Part 3

"Schools, Ranny dear, schools," she impatiently answered. "There are homelike places run by splendid women--just made for such cases. Why, even the little one--Jimmie, is it?--How old is he; four?--There are places even for kiddies as young as that."

A heavy confusion, the reverse of enthusiasm, oppressed me.

"You forget, Gertrude," I endeavored as gently as possible to remind her, "Laura confided those children to me with her dying breath--to me--her only relative. Do you think I ought to fling them out at once, God knows where!"

"Good Lord, Ranny!" she cried, flushing with a smile of anger peculiar to Gertrude when she is annoyed. "What a sentimentalist you are at bottom--after all!"

"A sentimentalist--I?" I felt hurt. "Just put yourself in my place, Gertrude, and see how easy such a decision would be for you."

"I do, Ranny; that is just what I am doing," she insisted impatiently. "But don't you see that if there is any one thing you cannot do, it is to keep them here--or in my apartment?"

"Yes," I said, "I see that. But I also see that I can't pitch them out among total strangers, a week after their mother's--" I could not trust my foolish voice to finish.

"Do you forget," demanded Gertrude with her smile that brands me imbecile, "do you forget, Ranny, that we are to be married in two weeks?"

"No, Gertrude--far from it. But that is why we are discussing this problem--because it is perplexing. Besides, schools of the right sort are bound to be pretty expensive things."

"Oh," said Gertrude, "of course. But poor Laura's income ought to be enough--"

"My dear Gertrude, that is what I don't know. Carmichael is to give me an accounting of it to-day or to-morrow. Laura never spoke of her money matters to me. But, as you say, there will probably be enough. Only, it isn't altogether that--you see, Gertrude--" I floundered.

"Yes, I see, Ranny, I see," she hammered at me in the maddening way women have. "You simply can't get up enough will power to do something. It's the old story. But you'll have to, my dear," and she smiled sweetly. "You have all my sympathy and all the cooeperation you'll take. But the one thing we can't do is stand still. You understand that--don't you, Ranny?"

"Yes. I understand that. But my brain is as fertile of plans as a glass door knob."

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Ranny," Gertrude summarized. "I know all this has been a great shock to you. I'll let you alone for a couple of days to turn things over. And think of what I've said. But then we must come to some definite decision. I'd give anything if this terrible thing had not happened now--but it can't be helped, can it?"

Now, that was very sweet and reasonable of Gertrude. And it is a thousand pities that she feels distressed. But it would have been ten thousand more if poor Laura had died just after we had been married instead of before. As it is, the problem before me is largely mine. Were we now married, Gertrude must have had to bear an undue share of it.

Shall I ever win back to the old tranquillity and the peace that was mine? That was the first thought that came to me when I parted from Gertrude, a selfish thought as I immediately realized, in view of what is facing me. I can no longer think as I have thought and new feelings are struggling for birth within me, commensurate with the new responsibility. The world, as I walk through it, seems to present an aspect strangely different from what it did a week ago. It is so chill and alien and hollow!

As I was reentering my study I heard a crash in the dining room, which is now the children's room, and when I glanced in upon them the girl Alicia was gathering up smithereens of glass and Ranny, the eldest boy, quietly announced, "It broke" in a manner that so obviously gave him away, all the others could not help laughing; and they laughed the louder when I joined them. Confused and angry, the boy ran out of the room.

It is a world apart, the world of children, into which parents, I suppose, grow gradually. Not being the parent of these children, I fear I shall never penetrate it.

Sooner or later they must be sent away, even as Gertrude maintains. And I must face that event forthwith.

I was interrupted at this point by the irruption into the room of Jimmie, the youngest, inimitably, grotesquely shapeless in his nightgear, pattering toward me and taking refuge between my knees. He was being pursued by the girl Alicia who stood shyly and distressfully smiling in the doorway, as though all explanation were futile.

"Well, old boy, what is it?" I demanded with mock severity, though in truth I was more afraid of him than he evidently was of me.

"Iwantsayprayerstoyoulikeamummy," he uttered in one excited breath, as though it were one single word.

"You want what?"

"He says he wants to say his prayers to you, sir," spoke up the girl clearly. "I am sorry--he broke away. Shall I take him away, sir?"

"Wanto say my prayers to you like to mummy," insisted Laura's child, scrambling upon my knees. And with a pang of sadness that set all my senses aching I saw the picture of the past--poor Laura with her sweet, resigned face, living when she lived only in her children, listening to the prayers of this sprite with the silken sunshine in his hair.

"All right, Jimmie," I murmured faintly, as he clung to me; "go ahead."

Tightly clutching me about the neck and nestling his face against mine, he brought forth with childish throaty sweetness the few words to the creative Spirit that mankind the world over, in one form or another, addresses as Our Father. "And God," he concluded with brilliant triumph in his eyes, "bless Mummy and Uncle Ranny."

Nothing that I can remember has ever moved me as that child moved me. Like St. Catherine of Genoa at her decisive confessional I seemed to receive a profound inner wound by that child's act, tender and bitter and sweet, that I never desire to heal. For the moment Laura and I were nearer to being one than ever we had been in her lifetime. Nevermore shall I forget the sweetness and fragrance of that little child and his warm nestling faith in me. And I am planning to cast him off.

"Come, now," interposed Alicia, as though breaking a spell.

"One more hug," cried Jimmie, with the arrogance of righteousness. And suiting his action to his words, he clambered down with engaging clumsiness from my knees and padded toward Alicia. Once more I was alone with my thoughts.

Can it be that some instinct in the child whose heart is still imbedded in his mother's had made him seek the one person who had been nearest his mother?

I cannot say, I cannot say.

Oh, God--and I must send him and the others, Laura's children, away, away among strangers!

There seems to be no other way out.

I have been turning idly the pages of books in a way bookish people have, seeking for inspiration, for some word of guidance. Brunetto tells me on the word of St. Bernard, that tarnished gold is better than shining copper; and that the wild ass brays once every hour and thus makes an excellent timepiece for his savage neighborhood. But nothing of this casts a glimmer of light upon my dilemma. Rabelais keeps shouting from his yellow page, "_fais ce que vondras_." But what is it that I desire to do?

Ah, I know what I desire to do! There is counsel in the old books, after all.

I will have in the girl Alicia, and see what I can glean. She was brought up without kith or kin of her own. And though an institution is more of a machine than a good school, still those who had the rearing of her were total strangers. There might be some gleam of suggestion in that.

Alicia has been here.

"Come, child, sit down," I invited her, observing that she still displayed a tendency to stand in awe of me. "I wish to ask you some questions." But her tense little face was still haunted by a vague fear. "It's about the children," I added, and she seemed somewhat more at ease on the edge of her chair.

"How long were you at that Home--in Sullivan County?" I began, grinning by way of ingratiating myself.

"Ever since I can remember, sir," she answered.

"Were they kind to you?"

"Oh, yes, sir."

"How kind?--What did they do for you?"

"They gave us food and--and medicine when we were sick. And on Christmas we had a tree. Only nobody ever came to see me. I always looked out of the window for somebody to come. But no one came."

"Yes, yes, I know," I pursued. "But did they show you affection--sympathy?"

Alicia was silent.

"Don't you know what I mean?" I pressed.

"Yes, sir, I think I do."

"Then why don't you answer?"

"I--it's hard to explain," and she laughed a frightened little laugh. "There is no one there to--to do those things you said. There were five hundred of us there. If you're not sick you just go on like all the rest. If you're sick they give you oil or something. Sometimes a child pretends it's sick just so the matron or a nurse might take it in her lap and make a fuss over it. And some are naughty--for the same reason."

I nodded gravely, but my heart was gripped by a poignant aching. I saw Laura's children compelled to feign illness or delinquency in order to receive a touch of individual attention which, I suppose, every child spontaneously craves.

"Were you glad to leave there?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, sir!" she answered eagerly.

"Tragic, my poor sister dying," I said, half to myself. "She was an ideal mother. Now--I hardly know what to do."

Alicia leaped from her chair and came yearning toward me. Her little face tremulous and working, she cried out:

"Oh, Mr. Byrd, you won't send us away--to a Home--will you?"

"No, no!--Not to a Home," I replied defensively. "But schools--there must be good places for children--"

"They'd feel terribly," she stifled a sob. "They love it so here--Even here Laura cries for her mother every night--and little Jimmie--"

"Never mind," I took her up hastily, "nothing is decided yet, my dear child. I'm glad I spoke to you. You see," I ran on, "there's so little room here, and I--I know nothing about children--"

"But there's nothing to do," she protested, sobbing.

"Nothing?" I smiled vaguely in an effort to cheer her and laid my hand upon her thin shoulder.

"Nothing except just love them," she said. "I'll take care of them--all I can." How simple!

"Well, well, we shall see," I aimed to be reassuring.

"Do I have to go--back to the Home?" she asked brokenly, with an arm hiding her face.

"Oh, no, certainly not," I answered hastily. "We'll find a better way than that. Now," I added, "be a good girl, dry your eyes; run along and don't say a word about--our conversation."

"No, sir," she murmured obediently. And still gulping, she left me.

It is obvious that the girl Alicia has been of decisive help to me!

Yet it is equally obvious that I cannot keep the children here.

Dibdin has been here and he has left me in a state of distraction, worse if possible than that I had been in before.

The good fellow endeavored to be vastly and solidly cheering.

"All nonsense," he growled, "about children being hostages to fortune. They are the only contribution a human being really makes to the world. All the digging that burrowing animals such as I do in the four corners of the earth, all the fuss that fellows in laboratories make over test tubes and microscopes and metals and germs, all the stuff that people sat up nights to put into those damned books of yours--all of that is done for them--for the next generation and the generations they will beget."

"Eloquent!" I flippantly mocked him; "but how is it you've elected to be what you call a tramp?"

"Elected?" he grunted disdainfully. "I didn't elect. It elected me. Besides," he continued, lowering his voice, "I would have given it up like a shot--given up anything, changed my life inside out, done anything if I had been able to marry the one woman I wanted. I'm one of those strange beasts for whom there is only one woman in the world--no other:

'If heaven would make me such another world Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, I'd not have sold her for it,'

he quoted, and added with a hoarse laugh, "you ought to know your Othello."

"Then why on earth didn't you marry her?" I could not help marveling.

"Too late," he murmured, with a whimsical smiling twitch to his head, that is very engaging. "She was already married to somebody else when I first saw her. Too late," he repeated with ruminative sadness. "But don't let us talk about that," he broke off abruptly. "Have the kids begun to go to school yet?"

"What is the use?" I answered him gloomily. "I haven't formed any plans for them yet."

"Plans? What do you mean?" he inquired, puzzled. Like the girl Alicia he seemed to think there was nothing to do that required any thought. And I wondered if the simple souls in life are only the improvident or the very young.

"Do you see this place," I demanded irritably, "as a home for a family with three children, to say nothing of a fourth in attendance upon them?"

"Have to have a larger place--farther out--of course," he answered glibly, puffing at his pipe.

"And am I a person to take care of and bring up three or four children?"

"Why the devil not?" he demanded.

"Why the devil yes?" I retorted fiercely. "What do I know about children? What experience have I had? Do you see me as a wet nurse to a lot of babies?"

"Wet nurse be hanged," he responded gruffly. "Here's your first chance to be of use in the world and--you talk like that--"

"Easy to talk," ruefully from me.

"Well, what the blazes do you mean to do?"

"That is what I am trying to work out," I fell upon him bitterly. "D'you think it's easy? I've got to work out some plan--find homes for them--the right kind of schools--with a home environment. Oh, it's easy, I assure you! Besides," I ran on savagely, "you seem to forget I'm to be married in two weeks."

"I did forget that," growled Dibdin, with a semblance of contrition. "What does the lady say?"

"Well, what should she say? Could you expect a girl on her wedding day to become the harassed mother of three children not her own?"

Dibdin jumped from his chair, ground an oath between his teeth and his forehead was a file of wrinkles.

"Listen, Randolph," he began in another voice. "It's damnably tough, and I know it. But you can't, you simply can't disperse your sister's children to God knows where. You are the only relation they've got. Put yourself in their place. It would be damnation. If you need--more money," he stammered in confusion, "why, dash it--I'm an old enough friend of yours to--to advance you some, eh?"

And he laughed raucously, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.

"You are a good sort--of tramp," I grinned sheepishly, seizing his hand. "But it isn't that. I don't know as yet what Laura left them. But it isn't that. I feel like--like hell about it--but what can I do--what with Gertrude and--and everything else. Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world, I assure you.--But I wish to God I could see my way to keeping them!"

"Easy or not," said Dibdin huskily, "if you send those children away, I'll break every bone in your body."

I laughed almost hysterically. I know Dibdin. When he is most moved and most sympathetic, he is at his most violent.

"Don't go," I clung to him as with sunken head he shouldered toward the door.

"Must," he growled. "I've got to think, too."

"I wish you had married, Dibdin, and had children of your own," I all but whispered with my hand on his shoulder. "And I'm sorry for the woman. You're a good devil, Dibdin. I wish I knew who the woman is."

"I'll tell you," murmured Dibdin, with a queer throatiness of tone. "I'll tell you who she was. It can't matter now. She was--No, by God! I can't--not now!"

And he shuffled out, leaving me gazing after him speechless and open-mouthed.

*CHAPTER V*

The girl Alicia keeps watching me like some bewildered household animal dimly aware of the breaking up of its household. Always I am conscious of her great eyes upon me. To her, I presume, I am a Setebos who can inflict pain and torture, like Death himself; who can disrupt her little world of clinging affections by the merest movement of my hand.

I am in that process of turning things over to which Gertrude has indulgently consigned me and I am if anything farther away from a decision than I was twenty-four hours ago. I finger my books and open at random a volume of Florio's "Montaigne" in an edition that is as fragrant of good ink and paper as the Tudor English is rich, and the first line that falls under my eye is that of Seneca, "_He that lives not somewhat to others, liveth little to himself._" Does this mean that my long absorption in my own small concerns has made me incapable of decision in anything of importance--that I live too little?

I stole into the bedroom last night where the children were sleeping, while Griselda was making up my couch in the study.

With their flushed faces they lay there almost visibly glowing before my eyes with that perfect faith that children seem to have in the grown-up world about them. Heine somewhere speaks of angels guarding the child's couch, and it is not sheer poetry. Their faith and trust, still illusioned, brevets, I suppose, to angelic rank every one about them. Randolph, with a slight frown and moving lips, dreaming seemingly of something active and strenuous, as befits his ripe age of eleven; Laura, serene with her mother's countenance and straying curls, and little Jimmie with his tumbled hair like that of some child by Praxiteles or Phidias--they slept--secure in their trust, despite their recent shattering bereavement.

No one can really know anything about children until he has seen them sleeping. Like fortune, they are always trustfully in the lap of the gods. Never before had they touched me as they seemed to touch the hidden springs in me at that moment. It was so, I pictured, that Laura was wont to steal into their dormitory of nights before going to bed; and that vision, no doubt, was a potent help to her courage to continue uncomplainingly and brave in the face of sorrow, humiliation and her self-effacing loneliness. Would I had been able to picture such things more clearly while she was living.

Griselda surprised me emerging from the room and she smiled, the austere, inscrutable Griselda, with such a smile as Michelangelo might have depicted on the face of one of his Sistine Sybils, those weird sisters who seem to know all things because they have suffered all.

I muttered a casual good night to Griselda and brushed by her nonchalantly, as a boy whistles with apparent carelessness when he feels most awkward or uneasy.

I slept upon my problem in the way old wives advise you, but to-day I am no nearer the solution.

I keep trying coolly to imagine them in appropriately chosen schools and homes, and yet some tugging at my heart strings, some strange alchemy of the brain, wipes out those images before they are formed and replaces them with the vision I saw last night in my invaded bedroom.

Who is to help me make a choice? And before I have put down these words I realize that no one will help me. My dining room is at this moment vocal with their laughter--but something within me is more loudly clamorous yet against the treachery I am planning them. Treachery! That is nonsense, of course. I have a perfect right to decide what I choose. But already that word keeps recurring in my brain whenever I envisage their dispersal.

My decision is taken.

I can hardly say who made it. In reality, I suppose it has made itself. But however it came about, there--heaven help me!--it is.

Gertrude telephoned that she was coming this afternoon. I offered to go to her, but she would drop in, she graciously insisted, now that I was a family man, after lunching with a friend at the Brevoort.

Gertrude's entry is always breezy and cheerful.

"Hello, Ranny," she murmured lightly, sinking on the sofa and holding out both hands. I took them, kissed them and held them in mine. I was well aware that for her these were days of tension.

"That's nice," said Gertrude with a laugh. "But what I want is a cigarette, a match and an ash tray."

"Of course, how stupid of me!" I mumbled and supplied her with her wants.

"Those books, Ranny," she puffed, scanning my laden shelves, "they terrify me afresh every time I see them--when I think you've read them all."

"They needn't alarm you," I deprecated quite sincerely. "The more I read them the less I seem to know--as you will agree." And I sat facing her.

"No room for the brains to turn round in?" she laughed. "Oh, come, dear boy, it's not so bad as that. I really think," she added more soberly, "you have a very wise old bean on your shoulders."

"What sudden and startling discovery leads you to words so rash?" I inquired.

"I've made the discovery all right," she nodded with emphasis. "Anybody who can handle a situation like this the way you're handling it is no piker."

Gertrude often affects the slang of the day as a humorous protest against what she terms my purism. But the truth is, I like the vernacular myself.

"Impart it," I urged her, whereat she smiled.

"Regular street Arab you are," she declared with arch satire, "but what I mean is this. I am always one for quick action--and I don't know much about children. I urged you to send them away at once. But I realize now that so soon after poor Laura's passing away that would have been cruel--and it wouldn't have looked well, besides. Now I see it more your way, Ranny."

"You do!" I could not help exclaiming.

"Yes," she continued firmly. "I see your way is best. I see that we can be quietly married and have our little trip just the same. Then, when we come back, in the natural course of events and rearrangement, we can look up places for them and settle it all right as rain. That's what you had in your clever old head, Ranny, I'm quite sure--and I admire you for it."

"I see," I gasped, wondering what words or acts of mine had conveyed this elaborate strategy to Gertrude. For the space of a minute perhaps I was sunk in thought. The vision of the children asleep in their innocent faith in me suddenly arose vividly and smote me to the heart. The nestling image of Jimmie--the girl Alicia with her great, wistful eyes telling me that there was nothing to do "but just love them"--all this was throbbing in my brain with every heartbeat. And had I in reality schemed out the intricate design with which Gertrude now credited me? By no cudgeling of my poor brains could I recall any such devising. It was impossible. It was new to me. Then something in me that is either better or worse than myself took the reins of the occasion and, like the auditor of another's speech, I heard myself saying with solemn firmness:

"No, Gertrude--you must have mistaken me. I had no such plan. We shall be married, of course, but our marriage can make no difference. I cannot turn these children, Laura's children, out of the house. Not now, at all events, not until they're older. They have no one in the world but me and I mean to keep them."

"Mean to keep them! You mean that?" she gasped. And it pained me to be the cause of a deep flush on Gertrude's face and neck.

"I've never meant anything more certainly in my life," I told her.

"Then we can't marry," said Gertrude in a low tone, still scrutinizing me as though she were wondering whether she had ever met me before.

"Why not?" I cried. "Why should they make so great a difference? In any case, didn't you have an idea that we would each keep our separate flats?"