Hadn’t you better wait a while? Aren’t you in danger of stirring up your father? He might cause a lot of trouble out there if he were so minded.”
“Only once in three months!” she exclaimed, with rising emphasis, as he began this explanation. “Oh, Frank, no! Surely not! Once in three months! Oh, I can’t stand that! I won’t! I’ll go and see the warden myself. He’ll let me see you. I’m sure he will, if I talk to him.”
She fairly gasped in her excitement, not willing to pause in her tirade, but Cowperwood interposed with her, “You’re not thinking what you’re saying, Aileen. You’re not thinking. Remember your father! Remember your family! Your father may know the warden out there. You don’t want it to get all over town that you’re running out there to see me, do you? Your father might cause you trouble.
Besides you don’t know the small party politicians as I do. They gossip like a lot of old women. You’ll have to be very careful what you do and how you do it. I don’t want to lose you. I want to see you. But you’ll have to mind what you’re doing. Don’t try to see me at once. I want you to, but I want to find out how the land lies, and I want you to find out too. You won’t lose me.
I’ll be there, well enough.”
He paused as he thought of the long tier of iron cells which must be there, one of which would be his—for how long?—and of Aileen seeing him through the door of it or in it. At the same time he was thinking, in spite of all his other calculations, how charming she was looking to-day. How young she kept, and how forceful!
While he was nearing his full maturity she was a comparatively young girl, and as beautiful as ever. She was wearing a black-and-white-striped silk in the curious bustle style of the times, and a set of sealskin furs, including a little sealskin cap set jauntily on top her red-gold hair.
“I know, I know,” replied Aileen, firmly. “But think of three months! Honey, I can’t! I won’t! It’s nonsense. Three months! I know that my father wouldn’t have to wait any three months if he wanted to see anybody out there, nor anybody else that he wanted to ask favors for. And I won’t, either. I’ll find some way.”
Cowperwood had to smile. You could not defeat Aileen so easily.
“But you’re not your father, honey; and you don’t want him to know.”
“I know I don’t, but they don’t need to know who I am. I can go heavily veiled. I don’t think that the warden knows my father.
He may. Anyhow, he doesn’t know me; and he wouldn’t tell on me if he did if I talked to him.”
Her confidence in her charms, her personality, her earthly privileges was quite anarchistic. Cowperwood shook his head.
“Honey, you’re about the best and the worst there is when it comes to a woman,” he observed, affectionately, pulling her head down to kiss her, “but you’ll have to listen to me just the same. I have a lawyer, Steger—you know him. He’s going to take up this matter with the warden out there—is doing it today. He may be able to fix things, and he may not. I’ll know tomorrow or Sunday, and I’ll write you. But don’t go and do anything rash until you hear. I’m sure I can cut that visiting limit in half, and perhaps down to once a month or once in two weeks even. They only allow me to write one letter in three months”—Aileen exploded again—“and I’m sure I can have that made different—some; but don’t write me until you hear, or at least don’t sign any name or put any address in. They open all mail and read it. If you see me or write me you’ll have to be cautious, and you’re not the most cautious person in the world. Now be good, will you?”
They talked much more—of his family, his court appearance Monday, whether he would get out soon to attend any of the suits still pending, or be pardoned. Aileen still believed in his future.
She had read the opinions of the dissenting judges in his favor, and that of the three agreed judges against him. She was sure his day was not over in Philadelphia, and that he would some time reestablish himself and then take her with him somewhere else.
She was sorry for Mrs. Cowperwood, but she was convinced that she was not suited to him—that Frank needed some one more like herself, some one with youth and beauty and force—her, no less. She clung to him now in ecstatic embraces until it was time to go. So far as a plan of procedure could have been adjusted in a situation so incapable of accurate adjustment, it had been done. She was desperately downcast at the last moment, as was he, over their parting; but she pulled herself together with her usual force and faced the dark future with a steady eye.
Chapter LI
Monday came and with it his final departure. All that could be done had been done. Cowperwood said his farewells to his mother and father, his brothers and sister. He had a rather distant but sensible and matter-of-fact talk with his wife. He made no special point of saying good-by to his son or his daughter; when he came in on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings, after he had learned that he was to depart Monday, it was with the thought of talking to them a little in an especially affectionate way.
He realized that his general moral or unmoral attitude was perhaps working them a temporary injustice. Still he was not sure. Most people did fairly well with their lives, whether coddled or deprived of opportunity. These children would probably do as well as most children, whatever happened—and then, anyhow, he had no intention of forsaking them financially, if he could help it. He did not want to separate his wife from her children, nor them from her.
She should keep them. He wanted them to be comfortable with her.
He would like to see them, wherever they were with her, occasionally.
Only he wanted his own personal freedom, in so far as she and they were concerned, to go off and set up a new world and a new home with Aileen. So now on these last days, and particularly this last Sunday night, he was rather noticeably considerate of his boy and girl, without being too openly indicative of his approaching separation from them.
“Frank,” he said to his notably lackadaisical son on this occasion, “aren’t you going to straighten up and be a big, strong, healthy fellow? You don’t play enough. You ought to get in with a gang of boys and be a leader. Why don’t you fit yourself up a gymnasium somewhere and see how strong you can get?”
They were in the senior Cowperwood’s sitting-room, where they had all rather consciously gathered on this occasion.
Lillian, second, who was on the other side of the big library table from her father, paused to survey him and her brother with interest. Both had been carefully guarded against any real knowledge of their father’s affairs or his present predicament.
He was going away on a journey for about a month or so they understood. Lillian was reading in a Chatterbox book which had been given her the previous Christmas.
“He won’t do anything,” she volunteered, looking up from her reading in a peculiarly critical way for her. “Why, he won’t ever run races with me when I want him to.”
“Aw, who wants to run races with you, anyhow?” returned Frank, junior, sourly. “You couldn’t run if I did want to run with you.”
“Couldn’t I?” she replied. “I could beat you, all right.”
“Lillian!” pleaded her mother, with a warning sound in her voice.
Cowperwood smiled, and laid his hand affectionately on his son’s head. “You’ll be all right, Frank,” he volunteered, pinching his ear lightly. “Don’t worry—just make an effort.”
The boy did not respond as warmly as he hoped. Later in the evening Mrs. Cowperwood noticed that her husband squeezed his daughter’s slim little waist and pulled her curly hair gently.
For the moment she was jealous of her daughter.
“Going to be the best kind of a girl while I’m away?” he said to her, privately.
“Yes, papa,” she replied, brightly.
“That’s right,” he returned, and leaned over and kissed her mouth tenderly. “Button Eyes,” he said.
Mrs. Cowperwood sighed after he had gone. “Everything for the children, nothing for me,” she thought, though the children had not got so vastly much either in the past.
Cowperwood’s attitude toward his mother in this final hour was about as tender and sympathetic as any he could maintain in this world. He understood quite clearly the ramifications of her interests, and how she was suffering for him and all the others concerned. He had not forgotten her sympathetic care of him in his youth; and if he could have done anything to have spared her this unhappy breakdown of her fortunes in her old age, he would have done so. There was no use crying over spilled milk. It was impossible at times for him not to feel intensely in moments of success or failure; but the proper thing to do was to bear up, not to show it, to talk little and go your way with an air not so much of resignation as of self-sufficiency, to whatever was awaiting you. That was his attitude on this morning, and that was what he expected from those around him—almost compelled, in fact, by his own attitude.