the tenants as long as the terrible conditions remained the same. Slowly my mother’s heart was broken over ills she could not cure. She and I had used as little of the wages of unrighteousness as we could. I had secured the best education the city afforded, and when my mother died I left home to support myself by teaching and writing. My father died a year before you twins were born ; he was a whimsical man. He left all his property undivided in the hands of your father, to manage as he saw fit, paying a certain income to me. If 1 survived your father the undivided property was to come to me, to run as I saw fit, with a certain proportion of income to be paid to any children your father might leave. My earnest opposition to the method in which he managed these tenement houses angered your father ; he was cold and had little to do with me. Twice in time of sickness and death I came to his rescue ; my work for him done, I left because I could not share in the iniquity of his business.”

THE CARDIFF ESTATE.

Chapter II. Seeds Of Fire

“ In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.”

“ Then he speaks What 's in his heart.”

'‘Well, Aunt Prudence,” said John, “it seems to me you were simply fanatical. Why was my father not as likely to be right about the business as you were ?”

“ Because, my nephew, there is a rule laid down for right action ; it is found in the Bible, and the ‘ thus saith the Lord,’ is final in moral matters; I had that : the ‘ Do as you would be done unto,’ ‘ Thou shalt not oppress the poor,’ the constant command to succor the needy, to recognize human kindness ; the example of Christ, prince of the poor and the outcast, the sufferer’s friend.