way,” said the Honourable Hilary.
“I supposed you would hear of it,” answered Austen.
“I was up there to-day. Gave Mr. Flint your pass did you?”
“Yes.”
“Didn't see fit to mention it to me first—did you? Said you were going up to thank him for it.”
Austen considered this.
“You have put me in the wrong, Judge,” he replied after a little. “I made that remark ironically. I I am afraid we cannot agree on the motive which prompted me.”
“Your conscience a little finer than your father's—is it?”
“No,” said Austen, “I don't honestly think it is. I've thought a good deal in the last few years about the difference in our ways of looking at things. I believe that two men who try to be honest may conscientiously differ. But I also believe that certain customs have gradually grown up in railroad practice which are more or less to be deplored from the point of view of the honour of the profession. I think they are not perhaps—realized even by the eminent men in the law.”
“Humph!” said the Honourable Hilary. But he did not press his son for the enumeration of these customs. After all the years he had disapproved of Austen's deeds it seemed strange indeed to be called to account by the prodigal for his own. Could it be that this boy whom he had so often chastised took a clearer view of practical morality than himself? It was preposterous. But why the uneasiness of the past few years? Why had he more than once during that period, for the first time in his life, questioned a hitherto absolute satisfaction in his position of chief counsel for the Northeastern Railroads? Why had he hesitated to initiate his son into many of the so-called duties of a railroad lawyer? Austen had never verbally arraigned those duties until to-night.
Contradictory as it may seem, irritating as it was to the Honourable Hilary Vane, he experienced again the certain faint tingling of pride as when Austen had given him the dispassionate account of the shooting of Mr. Blodgett; and this tingling only served to stiffen Hilary Vane more than ever. A lifelong habit of admitting nothing and a lifelong pride made the acknowledgment of possible professional lapses for the benefit of his employer not to be thought of. He therefore assumed the same attitude as had Mr. Flint, and forced the burden of explanation upon Austen, relying surely on the disinclination of his son to be specific. And Austen, considering his relationship, could not be expected to fathom these mental processes.
“See here, Judge,” he said, greatly embarrassed by the real affection he felt, “I don't want to seem like a prig and appear to be sitting in judgment upon a man of your experience and position especially since I have the honour to be your son, and have made a good deal of trouble by a not irreproachable existence. Since we have begun on the subject, however, I think I ought to tell you that I have taken the case of Zeb Meader against the Northeastern Railroads.”
“Wahn't much need of telling me, was there?” remarked the Honourable Hilary, dryly. “I'd have found it out as soon as anybody else.”
“There was this need of telling you,” answered Austen, steadily, “although I am not in partnership with you, I bear your name. And in-as-much as I am to have a suit against your client, it has occurred to me that you would like me to move—elsewhere.”
The Honourable Hilary was silent for a long time.
“Want to move—do YOU? Is that it?”
“Only because my presence may embarrass you.”
“That wahn't in the contract,” said the Honourable Hilary; “you've got a right to take any fool cases you've a mind to. Folks know pretty well I'm not mixed up in 'em.”
Austen did not smile; he could well understand his father's animus in this matter. As he looked up at the gable of his old home against the stars, he did not find the next sentence any easier.
“And then,” he continued, “in taking, a course so obviously against your wishes and judgment it occurred to me—well, that I was eating at your table and sleeping in your house.”
To his son's astonishment, Hilary Vane turned on him almost truculently.
“I thought the time'd come when you'd want to go off again—gypsying,” he cried.
“I'd stay right here in Ripton, Judge. I believe my work is in this State.”
The Honour could see through a millstone with a hole in it. The effect of Austen's assertion on him was a declaration that the mission of the one was to tear down what the other had so laboriously built up. And yet a growing dread of Hilary Vane's had been the loneliness of declining years in that house should Austen leave it again, never to return.
“I knew you had this Meader business in mind,” he said. “I knew you had fanciful notions about—some things. Never told you I didn't want you here, did I?”
“No,” said Austen, “but—”
“Would have told you if I hadn't wanted you—wouldn't I?”
“I hope so, Judge,” said Austen, who understood something of the feeling which underlay this brusqueness. That knowledge made matters all the harder for him.
“It was your mother's house—you're entitled to that, anyway,” said the Honourable Hilary, “but what I want to know is, why you didn't advise that eternal fool of a Meader to accept what we offered him. You'll never get a county jury to give as much.”
“I did advise him to accept it,” answered Austen.
“What's the matter with him?” the Honourable Hilary demanded.
“Well, judge, if you really want my opinion, an honest farmer like Meader is suspicious of any corporation which has such zealous and loyal retainers as Ham Tooting and Brush Bascom.” And Austen thought with a return of the pang which had haunted him at intervals throughout the afternoon, that he might almost have added to these names that of Hilary Vane. Certainly Zeb Meader had not spared his father.
“Life,” observed the Honourable Hilary, unconsciously using a phrase from the 'Book of Arguments,' “is a survival of the fittest.”
“How do you define 'the fittest?'” asked Austen. “Are they the men who have the not unusual and certainly not exalted gift of getting money from their fellow creatures by the use of any and all weapons that may be at hand? who believe the acquisition of wealth to be exempt from the practice of morality? Is Mr. Flint your example of the fittest type to exist and survive, or Gladstone or Wilberforce or Emerson or Lincoln?”
“Emerson!” cried the Honourable Hilary, the name standing out in red letters before his eyes. He had never read a line of the philosopher's writings, not even the charge to “hitch your wagon to a star” (not in the “Book of Arguments”). Sarah Austen had read Emerson in the woods, and her son's question sounded so like the unintelligible but unanswerable flashes with which the wife had on rare occasions opposed the husband's authority that Hilary Vane found his temper getting the best of him—The name of Emerson was immutably fixed in his mind as the synonym for incomprehensible, foolish habits and beliefs. “Don't talk Emerson to me,” he exclaimed. “And as for Brush Bascom, I've known him for thirty years, and he's done as much for the Republican party as any man in this State.”
This vindication of Mr. Bascom naturally brought to a close a conversation which had already continued too long. The Honourable Hilary retired to rest; but—if Austen had known it—not to sleep until the small hours of the morning.
It was not until the ensuing spring that the case of Mr. Zebulun Meader against the United Northeastern Railroads came up for trial in Bradford, the county-seat of Putnam County, and we do not wish to appear to give it too great a weight in the annals of the State. For one thing, the weekly newspapers did not mention it; and Mr. Paul Pardriff, when urged to give an account of the proceedings in the Ripton Record, said it was a matter of no importance, and spent the afternoon writing an editorial