Chapter 6

JOHNNY would have had his gun right off, and many other things, too, if Miss Lydia hadn't interfered. "Please don't send him so many presents," she wrote Mrs. Robertson in her scared, determined way. And Mary, reading that letter, fed her bitterness with the memory of something which had happened during the visit.

"It's just what I said," she told Johnny's father; "she influences him against us by not letting us give him presents! I know that from the way he talks. I told him, after I bought the stereopticon for him, that I could give him nicer things than she could, and--"

"Mary! You mustn't say things like that!"

"And--and--" Mary said, crying, "he said, 'I like Aunty without any presents.' You see? Influence! The idea of her daring to say we mustn't give him a gun. He's _ours_!"

"No, he's hers," Johnny's father said, sadly; "she has the whip hand, Mary--unless we tell the truth."

"Of course we can't do that," she said, sobbing.

But after that Philadelphia experience Miss Lydia--a fragile creature now, who lived and breathed for her boy--was obliged every winter to let Johnny visit these people who had disowned him, cast him off, deserted him!--that was the way she put it to herself. She had to let him go because she couldn't think of any excuse for saying he couldn't go. She even asked Doctor Lavendar for a reason for refusing invitations, which the appreciative and frankly acquisitive Johnny was anxious to accept. With a present of a bunch of lamplighters in her hand she went to the rectory, offering, as an explanation of her call, the fact that Johnny had got into a fight with the youngest Mack boy and rubbed his nose in the gutter, and Mrs. Mack was very angry, and said her boy's nose would never be handsome again; and she, Miss Lydia, didn't know what to do because Johnny wouldn't tell her what the fight was about and wouldn't apologize.

"Johnny's fifteen and the Mack boy is seventeen; and a boy doesn't need a handsome nose," said Doctor Lavendar. "I'd not interfere, if I were you."

Then she got the real question out: Didn't Doctor Lavendar think it might be bad for Johnny to visit Mr. and Mrs. Robertson? "They're very rich, you know," Miss Lydia warned him, piteously.

"They've taken a fancy to him, have they?" Doctor Lavendar asked. She nodded. The old man meditated. "Lydia," he said at last, "you are so rich, and they're so poor, I'd be charitable, if I were you."

So she was charitable. And for the next three or four years Johnny went away for his good times, and old Miss Lydia stayed at home and had very bad times for fear that Mr. and Mrs. Robertson might suddenly turn into Johnny's father and mother! Then the father and mother would come to Old Chester in the summer and have their bad times, for fear that Miss Lydia would "influence" Johnny against Mr. and Mrs. Robertson. (We got to quite like the Robertsons, though we didn't see much of them. "Pity they had no children," said Old Chester; "all that Smith money going begging!")

The Smith money certainly went begging, so far as Johnny was concerned. Every time his father and mother tried to spend it on him Miss Lydia put her little frightened will between the boy and his grandfather's fortune. "Boys can't accept presents, Johnny, except from relations, you know," she would tell him; "it isn't nice." And Johnny, thinking of the gun or the pony or what not, would stick out his lips and sigh and say no, he "s'posed not." As a result of such remarks he developed as healthy a pride as one could hope for in a lad, and by the time he was eighteen he was hot with embarrassment when Mrs. Robertson tried to force things upon him.

"No, ma'am," he would say, awkwardly. "I--I can't take any presents."

"Why not?" she would demand, deeply hurt.

"Well, you know, you are not a relation," Johnny would say; and his mother would rush up to her room and pace up and down, up and down, and cry until she could hardly see.

"She's robbed us of our own child!" she used to tell her husband.

As for Johnny, he told Miss Lydia once that Mrs. Robertson was kind, and all that, but she was a nuisance.

"Oh, Johnny, I wouldn't say _that_, dear. She's been nice to you."

"What makes her?" said Johnny, curiously. "Why is she always gushing round?"

"Well, she likes you, Johnny."

Johnny grinned. "I don't see why. I'm afraid I'm not awfully polite to her. She was telling me she'd give me anything on earth I wanted; made me feel like a fool!" said Johnny, "and I said, 'Aunty gives me everything I want, thank you'; and she said, 'She doesn't love you as much as I do.' And I said (all this love talk makes me kind of sick!) I said, 'Oh yes, she does; she loved me when I was a squealing baby! You didn't know me then.'"

"What did she say?" Miss Lydia asked, breathlessly.

"Oh, she sort of cried," said Johnny, with a bored look.

But his perplexity about Mrs. Robertson's gush lingered in his mind, and a year or two later, on his twentieth birthday, as it happened, he asked Miss Lydia again what on earth it meant? . . . The Robertsons had braved the raw Old Chester winter and come down to the old house to be near their son on that day. They came like the Greeks, bearing gifts, which, it being Johnny's birthday, they knew could not be refused--and old Miss Lydia, unlike the priest of Apollo, had no spear to thrust at them except the forbidden spear of Truth! So her heart was in her mouth when Johnny, who had gone to supper with his father and mother, came home at nearly midnight and told her how good they were to him. But he was preoccupied as he talked, and once or twice he frowned. Then suddenly he burst out:

"Aunty, why does Mr. Robertson bother about me?"

"Does he?" Miss Lydia said.

"Well, yes; he says he wants me to go into his firm when I leave college. He says he'll give me mighty good pay. But--but he wants me to take his name."

"_Oh!_" said Miss Lydia. She looked so little and pretty, lying there in her bed, with her soft white hair--the frizette had vanished some years ago--parted over her delicate furrowed brow, and her blue eyes wide and frightened, like a child's, that Johnny suddenly hugged her.

"As for the name part of it," he said, "I said my name was Smith. Not handsome or distinguished, but my own. I said I had no desire to change it, but if I ever did it would be to Sampson."

A meager tear stood in the corner of Miss Lydia's eye. "That was very nice of you, Johnny," she said, quaveringly.

"I'd like the business part of it all right," said Johnny. . . . "Say, Aunt Lydia--what _is_ all the milk in the coconut about me? Course I'm not grown up for nothing; I know I'm--queer. I got on to that when I was fifteen--I put the date on Eddy Mack's nose! But I'd like to know, really, who I am?"

"You're my boy," said Miss Lydia.

"You bet I am!" said Johnny; "but who were my father and mother?"

"They lived out West, and--"

"I know all that fairy tale, Aunty. Let's have the facts."

Miss Lydia was silent; her poor old eyes blinked; then she said: "They--deserted you, Johnny. But you mustn't mind."

The young man's face reddened sharply. "They weren't married, I suppose, when I was born?" he said, in a husky voice.

"They--got married before you were born."

He frowned, but he was obviously relieved; then he looked puzzled. "Yet they deserted me? Were they too poor to take care of me?"

"Well, no," Miss Lydia confessed.

"Not poor, yet they dumped me onto your doorstep?" he repeated, bewildered, but with a slow anger growing in his face. "Well, I guess I'm well rid of 'em if they were that kind of people! Cowards. I'd rather have murderers 'round, than cowards!"

"Oh, my dear, you mustn't be unjust. They gave me money for your support."

"Money!" he said. "They paid you to take me off their hands?" He paused; "Aunt Lydia," he said--and as he spoke his upper lip lifted and she saw his teeth--"Aunt Lydia, I'll never ask you about them again. I have no interest in them. They are nothing to me, just as I was nothing to them. But tell me one thing, is Smith my name?"

"Yes," said Miss Lydia (it's his _middle_ name, she assured herself truthfully).

But Johnny laughed: "I guess you just called me Smith. Well, that's all right, though I'd rather you'd made it Sampson. But Smith will do. I said so to Mrs. Robertson. I said that my name was the same as her father's, and I thought he was the finest old man I'd ever known, and, though I was no relation, I hoped my Smith name would be as dignified as his."

"What did she say?" said Miss Lydia.

"Oh, she got weepy," said Johnny, good-naturedly; "she's always either crying or kissing. But she's kind. Look at those!" he said, displaying some sleeve links that his mother's soft, adoring fingers had fastened into his cuffs. "Well, I don't take a berth with a new name tacked on to it, at Robertson & Carey's. He'll have to get some other fellow to swap names for him!"

He went off to his room, his face still dark with the deep, elemental anger which that word "deserted" had stirred in him, but whistling as if to declare his entire indifference to the deserters. Old Miss Lydia, alone, trembled very much. "Take their name! _What will they do next?_" she said to herself.

The Robertsons were asking each other the same question, "What can we do now to get him?" The lure of a business opportunity had not moved the boy at all, and what he had said about being called Sampson had been like a knife-thrust in their hearts. It made Mary Robertson so angry that she sprang at a fierce retaliation: "She _couldn't_ keep him--he wouldn't stay with her--if we told him the truth!" she said to Johnny's father.

"But we never can tell him," Carl reminded her.

"Sometimes I think she'll drive me to it!" said Mary.

"No," Robertson said, shortly.

"No one would know it but the boy himself. And if he knew it he'd let us adopt him. And that would mean taking his own name."

"No!" Carl broke out, "it won't do! You see, I--don't want him to know." He paused, then seemed to pull the words out with a jerk: "I won't let him have any disrespect for his mother, and--" He got up and tramped about the room. "Damn it! _I_ don't want to lose his good opinion, myself."

Her face turned darkly red. "Oh," she cried, passionately, "'opinion'! What difference does his 'opinion' make to me? A mother is a mother. And I love him! Oh, I love him so, I could just _die_! If he would put his arms around me the way he does to that terrible Miss Lydia, and kiss me, and say"--she clenched her hands and closed her eyes, and whispered the word she hungered to hear--"'_Mother! Mother!_' If I could hear him say _that_," she said, "I could just lie down and die! Couldn't you?--to hear him say 'Father'?"

Robertson set his teeth. "And what kind of an idea would he have of his 'father'? No, I won't consent to it!"

"We can't get him in any other way," she urged.

"Then we'll never get him. I can't face it."

"You don't love him as much as I do!"

"I love him enough not to want to risk losing his respect."

But this sentiment was beyond Johnny's mother; all she thought of was her aching hunger for the careless, good-humored, but bored young man. The hunger for him grew and grew; it gnawed at her day and night. She urged Carl to take a house in Princeton while Johnny was in college, and only Johnny's father's common sense kept this project from being carried out. "You're afraid!" she taunted him.

"Dear," he said, kindly, "I'm afraid of being an ass. If he saw us tagging after him he'd hate us both. He's a man!" Carl said, proudly. "No, I've no fancy for losing the regard of"--he paused--"my son," he said, very quietly.

His wife put her hand over her mouth and stared at him; the word was too great for her; it was her baby she thought of, not her son.

In Johnny's first vacation, when she had rushed to Old Chester in June to open the house, she was met by the information that he was going off for the summer on a geological expedition.

Mary's disappointment made her feel a little sick. "What _shall_ I do without you!"

"Oh, if Aunty can do without me, I guess outsiders can," said Johnny, with clumsy amiability.

"We'll be here when you get back in September," she said.

He yawned, and said, "All right." Then he strolled off, and she went upstairs and cried.

Johnny, walking home after this embarrassing interview, striking at the roadside brambles with a switch and whistling loudly, said to himself: "How on earth did Mr. Robertson fall in love with her? _He's_ got brains." A day or two later he went off for his geological summer, leaving in his mother's heart that rankling word, "outsiders." As the weeks dragged along and she counted the days until he would be back, she brooded and brooded over it. It festered so deeply that she could not speak of it to Johnny's father. But once she said: "He's ungrateful! See all we've done for him!"--and Carl realized that bitterness toward Miss Lydia, who had "robbed" her, was extending to the boy himself. And again--it was in August, and Johnny was to be at home in a fortnight--she said, "He ought to be _made_ to come to us!"

Her husband looked at her in surprise. "You can't 'make' anybody love you, Mary. We are just outsiders to him."

She cried out so sharply that he was frightened, not knowing that he had turned a dagger-word in the wound.

Perhaps it was the intolerable pain of knowing that she was helpless that drove her one day, without Carl's knowledge, to the rectory. "I'll put it to Doctor Lavendar as--as somebody else's story--the trouble of a 'friend,' and maybe he can tell me how I can make Johnny feel that we are _not_ outsiders! Oh, he owes it to us to do what we want! I'll tell Doctor Lavendar that the father and mother lived out West and are friends of mine. . . . He'll never put two and two together."

She walked past the rectory twice before she could get her courage to the point of knocking. When she did, it was Willy King who opened the door.

"Oh--is Doctor Lavendar ill?" she said. And Doctor King answered, dryly, that when you are eighty-two you are not particularly well.

"I thought I'd just drop in and ask his advice on something--nothing important," said Johnny's mother, breathlessly. "I'll go away, and come some other time."

Upon which, from the open window overhead, came a voice: "I won't be wrapped up in cotton batting! Send Mary Robertson upstairs."

"Haven't I any rights?" Willy called back, good-naturedly, and Doctor Lavendar retorted:

"Maybe you have, but I have many wrongs. Come along, Mary."

She went up, saying to herself: "I'll not speak of it. I'll just say I've come to see him." She was so nervous when she entered the room that her breath caught in her throat and she could hardly say, "How do you do?"

The old man was in bed with a copy of _Robinson Crusoe_ on the table beside him. He held out a veined and trembling hand:

"William's keeping me alive so he can charge me for two calls a day. Well, my dear, what can I do for you?"

Mrs. Robertson sat down in a big armchair and said, panting, that--that it was terribly hot.

Doctor Lavendar watched her from under his heavy, drooping eyelids.

"There was something I was going to ask you about," she said, "but it's no matter. Doctor King says you are sick."

"Don't believe all Doctor King tells you."

"I just wanted to get advice for--for somebody else. But it's no matter."

"Let's hear about the 'somebody else.'"

"They are not Old Chester people--so you won't mind if I don't name names?"

"Not in the least," said Doctor Lavendar, genially. "Call 'em Smith; that's a somewhat general title."

"Oh--no, that's not their name," she said, panic-stricken--then saw that he had meant it as a joke, and said, trying to smile, yes, there _were_ a good many Smiths in the world! Then suddenly her misery rose like a wave, and swept her into words: "These people are terribly unhappy, at least the mother is, because--" She paused, stammered, felt she had gone too far, and stumbled into contradictions which could not have misled anyone, certainly not Doctor Lavendar. "They, these people, had let their child be adopted--oh, a great many years ago, because they--they were not so situated that they could bring him--it--up. But they could, now. And they wanted him, they wanted him--her, I mean," said Mary; "I believe it was a little girl. But the little girl didn't want to come back to them. And the person who had taken her influenced her against her parents, who had done _everything_ for her!--given her everything a child could want. It's cruel," said Mary. "Cruel! I know the parents, and--"

"Mary," said Doctor Lavendar, gently, "so do I."

She recoiled as if from a blow. "No--oh no! You are mistaken, sir. You couldn't know them. His--his relatives don't live here. They live in another city. You couldn't possibly know them!"

She was white with terror. What would Carl say? Oh, she must lie her way out of it! How mad she had been to come here and hint at things!

"I have known Johnny Smith's parentage for several years, Mary."

"I didn't say the child was Johnny Smith!"

"_I_ said so."

"I don't know what you're talking about! The father and mother lived out West, but _I_ don't know the child. He is nothing to me."

"I wonder," said Doctor Lavendar, half to himself, "do we all deny love thrice?--for you do love him, Mary, my dear; I know you do."

She tried, in panic denial, to meet his quiet eyes--then gave a little moan and bent over and hid her face on her knees.

"Oh, I do love him--I do," she said in a whisper. "But he doesn't love me. . . . And yet he is _mine_--Carl's and mine." Then anger flared up again: "Who told you? Oh, it was Miss Lydia, and she promised she wouldn't! How wicked in her!"

"No one told me." There was a moment's silence, then Doctor Lavendar said, "There were people in Old Chester who thought he was Miss Lydia's."

"Fools! fools!" she said, passionately.

"No one came forward to deny it."

She did not notice this; the flood of despair and longing broke into entreaty; how could she get her child--her own child--who considered her just an outsider! "That's Miss Lydia's influence!" she said.

Doctor Lavendar listened, asked a question or two, and then was silent.

"I am dying for him!" she said; "oh, I am in agony for him!"

The old man looked at her with pitying keenness. Was this agony a spiritual birth or was it just the old selfishness which had never brooked denial? And if indeed it was a travail of the spirit, would not the soul be stillborn if her son's love should fail to sustain it? Yet why should Johnny love her? . . . Mary was talking and trying not to cry; her words were a fury of pain and protest:

"Miss Lydia won't give him up to people who haven't any claim upon him,--I mean any claim that is known. Of course we have a claim--the greatest! But Johnny doesn't know, so he won't consent to take our name--though it is our _right_! He doesn't know any reason for it. You see?"

"I see."

"I suppose if we told him the truth we could get him. But I'm afraid to tell him. Yet without telling him I can't make him love me! He said I was an 'outsider.' _I!_ his mother! But if he knew there was a reason--"

Doctor Lavendar looked out of the window into the yellowing leaves of the old jargonelle-pear tree, and shook his head. "Hearts don't come when Reason whistles to 'em," he said.

"Oh, if I could just hear him say 'mother'!"

"Why should he say 'mother'? You haven't been a mother to him."

"I've given him everything!"

Doctor Lavendar was silent.

"He _ought_ to come to us. He is ours; and he owes us--"

"Just what you've earned, Mary, just what you've earned. That's what children 'owe' their parents."

"Oh, what am I to do? What am I to do?"

"How much do you want him, Mary?"

She was stammering with sobs. "It's all I want--it's my life--"

"_Perhaps_ publicity would win him. He has a great respect for courage. So perhaps--"

She cringed. "But that couldn't be! It couldn't be. Don't you understand?"

"Poor Mary!" said Doctor Lavendar. "Poor girl!"

"Doctor Lavendar, make him come to us. _You_ can do it. You can do anything!"

"Mary, neither you nor I nor anybody else can 'make' a harvest anything but the seed which has been sowed. My child, you sowed vanity and selfishness." . . . By and by he put his hand on hers and said: "Mary, wait. Wait till you love him more and yourself less."

It was dark when she went away.

When Doctor King came in in the evening he said to himself that Mary Robertson and the whole caboodle of 'em weren't worth the weariness in the wise old face.

"William," said Doctor Lavendar, "I hope there won't be any conundrums in heaven; I don't seem able to answer them any more." Then the whimsical fatigue vanished and he smiled. "Lately I've just said, 'Wait: God knows.' And stopped guessing."

But he didn't stop thinking.