Part 2

The man nodded half guiltily.

“Yes, old Oscar,--the man who gave me everything,--the chance to live, to win you--all.”

He resumed his tramp to and fro across the rug, scrupulously refraining from stepping beyond the border. His wife still kept her eyes fixed on him, as though resolved to win from him the secret of the matter. Suddenly she rose and went to him, putting her arms about his neck.

“Let me look at you! You have always been a good man, I know. You need not tell me so. This cannot be some terrible revenge for your weakness or wickedness. Have I not held you in my arms? I should have known, if it had been you, for whom our boy suffers.”

He kissed her tenderly and led her to a couch; then knelt down beside her.

“No, Evelyn--not that. But you must be calm or you will lose your head. You take it too seriously. Oscar is a baby five years old. A five-year-old baby!”

“And some day he will commit murder. My God, will you tell me to be quiet and not think of that!”

A maid entered the room to announce dinner.

III

Mrs. Simmons sat through the meal, white faced and silent. Her eyes followed her husband’s nervous movements, but she did not seem to be listening to his incessant talk. He was trying to talk away the disagreeable thing between them, and apparently she had not the strength to join him in the effort. She saw him across the table, strangely apart from her,--not the lover and husband who had been woven into her life. He was a large, tall man, with clear black eyes, a resounding laugh, and vehement, expressive movements. Compared with Dr. Vessinger he had almost a foreign intensity and emotionality about him, which it occurred to her suddenly had become more prominent during the years of their marriage, just as his chest had broadened, his arms and hands had become thicker, his whole person had grown mature.

She recalled him as he was when she had first seen him, in Colorado Springs, eight years before, tall, large-boned, awkward. He had gained from civilization. The power that she had felt then in the rough, she had tested in the common manner of marriage and had never found it wanting--until now!

Now, from this fear which beset her, this trouble growing from them both in the person and soul of the child, she could feel no help in him. He was turning away his gaze and chattering, believing only in gross physical ills, such as sickness and sudden death, loss of money and accident,--calamities which one might name to one’s neighbors, discuss with one’s doctor, and bemoan quite aloud. But for this which was unnamable, the fear of destiny, he had no courage: he refused to see! She must grope her way to the understanding of the riddle; she must begin, alone, the struggle with the future....

The maid poured Simmons a second glass of whiskey and water, and handed him a box of cigars. He leaned back in his chair, stretching forward his feet in physical comfort, emphasized by the roar of the summer tempest, which had finally broken in full fury outside. Forked streaks of light illumined the pallid curtains; furious bursts of rain hit sharply the casement windows, as with the thongs of whips. Lull and sullen quiet; then the fury of the tempest--thus it repeated itself.

Mrs. Simmons left the room, noiselessly crossing the hall and mounting the stairs. By the time her husband finished his cigar she had returned, with the same stealthy, restless step, the same questioning eyes.

“He is lying so quietly, Olaf,” she said. “His arm is doubled under his head, and his little fingers are open. His lips tremble with his breath. He is my angel again! I cannot believe anything else. Why should _my_ child be that demon?”

Her husband put his arm about her affectionately and led her into the drawing-room.

“There! You are coming to look at it sensibly, Evelyn,” he said encouragingly.

She drew away from his caress.

“No, no! I know what is there. I had rather see him dead in his bed there to-night than to see that fire in his eyes grow and burn and kill him!”

Suddenly she burst into tears.

“To fear it always. To think of it day and night. To know that it will come back and seize him some hour when I am not there to help him! O God, why did it come to me? What have I done?”

She wept miserably, but when he tried to comfort her she held herself aloof. In their misery they were apart, God dealing with each one in his sorrow separately.

“Come, Evelyn!” the husband broke out. “Enough of this! To-morrow we’ll have in a doctor, the best you can find in the city. Maybe he’ll just give him a dose of something and jog his liver.”

But his wife, who had been standing beside the window, her forehead pressed against the cold pane, whirled about and faced him.

“Did you--ever think--that--you were old Oscar’s son?”

“What put that into your head? I told you all I knew--the story old Oscar told me. The whole camp had it the same way.”

“That he found you in the frozen cabin of those Vermonters up among the Rockies? Your father and mother had died from cold and hunger, and he found you just in time?”

“Yes, that was it.”

He hesitated a moment; and then he added honestly:

“It must have been so; but I have never found a man who knew anything about the cabin, or those Vermonters. Well, it made no difference--so long as you took me.”

“No, it made no matter to me. I said so then when you asked me to marry you.” She waited a moment before adding, “And I say so now. _Nothing_ can make it any different!”

“Bless you for that!”

But she quickly parted from his kiss.

“Tell me about old Oscar. He was rough and bad at times, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, rough,--not bad--a fierce customer, a regular Berserker, when he was taken that way,--when he was drunk or in a bad humor. But I don’t want to think of that--he was so good to me, brought me up, gave me my education, taught me my profession himself, and put me in the way of having a happy life. It isn’t right to remember his bad side.”

“What do you mean? You never told me he was bad. I thought you meant he was rough and uneducated--that he made his way without a cent from the time he landed in New York. What else do you mean? Was he a bad man? Was he wicked?”

The man walked to and fro, disturbed and puzzled. He had stumbled on the worst idea in the world for his wife to feed her imagination upon, and yet he knew that she was aroused--he could not put her off with excuses. He had never told her of his old barbarian benefactor’s darker side, partly because he did not like to mention rude vices to her and partly because it seemed disloyal to his kindest friend. And he was not skilful in handling the truth. What he had to say, he was forced to blurt out plainly.

“Why, it wasn’t drawing-room life in a Colorado camp in those days, anyway, and the older crowd were a pretty rough lot, all of them. Oscar Svenson was better than most, generally. But he would have his times of being drunk and disorderly, and he was such a big fellow and so strong that when he got violent the camp generally knew it. I can remember once when I was a little fellow sitting in the corner of the saloon when he had one of his fits. He was a giant, a head taller than I am, with a great mane of hair all over his head, growing down the nape of his neck in a thick mat under his shirt.”

Mrs. Simmons started, and twisted her hands nervously. But she controlled herself.

“Go on!”

“When he was drunk, he didn’t shoot--that wasn’t his way. He would use his knife, or take up a man in his arms and crush him like a bear with his two hands. That day--but, pshaw! It’s all nonsense, my sitting here and telling you fool stories to make you creepy. The rain has stopped. I’ll tell Tom to harness up, and we’ll drive over to the Country Club to see if they’ve got the election returns yet. Come, dear! Try to be strong and patient.”

“No! I shall not go out to-night one single step. I can’t get that cry out of my head, and I should hear it worse if I were away from the house. Tell me about that terrible old man. Did he kill a man before your eyes?”

“I hate to have you think of him so. He gave me everything, even _you_.”

She smiled forlornly.

“He was different in nature from us tame folk in the States. He came from a people that drink deep and have fiery passions,--big-boned, strong-hearted people, as gentle as women and as savage as bulls. I’ve seen him--”

“What makes you stop so short, when you are just ready to tell something? I want to hear the worst thing you remember.”

He stammered and hunted for an excuse.

“Come, come. It’s all rot. They tell stories about men. Such a fellow as old Oscar Svenson you must make allowances for, take the good with the bad. There were plenty of better men than he at his worst, but few as good as he at his best. You can’t line such men up with meeting-house folk. I’ll tell you how he saved the Irish family off Keepsake trail, all alone. But it is stifling here. Come out to the terrace, now the rain has stopped.”

There they sat together on a bench in the corner of the terrace, while he told the story of old Oscar’s magnificent courage and will. The big Norwegian had ploughed his way ten miles up the mountains in a blinding snowstorm to carry food to a woman and some children. The woman’s husband was too cowardly to leave the camp. And when old Oscar had reached the cabin, finding one child sick, he had gone back to the camp for medicine.

As Simmons told the story, the stars came out in the soft summer heavens; the damp odor of cut grass filled the air. The parched earth, having drunk, breathed forth. But the woman’s tense gaze never softened. When he had finished, she said:

“Now you must tell me the worst thing he ever did. I will know it!”

“They say he threw a man over a precipice once, and nearly broke his back. The fellow had been stealing water, when there wasn’t enough to go around, and he had had his share. He lied about it, too. Old Oscar just chucked him off the trail like a rat. He would call that justice. I don’t know. That was before I knew him.”

She shivered, and held her husband’s hand more tightly.

“Go on!”

“There were other stories of the same thing; well, we’d call it murder now, maybe!”

And she forced him to tell much--the dark deeds of this old Berserker in his mad rages,--swift, brutal love, murder--all that the furies of blood drive a man to do. Bit by bit, she had them all,--stories whispered here and there on the slopes of mountains, in far-off mining camps and towns, where the Norseman had spent his life; things remembered out of that rough childhood for which she had pitied her husband, for which she had loved him the more, with a woman’s desire to make the bitter sweet. As the soft summer night got on, she heard the story of that killing, the sole one which he had seen with his own eyes. He had locked it tight within his breast all the years since: the quarrel with a friend about some insignificant trifle, the burst of anger, the sudden blow, and then, while the boy tried to part the men, a strange look of wonder on the fierce face from which the red passion was paling. And the next morning forgetfulness of it all!

“But it troubled him always like a bad dream--he could never remember exactly what he had done. He never thought _I_ knew.”

She rose from the bench and walked away from him to the end of the terrace.

“And, my Evelyn,” he pleaded, “you loved me first because _he_ had been all I had had. You asked nothing of me--you gave me all your love gladly.”

He had an uneasy feeling that something strange and impalpable was pushing its way between them.

“Yes,” she murmured. “It was--a long time ago.”

“Seven years. Is that a long time?”

“Yes. I was a girl then. It is always a long time to when one was a girl.”

“It doesn’t seem to me a long time!”

“Well, it’s a great while since, since _this_ came up--like a mountain. The past is on the other side.”

“I don’t know what you mean. No kind of trouble should divide man and wife!”

For a few moments there was silence; then she cried, in the accent of reproach, of accusation:

“Can’t you see? You were _his_ child!”

“Old Oscar’s?... Sometimes I have thought it might be so. I am dark like him. But we can never know it now.”

“_I_ know it! The devil in that bad old man has slept in you and is waking in little Oscar,--my child, _my_ child! That is what you have brought me for my love. I took you because I loved you, because I was mad to have you. I wanted you just for myself, just to give me joy. Now! Now!... I can sit and watch the child who is me fight with that devil. Oh! there is nothing but pain!”

IV

Moods of the night pass with their tragic glooms, and the first lines of sorrow fade into dull distaste and distant apprehension. Husband and wife met day by day, and slowly the black cloud between them became imperceptibly mist: the man dared raise his eyes to that pitiable face, and the silent wife began to speak. Doctors had come and applied their poultices against panic,--the vast circle of probabilities, the excellences of regimen.

Then the engineer, in the fulfilment of his business engagements, had gone away for six weeks, which the mother and child had spent at the seacoast for a change of air. Early in September they were living once more in the pleasant country house outside the great city, and husband and wife were talking almost confidently of what they should do in this matter and that, speaking with more and more certainty as the days slipped past. Something grave in the woman’s voice, a touch of doubt in the glance between them--those signs alone remained, and the memory.

Another trip to the mines was to be made; the date of departure Simmons put off, in order that he might take his wife to the large dance at the Bellflowers’. On this day he returned from the city by an early afternoon train. When the coachman drew up before the house, no one could be seen about the place. Simmons called out heartily:

“I say, where are you? Is any one about? Evelyn!”

Windows and doors were open; the summer wind blew through the house. There was a vacancy about it all which impressed the man.

“There was somethin’ or other goin’ on when I hitched up,” the coachman ventured to remark. “There were a lot of hollerin’ and screamin’, sir; somethin’ up with the children.”

He had the air of being able to tell more if necessary. Mr. Simmons jumped to the ground and entered the house. A servant, who finally appeared in answer to his repeated calls, told him that she had seen Mrs. Simmons crossing the meadow below the lawn, in the direction of the little river at the bottom of the grounds. She had little Oscar with her, so said the maid, and she seemed to be hurrying.

He hastened to the little boat-house on the river. Hot summer afternoons it was a common thing for his wife to row upon the river, yet every moment he quickened his steps until he was on the run. From the meadow wall he could see his boat tied to a stake in the stream, riding tranquilly. Evelyn was not on the river. He followed the foot-path, hesitatingly, beside the sluggish stream, calling in a voice which he tried to make quite natural:

“Evelyn! Oscar! Evelyn--where are you?”

There was a yard or two of sandy beach beside the boat-house, and there he found them. His wife was kneeling down on the sand, her face to the river, engaged in hurriedly undressing the child. She had him almost stripped of his clothes, and she was talking to him, while he listened with the attention, the thoughtfulness, of a man. Suddenly spying his father, he laughed and broke from his mother’s arms.

“There’s Dad!” he cried. “Are you going away, too, with mamma and me? She’s going to take me far out into the river, away and away, and we are never coming back any more, never going to play any more up there on the lawn!”

His voice rose in the childish treble of wonder, and he added, after a moment:

“Now you come, too, Dad.”

“Evelyn! What does this mean?”

She had risen hastily when little Oscar called out to his father. Her eyes were red with tears, and her hands shook with nervousness.

“I thought it would be all done, all over, before you came,” she murmured. “But he would not come with me unless I took off his clothes. I tried to take him in my arms, but he broke away.”

The man shuddered as he gradually comprehended what it meant. Little Oscar ran back to his mother and put his face close to hers.

“Mamma is sick,” he said gently. “You must take her home and put her to bed and have Dora sing to her.”

His lithe little body danced up and down. The hot wind waved his black curls around his neck. His mother pushed him away.

“Take him,” she groaned. “It kills me to look at him.”

Simmons gathered up the child’s clothes and began to put them on the dancing figure.

“What has crazed you?” he demanded roughly of his wife.

“I will tell you--when he is gone,” she answered wearily, leaning her head against the shingled wall of the boat-house.

Little Oscar ran to and fro in his drawers, wet the tips of his feet, and threw sand into the water, while his father was trying to dress him. Finally the mother took the child, put on his shirt, and told him to run home. He dashed into the thicket of alders beside the river with a shout. Soon they heard his voice in the meadow, ringing with the joy of living, the animal utterance of life.

“It was this afternoon,” the mother explained. “The Porters’ children and the Boyces’ boy were playing on the terrace. Dora was away. I was reading in my bedroom--I had told Dora I would look after the children. I must have dropped asleep with the heat--perhaps a minute, perhaps longer. Suddenly, I _felt_ something fearful. I seemed to hear a choking, a gurgling. When I jumped up, awake, everything was still, quiet,--too quiet, I thought; and I ran to the window over the terrace.”

She covered her face with her hands to shut out the sight of it, and the rest came brokenly through her smothered lips:

“Oscar was there--he and little Ned Boyce. Ned was lying--down on the brick floor--and Oscar had his hands about his throat choking him. I must have screamed. Oscar jumped up, and looked around. He said--he said just like himself,--‘What is it, mamma?’”

She stopped again and swallowed her tears.

“When I got down there, Ned was white and still. I thought he was dead. It was a long, long time before he got his breath, before he was himself. If, if I hadn’t wakened just then--”

Above them in the mottled sunshine on the lawn they could see little Oscar running, then stopping and listening, like some sprite escaped from the river alders. The man watched him springing over the turf, his little shirt fluttering in the breeze, and gradually his head sank. Then he straightened himself, and taking his wife’s hand led her back along the river path into the meadow.

“Ned Boyce is a bad-tempered little fellow: he irritated and exasperated Oscar until with the heat and all that he clutched him. We must think so at any rate. I’ll lick it out of him, if I catch him at it!” He ended with this feeble, masculine threat, this desire to take his exasperation out on somebody else--to be paid for his distress of mind. “But it frightens me to think of your coming here and thinking of doing such a thing!”

He turned his mood of reproach directly to her.

“If you had seen Ned lying there so white--it was whole minutes before he opened his eyes,”--she protested; and then it seemed to come over her in a wave that in her struggle with this evil she was alone,--her husband did not really understand what it meant. To him it was trouble, like difficulty with servants,--something which his buoyant nature refused to take altogether seriously. For him there was always a way out of a situation: to her there was no avenue out in this situation. She took her hand from his arm and stepped forth steadily by herself.

She had done him wrong! In his slower, less vivid mind, the tragedy was printing itself. He no longer could talk comfort. Something heavy and hard settled down on his spirit: he saw himself and this tender woman caught in a rocky bed of circumstance. In the gloom of his mind he could see no light, and he groaned.

Thus, together they mounted the slope of the lawn to the pleasant cottage, side by side and yet withdrawn from one another. As they reached the terrace little Oscar darted out, like a fleet arrow, from the big syringa where he had lain hidden. His voice rippled with joy:

“You’re so slow, you two! Do you see what I got? A piece of Mary’s Sunday cake. And _that’s_ what’s left. I’ll give you that, mamma, if you’ll be good.”

“Take him away!” his mother exclaimed fretfully. “I can’t look at him yet. I have had enough for one day.”

She entered the house and locked herself in her room. Later, when her husband knocked, she opened the door; she had been sitting before her dressing-table, looking vacantly into the mirror.

“I don’t suppose you want to go over there to their party?” he ventured timidly. “I’ll send Tom over with a note.”

“Why would I not go? Why should I stay at home? Is this the sort of place a woman would want to stay in all the time, do you think? Heavens! if anything could make me forget for one quarter of an hour _this_ idea,--anything, I would go--and sin for it too! Do you understand?”

The man’s face winced for the pain she had to bear. Again she burst out, looking into the mirror, her hair fallen about her strong young breast and shoulders:

“You brought this to me, you! Why didn’t something tell me of all that was hidden away in you, all that some day would come out from you and be mine? You did not let me know. Now I cannot get away from it! O my God! Why do you make me live? What right have you to make me live and endure?”

He did not resent her bitter reproaches. It was the instinctive recoil of her young body from terrible suffering, the first twitch of the flesh from the knife. There were no tears left in the eyes now; nothing shone there but passion and resentment.

“Stay at home? It’s the night of all others I’d go somewhere--get something. No! I won’t give in. I’ll get away from it, forget it, and be happy again. I will--see me do it.... They dine at half-past eight. Have the carriage at eight. I shall be ready.”

He walked to and fro in the dressing-room, wishing to say something that could soften her mood. At last he put his hand gently on her beautiful bare shoulders and lowered his face to hers.

“We must take this together, love,” he whispered simply.

“Don’t speak of it!” she cried, drawing herself from his touch. “Don’t touch me. I shall go mad, mad! You will have two instead of one, then.”

V

“Your husband seems to be having a good time,” Dr. Vessinger observed, twirling his champagne glass between his strong bony fingers. “Does he often enjoy--these good spirits--this--enthusiasm?”

Below them in the main portion of the large dining-room of Mrs. Bellflower’s house, the guests were supping at small tables. Dr. Vessinger had captured one of the few tables in the breakfast room at one side. Simmons was seated next to Mrs. Bellflower. His good-natured, bearded face was thrown back, and his eyes shone with champagne. His wife looked at him with surprise; she had not noticed him before. He was talking a great deal, and repeating what he said to right and left, in a loud voice, with much laughter. She could not hear what he was saying, but she divined that it was silly.

“No! I never saw him so--excited, before,” she answered her companion. “He doesn’t usually drink champagne.”

“He seems to like it rather well,” the doctor replied, watching him drain a fresh glass. “It’s a good thing to have such good spirits, isn’t it?” He turned his eyes to hers, and raised his glass. “To your beautiful self, Evelyn!”