Marching Men eBook

At his desk in the office of the plough trust David thought of his daughter in the settlement house at the edge of the First Ward.  “She is a white shining thing amid dirt and ugliness,” he thought “Her whole life is like the life of her mother during the hours when she once lay bravely facing death for the sake of a new life.”

On the day of her meeting with McGregor, father and daughter sat as usual in the restaurant.  Men and women passed up and down the long carpeted aisles and looked at them admiringly.  A waiter stood at Ormsby’s shoulder anxious for the generous tip.  Into the air that hung over them, the little secret atmosphere of comradeship they cherished so carefully, was thrust the sense of a new personality.  Floating in Margaret’s mind beside the quiet noble face of her father, with its stamp of ability and kindliness, was another face—­the face of the man who had talked to her in the settlement house, not as Margaret Ormsby daughter of David Ormsby of the plough trust but as a woman who could serve his ends and whom he meant should serve.  The vision in her mind haunted her and she listened indifferently to the talk of her father.  She felt that the stern face of the young lawyer with its strong mouth and its air of command was as something impending and tried to get back the feeling of dislike she had felt when first he thrust himself in at the settlement house door.  She succeeded only in recalling certain firm lines of purpose that offset and tempered the brutality of his face.

Sitting there in the restaurant opposite her father, where day after day they had tried so hard to build a real partnership in existence, Margaret suddenly burst into tears.

“I have met a man who has compelled me to do what I did not want to do,” she explained to the astonished man and then smiled at him through the tears that glistened in her eyes.

CHAPTER II

In Chicago the Ormsbys lived in a large stone house in Drexel Boulevard.  The house had a history.  It was owned by a banker who was a large stockholder and one of the directors of the plough trust.  Like all men who knew him well the banker admired and respected the ability and integrity of David Ormsby.  When the ploughmaker came to the city from a town in Wisconsin to be the master of the plough trust he offered him the house to use.

The house had come to the banker from his father, a grim determined old money-making merchant of a past generation who had died hated by half Chicago after toiling sixteen hours daily for sixty years.  In his old age the merchant had built the house to express the power wealth had given him.  It had floors and woodwork cunningly wrought of expensive woods by workmen sent to Chicago by a firm in Brussels.  In the long drawing room at the front of the house hung a chandelier that had cost the merchant ten thousand dollars.  The stairway leading to the floor above was from the palace of a prince in Venice and had been bought for the merchant and brought over seas to the house in Chicago.