Alden let that insult pass unchallenged. He was rapidly revising his opinion of his sister-in-law. She had never seemed to him an hysterical woman. But this stroke of luck had quite unbalanced her.
“You don’t know anything!” she kept repeating. “You don’t know anything, either of you! You don’t know anything at all!”
II
On looking back on the first few weeks that followed her father-in-law’s death, Jane was always most impressed by the astounding efficiency of her children. The explosive efficiency of her children. Jane felt as if the dead hand of Mr. Carver had pulled the corks from the three bottles of extremely effervescent champagne. Event followed event with catastrophic rapidity.
It was young Steve who threw the first bomb. He threw it in Boston the day after his grandfather’s funeral, just two hours after he had heard of his legacy. He walked in abruptly on Alden and Stephen and Jane, who were discussing the questions of inheritance tax and probate in the old brown library that overlooked the river.
“The contents of both houses must be appraised immediately,” Alden was saying, when his nephew entered the room.
“Am I interrupting?” said Steve amiably. “I want to ask Uncle Alden a question.”
“I’ve told you everything I know about that bequest already,” said Alden, with that faint hint of irritation in his tone.
“This isn’t about the bequest,” said Steve cheerfully. “And it’s a very simple question. Have you got a job for me?”
“A job for you?” echoed Alden.
“Yes. In the Bay State Trust Company. I want to live here.”
“Here?” echoed Jane.
“Well, not in this house,” said Steve calmly. “Though I like that view of the river. But in Boston. I’ve always loved Boston. I think it’s the place for Carvers to live.”
“You’re right there, my boy,” put in Alden approvingly.
“I’ve just been taking,” said Steve—and his eye brightened—“a walk around Beacon Hill. You don’t know what it does to me, Mumsy. I simply love it. It’s the call of the blood or something. I’m going to buy a little old redbrick house on Chestnut or Mount Vernon Street—a little old redbrick house with a white front door and a bright brass knocker and lavender-tinted panes of old glass in its front window. I’m going to buy the best old stuff I can get to furnish it with. It’s going to be—well—if not an American Wing, at least an American Lean-to! The Metropolitan is going to envy me some of my pieces. I’m going to have a good cook and a better cellar and give delightful little parties. I’m going to be Boston’s Most Desirable Bachelor. But I’m not going to end up like Uncle Alden!” Steve paused to smile engagingly at his astounded relatives. “On my twenty-ninth birthday, I’m going to marry the season’s most eligible débutante—and her name will be Cabot or Lodge or Lowell—and replenish the dwindling Carver stock, I’m going to have ten children in the good old New England tradition, and marry them all off to the best Back Bay connections. There! That’s a brief résumé of my earthly plans and ambitions. But in the meantime, I need a job. I’d rather be in Grandfather’s bank than in any other. So I thought if Uncle Alden had a high stool vacant, I’d just put in a bid for it. If not—”
But Alden’s face was shining with approbation.
“Of course I have, Steve!” he said warmly. “And I must say this would have delighted your grandfather! Wouldn’t it have delighted him, Stephen?”
Jane looked quickly at Stephen’s face. Her own sense of defeat was clearly written there.
“I suppose it would have,” he said slowly. “But, just the same, Steve’s really a Westerner. Partly by blood and wholly by upbringing—”
Jane loved him for his words. Alden looked pained.
“Do you call an education at Milton and Harvard a Western upbringing?” he inquired with acerbity.
Stephen laughed shortly.
“I suppose we should have sent him to the high school in Lakewood,” he said a trifle bitterly.
“And to some freshwater college?” inquired Alden. “Don’t be absurd, Stephen!”
“You don’t need me, Dad, in the Midland Loan and Trust Company,” said Steve persuasively. “You’ve got Jack.”
“I want you, nevertheless,” said Stephen soberly.
“But I want this, Dad,” said Steve. He walked to the window as he spoke and gazed out over the back yards of Beacon Street and the sparkling blue river toward the grey domes and cornices of the Tech buildings across the basin. “I—want—this. I want to live forever in sight of that little gold dome that tops Beacon Hill. I know what I want, Dad—”
“In that case,” said Stephen dryly, “you’ll probably get it. Carvers usually do. Male Carvers, that is—”
Jane knew he was thinking of wasted Silly.
“I’m sorry for your wife, Steve,” she commented tartly.
“Oh—she’ll like it,” said Steve easily. “I’ll pick one that will.”
It was all arranged with Alden in the next half-hour.
“Darling,” said Jane, as she left the room with Stephen, “perhaps he’ll tire of it. Perhaps he’ll come home.” She tried to make her weary voice ring clear with conviction. But she knew he wouldn’t. Stephen knew it, too. He had nothing to add to the arguments he had been vainly propounding for the last half-hour.
“Jane—you’re a trump!” was all he said.
III
It was on the Twentieth Century, three days later, that Jenny issued her ultimatum. The female Carvers in the rising generation yielded nothing in determination to the male. Jane and Stephen were sitting in their compartment, looking out at the bleak midwinter landscape of the Berkshire Hills, when she thrust her blonde head around their door.
“They’ve had a lot of snow,” Stephen was just saying absently. He had been saying things like that, very absently and at long intervals, ever since the train had pulled out of the Back Bay Station. Jane was terribly sorry for him.
“What are you two doing?” cried Jenny very gaily. “Holding hands, as I live and breathe! You look like a coloured lithograph of
