Part 21

As a dyke before the pressure of a flood, the barrier broke here, broke there, and yet as a whole maintained itself. Heights were cut off from heights. Valleys were carved between them. What was sharp became rounded; what was jagged was worn smooth. The highest pinnacles crashed down. When after thousands of years the glacial mass receded, only the stumps were left of what had once been terrific primordial elevations.

Dense forests began to cover them. Lakes formed in the hollows. Little rivers drained them, to be drained themselves by a nameless stream which fell into a nameless sea. Through ages and ages the thrushes sang, the wild bees hummed, and the bear, the deer, the fox, the lynx ranged freely.

Man came. He came stealthily, unnoted, leaving so light a trace that nothing remains to tell of his first passage but a few mysterious syllables. The river once nameless became the Connecticut; the base of a mighty primeval mountain bears the Nipmuck name Monadnock.

In this angle of New Hampshire thrust in between Massachusetts and Vermont names are a living record. The Nipmuck disappeared in proportion as the restless English colonists pushed farther and farther from the sea. They came in little companies, generally urged by some religious disagreement with those they had left behind. To escape the "Congregational way" they fled into the mountains. There they were free to follow the "Episcoparian way." As "Episcoparians" they printed the map with names which enshrined their old-home memories. Clustering within sight of the blue mass of Monadnock are neat white towns--Marlborough, Richmond, Chesterfield, Walpole, Peterborough, Fitzwilliam, Winchester--rich with "Episcoparian" suggestion.

In the early eighteenth century there came in another strain. Driven by famine, a thousand pilgrims arrived in these relatively empty lands from the North of Ireland, sturdy, strong-minded, Protestant. Grouping themselves into three communities, they named them with Irish names, Antrim, Hillsborough, Dublin. It was to Dublin that Tom and Hildred were on the way.

The subject of cars exhausted, she swung to something else.

"You like the idea of going with Guy?"

"It's great."

"I like it too. I'd rather he was with you than with anybody. You never make game of him, and yet you never humor him."

"What do you mean by that, that I never humor him?"

"Oh, well! Guy's standards aren't very high. We know that. But you never lower yours."

"How do you know I don't?"

"Because Guy says so. Don't imagine for a minute that he doesn't see. He likes you so much because he respects you."

"He respects a lot of other fellows too."

A little "H'm!" through pursed-up lips was a sign of dissent. "I wonder. He goes with them, I know, and rather envies them, which is what I mean by his standards not being very high; but--"

"Oh, Guy's all right. The fellows you speak of are sometimes a little fresh; but he knows where to draw the line. He'll go to a certain point; but you won't get him beyond it."

"And he owes that to you."

"Oh, no, he doesn't, not in the least."

"Well, _I_--" she held the personal pronoun for emphasis--"think he does."

In this good opinion she was able to be firm because she seemed older than he. In reality she was two years younger, but life in a larger society had given her something of the tone of a woman of the world. This development on her part disconcerted him. So long as she had been the slip of a thing he remembered, prim, sedate, old-fashioned as the term is applied to children, she had not been a factor in his relations with the Ansley family. Now, suddenly, he saw her as the most important factor of all. The emergence of personality troubled him. Since she was obliged to keep her eyes on the turnings of the road, he was able to study her in profile.

It was the first time he had really looked at a woman since he had summed up Maisie in Nashua. That had been two months earlier. The place which Maisie had so long held in his heart had been empty for those two months, except for a great bitterness. It was the bitterness of disillusion, of futility. Rage and pain were in it, with more of mortification than there was of either. He would never again hear of a cheap skate without thinking of the figure he had cut in the eyes of the girl whom he thought he was honoring merely in being true. All girls had been hateful to him since that day, just as all boys will be to a dog who has been stoned by one of them. Yet here he was already looking at a girl with something like fascination.

That was because fascination was the emotion she evoked. She was strange; she was arresting. You wondered what she was like. You watched her when she moved; you listened to her when she talked. Once you had heard her voice, bell-like and crystalline, you would always be able to recall it.

He noticed the way she was dressed because her knitted silk sweater was of a pattern he had never seen before. It ran in horizontal dog-toothed bands, shading from green to blue, and from blue to a dull red. Green was the predominating color, grass-green, jade-green, sea-green, sage-green, but toned to sobriety by this red of old brick, this blue of indigo. Indigo was the short plain skirt, and the stockings below it. An indigo tam-o'-shanter was pinned to her smooth, glossy, bluish-black hair with a big carnelian pin. He remembered that he used to think her Cambodian. He thought so again.

Having arrived at the house, they found no one but Pilcher to receive them. Mrs. Ansley had gone out to tea; Mr. Guy had left word for Miss Hildred to bring Mr. Tom to the club, where he was playing tennis.

"Do you care to go?"

Knowing that he couldn't spend three weeks in Dublin without facing this invitation, he had decided in advance to accept it the first time it came.

"If you go."

"All right; let's. But you'd like first to go to your room, wouldn't you? Pilcher, take Mr. Whitelaw up. I'll wait here with the car. We'll start as soon as you come down." Running up the stairs, he wondered whether it would be the proper thing for him to change to his new white flannels, when, as if divining his perplexity, she called after him. "Come just as you are. Don't stop to put on other things. I'll go as I am too."

This maternal foresight was again on guard as they turned from the road into the driveway to the club.

"Do you want to come and be introduced to a lot of people, or would you rather browse about by yourself? You can do whichever you like."

He replied with a suggestion. As a good many cars would be parked in the narrow space of the club avenues, he thought she had better jump out at the club steps, leaving him to find a space where the car could stand. He would hang around there till Guy's game was over and the party was ready to go home.

Having parked the car, he was in with the chauffeurs, some of whom were old acquaintances. True to his formula, he went about among them, shaking hands, and asking for their news. They were oddly alike, not only in their dustcoats and chauffeurs' caps, but in features and cast of mind.

"You got a job?" he was asked in his turn.

"Been taken on to travel with young Ansley. We stay here for three weeks, and then go out west."

"Loot pretty good?"

"Oh, just about the same, and, of course, I get my expenses."

"Pretty soft, what?" came from an Englishman.

"Yes, but then it's only for the summer."

These duties done, he felt free to stroll off till he found a convenient rock on which to sit by the lakeside. Lighting a cigarette, he was glad of a half hour to himself in which to enjoy the scene. It was a reposeful scene, because all that was human and sporting in it was lost in the living spirit of the background.

It was what he had always felt in this particular landscape, and had never been able to define till now--its quality of life. It was life of another order from physical life, and on another plane. You might have said that it reached you out of some phase of creation different from that of Earth. These hills were living hills; this lake was a living lake. Through them, as in the serene sky, a Presence shone and smiled on you. He had often noticed, during the summer at the inn-club, that you could sit idle and silent with that Presence, and not be bored. You looked and looked; you thought and thought; you were bathed about in tranquillity. People might be running around, and calling or shouting, as they were doing now in the tennis courts on a ledge of the hillside above him, not five hundred yards away, but they disturbed you no more than the birds or the butterflies. The Presence was too immense, too positive, to allow little things to trouble it. Rather, it took them and absorbed them, as if the Supreme Activity, which for millions of years before there was a man had been working to transform this spot into a cup of overflowing loveliness, could use anything that came Its way.

So he sat and smoked and thought and felt soothed. It was early enough in the summer for the birds to be singing from all the wooded terraces and the fringe of lakeside trees. Calls from the tennis courts, cries from young people climbing on the raft in the lake or diving from the spring-board, came to him softened and sweet. It was living peace, invigorating, restful.

XXXVI

A woman passed along the driveway, and looked at him. He looked at her. The rock on which he sat being no more than a dozen yards from where she walked, they could see each other plainly. It seemed to him that as she went by she relaxed her pace to study him. She was a little woman, pretty, sad-faced, neatly dressed and perhaps fifty years of age. Having passed once, she turned on her steps and passed again. She passed a third time and a fourth. Each time she passed she gave him the same long scrutinizing look, without self-consciousness or embarrassment. He thought she might be a lady's maid or a chauffeur's wife.

He turned to watch a young man taking a swan dive from the spring-board. Having run the few steps which was all the spring-board allowed of, he stood poised on the edge, feet together, his arms at his thighs. With the leap forward his arms went out at right angles. When he turned toward the water they bent back behind his head, his palms twisted upward. Nearing the surface they pointed downward, cleaving the lake with a clean, splashless penetration. The whole movement had been lithe and graceful, the curve of a swan's neck, the spring of a flying fish.

Not till she was close beside him did he notice that the little woman had left the roadway, crossed the intervening patch of blueberry scrub, and seated herself on a low bowlder close to his own.

Her self-possession was that of a woman with a single dominating motive. "You've just arrived with Miss Ansley, haven't you?"

The voice, like the manner, was intense and purposeful. In assenting, he had the feeling of touching something elemental, like hunger or fire, which wouldn't be denied.

"And you're at Harvard."

He assented to this also.

"At Harvard they call you the Whitelaw Baby, don't they?"

"I've heard so. Why do you ask?"

"Because I'm the nurse from whom the Whitelaw baby was stolen nearly twenty years ago. My name is Nash."

A memory came to him of something far away. He could hear Honey saying he had seen her, a pretty little Englishwoman, and that Nash was her name. Looking at her now, he saw that she was more than a pretty little Englishwoman; she was a soul in torture, with a flame eating at the heart. He felt sorry for her, but not so sorry as to be free from impatience at the dogging with which the Whitelaw baby followed him.

"Why do you say this to me?"

"Because of what I've heard from the family. They've spoken of you. They think it--queer."

"They think what queer?"

"That your name is Whitelaw--that your father's name was Theodore--that you look so much like the rest of them. Mr. Whitelaw's name is Henry Theodore--"

"And my father's name was only Theodore. My mother's name was Lucy. I was born in The Bronx. I'm exactly nineteen years of age. I've heard that Mr. Whitelaw's son if he were living now would be twenty."

Large gray eyes with silky drooping lids rested on his with a look of long, slow searching. "You're sure of all that?"

He tried to laugh. "As sure as you can be of what's not within your own recollection. I've been told it. I've reason to believe it."

"I'd no reason to believe that I should ever find my boy again; but I know I shall."

"That must be a comfort to you in the trial you've had to face."

"It hasn't been a trial exactly, because you bear a trial and live through it. This has been spending every day and every night in the lake of fire and brimstone. I wonder if you've any idea of what it's like."

"I don't suppose I have."

"If you did have--" He thought she was going to say that if he did have he would allow himself to become the Whitelaw baby in order to relieve her anguish, but she struck another note. "I hadn't the least suspicion of what had been done to me till the two footmen had lifted the little carriage up over the steps and into the hall. Then I raised the veil to take my baby out, and I--I fell in a dead swoon."

He waited for her to go on again.

"Try to imagine what it is to find in place of the living child you've laid in its bed with all the tenderness in your soul--to find in place of that a dirty, ugly, stuffed thing, about a baby's size.... For days after that I was just as if I was drugged. If I came to for a few minutes I prayed that I mightn't live. I didn't want to look the mother and father in the face."

"But hadn't you told them anything about it?"

"There was nothing to tell. The baby had vanished. I'd seen nothing; I'd heard nothing. Neither had my friend who was with me, and who's married now, in England. If an evil spirit had done it, it couldn't have been silenter, or more secret. It was a mystery then; it's been a mystery ever since."

"But you raised an alarm? You made a search?"

"The whole country raised the alarm. There wasn't a corner, or a suspicious character, that wasn't searched. We knew it had been done for ransom, and the ransom was ready if ever the baby had been returned. The father and mother were that frantic they'd have done anything. There never was a baby in the world more loved, or more lovable. All three of us--the father, the mother, and myself--would have died for him."

He grew interested in the story for its own sake. "And did you never get any idea at all?"

"Nothing that ever led to anything. For a good five years Mr. Whitelaw never rested. Mrs. Whitelaw--but it's no use trying to tell you. It can't be told; it can't be so much as imagined. Even when you've lived through it you wonder how you ever did. You wonder how you go on living day by day. It's almost as if you were condemned to eternal punishment. The clues were the worst."

"You mean that--?"

"If we could have known that the child was dead--well, you make up your mind to that. After a while you can take up life again. But not to know anything! Just to be left wondering! Asking yourself what they're doing with him!--whether they're giving him the right kind of food!--whether they're giving him _any_ kind of food!--whether they're going to kill him, and how they're going to kill him, and who's to do the killing! To go over these questions morning, noon, and night--to eat with them, and sleep with them, and wake with them--and then the clues!"

"You said they were the worst."

"Because they always made you hope. No matter how often you'd been taken in you were ready to be taken in again. Each time they said there was a chance you couldn't help thinking that there _might_ be a chance. It didn't matter how much you told yourself it wasn't likely. You couldn't make yourself believe it. You felt that he'd _have_ to be found, that he couldn't help being found. The whole thing was so impossible that you'd have to go to his room and look at his little empty crib to persuade yourself that he wasn't there."

To divert her from going over the ground she must have gone over thousands of times already, he broke in with a new line of thought.

"But I've heard that they don't want to find him now--a grown-up man."

She stared at him fiercely. "_I_ do. _I_ want to find him. They were not to blame. I was. It makes the difference."

"Still he was their son."

"He was their son, and they've suffered; but they can rest in spite of their suffering. I can't. They can afford to give up hope because they've nothing with which to reproach themselves. If they were me--"

He began to understand. "I see. If you could find him and bring him back, even if they didn't want him--"

"I should have done _that_ much. It would be something. It's why I pleaded with them to let me stay with them when I suppose the very sight of me must have tortured them. I swore that I'd give my life to trying to--"

"But what could you do when even the child's father, with all his money, couldn't--?"

"I could pray. They couldn't. They're not like that. Praying's all I've ever done which wasn't done by somebody else. I've prayed as I don't think many people have ever prayed; and now I've come to where--"

"Where what?"

The light in her eyes was lambent, leaping and licking like a flame.

"Where I'm quieter." She made her statement slowly. "I seem to know that he'll be given back to me because the Bible says that when we pray believing that we _have_ what we ask for we shall receive it. Latterly I've believed that. I haven't forced myself to believe it. It's just come of its own accord--something like a certainty."

The claim in the look which without wavering fixed itself upon him prompted another question. "And has that certainty got anything to do with me?"

"I wonder if it hasn't."

"But I don't see how it can have, when you never saw me in your life till twenty minutes ago."

"I never saw you; but I'd heard of you. I meant to see you as soon as I got a chance. I never got it till to-day."

"But how did you know?"

"That it was you? This way. You see I'm here with Miss Lily. She's staying for a few nights at the inn-club before going to make some visits."

"Who's Miss Lily?"

"She was the second of the two children born after my little boy was taken. First there was Mr. Tad. Then there was a little girl. She knows Miss Ansley. Miss Ansley told her you were coming up, that you'd very likely be here this afternoon, so I came and waited. Even if I hadn't seen you drive up with her--if we'd met in the heart of Africa--I'd have known.... You've been taken for Mr. Tad already. You know that, don't you?"

"I know there's a resemblance."

"It's more than a resemblance. It's--it's the whole story. Mr. Whitelaw himself saw it first. When he came back after meeting you, in this very place, nearly two years ago, he was--well, he was terribly upset. If it hadn't been for Mr. Tad and Miss Lily--"

"And their mother too."

"Yes, I suppose; and their mother too. But that's not what we're considering. Whether they want you or not, if you _are_ the boy--"

He tried to speak very gently. "But you see, I couldn't be. I had a mother. I don't remember much about her because I was only six or seven when she died. But two things I recall--the way she loved me, and the way I loved her. If I thought there was any truth in what you--in what you suspect--I couldn't love her any more."

"I don't see why."

"Because I should be charging her with a crime. Would you do that--to your own mother--after she was dead?"

"If she was dead it wouldn't matter."

"Not to her. But it would to me."

"It couldn't do you any harm."

"I'm the only judge of that."

There was exasperation in the eyes which seemed unable to tear themselves from his face.

"But most people would like to have it proved that they'd been--"

"Been born rich men's sons. That's what you were going to say, isn't it? I daresay I should have liked it, if.... But what's the use? We don't gain anything by discussing it. You want to find some one who'll pass for the lost boy. I understand that; and I understand how much it would lessen all the grief--"

She interrupted quickly. "Yes, but I wouldn't try to foist an imposter on them, not if it would take me out of hell. If I didn't believe--"

"But you don't believe now; you can't believe. What I've told you about myself must make believing impossible."

"Oh, if I hadn't believed when believing was impossible I shouldn't have the little bit of mind I've got now. Believing when it was impossible was all that kept me sane."

"But you won't go on doing it, not as far as I'm concerned?"

She rose, with dignity. "Why not? I shan't be hurting you, shall I? In a way we all believe it--even the Whitelaw family--even Miss Ansley."

He jumped up, startled. "Did she tell you so?"

"She didn't tell me so exactly. We were talking about it--we've all talked of it more than you suppose--and Miss Ansley said that you couldn't be what you are unless you were--_somebody_."

He tried to take this jocosely. "No, of course I couldn't."

"Oh, but I know what she meant." She moved away from him, speaking over her shoulder as she crossed the blueberry scrub, "It was more than what's in the words."

XXXVII

Except for a passing glimpse in Dublin, Tom never saw Lily Whitelaw till in December he met her at the ball at which Hildred Ansley came out. As to going to this ball he had his usual fit of funk, but Hildred had insisted.

"But, Tom, you must. You're the one I care most about."

"I shouldn't know what to do."

"I'll see to that. You'll only have to do what I tell you."

"And I haven't got an evening coat with tails."

"Well, get one. If you look as well in it as you do in your dinner-jacket outfit--and you'd better have a white waistcoat, a silk hat, and a pair of white gloves. What'll happen to you when you get there you can leave to me. Now that I know you look so well, and dance so well, you'll give me no trouble at all."

Her kindness humbled him. He felt the necessity of taking it as kindness and nothing more. Knowing too that he must school his own emotions to a sense of gratitude, he imagined that he so schooled them.

With the five hundred dollars he had earned through the summer added to what remained of Honey's legacy, he had enough for his current year at Harvard, with a margin over. The tailed evening coat, the white waistcoat, the silk hat, the gloves, he looked upon as an investment. He went to the ball.

It was given at the Shawmut, the new hotel with a specialty in this sort of entertainment. The ballroom had been specially designed so as to afford a spectacle. A circular cup, surrounded by a pillared gallery for chaperons and couples preferring to "sit out," you descended into it by one of four broad shallow staircases, whence the _coup d'oeil_ was superb.

By being more or less passive, he got through the evening better than he had expected. Knowing scarcely anyone, he fell back on his formula.

"I mustn't be conscious of it. I must take not knowing anyone for granted, as I should if I were in a crowd at a theater, or the lobby of this hotel. If I feel like a stray cat I shall look like a stray cat. If I feel at ease I shall look at ease."

In this he was supported by the knowledge of wearing the right thing. Even Guy, whom he had met for a minute in the cloakroom, had been surprised into a compliment.

"Gee whiz! Who do you think you are? The old lady's been afraid you'd look like an outsider. Now she'll be struck silly. Lot of girls here that you'll put their eye out."