Part 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I told him my father’s age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was gazing off toward the dark horizon.

“Vaguely.”

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

“Vaguely.”

“Do you know that—”

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

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

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

“And is he—is he dead?”

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

“Who told her?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I do. You see that, don’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

I felt it right to throw out a warning.

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

He put on his melancholy face.

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

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

The effect was what I had expected.

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

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

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

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

_CHAPTER XV_

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

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

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

“Why do you think he left you anything?”

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

“But why should he want to feel that?”

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

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

“He cared for me to—to that extent.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s the club that’s been game.”

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

“Oh no, sir; I don’t.”

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

I nodded slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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