The Cost | Page 5

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 through."
He felt that he was fully entitled to the rights of the regenerate; he went to Colonel Gardiner's law office boldly to claim them.
At sight of him the colonel's face hardened into an expression as near to hate as its habit of kindliness would concede. "Well, sir!" said he, sharply, eying the young man over the tops of his glasses.
Dumont stiffened his strong, rather stocky figure and said, his face a study of youthful frankness: "You know what I've come for, sir. I want you to give me a trial."
"No!" Colonel Gardiner shut