CHAPTER XIX

HOW NORMAN CAME HOME

Those years abroad had been very precious years to me in spite of the great disappointment of not returning home at the promised time. I found Mr. Le Moyne a charming gentleman, and was not made in any degree a servant, but treated like a relative. I knew afterward that he took a great fancy to me from what Mr. Harris said, and, as he told me, "he liked my face." I kept accounts for him, wrote letters, read aloud, studied and wrote to the Little Girl and my mother as often as I could. She was such an innocent little girl, and so sweet, so altogether different from the girls I had come in contact with.

When we went to Washington, where Mr. Le Moyne was entrusted with a very delicate mission that was not to be put into writing, he decided to go abroad at once, as his eyes were causing him great uneasiness. We would not need to remain more than a year, he thought. But months passed, he was improving so much that the oculist thought he ought not break with the treatment. It was one thing and another. He came to depend so wholly upon me. And I never had the courage to tell him I had left a little girl in Chicago that I desired sometime to make my wife.

I used to say things in letters that I hoped she would take up, that might pique her curiosity, but they did not rouse her. If I wrote to her, and she had no especial love for me, that would end it. And how hard it would be to have a long engagement. I was a little afraid of my brother Ben, who had somehow stepped into my place, yet it seemed mean to grudge him any happiness if he could win her. Then Mr. Le Moyne's health began to break and his eyesight fail, with some new complication. He asked me never to leave him while he lived. I could not deny him. So I trusted my Little Girl to God. If she was for me it would all come right in time. I was having a rich, full life and developing in many directions. I did have a great deal of the finest enjoyment.

But when I heard that Dan had married my darling Ruth I was as one struck dumb with amazement. He was a big, strong, burly fellow, full of life and jollity, and not over-refined. But then I reflected Chicago was not Paris, or London, or Rome, or Florence. It was a hard blow to me. I had no duty left but to devote myself to my benefactor. No father and son could have lived in finer accord, or had tastes more in unison. I was glad that I could comfort him in his misfortune.

His health failed gradually, and the end came in peace. He had dealt very generously by me. I found it would take a long time to settle the estate, and resolved to return home for part of a year at least.

How everything had changed! Chicago had made great strides, increased her business, widened her borders. Fresh from beautiful cities that had taken hundreds of years in their growth, this had hardly begun. What was a place thirty or so years old compared to their centuries of advancement!

Dickens had been over and touched up the West with his caustic pen. Many people in Europe seemed to think we as a nation were reverting to the Indian type and lived in wigwams. I was astonished at times at the little our neighbors really knew about us, compared with our knowledge of the different European countries.

After all my fascinating rambling about, and my different attainments, this was home, and a man's birthplace and his boyhood remembrances are always dear to him. Two lines of a poem credited to Stoddard always suggest this meeting to me:

"My mother fell on my neck and wept, She kissed me and then she sighed, And our hearts were filled with a silent grief For * * * * the one who had died,"

and that was father.

Chris was home to supper. Homer and his wife came in. Sophie had been a great friend of the Little Girl's I remembered. Oh, how dear and sweet it was. Mother kept studying me—she had in her mind the boy who went away.

All the next morning the house was thronged with callers. Mother was proud as a queen. Then I ran away and went over to the Gaynors', hoping they had not heard. I had my wish. There seemed no one at home. The doors stood hospitably open and I entered. Then I caught sight of the girl who had never been out of my mind all these years. I came upon her unaware, and we stood face to face reading the inmost secrets of each other's souls, knowing what might have been, what we had lost. She put out her hand a little blindly and then she fell into my arms. I caught her and saved her from dropping on the floor.

I carried her to the settle and laid her down. She was as beautiful as any statue I had ever seen. The straight Greek nose with its thin nostrils, the rounded chin with a faint dimple, the perfect brows, the tendrils of hair that were like cloud-like vapor, so light and showing the white skin through. I glanced a moment, then I kissed her with the pent-up love of years, brow and lids with their long brown lashes, mouth and chin, but she lay like a form in marble, as if the tenderest passion could not rouse her.

Then I called for help. A black woman came, and, frightened, she ran for a neighbor. I tried chafing the hands. I called her endearing names, and then I remembered she was my brother's wife, but she was my darling, nevertheless.

When Mrs. Miller came, Jolette, the black woman, skirmished up a bottle of liniment and one of camphor.

"Is there any brandy or whiskey?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," and she went for that. Just then John Gaynor came in, and it seemed as if he would faint as well. But between us all we presently had her restored.

"I took her too suddenly," I began in apology.

"What did she say?" He eyed me sharply.

"She had not time for even a word of welcome," I answered. "Is she well?"

He shook his head with a reluctant dubiousness. "I'm afraid she isn't quite," was the slow reply.

I noticed then that she was very thin. You could see the blue veins in her arms and hands as well as her temples.

She made light of it, though I understood she was a little frightened, as she had never fainted before. Then Mrs. Miller suggested we take her out on the porch, where it was cooler, and we packed her in a rocking chair. I fanned her slowly. Her father placed his chair beside her. How he did love her. It shone in every line of his face, which seemed to have taken on a certain kind of refinement that had perhaps come from the invalidism. I noticed that he used great care in sitting down and getting up, and that he was very lame.

I was fain to go away, not that I really wanted to, but Mr. Gaynor insisted on my staying to supper. Dan was absent, and he plied me so with questions that we were summoned to supper before I had answered half of them. Afterward we went out again. Ruth had the chair tilted back almost like a couch. How slim and graceful she was, most like to a willow wand. And her sweet face told the story to me that she was trying to make herself happy and content in a life that did not fill her heart, and was slowly sapping her strength.

How we talked all the evening. She held her father's hand—it showed little marks of toil now and was shapely enough, but not as white as hers. And when I went away John Gaynor wrung my hand with subtle, meaning strength.

"You will come in often," he said. "We are so glad to get you back."

How had these two people come to marry? I learned some of the causes afterward. I was anxious to see her and Dan together.

I had warm enough welcomes everywhere. The interviewer had not come into existence, but I went to the office of the _Prairie Farmer_ and saw young John. Then there was the _Journal_, a new friend in what was then the Saloon Building. There was a daily _Tribune_, rather shaky on its legs, in an old wooden shanty at Lake and Clark streets. The Hon. John Wentworth, of my father's old love, the _Democrat_, was on LaSalle Street in quite grand quarters, the printing room boasting a Hoe press from New York. And there was a bookstore, laying a foundation of one of the great publishing houses in years to come.

There was the old jail built, as the contract called for, "of logs firmly bolted together," and the Court House I had never seen before, on the northeast corner of the square. It had offices on the lower floor, but they were talking of a new one, as it was too small. There was gas in some of the principal streets. But the wharves and the grain elevator had improved most of all, and the packing house was quite an institution. Railroads were planned in almost every direction and the canal was an established fact.

Dan returned a few days after. He was a big, handsome animal, not gross, but with the material in every line, the intellectual in scarcely none. He was shrewd, jolly, forceful in all business matters, and had a laughing face that won more by its good humor than his argument. I had once thought he might be something of a politician, but he was all business. Ben would take up that line. Our Senators were Messrs. Douglas and Shields, the Stephen A. Douglas I had gone to hear speak long ago. They had won a grant of land from Congress for a railroad from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico.

The gold fields had not taken as many of our men as I fancied it would. The unfortunate revolutions in Germany and Hungary had sent an influx of immigrants over, many well-informed people among them, ready and anxious to work for homes in the new country, many of them farmers.

Mother was a very happy woman. I am not sure but Chris came the nearest to her heart. He was her last baby, and he had a religious tendency that harmonized strongly with her now. She was proud to have him preparing for the life of a clergyman. Homer's children were her delight. They were merry, pretty things and in exuberant health.

She felt somehow curiously about Dan, though his marriage had not settled him quite as much as she had hoped. Ruth was a lovely wife, but it was a pity there were no children, when there was likely to be so much money on both sides.

Because I loved her so and had been betrayed into that one impassioned moment I was very careful. I went there when I was almost sure Mr. Gaynor would be around. And Dan, I found, was seldom home of an evening. Both Ruth and her father never tired of hearing about my travels and Mr. Le Moyne.

Then a curious whisper seemed to pervade the air about Dan, that he went a good deal to the Morrisons'. He had been making some investments for Polly. I ventured to call one day, but the house was shut up. Polly went out very little among her old friends, it seemed. It was reported that her rich marriage had not left her a rich widow.

Dan was very much interested in the copper at Lake Superior, and planning to make a journey thither. But Sophie one day roused my indignation by telling me that Dan spent nearly every evening at the Morrisons', and that occasionally Polly stole out to a lane below, little frequented, and met Dan and drove off with him.

I knew after seeing Dan and Ruth together a few times that whatever love he had once had for her no longer existed. He was not rough to her, but cruelly indifferent. Did she still care for him, or was this only a semblance, this sweet devotion that would have won any man's heart twice over? She clung so closely to her father. There never could be a tenderer affection.

One evening I resolved to learn the truth of Sophie's story. From the Gaynors' I went down to the Morrisons', a long walk. The house was all in darkness except a faint glimmer at the kitchen end. I crept softly up, when a low growl from a bulldog fairly curdled my blood. I could not see where he was, and retraced my steps cautiously. The next day I planned differently. I stationed myself at an intersection of streets, they were not much beside lanes, and sat down under a tree to wait. There was no moon, and at first a rather hazy sky, but it cleared presently into magnificent starlight.

From my point I could see down to the house. It was all a blur at first, but by degrees I became so accustomed to it that I could discern the outlines of all between. A tree partly hid the side, but the front was dimly visible.

It was ten when I took up my vigil. Eleven, half-past. Perhaps I was on a fool's errand. Then—yes, there were two figures stepping out in the open space. They found parting such "sweet sorrow" that it seemed as if they would say "Good-night 'til it were morrow." Their arms were about each other, their faces turned from me, but close together. A long, long embrace, then Dan started away swiftly.

I rose. He took the other way, but I stepped over there.

"Dan," I exclaimed, steady voiced, "Dan!"

"Who the devil are you?" sharply.

"Norman Hayne, and I want to talk with you. I know where you spend nearly every evening."

Dan whipped out his pistol and uttered an oath. "You've been spying on me, and it's the last time you'll spy on anybody, you mean sneak."

I put up my hand. We were facing each other, and we were both of a height. My heart was unprotected.

"See here, Dan," I said calmly, "you could shoot me and my dead body might be found in the morning. That is not all. Before noon Chicago would know the name of the murderer and his connection with the woman down there. If you are willing to yield up your life and draw down obloquy on the woman you have just left, then shoot."

Dan still held the pistol.

"That devil of a Gaynor put you on the track, curse him," in a vengeful tone.

"No, I do not think he suspects such a thing. He imagines you at the hotel talking business and playing cards, and he is proud that you come home sober. It is from this neighborhood the report has spread. You have taken her out driving. Your true wife that you must have cared for when you married owns your fealty. I do not need to read you a lecture, you know what you are doing and the end will be a scandal that will not raise you in any one's estimation and break her heart. It will also drag down the other woman."

"A miserable puling, white-livered thing who has no heart to break, who cares nothing for love, could not understand it!" he flung out.

"Why did you marry her? Why not have taken Polly at first?" I questioned sternly.

"Because I was a blind, dumb fool all the way through. And when she married I thought that the end of it."

"And when you married, that was the honorable end of it."

"No, it wasn't the end at all. Love with fire in it may smoulder, but it breaks out into a flame if one stirs among the ashes."

Dan suddenly put away his pistol.

"See here, Norme, I'll admit the whole thing is wrong. But a love like that sweeps a man off his feet. I'm going away presently and shall be absent two or three months, and maybe I'll get over it. You see, Polly had some troublesome business to settle. She wasn't left at all well off by that miserable old weasel of a Frenchman. I made some investments for her, and somehow her story was a sad one and she had been my old love, and now that I am going away—Ruth is good enough, but she isn't my kind. Maybe up there all alone I'll straighten matters out and come to my senses, and when I return things may go better with us. Polly and her mother are going to Vincennes to live. She doesn't feel at home in this old mud hole any more. So that's the whole of it. I'm all-fired sorry, Norman, that I went at you so, but the thought of being spied upon made me thundering mad."

The whole thing rang false. Yet I could not controvert it. He _was_ going away. About Polly I could not tell. Perhaps she had planned to follow him.

"Dan," I said—"on your word and honor?"

"As God hears me," he answered solemnly.

"You would break your mother's heart as well, and disgrace us all. And the way Ruth looks, it doesn't seem to me you will have to wait long for your freedom. She is almost transparent."

"Oh, those thin people are wiry. She's always looked so. She'll live to be eighty."

"She was a rosy little girl."

"Well, you just trust me, I've given my word."

Here was where I had to turn off to mother's, and we said good-night.

Dan was not home the next evening, but if he went to the Morrisons' he took another way and entered by the garden. And there was a bright light in the parlor that fronted the street.

I could only wait. I knew people bent on an intrigue could outwit the keenest eyes.

Dan came over to say good-by to mother, and was so tender it brought tears to her eyes as she told it over. He was most cordial to Sophie and the children. I went down to see him off and he shook hands in a friendly manner. It was a splendid day. I thought I would go to the Morrisons' that evening to see if all was right, but there came up a curious threatening blow. I spent the evening with mother. She was very proud of Dan and was delighted to think he had given up drinking to any excess. Liquor drinking was a very common thing even among respectable people, but drunkenness was beginning to be frowned upon.

About midnight the storm broke. We did not feel it so much here, but the roar of the elements was something frightful. I am sure I had never known such a storm. The wreck and damage were terrible. Mother was almost crazy about Dan.

I made my way to the Gaynors' about mid-afternoon. Their house was solidly built of brick and they had suffered very slight damage. Ruth was a pale little ghost and her sapphire-blue eyes asked wordless questions. None of us spoke of the Prairie Bird. It was too soon to hear.

The lake seemed strewn with wrecks. At the warehouses everybody was appalled. The only hope was that any boat seeing the storm coming up would run to shelter.

Four days afterward a sailor, escaped from the wreck, came into Chicago and told the story. Of the bodies that were beaten up ashore there were two locked in each other's arms—Dan Hayne and Polly Maseurier—and they were buried together. The best cabin had been engaged for her and she had come aboard in the morning. They had partaken of a gay supper together, and now it seemed half the men suspected she would flit with him. He had been selling out his Galena interest and most of his property. Chita had been taken with them, and she, too, had found a watery grave.

I must go to the Gaynors before some one rudely bruited the tragedy to them. John Gaynor could break the news more tenderly to his child. I was glad to find him on the porch in the old reclining chair, reading his paper.

I don't remember how I told it. I think I left something to be inferred. I did not hear Mr. Gaynor's question, for a white wraith glided out on the porch. The soft light hair framed in the sweet, deathlike face, but the clear eyes shone out with an unearthly light. I would have caught her, but she went straight to her father.

"I know," she said, and her voice was like a low-toned bell shaken wildly about. "Dan told me that day. They loved each other and went away together."

Then she fell into her father's lap.

I lifted her to the settle, limp and lifeless. It seemed as if she had lost all her flesh during these days that she had carried her secret. Was her heart broken? My poor Little Girl! My poor Little Girl!

I went for the doctor presently. All night she lapsed from one faint to another, and was left as near lifeless as any human body could be. Mr. Gaynor watched her dry eyed, but with such an expression of despair as is seldom concentrated in any countenance. He would place his cold hand in mine, that was so vigorous and warm, that I felt almost ashamed. I had given her up to Dan, I could not give her up to death.

After two days fever set in. It was not raging or violent, but the lassitude was painful to witness. The boys were both going away, and I persuaded mother to shut her house and come up. Her sorrow was heart-breaking, but she knew it was still worse for Ruth.

The result of the storm was being cleared away and repaired. There was a good deal of talk, to be sure, and the men who had liked Dan best blamed Polly bitterly. Others did not see how he could have thrown up his prospects for any woman, for it was admitted if all went well with Mr. Gaynor and Chicago Ruth would be no mean heiress.

Sad as it was to watch day and night with only a mere thread of hope, it took mother and Ruth out of the head of the gossip. I looked after Mr. Gaynor's affairs as well as I could, and there were some matters of Dan's left unsettled. He must have taken a considerable amount of money with him, but whether it was in the bottom of the lake or buried with him no one was ever to know.

After a month or so Ruth began to evince a slow improvement. "If she had enough strength to pull through," the doctor said with a faint inflection in his voice that sounded like hope to the waiting, longing ear. She could not have had a tenderer nurse than mother, and womanly care and sympathy exceeds that of the most loving man.

Through this time I learned by bits and snatches how this ill-fated marriage had come about. And although at first Mr. Gaynor could have rejoiced over Dan's untimely end, he had built high hopes on him and would have loved him like a son. Even now he referred to the kindly things Dan had done for him in his illness, and I could see Dan had held many fascinations for him. But when he wanted to get all the property interests into his hands and began to treat Ruth with indifference all the fatherly feelings were roused. Then he had grudged young John Gaynor the relationship.

I could not but admire the wise and kindly reticence he observed in speaking of Dan. Of course there was no glossing over the last cruel insult to Ruth, but poor Dan had paid for it with his life, Polly as well.

I had many plans in my mind through this time. Go back to Paris I must. The boys had gone to their different institutions, and that left mother alone. Homer wanted her to rent the house and live with them. Then in watching Mr. Gaynor it seemed to me that something might still be done for him. Surgery in Paris had made rapid strides. There were splendidly equipped hospitals, perhaps I might find them in New York or Philadelphia, but I could not go there to stay. If I might take them all to Paris with me, mother as companion and chaperone for Ruth.

I advanced my plans very cautiously. Ruth's welfare was my first point. She did not get along rapidly. The doctor had insisted on having her beautiful hair cut, and it was now a mass of rings, like silken floss. She seemed to have gone back to childhood, her face was so small and wore such a look of timid entreaty. Her eyes were still like the midnight blue of the sky and their expression penetrated one's very soul with their infinite pathos.

Mr. Gaynor at first considered a journey abroad for himself an impossibility with his farming interest. It did puzzle me a little to know how this could be managed. And when I was about discouraged in my search for a capable person Providence sent him right in my way. Since the unfortunate struggle in Hungary we had received many immigrants of the better class who had largely drifted to the West in search for land. Homer had taken a young man to work for him when he had spent his little all. He and his father had been successful wheat growers, but their farms had been confiscated. The young man had left his wife and two little ones and the mother with friends, hoping soon to be able to send for them, but they found it very hard to get at anything without money.

I asked them to come over and spend an evening with us. John Gaynor was much interested in them, for both were intelligent, though speaking rather broken English. They discussed the possibility of buying government land and tilling it, and exploited their own methods, which were not behind ours, but their markets were.

The upshot of this was at the proper time my plan of having them as overseers, living in the house and looking after everything.

"It would be a godsend to them," said Mr. Gaynor. "They could get quite forehanded. These are the kind of citizens we need."

I left the leaven to work without any needless stirring up. Then I sought to persuade my mother that it was her duty to go for Ruth's sake. Since one of ours had so nearly wrecked her life surely we ought to strive to repair it.

"An old country woman like me," she cried in a kind of indignation. "A woman who has baked and brewed, and washed and ironed, milked and churned, and spun and spent the best of her life waiting on menfolk! A pretty sight I would be to go to Paris!"

"We should not expect to live at court," I laughed. "I was quite an ignorant lad when I went there. And if it was best for both Ruth and her father? She could not go without you."

It did take a good deal of argument and persuasion as well as good temper, but at last I gained my point. We had the father, Michael Sontieff, come and stay with us and found him clear minded and a really able man. They could send for the family at once. The mother and the young wife had some money of their own and were most anxious to rejoin their husbands.

So the matter was settled to my great delight. Ruth was willing to do anything. I did not like the apathy, though it was so sweet one could not chide her.

Mother was still an energetic woman. And now that there was some real work devolving upon her, she was happy and cheerful. Her best belongings were sent to Sophie's and her house rented. She packed away the choicest of the Gaynors', she looked up the articles and clothing we needed for our journey.

"I feel as if I was going on a fool's errand," said John Gaynor emphatically, "but if Ruth can recover her health and forget the sad tragedy I shall be repaid."

The Sontieffs came in delighted. Young John was most loth to have us go. He had the making of a newspaper man in him, he would never have been a successful practical farmer.

We went to New York, and the middle of April we sailed for Liverpool. It was a pleasant voyage and the ocean trip did seem to revive the drooping Little Girl.