Part 2

"Value it!" I cried, as my fingers caressed it. "Why, certainly I value it. It is a perfectly genuine Elzevir--the great Louis himself printed this at Leyden. It is not what you would call a tall copy, and binders have sacrilegiously spoiled an originally fine broad margin. It's not perfect. But it's a splendid specimen of early printing, with title page and colophon intact. It's a beauty!"

"You beat the devil," murmured Dibdin in his beard. "You can be enthusiastic about some things, that's clear. Anyway, the book is yours," he concluded. "I have no use for it."

"You don't mean it!" I exulted incredulously. "I am simply delighted, Dibdin, tickled pink, as you would say! I have long wanted the Elzevir 'Horace.' I haven't a single Elzevir to compare with this. Think of this coming out of the blue!" And in my foolish way I fell to gloating over the thin, musty little volume, examining the worm drills, holding it up to the light for watermarks in the gray paper and, in general, I suppose, behaving like an imbecile.

"Illustrates my point," muttered Dibdin, fumbling with a malodorous corn cob and a tobacco pouch.

"Point? What point?" I looked up at him abstractedly.

"Out of the blue--this book you say you yearned for--anything may happen."

"And you call yourself a scientist," I marveled, leaning back in the chair. "Things like this happen--yes. But in the serious business of life you're ground between the millstones of the gods--a victim of events you cannot control. Look at Rabelais and Montaigne, two free spirits if ever there were any. Yet one was a victim of priestcraft so that he cried out until he roared with orgiastic laughter, and the other a victim of property,--took a wife that disgusted him. (I have beautiful editions of both of them, by the way, which you ought to look at.) But each of them was a victim."

"A victim if you're victimized." Dibdin puffed at his foul pipe. (I cannot make him smoke a decent cigarette.) "But if you know how to play with circumstances, you use them as I saw a cowboy in Arizona ride a bucking broncho. You ride them till you break them. Look at me, my boy," he went on, with a grin of mingled modesty and bravado. "I knew I was a tramp at heart. But my people would have been broken with humiliation if I had turned out a 'hobo' on their hands. So I took to ruins and buried cities in out-of-the-way places, and politely speaking I'm an archeologist. But I tramp about the world to my heart's content."

That, I admit, presented Dibdin and the whole matter in a new light to me.

"Why," I finally asked, "didn't I do that?"

"Because you're not a tramp at heart," puffed Dibdin.

"Yes, I am!" I almost shouted at him. "That is exactly what I must be, since I have such a horror of home, of domesticity."

"You with all this comfort--a flat, a housekeeper, all the truck in this room? No, no, my boy! You're cast for something else. Hanged if I know for what, though. These things are too deep to generalize about. Time will tell."

I rose and circled the room, inanely surveying "this comfort" that seems to offend Dibdin, though he likes well enough to sprawl in my best arm-chair. The books, the rugs, the fire, the alluring chairs, the happy hours that I have spent here seemed to crowd about me like the ghosts of familiars, praying to be not driven from their haunts.

"Then why the devil," I demanded accusingly, pausing before him, "did you encourage me and praise my little papers and bits of work in college when you were teaching me?"

"Trying to teach you," he corrected placidly. "You've never been a teacher in a large fashionable college, my boy. When most of your so-called students are taking your course because it is reported to be a snap, so they can spend their evenings at billiards, musical comedies, or the like, any young devil with a ray of intellectual interest becomes the teacher's golden-haired boy. Even teachers are human. You'll admit you haven't set even so much as your own ink-well on fire as yet."

"All that is beside the point," I returned irritably. "Here I am in the devil of a fix and you are talking like Job's comforters."

"Yes," he agreed, "I suppose I am. But in the end it was not the comforters but events that pulled Job up. Await events with resignation and expectancy, Randolph, my lad, and play the game. Stake your coin and wait until the wheel stops and see what happens."

"A fine teacher you are!" I laughed at him, albeit mirthlessly.

"No good at all," he assented cheerfully, knocking his pipe against the ash tray and pocketing the noisome thing. "And didn't I chuck teaching the minute events made it possible? Events, my boy; they are the teacher and the deities to tie to. Set up a little altar to the great god Event--right here in your perfumed little temple. That's what I should do," he concluded, muttering into his beard.

"Incidentally," he added, "I'm getting extraordinarily hungry."

"Oh, sorry," I murmured. "Glad you're here to eat with me, anyway. It enables me to put off breaking the news of my coming marriage to Griselda."

"What--you haven't told her yet?" shouted Dibdin, sitting up in his chair. "That fine, upright Highland lassie? Then you're no disciple of mine! Face things with courage and face 'em fairly, Randolph. Go and tell her now! I'll wait here with my highly moral support."

"I--I can't," I blurted miserably.

"Yes, you can," he insisted with obstinacy. "Go and do it now."

With a gesture of desperation I pressed the bell.

"If I am going to tell her anything," I mumbled between my teeth, "I'll say it right here." Dibdin laughed ghoulishly.

"This cowardice--this shrinking from life," he philosophized detestably--"that's what our kind of education brings about."

Griselda appeared at the door.

"You rang, Mr. Randolph."

"Yes--er--yes, Griselda," and I felt myself idiotically hot and flushed. "I wanted to say--" and beads of perspiration prickled my forehead. Then in desperation, I stammered out,

"Mr. Dibdin, Griselda--he is dining here to-night--that's all, Griselda!"

Dibdin's laugh rattled throatily in the room. How I hated him at that moment! Griselda swept us with an impenetrable glance.

"There is a place laid for him," she uttered in the tone of one whose patience is a sternly acquired virtue. And she left us.

"Better strip, my lad," chuckled Dibdin, "and put on your wrestling trunks."

"What d'you mean?" I demanded sulkily.

"The tussle that life is going to give you will be a caution."

"A lot you know about life!"

"Not much, that's a fact," Dibdin observed more soberly. "But I've had to face some things, Randolph. I've had to grin at a lot of greasy Arabs in the desert who thought they would hold me for ransom. I've had to laugh out of their dull ambition a pack of villainous Chinese thugs in Gobi, who felt it would profit them to cut my throat. I've had to make my way alone through a jungle in Central America for days when the beastly natives absconded with the supplies and left me in the middle of a job of excavation. I've had other little episodes. But never, son, I may say truthfully, have I shown such blue funk as you did just then before the patient Griselda."

"Rot!" was my only answer. "Let's go in to dinner."

It is after ten. Old Dibdin is gone and I have been putting down these foolish notes.

It must be by some odd law of balance or compensation, I suppose, that those whose lives are least important keep the fullest record of them. It is a weakness of mine to wish to read in the future the things I failed to do in the past. It is really for you, O Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that I am writing these notes.

If only Gertrude had made up her masterful mind to three months hence, instead of three weeks, I should have taken my last fling and gone by the next boat to Italy.

Biagi, that courteous scholar and humanist, writes me from the Laurentian at Florence that he has discovered some new material concerning Brunetto Latini--the teacher of Dante. Among the few ambitions that I dally with there has always been the one to write a life of Brunetto, who taught Dante how a man may become immortal. I have a fine copy of Ser Brunetto's works, the "Tesoro" and the "Tesoretto", and it seems a shabby enough little encyclopedia in verse of knowledge now somewhat out of date. There must have been, therefore, something in the man himself that enabled Dante to attribute his own greatness to the teacher.

But I cannot go to Florence and return in three weeks.

Gertrude, I know, will tell me I can do it after we're married. But she will expect me to "clean up the job" in two weeks.

There is nothing about Gertrude that terrifies me so much as her efficiency. I shall never dare to mention the subject to her, and so I shall never attempt it and never know the mystery of Dante's immortality. It is all one, however; what have I to do with greatness? No more than with marriage.

Bur-r-r! The room is cold. _Sparge ligna super foco_, as cheerful old Horace advises. I have just complied and put another log on the fire.

My nerves must be a shade off color to-night. I could have sworn a moment ago, as the room grew chilly, that my sister Laura was standing before me. It is my guilty conscience, I suppose. Too late to call her now. Besides, the telephone is no doubt still "out of order." Poor Laura! I saw her, white as death, with tears running down her drawn cheeks. What things are human nerves when a bit unstrung! I shall go and see Laura to-morrow.

I have had my conversation with Griselda and it came off not amiss.

"Griselda," I began carelessly, after Dibdin had gone, "did I mention to you that I am to be married in three weeks?"

Griselda is not one to waste breath in futile and flamboyant feminine exclamations. She turned somewhat pale, I thought.

"You know very well you did not," she answered in level tones, polishing a spoon the while.

"Well, I meant to," I told her truthfully enough. "Didn't you expect it?"

"No, sir," was her blunt reply.

"Neither did I," I blurted out before I knew it.

A wry, unaccustomed smile for a moment illumined her dark, gypsy-like features.

"You needn't tell me that," she retorted, and I wonder what she meant by it. It is not like her to waste words. "Am I," she continued, "to take this as notice to find a new place?"

"God forbid!" I cried in horror. "Whatever happens, Griselda, you remain with me--let that be understood."

"And suppose Miss Bayard shouldn't want me?" she demanded with quiet intensity.

"Then she will probably not want me," I told her. "That question won't arise. Besides, Griselda," I went on, "we haven't decided yet how we are going to manage. Miss Bayard will probably want to keep her apartment and I mine. She would hardly wish to be bothered with me all the time."

"And you would call that marriage!" exclaimed Griselda aghast.

"Why not?" I queried mildly. "I don't know much about it, Griselda, but marriage is determined by the kind of license you get at the City Hall and what the alderman says to you. The leases of apartments have nothing to do with it, I'm quite sure--though I might inquire."

Griselda's face was blank for a moment. Then on a sudden she was bent double in a gale of wild, hysterical laughter. Never have I known her so shaken by meaningless cachinnation. Perhaps her own nerves are no better than mine. Even now I still hear her rattling deeply from time to time like muffled thunder. But I don't care now. What a relief to get it over!

It is nearly bedtime. Casting over the events of the day, I cannot but conclude that my own will has played too small a part in the whole matter.

I must see Gertrude to-morrow in good time and acquaint her with my desire to run over to Florence before we are married and look up Biagi's new material bearing upon the blessed old heathen, Brunetto Latini. Since Gertrude desires me to be great and famous, she cannot deny me the opportunity to discover how a great and famous man accomplished the trick. Besides, what has been delayed three years can surely support a further delay of three months.

But, good heavens! What is this? Voices--the scuffling of feet in the hallway--what army is invading me at this hour! I believe I hear children's voices--and a scream from Griselda, who has never screamed in her life!

*CHAPTER III*

Laura--my dear sister Laura--is dead! Her children are with me!

Without warning she dropped suddenly under her burdens and with her dying breath confided her children to me--me!

That one cataclysmic fact has taken its abode in my brain and numbed it as well as all my nerves to a chill and deadly paralysis that excludes everything else. It still seems wholly unbelievable--some nightmare from which I shall awake with a vast sickly sort of relief to the old custom of my tranquil life.

The turbulence and the pain of the last three days, however, are still lashing about me like the angry waves after a tempest, in a manner too realistic for any dream. I am broad awake now, I know, and for hours I have been blankly staring into a very abyss of darkness.

What will happen or what I shall do next, I haven't the shadow of an idea.

Laura is dead and her children are with me, and I am their guardian and sole reliance. Who could have forecast such a fate or such a role for me? Three days! It is incredible! Only three days ago, I was languidly protesting because I could not take ship forthwith for Italy to examine some manuscript at the Laurentian in Florence!

No, by heavens! It was not I. It was some one else--some one I knew vaguely, in a past age, a man to be envied, serene and cheerful, blest of life, whom I shall never meet again.

The last three days! I cannot banish them and yet I cannot meet the memory of them. Was it I who faced the tragedy, or was it some one else? Nothing surely is more tragic than a young mother's death--and that young mother my own sister! Who was it that stonily passed through the ordeal of the "arrangements" and the black pantomime of the sepulture? I cannot record it even for myself, for never, I know, shall I desire to be reminded of it. At the death of my mother, I still had Laura with her practical woman's sense. But now I was alone. I say now because however remote it seems, this tragedy will always be present. My life must forever remain under its stupefying spell.

It is not credible that only three days ago I sat here in my study revolving trifles, those many shining trifles that went to make up my former life.

Three days ago the silence of this house was disturbed by the voices of children, the clatter of their feet, and for the first time in my life I heard Griselda scream.

"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she rushed in, sobbing, with the dry tearless sobs of those much acquainted with grief, "Miss Laura--she--the children are here!"

I knew. Though inwardly I sank all but lifeless under the blow, I knew clearly that Laura was dead.

"Is she very ill?" I heard myself asking faintly, with a clutching desire to shrink still from the appalling truth.

"She--oh, Mr. Randolph,'" she lamented, "don't you understand--ye know very well!" she suddenly added with a harshness that surprised me. "We shall have to put the children to bed in your bedroom."

It was as though she had suddenly revolted at the softness of the atmosphere in my environment, at any artificiality or evasion. She seemed abruptly determined to face the stark facts in the open.

"The girl will sleep with me," she concluded tonelessly and turned to go.

"Which girl?" I queried dazedly.

"Her that brought the bairns," she replied and left me.

"Send her in here--I want to speak to her!" I shouted after Griselda. I could not face the thought of going out there. I was held to my chair by a sheer pitiful lack of courage to move into the dreadful gulf before me.

I closed my eyes and endeavored to still the tumult in my brain into silence. I wanted to think. But only those can achieve silence who do not need it. I could not. I opened my eyes.

A thin little girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen stood before me. This surely could not be the girl Griselda had referred to in charge of the children. She was herself a child. Were my disordered senses tricking me? I experienced the thrill Poe's hero must have felt at sight of the raven on the bust of Pallas.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

"I am Alicia, sir," she answered with large, frightened gray eyes fastened upon mine.

"What--what is it?" I stammered.

"The lady said you wanted to see me."

"Did you bring the children?" I breathed, incredulous.

"Yes, sir."

I was awestruck. Her eyes, were the eyes of a child yet they were filled with sorrow and a searching fear old as the world.

"How old are you?" I could not help asking, with an irrelevance foolish enough in the circumstances.

"Going on fourteen, sir."

"And you--you are the nurse?"

"I helped Mrs. Pendleton with the children before school and after school," she answered with more assurance now, but still uneasy. "I am a mother's helper, sir." There was no mirth in my soul, but the muscles contorted my features into a sickly grin.

"I see," I murmured mendaciously. But I saw only my own confused turpitude at my blindness and neglect in face of the shifts and needs poor Laura had been compelled to suffer.

"Where do you come from?" I inquired with a dry throat, ashamed to ask anything of importance.

"From--the Home for--Dependent Children--in Sullivan County," she murmured hesitatingly, with a tinge of color in her cheeks. On a sudden I saw her pale lips tremble and guiltily I realized that, thoughtless, after my wont, I was subjecting her to an ordeal merely because I was in torment.

"Sit down," I forced myself to speak evenly, "and tell me exactly what happened."

She sidled to the big chair, her gaze still fixed upon me, as though to watch me was henceforth her first anxiety. She gripped the arm of the chair and hung undecided for a moment as though fearful of making herself so much at home as to sit down in this room.

"Sit down," I reiterated more encouragingly, "and tell me what happened to my sister."

"Yes, sir," she murmured obediently, perching on the edge of the great chair. "Well," she began, "when I came home from school in the afternoon Mrs. Pendleton was lying down. The children were hanging about her bed and she looked very pale."

"Yes, yes," I urged her on impatiently.

"Then I took them downstairs and gave them their bread and milk and tried to read to them so as to keep them quiet. But only the littlest one, Jimmie, wanted to listen. Randolph and Laura wanted to play Kings and Queens." I realized that I must hear the story in the girl's own way.

"Then," she continued, with an effort at exactitude, "I thought that Jimmie and I had better join them, because then I could keep them from making so much noise. We played until supper time. But Mrs. Pendleton didn't feel well enough to come down. So the children and I had supper downstairs and Hattie--that's the cook--took Mrs. Pendleton's supper up on a tray."

That must have been while I was lamenting to Dibdin over the hardness of my lot.

"Then what happened?" I muttered, turning away from her gaze.

"I went up to see if Mrs. Pendleton wanted anything," she resumed nervously, frightened by my movement, "and she said no, but that she'd get up later when it was time for them to go to bed. So I helped them with their lessons until bedtime and Mrs. Pendleton came down. She said she felt a little better, but she looked very sad and white. And when she began to walk up the stairs--" her lips grew tremulous again and the tears dashed out of her eyes, but she finally controlled herself bravely.

"--She fell--and--" she began to weep bitterly, "she just said, 'The children--my brother--telephone--' and that was all--" and that piteous child who was no kindred to my poor sister sobbed convulsively.

That must have been about the time when I was at table with Dibdin and, over the sauterne, complaining to him of the narrowness of my income in view of the lacunae and wants of my library.

"We couldn't--get you--on the telephone," she found breath to utter at last. "So I brought the children here--Hattie told me how to go--Hattie's over there alone."

Nothing in this world can ever stab me again as the poignancy of her recital stabbed me. My life seemed shattered, irreparable. All my dreams were at an end. Laura was gone and here were her children thrust by destiny upon my hands--unless their scoundrel of a father should ever return to relieve me of them. I had lived peacefully and harmlessly in my way, but for some inscrutable reason Fate had selected me for her heaviest blow.

"Very well," I told her as kindly as I could in the conditions, "now you go back to Griselda and go to bed. I'll have to think things out."

"Oh--but the house!" exclaimed the little girl--and never again do I wish to see such horror on a childish countenance as at that instant froze the features of little Alicia. "All alone," she added, her thin shoulders heaving. "Aren't you going over now, sir?"

"Now!" I exclaimed, looking automatically at my watch. "Why--yes--in a few minutes, child."

"But--Hattie is there alone--" she stammered. "There's nobody else--then I'd better go back."

It was obvious, of course, that I must go at once. But why should a child see spontaneously that to which I am obtuse?

"Oh, well, you are right, of course--I must go immediately--I hadn't thought--I'll go over now"--and I turned away from her, lifted the curtain and gazed out into the wet, murky street below. Life had collapsed and the ruins of it were tumbled about my hot ears. I hardly know how long I stood there, completely oblivious of the girl Alicia.

"Please, Mr. Byrd," I was startled to hear a tearful, childish voice behind me--"won't you see the children before you go, sir?"

I wheeled about sharply.

"The children? Oh, yes--no!" The horror of the situation fell about me like an avalanche that had hung suspended for a moment and then crashed smotheringly over me. "No," I whispered huskily, "I can't--not now--not now!" A kind of chill darkness numbed my senses.

Like a pistol shot I suddenly heard the harsh voice of Griselda in the doorway.

"The cab is at the door, Mr. Randolph. Don't forget your rubbers."

And like an automaton galvanized into life I found myself whirling to the house of death.

*CHAPTER IV*

For a week the children have been with me and nothing has yet been done about them. Another week, I think, will drive me mad with indecision.

I seem unable to emerge from the shadow of mystery and terror into which my serene world has been so suddenly plunged. The book-lined study is my solitary refuge; and like a schoolgirl I can do no more than unpack my heart with words.

I have seen Gertrude.

It is astonishing how resourceless are even one's nearest and dearest friends in face of anything really capital.

"Poor Ranny! How ghastly!" Gertrude cried, when she first heard of it, wringing my hand. "But buck up, dear boy. You know how I feel. There is a way out for everything." She spoke, I thought, as though I were in need of ready money.

She was here this afternoon to see the children. Gertrude is no hand with children. They seemed strangely shy of her, a woman, though they literally fell upon the neck of growling, grizzled old Dibdin. They are still subdued by the suddenness of their tragedy, though real sorrow Gertrude tells me, is, thank Heaven, beyond them.

"We'll have to think up a way of disposing of the dear things," she remarked briskly. And though I am myself completely at a loss what to do with them, I cannot say I relished her way of putting it.

"What, for instance, could you suggest?" I inquired dully.