Part 12

"What happened? Your sister's orphans come to you. You plunge into life, go into business which you detest, lose your money, go to work as a clerk, by George! You of all people!--Keep a roof over them, bring them up and hang me if I don't think you were idiotically happy in it all until I brought this Old Man of the Sea!--What right had I to pick him up and bring him and bungle it all? And why the hell didn't you warn me not to fetch him? I thought I was helping you out. I'd sooner have chucked the brute overboard--I would, by Heaven!"

For a moment I could reply nothing at all to Dibdin. His estimate and account of my actions were natural enough to him who, despite his burly manner, exaggerates everybody's qualities. It seemed the more remarkable that he who so firmly believed in the second chance should now find no word to say in Pendleton's favor. But I could see clearly enough that what troubled him was the pain he instinctively realized the departure of the children from me to Pendleton was certain to bring me.

"Why didn't you cable me, 'Lose the brute?'" he took up his argument.

"Because, my dear fellow," I put my hand on his arm across the table, "it was too late; once you had found him and told him of what had occurred in his absence, it was too late. Would you like to live with the menacing uncertainty of him overhanging in space? Rather have him here and face him. Besides, the children are his"--I knew I must state my view squarely on that head--"If he is fit to take them, then have them he must, regardless."

"Regardless of you, you mean?" He put it darkly.

"Yes--regardless of me, certainly. I don't count."

"By the Lord!" and his fine head shot upwards in a gesture that was in itself invigorating. "D'you know you are twenty times the man you were?" he cried. "I couldn't have believed it. You--you're stupendous!"

I laughed and waved him away with a "_Retro, Satanas_."

"You're going it blind like that," he ran on, disregarding me,--"Salmon and Byrd," with a laugh--"losing all your money and then--Visconti's--slaving for the kids--meeting it all--by gad, you are living life!--heroic, I call it--I take off my hat to you!"

"Put it on again," I murmured, moved by his vehemence. It was certainly agreeable to hear such words from Dibdin, who never lied. Praise is a savory dish, not a thing that my misspent life has been surfeited with, and it was exquisitely soothing to one's vanity. But it was clear enough that Dibdin was wrong. His usually lucid view was obscured by the tangle of circumstances that weighed upon him. Naturally, I could not leave him in his error.

"If you knew," I managed to stammer, "the malignant fear that is eating my liver white, you--"

"Fear of what?" he broke in.

"Of turning those kids over to him;" I lowered my voice--"just that and--nothing else."

"Just that," he repeated gloomily, nodding his head. "Who would have supposed it? By the Lord! If ever there was a bull in a China shop, I am that bull. Why the devil did I ever pick the brute up? Look here!" he flashed with sudden inspiration, "why not deport him as we imported him, eh? I might manage it--I might!"

"No--no, Dibdin--neither you nor I would do such a thing."

"Why not?" he growled.

"That would make us--worse than he is, or was," I explained sadly. For I must own that for an instant my heart leaped at his suggestion. "Besides," I went on prosily, "it's not so easy to lay a ghost when once you've raised it. We've got to believe him, Dibdin, my boy--if only for the young ones' sake. He will probably get his job, and the thing to do now is not to arouse his suspicion of how we feel about him. Believe everything he says--believe in him. Thousands every year, according to the newspapers, turn up willfully missing! He was tired of the humdrum life and lit out; that is all there was to it. Now he wants to try back. You yourself thought he ought to have another chance."

There was genuine pathos in old Dibdin's voice when he spoke out with a humid somber look:

"By George, that chap's the Nemesis of us all! By his one willful act of destructive irresponsibility he has affected all our lives destructively. It's maddening that one worthless brute should be able to do all that. He killed Laura, damn him; he orphaned these kids; he's upset your life--he makes wretched conspirators of you and me--g-r-r-r! I'd like to pound him to a jelly!"

I laughed joylessly.

"What would that undo?"

"Nothing, I dare say," snapped Dibdin. "Besides, you really have no complaint, boy. You tower, Randolph, my lad; yes, by George! you tower head and shoulders above any one I know! His very villainy has made you over--blown the breath of life into you."

I believe I answered something flippant.

"Look here!" he cried, with a sudden movement upsetting a glass of water and disregarding it. "If those kids go over to him, we can keep an eye on him--just the same--as though we were with them!"

"How d'you mean?" I queried, puzzled.

"That girl--what's her name--Alicia! She'll keep an eye on him--and them. She's sharp, I tell you, with her innocent blue eyes. Give you a daily report like--like--"

"No!" I emphatically interrupted him. "That, never! She is not going from my house--certainly not to him!"

I was the more abashed by my own vehemence when I saw Dibdin staring at me with lifted eyebrows.

"Why--you are not--" he began blankly--but I interrupted him hotly.

"I am nothing!--She is to me just as Jimmie and Laura and Randolph are, but they are unfortunately his. Don't you know the meaning of responsibility for young lives, Dibdin? I want to give her her chance, educate her, make a fine woman of her. They have a father; she has no one but me. I can't turn her out--and I wish," I added lamely, "I had as much right to keep them all."

"Whew!" he whistled in renewed astonishment.

"I can only say I don't know you any more. I used to know you, but I'm proud to make the acquaintance of the new Mr. Randolph Byrd."

"Don't be a damn fool, Dibdin," I mumbled in exasperation. "You know you are talking rot. Why the devil are you so interested in the kids? There is that cheque you sent--!"

"You haven't cashed it," he interposed, moving his shoulders as one shaking off something. "Why the deuce haven't you?"

"I will some day," I grinned at him feebly, "when I need it more. But you haven't answered my question."

I felt I was goading him brutally but for once I seemed to have the dear old tramp upon the hip. For all his gruffness he was as full of emotions as anybody. It seemed to me absurd for a man to hide his implanted instinct, one of the noblest of all the little hidden root-cellars of our instincts, under a false shame or indifference. Women are wiser--they don't hide theirs; and I had become shameless about mine.

"Why," I repeated, "are you so much interested in those kids?"

"Don't be an ass!" he grunted, looking down upon the wet tablecloth, and a spasm as of pain crossed his countenance.

"Ah, you see!" I laughed, attempting to lighten his mood.

"Randolph," he uttered in a strange solemn tone that sent a slight thrill through me. "I told you once there was a woman I had cared about--and only one."

"Yes--but you never married her."

"No," he continued in the etiolated tone of a dead grief. "She was married already when I knew her."

And then my sympathy went out to grizzled old Dibdin.

"I am sorry," I murmured, touching his hand across the table. "Did I know her?"

"Yes," he said quietly, "you knew her. It was Laura."

In a flash of poignantly bitter and vain regret I saw the vista of the dead years--of what might have been! ...

*CHAPTER XVI*

Miracles--miracles are common as blackberries!

Pendleton is once again a faithful worker in the vineyard of the insurance company.

A commonplace miracle enough, but all miracles, I suppose, are commonplaces that happen to surprise us or that we don't understand.

The abstract office, I am sure, has more joy over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine--but I do not wish to be blasphemous. Like Death, it claims us all in the end. A voluptuary, an idler like myself, or a renegade who broke from it indefensibly like Jim Pendleton--all, sooner or later--turn or return to its yoke like starved runaway slaves--the unrelenting office! What a change it must be to Jim after the beaches and the barrooms of the gorgeous East! But for one closely relevant circumstance I could find it in my heart to be sorry for him.

What a strange and wonderful institution is the family! Another of those commonplace miracles so charged with mystery, like birth and death. If I were a classical writer or a Sir Barnes Newcome I might expatiate at length upon the subject. The things we swallow and condone and cover up for the sake of its ties!

Suffice it, however, that Jim Pendleton is quietly working out his salvation, a salary and plans for re-creating his dismembered home.

The children are becoming quite used to him. Randolph seems to be the nearest to him and Jimmie remains stubbornly farthest away. It is painful to think however that Jimmie's youth will the more certainly and completely detach him from me in the end.

When is it all to happen? I for one dare not fix the fateful day which, with every passing hour, draws nearer. No one fixes the day. It is left dangling in the air by an invisible thread of uncertain length and strength--

There are times when I could cry out in my anguish, my agony of nameless pain, fear, apprehension. But what a spectacle I should make of myself if I gave vent to emotion! We humans are not so much whited sepulchers as masked and silent volcanoes.

And Jim Pendleton--what is he thinking, feeling? He is suave, quiet, controlled. He is very gentle with them all, and particularly soft-spoken with Alicia. He has taken to consulting and confabulating with her touching the characteristics and the needs of the children. At times it seems to me that I cannot bear it and once at least I have called her and spoken harshly to her, and charged her with having mislaid a volume of _Book Prices Current_.

How childish on my part! But my nerves are not what once they were. They are tetchy and fractious. It has been decreed that I am to have a vacation and go away for a fortnight--go to Maine or New Hampshire. If I were to burst into laughter at the thought, I might end like an hysterical woman, in uncontrollable tears. I could no more go now than I could spread my arms and fly. I am as remote from the holiday spirit as from the North Star.

Poor Dibdin--how mistaken he is in me! He blathers of my "towering head and shoulders"--b-r-r-r! it makes me shudder with shame. What a weakling I am in the face of life!

No--I am a toiler in Bleecker Street, of its reeking pavements, its fly-infested purlieus, where the Italian children grub and shout and sun themselves in the gutters, in the air of a thousand smells throbbing under the noonday sun. The homecoming to the third-rate suburb used to be refreshing and soothing like a delicate perfume. To see the children laughing and rosy in the square inch of garden, to see Alicia, sparkling with her young energy and enthusiasm,--it had all been like coming into a cool temple filled with shapes of beauty, after wandering in some fetid bazaar. Now it is dust and ashes. I could never convey to Dibdin or to any one else how alone I feel in the world, what chill and cutting blasts of desolation sweep into my life every time I think of its present or its future.

Minot Blackden came in to Visconti's at noon to-day to drag me out to lunch.

"Let's stop in at my studio for a minute," he proposed as he steered me round a corner. "Something for you to see."

He showed me a small rose window designed for some church in Cincinnati and turned expectantly to catch my exclamations. I gasped out some inanities.

"Art, my boy!" he gloated. "That's art for you!"

"It is, indeed!" I assented helplessly. "Only surprising thing is how a real artist can acquire so much fame. Seems to me I see something about you in every Sunday newspaper I take up."

"Ah, that's business instinct," he chuckled. "I am no amateur, I can tell you. I live this thing. You may think it insane, but sometimes I think I am Benvenuto Cellini reincarnated." He was not laughing; he was in deadly earnest. "Come in," he added solemnly, directing me to a door in the rear of his shop. "I want to introduce you to my press agent."

I was duly introduced to a plain bustling Mrs. Smith of perhaps thirty-five, who rose from a typewriter and spoke with a devotional, a reverential fervor of "our work", while casting worshipful glances at the artist. How do the Minot Blackdens inspire such adoration? I know I have rediscovered no lost art and it is plain I am no incarnation of Benvenuto Cellini. No one will ever worship me.

"Have you seen Miss Bayard lately?" Blackden inquired as we sat down to an Italian luncheon, beginning with sardines and red pepper.

"No--I haven't," I answered, surprised. "Do you know her?"

"Do I know her! Don't you remember introducing us in front of Brentano's?"

I had forgotten it, and it seemed to hurt him that I did not regard his movements and events with the devotional attention of his press agent.

"Of course," I murmured lamely. "You've seen her again?" He smiled a detached, superior smile such as the immortals might smile over erring, unregenerate humans, and ran his fingers through his dark, artistic hair.

"I see her quite often," he explained. "Very wonderful woman, Miss Bayard. She is a great inspiration to me in my art. My art has taken strides and leaps since I met her. Surprised you don't seize the opportunity of seeing her oftener--a truly artistic nature!"

"Ass!" I thought. But aloud I explained that domestic preoccupations left me little time for social or any other visits. The casualness of my answer seemed to brighten Blackden perceptibly.

I recalled, incidentally, that I had promised Gertrude, though heaven knows why, to let her know the upshot of Pendleton's return.

"Tell her, when you see her, that I am coming very soon. I've had a good deal on my hands. She will understand."

"She understands everything," murmured Blackden absently. "Ah, there is a woman! Yes, I'll tell her." And his eyes glowed in anticipation.

He was positively affectionate to me, this austere artist, when he left me at Visconti's door.

To come home, as I have said, used to be a delight. The presence of one person in it has changed it to a torment.

This evening when I approached my chalet on the rock, I found Pendleton in high good humor playing a game with the children on the lawn.

A flap of canvas, making a sort of pup tent, had been fastened to the tree for Jimmie, to give him that touch of savage life which even at Crestlands little boys seem to crave. Savage life at Crestlands! Yet once the Mohicans roamed here and the Mohican that is in all of us craves an outlet in Jimmie. It craved an outlet in me when I saw the great hulk of Pendleton squatting tailor-fashion in the tent entrance, enacting the role of cannibal chief. I stood unobserved for a moment, watching the scene with bitterness in my heart and shame on top of the bitterness.

"Bring the prisoner before me," grunted Pendleton in the character of the chief.

Tittering in suppressed glee, Randolph and Laura marched Jimmie up to Pendleton, who measured the child with a fearful frown and demanded where were the other prisoners.

"They escaped, your majesty," exploded Randolph with stifled laughter. "This white man alone dared to remain and brave your power!"

"He should be boiled and eaten by rights," Pendleton growled truculently. "He dares to face the Big Chief of the Cannibal Islands! Because of his great courage, however," he added as an afterthought, "we shall spare his life. Of such stuff great warriors are made."

"Beware, your Majesty," giggled Laura, "he might treacherously plan some harm to you. He is very brave, this white chief!"

"We see he is a desperate blade," answered Pendleton judicially. "But we admire bravery. He shall be our spear-bearer in battle."

"No, I want to be eaten!" shrilled Jimmie in his excitement, whereat the others shrieked and shook with laughter.

Alicia alone seemed moderate in her merriment. I hugged it to my heart that she appeared to look a shade sadly upon the scene. But I am probably wrong. I went indoors and sank my chin upon my hands with a turmoil of emotions which I wish to forget.

Pendleton is winning them, there is no doubt about that. In all the world there is not a soul who would cling to me, excepting possibly Griselda. Shakespeare never uttered anything truer than that life was "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I wish I had never been born.

This morning I longed to romp and riot with the children, to shake off every atom of care, to laugh and roll on the floor with them, to be happy as I have been happy, but I could not. Held in the grip of a heartache that permeated every fiber in my body, I slunk sullenly away to my study after dinner to be alone. But even that I could not have.

Pendleton followed on my heels, lit a cigar and inquired whether he could have a talk with me. Naturally I could not prevent it. I can prevent nothing, for I am no longer master in my own house.

"Old man," he began in his suave thick voice, which he means to be friendly, which to me seems orgulous with triumph. "Seems to me you're about due for a rest."

"What d'you mean?" I faltered, wincing, though inwardly I knew well enough what he meant.

"Just what I say," he smiled. "You have worked hard enough--supporting my family. Time I took the load off your shoulders--that's what I mean."

I waved my hand in a gesture of deprecation, but I could not speak.

"Oh, I know," he insisted doggedly, though even now he cannot look me in the eyes, "you didn't do it specially for me. You did it because you are a man--you--bah! they don't make 'em like you, as I've told you. But you don't want praise from me, I know that. You don't need it. What's more to the point is, it's time I took a flat or small house in one of the suburbs and had the lot of them move over and live on me for a while. About time," he nodded his head and shifted his cigar, "about time!"

Every word was a stab, but I steeled myself for the ordeal. Wasn't that what I had been expecting all this time?

"When--do you want to make the change?" I endeavored to speak crisply, as when I address the National City or the Guaranty Trust over the telephone at Visconti's.

"Well, I thought I'd begin to look round to-morrow. There'll be the place to find, some furniture to get--the installment plan will help--whole job ought to be fixed up in two or three weeks, I guess," he added with a laugh. "Uncle Ranny will have to come to supper pretty often to keep the kids as happy as we'd like to see them, eh?"

"But a going household--" I spoke quickly in a sort of last spasm of pitiful expostulation--"it's quite a--an undertaking to set going?"

"Yes--I know," he nodded soberly. "Don't think I don't know I'll have to push the wheel hard--with both shoulders. But d'you know," he lifted a confidential eyebrow, "that young woman--Alicia--will be a great help to me--quite a little housekeeper, she is--quite a kid--I hope Laura will take after her."

My heart was of lead. If he was watching my face, he must have perceived a deadly pallor sweeping every drop of blood away from it. There was a pounding in my ear's like rushing waters.

"Alicia," I heard myself saying as one speaking after being rescued from drowning, "Alicia, you know, isn't my child--or yours. I can't send her to you. She--there are formalities--but, anyway, her wishes are a factor in the matter. I'll do anything, old man," my head seemed to swell suddenly and shoot upwards like a cork from an abyss, and my face was damp with perspiration--"anything, but I can't send that child to you unless--unless she is keen--you see that, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, I see--certainly." He was looking away as he spoke. I have a lingering hope he had not been watching my face. "That's all true, of course. But put yourself in my place, Randolph. Here are three motherless children. She, that girl, has been a kind of mother to them. Seems to have a born faculty for it. What would I do without her, just starting in like that--you understand!"

"Surely, surely!" I hastened to assure him, because I felt slightly more master of myself. "But you see my point--she doesn't belong to me. And even if she did--I can't just pass her about--it's a responsibility--her wish--what I mean is, I can't coerce her in any way."

And suddenly I saw the children away from me, with this dubious, mysterious man, alone, and my heart was wrung with agony. With Alicia, at least--but, no! I could not acquiesce so completely.

"Coerce--certainly not," was his wholly reasonable comment. "I reckon a word from you would go a long way, though. But I see your point, Randolph, I see your point. Tell you what!" he began in a new tone. "Suppose we put it this way. I'll speak to her myself--I'll put it up to her--leave you out of it altogether, see?--leave it to her to decide--so you won't have to--you'll be neutral, you see?--What's the matter with doing it that way?"

A thousand devils within me moved me with all but irresistible force to jump at his throat, to stifle his words, to choke the beastly life out of him, to end the torment then and there. But I could not--I could not. I knew he was expressing by his words his sense of certainty that he could win over Alicia, as he had won the children--that I was helpless in his hands--that I was a weakling whom he was making the barest pretense of respecting--that he could strip my household of all I held dear with an ease so laughable that he could not even bother to ridicule me. And yet I could not rise up and strangle him.

As one in a vise, I sat for a moment chained by wild conflicting passions, and then--a strange thing happened. A feeling of nakedness, a sense of being stripped of everything like another Job, of being utterly alone in the world fell about me like an atmosphere. I felt deprived of everything, though not bereft. It was an odd feeling, a sort of involuntary renunciation of all that was my life in which yet I calmly acquiesced. I faced and addressed Pendleton almost with tranquillity. Certainly I experienced a strange new dignity that was very soothing, very grateful, as water to the thirsty after battle.

"Very well, Jim," I heard myself saying quietly. "Go ahead your own way. That perhaps is best."

All that I remember is a gleam of triumph in his eye. No word of all his chunnering and maundering afterwards do I recall. He talked on, smoking, for perhaps four or five minutes and then he left me.

By myself I felt at once strangely heavy as a mountain and insubstantial as the shadow thereof.

*CHAPTER XVII*

Again and again I have been told that I am a fool. But not even my dearest friends have called me mad.

Are the gods then really so anxious to destroy me? What have I done to deserve it?

This morning, after last night's interview with Pendleton, I saw Alicia--suddenly saw her as it seemed for the first time. And yet an overwhelming realization flooded me like a tidal wave that through countless ages she and she alone had been inexpressibly dear to me. She, the divine ideal I had been pursuing, catching fitful glimpses of in glades and forests, on mountain tops, in palaces, in fantastic surroundings, amid incredible scenes of a dim and ancient dream-life, more real than any reality--_she_ was Alicia, this child Alicia.

And I am more than twice her age!