Chapter VI: Part 6

“Say, boys, I’ll tell you somethin’ confidential like, and don’t think I’m braggin’. The furniture-movin’ business is the grandest one there is. For a man that’s mastered it there don’t seem anything in the world left for him to learn. He’s ready to command a army or to run a ocean liner. But there’s one thing I’ll be hanged if even a furniture-mover knows anything about—and that’s love. I’ve thought about it and thought about it—and it gets me every time. I don’t know what it is, or where it comes from, or how they brew the durned thing in hearts like yours and mine. All I know is that it’s there—and that this old world goes round in it. I’m buttin’ into it all the time, and it kind o’ turns me shy like. My own little home is so full of it that sometimes it makes me choke. If I try to get away from it and come down here—well, I’m blest if some bloke don’t begin ladlin’ it out to me when he don’t hardly know what he’s doin’. The furniture-movin’ business is that shiny with it when you know how to see it— But I’ll not say no more. You’d laff. You’re laffin’ at me now, and I don’t blame you. All I’ve wanted to do is to put some of you boys wise. If there’s a blue-star man who knows any one in the world that’s fond of him—then for Christ’s sake get after ’em! And do it not later than to-night.”

And so I did it. Before going to bed I wrote a long letter to my father, giving him such details of my history during the past three years as I thought he would like to know. I hinted that if he or my mother would care for a visit from me I could go home for a few days.

Then I waited.

In a week I got my reply. It read:

MY DEAR FRANK,—I am glad to receive your letter, but sorry that
it should ever have been necessary for you to write it. That
you should be doing well no one could be more thankful for than
I. I have given your messages to your mother, and she wishes me
to send you her love. I consider it my duty to add, however,
that no messages can withdraw the sword you have thrust into
her heart—and mine.

Your affectionate father,

EDWARD MELBURY.

_CHAPTER XIII_

After that my work took me to Atlantic City, though not before I had had a number of meetings with Regina Barry, each of which, with one exception, took me by surprise.

The exception was the first. Cantyre urged me so strongly to come with him to call on Mrs. Barry and her daughter that in the end I yielded.

I found Mrs. Barry a charming invalid lady, keeping to the background and allowing her daughter to take all the initiative. From her as well as from Regina I got the reflex action of their liking for Jack. Mrs. Barry had seen him only once, but had preserved the memory of the pleasure which the meeting had given her. She repeated the statement, which had already grown familiar, that she thought Jack different from other men. Perhaps he was, though I could never see it. Perhaps she thought I was, myself, though she didn’t say so in words.

In any case, the call was followed by an invitation to dinner, and not long after that Annette placed me next to Miss Barry at lunch. Mrs. Grace did the same, and so did Cantyre when he insisted on my joining a party he gave at a theater. Two or three other meetings were accidental, and if I say that in all of them Miss Barry herself made the advances it is only to emphasize my nervousness. I had no right to be meeting her; I had no business to be allowing her to talk to me and show that—well, that she didn’t dislike me. The revolver was still in my desk and I began to ask myself if it wasn’t my duty to make use of it. True, she had not accused me with her eyes, but she was in some ways doing worse. What was to be the end of it?

I welcomed the work at Atlantic City, then, for more reasons than one. It took me away from New York; it kept me out of danger. Cantyre having confided to me the fact that his hopes were not dead, it left the field free to him. Never for a moment did he suspect that in my heart there was anything that could interfere with him; nor did he so much as dream that in hers....

It is curious that in proportion as the craving for drink diminished its place was taken by another craving for what I knew I couldn’t have. There was every reason why I couldn’t have it, why I could never have it. Atlantic City offered me, therefore, the readiest means of flight.

When that should be over I was planning a still further retirement. Sterling Barry was in California, directing the first stages of the erection of a block of university buildings in which he took great pride. Coningsby himself had suggested that when the Atlantic City job was finished there would be an opening for me there if I cared to make a bid for it. I did so care, and he promised to speak for me. Once I reached the Pacific, I was resolved not to come back for years, and perhaps never to come back at all.

It is lucky for me that I am temperamentally inclined to look forward. The retrospective view in my case would very soon have led me back to Greeley’s Slip, but I was rarely inclined to dwell on it. Once when I was crossing the Atlantic as a small boy our steamer had run on the rocks at Cape Clear. To enable us to get off her before she slipped back into the water and went down, long rope ladders were lowered to us from the top of the cliff, and up them we had to climb. This we did in a foggy Irish dawn, seeing just the rope rung ahead of us. Had we been able to look farther up the face of the cliff my mother and sisters would hardly have had the nerve for the ascent. As it was, they could see that single rung and no more, and so could keep their gaze upward without fear.

In the same way I kept my own gaze forward. I tried not to look ahead of the day, and at Atlantic City the days, even in November, were bearable enough. The booming of the long miles of breakers acted on me as a sedative. They dulled memory; they dulled pain; at the same time they incited me to work as the piercing wail of the bagpipes incites the Highlander to fight. I got companionship from them and a sense of timelessness. In their roll and tumble and crash I could hear the _poluphoisboio thalasses_ in which Homer put the sound of breakers forever into speech.

So November went by, and a great part of December. Christmas was approaching, and I was eager to have it over. Not that it mattered to me; but the sense that there was a gay companionship in the world from which I was excluded got slightly on my nerves. Cantyre, who came down to spend a week-end with me whenever he could, having to go for that season to his relatives in Ohio, I looked for nothing more festal than a merry meal with Lovey.

The late afternoon on the day before Christmas Eve was both windy and foggy, with a dash of drizzle in the air. The men had knocked off working, and as I left the half-finished building I stood for a minute to get the puffs of wet wind in my face. The lights along the Board Walk were reflected on the wet planks as in a blurred mirror. Here and there a pedestrian beat his way against the wind, and an occasional rolling-chair—the jinrikisha of Atlantic City—disappeared into the aureole of the sea-front.

As I came down our rickety temporary steps I became aware that a woman’s figure darted out of the shelter of a pavilion on the shore edge and walked rapidly across toward me. She wore an ulster and a tam-o’-shanter cap, and made a gallant little figure in the wind. More than that I did not take time to notice, as I had no suspicion that she could have anything to do with me.

I was, in fact, turning southward toward the house where I was staying when she managed to beat her way in front of me.

“Don’t you know me?”

I stopped in astonishment.

“Why—why, what are you doing here?”

“I was waiting for you.”

I could think of nothing better to say than, “On an evening like this?”

“Oh, I don’t mind that. We arrived only this afternoon. You see, my father can’t get back from California, and mother wouldn’t spend Christmas in town. We’re not going to have any Christmas, and so—”

We struggled across the walk to the pavilion, which, though open on all sides, afforded at least an overhead protection.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked, stupidly.

“Ralph Coningsby told me—and the time you would be coming out. I—I’ve something—something rather special to—to say to you.”

I stood looking down at her. In the wooden ceiling above our heads there was an electric light that shed its beams through the whirl of mist right into her upturned face. There was a piteous quiver in the scarlet lips, and to the eyes had returned that mingling of compassion and amazement with which she had watched me when I pulled out her trinkets and threw them on the desk. It was the first time I had seen it since that night.

As I look back we seem to have gazed at each other in this way for an immeasurably long while, but I suppose it was only for some seconds. I knew why she was there. The truth had dawned on her at last, and she had come to tell me it wouldn’t make any difference.

But it would.

I had left the revolver in my desk in town; but I reminded myself that there was a train between eight and nine and that I should have plenty of time to catch it.

_CHAPTER XIV_

For my own sake, rather than for Regina Barry’s, I made an effort to escape from the pitiless pavilion light overhead.

“You’ll need to go back to your hotel. Sha’n’t we walk along? Then you can tell me as we go.”

The tramp through the gale and spray would have been exhilarating were it not that confidential things had to be thrown out into the tempest. As we left the pavilion, however, a voice floated toward me from the semi-darkness.

“Chair, boss?”

Another minute and we were seated side by side in the odd little vehicle—something between a baby’s perambulator and a touring-car—with the leather curtains buttoned to protect us, and a view through the wind-shield of a long line of lights shining into fog. There was a minute of surprise in the fact that, involuntarily expecting to go at a heightened speed, we found ourselves literally creeping at the snail’s pace which was the customary gait of our pusher.

But that was only subconscious. I took note of it without taking note of it, to remember it when I pieced the circumstances together on returning home. The one thing of which I was really aware was that in this curious conveyance I was seated at her side, and able, as she sat half turned toward me, to look her in the eyes.

Now that we were there, she lost some of her self-possession. After the months in which I had been afraid of her she seemed suddenly to have become afraid of me. Crouching back into her corner of the chair, she grew small and apologetic.

“Mother made me come. She said some one ought to tell you.”

It was like a little cry—the cry of a child confessing before it is accused. I could follow her mental action. She wanted me to understand that nothing but _force majeure_ would have induced her to waylay a man as he was coming home from work and take him in a kind of ambush.

Having once already talked with her at cross-purposes, I was careful to let her state her message before betraying my conviction of what it was to be.

“It’s very kind of Mrs. Barry,” I began, vaguely.

“You see, she likes you,” she broke in, impulsively. “If you had any one belonging to you in this country I dare say she—But she’s awfully maternal, mother is; and when Annette told her—”

“What did Annette tell her?”

“That’s it. Oh, Mr. Melbury, I’m so sorry that I should be the one to bring the news.”

“If it’s bad news,” I said, encouragingly, “I’d rather have you to share it with me than any one else in the world.”

She asked, abruptly, “Have you heard anything from home—lately?”

I had once more the sensation of the blood rushing back to my heart and staying there. All I could do was to shake my head.

“That’s what Annette thought. We told her she ought to write to you.”

In my excitement I clutched her by the hand, but I think she was hardly aware of the act any more than I.

“But what is it?”

“It’s—it’s about your father.”

“He’s not—he’s not—dead?”

She fell back again into her corner of the chair, withdrawing her hand. I, too, fell back into my corner, staring out through the wind-shield. Knowing that by not saying no she was really saying yes, I was obliged not only to get possession of the fact, but to control my sense of it.

I may say at once that it was the first sudden shock of my life. Every other trial had come to me by degrees—I had more or less seen it on the way and had been ready to meet it. This was something I had hardly ever thought of. That it might happen some time had been vaguely in the back of my mind, of course; but I had never considered it as an event of the day and hour. Now that it had occurred, my mental heavens seemed to fall.

I have told you so little of my family life that you hardly realize the degree to which my father was its center and support. My memory cannot go back to the time when he was not an important man, not only in the estimation of his children, but in that of the entire country. One of the youngest of that group of men who in the ’sixties and ’seventies took the scattered colonies of Great Britain lying north of the border of the United States and welded them into a gigantic, prosperous whole, he had outlived all but the sturdiest of his contemporaries. With Macdonald, Mount Stephen, Strathcona and a few others he had had the vision of a new white man’s empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Arctic, and through good times and evil he had never let it go. That there were evil times as well as good ones is a matter of history; but however dark the moment, my father was one of those who never lost for a fraction of an instant his belief in ultimate success. In helping to build up the vast financial system of the Canadian Pacific Railway there was no door, in Europe or America, where money could be borrowed at which he did not knock. There were days when the prospect was so hopeless and the treasury so empty that he was obliged to pledge everything he possessed, and after that to use nothing but his honor and his name. The winning out is one of the fairy-tales of the modern world. He had begun to reap his reward just as my memory of him opens. Of his days of struggle I knew only by hearsay. By the time I was five he was already a man of considerable wealth, honored throughout the Dominion, honored in Great Britain, and one of the eight or ten Canadian baronets created by the Queen.

I see him as tall, spare, and vigorous, with thin, clear-cut, clean-shaven features, a piercing eye, and a mouth that sagged at the corners not from dejection, but from determination. Spartan in his own life, he required his children to be Spartan in theirs. Though with our added means our manner of living increased in dignity, it gained little in the way of luxury; and many were the shifts to which my brothers and I were pushed to indulge the follies of young men.

My brothers did this no more than experimentally, covering their tracks and returning to right ways before their digressions could be noticed. I was invariably caught, coming in for some dramatic moments with my father, which increased in tension with the years. I have often wondered what his own youth could have been that he had so little mercy on what was at first not much worse than high spirits and boisterousness. Though I am far from blaming any one but myself for my ultimately going wrong, I have sometimes thought that a gentler handling might have led me aright when sheer repression only made me obstinate. That gentler handling my mother would have given me had not my father felt that it was weak. This knowledge only added to my perversity, the result being a state of continuous rebellion on my part and permanent displeasure on his.

“You’re getting in worse and worse with the old man,” my brother Jack warned me a few months before I left Montreal for good. “I heard him telling mother that if you didn’t turn over a new leaf he’d cut you out of his will.”

The information that he had so cut me out was the last form of appeal he ever made to me. I didn’t believe he meant it otherwise than as a bluff—a stroke of the pen could have reinstated me; but merely as a bluff it angered me. It implied that I might be induced to do for money what I hadn’t done for love or duty, and I was foolish enough to consider it part of my manhood to prove that any one who so judged me was mistaken. In that phase of my misguided life there was a kind of crazy, Cordelia-like attempt to show my father that it was not because of his money that I cared for him—or didn’t care for him; but all I succeeded in doing was to rouse the resentment of a man who had hardly ever been defied.

But I had repented of that kind of bravado long before I had repented of anything else. My letter to him in October had been quite sincere. To be cut out of his will had never meant anything to me but the loss of his affection. I was sorry for that loss, sorrier than any words I have could tell you. But when he wrote to me, in answer to my October letter, I knew from his tone that I had definitely killed whatever had once existed between him and me, and that all that was left for me was to bury it. I had been trying to bury it for the past eight weeks, and I do not deny that the effort was a bitter one.

You must understand that I had now come in for a set of emotions that had not belonged to me before I went to the Down and Out. I can explain it only on the ground that months of abstinence from anything that could inflame the senses or disturb the poise of the mind had induced a sanity of judgment to which I had been a stranger. In this new light I was really a prodigal son—not from any hope of a ring on my hand or the fatted calf, but genuinely from affection for the parents I had wronged.

To have this impulse to arise and go to my father thrown back on itself was the hardest thing in my experience. Somehow I had kept the conviction that if ever I repented that door would be open to my return. It had not really occurred to me that they wouldn’t say at home, “It is meet that we should make merry and be glad.” That my brothers might refuse to join in the chorus was a possibility. That my sister might not be over-enthusiastic in doing so I should be able to understand. But that my father and mother.... Throughout my stay in Atlantic City I had been saying to myself, “Well, if I’ve thrust a sword into your hearts, old dears, you’ve jolly well thrust one into mine; and so we’re quits.”

“When did it happen?” was the first question I was sufficiently master of myself to ask.

“Annette heard yesterday. I think it was the day before.”

“Do you know if—if he’d been ill?”

“He hasn’t been well for a long time, Annette says—not for two or three years; but the end was—well, it was heart failure. He was in his motor—going home. When the car drove up to the door they found him—”

It was the picture thus presented that made me put my hand to my forehead and bow my head. I was thinking of him seated in his corner of the car, stately, unbending, unpardoning, dead. I was thinking of the plight of my poor little mother when the man she had for so many years worshiped and obeyed was no longer there to give her his commands. I was thinking of the commotion in the family, of the stir of interest throughout the community. A prince and a great man would have fallen in Israel, and all our Canadian centers would be aquiver with the news. Jerry and Jack would cable to my sister in England, as well as to our uncles and aunts in that country and in the United States. There were cousins and friends who wouldn’t be forgotten. I alone was left out.

That was, however, more than I could believe. It was more, too, than I was willing to allow Regina Barry to suppose.

“There must be a telegram for me at my rooms in New York,” I managed to stammer, though I fear my tone lacked conviction.

To this she said nothing. She had, in fact, as Cantyre informed me later, already ascertained that up to the hour of her departure from New York there was none.

I talked to Cantyre on the telephone immediately on returning to my hotel. He said that, though in my rooms there were some odds and ends of mail matter which he hadn’t yet forwarded, there was no telegram or Canadian letter. Having called up Annette, I got a repetition of the meager information Miss Barry had given me, though I learned in addition that the funeral was to take place on the following day, which would be Christmas Eve. Her father had already gone to Montreal to take part in the ceremony. The embarrassment of her tone in saying she was surprised that I had received no announcement told me that she was not surprised. It was the last touch to the certainty that I had been omitted with intention.

After that, for a time, my grief gave place to rage. The punishment was so much greater than the crime that my heart cried out against its injustice. Had I stayed down in the depths where I was I should have accepted it phlegmatically; but having made the effort to rise, and made it with some success....

I acquitted my mother and my sister of any share in the injury done to me. My mother was the tenderest little creature God ever made, but she had always been under the domination of my father, and had now come under that of her sons. Never having asserted herself, she would hardly begin to do it at this date, though she might weep her heart out in secret. I knew my sister would put in a good word for me, but as the youngest of the family and a girl she would easily be overruled.

Jack might be mercifully inclined, but he would do as Jerry insisted. Jerry—who as Sir Gerald Melbury would now cut a great swath as head of the family—Jerry would be my father over again. He would be my father over again, only on a smaller scale. My father was tyrannical by instinct; Jerry would be so by imitation. My father believed his word to be law because he didn’t know how to do anything else; Jerry would believe his word to be law in order to be like my father. My father wouldn’t forgive me because I had outraged his affections; Jerry wouldn’t forgive me because my father hadn’t done it first. As far as he could bring it about, my future would be locked and sealed with my father’s death, not because he, Jerry, would be so shocked at my way of life, but because the laws of the Medes and Persians alter not.

Nothing remained for me, then, but to grin and bear it, and bide my time. That I had friends of my own was to me a source of that kind of consolation which is largely pride. Cantyre and the Coningsbys, Regina Barry and her mother—came closer to me now than any one with whom I had ties of blood. “Our relatives,” George Sand writes somewhere, “are the friends given us by Nature; our friends are the relatives given us by God.”

As relatives given me by God I regarded Lovey and Christian and Colonel Straight and Pyn and Beady Lamont and all that band of humble, helpful pals to whom I was knit in the bonds of the “robust love” which was the atmosphere of brave old Walt Whitman’s City of Friends. There was no pose among them, nor condemnation, nor severity. Forgiveness was exercised there till seventy times seven. They forbore one another in love, and endeavored to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace to a degree of which Some One would have said that He had not found the like, no, not in Israel.

My family were all of Israel, and of the strictest sect. They fasted twice in the week, so to speak; in theory, if not in practice, they gave tithes of all that they possessed; they could sincerely thank God that they were not as such men as composed the Down and Out; and yet it was precisely among those who smote their breasts and didn’t dare so much as to lift up their eyes unto heaven that I found the sympathy that raised me to my feet and bade me be a man. No wonder, then, that that evening I kept poor old Lovey near me, that I took him down to the café, where there were only men, and made him dine with me, and told him of my bereavement.

“Is he, now?” he said, drawing a melancholy face. “No one can’t live forever, can they? He’d have been an old, aged man, I expect.”

I told him my father’s age.

“Ah, well, at that time of life they gits carried off. Too bad you didn’t know in time for the funeral. Ye’d ’ave liked to see him laid away safe underground, wouldn’t ye, Slim? I ’ope he was in some good benefit club, like, that’ll take care of the expenses of burial. Awful dear, coffins is; but I suppose your family has a plot in some churchyard.”

When I had assured him that this was the case he continued: “And as for goin’ off sudden—well, it’s awful ’ard on relations when a old, ancient man’ll lay round sick and don’t know when ’is time’s come. I’ve knowed ’em when you’d swear they hung on a-purpose, just to spite them as ’ad to take care of ’em. I ’ad a grandfather o’ me own—well, you’d think that old man just couldn’t die. Ninety, I believe he was, and a wicked old thing when he got silly, like. Take the pepper, he would, and pour it into the molasses-jug, and everything like that. Terr’ble fun he was for us young ones, especially one day when he dressed all up in ’is Sunday clothes and went out in the street without ’is pants. I don’t suppose yer guv’nor ever did the like o’ that, Slim. Don’t seem as if old people on this side ’ad them playful ways.”

In this sort of reminiscence the evening went by, and in the morning I received a note that did much to comfort me. It was no more than the conventional letter of condolence from Mrs. Barry, but it was tactfully couched.

“A loss like yours,” she wrote, “painful as it is at all times, becomes tragically so when the support one finds in family ties is too far away to sustain one. I have often found in my own experience that loneliness added a more poignant element to grief. I wish you would remember, dear Mr. Melbury, that you have friends at this Christmas-time quite near you. Run in and see us whenever you feel the need of a friendly word. We are leading a life here absolutely without engagements, and you will cheer us up more than we can cheer you. If on Christmas Eve you would care to look in between four and five you would find us here, and we could give you a cup of tea.”

Needless to say all through the day of Christmas Eve my thoughts were with the gathering in our house on the slopes of Mount Royal. I saw in fancy every detail of the lugubrious pomp through which Christians contradict their Saviour in his affirmation that there is no death. Solemnity, blackness, muffled drums, and long lines of men throwing awe into their faces—would smite the heart with a sense of the final, the irreparable, the gone and lost. Flowers would lend a timid touch of brightness, but they would bloom in little more than irony. The roll of many wheels, the tramp of many feet, and a funeral service in which the triumphant note itself would be turned into a dirge, these would be the massive accompaniment to the few sobs welling up from hearts in which they would be irrepressible. Though shut out in person, in spirit I was there, standing in the shrouded room, witnessing my mother’s farewell kiss, watching the lid placed on the coffin, marching with my brothers, kneeling in the church, hearing the clods fall in the grave. At the very moment when Mrs. Barry handed me a cup of tea I was saying to myself, “Now it is all over, and they are coming back to the darkened, empty house.”

I was not cheerful as a companion, and apparently no one expected me to be so. We can scarcely be said to have talked; we merely kept each other company. It was Miss Barry herself who suggested, when we had finished tea, that she and I should take a walk.

The weather had grown clear, bright, and windless. All along the promenade there was Christmas in the shops and in the air. It was not like any Christmas I had ever known before, with the blare, the lights, the gay, homeless people, and the thundering of breakers under starlight; but some essential of the ancient festival was present there, and it reached me. It reached me with a yearning to have something belonging to me that I could claim as my own—something to which I should belong and that wouldn’t cast me off—something that would love me, something that I should love, with a love different from that with which even the City of Friends could supply me.

But out on the crowded, starry sea-front we neither walked nor talked. We sauntered and kept silent. On my side, I had the feeling that there was so much to say that I could say nothing; on hers, I divined that there was the same. I will not affirm that in view of all the circumstances I could be anything but uneasy; and yet I was ecstatic. This wonderful creature was beside me, comforting me, liking to be with me! But if she knew exactly who I was....

I was swept by an intense longing that she should be told. It was a longing I was never free from, though it didn’t often seize me so imperiously as to-night. It seized me the more imperiously owing to the fact that I could see her moving farther and farther away from any recollection and realization coming through herself. I had hoped that both would occur to her without my being obliged to say in so many words, “I am the man who tried a few months ago to steal your jewelry.”

But if ever the shadow of this suggestion crossed her mind, it didn’t cross it now. From the beginning the face and figure of that man had been blurred behind the memory of my brother Jack. Recent events had fixed me, just as she saw me, definitely in conditions in which sneak-thieving is unimaginable. I was the son of Sir Edward Melbury, Baronet, of Montreal and Ottawa, a man who would rank among the notables of the continent. Though a son in disfavor, I was still a son, and moreover I was exercising an honorable craft with some credit. I might propose to her, I might marry her, I might live my whole life with her, and the chances were that she would never connect me with the man she had seen for a few hurried minutes on pulling the rose-colored hangings aside.

For this very reason it seemed to me I must tell her before our friendship went any further. It was an additional reason that I began to think that the information would be a shock to her. How I got that impression I can scarcely tell you; the ways in which it was conveyed to me were so trifling, so infinitesimal.

For example, I asked her one day what she meant by her oft-repeated statement that I was different from other men.

“Our men,” she explained, promptly, “have no life apart from their businesses and professions. Business and profession are stamped all over them. They are in their clothes, their faces, the tones of their voices. You’d know Ralph Coningsby was an architect, and Stephen Cantyre a doctor, and Rufus Legrand a clergyman, the minute you heard them speak. Now you wouldn’t know what you were. You might be anything—anything a gentleman can be, that is. I’ve heard some one say that Oxford is a town in a university, and Cambridge a university in a town. In just the same way my father, for instance, is a man in an architect. You’re an architect in a man. With you the man is the bigger. With us he’s the smaller. It isn’t merely business before pleasure; it’s business before human nature; and somehow I’ve a preference for seeing human nature put first.”

There was little in this to say what I have just hinted at. There was barely sufficient to let me see that she was putting me above most of her men acquaintances, in a place in which I had no right to be. Though it was as far as she ever went, it was far enough to create my suspicion and to make me feel that the earliest confession would not come too soon.

When we got down to the less frequented end of the Board Walk the moment seemed to have arrived. The crowd had thinned out to occasional groups of stragglers or lovers going two and two. Only here and there one came on a shop; only here and there on a hotel. One got an opportunity to see the stars, and to hear the ocean as something more than a drumbeat to the blare.

By a simultaneous movement we paused by the rail, to look down on the dim, white, moving line of breakers. It was one of those instants when between two people drawn closely to each other something leaps. Had there been nothing imperative to keep us apart I should have seized her in my arms; she would have nestled there. I had distinctly the knowledge that she would have responded to anything—and that the initiative was mine.

As a rocket that bursts into cascades of fire suddenly goes out, so suddenly the moment passed, leaving us with a sense of coldness, primarily due to me.

Somewhat desperately I began: “Do you know what has made the difficulties between me and my family?”

She was gazing off toward the dark horizon.

“Vaguely.”

“Do you know that for years I gave them a great deal of trouble?”

“Vaguely.”

“Do you know that—”

“Do you know,” she interrupted, quietly, “that I used to have a brother?”

The question so took me by surprise that I answered, blankly, “No.”

“Yes, I had. He was nearly ten years older than I, which would make him about your age. He was—he was wild.”

“And is he—is he dead?”

“He shot himself—about five years ago. It was a terrible story, and I don’t want to tell it to you. I only want to say that my mother feels that if—if father hadn’t been so hard on him—if he’d played him along gently—he might easily have been saved. It’s what Mr. Christian—he’s had great experience in that sort of thing—he does a wonderful work among men that have gone under—but it’s what he used to tell father; only father hadn’t nearly so much patience with his own son as he would have had with some one else’s, and so— I wonder if you can understand that when mother heard that you had been—had been—well, a little like my brother—”

“Who told her?”

“Oh, I don’t know. These things get about. It might have been Annette.”

“And assuming that I was what you call wild, have you any idea how wild I was?”

Her response to this was to say: “I like a man to have spirit. The men who always keep on the safe side—” She left this sentiment there, to add, less irrelevantly than it sounded: “Mother wants you to come and dine with us to-morrow evening. It will be Christmas Day, but we sha’n’t keep it as Christmas. We don’t have any Christmases since—since Tony died. We simply—we simply sha’n’t be alone.”

In the turn our talk had taken there was so much human need that I found my efforts at confession paralyzed. That a family whom I had regarded as enviably care-free should be living in the shadow of a great tragedy, and nursing a sorrow in which there was this element of remorse, was curiously illuminating as a discovery. It seemed to cast into other people’s lives the sort of sharp revealing ray that a flash of lightning throws on a dark road. Here was a girl whom I had thought of hitherto as immune from the more sordid varieties of trial; and yet she had at least tasted of their cup. It gave me a new conception of her. I began to see her not as a flat surface or as static like a portrait, but as a living, palpitating human being with duties round her and a vista of experiences as background.

The immediate inference was that I must assist them over Christmas, as they would assist me; and to do that I must put off telling Regina Barry where she had seen me first.

To be quite free, however, I had to get a kind of permission from Lovey. My relations with him had grown to be peculiar. He seemed to develop two personalities, from the one to the other of which he glided more or less unconsciously. Though even in our privacy he refused any longer to speak of us as buddies and fellas together, he called me Slim and sonny, and referred without hesitation to our fraternal past. On my part I found it almost consoling, in view of the bluff I was putting up, to have some one near me who knew me at my worst. Where I had to pretend before others there was no pretense at all with him; and so I got the relief that comes at any time when one can drop one’s mask.

Here in Atlantic City I was paying all his expenses, but no wages. In New York I offered him nothing but his room. How he lived I didn’t always know, beyond the fact that it was honestly. As to this he was so frank that I could have little doubt about it.

“There’s many a good thing I lets go by, Slim, all on account o’ you. Washin’ windows ain’t nothink but old woman’s work when a man’s been a ’atter. If it wasn’t to save you, sonny—”

“Yes, I know, Lovey. One of these days I may get a chance to make it up to you.”

“Oh, well, as for makin’ it up, so long as you goes on with the fancy you took to me that night at Stinson’s, like—”

“Oh, I do. You see that, don’t you?”

“Yes; I see it right enough, Slim. It kind o’ passes the buck on me, as you might say. But there! Lord love ye, I don’t complain! Ye’re a fine young fella, and what I does for you—self-denial ye might call it—I don’t grudge. When I sees ye goin’ round like a swell with other swells I just says to myself, ‘Lovey, that’s your work, old top’; and I feels kind o’ satisfied.”

It was kind o’ satisfied that he showed himself when I told him I had been asked to eat my Christmas dinner with Mrs. and Miss Barry.

“Ain’t that grand!” he commented, exultingly. “Ye’ll put on them swell togs—”

“But it will leave you alone, Lovey,” I reminded him.

“Lord love ye, Slim, I don’t mind that! What’s Christmas to me? I don’t pay no attention to all that foolishness—except the plum puddin’.”

I felt it right to throw out a warning.

“In your dining-room, Lovey, with all the chauffeurs, there’ll be things to drink, very likely.”

He put on his melancholy face.

“It won’t make no difference to me, Slim. The Down and Out has got me bound by so many promises, like, that I can’t take a sip o’ nothink, not no more than a dead man that’s got a bottle in ’is coffin. I’m one that can take it or leave it, as I feel inclined.”

“If you’re going to try taking it or leaving it to-morrow I sha’n’t accept Mrs. Barry’s invitation to dinner.”

The effect was what I had expected.

“You go to the dinner, Slim, my boy, and I’ll let you see me ’ittin’ the ’ay before you starts.”

“But you could hit the hay and get out of bed again.”

“No; because I’ll make you lock the door. I ain’t a-goin’ to ’ave ye ’ave no hanxiety on my account.”

So we settled it—not that I was to lock him in, but that he was to guarantee me against being anxious; and I suppose Christian would say that another bit of victory was scored.

_CHAPTER XV_

A few days later I learned that my father had established a small trust fund for my benefit, and that the income was to be paid to me quarterly. He had thus, after all, recognized me as his son, though not on the footing of his other sons. Each of his other sons would have— But I won’t go into that. It is enough to say that for every dollar I should receive Jerry and Jack would have twenty or thirty, and so would my sisters. Even in my mother’s life interest I was not to have a share when she no longer needed it.

Among the many sins I have to confess, that of being specially mercenary is not one. I make this affirmation in order that you may not condemn me too severely when I say that for days I labored under a sense of outrage. Mine was the state of mind common among evil-doers who object to paying the penalty of which they have had fair warning. My father had told me with his own mouth that on account of certain indulgences which I had refused to give up he had cut me off altogether. I had chosen to take my own way and to brave the consequences; and now when the latter proved to be not so bad as I had been bidden to expect I was indignant.

When I informed Andrew Christian of the bequest I added that I had practically made up my mind to refuse it. He gave me that look which always seemed about to tell you a good joke.

“Why do you think he left you anything?”

“I suppose he wanted to feel that if the worse came to the worst I shouldn’t be quite penniless.”

“But why should he want to feel that?”

“Well, hang it all, sir, when everything is said and done I was his son!”

“You were his son, and he—he cared for you.”

“He cared for me to—to that extent.”

“And considering your attitude toward him, could you expect him to care for you more?”

I said, unwillingly, “No, I suppose not.”

“Could you expect him to care for you as much?”

“I—I’d given up thinking he cared for me at all.”

“And this shows he did. In spite of all you made him suffer—and, what was probably worse in his eyes, made your mother suffer—he loved you still. I know you’re not thinking of the money, Frank.”

“No, I’m not; and that’s perfectly sincere.”

“You’re thinking of his affection for you; and now you’re assured of it. The amount of money he left you is secondary. That, and the way in which he left it to you, were determined by something else.”

I looked at him hard as I said, “And what was that?”

His look as he answered me was frank, straight, and fearless.

“The fact that he didn’t trust you.” I suppose he must have seen how I winced, for he went on at once: “That’s about the bitterest pill fellows like us have to swallow. In addition to everything else that we bring on ourselves we forfeit other people’s confidence. There’s the nigger in the woodpile, even when we buck up. Your father was fond of you, Frank; but he was afraid that if he did for you all he would have done if you’d gone straight it would only send you to the devil. Don’t you see that?”

With some relief as well as some reluctance I admitted that I did.

“It takes years, Frank, old boy, for men who’ve been where you and I have been to build up a life which gives a reasonable promise of making good. In seven or eight months you’ve done splendidly. I don’t know that we’ve ever had a fellow in the club whose been more game—”

“It’s the club that’s been game.”

“True; but you’ve got out of it the best that it can give. I’ll say that for you. Only don’t imagine for a moment that your fight is over.”

“Oh no, sir; I don’t.”

“It’s perfectly true that if you resist the devil he will flee from you; but he can show a marvelous power of coming back. Some of your toughest tussles lie ahead. Now I’m only reminding you of that to show you that your father has perhaps done the very wisest thing for you. A large part of your safety lies in the necessity for your working. If you weren’t absolutely obliged to do it in order to live like a respectable man there’s no telling what tide of suppressed temptations might rush in and engulf you.”

I nodded slowly.

“I see that. Thank you for pointing it out to me.”

“But, Frank, old fellow, that’s not the chief thing I want you to see. What will give you more satisfaction than anything else is the knowledge that what has been done for you has been done in love. Your father has shown his love for you; you show your love for him. Accept this gift graciously. Enjoy it and make the best of it. Your life with him isn’t over.”

My expression must have been one of inquiry, because he went on:

“One of the sublimest and truest things that ever fell from a pen is this, ‘Love is of God; and every one that love is born of God, and knoweth God.’ It’s almost a startling thing to realize that by the sheer act of love we’re sons of God and know Him.”

“Ah, but what kind of love?” I asked, with some incredulity.

“Are there more kinds than one? The kingdom of love is like that of minerals or that of vegetation—one in essence, though multiform in manifestation. Just as one will give us coal and diamonds with much the same ingredients, and another the strawberry, the rose, and the apple-tree, all closely akin, so love shows itself in a million ways, and yet remains always love.”

“And would you say that the love of parents and children, the love of husbands and wives, the love of sweethearts, and the love of God—”

“—are all fundamentally related? Yes, I would. I can’t understand love in any other sense, if it’s to be real love. Do you remember how often we’ve talked of the spirit there is in the world that throws dust into our eyes by creating distinctions and confusions where neither confusion nor distinction exists? Well, the same evil imp is forever at work to stultify love by trying to take the meaning from the word. And when it has stultified love it has stultified God, since the one is identical with the other.”

I became argumentative.

“But if all love is identical with God, how do you account for what would commonly be called a wrong love?”

“There’s no such thing as a wrong love. Men are wrong and women are wrong, and they treat love wrongly; but love itself is always right. There a distinction must be made between love and passion; but it’s easy enough to make it. One of these days we’ll take the time to talk that over. At present my point is simply this—that there’s only one love as there’s only one God, and it’s only by understanding the unity of both that we get the significance of either. Moreover, the same pen that wrote, ‘Every one that loveth is born of God,’ wrote, ‘He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.’ You see then how magical a thing love is, and why any kind of love—remember I’m speaking of love, not of physical passion, which is another thing—but you can see how any kind of love should work wonders.” He asked, suddenly, “Have you written to your mother since your father died?”

I said I had not, that I hadn’t supposed a letter from me would be welcome.

“Don’t ask whether it would be welcome or not. Do your duty—and let other people take care of theirs. Let your mother see that, so far from feeling sore over the provision in your father’s will, you take it in the way I’ve tried to indicate. It will be an amazing comfort to her; and if you want to give your brothers and sisters the surprise of their young lives you’ll be doing it.” He took my hand and pressed it. “Good-by now, old chap. I’ve got to go and see Momma about the meals for to-morrow.”

He passed on to the kitchen, where a Greek named Pappa—nicknamed Momma by the boys—had taken the place of Mouse; but he left me with a new outlook.

Following his instructions, I began almost immediately to get some of the reward he promised me. My mother wrote to me within a week, timidly but tenderly, and with joy at being in touch with me again. A few weeks later my sister wrote, affectionately, if with reserve. When my birthday came in March, and I was thirty-two, I had small presents from them both, and from my two sisters-in-law as well. I noticed that all letters, even from my mother, were hesitatingly expressed, and in something like an undertone of awe. My family, too, felt apparently that I had put an abyss between myself and them, and that in the effort to recross it there was a suggestion of the supernatural. It was as if my father were saying to them, “This, thy brother, was dead, and is alive again”—and they were experiencing some of the strangeness that Mary and Martha must have known when Lazarus came back to the house at Bethany.