The Cost | Page 5

son of the richest banker in Saint X,
had furnished the loft of his father's stable as bachelor quarters and
entertained his friends there without fear that the noise would break the
sleep and rouse the suspicions of his father. That night, besides
Braddock and Dumont, there were Jim Cauldwell and his brother Will.
As they played they drank; and Dumont, winning steadily, became
offensive in his raillery. There was a quarrel, a fight; Will Cauldwell,
accidently toppled down a steep stairway by Dumont, was picked up
with a broken arm and leg.
By noon the next day the town was boiling with this outbreak of
deviltry in the leading young men, the sons and prospective successors
of the "bulwarks of religion and morality." The Episcopalian and
Methodist ministers preached against Dumont, that "importer of Satan's
ways into our peaceful midst," and against Charley Braddock with his
"ante-room to Sheol"--the Reverend Sweetser had just learned the
distinction between Sheol and Hades. The Presbyterian preacher
wrestled spiritually with Will Cauldwell and so wrought upon his
depression that he gave out a solemn statement of confession, remorse
and reform. In painting himself in dark colors he painted Jack Dumont
jet black.
Pauline had known that Dumont was "lively"--he was far too proud of
his wild oats wholly to conceal them from her. And she had all the
tolerance and fascinated admiration of feminine youth for the friskiness
of masculine freedom. Thus, though she did not precisely approve what
he and his friends had done, she took no such serious view of it as did
her parents and his. The most she could do with her father was to
persuade him to suspend sentence pending the conclusion of an
investigation into Jack's doings at the University of Michigan and in
Detroit. Colonel Gardiner was not so narrow or so severe as Jack said
or as Pauline thought. He loved his daughter; so he inquired thoroughly.
He knew that his daughter loved Dumont; so he judged liberally. When
he had done he ordered the engagement broken and forbade Dumont
the house.
"He is not wild merely; he is--worse than you can imagine," said the
colonel to his wife, in concluding his account of his discoveries and of
Dumont's evasive and reluctant admissions--an account so carefully
expurgated that it completely misled her. "Tell Pauline as much as you

can--enough to convince her."
This, when Mrs. Gardiner was not herself convinced. She regarded the
colonel as too high-minded to be a fit judge of human frailty; and his
over-caution in explanation had given her the feeling that he had a
standard for a husband for their daughter which only another such rare
man as himself could live up to. Further, she had always been
extremely reserved in mother-and-daughter talk with Pauline, and thus
could not now give her a clear idea of what little she had been able to
gather from Colonel Gardiner's half-truths. This typical enacting of a
familiar domestic comedy-tragedy had the usual result: the girl was
confirmed in her original opinion and stand.
"Jack's been a little too lively," was her unexpressed conclusion from
her mother's dilution of her father's dilution of the ugly truth. "He's
sorry and won't do it again, and--well, I'd hate a milksop. Father has
forgotten that he was young himself once."
Dumont's father and mother charged against Ann Arbor that which they
might have charged against their own alternations of tyranny and
license, had they not been humanly lenient in self-excuse. "No more
college!" said his father.
"The place for you, young man, is my office, where I can keep an eye
or two on you."
"That suits me," replied the son, indifferently--he made small pretense
of repentance at home.
"I never wanted to go to college."
"Yes, it was your mother's doing," said old Dumont. "Now we'll try
MY way of educating a boy."
So Jack entered the service of his father's god-of-the-six-days, and
immediately showed astonishing talent and twelve-to-fourteen-hour
assiduity. He did not try to talk with Pauline. He went nowhere but to
business; he avoided the young men.
"It's a bad idea to let your home town know too much about you," he
reflected, and he resolved that his future gambols out of bounds should
be in the security of distant and large cities--and they were. Seven
months after he went to work he amazed and delighted his father by
informing him that he had bought five hundred shares of stock in the
mills--he had made the money, fifty-odd thousand dollars, by a
speculation in wool. He was completely reestablished with his father

and with all Saint X except Colonel Gardiner.
"That young Jack Dumont's a wonder," said everybody. "He'll make the
biggest kind of a fortune or the biggest kind of a smash before he gets