University of Virginia Library

26. CHAPTER XXVI.

RUMORS of Ruth's frivolity and worldliness at Fallkill
traveled to Philadelphia in due time, and occasioned no
little undertalk among the Bolton relatives.

Hannah Shoecraft told another cousin that, for her part,
she never believed that Ruth had so much more “mind”
than other people; and Cousin Hulda added that she always
thought Ruth was fond of admiration, and that was the reason
she was unwilling to wear plain clothes and attend Meeting.
The story that Ruth was “engaged” to a young gentleman
of fortune in Fallkill came with the other news, and helped
to give point to the little satirical remarks that went round
about Ruth's desire to be a doctor!

Margaret Bolton was too wise to be either surprised or
alarmed by these rumors. They might be true; she knew a
woman's nature too well to think them improbable, but she
also knew how steadfast Ruth was in her purposes, and that,
as a brook breaks into ripples and eddies and dances and
sports by the way, and yet keeps on to the sea, it was in
Ruth's nature to give back cheerful answer to the solicitations
of friendliness and pleasure, to appear idly delaying
even, and sporting in the sunshine, while the current of her
resolution flowed steadily on.

That Ruth had this delight in the mere surface play of life

—that she could, for instance, be interested in that somewhat
serious by-play called “flirtation,” or take any delight in the
exercise of those little arts of pleasing and winning which
are none the less genuine and charming because they are not
intellectual, Ruth, herself, had never suspected until she went
to Fallkill. She had believed it her duty to subdue her
gaiety of temperament, and let nothing divert her from what
are called serious pursuits. In her limited experience she
brought everything to the judgment of her own conscience,
and settled the affairs of all the world in her own serene
judgment hall. Perhaps her mother saw this, and saw also
that there was nothing in the Friends' society to prevent her
from growing more and more opinionated.

When Ruth returned to Philadelphia, it must be confessed
—though it would not have been by her—that a medical
career did seem a little less necessary for her than formerly;
and coming back in a glow of triumph, as it were, and in the
consciousness of the freedom and life in a lively society and
in new and sympathetic friendship, she anticipated pleasure
in an attempt to break up the stiffness and levelness of the
society at home, and infusing into it something of the motion
and sparkle which were so agreeable at Fallkill. She expected
visits from her new friends, she would have company, the
new books and the periodicals about which all the world was
talking, and, in short, she would have life.

For a little while she lived in this atmosphere which she had
brought with her. Her mother was delighted with this
change in her, with the improvement in her health and the
interest she exhibited in home affairs. Her father enjoyed
the society of his favorite daughter as he did few things besides;
he liked her mirthful and teasing ways, and not less a
keen battle over something she had read. He had been a
great reader all his life, and a remarkable memory had stored
his mind with encyclopædic information. It was one of Ruth's
delights to cram herself with some out of the way subject
and endeavor to catch her father; but she almost always
failed. Mr. Bolton liked company, a house full of it, and

the mirth of young people, and he would have willingly
entered into any revolutionary plans Ruth might have suggested
in relation to Friends' society.

But custom and the fixed order are stronger than the most
enthusiastic and rebellions young lady, as Ruth very soon
found. In spite of all her brave efforts, her frequent correspondence,
and her determined animation, her books and her
music, she found herself settling into the clutches of the old
monotony, and as she realized the hopelessness of her endeavors,
the medical scheme took new hold of her, and seemed
to her the only method of escape.

“Mother, thee does not know how different it is in Fallkill,
how much more interesting the people are one meets, how
much more life there is.”

“But thee will find the world, child, pretty much all the
same, when thee knows it better. I thought once as thee
does now, and had as little thought of being a Friend as thee
has. Perhaps when thee has seen more, thee will better appreciate
a quiet life.”

“Thee married young. I shall not marry young, and perhaps
not at all,” said Ruth, with a look of vast experience.

“Perhaps thee doesn't know thee own mind; I have known
persons of thy age who did not. Did thee see anybody whom
thee would like to live with always in Fallkill?”

“Not always,” replied Ruth with a little laugh. “Mother,
I think I wouldn't say `always' to any one until I have a
profession and am as independent as he is. Then my love
would be a free act, and not in any way a necessity.”

Margaret Bolton smiled at this new-fangled philosophy.
“Thee will find that love, Ruth, is a thing thee won't reason
about, when it comes, nor make any bargains about. Thee
wrote that Philip Sterling was at Fallkill.”

“Yes, and Henry Brierly, a friend of his; a very amusing
young fellow and not so serious-minded as Philip, but a bit
of a fop may be.”

“And thee preferred the fop to the serious-minded?”

“I didn't prefer anybody, but Henry Brierly was good
company, which Philip wasn't always.”

“Did thee know thee father had been in correspondence
with Philip?”

Ruth looked up surprised and with a plain question in her
eyes.

“Oh, it's not about thee.”

“What then?” and if there was any shade of disappointment
in her tone, probably Ruth herself did not know it.

“It's about some land up in the country. That man Bigler
has got father into another speculation.”

“That odious man! Why will father have any thing to do
with him? Is it that railroad?”

“Yes. Father advanced money and took land as security,
and whatever has gone with the money and the bonds, he
has on his hands a large tract of wild land.”

“And what has Philip to do with that?”

“It has good timber, if it could ever be got out, and father
says that there must be coal in it; it's in a coal region. He
wants Philip to survey it, and examine it for indications of
coal.”

“It's another of father's fortunes, I suppose,” said Ruth.
“He has put away so many fortunes for us that I'm afraid
we never shall find them.”

Ruth was interested in it nevertheless, and perhaps mainly
because Philip was to be connected with the enterprise. Mr.
Bigler came to dinner with her father next day, and talked a
great deal about Mr. Bolton's magnificent tract of land,
extolled the sagacity that led him to secure such a property,
and led the talk along to another railroad which would open
a northern communication to this very land.

“Pennybacker says it's full of coal, he's no doubt of it,
and a railroad to strike the Erie would make it a fortune.”

“Suppose you take the land and work the thing up, Mr.
Bigler; you may have the tract for three dollars an acre.”

“You'd throw it away, then,” replied Mr. Bigler, “and
I'm not the man to take advantage of a friend. But if

you'll put a mortgage on it for the northern road, I wouldn't
mind taking an interest, if Pennybacker is willing; but Pennybacker,
you know, don't go much on land, he sticks to the
legislature.” And Mr. Bigler laughed.

When Mr. Bigler had gone, Ruth asked her father about
Philip's connection with the land scheme.

“There's nothing definite,” said Mr. Bolton. “Philip is
showing aptitude for his profession. I hear the best reports
of him in New York, though those sharpers don't intend to
do anything but use him. I've written and offered him
employment in surveying and examining the land. We
want to know what it is. And if there is anything in it that
his enterprise can dig out, he shall have an interest. I
should be glad to give the young fellow a lift.”

All his life Eli Bolton had been giving young fellows a
lift, and shouldering the losses when things turned out unfortunately.
His ledger, take it altogether, would not show a
balance on the right side; but perhaps the losses on his books
will turn out to be credits in a world where accounts are kept
on a different basis. The left hand of the ledger will appear
the right, looked at from the other side.

Philip wrote to Ruth rather a comical account of the
bursting up of the city of Napoleon and the navigation
improvement scheme, of Harry's flight and the Colonel's discomfiture.
Harry left in such a hurry that he hadn't even
time to bid Miss Laura Hawkins good-bye, but he had no doubt
that Harry would console himself with the next pretty face he
saw—a remark which was thrown in for Ruth's benefit. Col.
Sellers had in all probability, by this time, some other equally
brilliant speculation in his brain.

As to the railroad, Philip had made up his mind that it was
merely kept on foot for speculative purposes in Wall street,
and he was about to quit it. Would Ruth be glad to hear,
he wondered, that he was coming East? For he was coming,
in spite of a letter from Harry in New York, advising him to
hold on until he had made some arrangements in regard to

[ILLUSTRATION]

"BROTHER PLUM."

[Description: 499EAF. Page 240. In-line image of a tall man dressed in black wearing a white hat.] contracts, he to be a little careful about Sellers, who was
somewhat visionary, Harry said.

The summer went on without much excitement for Ruth.
She kept up a correspondence with Alice, who promised a
visit in the fall, she read, she earnestly tried to interest herself
in home affairs and such people as came to the house;
but she found herself falling more and more into reveries, and
growing weary of things as they were. She felt that everybody
might become in time like two relatives from a Shaker
establishment in Ohio, who visited the Boltons about this
time, a father and son, clad exactly alike, and alike in manners.
The son, however, who was not of age, was more
unworldly and sanctimonious than his father; he always
addressed his parent as “Brother Plum,” and bore himself

altogether in such a superior manner that Ruth longed to put
bent pins in his chair. Both father and son wore the long, single
breasted collarless coats of their society, without buttons,
before or behind, but with a row of hooks and eyes on either
side in front. It was Ruth's suggestion that the coats would
be improved by a single hook and eye sewed on in the small
of the back where the buttons usually are.

Amusing as this Shaker caricature of the Friends was, it
oppressed Ruth beyond measure, and increased her feeling of
being stifled.

It was a most unreasonable feeling. No home could be
pleasanter than Ruth's. The house, a little out of the city,
was one of those elegant country residences which so much
charm visitors to the suburbs of Philadelphia. A modern dwelling
and luxurious in everything that wealth could suggest for
comfort, it stood in the midst of exquisitely kept lawns, with
groups of trees, parterres of flowers massed in colors, with
greenhouse, grapery and garden; and on one side, the garden
sloped away in undulations to a shallow brook that ran over
a pebbly bottom and sang under forest trees. The country
about was the perfection of cultivated landscape, dotted with
cottages, and stately mansions of Revolutionary date, and
sweet as an English country-side, whether seen in the soft
bloom of May or in the mellow ripeness of late October.

It needed only the peace of the mind within, to make it a
paradise. One riding by on the Old Germantown road, and
seeing a young girl swinging in the hammock on the piazza and
intent upon some volume of old poetry or the latest novel,
would no doubt have envied a life so idyllie. He could not
have imagined that the young girl was reading a volume of
reports of clinics and longing to be elsewhere.

Ruth could not have been more discontented if all the
wealth about her had been as unsubstantial as a dream. Perhaps
she so thought it.

“I feel,” she once said to her father, “as if I were living
in a house of cards.”

“And thee would like to turn it into a hospital?”

“No. But tell me father,” continued Ruth, not to be put
off, “is thee still going on with that Bigler and those other
men who come here and entice thee?”

Mr. Bolton smiled, as men do when they talk with women
about “business.” “Such men have their uses, Ruth. They
keep the world active, and I owe a great many of my best
operations to such men. Who knows, Ruth, but this new land
purchase, which I confess I yielded a little too much to Bigler
in, may not turn out a fortune for thee and the rest of the
children?”

“Ah, father, thee sees every thing in a rose-colored light.
I do believe thee wouldn't have so readily allowed me to
begin the study of medicine, if it hadn't had the novelty of
an experiment to thee.”

“And is thee satisfied with it?”

“If thee means, if I have had enough of it, no. I just
begin to see what I can do in it, and what a noble profession
it is for a woman. Would thee have me sit here like a bird
on a bough and wait for somebody to come and put me in a
cage?”

Mr. Bolton was not sorry to divert the talk from his own
affairs, and he did not think it worth while to tell his family
of a performance that very day which was entirely characteristic
of him.

Ruth might well say that she felt as if she were living in
a house of cards, although the Bolton household had no idea
of the number of perils that hovered over them, any more
than thousands of families in America have of the business
risks and contingences upon which their prosperity and luxury
hang.

A sudden call upon Mr. Bolton for a large sum of money,
which must be forthcoming at once, had found him in the
midst of a dozen ventures, from no one of which a dollar
could be realized. It was in vain that he applied to his business
acquaintances and friends; it was a period of sudden
panic and no money. “A hundred thousand! Mr. Bolton,”

said Plumly. “Good God, if you should ask me for ten, I
shouldn't know where to get it.”

And yet that day Mr. Small (Pennybacker, Bigler and
Small) came to Mr. Bolton with a piteous story of ruin in a
coal operation, if he could not raise ten thousand dollars.
Only ten, and he was sure of a fortune. Without it he was
a beggar. Mr. Bolton had already Small's notes for a large
amount in his safe, labeled “doubtful;” he had helped him
again and again, and always with the same result. But Mr.
Small spoke with a faltering voice of his family, his daughter
in school, his wife ignorant of his calamity, and drew such a
picture of their agony, that Mr. Bolton put by his own more
pressing necessity, and devoted the day to scraping together,
here and there, ten thousand dollars for this brazen beggar,
who had never kept a promise to him nor paid a debt.

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society.
Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust,
of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a
peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to
instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper
anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished
speculator in lands and mines this remark:—“I wasn't worth
a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.”