"My dear," said her husband, with his laugh, "she has behaved TOO well.If she had studied the whole situation with the most artful eye to its mastery, she could not possibly have behaved better."The process of Lapham's financial disintegration was like the course of some chronic disorder, which has fastened itself upon the constitution, but advances with continual reliefs, with apparent amelioration, and at times seems not to advance at all, when it gives hope of final recovery not only to the sufferer, but to the eye of science itself.There were moments when James Bellingham, seeing Lapham pass this crisis and that, began to fancy that he might pull through altogether;and at these moments, when his adviser could not oppose anything but experience and probability to the evidence of the fact, Lapham was buoyant with courage, and imparted his hopefulness to his household.Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false.
The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing.
Bursts of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jests together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and ****** it all up again with the conventional fitness of things.Lapham's adversity had this quality in common with bereavement.It was not always like the adversity we figure in allegory; it had its moments of being like prosperity, and if upon the whole it was continual, it was not incessant.Sometimes there was a week of repeated reverses, when he had to keep his teeth set and to hold on hard to all his hopefulness; and then days came of negative result or slight success, when he was full of his jokes at the tea-table, and wanted to go to the theatre, or to do something to cheer Penelope up.
In some miraculous way, by some enormous stroke of success which should eclipse the brightest of his past prosperity, he expected to do what would reconcile all difficulties, not only in his own affairs, but in hers too."You'll see,"he said to his wife; "it's going to come out all right.
Irene'll fix it up with Bill's boy, and then she'll be off Pen's mind; and if things go on as they've been going for the last two days, I'm going to be in a position to do the favours myself, and Pen can feel that SHE'S makin'
a sacrifice, and then I guess may be she'll do it.
If things turn out as I expect now, and times ever go get any better generally, I can show Corey that I appreciate his offer.I can offer him the partnership myself then."Even in the other moods, which came when everything had been going wrong, and there seemed no way out of the net, there were points of consolation to Lapham and his wife.
They rejoiced that Irene was safe beyond the range of their anxieties, and they had a proud satisfaction that there had been no engagement between Corey and Penelope, and that it was she who had forbidden it.In the closeness of interest and sympathy in which their troubles had reunited them, they confessed to each other that nothing would have been more galling to their pride than the idea that Lapham should not have been able to do everything for his daughter that the Coreys might have expected.
Whatever happened now, the Coreys could not have it to say that the Laphams had tried to bring any such thing about.
Bellingham had lately suggested an assignment to Lapham, as the best way out of his difficulties.It was evident that he had not the money to meet his liabilities at present, and that he could not raise it without ruinous sacrifices, that might still end in ruin after all.If he made the assignment, Bellingham argued, he could gain time and make terms; the state of things generally would probably improve, since it could not be worse, and the market, which he had glutted with his paint, might recover and he could start again.Lapham had not agreed with him.
When his reverses first began it had seemed easy for him to give up everything, to let the people he owed take all, so only they would let him go out with clean hands; and he had dramatised this feeling in his talk with his wife, when they spoke together of the mills on the G.L.&P.But ever since then it had been growing harder, and he could not consent even to seem to do it now in the proposed assignment.He had not found other men so very liberal or faithful with him; a good many of them appeared to have combined to hunt him down; a sense of enmity towards all his creditors asserted itself in him;he asked himself why they should not suffer a little too.
Above all, he shrank from the publicity of the assignment.
It was open confession that he had been a fool in some way;he could not bear to have his family--his brother the judge, especially, to whom he had always appeared the soul of business wisdom--think him imprudent or stupid.
He would make any sacrifice before it came to that.
He determined in parting with Bellingham to make the sacrifice which he had oftenest in his mind, because it was the hardest, and to sell his new house.
That would cause the least comment.Most people would simply think that he had got a splendid offer, and with his usual luck had made a very good thing of it;others who knew a little more about him would say that he was hauling in his horns, but they could not blame him;a great many other men were doing the same in those hard times--the shrewdest and safest men: it might even have a good effect.He went straight from Bellingham's office to the real-estate broker in whose hands he meant to put his house, for he was not the sort of man to shilly-shally when he had once made up his mind.
