Chapter VI: Part 6

"This must be Randolph," he finally turned to the eldest boy, "grown--grown up--isn't it?" and his arms stirred forward.

"Yes, sir," the boy answered hoarsely and put out his hand.

"And this--can this be baby Laura?" Laura hung her head then raised it bravely and with shy resolution held out her hand. Pendleton took it and kissed her clumsily on the cheek.

Jimmie, hanging back, clung to Alicia's skirt and watched the proceedings with troubled stealth from behind her.

"And this is Jimmie," I said, taking the child by the shoulder--"the youngest of them."

As Pendleton was stooping toward him, Jimmie uttered a wild scream of heartbreaking terror, wrenched himself from my hold and fled like some little wounded animal toward the house. Pendleton gave a short, mirthless laugh.

My throat was parched, my heart Was thumping like a rabbit's, but how I loved Jimmie at that moment!

"He is only a baby," put in Alicia softly.

Again Pendleton looked at her--obliquely.

"And this is--" he murmured.

"Alicia Palmer," I supplied hastily, "who has been looking after them."

"Ah, Alicia--a little deputy mother--" and he held out his hand with shamefaced suavity.

The scene was over--the incredible episode--commonplace enough as I write it down. But I lived a dozen melodramas in that eternity that a clock would tick off in three or four minutes of time.

*CHAPTER XV*

Walking about as I do under sentence, I am like a man of my acquaintance, a stodgy, a terrible Philistine, who cherished for years a fancy that he could write Gilbert and Sullivan operas. In all his life he had probably never rhymed anything more subtle than love, above and dove. Since any fool, in his opinion, could supply the music, he aspired only to the Gilbertian librettos. Incessantly and hopelessly out of key he went about humming the Sullivan tunes to the lyrics he alleged to have in his mind.

Similarly, I go about with a sense of mendacious buoyancy,--like a shipwrecked passenger bobbing helplessly in a troubled sea, but still alive; a flickering glimmer of hope, like a desperate man facing a tiger, but still undevoured.

Brazenly I still expect happiness to emerge, somehow, out of hopelessness.

It is easy, of course, to lapse into moods of despondency, into wishing I were dead, since I cannot live in happiness,

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.

But such moments pass. There is a sort of tonic in the rough of life when the smooth is absent, and the wits, my poor dull wits, brace themselves for the shock of action. I feel certain now that in all my years of tranquillity it is the salt of suffering that was lacking. Yet who would seek suffering for its own sake? I know, however, that I feel younger and more energetic to-day than ever I felt five years ago.

Even Pendleton has his uses. He is the thorn in the side, the fox gnawing at my vitals under the cloak, but here he is in my house as its guest.

He goes with me to the city of a morning on his quest for work, "a connection" as he calls it, and often I find him at home before me when I arrive, in my room, smoking, or out in the garden with the children. I wince inwardly, but I hope I do not show it.

I spoke of hating him, but that is untrue. You cannot persistently hate any man, notably a guest in your house. You can only suspect him. Yet, when I see the children still shy of him, why does it give me a throbbing sense of triumph? I do not know, but so it is. Randolph alone seems to approach him nearer as the days go by. They go on walks together and Randolph confides to Alicia that he is fascinated by the tales of his father's experiences in the tropics, of ships and islands and pearl-fishing and native customs. I fancy Pendleton must be selectively on the alert in his narratives with his young son as the listener. His past must contain many things that none of us in this quiet haven will ever hear recounted.

But I am indifferent to his past. I could listen and even tolerate him as my guest, if only the children were not passing to his care. He talks of "relieving" me of the burden.

"Don't hurry, old man," I answer casually, "they are no burden to me."

He gazes at me and lowers his eyes.

"I tell you, Randolph, you're a revelation to me. I never knew a man like you before. They don't make them like that these days."

"Praise from Sir Hubert," occurs to me, but I don't say it. I am in reality at his mercy, I suppose, but I often feel as though he were at mine. The glossing over of his atrocious conduct, the taking him at his word on the subject of his lapsed memory, which we either slur or don't refer to at all, seem to give me a tremendous advantage over him,--the commonplace advantage of simple honesty over mendacity. Not for a moment do I now believe in his lapsed memory story. I cannot deny, however, that his air is one of repentance and, as Dibdin has said, who in this world is so hard but he wouldn't give a fellow man a second chance?

Jim Pendleton, now that he has been to a New York tailor's, appears as impressive and debonair as ever. He must be in the middle forties and he is not ill-looking. It is chiefly his eyes that seem changed to me. Do what I will, I cannot look at them. There is a certain disturbing obliqueness about his gaze that makes me turn mine away in a sort of vicarious shame.

But, again, _C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire_. And conscious of that truth, I mean to speak or think no more ill of Jim Pendleton. After all, his large contact with the world has given him something that I lack.

Last evening at dinner he was regaling us with an experience of his of spearing fish in the Marquesas.

"I was in the back of the boat," he was saying, "with a torch in my hand, and my islander, who was an expert at it, held his spear ready for the first fish that leaped. Several of them leaped and fell again into the water round us churning it up, so that we were wet with spray. Suddenly I saw a huge mass glistening in the torchlight, falling, it seemed, right on top of us.

"The native buried his spear upward in the thing as it fell. I tell you that man was quick! But it was too late. The huge fish flopped into the boat with its great head on my knees and the full weight of his body on the man, sending him overboard and splintering the side of the boat. In just about a second we were in total darkness, floundering in the water, with an overturned boat. I was badly bruised and the native had both legs broken.

"In spite of his broken legs, however, he offered to swim ashore, to the nearest projecting rock. But I was sure he couldn't make it and very certain I couldn't. It was a job, I can tell you, righting that boat, helping that man into it and scrambling in myself; and then with a piece of splintered oar rowing ourselves in. The fellow with his broken legs, worked just as hard as I did and never uttered so much as a groan. It did me up for some time. But that fellow was spearing fish again in ten days or so."

Jimmie, who is sometimes allowed to take his supper with us, sat gazing at his father, fascinated by the narrative until the last word. Then seemingly jealous that any one, even this strange father, should exceed me in prowess, his little face clouded and he demanded:

"Uncle Ranny, didn't you ever spear a big fish?"

"No, Jimmie," I laughed, "but maybe you and I will go there one day and spear some together."

"Well, anyway," he retorted stoutly, "you took us on a picnic."

Whereat we all laughed, albeit my own laugh was rueful. The thought flashed through my mind that Pendleton was certain to win them to himself the moment he decided to do so. The very memory of me would become ridiculous to them.

"Uncle Ranny," spoke up Laura, "has been too busy feeding us and buying us clothes to go traveling."

Alicia smiled radiantly at Laura across the table, and Griselda, who had just come in with the dessert, nodded her head with somber emphasis as she placed the bowl before me.

I could have hugged them all three in gratitude, but nevertheless I pressed Pendleton to narrate more of his experiences.

"No," he shook his head, evidently taking the children's comment to heart. "That's yarn enough for one evening."

That seemed to me very decent of Pendleton.

I could not help laughing at Dibdin to-day. I called him up on the telephone and demanded what he meant by coming from devil knows where after more than two years' absence and virtually cutting me.

"Come to lunch at the Salmagundi Club," he growled.

"Does it pain you as much as that to ask me?"

"Don't be a damn fool," he retorted.

"Don't be so wickedly witty," I replied.

"At twelve-thirty," he muttered and hung up the receiver. From which I gathered that he was out of sorts.

In the hall of the Club where he was waiting, I greeted him with,

"'Is it weakness of intellect, birdie,' I cried,
'Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?'"

He stared at me.

"How you can be so light and idiotic in the face of circumstances," he began, "passes my comprehension."

"Circumstances, my dear fellow, are all there is to life."

"Want to wash your paws?"

"No--I am as clean as I shall ever be."

I put my arm through his and allowed him to lead me to a quiet table in the rear of the billiard room, softly illumined by a shaded lamp at midday.

"What a delightful place!" I exclaimed. "Residence of Q.T. tranquillity."

"Tranquillity be blowed," he grunted, as he sat down facing me. "What are you going to do about that Old Man of the Sea of yours?"

"You mean Pendleton?"

"Whom the devil else can I mean?"

"Why, nothing of course, but give him a leg up if we can. What else is there to do? I just received a letter this morning from an insurance company asking for confidential information about him. He's given me as a reference and they're evidently considering him."

"The Danbury and Phoenix?" he asked.

"Yes. How did you know?"

"I got one, too."

"I suppose we are really his only two possible sponsors at present."

"I'd as soon recommend a convict from Sing Sing," he muttered.

"Oh, no!" I protested. "Not as bad as that. Besides, sometimes you have to recommend even a convict."

"I'd much rather recommend a convict. I hate to lie about this man. I've been asked whether I would trust him and I have to say yes. But you know dashed well I wouldn't. Give me a cigarette," he ended savagely.

"I think he'll go straight now," I murmured dully, passing my case to Dibdin and looking away. "The children will no doubt have an influence on him."

"You judge everybody by yourself."

"How d'ye mean--myself?"

"The long and the short of it is," he declared, putting both elbows on the table, "I had no idea what the children would do to you."

"What did they do to me?" I queried, mystified.

"Made you over--that's all."

"Explain," I said, gazing at him stupidly.

"What is there to explain?" growled Dibdin, when the waiter was out of earshot. "You were always a decent sort of idiot--bookworm, muddler, dilettante, whatever it was--afraid of real life, fit only to collect pretty little books or old musty volumes that nobody really cares to read in--a drifter, with about as much knowledge of the problems of existence as a stuffed owl in a glass.

"What happened? Your sister's orphans come to you. You plunge into life, go into business which you detest, lose your money, go to work as a clerk, by George! You of all people!--Keep a roof over them, bring them up and hang me if I don't think you were idiotically happy in it all until I brought this Old Man of the Sea!--What right had I to pick him up and bring him and bungle it all? And why the hell didn't you warn me not to fetch him? I thought I was helping you out. I'd sooner have chucked the brute overboard--I would, by Heaven!"

For a moment I could reply nothing at all to Dibdin. His estimate and account of my actions were natural enough to him who, despite his burly manner, exaggerates everybody's qualities. It seemed the more remarkable that he who so firmly believed in the second chance should now find no word to say in Pendleton's favor. But I could see clearly enough that what troubled him was the pain he instinctively realized the departure of the children from me to Pendleton was certain to bring me.

"Why didn't you cable me, 'Lose the brute?'" he took up his argument.

"Because, my dear fellow," I put my hand on his arm across the table, "it was too late; once you had found him and told him of what had occurred in his absence, it was too late. Would you like to live with the menacing uncertainty of him overhanging in space? Rather have him here and face him. Besides, the children are his"--I knew I must state my view squarely on that head--"If he is fit to take them, then have them he must, regardless."

"Regardless of you, you mean?" He put it darkly.

"Yes--regardless of me, certainly. I don't count."

"By the Lord!" and his fine head shot upwards in a gesture that was in itself invigorating. "D'you know you are twenty times the man you were?" he cried. "I couldn't have believed it. You--you're stupendous!"

I laughed and waved him away with a "_Retro, Satanas_."

"You're going it blind like that," he ran on, disregarding me,--"Salmon and Byrd," with a laugh--"losing all your money and then--Visconti's--slaving for the kids--meeting it all--by gad, you are living life!--heroic, I call it--I take off my hat to you!"

"Put it on again," I murmured, moved by his vehemence. It was certainly agreeable to hear such words from Dibdin, who never lied. Praise is a savory dish, not a thing that my misspent life has been surfeited with, and it was exquisitely soothing to one's vanity. But it was clear enough that Dibdin was wrong. His usually lucid view was obscured by the tangle of circumstances that weighed upon him. Naturally, I could not leave him in his error.

"If you knew," I managed to stammer, "the malignant fear that is eating my liver white, you--"

"Fear of what?" he broke in.

"Of turning those kids over to him;" I lowered my voice--"just that and--nothing else."

"Just that," he repeated gloomily, nodding his head. "Who would have supposed it? By the Lord! If ever there was a bull in a China shop, I am that bull. Why the devil did I ever pick the brute up? Look here!" he flashed with sudden inspiration, "why not deport him as we imported him, eh? I might manage it--I might!"

"No--no, Dibdin--neither you nor I would do such a thing."

"Why not?" he growled.

"That would make us--worse than he is, or was," I explained sadly. For I must own that for an instant my heart leaped at his suggestion. "Besides," I went on prosily, "it's not so easy to lay a ghost when once you've raised it. We've got to believe him, Dibdin, my boy--if only for the young ones' sake. He will probably get his job, and the thing to do now is not to arouse his suspicion of how we feel about him. Believe everything he says--believe in him. Thousands every year, according to the newspapers, turn up willfully missing! He was tired of the humdrum life and lit out; that is all there was to it. Now he wants to try back. You yourself thought he ought to have another chance."

There was genuine pathos in old Dibdin's voice when he spoke out with a humid somber look:

"By George, that chap's the Nemesis of us all! By his one willful act of destructive irresponsibility he has affected all our lives destructively. It's maddening that one worthless brute should be able to do all that. He killed Laura, damn him; he orphaned these kids; he's upset your life--he makes wretched conspirators of you and me--g-r-r-r! I'd like to pound him to a jelly!"

I laughed joylessly.

"What would that undo?"

"Nothing, I dare say," snapped Dibdin. "Besides, you really have no complaint, boy. You tower, Randolph, my lad; yes, by George! you tower head and shoulders above any one I know! His very villainy has made you over--blown the breath of life into you."

I believe I answered something flippant.

"Look here!" he cried, with a sudden movement upsetting a glass of water and disregarding it. "If those kids go over to him, we can keep an eye on him--just the same--as though we were with them!"

"How d'you mean?" I queried, puzzled.

"That girl--what's her name--Alicia! She'll keep an eye on him--and them. She's sharp, I tell you, with her innocent blue eyes. Give you a daily report like--like--"

"No!" I emphatically interrupted him. "That, never! She is not going from my house--certainly not to him!"

I was the more abashed by my own vehemence when I saw Dibdin staring at me with lifted eyebrows.

"Why--you are not--" he began blankly--but I interrupted him hotly.

"I am nothing!--She is to me just as Jimmie and Laura and Randolph are, but they are unfortunately his. Don't you know the meaning of responsibility for young lives, Dibdin? I want to give her her chance, educate her, make a fine woman of her. They have a father; she has no one but me. I can't turn her out--and I wish," I added lamely, "I had as much right to keep them all."

"Whew!" he whistled in renewed astonishment.

"I can only say I don't know you any more. I used to know you, but I'm proud to make the acquaintance of the new Mr. Randolph Byrd."

"Don't be a damn fool, Dibdin," I mumbled in exasperation. "You know you are talking rot. Why the devil are you so interested in the kids? There is that cheque you sent--!"

"You haven't cashed it," he interposed, moving his shoulders as one shaking off something. "Why the deuce haven't you?"

"I will some day," I grinned at him feebly, "when I need it more. But you haven't answered my question."

I felt I was goading him brutally but for once I seemed to have the dear old tramp upon the hip. For all his gruffness he was as full of emotions as anybody. It seemed to me absurd for a man to hide his implanted instinct, one of the noblest of all the little hidden root-cellars of our instincts, under a false shame or indifference. Women are wiser--they don't hide theirs; and I had become shameless about mine.

"Why," I repeated, "are you so much interested in those kids?"

"Don't be an ass!" he grunted, looking down upon the wet tablecloth, and a spasm as of pain crossed his countenance.

"Ah, you see!" I laughed, attempting to lighten his mood.

"Randolph," he uttered in a strange solemn tone that sent a slight thrill through me. "I told you once there was a woman I had cared about--and only one."

"Yes--but you never married her."

"No," he continued in the etiolated tone of a dead grief. "She was married already when I knew her."

And then my sympathy went out to grizzled old Dibdin.

"I am sorry," I murmured, touching his hand across the table. "Did I know her?"

"Yes," he said quietly, "you knew her. It was Laura."

In a flash of poignantly bitter and vain regret I saw the vista of the dead years--of what might have been! ...

*CHAPTER XVI*

Miracles--miracles are common as blackberries!

Pendleton is once again a faithful worker in the vineyard of the insurance company.

A commonplace miracle enough, but all miracles, I suppose, are commonplaces that happen to surprise us or that we don't understand.

The abstract office, I am sure, has more joy over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine--but I do not wish to be blasphemous. Like Death, it claims us all in the end. A voluptuary, an idler like myself, or a renegade who broke from it indefensibly like Jim Pendleton--all, sooner or later--turn or return to its yoke like starved runaway slaves--the unrelenting office! What a change it must be to Jim after the beaches and the barrooms of the gorgeous East! But for one closely relevant circumstance I could find it in my heart to be sorry for him.

What a strange and wonderful institution is the family! Another of those commonplace miracles so charged with mystery, like birth and death. If I were a classical writer or a Sir Barnes Newcome I might expatiate at length upon the subject. The things we swallow and condone and cover up for the sake of its ties!

Suffice it, however, that Jim Pendleton is quietly working out his salvation, a salary and plans for re-creating his dismembered home.

The children are becoming quite used to him. Randolph seems to be the nearest to him and Jimmie remains stubbornly farthest away. It is painful to think however that Jimmie's youth will the more certainly and completely detach him from me in the end.

When is it all to happen? I for one dare not fix the fateful day which, with every passing hour, draws nearer. No one fixes the day. It is left dangling in the air by an invisible thread of uncertain length and strength--

There are times when I could cry out in my anguish, my agony of nameless pain, fear, apprehension. But what a spectacle I should make of myself if I gave vent to emotion! We humans are not so much whited sepulchers as masked and silent volcanoes.

And Jim Pendleton--what is he thinking, feeling? He is suave, quiet, controlled. He is very gentle with them all, and particularly soft-spoken with Alicia. He has taken to consulting and confabulating with her touching the characteristics and the needs of the children. At times it seems to me that I cannot bear it and once at least I have called her and spoken harshly to her, and charged her with having mislaid a volume of _Book Prices Current_.

How childish on my part! But my nerves are not what once they were. They are tetchy and fractious. It has been decreed that I am to have a vacation and go away for a fortnight--go to Maine or New Hampshire. If I were to burst into laughter at the thought, I might end like an hysterical woman, in uncontrollable tears. I could no more go now than I could spread my arms and fly. I am as remote from the holiday spirit as from the North Star.

Poor Dibdin--how mistaken he is in me! He blathers of my "towering head and shoulders"--b-r-r-r! it makes me shudder with shame. What a weakling I am in the face of life!

No--I am a toiler in Bleecker Street, of its reeking pavements, its fly-infested purlieus, where the Italian children grub and shout and sun themselves in the gutters, in the air of a thousand smells throbbing under the noonday sun. The homecoming to the third-rate suburb used to be refreshing and soothing like a delicate perfume. To see the children laughing and rosy in the square inch of garden, to see Alicia, sparkling with her young energy and enthusiasm,--it had all been like coming into a cool temple filled with shapes of beauty, after wandering in some fetid bazaar. Now it is dust and ashes. I could never convey to Dibdin or to any one else how alone I feel in the world, what chill and cutting blasts of desolation sweep into my life every time I think of its present or its future.

Minot Blackden came in to Visconti's at noon to-day to drag me out to lunch.

"Let's stop in at my studio for a minute," he proposed as he steered me round a corner. "Something for you to see."

He showed me a small rose window designed for some church in Cincinnati and turned expectantly to catch my exclamations. I gasped out some inanities.

"Art, my boy!" he gloated. "That's art for you!"

"It is, indeed!" I assented helplessly. "Only surprising thing is how a real artist can acquire so much fame. Seems to me I see something about you in every Sunday newspaper I take up."

"Ah, that's business instinct," he chuckled. "I am no amateur, I can tell you. I live this thing. You may think it insane, but sometimes I think I am Benvenuto Cellini reincarnated." He was not laughing; he was in deadly earnest. "Come in," he added solemnly, directing me to a door in the rear of his shop. "I want to introduce you to my press agent."

I was duly introduced to a plain bustling Mrs. Smith of perhaps thirty-five, who rose from a typewriter and spoke with a devotional, a reverential fervor of "our work", while casting worshipful glances at the artist. How do the Minot Blackdens inspire such adoration? I know I have rediscovered no lost art and it is plain I am no incarnation of Benvenuto Cellini. No one will ever worship me.

"Have you seen Miss Bayard lately?" Blackden inquired as we sat down to an Italian luncheon, beginning with sardines and red pepper.

"No--I haven't," I answered, surprised. "Do you know her?"

"Do I know her! Don't you remember introducing us in front of Brentano's?"

I had forgotten it, and it seemed to hurt him that I did not regard his movements and events with the devotional attention of his press agent.

"Of course," I murmured lamely. "You've seen her again?" He smiled a detached, superior smile such as the immortals might smile over erring, unregenerate humans, and ran his fingers through his dark, artistic hair.

"I see her quite often," he explained. "Very wonderful woman, Miss Bayard. She is a great inspiration to me in my art. My art has taken strides and leaps since I met her. Surprised you don't seize the opportunity of seeing her oftener--a truly artistic nature!"

"Ass!" I thought. But aloud I explained that domestic preoccupations left me little time for social or any other visits. The casualness of my answer seemed to brighten Blackden perceptibly.

I recalled, incidentally, that I had promised Gertrude, though heaven knows why, to let her know the upshot of Pendleton's return.

"Tell her, when you see her, that I am coming very soon. I've had a good deal on my hands. She will understand."

"She understands everything," murmured Blackden absently. "Ah, there is a woman! Yes, I'll tell her." And his eyes glowed in anticipation.

He was positively affectionate to me, this austere artist, when he left me at Visconti's door.

To come home, as I have said, used to be a delight. The presence of one person in it has changed it to a torment.

This evening when I approached my chalet on the rock, I found Pendleton in high good humor playing a game with the children on the lawn.

A flap of canvas, making a sort of pup tent, had been fastened to the tree for Jimmie, to give him that touch of savage life which even at Crestlands little boys seem to crave. Savage life at Crestlands! Yet once the Mohicans roamed here and the Mohican that is in all of us craves an outlet in Jimmie. It craved an outlet in me when I saw the great hulk of Pendleton squatting tailor-fashion in the tent entrance, enacting the role of cannibal chief. I stood unobserved for a moment, watching the scene with bitterness in my heart and shame on top of the bitterness.

"Bring the prisoner before me," grunted Pendleton in the character of the chief.

Tittering in suppressed glee, Randolph and Laura marched Jimmie up to Pendleton, who measured the child with a fearful frown and demanded where were the other prisoners.

"They escaped, your majesty," exploded Randolph with stifled laughter. "This white man alone dared to remain and brave your power!"

"He should be boiled and eaten by rights," Pendleton growled truculently. "He dares to face the Big Chief of the Cannibal Islands! Because of his great courage, however," he added as an afterthought, "we shall spare his life. Of such stuff great warriors are made."

"Beware, your Majesty," giggled Laura, "he might treacherously plan some harm to you. He is very brave, this white chief!"

"We see he is a desperate blade," answered Pendleton judicially. "But we admire bravery. He shall be our spear-bearer in battle."

"No, I want to be eaten!" shrilled Jimmie in his excitement, whereat the others shrieked and shook with laughter.

Alicia alone seemed moderate in her merriment. I hugged it to my heart that she appeared to look a shade sadly upon the scene. But I am probably wrong. I went indoors and sank my chin upon my hands with a turmoil of emotions which I wish to forget.

Pendleton is winning them, there is no doubt about that. In all the world there is not a soul who would cling to me, excepting possibly Griselda. Shakespeare never uttered anything truer than that life was "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I wish I had never been born.

This morning I longed to romp and riot with the children, to shake off every atom of care, to laugh and roll on the floor with them, to be happy as I have been happy, but I could not. Held in the grip of a heartache that permeated every fiber in my body, I slunk sullenly away to my study after dinner to be alone. But even that I could not have.

Pendleton followed on my heels, lit a cigar and inquired whether he could have a talk with me. Naturally I could not prevent it. I can prevent nothing, for I am no longer master in my own house.

"Old man," he began in his suave thick voice, which he means to be friendly, which to me seems orgulous with triumph. "Seems to me you're about due for a rest."

"What d'you mean?" I faltered, wincing, though inwardly I knew well enough what he meant.

"Just what I say," he smiled. "You have worked hard enough--supporting my family. Time I took the load off your shoulders--that's what I mean."

I waved my hand in a gesture of deprecation, but I could not speak.

"Oh, I know," he insisted doggedly, though even now he cannot look me in the eyes, "you didn't do it specially for me. You did it because you are a man--you--bah! they don't make 'em like you, as I've told you. But you don't want praise from me, I know that. You don't need it. What's more to the point is, it's time I took a flat or small house in one of the suburbs and had the lot of them move over and live on me for a while. About time," he nodded his head and shifted his cigar, "about time!"

Every word was a stab, but I steeled myself for the ordeal. Wasn't that what I had been expecting all this time?

"When--do you want to make the change?" I endeavored to speak crisply, as when I address the National City or the Guaranty Trust over the telephone at Visconti's.

"Well, I thought I'd begin to look round to-morrow. There'll be the place to find, some furniture to get--the installment plan will help--whole job ought to be fixed up in two or three weeks, I guess," he added with a laugh. "Uncle Ranny will have to come to supper pretty often to keep the kids as happy as we'd like to see them, eh?"

"But a going household--" I spoke quickly in a sort of last spasm of pitiful expostulation--"it's quite a--an undertaking to set going?"

"Yes--I know," he nodded soberly. "Don't think I don't know I'll have to push the wheel hard--with both shoulders. But d'you know," he lifted a confidential eyebrow, "that young woman--Alicia--will be a great help to me--quite a little housekeeper, she is--quite a kid--I hope Laura will take after her."

My heart was of lead. If he was watching my face, he must have perceived a deadly pallor sweeping every drop of blood away from it. There was a pounding in my ear's like rushing waters.

"Alicia," I heard myself saying as one speaking after being rescued from drowning, "Alicia, you know, isn't my child--or yours. I can't send her to you. She--there are formalities--but, anyway, her wishes are a factor in the matter. I'll do anything, old man," my head seemed to swell suddenly and shoot upwards like a cork from an abyss, and my face was damp with perspiration--"anything, but I can't send that child to you unless--unless she is keen--you see that, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, I see--certainly." He was looking away as he spoke. I have a lingering hope he had not been watching my face. "That's all true, of course. But put yourself in my place, Randolph. Here are three motherless children. She, that girl, has been a kind of mother to them. Seems to have a born faculty for it. What would I do without her, just starting in like that--you understand!"

"Surely, surely!" I hastened to assure him, because I felt slightly more master of myself. "But you see my point--she doesn't belong to me. And even if she did--I can't just pass her about--it's a responsibility--her wish--what I mean is, I can't coerce her in any way."

And suddenly I saw the children away from me, with this dubious, mysterious man, alone, and my heart was wrung with agony. With Alicia, at least--but, no! I could not acquiesce so completely.

"Coerce--certainly not," was his wholly reasonable comment. "I reckon a word from you would go a long way, though. But I see your point, Randolph, I see your point. Tell you what!" he began in a new tone. "Suppose we put it this way. I'll speak to her myself--I'll put it up to her--leave you out of it altogether, see?--leave it to her to decide--so you won't have to--you'll be neutral, you see?--What's the matter with doing it that way?"

A thousand devils within me moved me with all but irresistible force to jump at his throat, to stifle his words, to choke the beastly life out of him, to end the torment then and there. But I could not--I could not. I knew he was expressing by his words his sense of certainty that he could win over Alicia, as he had won the children--that I was helpless in his hands--that I was a weakling whom he was making the barest pretense of respecting--that he could strip my household of all I held dear with an ease so laughable that he could not even bother to ridicule me. And yet I could not rise up and strangle him.

As one in a vise, I sat for a moment chained by wild conflicting passions, and then--a strange thing happened. A feeling of nakedness, a sense of being stripped of everything like another Job, of being utterly alone in the world fell about me like an atmosphere. I felt deprived of everything, though not bereft. It was an odd feeling, a sort of involuntary renunciation of all that was my life in which yet I calmly acquiesced. I faced and addressed Pendleton almost with tranquillity. Certainly I experienced a strange new dignity that was very soothing, very grateful, as water to the thirsty after battle.

"Very well, Jim," I heard myself saying quietly. "Go ahead your own way. That perhaps is best."

All that I remember is a gleam of triumph in his eye. No word of all his chunnering and maundering afterwards do I recall. He talked on, smoking, for perhaps four or five minutes and then he left me.

By myself I felt at once strangely heavy as a mountain and insubstantial as the shadow thereof.

*CHAPTER XVII*

Again and again I have been told that I am a fool. But not even my dearest friends have called me mad.

Are the gods then really so anxious to destroy me? What have I done to deserve it?

This morning, after last night's interview with Pendleton, I saw Alicia--suddenly saw her as it seemed for the first time. And yet an overwhelming realization flooded me like a tidal wave that through countless ages she and she alone had been inexpressibly dear to me. She, the divine ideal I had been pursuing, catching fitful glimpses of in glades and forests, on mountain tops, in palaces, in fantastic surroundings, amid incredible scenes of a dim and ancient dream-life, more real than any reality--_she_ was Alicia, this child Alicia.

And I am more than twice her age!

Nothing can come of it but misery and wretchedness for me. By no word or sign dare I convey such a thing to her or to any one else--to no one except these pale pages that receive my poor motley confidences with the only discretion I can trust.

She is dearer to me than all the worlds. Yet not only must I remain dumb but I must guard my every word, gesture, thought even, as never before.

In the midst of all else this is a catastrophe. Yet it overshadows and overbalances everything.

Let me disclose the truth by so much as a sign, and every act and motive of mine becomes abruptly suspect, and I shall stand revealed for the immoral, shameful creature that I suppose I am.

I could face that, I believe, if there were any possibility--but there isn't.

I must hide and cover and conquer the feeling by inanition. But how can I, when she is so untellably dear and precious to me?

No, no! A thousand times no! I cannot let Pendleton try to inveigle her to leave me. No!

And all I have to do is to betray this garish resolution and my secret will be out, and all that I am and have done will stand forth as naked pretense and I shall appear stripped and manacled like a common criminal too good for the hangman.

And I have dared to judge Pendleton!

The time-honored remedy in fiction, when a man finds himself in love with any one he has no business to love is, I believe, to go away, to travel. How ridiculous that sounds to me. The only place I can go to is Visconti's. To Visconti's! And now I have come back from Visconti's and I cannot stay in the house.

I cannot stay in the house because Alicia is in it--and Pendleton!

Oh, he will have his way, I am sure! The Old Man of the Sea infallibly has. Why should the unscrupulous always have the advantage? I abhor to think of him.

It is Alicia that is filling my mind, my heart, my life. I have been trying to think of her even until yesterday as a child, and I know I have been deceitful. She is a woman--she is womanhood. I see her now in her radiance and every movement and gesture of her, every act, every glance speaks of the freshness and youth of life, of a supreme, a divine beauty. I have called her a child and I yearn to sink at her knees and cry out my anguish and my adoration. I am the child, helpless before her. Whatever I conceal, I cannot conceal what her going would do to me. It would shatter what remains of my life. And I suffered Pendleton yesterday to propose calmly that she go over to him--trafficking in Alicia!--and with Pendleton! It is stifling to think of. I must go out. But I cannot let any of them see me. I feel like a thief in my own house. The window--ah, I can slip out for at least a solitary hour under the stars!

I did not manage to get out under the stars after all. Just as I began to fumble with the screen Alicia asked leave to come in. No presence could have been more welcome to me, but the dark thoughts under which I had been brooding made me wince with pain as she entered. Nevertheless I contrived to greet her with almost normal cheerfulness.

"Uncle Ranny," she began hurriedly in an undertone, coming close to me, "is it really coming, then?"

"What do you mean, my dear?" I asked her, though such subterfuges are quite useless with Alicia.

"Oh, he's just been telling me that he has his eye on a flat near Columbia University in New York--that he expects to have it going by the time the schools open--hasn't he told you?"

"What else did he say?" I queried breathlessly.

"Nothing much--only he asked me whether I didn't think it was wise to get settled there as soon as possible. He is very nice to me."

"Is that all?" I breathed.

"Yes, that's about all--but isn't that enough?"

I smiled feebly and sank into my chair with immense relief.

I longed to draw her to me, to enfold her, to rest her head against my heart, to hold her close and to exclude thereby all black care and worry, all overhanging shadows, all the threatening and looming clouds of existence--to make my world blissfully complete. But I am only "Uncle Ranny" to her--and I felt a shudder pass down my spine.

"And you, Alicia," I managed to say. "What did you answer?"

"Of course, I said that was true--what could I say? But oh, Uncle Ranny," she leaned toward me as she stood at my desk, "I am afraid, Uncle Ranny! They are ours--aren't they--I know he's their father, but I can't help feeling as though we were--handing them over to a stranger--Oh, I suppose I ought not say it--some one we don't know at all!"

And she burst into tears.

Blood and flesh could not bear it longer. I twitched and writhed in my chair for an instant, then I leaped up and threw my arms about her and strained her to me.

"My darling," I murmured brokenly, "and how do you suppose I feel?"

"I know," she sobbed and gently, very much as Jimmie or Laura might have done, she put her arms about me and nestled as though I were some one old and fragile for whom she had a deep affection--but that was all. Alicia's first embrace!

And then I knew also. She did not, I trust, for an instant suspect the bitterness of the cup I was that moment draining. But why should I expect anything else? The guilt in my own heart tells me enough,--and too much--of exactly where I stand. Alicia is still a child. As yet evidently she did not even suspect that Pendleton was bent upon taking her also. Suppose I prevented that, then what of the other three whom, in another way, I love no less? My head was throbbing dizzily, my pulses were beating like drums. For me this was the supreme moment of anguish and sacrifice, the dark night of the soul, that _noche oscura_ that St. John of the Cross knows so well how to describe, that shakes one's being and changes one's life forever more. My lot seemed to be to sacrifice and break myself in final and complete renunciation, to drain my cup of bitterness to its uttermost dregs.

For a moment the world was as a shadow, swaying, airy and insubstantial. The cowled monk that is buried somewhere within me was suddenly uppermost and the life of the world seemed sordid and leprous; a deadly thing rotted with lusts and passions, a thing to run away from--that was pulling me into its sensual center. But only for a moment.

Then suddenly the blood surged to my temples, as Alicia lay in my arms, and the ancient cunning of a thousand male ancestors, of savage hunters and crafty warriors who died that I might live, swept into my thews and nerves and brain and I crackled with eagerness to fight for my own.

No!--I would not--could not give up all that I held dear. I would fight! I gripped Alicia's shoulders in a spasm of fierce joy and in a hoarse guttural voice that surprised her no more than it surprised me, I breathed out:

"Never fear, Alicia--it can't be! It won't be. He hasn't done it yet. I'll do something--I don't know what as yet. But give me time--a little time--I'll work it out. We'll fight if we must--but we won't give up tamely!"

Alicia's warm cheek against mine, though with a trust that can only be described as childlike, was reward enough for victory, let alone for this still empty challenge. But an irresistible, throbbing feeling of confidence tells me that something will happen--that I shall win!

Is it simply the confidence of a fool, and the surge of melodrama that is never very far from any of us? Possibly. But my blood still throbs and my muscles still crackle with the strange eagerness and lust for battle. It may be that the fragrance and the starry look of Alicia that linger with me yet, the sweet joy and pride of Alicia when she returned my good-night kiss before she left me, the affection with which she clung, the reluctance with which she went, all have something to do with this new accession of courage. But I do not comfort myself with vain things. Alicia happens to be a girl whose affections have never been pampered by any doting parents. If she looks upon me _in loco parentis_, that ought to be enough for me. It is not enough. And the pain of that leaves a barbed sting in my breast. But that wound I shall carry gladly--I shall wear my hair shirt like the girl wife of Jacopone da Todi--if only I can play the man.

The evening and the morning were a day--the first day of a new life, and what a day!

I went down in the train with Pendleton and briskly suggested that he need not hurry with his arrangements.

"I thought," said he, with a furtive, sidelong glance at me, "that my first duty was to ease you. I owe you too much already," he added, looking out toward the drabness of the Mt. Vernon right of way.

"It's only strangers and enemies that owe each other things;" I countered easily. "Friends owe each other everything and nothing. There is no audit for such accounts."

He laughed out of proportion to the deserts of this lump of wisdom and exclaimed:

"You're great, Randolph--great!"

It was my turn to laugh, and I felt that I had the advantage of him. With the sixth sense, or the pineal gland, or whatever it is, I was conscious that he was a little afraid of me--and that did not damage my temper.

"Your experience in life has been so--peculiar," I told him, "that anybody would be glad to be of any service possible. And you must remember that Laura was my only sister. Tell me," I added conversationally, "don't you find the harness galling at times after all--you have been through?"

"Galling! Say, Randolph, those little machine people in their skyscraper beehives--cages--don't know what living is!--Freedom!" ...

For the first time I had noted the light of spontaneity glowing in his eyes, and my heart bounded: I was about to hear a confession. But on a sudden he checked himself and looked away. "Of course," he added in a forced tone, "one has to face one's responsibilities. No--take it all in all, I am glad to be doing my share of the work and carrying my burden."

I knew he was lying. I knew that his first outburst was the true Pendleton; that the addendum was meant, as politicians say, for home consumption.

"Of course, of course," I muttered hastily, "but we're only human." And alternately I cudgeled my poor wits to stand by me and prayed to them as to deities to light my way.

This lawless spirit, Pendleton, I had a vague gleam of intuition, was repenting his return to the yoke of duty, to the restraints of civilization. What, then, was it that held him? It was not a suddenly developed conscience. Of that I was certain. There was a problem I must solve and solve immediately.

We parted with cordiality at Grand Central station and twenty minutes later I was one of those little machines functioning at Visconti's.

"I want a draft at thirty days," I was saying, "for ten thousand lire on Naples. Your best rate at that date." And with the receiver to my ear I heard a voice within me, independent of the telephone, whispering:

"Could it be that he too is bewitched by Alicia?--with all his roving and experience--or is it his sense of duty to his children?"

"Four ninety-eight," said the exchange man, Hoskyns, at the National City, and "four ninety-eight," I repeated after him automatically. "Can't you do better--at thirty days?" And the independent voice in my brain put in: "Perhaps I am hipped upon the subject of Alicia?" And so the morning wore on.

Gertrude, to my surprise and confusion, rang me up at eleven.

"Good morning, Ranny," she opened sweetly. "You haven't kept your promise, have you?"

"Promise?" I repeated dully. "What promise?"

"You said you would keep me informed about Pendleton's return. You haven't done it--have you?"

"But you have been away for the summer, haven't you?" I ventured desperately.

"Yes, and I am back," she murmured gently, "and still--better come and lunch with me to-day--don't you think so?"

If there's any one thing that my career as a business man has done for me, it is to implant in my heart a hatred for procrastination and shiftiness. I had no luncheon engagement, and yet I despairingly told her I had.

"Dinner," she answered, "would suit me even better."

"I ought to go home," I protested feebly, with a sinking instinctive feeling that I really ought not to resume such relations with Gertrude.

"We'll have an early little meal, at six-thirty," she smoothly ignored me, "Until then, good-by."

I clicked the receiver angrily for a moment, but Gertrude had hung up. Her high-handed manner irritated me, but that was her characteristic. We were more leagues apart, Gertrude and I, than ever she or I could travel backward. And though the results of our meeting seemed to be unsatisfactory to Gertrude, I must in justice to her admit that she is always an admirable hostess.

I had telephoned to my house that I was not to be expected to dinner, and when Griselda had dryly answered, "Ye don't know what ye'll miss," I thought with a pang that I knew more about that than she did. Gertrude's calm and comfortable atmosphere, however, her deep chairs and sofas and the air of excluding a disorderly world, were not disagreeable to one fresh from the filthy pavements south of Fourth Street. Could those junk shops, paper-box factories, delicatessen "garages" and machine shops be in the same world with Gertrude's flat, in Gramercy Park? Yet they were only a little more than a mile away, and those were my real world, my daily environment. Gertrude's flat was now foreign ground.

"Yes--goose of a man!--don't you see? What could be better? The man comes back anxious to reassume his responsibilities. You have had a Hades of a time, but you have done the square thing, acquitted yourself like a man and a hero. And now the little romance ends happily and everything is satisfactory and you are free again--what could be more delightful?"

The heaviness of my heart portended anything but delight, but I remained silent.

"Don't think I am being trivial, Ranny," she resumed with a more sober vehemence. "It was a wonderful thing to do. I feel I was wrong in what I advised in the past. Your sticking to the children has done heaps for you--for your development, I mean--more for you than for them, perhaps," she inserted as a parenthesis with a laugh. "But don't be quixotic now. Everything's coming right in the best of all possible worlds. So don't go throwing a wrench into the machinery just because you've had the wrench in your hand so long you can't think what else to do with it!"

"I am not good at changes," I murmured gloomily. "I was catapulted from one kind of life into another by main force of circumstances. Now I don't feel I can stand being shot back into something else. The wear and tear, the strain is too great."