CHAPTER XIV
For my own sake, rather than for Regina Barry’s, I made an effort to escape from the pitiless pavilion light overhead.
“You’ll need to go back to your hotel. Sha’n’t we walk along? Then you can tell me as we go.”
The tramp through the gale and spray would have been exhilarating were it not that confidential things had to be thrown out into the tempest. As we left the pavilion, however, a voice floated toward me from the semi-darkness.
“Chair, boss?”
Another minute and we were seated side by side in the odd little vehicle—something between a baby’s perambulator and a touring-car—with the leather curtains buttoned to protect us, and a view through the wind-shield of a long line of lights shining into fog. There was a minute of surprise in the fact that, involuntarily expecting to go at a heightened speed, we found ourselves literally creeping at the snail’s pace which was the customary gait of our pusher.
But that was only subconscious. I took note of it without taking note of it, to remember it when I pieced the circumstances together on returning home. The one thing of which I was really aware was that in this curious conveyance I was seated at her side, and able, as she sat half turned toward me, to look her in the eyes.
Now that we were there, she lost some of her self-possession.After the months in which I had been afraid of her she seemed suddenly to have become afraid of me. Crouching back into her corner of the chair, she grew small and apologetic.
“Mother made me come. She said some one ought to tell you.”
It was like a little cry—the cry of a child confessing before it is accused. I could follow her mental action. She wanted me to understand that nothing butforce majeurewould have induced her to waylay a man as he was coming home from work and take him in a kind of ambush.
Having once already talked with her at cross-purposes, I was careful to let her state her message before betraying my conviction of what it was to be.
“It’s very kind of Mrs. Barry,” I began, vaguely.
“You see, she likes you,” she broke in, impulsively. “If you had any one belonging to you in this country I dare say she—But she’s awfully maternal, mother is; and when Annette told her—”
“What did Annette tell her?”
“That’s it. Oh, Mr. Melbury, I’m so sorry that I should be the one to bring the news.”
“If it’s bad news,” I said, encouragingly, “I’d rather have you to share it with me than any one else in the world.”
She asked, abruptly, “Have you heard anything from home—lately?”
I had once more the sensation of the blood rushing back to my heart and staying there. All I could do was to shake my head.
“That’s what Annette thought. We told her she ought to write to you.”
In my excitement I clutched her by the hand, but I think she was hardly aware of the act any more than I.
“But what is it?”
“It’s—it’s about your father.”
“He’s not—he’s not—dead?”
She fell back again into her corner of the chair, withdrawing her hand. I, too, fell back into my corner, staring out through the wind-shield. Knowing that by not saying no she was really saying yes, I was obliged not only to get possession of the fact, but to control my sense of it.
I may say at once that it was the first sudden shock of my life. Every other trial had come to me by degrees—I had more or less seen it on the way and had been ready to meet it. This was something I had hardly ever thought of. That it might happen some time had been vaguely in the back of my mind, of course; but I had never considered it as an event of the day and hour. Now that it had occurred, my mental heavens seemed to fall.
I have told you so little of my family life that you hardly realize the degree to which my father was its center and support. My memory cannot go back to the time when he was not an important man, not only in the estimation of his children, but in that of the entire country. One of the youngest of that group of men who in the ’sixties and ’seventies took the scattered colonies of Great Britain lying north of the border of the United States and welded them into a gigantic, prosperous whole, he had outlived all but the sturdiest of his contemporaries. With Macdonald, Mount Stephen, Strathcona and a few others he had had the vision of a new white man’s empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from theGreat Lakes to the Arctic, and through good times and evil he had never let it go. That there were evil times as well as good ones is a matter of history; but however dark the moment, my father was one of those who never lost for a fraction of an instant his belief in ultimate success. In helping to build up the vast financial system of the Canadian Pacific Railway there was no door, in Europe or America, where money could be borrowed at which he did not knock. There were days when the prospect was so hopeless and the treasury so empty that he was obliged to pledge everything he possessed, and after that to use nothing but his honor and his name. The winning out is one of the fairy-tales of the modern world. He had begun to reap his reward just as my memory of him opens. Of his days of struggle I knew only by hearsay. By the time I was five he was already a man of considerable wealth, honored throughout the Dominion, honored in Great Britain, and one of the eight or ten Canadian baronets created by the Queen.
I see him as tall, spare, and vigorous, with thin, clear-cut, clean-shaven features, a piercing eye, and a mouth that sagged at the corners not from dejection, but from determination. Spartan in his own life, he required his children to be Spartan in theirs. Though with our added means our manner of living increased in dignity, it gained little in the way of luxury; and many were the shifts to which my brothers and I were pushed to indulge the follies of young men.
My brothers did this no more than experimentally, covering their tracks and returning to right ways before their digressions could be noticed. I was invariably caught, coming in for some dramatic moments with my father, which increased in tension with the years. I have oftenwondered what his own youth could have been that he had so little mercy on what was at first not much worse than high spirits and boisterousness. Though I am far from blaming any one but myself for my ultimately going wrong, I have sometimes thought that a gentler handling might have led me aright when sheer repression only made me obstinate. That gentler handling my mother would have given me had not my father felt that it was weak. This knowledge only added to my perversity, the result being a state of continuous rebellion on my part and permanent displeasure on his.
“You’re getting in worse and worse with the old man,” my brother Jack warned me a few months before I left Montreal for good. “I heard him telling mother that if you didn’t turn over a new leaf he’d cut you out of his will.”
The information that he had so cut me out was the last form of appeal he ever made to me. I didn’t believe he meant it otherwise than as a bluff—a stroke of the pen could have reinstated me; but merely as a bluff it angered me. It implied that I might be induced to do for money what I hadn’t done for love or duty, and I was foolish enough to consider it part of my manhood to prove that any one who so judged me was mistaken. In that phase of my misguided life there was a kind of crazy, Cordelia-like attempt to show my father that it was not because of his money that I cared for him—or didn’t care for him; but all I succeeded in doing was to rouse the resentment of a man who had hardly ever been defied.
But I had repented of that kind of bravado long before I had repented of anything else. My letter to him in October had been quite sincere. To becut out of his will had never meant anything to me but the loss of his affection. I was sorry for that loss, sorrier than any words I have could tell you. But when he wrote to me, in answer to my October letter, I knew from his tone that I had definitely killed whatever had once existed between him and me, and that all that was left for me was to bury it. I had been trying to bury it for the past eight weeks, and I do not deny that the effort was a bitter one.
You must understand that I had now come in for a set of emotions that had not belonged to me before I went to the Down and Out. I can explain it only on the ground that months of abstinence from anything that could inflame the senses or disturb the poise of the mind had induced a sanity of judgment to which I had been a stranger. In this new light I was really a prodigal son—not from any hope of a ring on my hand or the fatted calf, but genuinely from affection for the parents I had wronged.
To have this impulse to arise and go to my father thrown back on itself was the hardest thing in my experience. Somehow I had kept the conviction that if ever I repented that door would be open to my return. It had not really occurred to me that they wouldn’t say at home, “It is meet that we should make merry and be glad.” That my brothers might refuse to join in the chorus was a possibility. That my sister might not be over-enthusiastic in doing so I should be able to understand. But that my father and mother.... Throughout my stay in Atlantic City I had been saying to myself, “Well, if I’ve thrust a sword into your hearts, old dears, you’ve jolly well thrust one into mine; and so we’re quits.”
“When did it happen?” was the first question I was sufficiently master of myself to ask.
“Annette heard yesterday. I think it was the day before.”
“Do you know if—if he’d been ill?”
“He hasn’t been well for a long time, Annette says—not for two or three years; but the end was—well, it was heart failure. He was in his motor—going home. When the car drove up to the door they found him—”
It was the picture thus presented that made me put my hand to my forehead and bow my head. I was thinking of him seated in his corner of the car, stately, unbending, unpardoning, dead. I was thinking of the plight of my poor little mother when the man she had for so many years worshiped and obeyed was no longer there to give her his commands. I was thinking of the commotion in the family, of the stir of interest throughout the community. A prince and a great man would have fallen in Israel, and all our Canadian centers would be aquiver with the news. Jerry and Jack would cable to my sister in England, as well as to our uncles and aunts in that country and in the United States. There were cousins and friends who wouldn’t be forgotten. I alone was left out.
That was, however, more than I could believe. It was more, too, than I was willing to allow Regina Barry to suppose.
“There must be a telegram for me at my rooms in New York,” I managed to stammer, though I fear my tone lacked conviction.
To this she said nothing. She had, in fact, as Cantyre informed me later, already ascertained that up to the hour of her departure from New York there was none.
I talked to Cantyre on the telephone immediately on returning to my hotel. He said that, though in my rooms there were some odds and ends of mail matter which he hadn’t yet forwarded, there was no telegram or Canadian letter. Having called up Annette, I got a repetition of the meager information Miss Barry had given me, though I learned in addition that the funeral was to take place on the following day, which would be Christmas Eve. Her father had already gone to Montreal to take part in the ceremony. The embarrassment of her tone in saying she was surprised that I had received no announcement told me that she was not surprised. It was the last touch to the certainty that I had been omitted with intention.
After that, for a time, my grief gave place to rage. The punishment was so much greater than the crime that my heart cried out against its injustice. Had I stayed down in the depths where I was I should have accepted it phlegmatically; but having made the effort to rise, and made it with some success....
I acquitted my mother and my sister of any share in the injury done to me. My mother was the tenderest little creature God ever made, but she had always been under the domination of my father, and had now come under that of her sons. Never having asserted herself, she would hardly begin to do it at this date, though she might weep her heart out in secret. I knew my sister would put in a good word for me, but as the youngest of the family and a girl she would easily be overruled.
Jack might be mercifully inclined, but he would do as Jerry insisted. Jerry—who as Sir Gerald Melbury would now cut a great swath as head of the family—Jerry would be my father over again. He would be my father overagain, only on a smaller scale. My father was tyrannical by instinct; Jerry would be so by imitation. My father believed his word to be law because he didn’t know how to do anything else; Jerry would believe his word to be law in order to be like my father. My father wouldn’t forgive me because I had outraged his affections; Jerry wouldn’t forgive me because my father hadn’t done it first. As far as he could bring it about, my future would be locked and sealed with my father’s death, not because he, Jerry, would be so shocked at my way of life, but because the laws of the Medes and Persians alter not.
Nothing remained for me, then, but to grin and bear it, and bide my time. That I had friends of my own was to me a source of that kind of consolation which is largely pride. Cantyre and the Coningsbys, Regina Barry and her mother—came closer to me now than any one with whom I had ties of blood. “Our relatives,” George Sand writes somewhere, “are the friends given us by Nature; our friends are the relatives given us by God.”
As relatives given me by God I regarded Lovey and Christian and Colonel Straight and Pyn and Beady Lamont and all that band of humble, helpful pals to whom I was knit in the bonds of the “robust love” which was the atmosphere of brave old Walt Whitman’s City of Friends. There was no pose among them, nor condemnation, nor severity. Forgiveness was exercised there till seventy times seven. They forbore one another in love, and endeavored to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace to a degree of which Some One would have said that He had not found the like, no, not in Israel.
My family were all of Israel, and of the strictest sect. They fasted twice in the week, so to speak; in theory, ifnot in practice, they gave tithes of all that they possessed; they could sincerely thank God that they were not as such men as composed the Down and Out; and yet it was precisely among those who smote their breasts and didn’t dare so much as to lift up their eyes unto heaven that I found the sympathy that raised me to my feet and bade me be a man. No wonder, then, that that evening I kept poor old Lovey near me, that I took him down to the café, where there were only men, and made him dine with me, and told him of my bereavement.
“Is he, now?” he said, drawing a melancholy face. “No one can’t live forever, can they? He’d have been an old, aged man, I expect.”
I told him my father’s age.
“Ah, well, at that time of life they gits carried off. Too bad you didn’t know in time for the funeral. Ye’d ’ave liked to see him laid away safe underground, wouldn’t ye, Slim? I ’ope he was in some good benefit club, like, that’ll take care of the expenses of burial. Awful dear, coffins is; but I suppose your family has a plot in some churchyard.”
When I had assured him that this was the case he continued: “And as for goin’ off sudden—well, it’s awful ’ard on relations when a old, ancient man’ll lay round sick and don’t know when ’is time’s come. I’ve knowed ’em when you’d swear they hung on a-purpose, just to spite them as ’ad to take care of ’em. I ’ad a grandfather o’ me own—well, you’d think that old man just couldn’t die. Ninety, I believe he was, and a wicked old thing when he got silly, like. Take the pepper, he would, and pour it into the molasses-jug, and everything like that. Terr’ble fun he was for us young ones, especially one day when he dressed all up in ’is Sundayclothes and went out in the street without ’is pants. I don’t suppose yer guv’nor ever did the like o’ that, Slim. Don’t seem as if old people on this side ’ad them playful ways.”
In this sort of reminiscence the evening went by, and in the morning I received a note that did much to comfort me. It was no more than the conventional letter of condolence from Mrs. Barry, but it was tactfully couched.
“A loss like yours,” she wrote, “painful as it is at all times, becomes tragically so when the support one finds in family ties is too far away to sustain one. I have often found in my own experience that loneliness added a more poignant element to grief. I wish you would remember, dear Mr. Melbury, that you have friends at this Christmas-time quite near you. Run in and see us whenever you feel the need of a friendly word. We are leading a life here absolutely without engagements, and you will cheer us up more than we can cheer you. If on Christmas Eve you would care to look in between four and five you would find us here, and we could give you a cup of tea.”
Needless to say all through the day of Christmas Eve my thoughts were with the gathering in our house on the slopes of Mount Royal. I saw in fancy every detail of the lugubrious pomp through which Christians contradict their Saviour in his affirmation that there is no death. Solemnity, blackness, muffled drums, and long lines of men throwing awe into their faces—would smite the heart with a sense of the final, the irreparable, the gone and lost. Flowers would lend a timid touch of brightness, but they would bloom in little more than irony. The roll of many wheels, the tramp of many feet, and a funeral service inwhich the triumphant note itself would be turned into a dirge, these would be the massive accompaniment to the few sobs welling up from hearts in which they would be irrepressible. Though shut out in person, in spirit I was there, standing in the shrouded room, witnessing my mother’s farewell kiss, watching the lid placed on the coffin, marching with my brothers, kneeling in the church, hearing the clods fall in the grave. At the very moment when Mrs. Barry handed me a cup of tea I was saying to myself, “Now it is all over, and they are coming back to the darkened, empty house.”
I was not cheerful as a companion, and apparently no one expected me to be so. We can scarcely be said to have talked; we merely kept each other company. It was Miss Barry herself who suggested, when we had finished tea, that she and I should take a walk.
The weather had grown clear, bright, and windless. All along the promenade there was Christmas in the shops and in the air. It was not like any Christmas I had ever known before, with the blare, the lights, the gay, homeless people, and the thundering of breakers under starlight; but some essential of the ancient festival was present there, and it reached me. It reached me with a yearning to have something belonging to me that I could claim as my own—something to which I should belong and that wouldn’t cast me off—something that would love me, something that I should love, with a love different from that with which even the City of Friends could supply me.
But out on the crowded, starry sea-front we neither walked nor talked. We sauntered and kept silent. On my side, I had the feeling that there was so much to say that I could say nothing; on hers, I divined that therewas the same. I will not affirm that in view of all the circumstances I could be anything but uneasy; and yet I was ecstatic. This wonderful creature was beside me, comforting me, liking to be with me! But if she knew exactly who I was....
I was swept by an intense longing that she should be told. It was a longing I was never free from, though it didn’t often seize me so imperiously as to-night. It seized me the more imperiously owing to the fact that I could see her moving farther and farther away from any recollection and realization coming through herself. I had hoped that both would occur to her without my being obliged to say in so many words, “I am the man who tried a few months ago to steal your jewelry.”
But if ever the shadow of this suggestion crossed her mind, it didn’t cross it now. From the beginning the face and figure of that man had been blurred behind the memory of my brother Jack. Recent events had fixed me, just as she saw me, definitely in conditions in which sneak-thieving is unimaginable. I was the son of Sir Edward Melbury, Baronet, of Montreal and Ottawa, a man who would rank among the notables of the continent. Though a son in disfavor, I was still a son, and moreover I was exercising an honorable craft with some credit. I might propose to her, I might marry her, I might live my whole life with her, and the chances were that she would never connect me with the man she had seen for a few hurried minutes on pulling the rose-colored hangings aside.
For this very reason it seemed to me I must tell her before our friendship went any further. It was an additional reason that I began to think that the information would be a shock to her. How I got that impressionI can scarcely tell you; the ways in which it was conveyed to me were so trifling, so infinitesimal.
For example, I asked her one day what she meant by her oft-repeated statement that I was different from other men.
“Our men,” she explained, promptly, “have no life apart from their businesses and professions. Business and profession are stamped all over them. They are in their clothes, their faces, the tones of their voices. You’d know Ralph Coningsby was an architect, and Stephen Cantyre a doctor, and Rufus Legrand a clergyman, the minute you heard them speak. Now you wouldn’t know what you were. You might be anything—anything a gentleman can be, that is. I’ve heard some one say that Oxford is a town in a university, and Cambridge a university in a town. In just the same way my father, for instance, is a man in an architect. You’re an architect in a man. With you the man is the bigger. With us he’s the smaller. It isn’t merely business before pleasure; it’s business before human nature; and somehow I’ve a preference for seeing human nature put first.”
There was little in this to say what I have just hinted at. There was barely sufficient to let me see that she was putting me above most of her men acquaintances, in a place in which I had no right to be. Though it was as far as she ever went, it was far enough to create my suspicion and to make me feel that the earliest confession would not come too soon.
When we got down to the less frequented end of the Board Walk the moment seemed to have arrived. The crowd had thinned out to occasional groups of stragglers or lovers going two and two. Only here and there onecame on a shop; only here and there on a hotel. One got an opportunity to see the stars, and to hear the ocean as something more than a drumbeat to the blare.
By a simultaneous movement we paused by the rail, to look down on the dim, white, moving line of breakers. It was one of those instants when between two people drawn closely to each other something leaps. Had there been nothing imperative to keep us apart I should have seized her in my arms; she would have nestled there. I had distinctly the knowledge that she would have responded to anything—and that the initiative was mine.
As a rocket that bursts into cascades of fire suddenly goes out, so suddenly the moment passed, leaving us with a sense of coldness, primarily due to me.
Somewhat desperately I began: “Do you know what has made the difficulties between me and my family?”
She was gazing off toward the dark horizon.
“Vaguely.”
“Do you know that for years I gave them a great deal of trouble?”
“Vaguely.”
“Do you know that—”
“Do you know,” she interrupted, quietly, “that I used to have a brother?”
The question so took me by surprise that I answered, blankly, “No.”
“Yes, I had. He was nearly ten years older than I, which would make him about your age. He was—he was wild.”
“And is he—is he dead?”
“He shot himself—about five years ago. It was a terrible story, and I don’t want to tell it to you. I only want to say that my mother feels that if—if father hadn’tbeen so hard on him—if he’d played him along gently—he might easily have been saved. It’s what Mr. Christian—he’s had great experience in that sort of thing—he does a wonderful work among men that have gone under—but it’s what he used to tell father; only father hadn’t nearly so much patience with his own son as he would have had with some one else’s, and so— I wonder if you can understand that when mother heard that you had been—had been—well, a little like my brother—”
“Who told her?”
“Oh, I don’t know. These things get about. It might have been Annette.”
“And assuming that I was what you call wild, have you any idea how wild I was?”
Her response to this was to say: “I like a man to have spirit. The men who always keep on the safe side—” She left this sentiment there, to add, less irrelevantly than it sounded: “Mother wants you to come and dine with us to-morrow evening. It will be Christmas Day, but we sha’n’t keep it as Christmas. We don’t have any Christmases since—since Tony died. We simply—we simply sha’n’t be alone.”
In the turn our talk had taken there was so much human need that I found my efforts at confession paralyzed. That a family whom I had regarded as enviably care-free should be living in the shadow of a great tragedy, and nursing a sorrow in which there was this element of remorse, was curiously illuminating as a discovery. It seemed to cast into other people’s lives the sort of sharp revealing ray that a flash of lightning throws on a dark road. Here was a girl whom I had thought of hitherto as immune from the more sordid varieties of trial; and yet she had at least tasted of their cup. It gave me anew conception of her. I began to see her not as a flat surface or as static like a portrait, but as a living, palpitating human being with duties round her and a vista of experiences as background.
The immediate inference was that I must assist them over Christmas, as they would assist me; and to do that I must put off telling Regina Barry where she had seen me first.
To be quite free, however, I had to get a kind of permission from Lovey. My relations with him had grown to be peculiar. He seemed to develop two personalities, from the one to the other of which he glided more or less unconsciously. Though even in our privacy he refused any longer to speak of us as buddies and fellas together, he called me Slim and sonny, and referred without hesitation to our fraternal past. On my part I found it almost consoling, in view of the bluff I was putting up, to have some one near me who knew me at my worst. Where I had to pretend before others there was no pretense at all with him; and so I got the relief that comes at any time when one can drop one’s mask.
Here in Atlantic City I was paying all his expenses, but no wages. In New York I offered him nothing but his room. How he lived I didn’t always know, beyond the fact that it was honestly. As to this he was so frank that I could have little doubt about it.
“There’s many a good thing I lets go by, Slim, all on account o’ you. Washin’ windows ain’t nothink but old woman’s work when a man’s been a ’atter. If it wasn’t to save you, sonny—”
“Yes, I know, Lovey. One of these days I may get a chance to make it up to you.”
“Oh, well, as for makin’ it up, so long as you goes onwith the fancy you took to me that night at Stinson’s, like—”
“Oh, I do. You see that, don’t you?”
“Yes; I see it right enough, Slim. It kind o’ passes the buck on me, as you might say. But there! Lord love ye, I don’t complain! Ye’re a fine young fella, and what I does for you—self-denial ye might call it—I don’t grudge. When I sees ye goin’ round like a swell with other swells I just says to myself, ‘Lovey, that’s your work, old top’; and I feels kind o’ satisfied.”
It was kind o’ satisfied that he showed himself when I told him I had been asked to eat my Christmas dinner with Mrs. and Miss Barry.
“Ain’t that grand!” he commented, exultingly. “Ye’ll put on them swell togs—”
“But it will leave you alone, Lovey,” I reminded him.
“Lord love ye, Slim, I don’t mind that! What’s Christmas to me? I don’t pay no attention to all that foolishness—except the plum puddin’.”
I felt it right to throw out a warning.
“In your dining-room, Lovey, with all the chauffeurs, there’ll be things to drink, very likely.”
He put on his melancholy face.
“It won’t make no difference to me, Slim. The Down and Out has got me bound by so many promises, like, that I can’t take a sip o’ nothink, not no more than a dead man that’s got a bottle in ’is coffin. I’m one that can take it or leave it, as I feel inclined.”
“If you’re going to try taking it or leaving it to-morrow I sha’n’t accept Mrs. Barry’s invitation to dinner.”
The effect was what I had expected.
“You go to the dinner, Slim, my boy, and I’ll let you see me ’ittin’ the ’ay before you starts.”
“But you could hit the hay and get out of bed again.”
“No; because I’ll make you lock the door. I ain’t a-goin’ to ’ave ye ’ave no hanxiety on my account.”
So we settled it—not that I was to lock him in, but that he was to guarantee me against being anxious; and I suppose Christian would say that another bit of victory was scored.