"Oh!"
It was the woman again. The sound was rather queer. You could not have told whether it meant relief or indignation.
The man's sad penetrating eyes were bent on him sympathetically. "When you say that you don't want to, exactly what do you mean?"
"I'm not sure that I can say. She was my mother. She was good to me. I was fond of her. I never knew any other mother. I don't think I could—" he looked over at the woman in the shadow, letting his words fall with a certain significant spacing—"know—any other—mother—now—and so—"
Rising, she took a step toward him. He too rose so that as she stood looking up at him he stood looking down at her. There and then her face was imprinted on his memory, a face of suffering, but of suffering that had not made her strong. The quivering victim of self-pity, she begged to be allowed to forget. She had suffered to her limit. She couldn't suffer any more. Everything in her that was raked with the harrow protested against this bringing up again of an outlived agony.
Her beautiful eyes, brimming with unspilled tears, gazed at him reproachfully. As plainly as eyes could tell him anything, they told him that now, when life and time had dug between them such a gulf, she didn't want him as her son. She might have to accept him, since so many things pointed that way, but it would be hard for her. Taking back a little boy would have been one thing; taking back a grown man, none of whose habits or traditions were the same as theirs, would be another. She would do it if it were forced on her, but it couldn't recompense her now for past unhappiness. It would be only a new torture, a torture which, if he hadn't drifted in among them, she might have escaped.
When swiftly and silently she had left the room the man put his hand on Tom's arm.
"Sit down again. You mustn't think that my wife doesn't feel all this. She does. It's because she does that she's so overwrought."
Tom sat down. "Yes, sir, of course!"
"She's been through it so often. For a good ten years after our child was lost boys used to be brought to us to look at every few months. And every time it meant a draining of her vitality."
"I understand that, sir; and I hope Mrs. Whitelaw doesn't think I've come of my own accord."
"No, she knows you haven't. We've asked you to come because—but I must go back. When my wife had been through so much—so many times—and all to no purpose—she made me promise—the doctors made me promise—that she shouldn't be called on to face itagain. Whenever she had to interview one of these claimants—"
"I'mnot a claimant," Tom put in, hastily.
"I know you're not. That's just it. It's what makes the difference. But whenever she had to do it—and decide whether a particular lad was or was not her son—it nearly killed her."
Tom made an inarticulate murmur of sympathy.
"The worst times came after we'd turned down some boy of whom we hadn't been quite sure. That was as hard for me as it was for her—the fear that our little fellow had come back, and we'd sent him away. It got to be so impossible to judge. You imagined resemblances even when there were none, and any child who could speak could be drilled about the facts, as we were so well known. It was hell."
"It must have been."
"Then there were our two other children. It wasn't easy for them. They grew up in an atmosphere of expecting the older brother to come back. At first it gave them a bit of excitement. But as they grew older they resented it. You can understand that. A stranger wouldn't have been welcome. Whenever a new clue had to be abandoned they were glad. If the boy had been found they'd have given him an awful time. That was another worry to my wife."
"Yes, it would be."
"So at last we made up our minds that he was dead. It was the only thing to do. Self-protection required it. My wife took up her social life again, the life she's fond of and is fitted for. Things went better.She didn't forget, but she grew more normal. In spite of the past there were a few things she could still enjoy. She'd begun to feel safe; and then—in that lake in New Hampshire—I happened to see you."
"If I were you, sir, I shouldn't let that disturb me."
"It does disturb me. When I went back that year to our house at Old Westbury and spoke to my wife and children about it, they all implored me not to go into the thing again."
"If I could implore you, too—"
He shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. I've come to the point where I've got to see it through. I have all the data you've given me—as well as some other things. If you're not—not my son—" He rose striding to the fireplace, where he stood pensively, his back to the smouldering fire—"if you're not my son, at least we can find out pretty certainly whose son you are."
Tom also rose, so that they stood face to face. "And if you can't find out pretty certainly whose son I am—?"
"I shall be driven to the conclusion that—"
He didn't finish this sentence. Tom didn't press for it. During the silence that followed it occurred to him that if there was a war the question might be shelved. It was what, he thought, he would work for.
The same idea might have come to the older man, for looking up out of his reverie, he said, with no context:
"What do you mean to be?"
"I've always hoped, sir, to go into a bank. It's what I seem best fitted for."
There came into the eyes that same sudden light, like the switching on of electricity, which Tom remembered from their meeting in the water.
"I could help you there."
"Oh, but it would only be in a small way, sir. I'd have to begin as something—"
"All the same I could help you. I want you to promise me this, that when you're free—either after Harvard, or after the war—you'll come to me before you do anything else. Is that a bargain?"
To Tom it was the easiest way out. "Yes sir, if you like."
"Then our hands on it!"
Their right hands clasped. Once more Tom found himself held. The man's left hand came up and rested on his shoulder. The eyes searched him, searched him hungrily, with longing. Whether they found what they sought or merely gave up seeking Tom could hardly tell. He was only pushed away with a little weary gesture, while the tall man turned once more toward the dying fire.
XLII
Inthe April of 1920, nearly eighteen months after the signing of the Armistice, Tom Whitelaw came back to Boston, demobilized. He had crossed a good part of Europe almost in a straight line—Brest, Paris, Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Fère-en-Tardennois, Reims, Luxembourg, Coblenz—and more or less in the same way had come back again. Now, if he had been able to forget it all, he would gladly have forgotten it. Since it couldn't be forgotten it inspired him with an aim in life.
More exactly, perhaps, it made definite the aim he had been vaguely conscious of already. What he felt was not new; it was only more fixed and clear. He knew what he meant to do, even though he didn't see how he was to do it. He might never accomplish anything; very likely he never would; but at least he had a state of mind, and he was not going to be in a hurry. If for the ills he saw he was to work out a cure, or help to work out a cure, or even dream of working out a cure, he must first diagnose the disease; and diagnosis would take a good part of his lifetime. He was twenty-three, according to his count, but, again according to his count he had the seriousness of forty. With the advantage of a varied experience and an early maturity, he had also that of age.
His achievements in the war had given him the kind of importance interesting to newspapers. Theyhad begun writing him up from the days of the action at Belleau Wood. His picture had appeared in their Sunday editions as on the staff of General Pershing during his visit to the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. To Tom himself the only satisfaction in this was the possible diminishing of the distance between him and Hildred Ansley. It would not have been the first time in history when war had helped a lover out of his obscurity to put him on the level of the loved one. To Hildred herself it would make no difference; but by her father and mother, especially by her mother, a son-in-law who had worn with some credit his country's uniform might be pardoned his presumption.
Public approval also brought him one other consideration that meant much to him. The man who thought he might be his father wrote to him. He wrote to him often. He wrote to him partly as a friend might write, partly as a father might write to his son. Between the lines it was not difficult to read a yearning and sense of comfort. The yearning was plainly for assurance; just as plainly the sense of comfort lay in the knowledge that somewhere in the world there was a heart that beat to the measure of his own. It was as if he had written the words: "My two acknowledged children are of no help to me; my wife is crushed by her sorrow; you and I, even if there is no drop of common blood between us, understand each other. Whether or not we are father and son, we could work together as if we were."
The letters were full of a fatherly affection strange in view of the slight degree of their acquaintanceship.The man's heart cleared that obstacle with a bound. Tom's heart cleared it with an equal ease. To be needed was the call to which, with his strong infusion of the feminine, he never failed to answer instantaneously. As readily as the banker divined him, he divined the banker. If there was no fatherhood or sonship in fact there was both sonship and fatherhood in essence.
Whitelaw wrote as if he had been writing to his boy for years, with a matter-of-course solicitude, with offers of money, with scraps of news. He talked freely of the family, as if Tom would care to hear of them. A few words in one of his letters showed that he knew more than Tom had hitherto supposed.
"If Tad and Lily have been uncivil to you it was not because of personal dislike. In their situation some hostility toward the outsider, as they would call him, whom they might be forced to acknowledge as their older brother must be forgiven as not unnatural."
During all the three years of Tom's soldiering this was the only reference to the question that had been left suspended by the war. Whether or not it would ever be taken up again Tom had no idea. He hoped it would not be. For him an undetermined situation was enough.
Though during this period Henry Whitelaw was frequently in London and Paris they never met. When the one proposed that he should use his influence to get the other leave, Tom thought it wiser to stay, as he expressed it, on the job. Only once did he ask permission to run up for forty-eight hours to Paris, and that was to see Hildred.
She was then helping to nurse Guy, who, while working with the Y.M.C.A., had come down with typhoid fever. Convalescent by this time, he would sail for America in a month or two, Hildred going with him. Tom himself being on the eve of marching into Germany, the moment was one to be seized.
They dined in a little restaurant near the Madeleine. With the table between them they scanned each other's faces for the traces left by nearly two years of separation. Except that she was tired Tom found little change in her. Always lacking in temporary, girlish prettiness, her distinction of line and poise was that which the years affect but slowly, and experience enhances. He could only say of her that she was less the young girl he had last seen in Boston, and more the woman of the world who, having seen the things that happen as they happen most brutally, has grown a little heartsick, and more than a little weary.
"It's all so futile, Tom. It's such waste. It should never have been asked of the people of the world."
His lips had the dim disillusioned smile which had taken the place of the radiance of even a year or two earlier.
"What about the war to end war? What about making the world safe for democracy?"
She put up a hand in protest. "Oh, don't! I hate that clap-trap. The salt which was good enough to put on birds' tails is sickening when you see the poor creatures lying with their necks wrung. Oh, Tom, what can we do about it if we ever get home?"
"Do about what?"
"About the whole thing, about this poor pitiful, pitiable human race that's got itself into such an awful mess?"
"The human race is a pretty big problem to handle."
"Yes, but you don't think the bigness ought to stop us, do you?"
"Stop us from—?"
"From trying to keep the world from going on with its frightful policy of destruction. Isn't there anyone to show us that you can't destroy one without by that much destroying all; that you can't make it easier for one without by that much making it easier for everyone? Are we never going to be anything but fools?"
His dim smile came and went again. "We'll talk about that when I get home. We can't do it now. Even if we could it's no us trying to reason with a world that's gone insane. We must let it have time to recover. I want to hear about you."
She threw herself back in her chair, nervously crumbling a bit of bread. "Oh, I'm all right. Never better, as far as that goes. I've only grown an awful coward. Now that the fighting's over I seem to be more afraid than when it was going on. As far as pep goes I'm a rag."
"It'll do you good to get home."
"Oh, I want to get farther away than home. I want to get somewhere—to a desert island perhaps—where there won't be any people—"
"None?"
"Oh, well, dad and mother and Guy and—"
"And nobody else?"
"Yes, and you. I see you want me to say it, so I might as well. I want you there—andthennobody else—not a soul—not the shadow of a soul—except servants, of course—"
He grew daring as he had never been before. "Perhaps before many years we may find that island—with the servants all the time—but with your father and mother and Guy as visitors—very frequent visitors—but—"
"Oh, don't talk about it. It's too heavenly for a world like this." She looked him in the eyes, despairingly. "Do you suppose itevercould come true?"
"Stranger things have."
"But better things haven't."
He put down his knife and fork to gaze at her. "Hildred, do you really feel like that?"
"Well, don't you?" Her tone was a little indignant. "If you don't for pity's sake tell me, so that I shan't go on giving myself away."
"Of course, I feel that way, only it seems to me queer that you should."
"Why queer?"
"Because you're you, and I'm only me."
"You can't reason in that way. You can't really reason about the thing at all. The most freakish thing in the world is whom people'll fall in love with."
"It must be," he said humbly.
"Oh, cheer up; it isn't as bad as all that. There's no disgrace in my being in love with you. If you'll just be in love with me I'll take care of myself."
They laughed like children. To neither was it strange to have taken their love for granted, sincethey had done it for so long. It was as if it had grown with them, as if it had been born with them. Its flowers had opened because it was their springtime; there was nothing else for it to do. It was a stormy springtime, with only the rarest bursts of sunshine; but for that very reason they must make the most of such sunshine as there was. They had not met for two years; it might be two years more before they met again. They could only throw their hearts wide open.
She talked of her work. In her mood of reaction it seemed to her now a stupid, foolish work, not because it hadn't done good, but because it had done good for such useless purposes. A New York woman whom she knew, whose son had been killed fighting with the British in the earlier part of the war, had opened a sort of club for the cheering up of young fellows passing through Paris, or there for a short leave.
"We bucked them up so that they'd be willing to go back again, and be blown to bits. It was like giving the good breakfast and the cigarette to the man going out to the electric chair. My God, what a nerve we had, we girls! We'd laugh and dance with those poor young chaps, who a few days later would be in their graves, if the shells left anything to bury. We didn't think much about it then. It's only now that it comes over me. I feel as if I'd been their executioner."
"You're tired. You need a rest."
"Rest won't reconcile me to belonging to a race of wild beasts. Oh, Tom, couldn't we make a little lifefor ourselves away from everyone, and from all this cheap vindictiveness? I shouldn't care how humble or obscure it was."
He laughed, quietly. "There are a good many hurdles to take before we come even to the humble and obscure."
"Hurdles? What kind of hurdles?"
"Your father and mother for one."
She admitted the importance of this. "But you won't find that hurdle hard to take if you're Harry Whitelaw."
"But if I'm not?"
"I'm sure from what mother writes that you can be."
"And I'm sure from what I feel that I can't."
"Oh, but you haven't tried." She hurried on from this to give him the gist of her mother's letters on the subject. "She and Mr. Whitelaw have the most tremendous confabs about you, every time he comes to Boston. The fact that he can't talk to Mrs. Whitelaw—she's all nerves the minute you're mentioned—throws him back on mother. That flatters the dear old lady like anything. She begins to think now she adopted you in infancy. You were her discovery. She gave you your first leg-up. And after all, you know, we've got to admit that during the whole of these seven years she might have been a great deal worse."
He agreed with her gratefully.
"As a matter of fact," she went on, in her judicial tone, "you must hand it to us Boston people that, while we can be the most awful snobs, we're not suchsnobs that we don't know a good thing when we see it. It's only the second-cut among us, those who don't reallybelong, who are supercilious. Once you concede that we're as superior as we think ourselves, we can be pretty generous. If you've got it in you to climb up we not only won't kick you down, but we'll put out our hands and pull you. That's Boston; that's dad and mother. When you've made all the fun of them you like, the poor dears still have that much left which you can't take away from them."
Something of this Tom was to test by the time he and Hildred met again. It was not another two years before they did that, but it was a year. Demobilized in Washington, he traveled straight to Boston. He had made his plans. Before seeing Hildred again he would see her father. "It's the only straight thing to do," he told himself. After all the years in which they had been good to him he couldn't begin again to go in and out of their house while they were ignorant of what he hoped for. Hildred might have told them something; he didn't know; but the details of most importance were those which only he himself could give them.
Having written for a very private appointment, Ansley had told him to come to his office immediately on his arrival in Boston. He reached that city by half-past three; he was at the office by a little after four.
It was a large office, covering most of a floor of an imposing office building. On a glass door were the names of the partners, that of Philip Ansley standing first on the list and in bigger letters than the rest. Inthe anteroom an impersonal young lady reading a magazine said, by telephone, "Mr. Whitelaw to see Mr. Ansley."
The business of the day was over. As Tom passed through a corridor from which most of the private offices opened he saw that they were empty. The only one still occupied was at the most distant end, and there he found Philip Ansley. He found also his wife. The purpose of Tom's visit having been made clear by letter, both of Hildred's parents were concerned in it.
They welcomed him cordially, making the comments permissible to old friends on his improved personal appearance. They asked for his news; they gave their own. Guy was back at Harvard at the Law School; Hildred was at home, somewhat at loose ends. Like most girls who had worked in France, she found a life of leisure tedious.
"Eating her head off," Ansley complained. "Can't settle down again."
Mrs. Ansley was more heroic. "We accept it. It's part of what we offered up to the Great Cause. We gave our all, and though all was not taken from us we should not have murmured if it had been."
Taking advantage of this turn of the talk, Tom launched into his appeal. For the last time in his life, as he hoped, he told the story of his mother. As he had told it to Hildred and to Henry Whitelaw so now he gave it to Philip and Sunshine Ansley. Hating the task, he was upheld in carrying it through by the knowledge that everyone who had a right to know it knew it now.
He finished with the minute at which Guy first spoke to him. From that point onward they had been able to follow the course of his life for themselves. They had in a measure entered into it, and helped him to his opportunities. He thanked them; but before he could accept their goodwill again he wanted them to know exactly what he had sprung from. Hildred did know. She had known it for several years. It had made no difference to her; he hoped so to make good in the future that it would make no difference to them.
They listened attentively, with no sign of being shocked. Now and then, at such points as the stealing of the first little book, or the final arrest, one or the other would murmur a "Dear me!" but sympathy and pity were plainly their sentiments. They didn't condemn him; they didn't even blame him. He had been an unfortunate child. There was nothing to be thought of him but that.
After he had finished there was a silence that seemed long. Ansley sat at his desk, leaning back in his revolving chair. Mrs. Ansley was near a window, where she could to some extent shield herself by looking out. She left to her husband the duty of speaking the first word.
"It all depends, my dear fellow, on your being accepted by Henry Whitelaw as his son."
There was another silence. "Is that final, sir?"
"I'm afraid it is."
"Is there no way by which I can be taken as myself?"
Mrs. Ansley turned from her contemplation of theLion and the Unicorn on the Old State House. "No one is ever taken as himself. We all have to be taken with the circumstances that surround us."
Ansley enlarged on this, leaning forward and toying with a paperweight. "My wife is quite right. Nobody in the world is just a human being pure and simple. He's a human being plus the conditions which go to make him up. You can't separate the conditions from the man, nor the man from the conditions. If you're Henry Whitelaw's son, stolen and brought up in circumstances no matter how poor and criminal, you're one person; if you're the son of this—this woman, whom I shan't condemn any more than I can help, you're another. You see that, don't you?"
"Can't I be—what I've made myself?"
"You can't make yourself anything but what you've been from the beginning. You can correct and improve and modify; but you can't change."
"So that if I'm the son of—of this woman, you wouldn't want me. Is that it?"
"How could we?" came from Mrs. Ansley. "But I know from Mr. Whitelaw himself that—"
Ansley smiled, paternally. "Suppose we leave it there. After all, the last word rests with him."
"I don't think so, sir. It rests with me."
This could be dismissed as of no importance. "Oh, with you, of course, in a certain sense. They can't force you. But if they're satisfied that you're—"
"And if I'm not satisfied?"
"Oh, but, my dear fellow, you wouldn't make yourself difficult on that score."
"It's not a question of being difficult; it's one of what I can do."
They got no farther than that. Tom's reluctance to deny the woman he had always regarded as his mother was not only hard for them to seize, it was hard for him to explain. He couldn't make them see that the creature who for them was only a common shoplifter was for him the source of tender and sacred memories. To accuse her of a greater crime than theft would be to desecrate the shrine which he himself had built of love and pity; but he was unable to put it into words, as they were unable to understand it. He himself worded it as plainly as he could when, rising, he said:
"So that I must renounce my mother or renounce Hildred."
Ansley also rose. "That's not quite the way to express it. If shewasyour mother, there can be no question of your renouncing her. But then, too, there can be no question of—of Hildred. I'm sure you must see."
"And if I see, would Hildred also see?"
Leaving her window, Mrs. Ansley, bulbous and quivering, lilted forward. "We must leave that to your sense of honor. In a way we're in your hands. It's within your power to make us suffer."
"I should never do that," he assured her, hastily. "Hildred wouldn't want me to. After all you've done for me neither she nor I—"
"Quite so, my dear fellow, quite so." Ansley held out his hand. "We trust you both. But the situation is clear, I think. If you come back to us as HarryWhitelaw, you'll find us eager to welcome you. If you don't, or if you can't—"
A wave of the hand, a shrug of the shoulders, expressing the rest, Tom could only bow himself out.
XLIII
Onthe part of Philip and Sunshine Ansley the confidence was such that Hildred was permitted to take a walk with Tom before his departure for New York.
"We're not engaged," Hildred reported as part of her mother's conditions, "and we can't be engaged unless you're proved to be Harry Whitelaw. Mother thinks you're going to be. So apparently the question in the long run will be as to whether or not you want me."
"It won't be that. I'm crazy about you, Hildred, more than any fellow ever was before."
"And that's the way I feel about you, Tom. I don't care a bit about the things dad and mother think so important. You're you; you're not your father or your mother, whoever they may have been. I shouldn't love you any the better if you became the son of Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw. It would only make it easier."
It was a windy afternoon in April, with the trees in new leaf. All along the Fenway the bridal-veil made cascades of whiteness whiter than the hawthorns. Pansies, tulips, and forget-me-nots brightened all the foot-paths. The two tall, supple figures bent and laughed in the teeth of the lusty wind.
Rather it was she who laughed, since she had the confidence in life, while he knew only life's problems.He had always known life's problems, and though there had never been a time when he was free from them, he never had had one to solve so difficult as this.
"But that's where the shoe pinches," he declared, "that I'm myself, so much more myself than many fellows are; and yet, unless I turn into some one else, I shall lose you."
She threw back her answer with a kind of radiant honesty. "You couldn't lose me, Tom. I couldn't lose you. We've grown together. Nothing can cut us asunder. One can't win out against two people who're as willing to wait as we are."
He was not comforted. "Oh, wait! I don't want to wait."
"Neither do I; but we'd both rather wait than give each other up."
"Wait—for how long?"
"How can I tell how long? As long as we have to."
"Till your father and mother die?"
"Oh, gracious, no! I'm not killing the poor lambs. Till they come round. They'llcomeround."
"How do you know?"
"Because fathers and mothers always do. Once they see how sad I'll be—"
"Oh, you're going to play that game."
She was indignant. "I shan't play a game. I shallbesad. I'm all right now while you're here; but once you're gone—well, if dad and mother want a martyr on their hands they'll have one. I shan't be putting it on either. I'll not be able to help myself."
"I'd rather they came around for some other reason than to save your life."
"I'm not particular about the reason so long as they come round. But you see I'm talking as if the worse were coming to the worst. As a matter of fact, I believe the better is coming to the best."
"Which means that you think the Whitelaws...."
"I know they will."
"And that I...."
"Oh, Tom, you'll be reasonable, won't you?"
He was silent. Even Hildred couldn't see what his past had meant to him. A wretched, miserable past from some points of view, at least it was his own. It had entered into him and made him. It was as hard to take it now as a hideous mistake as it would have been to take his breathing or the circulation of his blood.
The farther it drifted behind him the more content he was to have known it. Each phase had given him something he recognized as an asset. Honey, the Quidmores, the Tollivants, Mrs. Crewdson, the "mudda," had all left behind them experiences which time was beginning to consecrate. Hildred couldn't understand any more than anybody else what it cost him to disclaim them. He often wondered whether, had he been born the son of Henry and Eleonora Whitelaw, and never been stolen away from them, he would have grown to be another Tad. He thought it very likely.
Not that Tad hadn't justified himself. He had. His record in the war had gone far to redeem him. He had come through with sacrifice and honor. Having fought without a scratch for a year and a half, he had, on the very morning of the day when the Armistice was signed, received a wound which, because of the infection in his blood, had resulted in the loss of his right arm. This maiming, which the chance of a few hours would have saved him, he took, according to Hildred, with splendid pluck, though also with an inclination to be peevish. Lily, so Tom's letters from Henry Whitelaw had long ago informed him, had married a man named Greenshields, had had a baby, had been divorced, and again lived at home with her parents.
Tom pondered on the advantages they, Tad and Lily, were assumed to have enjoyed and which he himself had been denied. Everyone, Hildred included, took it for granted that ease and indulgence were blessings, and that he had suffered from the loss of them. Perhaps he had; but he hadn't suffered more than Tad and Lily on whom they had been lavished. Tad with his maimed body, Lily with her maimed life, were not of necessity the product of wealth and luxury; but neither did a blasted soul or character come of necessity from poverty and hardship, or even from an origin in crime.
He couldn't explain this to Hildred, partly because she didn't care, partly because he had not the words, and mostly because her assumptions were those of her society. She would love him just the same whether he were the son of a woman who had killed herself in jail, or that of a banker known throughout the world; but the advantages of being the latter wereto her beyond argument. So they were to him, except that....
Thus with Hildred he came to no conclusions any more than with her parents. With her as with them it was an object to keep him from making any statement that might seem too decisive. If they left it to Henry Whitelaw and himself the scales could but dip in one direction.
And yet when actually face to face with the banker, Tom doubted if the subject was going to be raised. He had written, reminding Whitelaw of the promise he himself had exacted, that on looking for work, Tom should apply first of all to him. Like Ansley, the banker had made an appointment at his office.
The office was in the ponderous and somewhat forbidding structure which bore the name of Meek and Brokenshire in Wall Street. The room into which Tom was shown was shabby and unpretentious. Square, low-ceiled, lighted by two windows looking into yards or courts, its one bit of color lay in the green and red of a Turkey rug, threadbare in spots, and scuffed into wrinkles. Against the walls were heavily carved walnut bookcases, housing books of reference. A few worn leather armchairs made a rough circle about a wide flat-topped desk, which stood in the center of the room. On the desk were some valuable knickknacks, paper weights, paper cutters, pen trays, and other odds and ends, evidently gifts. A white-marble mantelpiece clumsily sculptured in the style of 1840 was adorned above by the lithographed head of the first J. Howard Brokenshire, also of 1840, and one of the founders of the firm.
For the first few minutes the room was empty. Tom stood timidly close to the door through which he had come in. The banker entered from a room adjoining.
"Ah, here you are!"
He crossed the floor rapidly. For a long minute Tom found himself held as he had been held before, the man's right hand grasping his, the left hand resting on his shoulder. There was also the same searching with the eyes, and the same little weary push when the eyes had searched enough.
"Sit down."
Tom took the armchair nearest him; the man drew up another. He drew it close, with hungry eagerness. Tom was apologetic.
"I must beg your pardon, sir, for asking you to see me—"
"Oh, no, my dear boy. I should have been hurt if you hadn't. I've been expecting you ever since I read that you'd landed. What made you go to Boston before coming here?"
There was confession in Tom's smile. "I had to see some one."
"Was it Hildred Ansley?"
Tom found himself coloring, and without an answer.
"Oh, you needn't tell me. I didn't mean to embarrass you. The Ansleys are very good friends of mine. Known them well for years. If it hadn't been for them you and I might never have got together. Now give me some account of yourself. Itmust be nearly two months since I last heard from you."
Tom gave such scraps of information as he hadn't told in letters, and thought might be of interest. With some use of inner force he nerved himself to ask after Mrs. Whitelaw, and "the other members of the family," a phrase which evaded the use of names.
The banker talked more freely than he had written. He talked as to one with whom he could open his heart, and not as to an outsider. Mrs. Whitelaw was stronger and calmer, less subject to the paralyzing terrors which had beset her for so long. Tad was doing with himself the best he could, but the best in the case of a fellow of his age and tastes who had lost his right arm was not very good. He could ride a little, guiding his horse with his left hand, but he couldn't drive a car, or hunt, or play polo, or use his hand for writing. He could hardly dress himself; he fed himself only when everything was cut up for him. In the course of time he would probably do better, but as yet he couldn't do much. Lily had made a mess of things. It was worse than what he had told Tom in his letters. She had eloped with a worthless fellow, whom he, her father, had forbidden her to know, and who wanted nothing but her money. It was a sad affair, and had stunned or bewildered her. He didn't like to talk of it, but Tom would see for himself.
He reverted to Tom's own concerns. "You wrote to me about a job."
"Yes, sir; but I'm afraid it's bothering you too much."
"Don't think that. I've got the job."
The young man tried to speak, but the other hurried on.
"I hope you'll take it, because I've been keeping it for you ever since I saw you last."
Tom's eyes opened wide. "Over three years?"
"Oh, there was no hurry. Easy enough to save it. I want you to be one of the assistants to my own confidential secretary. This will keep you close to myself, which is where I want to have you for the first year at least. You'll get the hang of a lot of things there, and anything you don't understand I can explain to you. Later, if you want to go into the study of banking more scientifically—well, I shall be able to direct you."
He sat dazzled, speechless. It was the future!—Hildred!—happiness!—honor!—the big life!—the conquest of the world! He could have them all by sitting still, by saying nothing, by letting it be implied that he renounced his loyalties, by being passive in the hand of this goodwill. He would be a fool, he told himself, not to yield to it. Everyone in his senses would consider him a fool. The father of the Whitelaw baby believed that he had found his child. Why not let him believe it? How did he, Tom Whitelaw, know that he wasn't his child? The woman who had told him he was never to think so was dead and in her grave. Judged by all reasonable standards, he owed her nothing but a training in wicked ways. He would give her up. He would admit, tacitly anyhow, even if not in words, that shehad stolen him. He would be grateful to this man—and profit by his mistake.
He began to speak. "I hardly know how to thank you, sir, for so much kindness. I only hope—" He was trying to find the words in which to express his ambition to prove worthy of this trust, but he found himself saying something else—"I only hope that you're not doing all this for me because you think I'm—I'm your son."
Leaning toward him, the banker put his hand on his knee. "Suppose we don't bring that up just yet? Suppose we just—go on? As a matter of fact—I'm talking to you quite frankly—more frankly than I could speak to anyone else in the world—but as a matter of fact I—I want some one who'll—who'll be like a son to me—whether he's my son or not. I wonder if you're old enough to understand."
"I think I am, sir."
"I'm rather a lonely man. I've got great cares, great responsibilities. I can swing them all right. There are my partners, fine fellows all of them; there are as many friends as I can ask for. But I've nobody who comes—who comes very close to me—as a son could come. I've thought—I've thought it for some time past—that—whoever you are—you might do that."
As he leaned with his hand on Tom's knee his eyes were lower than Tom's own. Tom looked down into them. It was strange to him that this man who held so much of the world in his grasp should be speaking to him almost pleadingly. His memories filed by him with the speed and distinctness of lightning. Hewas the little boy moving from tenement to tenement; he was in the big shop on that Christmas Eve; he was walking with his mother in front of the policeman; he was watching her go away with the woman who was like a Fate; he was staring at the Christmas Tree; he was being pelted on his first day at school; he was picking strawberries for the Quidmores; he was sleeping in the same room with Honey; he was acting as chauffeur at the inn-club in Dublin, New Hampshire, and picking up this very man at Keene. And here they were together, the instinct of the father calling to the son, while the instinct of the son was scarcely, if at all, articulate.
The struggle was between his future and his past. "I must be his son," he cried to himself. But another voice cried, "And yet I can't be." Aloud he said, modestly, "I'm not sure, sir, that I could fill the bill for you."
"That would be up to me. It isn't what you can do but what I'm looking for that matters in a case like this." He stood up. "I'm sorry I must go back to a conference inside, but I shall see you soon again. What's your address in New York?"
Tom gave him the name of the hotel at which he was putting up. Whitelaw had never heard of it.
"Can't you do better than that?"
"Oh, it isn't bad, sir. I'm not used to luxury, and I manage very well. I'm quite all right."
"Is it money?"
"Only in the sense that everything is money. I've a little saved—not much—and I like to keep on the weather side of it. The man who did more for methan anybody else—the ex-burglar I told you about—always taught me to be economical."
"All the same I don't like to have you staying in a place like that. You must let me—"
"Oh, no, sir! I'd a great deal rather not." He spoke in some alarm. "I've got to be on my own. Imustbe."
"Oh, very well!"
The tone was not precisely cold; it was that of a man whose good intentions were sensitive. Tom did something which he never had supposed he would have dared to do. He went up to this man, and laid his hand gently on his arm. Instantly the man's free hand was laid on the one which touched him, welcoming the caress. Tom tried to explain himself.
"It isn't that I'm not grateful, sir. I hope you don't think that. But—but I'm myself, you see. I've got to stand on my own feet. I know how to do it. I've learned. I—I hope you don't mind."
"I want you to do whatever you think best yourself. You're the only judge." They had separated now, and the banker held out his hand. "Oh, and by the way," he continued, clinging to Tom's hand in the way he had done on earlier occasions. "My wife wants to see you. She told me to ask you if you couldn't go and lunch with her to-morrow."
Since there was no escape Tom could only brace himself.
"Very well, sir. It's kind of Mrs. Whitelaw. I'll go with pleasure. At one o'clock?"
"At one o'clock." He picked up a card from the desk. "This is our address. You'll find Mrs. Whitelaw less—less emotional than when you saw her last and more—more used to the idea."
Without explaining the idea to which she was more used, the banker released Tom's hand with his customary little push, as if he had had enough of him, hurrying out by the door through which he had come in.
XLIV
Beforeturning into bed that night Tom had fought to a finish his battle with himself. The victory rested, he hoped, with common sense. He could no longer doubt that before very long an extraordinary offer would be made to him. To repulse it would be insane.
"As far as my personal preferences go," he wrote to Hildred, "I would rather remain as I am. Remaining as I am would be easier. I'm free; I've no one to consider; I know my own way of life, and can follow it pretty surely. But I'm not adaptable. You yourself must often have noticed that my mind works stiffly, and that I find it hard to see the other fellow's point of view. I'm narrow, solitary, concentrated, and self-willed. But as long as I've no one to consult I can get along.
"To enter a family of which I know nothing of the ways or traditions or points of view is going to be a tough job. It will be much tougher than if I merely married into it. In that case I should be only an adjunct to it, whereas in what may happen now I shall have to become an integral part of it. I must be as a leg instead of as a crutch. I don't know how I shall manage it.
"I'm not easily intimate with anyone. Perhaps that's the reason why, as you say, I haven't enoughof the lover in me. I'm not naturally a lover. I'm not naturally a friend. I'm a solitary. A solitudeà deux, with the servants, as you always like to stipulate, is my conception of an earthly paradise.
"To you the normal of life is a father, a mother, a brother, a sister. To me it isn't. To have a father seems abnormal to me, or to have a sister or a brother. If I can see myself with a mother it's because of a poignant experience of the kind that burns itself into the memory. But I can't see myself withanothermother, and that's what I've got to do. Mind you, it isn't a stepmother I must see, nor an adopted mother, nor a mother-in-law; it's a real mother of my own flesh and blood. I must see a real brother, a real sister. They think that all they have to do is to fling their doors open, and that it will be a simple thing for me to walk in. But I must fling open something more tightly sealed than any door ever was—my life, my affections, my point of view. They are four, and need only make room for one. I'm only one, and must make room for four.
"But I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it for a number of reasons which I shall try to give you in their order.
"First, for your sake. You want it. For me that is enough. I see your reasons too. It will help us with your father and mother, and all our future life. So that settles that.
"Then, I want to conform to what those who care anything about me would expect. I don't want to seem a fool. It's what I should seem if I turned such an offer down. Nobody would understand myemotional and sentimental reasons but myself; and when it comes to the emotional and sentimental there is a pro side as well as a con to the whole situation.
"Because if Imusthave a father there's no one whom I could so easily accept as a father as this very man. He seems to me like my father; I think I seem to him like his son. More than that, he looks like my father, and I must look like the kind of son he would naturally have. I'm sure he likes me, and I know I like him. If I was choosing a father he's the very one I should pick out.
"Next, and you may be surprised to hear me say it, I could do very well with Tad as a brother. That he couldn't do with me is another thing; but there's something about the chap which has bewitched me from the day I first laid eyes on him. I haven't liked him exactly; I've only felt for him a kind of responsibility. I've tried to ignore it, to laugh at it, to argue it down; but the thing wouldn't let me kill it. If there's such a thing as an instinct between those of the same flesh and blood I should say that this was it. I've no doubt that if we come to living in one menagerie we shall be the same sort of friends as a lion and a tiger—but there it is.
"The women appall me. I can't express it otherwise. With the father I could be a son as affectionate as if I'd never left the family. With Tad I could establish—I've established already—a sort of fighting fraternity. To neither the mother nor the daughter could I ever be anything, so far as I can see now. They wouldn't let me. They wouldn't want me. If they yield to the extent of admitting me into thefamily they'll always bar me from their hearts. The limit of my hope is that, since I generally get along with those I have to live with, the hostility won't be too obvious. I also have the prospect that when you and I are married—and that's my motive in the whole business—I shall get a measure of release."
He purchased next morning a pair of gloves and an inexpensive walking stick so as to look as nearly as might be like the smart young men he saw on the pavements of Fifth Avenue. It was not his object to be smart; it was to be up to the standard of the house at which he was to lunch.
To reach that house he went on the top of a bus like the one on which he had ridden with Honey nearly ten years earlier. He did this with intention, to make the commemoration. Honey's suspicions and predictions had then seemed absurd; and here they were on the eve of being verified.
He got off at the corner at which, as he remembered, Honey and he had got off on that August Sunday afternoon. He crossed the road to see if he could recognize the home of the Whitelaw baby as it had been pointed out to him. Recognition came easily enough because in the whole line of buildings it was the only one which stood detached, with a bit of lawn on all sides of it. A spacious brownstone house, it had the cheery, homey aspect which comes from generous proportions, and masses of spring flowers, daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths, banked in the bow-windows.
Being a little ahead of his time, he walked up the street, trying to compose himself and recapture hisnerve. The story, first told to him by Honey, and repeated in scraps by many others, returned to him. Too far away to be noticed by anyone who chanced to be looking out, he stood and gazed back at the house. If he was really Harry Whitelaw he had been born there. The last time he had come forth from it he had been carried down those steps by two footmen. He had been wheeled across the street and into the Park by a nurse in uniform. Within the glades of the Park a change had somehow been wrought in his destiny, after which there was a blank. He emerged from that blank into consciousness sitting on a high chair in a kitchen, beating on the table with a spoon, and asking the question: "Mudda, id my name Gracie, or id it Tom?" The memory was both vague and vivid. It was vague because it came out from nowhere and vanished into nowhere. It was vivid because it linked up with that bewilderment as to his identity which haunted his early childhood. The discovery that he was a little boy forced on a woman craving for a little girl was the one with which he first became aware of himself as a living entity.
To his present renunciation of that woman he tried to shut his mind. There was no help for it. He had long kept a veil before this sad holy of holies; he would simply hang it up again. He would nail it up, he would never loosen it, and still less go behind it. What was there would now forever be hidden from any sight, even from his own.
At a minute before one he recrossed the avenue, and went down the little slope. In the rôle of Harry Whitelaw which he was trying to assume going up thesteps was significant. The long, devious, apparently senseless odyssey had brought him back again. It was only to himself that the odyssey seemed straight and with a purpose.
The middle-aged man who opened the door raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide in a flash of perturbation. It was only for an instant; in the half of a second he was once more the proper stiffened image of decorum. And yet as he took from the visitor the hat, stick, and gloves, Tom could see that the eyes were scanning his face furtively.
It was a big dim hall, impressive with a few bits of ancient massive furniture, and a stairway in an alcove, partially hidden by a screen which might have been torn from some French cathedral. Tom, who had risen to the modest standard of the Ansleys, again felt his insufficiency.
Following the butler, he went down the length of the hall toward a door on the right. But a door on the left opened stealthily, and stealthily a little figure darted forth.
"So you've come! I knew you would! I knew I shouldn't go down to my grave without seeing you back in the home from which twenty-three years ago you were carried out. I've said so to Dadd times without number, haven't I, Dadd?"
"You have indeed, Miss Nash," Dadd corroborated, "and none of us didn't believe you."
"Dadd was the second footman," Miss Nash explained further. "He was one of the two who lifted you down that morning. Now he's the butler; but he's never had my faith."
She glided away again. Dadd threw open a door. Tom found himself in a large sunny room, of which the bow-window was filled with flowers.
There was no one there, which was so far a relief. It gave him time to collect himself. Except for apartments in museums, or in some château he had visited in France, he had never been in a room so stately or so full of costly beauty. He knew the beauty was costly in spite of his lack of experience.
On the wall opposite the bow-window stretched a blue-green Flemish tapestry, with sad-eyed, elongated figures crowding on one another within an intricate frame of flowers, foliage, and fruits. A white-marble mantelpiece, bearing in shallow relief three garlanded groups of dancing Cupids, supported a clock and a pair of candelabra inbiscuit de Sèvresmounted in ormolu. Above this hung a full-length eighteenth-century lady—Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough—he was only guessing—looking graciously down on a cabinet of European porcelains, on another of miniatures, and another of old fans. Bronzes were scattered here and there, with bits of iridescent Spanish luster, and two or three plaques of Limoges enamel intense in color. Since there was room for everything, the profusion was without excess, and not too carefully thought out. A work-basket filled with sewing materials and knitting stood on a table strewn with recent magazines and books.
He was so long alone that he was growing nervous when Lily dropped into the room as if she had happened there accidentally. She sauntered up to him,however, offering her hand with a long, serpentine lifting of the arm, casual and negligent.
"How-d'ye-do? Mamma's late. I don't know whether she's in the house or not. Perhaps she's forgotten. She often does." She picked up a silver box of cigarettes. "Have one?"
On his declining she lighted one for herself, dropping into a big upright chair and crossing her legs. It was the year when young ladies liked to display their ankles and calves nearly up to the knee. Lily, whose skirt was of unrelieved black, wore violet silk stockings, with black slippers which had bright red buckles set in paste. Over her shoulders a violet scarf, with bright red bars, hung loosely. In sitting, her sinuous figure drooped a little forward, the elbow of the hand which held the cigarette supported on her knee.
Though she hadn't asked him to sit down, he took a chair of his own accord, waiting for her to speak again. When she did so, after an interval of puffing out tiny rings of blue smoke, her voice was languid and monotonous, and yet with overtones of passionate self-will.
"You've been in the army, haven't you?"
He said he had been.
"Did you like it?"
"I never had time to think as to whether I did or not. I just had to stick it out."
"Did you ever see Tad over there?"
"No, I never did."
As she was laconic he too would be laconic. She didn't look at him, or show an interest in his personality. If she thought him the brother who after long disappearance was coming home again she betrayed no hint of the possibility. He might have been a chance stranger whom she would never see again. Lapses of silence did not embarrass her. She sat and smoked.
He decided to assume the right to ask questions on his own side. "You've been married since I saw you last, haven't you?"
"Yes." She didn't resent this, apparently, and after a long two minutes of silence, added: "and divorced." There was still a noticeable passage of time before she continued, in her toneless voice: "I've a baby too."
"Do you like him?"
A flicker of a smile passed over a profile heavy-browed, handsome, and disdainful. "He's an ugly little monster so far." She had a way of stringing out her sentences as after-thoughts. "I daresay he's all right."
There followed a pause so long and deep that in it you could hear the ticking of the clock. He was determined to be as apathetic as herself. She had no air of thinking. She scarcely so much as moved. Her stillness suggested the torrid, brooding calm before volcanic or seismic convulsion. Without a turning of the head or a change in her languid intonation, she said, casually:
"You're our lost brother, aren't you?"
The emotion from which she was so free almost strangled him. He could barely breathe the words, "Would you care if I were?"
"What would be the use of my caring if papa was satisfied?"
"Still, I should think, that one way or the other, you might care."
To this challenge she made no response. She was not hostile in any active sense; he was sure of that. She impressed him rather as exhausted after terrific scenes of passion, waywardness, and disillusion. A little rest, and she would be ready for the same again, with himself perhaps to take the consequence.
Mrs. Whitelaw came in with the rapid step and breathless, syncopated utterance he remembered.
"So sorry to be late. I'd been for a long drive. I wanted to think. I had no idea what time it was. I suppose you must be hungry."
She gave him her hand without looking him in the face, helped over the effort of the meeting by the phrases of excuse.
"So this is my mother!"
It was his single thought. In the attempt to realize the fact he had ceased to be troubled or embarrassed. He could only look. He could only wonder if he would ever be able to make himself believe that which he did not believe. He repeated to himself what he had already written to Hildred: he could believe the man to be his father; but that this woman was his mother he rejected as an impossibility.
Not that there was anything about her displeasing or unsympathetic. On the contrary, she had been beautiful, and still had a lovely distinction. Features that must always have been soft and appealing had gained by the pathos of her tragedy, while a skin thatcould never have been anything but delicate and exquisite was kept exquisite and delicate by massage and cosmetics. Veils protected it from the sun and air; gauntlets, easy to pull on and off, preserved the tenderness of hands wearing many jeweled rings, but a little too dimpling and pudgy. The eyes, limpid, large, and gray with the lucent gray of moonstones, had lids of the texture of white rose petals just beginning to shrivel up and show littlebistréstains. The lashes were long, dark, and curling like those of a young girl. Tom couldn't see the color of her hair because she wore a motoring hat, with a sweeping brown veil draped over it and hanging down the back. Heather-brown, with a purplish mixture, was the Harris tweed of her coat and skirt. The blouse of a silky stuff, was brown, with blue and rose lights in it when she moved. A row of great pearls went round her neck, while the rest of the string, which was probably long, disappeared within the corsage.
Dadd appeared on the threshold, announcing lunch.
"Come on," Mrs. Whitelaw commanded, and Lily rose listlessly. "Is Tad to be at home?"
Lily dragged her frail person in the wake of her mother. "I don't know anything about him."
Tom followed Lily, since it seemed the only thing to do, crossing the hall and passing through the door by which Miss Nash had darted out to speak to him.
The dining room, on the north side of the house, was vast, sunless, and somber. Tom was vaguely aware of the gleam of rich pieces of silver, of the carving of high-backed chairs as majestic as thrones. One of these thrones Dadd drew out for Mrs. Whitelaw; a footman drew out a second for Lily; another footman a third for himself.
"Sit there, will you?" Mrs. Whitelaw said, in her offhand, breathless way, as if speaking caused her pain. "This room is chilly."
She pulled her coat about her, though the room had the temperature suited to the great plant of Cattleya, on which there might have been thirty blooms, which stood in the center of the table. With rapid, nervous movements she picked up a spoon and tasted the grapefruit before her. A taste, and she pushed it away, nervously, rapidly. Nervously, rapidly, she glanced at Tom, glancing off somewhere else as if the sight of him hurt her eyes.
"How long have you been back?"
He gave her the dates and places connected with his recent movements.
"Did you like it over there?"
He made the reply he had given to Lily.
"Were you ever wounded?"
He said he had once received a bad cut on the shoulder which had kept him a month in hospital, but otherwise he had not suffered.
"Tad's lost his right arm. Did you know that?"
He had first got this news from Guy Ansley. He was very sorry. At the same time, when others had been so horribly mangled, it was something to escape with only the loss of a right arm.
She gave him another of her hurried, unwilling glances. "How did you come to know the Ansleys so well?"
He told the story of his early meetings with the fat boy on the sidewalk of Louisburg Square.
"Wasn't it awful living with that burglar?"
Tom smiled. "No. It seemed natural enough. He was a very kind burglar. I owe him everything."
To Tom's big appetite the lunch was frugal, but it was ceremonious. He was oppressed by it. That three strong men should be needed to bring them the little they had to eat and drink struck him as ridiculous. And this was his father's house. This was what he should come to take as a matter of course. He would get up every morning to eat a breakfast served with this magnificence. He would sit every day on one of these thrones, like an apostle in the Apocalypse. He thought of breakfasts in the tenements, at the Tollivants', at the Quidmores', or with Honey in the grimy eating-places where they took their meals, and knew for the first time in many years a pang something like that of homesickness.
It was not altogether the ceremony against which he was rebellious. It had elements of beauty which couldn't be decried. What he felt was the old ache on behalf of the millions of people who had to go without, in order that the few might possess so much. It was the world's big wrong, and he didn't know what caused it. His economic studies, taken with a view to helping him in the banking profession, had convinced him that nobody knew what caused it, and that the cures proposed were worse than the disease. Without thinking much of it actively, it was always in the back of his mind that he must work to eliminate this fundamental ill. Sitting and eating commonplacefood in this useless solemn stateliness, the conviction forced itself home. Somewhere and somehow the world must find a means between too much and too little, or mankind would be driven to commit suicide.
During the meal, which was brief, Lily scarcely spoke. As they recrossed the hall to go back to the big sunny room, she sloped away to some other part of the house. Tom and his mother sat down together, embarrassed if not distressed.
Pointing to the box of cigarettes, she said, tersely, "Smoke, if you like."
In the hope of feeling more at ease he smoked. Still wearing her hat and coat, she drew her chair close to the fire, which had been lighted while they were at lunch, holding her hands to the blaze.
"Do you think you're our son?"
The question was shot out in the toneless voice common to Lily and herself, except that with the mother there was the staccato catch of breathlessness between the words.
Tom was on his guard. "Do you?"
Turning slightly she glanced at him, quickly glancing away. "You look as if you were."
"But looks can be an accident."
"Then there's the name."
"That doesn't prove anything."
"And my husband knows a lot of other things. He'll tell you himself what they are."
He repeated the question he had put to Lily, "Would you care if I were your son?"
Making no immediate response, she evaded thequestion when she spoke. "If you were, you'd have to make your home here."
"Couldn't I be your son—and make my home somewhere else?"
"I don't see how that would help."
"It might help me."
The large gray eyes stole round toward him. "Do you mean that you wouldn't want to live with us?"
"I mean that I'm not used to your way of living."
"Oh, well!" She dismissed this, continuing to spread her jeweled fingers to the blaze. "You said once—a long time ago—when I saw you in Boston—that you couldn't get accustomed to another—to another mother—now—or something like that. Do you remember?"
He said he remembered, but he said no more.
"Well, what about it?"