Part 13

Nothing can come of it but misery and wretchedness for me. By no word or sign dare I convey such a thing to her or to any one else--to no one except these pale pages that receive my poor motley confidences with the only discretion I can trust.

She is dearer to me than all the worlds. Yet not only must I remain dumb but I must guard my every word, gesture, thought even, as never before.

In the midst of all else this is a catastrophe. Yet it overshadows and overbalances everything.

Let me disclose the truth by so much as a sign, and every act and motive of mine becomes abruptly suspect, and I shall stand revealed for the immoral, shameful creature that I suppose I am.

I could face that, I believe, if there were any possibility--but there isn't.

I must hide and cover and conquer the feeling by inanition. But how can I, when she is so untellably dear and precious to me?

No, no! A thousand times no! I cannot let Pendleton try to inveigle her to leave me. No!

And all I have to do is to betray this garish resolution and my secret will be out, and all that I am and have done will stand forth as naked pretense and I shall appear stripped and manacled like a common criminal too good for the hangman.

And I have dared to judge Pendleton!

The time-honored remedy in fiction, when a man finds himself in love with any one he has no business to love is, I believe, to go away, to travel. How ridiculous that sounds to me. The only place I can go to is Visconti's. To Visconti's! And now I have come back from Visconti's and I cannot stay in the house.

I cannot stay in the house because Alicia is in it--and Pendleton!

Oh, he will have his way, I am sure! The Old Man of the Sea infallibly has. Why should the unscrupulous always have the advantage? I abhor to think of him.

It is Alicia that is filling my mind, my heart, my life. I have been trying to think of her even until yesterday as a child, and I know I have been deceitful. She is a woman--she is womanhood. I see her now in her radiance and every movement and gesture of her, every act, every glance speaks of the freshness and youth of life, of a supreme, a divine beauty. I have called her a child and I yearn to sink at her knees and cry out my anguish and my adoration. I am the child, helpless before her. Whatever I conceal, I cannot conceal what her going would do to me. It would shatter what remains of my life. And I suffered Pendleton yesterday to propose calmly that she go over to him--trafficking in Alicia!--and with Pendleton! It is stifling to think of. I must go out. But I cannot let any of them see me. I feel like a thief in my own house. The window--ah, I can slip out for at least a solitary hour under the stars!

I did not manage to get out under the stars after all. Just as I began to fumble with the screen Alicia asked leave to come in. No presence could have been more welcome to me, but the dark thoughts under which I had been brooding made me wince with pain as she entered. Nevertheless I contrived to greet her with almost normal cheerfulness.

"Uncle Ranny," she began hurriedly in an undertone, coming close to me, "is it really coming, then?"

"What do you mean, my dear?" I asked her, though such subterfuges are quite useless with Alicia.

"Oh, he's just been telling me that he has his eye on a flat near Columbia University in New York--that he expects to have it going by the time the schools open--hasn't he told you?"

"What else did he say?" I queried breathlessly.

"Nothing much--only he asked me whether I didn't think it was wise to get settled there as soon as possible. He is very nice to me."

"Is that all?" I breathed.

"Yes, that's about all--but isn't that enough?"

I smiled feebly and sank into my chair with immense relief.

I longed to draw her to me, to enfold her, to rest her head against my heart, to hold her close and to exclude thereby all black care and worry, all overhanging shadows, all the threatening and looming clouds of existence--to make my world blissfully complete. But I am only "Uncle Ranny" to her--and I felt a shudder pass down my spine.

"And you, Alicia," I managed to say. "What did you answer?"

"Of course, I said that was true--what could I say? But oh, Uncle Ranny," she leaned toward me as she stood at my desk, "I am afraid, Uncle Ranny! They are ours--aren't they--I know he's their father, but I can't help feeling as though we were--handing them over to a stranger--Oh, I suppose I ought not say it--some one we don't know at all!"

And she burst into tears.

Blood and flesh could not bear it longer. I twitched and writhed in my chair for an instant, then I leaped up and threw my arms about her and strained her to me.

"My darling," I murmured brokenly, "and how do you suppose I feel?"

"I know," she sobbed and gently, very much as Jimmie or Laura might have done, she put her arms about me and nestled as though I were some one old and fragile for whom she had a deep affection--but that was all. Alicia's first embrace!

And then I knew also. She did not, I trust, for an instant suspect the bitterness of the cup I was that moment draining. But why should I expect anything else? The guilt in my own heart tells me enough,--and too much--of exactly where I stand. Alicia is still a child. As yet evidently she did not even suspect that Pendleton was bent upon taking her also. Suppose I prevented that, then what of the other three whom, in another way, I love no less? My head was throbbing dizzily, my pulses were beating like drums. For me this was the supreme moment of anguish and sacrifice, the dark night of the soul, that _noche oscura_ that St. John of the Cross knows so well how to describe, that shakes one's being and changes one's life forever more. My lot seemed to be to sacrifice and break myself in final and complete renunciation, to drain my cup of bitterness to its uttermost dregs.

For a moment the world was as a shadow, swaying, airy and insubstantial. The cowled monk that is buried somewhere within me was suddenly uppermost and the life of the world seemed sordid and leprous; a deadly thing rotted with lusts and passions, a thing to run away from--that was pulling me into its sensual center. But only for a moment.

Then suddenly the blood surged to my temples, as Alicia lay in my arms, and the ancient cunning of a thousand male ancestors, of savage hunters and crafty warriors who died that I might live, swept into my thews and nerves and brain and I crackled with eagerness to fight for my own.

No!--I would not--could not give up all that I held dear. I would fight! I gripped Alicia's shoulders in a spasm of fierce joy and in a hoarse guttural voice that surprised her no more than it surprised me, I breathed out:

"Never fear, Alicia--it can't be! It won't be. He hasn't done it yet. I'll do something--I don't know what as yet. But give me time--a little time--I'll work it out. We'll fight if we must--but we won't give up tamely!"

Alicia's warm cheek against mine, though with a trust that can only be described as childlike, was reward enough for victory, let alone for this still empty challenge. But an irresistible, throbbing feeling of confidence tells me that something will happen--that I shall win!

Is it simply the confidence of a fool, and the surge of melodrama that is never very far from any of us? Possibly. But my blood still throbs and my muscles still crackle with the strange eagerness and lust for battle. It may be that the fragrance and the starry look of Alicia that linger with me yet, the sweet joy and pride of Alicia when she returned my good-night kiss before she left me, the affection with which she clung, the reluctance with which she went, all have something to do with this new accession of courage. But I do not comfort myself with vain things. Alicia happens to be a girl whose affections have never been pampered by any doting parents. If she looks upon me _in loco parentis_, that ought to be enough for me. It is not enough. And the pain of that leaves a barbed sting in my breast. But that wound I shall carry gladly--I shall wear my hair shirt like the girl wife of Jacopone da Todi--if only I can play the man.

The evening and the morning were a day--the first day of a new life, and what a day!

I went down in the train with Pendleton and briskly suggested that he need not hurry with his arrangements.

"I thought," said he, with a furtive, sidelong glance at me, "that my first duty was to ease you. I owe you too much already," he added, looking out toward the drabness of the Mt. Vernon right of way.

"It's only strangers and enemies that owe each other things;" I countered easily. "Friends owe each other everything and nothing. There is no audit for such accounts."

He laughed out of proportion to the deserts of this lump of wisdom and exclaimed:

"You're great, Randolph--great!"

It was my turn to laugh, and I felt that I had the advantage of him. With the sixth sense, or the pineal gland, or whatever it is, I was conscious that he was a little afraid of me--and that did not damage my temper.

"Your experience in life has been so--peculiar," I told him, "that anybody would be glad to be of any service possible. And you must remember that Laura was my only sister. Tell me," I added conversationally, "don't you find the harness galling at times after all--you have been through?"

"Galling! Say, Randolph, those little machine people in their skyscraper beehives--cages--don't know what living is!--Freedom!" ...

For the first time I had noted the light of spontaneity glowing in his eyes, and my heart bounded: I was about to hear a confession. But on a sudden he checked himself and looked away. "Of course," he added in a forced tone, "one has to face one's responsibilities. No--take it all in all, I am glad to be doing my share of the work and carrying my burden."

I knew he was lying. I knew that his first outburst was the true Pendleton; that the addendum was meant, as politicians say, for home consumption.

"Of course, of course," I muttered hastily, "but we're only human." And alternately I cudgeled my poor wits to stand by me and prayed to them as to deities to light my way.

This lawless spirit, Pendleton, I had a vague gleam of intuition, was repenting his return to the yoke of duty, to the restraints of civilization. What, then, was it that held him? It was not a suddenly developed conscience. Of that I was certain. There was a problem I must solve and solve immediately.

We parted with cordiality at Grand Central station and twenty minutes later I was one of those little machines functioning at Visconti's.

"I want a draft at thirty days," I was saying, "for ten thousand lire on Naples. Your best rate at that date." And with the receiver to my ear I heard a voice within me, independent of the telephone, whispering:

"Could it be that he too is bewitched by Alicia?--with all his roving and experience--or is it his sense of duty to his children?"

"Four ninety-eight," said the exchange man, Hoskyns, at the National City, and "four ninety-eight," I repeated after him automatically. "Can't you do better--at thirty days?" And the independent voice in my brain put in: "Perhaps I am hipped upon the subject of Alicia?" And so the morning wore on.

Gertrude, to my surprise and confusion, rang me up at eleven.

"Good morning, Ranny," she opened sweetly. "You haven't kept your promise, have you?"

"Promise?" I repeated dully. "What promise?"

"You said you would keep me informed about Pendleton's return. You haven't done it--have you?"

"But you have been away for the summer, haven't you?" I ventured desperately.

"Yes, and I am back," she murmured gently, "and still--better come and lunch with me to-day--don't you think so?"

If there's any one thing that my career as a business man has done for me, it is to implant in my heart a hatred for procrastination and shiftiness. I had no luncheon engagement, and yet I despairingly told her I had.

"Dinner," she answered, "would suit me even better."

"I ought to go home," I protested feebly, with a sinking instinctive feeling that I really ought not to resume such relations with Gertrude.

"We'll have an early little meal, at six-thirty," she smoothly ignored me, "Until then, good-by."

I clicked the receiver angrily for a moment, but Gertrude had hung up. Her high-handed manner irritated me, but that was her characteristic. We were more leagues apart, Gertrude and I, than ever she or I could travel backward. And though the results of our meeting seemed to be unsatisfactory to Gertrude, I must in justice to her admit that she is always an admirable hostess.

I had telephoned to my house that I was not to be expected to dinner, and when Griselda had dryly answered, "Ye don't know what ye'll miss," I thought with a pang that I knew more about that than she did. Gertrude's calm and comfortable atmosphere, however, her deep chairs and sofas and the air of excluding a disorderly world, were not disagreeable to one fresh from the filthy pavements south of Fourth Street. Could those junk shops, paper-box factories, delicatessen "garages" and machine shops be in the same world with Gertrude's flat, in Gramercy Park? Yet they were only a little more than a mile away, and those were my real world, my daily environment. Gertrude's flat was now foreign ground.

"Yes--goose of a man!--don't you see? What could be better? The man comes back anxious to reassume his responsibilities. You have had a Hades of a time, but you have done the square thing, acquitted yourself like a man and a hero. And now the little romance ends happily and everything is satisfactory and you are free again--what could be more delightful?"

The heaviness of my heart portended anything but delight, but I remained silent.

"Don't think I am being trivial, Ranny," she resumed with a more sober vehemence. "It was a wonderful thing to do. I feel I was wrong in what I advised in the past. Your sticking to the children has done heaps for you--for your development, I mean--more for you than for them, perhaps," she inserted as a parenthesis with a laugh. "But don't be quixotic now. Everything's coming right in the best of all possible worlds. So don't go throwing a wrench into the machinery just because you've had the wrench in your hand so long you can't think what else to do with it!"

"I am not good at changes," I murmured gloomily. "I was catapulted from one kind of life into another by main force of circumstances. Now I don't feel I can stand being shot back into something else. The wear and tear, the strain is too great."

I will not deny that what I chiefly saw at that moment was a disruption that would rob me not only of the affection of the children of which I could not speak, but of Alicia, of whom I could speak even less.

Gertrude graciously lit a cigarette for me and sat down beside me. She herself, however, was not smoking.

"There is one change, Ranny," she began in a new and strange voice that was almost tender, "that would do you more good than anything else in the world--can you guess what I mean?"

"A trip abroad?" I fumbled uncertainly.

"No"--smiled Gertrude quietly laying her hand on mine, "I mean--marriage."

"Oh, my God!" I exclaimed in an agony of apprehension, and a cold perspiration bedewed my forehead. That was one thing I never had expected Gertrude to discuss with me again, even in the abstract.

I do not remember what I ate, except that the dinner was dainty and cool and exquisite. There was a dewy cup of something light and refreshing and Gertrude's frock was charming, her eyes were bright and there was a touch of color in her cheeks. She did little talking herself at first, but pressed me to tell her all I could of Pendleton.

I told her. I told her of his coming, of his air of penitence, of his returning to the offices of the insurance company and of his present effort to reestablish a home for his children. The only suppressions I was conscious of were any references to Alicia or to my own somber emotions on the score of the children. Otherwise I was frank enough, Heaven knows, for it is hard for me not to be. To the very end Gertrude did not interrupt me. Only when I had done she made one crisp, incisive comment with a faint smile that was merely a lift of the upper lip.

"The one thing I cannot understand, Ranny," she observed, "is your unreasonable skepticism."

"You feel you could trust such a man implicitly?" I demanded.

"Yes," was the firm reply. "If there is any one thing clear, it is that Jim Pendleton is genuinely penitent. Suppose that lost-memory story is all moonshine, as you and Dibdin seem to think. By coming back that way doesn't the man really display more character than if it were true? He really shows that if he's gone wrong he has the stamina to come right again--and that's a good deal in this wicked world, Ranny."

"I had not looked at it in that light," I muttered, disturbed.

"I know you haven't," she gave a triumphant laugh. "You couldn't be calm on the subject. You really are an emotional, high-strung romantic, Ranny, and I don't altogether blame you for being prejudiced. But any dispassionate person knowing the facts will tell you I am right."

"It would be difficult for me to feel dispassionate on the subject," I returned doggedly.

"Certainly it would," was her ready reply. "That's why I am glad I captured you. Some friend had to show you your own interest."

"My interest?"

"Ranny," she cried in a voice charged with purpose if not with emotion,--with an intense, a vibrating resolution that impinged like a heavy weight upon my senses. "Ranny--don't let's be children--we are too old for that. Let bygones be bygones. I'll humiliate myself before you. I--I love you, Ranny--" and her lips really quivered--"I have always loved you--will you marry me, Ranny?"

Her face seemed strange, transformed by the force of an irresistible, a final compulsion. I writhed under her gaze as one on a rack. She hung for a moment, her eyes glittering into mine, positively tremulous; I had never seen Gertrude so serious. I could not bear it. It was excruciating. I know Gertrude was not herself. I leaped from the sofa, her hand still clinging to mine.

"I can't--I can't, Gertrude," I whispered hoarsely. "Oh--I--wish--but I am horribly sorry--I can't!"

Gertrude's nerves are strong and her control over them is stronger. She gazed at me for an instant, intently, searchingly, dropped my hand and turned away.

"There is some one else," she murmured in level tones to herself; "there is some one else now."

"Yes," I breathed, "though it won't--it can't--" and I paused.

"You needn't tell me," she turned, smiling harshly. "I know--it's that girl--the gutter-sni--but it doesn't matter. Every man is a fool--and you are the least likely to prove an exception. Oh, I always knew that--felt it--but never mind. I can't humiliate myself any more, can I?--Ranny," her voice suddenly struck a quieter note. "One thing I must ask for our old friendship's sake: You will forget this--episode--will you not? And I shall try to."

"My dear Gertrude--" I threw out my hands in a gesture of helplessness. If there was any humiliation it was I who was suffering it. She looked at me calmly, stonily. The color in her cheeks was exactly the same as before. Had Gertrude stooped to rouge?

"Your dear Gertrude--yes; then that's all right. Have a drink before you go? No? Very well. You will remember some day that I have given you my best--done my best for you."

It seems inherent in the nature of woman, so cosmic is the sweep of her outlook, or else so near to the earth, that when her desires are frustrated she feels the laws of the universe are frustrated. I did not make this comment to Gertrude, however; I could only murmur an entreaty for her forgiveness--which she ignored. Her only answer was a brief hard gesture of the head, a sort of jerk that expressed at once futility, contempt and dismissal.

As one dazed and paralyzed I must have made my way somehow downstairs, into a street car or some other conveyance at Fourth Avenue and into the babel at Grand Central station. But of this I have no recollection whatsoever. It is a blank. I must have walked like a somnambulist. I never came to until I left the train at Crestlands about a quarter past nine, and the first thing I was conscious of was the pain I must have inflicted.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

I can write this almost calmly now because so much has passed since that dreadful evening and details begin to emerge cloudily from the fog of that confusion.

I remember striking out homeward from the station down our drably progressive suburban Main Street, following the bumping, grinding, loitering trolley across the little bridge over a stream that sends up a dank, fishy odor, though all the living things I have ever seen in its neighborhood were mosquitoes and water snakes.

Over the rusty iron parapet I stood leaning for a few minutes and the original thought feebly stirred my dazed brain that life was not so much a dream--as the Spaniard Calderon would have it--as it is a stream. There is no knowing what it may not bring upon its bosom.

"That's it," I muttered to myself aloud. "Life is a stream within a dream."

"That's about the size of it," gruffly remarked a passing laborer behind me, his dinner pail clanking against his side, and he burst into a hoarse guffaw.

I laughed too, and concluded that I was still maudlin at the end of my perfect day.

I left the bridge and the highway, turned to the right and began to climb the ill-lighted crooked street, anciently a Dutch cattle track, no doubt, that leads to my isolated chalet upon the rock.

With all geography, history, the visible and invisible universe to draw upon, the fathers of Crestlands had denominated this obscure street Milwaukee Avenue. Milwaukee Avenue put the last touch to my nightmarish state. A sickly laugh escaped me as I bent my back to the ascent.

A young mounted policeman, who rode like another Lancelot by this remote Shalott, interrupted his tune long enough to give me a cheery greeting and rode on humming to himself.

The September evening was mild and I vaguely purposed walking past my house and strolling about for a bit before I went in. It was early for returning from dinner in town, and I was not overanxious to encounter anybody. A sudden sense of something eerie and awesome came to me as I looked at that deeply shadowed cottage. It appeared unfamiliarly remote, detached, and I gazed upon it with a weird sense of foreboding that sent a slight shiver down my back. The window shades of the chalet were drawn with only their rectangular lines of light showing through,--light, I reflected bitterly, by which Pendleton was no doubt beguiling Alicia to desert my house and follow him.

This thought lodged like a barb in my heart and my feet suddenly turned to lead. I could not go on farther and irresistibly I felt myself drawn homeward.

The somber habit of my recent reflections urged me with a plausibility strange and inexplicable to enter my study by the window instead of the comparatively public door. The window nearly always stood open. In case of storm Griselda or Alicia would dash about the house and close the windows, beginning always with my study. But this day had been clear.

I tiptoed around through the garden to the side upon which my study window gives. From it the land slopes away under a covering of trees until it reaches the stream.

There was a light in the study, though the shade was drawn, flapping gently against the rusty wire screen. This shade, as it happens, does not quite fit. It is short a full half-inch on either side, so that the peering observer can see as much as he pleases of what is going on in that room when it is lighted.