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Somewhere about half-past ten that supper was over. It seemed more like a week to the weary wanderer, though they professed to be hurrying through their program because he must be tired.
He really had had a very good time, in spite of the strangeness of the situation and his anxiety lest his double might appear on the scene at any moment to undo him. He had tried to think what he would say or do in case that should happen, but he could only plan to bolt through the nearest entrance, regardless of any parishioner who might be carrying potato salad or ice-cream, and take advantage of the natural confusion that would arise in the event of the return of another hero.
Having settled that matter satisfactorily, his easy, fun-loving nature actually arose to a moderate degree of enjoyment of the occasion. He had always taken a chance, a big chance, and in this kindly, admiring atmosphere his terror, that had driven him from one point to another during the last few weeks, had somewhat subsided. It was more than half-way likely that the man he was supposed to be was either hurt seriously or dead, seeing that they had had no direct word from him, and it was hardly probable he would appear at the supper at this late hour, even if he did get a later train to Marlborough. So, gradually, the tense muscles of his face relaxed, the alert look in his eyes changed to a normal twinkle, for he was a personableyoung man when he was in his own sphere, and his tongue began to be loosed. As his inner man began to be satisfied with the excellent food, and he drank deeply of the black coffee with which they plied him, he found a feeble pleasure in his native wit. His conversation was not exactly what might have been termed religious, but he managed to keep out of it many illusions that would not have fitted the gathering. He was by no means stupid, and some inner sense must have taught him, for he certainly was among a class of people to whom his previous experience gave him no clue. They were just as eager and just as vivacious over the life they were living and the work they were doing as ever the people with whom he was wont to associate were over their play. In fact, they seemed somehow to be happier, more satisfied, and he marvelled as he grew more at his ease among them. He felt as if he had suddenly dropped out of his own universe and into a different world, run on entirely different principles. For instance, they talked intermittently, and with deep concern, about a man whom they called John, who was suffering with rheumatic fever. It appeared that they went every day to see him, that he seemed of great importance to their whole group; some of them spoke of having spent the night with him, and of feeling intensely his suffering, as if it were their own, and of collecting a fund wherewith to surprise him on his birthday. They spoke of him with honor and respect, as if he were one with many talents, whom they deeply loved. They even spoke of his smile when they came into his sick-room, and of thehothouse roses that some one had sent him, how he enjoyed them. And then quite casually it came out that the man was an Italian day-laborer, a member of a Mission Sunday-school which this church was supporting! Incredible story! Quite irrational people! Love a day-laborer! A foreigner! Why, they had spoken of him as if he were one of their associates!
He looked into their faces and saw something beautiful; perhaps he would have named it “love” if he had known more about that virtue; or perchance he might have called it “spiritual” if he had been brought up to know anything but the material in life. As it was he named it “queer,” and let it go at that. But he liked it. They fascinated him. A wild fancy passed through his mind that if he ever had to be tried for murder he would like it to be here, among a people who thought and talked as these people did. They at least would not judge him before he had been tried. They were even fair and just and kind to common people whom one never expected to do right, of course, in the world where he came from. Then it flashed across him that he was not being square with these people. They thought him like themselves, and he was not. He did not even know what they meant by some of the things they said.
Between such weird thoughts as this he certainly enjoyed his dinner, wineless and smokeless even though it was. There was a taste about everything that reminded him of the days when he used to go up to Maine as a little boy, and spend the summers with his father’s maiden sister, Aunt Rebecca, long since dead. Things had tasted that way there, wonderful,delectable, as if you wanted to eat on forever, as if they were all real, and made with love. Queer how that word love kept coming to him. Ah! Yes, and there was Mrs. Chapparelle. She used to cook that way, too. It must be when people cooked with their own hands instead of hiring it done that it tasted that way. Mrs. Chapparelle and the pancakes, and the strawberry shortcake with cream, made of light puffy biscuit, with luscious berries between, and lots of sugar. Mrs. Chapparelle! Her face had begun to fade from his haunted brain since the night he had looked into her kitchen window and had seen her go briskly to the door in answer to the ring. What had she met when she opened that door? A white-robed nurse, and behind her men bearing a corpse? Or had they had the grace to send some one to break the news first?
The thought struck him suddenly from out the gaiety of the evening, and he lifted a blanched face to Anita as she put before him his second helping of ice-cream and another cup of coffee.
And he was a murderer! He had killed little Bessie Chapparelle, a girl a good deal like this Anita girl, clean and fine, with high ideals. What would these people, these kind, good people, think of him if they knew? What would they do? Would they put handcuffs on him and send for the police? Or would they sit down and try to help him out of his trouble? He half wished that he dared put himself upon their mercy. That minister now. He looked like a real father! But of course he would have to uphold the law. And of course there wasn’t anything to do buthang him when he had killed a little girl like Bessie! Not that he cared about the hanging. His life was done. But for the sake of his mother, who had never taken much time out of her social duties to notice him, and the father who had paid his bills and bawled him out, he was running away, he told himself, so that they would not have to suffer. Just how that was saving them from suffering he didn’t quite ever try to explain to himself. He was running away so there would not be any trial to drag his father and mother through. That was it.
He ate his ice-cream slowly, trying to get a hold upon himself once more, and across the room Anita and Jane happened to be standing together for an instant in a doorway.
“Isn’t he stunningly handsome, Anita? Aren’t you just crazy about him?” whispered Jane effusively.
“He’s good-looking enough,” admitted Anita, “but I’m afraid he knows it too well.”
“Well, how could he help it, looking like that?” responded the ardent Jane, and flitted away to take him another plate of cake.
But the crowning act of his popularity came whenMr.Harper, president of the bank, senior elder in the church, and honored citizen, came around to speak with the young man and welcome him to the town. He had been detained and came in late, being rushed to his belated supper by the good women of the committee. He had only now found opportunity to look up the new teller and speak to him.
Murray rose with a charming air of deference and respect, and stood before the elder man with all theease that his social breeding had given him. He listened with flattering attention while the bank president told him how glad he was to have a Christian young man in his employ, and how he hoped they would grow to be more than employer and employed.
Murray had dreaded this encounter if it should prove necessary, as he feared the president would have met his young teller before this occasion, and would discover that he was not the right man. But Elliot Harper stood smiling and pleased, looking the young man over with apparently entire confidence, and Murray perceived that so far he was not discovered.
It was easy enough to assent, and be deferential. The trouble would come when they began to ask him questions. He had settled it in his mind quite early in the evening that his strong point was to be as impersonal as possible, not to make any statements whatever about himself that could possibly not be in harmony with the character of the man he represented, as he thought they knew him, and to make a point of listening to others so well that they should think he had been talking. That was a little trick he learned long ago in college when he wanted to get on the right side of a professor. It came back quite naturally to him now.
So he stood with his handsome head slightly bowed in deference and his eyes fixed in eager attention, and the entire assembly fastened their eyes upon him, and admired.
That might possibly be called the real moment when the town, at least those representatives of thetown that were present, might be said to have opened their arms and taken him into their number. How he would meetMr.Harper was the supreme test. With one accord they believed inMr.Harper. He stood to them for integrity and success. They adoredMr.Harrison, their minister, and confided to him all their troubles; they had firm belief in his creed, and his undoubted faith and spirituality; they knew him as a man of God, and respected his wonderful mind and his consistent living; but they tremendously admired the keen mind, clear business ability, coupled with the staunch integrity, of their wealthy bank president, Elliot Harper. Therefore they awaited his leading before they entirely surrendered to the new young man who had come to live in their midst.
Murray Van Rensselaer felt it in the atmosphere as he sat down. He had not lived in an air of admiration all his life for nothing. This was his native breath, and it soothed his racked nerves and gave him that quiet satisfaction with himself that he had been wont to feel ever since he was old enough to know that his father was Charles Van Rensselaer, the successful financier and scion of an ancient family.
He had borne the test and the time was up. Now, any time, in a moment or two, he could get away, melt into the darkness, and forget Marlborough. They would wonder, and be indignant for a day or a week, but they would never find him nor know who he was. He would simply be gone. And then very likely in a day or two the other man that he had been representing for the evening would either turn up or have a funeral or something, and they would discover hisfraud. But there would in all probability be an interval in which he could get safely to a distance and be no more. He had gained a dinner, and a pleasant evening, a little respite in the nightmare that had pursued him since the accident, and he had a kindly feeling toward these people. They had been nice to him. They had showed him a genuineness that he could not help but admire. He liked every one of them, even the offish Anita, who had a delicate profile like Bessie’s, and the ridiculous Jane, who could not take her eyes from him. Now that he was an outcast he must treasure even such friendliness, for there would be little of that sort of thing left for him in the world hereafter. He could not hope to hood-wink people this way the rest of his life.
He felt a sudden pang at the thought of throwing this all away. It had been wonderfully pleasant, so different from anything he had ever experienced among his own crowd—an atmosphere of loving kindness like what he used to find at Chapparelle’s, which made the thought of stolen evenings spent in the company of Bessie seem wonderfully fresh and sweet, and free from taint of any selfishness or sordidness. How different, for instance, these girls were from the girls at home. Even that Jane had a childlikeness about her that was refreshing. How he would enjoy lingering to play with these new people who treated him so charmingly, just as he had lingered sometimes in new summer resorts for a little while to study new types of girls and frolic a while. It would be pleasant,howpleasant, to eat three good meals a day and have people speak kind words and try to forgetthat he was a murderer and an outlaw. If he were in a foreign land now he might even dare it. But four hundred miles was a short distance where newspapers and telegraph and radio put everything within the same room, so to speak. No, he must get out, and get out quickly. There would likely be a late train, and perhaps his other self would arrive on it. If possible he would have to get away without going back to Mrs. Summers’, but at least if he went back he must not linger there. He could make some excuse, run out for medicine to the drug-store, perhaps, or, if worst came to worst, pretend to go up to bed and then steal away after she was asleep. There would be a way!
His resilient nature allowed him to feel wonderfully cheerful as he arose from the table at last and prepared to make his adieus.
But it was not easy, after all, to get away. Mrs. Summers came to him and asked him if he would mind carrying a basket home for her, she wouldn’t be a minute, and then pressed him into service to gather up silver candlesticks and a few rare china dishes.
“You see they’re borrowed,” she explained, “and I don’t like to risk leaving them here lest some one will be careless with them in the morning before I could get over, or mix them up and take them to the wrong person. I wouldn’t like them to get broken or lost under my care.”
They walked together across the lawn under a belated moon that had struggled through the clouds and was casting silver slants over the jewelled brown of the withered grass.
“It’s been so lovely having you here,” said Mrs.Summers gently, “almost like having my boy back again. I kept looking at you and thinking, ‘He’s my boy. He’s coming home every night, and I can take care of him just as I did with my own.’”
Murray’s heart gave a strange lurch. Nobody had ever spoken to him like that. Love, except in a tawdry form, had never come his way, unless his father’s gruffness and continual fault-finding might be called love. It certainly had been well disguised so that he had never thought of it in that light. It had rather seemed to him, when he thought about it at all, that he stood to his father more in the light of an obligation than anything else. His mother’s love had been too self-centred and too peevish to interest him. There had been teachers occasionally who had been fond of him, but their interest had passed when he used them to slide out of school work. There had been a nurse in his babyhood that he barely remembered, who used to comfort him when he was hurt or sleepy, and sometimes when he was sick cuddle him in her arms as if she cared for him, but that was so very far away. He had sometimes watched the look between Bessie Chapparelle and her mother when he would be there playing games of an evening with the little girl, a look that had made him think of the word love; but that also was far away and very painful now to think about. Strange how one’s thoughts will snatch a bit from every part of one’s life and blend them together in an idea which takes but an instant to grasp, just as a painter will take a snatch of this and a dab of that color and blend them all into a tint, with no hint of the pink or the blue, or the black,or the yellow, or the white, that may have gone to form it, making just a plain gray cloud. Murray was doing more thinking these last few days than he had ever done in the whole of his life before. Life, as it were, was painting pictures on his mind, wonderful living truths that he had never seen before were flashing on the canvas of his brain, made up of the facts of his past life which at the time had passed over him unnoticed. He had gone from his cradle like one sliding down-hill and taking no note of the landscape. But he found now that he had suddenly reached the bottom of the hill, and had to climb up (if indeed he might ever attain to any heights again), that he knew every turning of the way he had come, and wondered how he could have been unheeding before. It occurred to him that this phenomenon might be called “growing up.” Trouble had come and he had grown up. Life had turned back on him and slapped him in the face, and he began to see things in life, now he had lost them, that he had not even recognized before.
As he slipped his arm through the big basket and stood waiting for Mrs. Summers to decide whose cake-pan the big square aluminum one was, he looked wistfully about him on the disarray of tables, a kind of hungering in his heart to come here again and feast and bask in the cheery comforting atmosphere. Good and sweet and wholesome it all was, a sort of haven for his weary soul that was condemned to plod on throughout his days without a place for his foot to remain, forevermore. He had a strange, tired feeling in his throat as if he would like to cry, like a child who has come to the end of the good time, and whosebubbles are broken and vanished. There would be no more bubbles for him any more. The bowl of soap-suds was broken.
And so as they walked toward the little cottage with its gleaming light awaiting them from the dining-room window he felt strangely sad and lonely, and he wished with all his heart that he might walk in and be this woman’s boy. If only he could be born again into her home and claim her as his mother, and take the place as her son and be a new man, with all his past forgotten! He thought—poor soul, he had not yet learned the subtlety of sin, the frailty of human nature—he thought if he could be in this environment, with such people about him, such a home to come to, and such a mother to love him, he could learn to fit it. If it hadn’t been for the possibility of the other man coming he would have dared to try it and keep up his masquerade.