CHAPTER II.

"Ah," exclaimed Mr. Floyd, starting to his feet, "that is your mother, I hope."

I had become too much absorbed in our talk to hear the click of the gate, but now I sprang up and rushed to the door, and, seeing my mother quietly walking up the path, I ran out bareheaded into the rain.

"Oh, mother," I cried, "you cannot guess who has come to spend Sunday with us!"

It seemed to me all at once that some thought of him must have been in her mind, for her color came and went. "I hope it is Cousin James," she replied calmly.

As I took her umbrella from her hand I could see that she was trembling and her lips quivering. I unclasped her cloak and untied her bonnet, and took them from her: she ungloved her hands hastily and smoothed her hair as she went along the hall. Mr. Floyd stood facing her as she entered the sitting-room. "Dear Mary!" said he, and took her in his arms and kissed her.

I felt as if I had been struck a heavy blow. I knew that he had been not only my father's first cousin, but his nearest and dearest friend as well; but, for all that, it was not easy for me to see my mother surrendering herself to that caress. But presently, when I saw that she was crying, I knew that she was thinking only of my father and her long agony of loneliness, and I forgave them both. When she regained her calmness she called me to her with a timid smile and a faint blush.

"This is my boy, James," she said, looking up at Mr. Floyd smiling, but with the tears still on her cheeks. "He is your godson, you remember, and namesake."

"My godson, my namesake, my ward, and my dear friend besides," replied Mr. Floyd, throwing his arm heavily over my shoulder. "I know him already very well, and I like him more than I can tell you."

That same old thrill of feeling goes over me now like a wave as I write. As I stood looking up at him I seemed to grow rich, as if I had suddenly come into my kingdom. I continued to stand leaning against him as he sat down close beside my mother and talked intimately and freely with her. I may have felt a little alien and apart at first, for the days they talked of were the days of long ago, before I could remember. Mr. Floyd's private personal history had been but one short chapter in his long, full and busy life. He was well past thirty before he had married Alice Raymond, the only child of a wealthy merchant: she was but seventeen when he first saw her and fell in love with her. Few people knew whether the twelve short months of his married life were but as a dream to him now, eleven years later, or whether his scant allusions to that time came from a shy tenderness for a memory which was his dearest and most sacred possession. Alice Raymond was but little past eighteen when she died, and even the child she left behind her had never really belonged to Mr. Floyd, but had grown up at her grandfather's at The Headlands while her father had assumed the duties of a mission abroad. Life had denied him little of what men seek as objects in a brilliant and exciting career; but in listening to him now I felt a certainty that he had been a lonely man, and, if not an unhappy one, that his mind was tinged at least with a certain melancholy which lay at the root of all his impulses.

My mother seemed to have grown younger in meeting him. She was always the most beautiful of women to me, with her large, serious brown eyes, her wavy brown hair, her complexion pure and delicate as a young girl's; and indeed she was but twenty years older than myself, thus at this date only thirty-four. But while she talked to Mr. Floyd I observed a change in her: her eyes had lost their pensiveness and calm, and fell before his shyly: the flushes came and went on her cheeks. He told her again and again that in meeting her he found the first realization that he had come back to his home: old Mr. Raymond had seemed to be afraid of him, and little Helen had cried with terror when he first clasped her in his arms and kissed her with unguarded fondness.

"But that was not strange," observed my mother. "Intimate affection is, after all, a habit. Now that you have a chance of having your little girl always with you, she will very soon grow fond of you."

"Oh, but I have no claim to her. She must stay with Mr. Raymond as long as he lives, I suppose. He loved Alice, but he worships Helen. I robbed him of his child once almost against his will, and now that he is so old a man I could not have the heart to do it again."

"But she is your own daughter!" cried my mother, half indignantly.

"But I made my mistake ten years ago. Just then I only cared for what lay beneath a fresh grave at The Headlands: there seemed to be no to-morrow for me--no time when I should get used to such sorrow and find comfort in any one or anything that took Alice's place. I gave up Helen then with absolute indifference: now such coldness seems enigmatical to me."

"You ought to have her with you now."

"It could not be. I asked her this morning if she would come with me: she burst into a passion of weeping, and declared she could not leave her grandfather--that he would die without her; and I verily believe that he would. Well! well! I have got along for ten years without happiness. I have a career, while Mr. Raymond, millionaire though he is, has nothing but Helen. If only my health does not altogether fail!"

"You are not ill, James?"

"The doctors tell me that I have three incurable diseases," returned Mr. Floyd, laughing. "Then I took cold the moment I landed in this horrible climate. I perfectly realize the truth of the Psalmist, who declares that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Physicians dote upon me: I am an admirable field of research. Some people have the ill taste to die without any preliminaries, but I shall not give occasion for any painful surprise. Still, I only tell you this that you may make the most of me. Let me hear about yourself, Mary. If you only knew how often I have thought of you shut away here from the world in this wretched country place, nothing near you not utterly foreign to your tastes and your circles of thought!"

My mother's hand stole into mine, and she met my jealous glance and smiled into my face. "Cousin James does not know what good times we have, does he, Floyd?" said she.

"I forgot for one moment your consolations," said Mr. Floyd. "I saw your boy's mates when I came in: one of them has a powerful face: he looks like a youthful Cato."

"That is Jack Holt," I cried. "He _is_ like Cato: he is strong, severe, just. Whatever he says ought to be done we know must be done, even if the heavens fall."

"And the handsome fellow, who is he? Harry Dart? He looks equal to the heroism of all Plutarch's heroes: he has a beautiful, consecrated face. I hope he will live up to what it tells us now."

Glad and proud although I was to see Mr. Floyd, his coming disturbed me a little. Hitherto I had accepted my life unquestioningly. We had been poor ever since my father's death, and my mother's life had become circumscribed and narrowed down to Belfield. It had seemed to me that no other people in the world were just so happy as my mother and myself. What need had we of a larger house, when the one stately mansion that I was familiar with appeared to me a desert, even with all its fairy-land splendors? Jack Holt's father was too rich a man not to allow his wife all the good things which she coveted, and her parlors, halls and bedrooms were irrefragable proof of the enormities which may be committed with an utter want of taste and tens of thousands of dollars. Both Harry and Jack hated the house, and spent every available moment out of school in our comfortable, well-worn nooks inside and out of doors. My mother used to play to us at twilight, and sing sweet ballads which gave us a state of mind full of the blessed misery which youth loves. Then what gay little waltzes used to rattle off from my mother's fingers! She taught us all to dance, and in the winter dusk we would waltz in turn with Georgy Lenox, the two of us who could not have her as a partner circling with our arms about each other's less slender waists. Then the feasts my mother used to cook for us with her own clever hands have made the greatest banquets seem poor since: she had the gift of performing every feminine task better than any other woman in the world. In short, I had lived the life which undoubtedly comes to many a lad who has no father: my mother appeared to have no thought but of me and my happiness, and not one of my dreams of far-reaching happiness but included her. I realized enough of the exquisite worth of her devotion to me never to cross her wishes: an invisible yet insurmountable barrier separated me from any of the grosser faults of boyhood, for she never let me go from her without her kiss, the clasp of her hand, and her saying, "You will be a good boy, Floyd?"

Yes, I had been perfectly happy; and, as I say, it disturbed me to have a doubt suggested that this full, complete existence of mine had not filled my mother's heart as well. Belfield--merely writing the word "Belfield" has a breezy influence over my mind still. Wherever a man has spent his boyhood there linger associations of the cool wind of the hill-top, the sound of the sea audible yet invisible, the hush before a storm, the tumbling of the ice in the river in the spring freshets, the berries that grew on the edge of the wood, the ecstatic thrill of physical strength and delight on the playground where he ran "drinking in the wind of his own speed." But youth is the season not alone of action, but of reverie. Most of our original thinking is done before we are sixteen: after that we acquire so much of other men's experience that our thoughts wear the current stamp. We come into our rich inheritance of the world's accumulated knowledge, and evolve from it the answers to the necessities of our own individual development. As boys we were not cribbed by any exact logic and hard common sense, which must stretch us a little later on a Procrustean bed, and we were free to grow as we would and to stand on the highest level of noble thought and heroic deed. The writers whom we read with avidity were those who ennobled us: in those days youth was the era of a high romanticism, and our authors did not enter the actual world which lay about us, giving us pictures of real life, and with devilish ingenuity teaching us to regard men's actions from the reverse side, and thus detect ignoble traits as the mainspring of human achievement.

More than forty of us went to school together in the stiff white academy which stood on the hill surrounded by a quadrangle of straight poplars. We learned many things there--some from the grim old preceptor, some outside the walls. I had a volume of Plutarch, from which I used to read stories to the boys as we lay on the grassy slopes in the shade, and I often felt a tremor in my voice as I read. It seems to me sometimes that the youth of this day lose some of the grandeur which made our ideals. Our sons read "Oliver Optic" and the magazines, while we used to thrill over the grand words of the men who have ruled the world. Then my mother's teaching was simple, direct and wise, and had become incorporated in every action of my will and impulse of my heart. I was to love and obey my God, never to tell a lie, never to do a mean action, never to be disloyal to a friend nor unfair to a foe. Still, if Harry and I were tolerably good, one of the reasons which acted most powerfully to restrain us from committing faults was our wish to stand well with Jack: he never scolded, never gave advice, but if he were displeased with our conduct we could not eat or sleep. Once Harry committed a trifling error--to call it a wickedness seems a grotesque exaggeration now--and Jack did not like it.

"Of course, Harry," he said coldly, "you can do as you please, but I am disappointed in you."

Harry rushed out of doors, and could not be found all night: he slept on the turf beneath his cousin's window, and the rain drenched him and he took a violent cold.

"You were foolish," observed Jack, smiling coldly.

"But do you forgive me now?"

"I forgive nothing: a bad action is a bad action. But I could not sleep when I did not know where you were: I got up and studied, for I was so tormented."

But Jack was so equable, so gentle! There was never a trace of harshness in his treatment of us. Indeed, it was only in his unfailing rectitude that he surpassed us, for, our senior although he was, he could barely keep up in our classes. Harry was the quickest of the three, but with a mortal hatred of hard study: he had an easy capacity for mastering knowledge without tedious assiduity; and, as he was resolved to be a painter, he held all mental acquirements as subsidiary to his master-passion for gaining dexterity and skill with his pencil. He could have done anything at his books had he expended any high endeavor, but he always let his chances slip by him, and allowed me to carry off the prizes which he might far more easily have won. I was by nature and habit rigidly conscientious, and discontented with myself unless I did my best. I hated cheap successes, and I was shy of praise, as my performances always fell short of my ideals. Mine was no studious disposition, and I had plenty of physical inclination to shirk lessons and lie beneath the forest boughs watching the birds all day; but there were detached lines that I used to repeat to myself aloud over and over again in lonely places, caring far less for their meaning than for the immeasurable music of the words.