Part 20

"Do you know what you are, Alicia?" I stood over her, puffing and chattering against time, "You are an old-fashioned girl, that's what you are--with emotions and--and all sorts of curious traits, when you ought to be discussing Freud and complexes and the single standard and the right of woman--" the right of woman, I had almost said, to motherhood irrespective of marriage, upon which I had heard a fashionable young woman descant only that morning in the shop, apropos of a book she was buying on the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. But I paused in time.

"And all sorts of things," I trailed off lamely.

"Yes," she murmured, a faint sad smile wavering on her lips. "I'll do that next time. I'll deliver a lecture to Jimmie some evening on the OEdipus complex--or why it's inadvisable to marry your own grandmother."

Clearly Alicia is no stranger to the patter of the time. But what a glorious, natural creature she is!

Her touch of satire after her tempest of emotion ravished me as perhaps nothing else. How adorable she was in all her moods!

"Do it now, Alicia," I cried.

"Now--I must go up and wash my face," she murmured. I couldn't bear to let her go.

"Where--where is Randolph to-night?" I clutched at her presence for another instant.

"I don't know," and with a sudden swift movement she glided out of the room. If only she knew how bewitching she is! But perhaps she is better ignorant.

One thing is certain. She has answered my question. She is not in love with Randolph.

Dimly I perceive a faint cohesiveness to the swimming lines of the picture. For some reason that she knows best, that seemed good to her, she yielded to the boy's importunities. In some way the mother in her is involved. How little, after all, I know of my eldest nephew! Alicia doubtless knows more--much more.

But this is the query that rises before me like a black pillar in the roadway:

Can that splendid girl be deliberately planning to sacrifice herself for some real or fancied good to the boy--hoping the while that by the time his dangers are past, he might tire of her, and release her plighted word? But suppose he shouldn't tire--as indeed how could he? Can I risk her happiness in that manner--her happiness which means to me a thousand times more than my own?

My own happiness--useless to think of that new! Whatever Alicia did or didn't betray, it was patently obvious that I am simply Uncle Ranny--as ever was. For one instant of excitement I was Randolph Byrd--but only for that. Ah, well, no use to dwell upon that bitterness now.

But about that young pair--what would I better do, my aged counselor? Doubtless at seventy you will be able to give me the sagest of advice. But that will be too late, friend, _par trop_, too late. I must watch more closely from this moment on. I have much to learn, Randolph Byrd. Of this, however, I am certain: One individual may with nobility sacrifice his life for another. That, according to my lights, is inherent in the very order of the universe. But every one is entitled to his or her own happiness. Woe and shame to the crippled soul that allows another to maim him in his happiness. Every human being has the unequivocal right to his share!

I am rambling, I see. My brain doubtless is still awhirl with the emotions and overtones of the interview with Alicia.

The headlines of the evening paper over which my tired eyes stray are vocal with the war spirit, with news of bridges guarded, of preparations, of munitions, of espionage, of ships, troops, volunteering! But the import of these makes hardly an impression upon my mind. So impersonal a thing is patriotism juxtaposed to the intimate business of living!

It is late. I must go to bed. Alicia's fiance has not yet come in.

To-day arrived a letter which overshadows all else, which momentarily put even my last night's talk with Alicia in the background and aroused strange sleeping instincts of alarm, of combat, of savage alertness. The last thing I could now have expected or thought of was this letter from Pendleton. The brilliant April sun turned darker as I opened it and the warmth went out of the vernal air, turning spring back into winter. This is what I read:

DEAR RANDOLPH:

I am writing you from St. Vincent's Hospital in San Francisco. A business trip that brought me here laid me flat with typhoid, and all my money, what remained for the return trip to Kobe, is gone.

I ask you to do me the great favor of advancing me three hundred dollars. I shall be out of hospital in a week or ten days at most and I want to return at once. Immediately I get back to Kobe I shall send you a draft in repayment. You must do this for me, Randolph, as I have no one else to turn to. Unless I can get back I am stranded and my only alternative will be to beat my way back to New York, which is the last thing I want to do. Please let me hear from you by wire that you'll do this.

Faithfully, JIM PENDLETON.

The impudent blackmailing scoundrel! His only alternative will be New York. That is his threat, and as a threat he means it. Yet I would send him the money willingly if only I were sure that he would really use it for passage to Kobe or to the devil--so long as it is far enough away. But what security have I?

Nevertheless it comes to me sadly that I shall have to take the risk and send him the money. To have Pendleton in New York again--at any cost I must take any chance to prevent that. And arrant blackmailer that he is, he understands that!

What could he do if he were here? The children? Though all minors, the two eldest are old enough to choose and I believe I am secure in my feelings as to their choice. He will not, moreover, be charging himself with the responsibility of the children, if only I seem indifferent enough as to whether he takes them or not. Alicia he is powerless to touch. Oh, I have learned something of the weapons needed to fight such a beast. But it is his hateful presence that I cannot stomach the thought of. And that he knows also. I must send him the money and take the chance that he will really return to his accustomed lairs. It will be an uneasy time for a while, nevertheless. But too much ease would now sit queerly upon my shoulders.

I shall send him the money.

*CHAPTER XXIV*

I have had a week of illness and it has been the happiest of my life.

Alicia has been my nurse and no one, I fervently hope, will ever discover that the larger half of that week has been sheer malingering. I might have got up in three days!

'Tis late to hearken, late to smile, But better late than never I shall have lived a little while, Before I die forever.

The Shropshire Lad was perfectly right in the two middle lines of his quatrain, but oddly wrong in the others. It was _not_ late to hearken or to smile. It never is late. Every moment has been heavenly for me. And who ever stops to dwell upon Purgatory once he has entered Paradise? I am very certain that by a law of spiritual physics past suffering is wiped out without a trace.

If "The Rosary" were not so absurd I should sing it to myself over and over. But being constructively a convalescent why may I not be absurd? Who shall say me nay? So being alone, I am humming the tune of "The Rosary" over and over and taking my pleasure in it.

The hours I have spent with Alicia no one can take from me. What a petulant patient I have been! I chuckle as I think of it. It's like _Felix Culpa_. Happy grippe-cold!

Alicia, let us say, brings me some broth upon a tray.

"Will you be comfortable, Uncle Ranny," she asks with concern in her voice, "until I come back with the rest?"

"No!" growls the eccentric uncle. "Not a bit of it. I want company while I eat."

Alicia laughs softly.

"But who is going to prepare the other tray, while Griselda is so busy?"

"Don't care," mutters the grouchy invalid. "I want company. If I let you go now, will you bring up your own luncheon and eat it here?"

"But that makes such a lot of dishes, Uncle Ranny."

"Don't care. I'm obstinate, fussy, irritable, sick. Have to be humored. Ask the doctor!"

Alicia peals a delicious silvery laugh and then I see a film as of tears in her eyes.

"All right--I'll humor you, Uncle Ranny. But I should think you'd be sick of seeing me round by this time!"

"Am sick," growl I. "Get a colored nurse to-morrow!" Whereupon I hear Alicia's laughter all the way down the stairs.

I wonder why Griselda's Scotch broth tastes so amazingly delicious, these days. Is it possible that an invalid's palate is more sensitive to culinary virtues and savors? I must ask the doctor.

On the little table at my bedside lies the Valdarfer Boccaccio, printed 1471, which Andrews, excellent fellow, had bought at a sale in my absence and, thrice excellent fellow, brought up for my delectation when he came to visit the sick. I once spent a delightful week in the British Museum, virtually under guard, examining that rare and beautiful volume. Now its only replica in America is near me and I ought to be feasting all my senses upon its vellum-bound richness and beauty. It was once the property of a Medici and has delighted the hours of popes, princes, dukes, lords; men have longed for it, have treasured it, loved it as men treasure and love diamonds or women. It is worth a moderate fortune. But I leave it neglected. I am waiting for the rattle of a tray and the entrance of the girl behind the tray. What would Rosenbach or any decent bookman say if they knew? But I don't care. Boccaccio himself would have approved me.

Alicia enters and the room is flooded with sunshine and I am quick with life.

"Why, Uncle Ranny!" Alicia pauses alarmed, tray in hand. "Do you think you have fever again? Your eyes are so bright!"

"'The better to see you with,' said the wolf," I mutter and turn away.

"And your cheeks are red." She puts down the tray, ignoring my nonsense.

"Let me feel if they are hot," she persists anxiously and her cool fingers barely touch my cheek which I hastily draw aside.

"I have no fever, I tell you, Alicia," I murmur irritably. "I am ravenous. Food, child--food is my craving. Sit down and eat--and let me eat."

"Very well, dear grouchy Uncle Ranny," answers Alicia, cheerfully placing my dishes on the invalid's table suspended over the counterpane and leaving her own on the tray. "It shall eat to its heart's content, it shall--this nice chop and this lovely muffin, and this luscious jam--greasing its little fisteses up to its little wristeses, the dirty little beasteses!"

Whereupon I am in good humor again.

"Have you looked over this Valdarfer Boccaccio at all?" asks Alicia lightly, by way of making conversation. I nod.

"Isn't it a love?" I nod again.

"What a history that book has had--and you know every detail of it, I suppose. All the princes and kings who owned it--all the romance it has accumulated in nearly five hundred years--don't you?"

"Don't I what?"

"Know about it?"

"Oh, yes."

"Look here," cries Alicia with mock anger, "don't you go and become a blatant materialist thinking only of money and profits--like all the rest of the world. That would be horrible, Uncle Ranny--when I've been adoring you so abjectly because even your business is lovely and intellectual and romantic!"

And that girl is betrothed to my nephew Randolph! flashes through my mind. Aloud I say with a faint grin meant to exasperate her:

"Who on earth cares for anything but money?"

That she very properly ignores and in a softer, more serious tone, she murmurs:

"I came across a little rhyme of Goethe's--'_Kophtisches Lied_.' Do you remember it?--'Upon Fortune's great scale the index never rests. You must either rise or sink, rule and win, or serve and lose; suffer or triumph, be anvil or hammer.' Isn't it lovely?"

"Yes. Did you translate that in your head as you went along?" I ask.

"Yes, Uncle Ranny--and you have triumphed over Goethe's wisdom. You have always triumphed even when you suffered--you have always been you, through all your troubles--Salmon and Byrd--Visconti's. You don't know how I, too, lived through all those things--even when I was a child and hardly dared to speak to you--I was, oh, so anxious--and so glad when you seemed to be happy. And even now--oh, it's been so wonderful to watch you!" The tears fill her eyes and she turns her face from me. "That's been my life."

"You little witch!" my heart cries out dumbly, in a very ache of tenderness. "And have you been mothering me in your thoughts all these years as you have mothered the children?"

"No, Alicia--I haven't triumphed," I whisper huskily. "But I am triumphing now."

She turns toward me again with a smile of misty radiance. By an effort I control my voice and launch out briskly:

"Did I ever tell you, Alicia, how I nearly owned the priceless copy of his Essays that Bacon inscribed and gave to Shakespeare?"

I am well again--and therefore solitary. It is little enough I have seen of my nephew Randolph during my illness and little that Alicia has seen of her fiance.

This being a Saturday when Randolph is at home, Alicia stopped him as he was about to leave the house to go to New York, "on business," as my "conditioned" Sophomore put it, and firmly proposed a walk with her instead. He demurred, the egregious whelp, demurred to a walk with Alicia! I surprised a note that was almost pleading beneath the bright decision--Alicia pleading to be taken for a walk! I could have trounced the boy in my hot indignation.

They departed--I saw them depart. They were in the obscure little hall and my door was open. Alicia waved her hand, smiling. "Just a wee bit walk!" she called out in Griselda's language. She could not have known the tug of longing and envy with which my heart and spirit followed her as my body felt suddenly and disconsolately heavy against the chair.

"Have a good time," I waved my hand back, "and greet the spring for me!"

The birds are reappearing and an enterprising family of wrens are already building urgently over my window. Robins are courting and strutting. The trees are tender with leaf and the throb of spring is in the air like a mighty force, ceaseless, slow, careless, yet all-penetrating. The morning sun was bathing all the world in the very elixir of youth. A fly was buzzing madly against the pane. I felt intensely solitary, poignantly alone.

The Valdarfer Boccaccio lay opened on my desk--but he was four and a half centuries removed from this sunlight. I almost hated it--hated all the beloved objects about me. My precious books were dumb, inert, a clog upon all the senses. With a heart passionately hungry I craved for youth, freshness, activity. I seized the Valdarfer Boccaccio as though to hurl it from me. Then, restraining myself, I brought it down on the table with a bang that nearly shattered its precious binding. I laughed ruefully. I determined on a sudden to greet the spring for myself.

Griselda came bustling as she heard me rattling the canes in the jar.

"You're going out?" she demanded.

"Yes, Griselda." I am always a little apologetic with Griselda, for did she not know me as a boy? It is a part of the instinctive clutching at youth that makes us respect our elders. That puts them at once in their own elderly world. Besides, Griselda is always in the right.

"Then why did ye not go with the bairns?"

"_They_ didn't want anybody with them," and I winked Spartan-wise--I can wink at Griselda. Has she not spent her life serving me? In this rare world you can do anything to people who love you enough.

"Havers!" muttered Griselda, with an enigmatic toss of her old head. "Then see that ye take your light coat."

"A coat to-day?" I protested.

"Aye--a coat to-day, young man!"

"Call me young man again, and I'll don goloshes and fur mittens," I challenged her.

"Child, I should have called ye," murmured Griselda, fumbling at the hook upon which my top coat hung.

"I'll put on rubber boots and a sou'wester for that," I told her and struggled into the sleeves as she held the garment out for me.

"I wouldna go too far to-day," cautioned Griselda. "Ye're not over strong yet."

"Just a little way," I mumbled, ashamed at her affection and care for one so worthless. "Thank you, Griselda!" She would have been shocked and scandalized had she known that at that moment there was a moderate lump in my throat and that I all but kissed her brown old face.

How much the spring had advanced during my days of imprisonment! The grasses were assertively green as though they had never been otherwise. Birds were twittering. Neighbors, or opulent neighbors' gardeners, were busy at their flower beds, and early blooms in some of them, transplanted from boxes or hothouses--violets, hyacinths, daffodils, cried forth their beauties in a way to make my breath catch. Queer, hungering, clamorous sensations stirred in my emaciated frame. How well I understood at that instant Verlaine's unshed tears of the heart when he sang:

Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est la, Simple et tranquille Cette paisible rumeur--la Vient de la ville.

--Qu'as tu fait, o toi que voila Pleurant sans cesse, Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voila De ta jeunesse?

That bitterly anguished cry of the heart: What have you made of your youth?

I strode on grimly in a sort of nameless anger, past the outlying houses, past empty lots with rank grass still awaiting the pressure of habitation, until the futilely laid-out streets, empty of all life, gave way to open country and meadowland. I was making my way to the wood that lies between the meadows, a skirting dairy farm or two, some scraggy orchard here and there, and the great line of the aqueduct, the most Roman of our enterprises, that carries the water to New York. In the wood I somehow felt I should be taken again to the bosom of earth and the sickness of my soul be healed.

I looked up at the sky and it was radiant with dazzling white clouds that made my mole's eyes water. A merry breeze fanned the newborn earth and once on the edge of the wood I caught that indescribable whisper of trees which to me is the earth-note, the age-long speech and intimation of the planet that, at all hazards, life must go on; that it is decreed, irresistible and sweet. A pang of envy stabbed my breast at the thought of the lovers abroad to-day, even though those lovers were almost my children. I for one find it difficult to keep apart those conflicting emotions of the heart. But do parents of the flesh, I wonder, encounter no similar struggles? Once among the trees I was permeated by that type of gentle melancholy serenity that woods induce. Softly I strolled about on last year's pine needles and leaves, sodden now after a winter's snowfall and a year's rains. The cat-like tread of your primeval aborigine returns even to your civilized boots in the Woods of Westermain, the stalker and the hunter throbs faintly in your blood.

My path led me up a slope where the trees, youngish still, like myself, were no saplings, however, but towered in a slender abandon toward the patches of cerulean sky overhead. They seemed to escort me, those tapering maples and sycamores with their feathery foliage, like a troop of young monks still fresh from their novitiate, still full of the sap of life. Somehow trees in a forest have always reminded me of monks chanting litanies and benedictions. The bass-note of all their murmurings is invariably so solemn. From the crest the land drops in a declivity and thence, soon abandoning the woodland in a fringe of bushes and underbrush, rolls on to the massive moundlike line of the aqueduct.

On a sudden I heard voices beneath me a little way down the declivity. And peering down with the delicious thrill of alertness that returns from primitive ages even to-day among trees, I perceived Alicia and Randolph with their backs to me in earnest colloquy.

My first impulse, naturally, was to hail them or to make some sort of monitory sound that might apprise them of my presence. But a sudden movement of Alicia's arrested all force or motion on my part.

Her hands shot forward and with a vehemence that was obviously not loverlike, she cried out in a tormented voice:

"But you've promised me that over and over again, 'Dolph! How many times"--she unconsciously shook him as she spoke, "how many times do you suppose you have promised me that you wouldn't drink and wouldn't play--that you'd give up going about with that set--that you'd leave it altogether? How many, many times?" she reiterated, with a pathetic note of indignation.

"A fellow can't quit cold like that," I barely heard the lad muttering--"got to have some friends!"

"Friends!" Alicia cried, in a voice of bitter exasperation. "Do you call Billy Banning and Tertius Cullen and Arthur Bloodgood friends? They're your worst enemies--almost criminals!" And on a sudden I realized that I was an eavesdropper and a flush of shame heated my cheeks. I was about to make a sound but my throat was dry and no sound came.

"Think what it would mean," took up Alicia, "if Uncle Ranny found it out--" and I could not choose but listen--"all that he has been to us--father and mother and everything else. Everything in the world he has given up for us," she cried with quivering lips, her voice thinning with passionate anguish. "His comfort, his leisure, his whole life he has sacrificed with a smile for us--for you and Jimmie and Laura and--and even me! Oh, 'Dolph, 'Dolph--do you suppose there are many such men in the world? And you want to break his heart by drinking and gambling and Heaven knows what else it might lead to?"

I write these words with shame. I had no business to hear them. I gathered my arrested forces to compel myself to move away, when I heard the boy's bass mutter:

"I know I'm rotten, 'Licia--rotten as they make 'em--but give me another chance, 'Licia--just one more, sweetheart--I tell you it's--"

"Yes," was the bitter interruption, "you made me those promises when I said I would be engaged to you--what have they amounted to? It would have broken his heart if it had come out then. I--I promised the Dean for you--that time--" her voice charged with emotion so she could scarcely speak--"and now--"

"But wait--wait, 'Licia," the boy suddenly drew her to him with passionate earnestness by both hands. "I give you my word of honor this time it's different. It isn't for myself--yes, it is, though--but it isn't for what you mean--not for anything you can think of. It is for a Purpose," he explained with great emphasis--"a Purpose--I can't tell you--but--"

"But you must tell me," insisted Alicia, searching his eyes tremulously.

"Can't--I can't!" he shook his head vehemently. "'Licia, darling, be good to me. I must have it. If I only had about fifty dollars! I could win it--I know--I am awfully good at poker--I can bluff the lot of 'em. But I've got to have ten to start--and I promise, word of honor, I'll never play again--word of honor, 'Licia."

It was too late now for me to betray my presence. I was contemptible in my own eyes, ashamed, yet exultant--I hardly knew what. My frame shook with a cold rage, with shame at my blindness, and yet a curious sense of vast illumination surrounded me like an atmosphere. I moved away, hardly knowing or caring whether I made any sound, and with bowed head and a tumult throbbing hot and cold within me, I walked down the slope through the still whispering woods.