Since it was precisely to another mother that he was now making up his mind, he found the question difficult. "It was three years ago that I said that. Things change."
"What's changed?"
"Perhaps not things so much as people. I've changed myself."
"Changed toward us—toward me?"
"I've changed toward the whole question—chiefly because Mr. Whitelaw's been so kind to me."
"I don't suppose his kindness makes any difference in the facts. If you're our son you're our son whether he's kind to you or not."
"His kindness may not make any difference in the facts, but it does make a difference in my attitude."
"Mine can't be influenced so easily."
Though he wondered what she meant by that he decided to find out indirectly. "No, I suppose not. After all, you're the one to whom it's all more vital than to anybody else."
"Because I'm the mother? I don't see that. They talk about mother-instinct as if it was so sure; but—" She swung round on him with sudden, unexpected flame—"but if they'd been put to as many tests as I've been they'd find out. Why, almost any child can seem as if he might have been the baby you haven't seen for a few years. You forget. You lose the power either to recognize or to be sure that you don't recognize. If anyone tries hard enough to persuade you...."
"Has anyone tried to persuade you—about me?"
He began to see from whence Tad and Lily had drawn the stormy elements in their natures. "Not in so many words perhaps; but when some one very close to you is convinced...."
"And you yourself not convinced...."
She rose to her feet tragically. "HowcanI be convinced? What is there to convince me? Resemblances—a name—a few records—a few guesses—a few hopes—but I don'tknow. Who can prove a case of this kind—after nearly twenty-three years?"
In his eagerness to reassure her he stepped near to where she stood. "I hope you understand that I'm not trying to prove anything. I never began this."
"I know you didn't. I feel as if a false position would be as hard on you as it would be on ourselves."
"Then you think the position would be a false one?"
"I'm not saying so. I'm only trying to make you see how impossible it is for me to say I'm sure you're my boy—when I don't know. I'm not a cold-hearted woman. I'm only a tired and frightened one."
"Would it be of any help if I were to withdraw?"
"It wouldn't be of help to my husband."
"Oh, I see! We must consider him."
"I don't see that you need consider anyone but yourself. We've dragged you into this. You've a right to do exactly as you please."
"Oh, if I were to do that...."
"What I don't want you to do is to misjudge me. Not that it would matter whether you misjudged me or not, unless—later—we were compelled to see ourselves as—as son and mother."
"I shouldn't like to have either of us do that—under compulsion."
Restlessly, rapidly, she began to move about, touching now this object and now that. Her hands were as active as if they had an independent life. They were more expressive than her tone when they tossed themselves wildly apart, as she cried:
"What else could it be for me—but compulsion?" He was about to speak, but she stopped him. "Do me justice. Put yourself in my place. My boy would now be twenty-four. They bring me a man who looks like thirty. Yes, yes; I daresay you're not thirty, but you look like it. It's just as hard for me as if youwerethirty. I'm only forty-four myself. They want me to think that this man—so big—so grave—soold—is my little boy. HowcanI? Hemay be. I don't deny that. But for me tothinkit ...!"
He watched her as she moved from table to table, from chair to chair, her eyes on him reproachfully, her hands like things in agony.
"It's as hard for me to think it as it is for you."
The words arrested her. Her frenzied motions ceased. Only her eyes kept themselves on him, with their sorrowful, fixed stare.
"What do you mean by that?"
He tried to explain. "My only conception of a mother is of some one poor—and hard-worked—and knocked about—and loving—and driven from pillar to post—whereas you're so beautiful—and young—young almost—and—and expensive—and—" A flip of his hand included the room—"with all this as your setting—and everything else—I can't credit it."
She came up to him excitedly. "Well, then—what?"
"The only thing we can do, it seems to me, is to try to make it easier for each other. May I ask one question?"
She nodded, mutely.
"Would you rather that your little boy was found?—or that he wasn't found?"
She wheeled away, speaking only after a minute's thought, and from the other side of the room. "I'd rather that he was found—of course—if I could be sure that hewasfound."
"How would you know when you were sure?"
She tapped her heart. "I ought to know it here."
"That's the way I'd know it too."
"And you don't?"
In a long silence he looked at her. She looked at him. Each strove after the mystery which warps the child to the mother, the mother to the child. Where was it? What was it? How could you tell it when you saw it? And if you saw it, could you miss it and pass it by? He sought it in her eyes; she sought it in his. They sought it by all the avenues of intuitive, spiritual sight.
She tapped her heart again. Her utterance was imperious, insistent, and yet soft.
"And youdon't—feel it there?"
He too spoke softly. "No, I don't."
In reluctant dismissal he turned away from her. With her quick little gasp of a sob she turned away from him.
XLV
ToTom Whitelaw this was the conclusion of the whole matter. A son must have a mother as well as a father. If there was no mother there was no son. The inference brought him a relief in which there were two strains of regret.
He would be farther away from Hildred. They would have more trials to meet, more bridges to cross. Very well! He was not accustomed to having things made easy. For whatever he possessed, which was not much, he had longed and worked and worked and longed till he got it. But he got it in the end. In the end he would get Hildred. Better win her so than to have her drop as a present in his arms. If not wholly content, he was sure.
In the matter of his second regret he was only sorry. It began to grow clear to him that a father needs a son more than a son needs a father. Of this kind of need he himself knew nothing. He was what he was, detached, independent, assured. He never asked for sympathy, and if he craved for love, he had learned to stifle the craving, or direct it into the one narrow channel which flowed toward Hildred. The paternal and filial instinct, having had no function in his life, seemed to have shriveled up.
But the instinct of response to the slightest movement of goodwill, to the faintest plea for help, wasactive with daily use. It leaped forth eagerly; if it couldn't leap forth something within him fretted and cried like a hound when the scent leads to earth. As Paul the Apostle, he could be all things to all men, if by any means he might help some. If Henry Whitelaw needed a son, he could be a son to him. The tie of blood was in no small measure a matter of indifference. His impulse was like Honey's "next o' kin." He remembered, as he had learned in school, that kin and kind were words with a common origin. Whitelaw's truest kinship with himself was in his kindness. His kinship with Whitelaw could as truly be in his devotion. Devotion was what he could offer most spontaneously.
If only that could satisfy the father yearning for his son! It could do it up to a point, since the banker identified kindness and kinship much as he did himself. But beyond that point there was the cry of the middle-aged man for some one who was part of himself on whom he could lean now that his strength was beginning to decline. That his two acknowledged children were nothing but a care sent him groping all the more eagerly for the son who might be a support to him. The son who was not a son might be better than no one, as he himself confessed; and yet nothing on earth could satisfy his empty soul but his ownson. Not to be that son made Tom sorry; but without a mother, how could he be?
Otherwise, to remain as what life had made him was unalloyed relief. He was himself. In his own phrase, he was more himself than most men. But to enter the Whitelaw family,and belong to it, wouldturn him into some one else. He might have a right there; an accident such as happens every day might easily make him the head of it; and yet he would have to put forth affections and develop points of view which could only come from a man with another kind of past. To be the son of that mother, and the brother of that sister, sorry for them as he was, would mean the kind of metamorphosis, the change in the whole nature, of which he had read in ancient mythology. He would make the attempt if he was called to it; but he shrank from the call.
Nevertheless, he took up his job as assistant to the great man's confidential secretary. This was a Mr. Phips whom Tom didn't like, but with whom he got on easily. He easily got on with him because Mr. Phips himself made a point of it.
A rubicund, smiling man, he had to be seen twice before you gave him credit for his unctuous ability. There was in him that mingling of honesty and craft which go to make the henchman, and sometimes the ecclesiastic. While he couldn't originate anything, he could be an instrument accurate and sharp. Always ready to act boldly, it was with a boldness of which some one else must assume the responsibility. He could be the power behind the throne, but never the power sitting on it publicly. With an almost telepathic gift for reading Whitelaw's mind, he could carry out its wishes before they were expressed. From sheer induction he could, in a secondary way, direct affairs from which he never took a penny of the profits over and above his salary.
Again like the ecclesiastic and the henchman, hehad neither will nor conscience beyond the cause he served. A born factotum, with no office but to carry out, he accepted Tom without questioning. Without questioning he set him to those duties which, as a beginner, would be within his grasp. He didn't need to be told that when a message or a document was to be sent to the most private of all offices, it should be through the person of this particular young man. Without having invented for Tom the soubriquet of the Whitelaw Baby, he didn't frown at it on hearing it pass round the office, as it did within a few days.
Tom found Whitelaw welcoming, considerate, but at first a little distant. He might have been conscious of the anomalies in the situation; he might have been anxious not to rush things; he might even have been shy. Except to ask him, toward the end of each day, how he was getting along, he didn't speak to him alone.
Then, on the fourth morning, Whitelaw sent for him. As Tom entered he was standing up, a packet in his hand.
"I want you to take a taxi and go up to my house. Ask for my wife, and give her this." He made the nature of the errand clearer. "It's the anniversary of our wedding. She thinks I've forgotten it. I've only been waiting to send this—by you."
The significance of the mission came to Tom while he was on the way. The thing in the packet, probably a jewel, was the token of a marriage of which he was the eldest born. It was to mark his position in the husband's mind that he was made the bearer of the gift. He had no opinion as to this, except thatin the appeal to the wife there was an element of futility.
In the big dim hall he met the second born. To answer the door Dadd had left the task of helping the one-armed fellow into his spring overcoat. As Tom came in the poor left arm was struggling with the garment viciously. Tad broke into a greeting vigorous, but non-committal.
"Hello, by Gad!"
Tom went straight to his business. "Your father has sent me with a message to Mrs. Whitelaw. I understand she's at home."
"So you've got here! I knew you'd work it some day."
"You were very perspicacious."
"I was. And there's another thing I'll tell you. You've got round the old man. Well, I'm not going to stand for it. See?"
"I see; but it's got nothing to do with me. Your father's given me a job. If you don't want him to do it you ought to tackle him."
Whatever war had done for Tad it had not ennobled him. The face was old and seamed and stained with a dark red flush. It was scowling too, with the helpless scowl of impotence. Tom was sorrier for him than he had ever been before.
Having taken his hat and stick, Tad strode off, turning only on the doorstep. "But there's one thing I'll say right now. If you've got a job at Meek and Brokenshire's I'll damn well have a better one. I'm going to keep my eye on you."
Tom laughed, good-naturedly. "That's the verybest thing you could do. Nothing would please your father half so well. You'd buck him up, and at the same time get your knife into me."
As the door closed behind Tad Miss Nash came forward from somewhere in the obscurity. She was in that tremulous ecstasy which the mere sight of Tom always roused in her. She was so very sorry, but Mrs. Whitelaw wasn't able to receive him. If Tom would leave his package with her she would see that it was delivered.
On the next afternoon as Tom was leaving the office Whitelaw offered him a lift uptown. In the seclusion of the limousine the father spoke of Tad.
"He's a great care to me, but somehow I feel that you might do him good."
"He wouldn't let me. I can't get near him, except by force."
"But force is what he respects. In the bottom of his heart he respects you."
"What he needs is a job—the smallest job you could offer him in the bank. If you could put it to him as a sporting proposition that he was to get ahead of me...."
"That's what I'll try to do."
In the course of a few days the lift uptown had become a custom. Though he had never received instructions to that effect, Mr. Phips so shaped Tom's duties that he found himself leaving the office at the same moment as the banker. Once or twice when things did not so happen Whitelaw came into the room where Tom was at work to look for him. Ifno one else saw it Mr. Phips did, that the lift uptown was the big minute of the banker's day.
"I've got a son," the secretary pondered to himself, "but I'll be hanged if I feel about him like that. I suppose it's because I never lost him."
"Tad's applied to me for a job," the father informed Tom in the limousine one day. "The next thing will be to make him stick to it."
"I believe I could manage that, once we get him there," Tom said confidently. "I can't always make him drink, but I can hold his head to the water. I did that at college more than once."
"I know you did. I can't tell you...."
A tremor of the voice cut short this sentence, but Tom knew what would have been said: "I can't tell you what it means to me now to have some one to fall back upon. The children have given me a good deal of worry which their mother couldn't share because of her unhappiness. But now—I've got you." Tom was glad, however, that it had not been put into words.
XLVI
Theycame into May, the joyous, exciting, stimulating May of New York, with its laughing promise of adventure. To Tom Whitelaw that sense of adventure was in the happy sunlight, in the blue sky, in the scudding clouds, in winds that were warm and yet with the tang of salt and ice in them, in the flowers in the Park, in the gay dresses in the Avenue, in the tall young men already beginning to look summery, in the shop windows with their flowers, fruit, jewels, porcelains, and brocades, in the opulent crush of vehicles, and in his own heart most of all. Never before had he known such ecstasy of life. It was more than vigor of limb or the strong coursing of the blood. It was youth and love and expectation, with their call to the daring, the reckless, and the new.
They reached a Saturday. Business was taking Whitelaw to Boston. Tom went with him to the station, to carry his brief-case, to hand him his ticket, to check his bags, and perform the other small services of a clerk for the man of importance.
"I shall come back on Wednesday," the banker explained to him, before entering the train. "On Thursday I shall not be at the office. It's a day on which I never leave my wife. Though I often have to go abroad and leave her behind, I always manage it so that we may have that particular day together. I shall see you then on Friday."
He saw him, however, on Thursday, since Mr. Phips willed it so. At least, it was Mr. Phips who willed it, as far as Tom ever knew. About three on that day he came to Tom with a brief-case stuffed with documents.
"The Chief may want to run his eyes over these before he comes to the office to-morrow. Ask for himself. Don't leave them with anybody else."
To the best of Tom's belief there was no staging of what happened next beyond that which was set by Phips's intuitions.
By the time he rang at the house in Fifth Avenue it was a little after four. Admitted to the big dim hall, he heard a hum of voices coming from the sitting room. In Dadd's manner there was some constraint.
"Will you step in here, sir, and I'll tell the master that you've come?"
The library was on the same side of the house as the dining room, but it got the afternoon sun. The sun woke its colors to a burnished softness in which red and blue and green and gold melted into each other lovingly. A still, well-ordered room, little used by anyone, it gave the impression of a place of rest for ancient beauty and high thought. Rich and reposeful, there was nothing in it that was not a masterpiece, but a masterpiece which there was no one but some chance visitor to care anything about. In the four who made up the Whitelaw family there were too many aching human cares for knowledge or art to comfort.
Tom's eyes studied absently the profile of a woman on an easel. She might have been a Botticelli; hedidn't know. She only reminded him of Hildred—neatly piled dark hair, long slanting eyes, a small snub nose, and lips deliciouslymoqueur. The colors she wore were also Hildred's, subdued and yet ardent, umber round the shoulders, with a chain of emeralds that almost sparkled in the westering light.
Whitelaw entered with his quick and eager tread, his quick and eager seizing of the young man's hand. Again the left hand rested on his shoulder; again there was the deep and earnest searching of the eyes, as if a lost secret had not yet been found; again there was the little weary push.
"Come."
Taking the brief-case into his own hands, he left Tom nothing to do but follow him. Diagonally crossing the hall, Tom noticed that the hum of voices had died down. Without knowing why he nerved himself for a test.
The test came at once. Whitelaw, having preceded him into the room, had carried his brief-case to a table, and at once went to work on the contents. Perhaps he did this purposely, to throw Tom on his own resources. In any case, it was on his own resources that he felt himself thrown the instant he appeared on the threshold. He judged from the face of anguish and protest which Mrs. Whitelaw turned on him that he was not expected. Dimly he perceived that Tad and Lily were in the room, and some one else whom as yet he hadn't time to see. All his powers were focused on the meeting of the woman who was not his mother, and didn't want him there.
He thought quickly. He would be on the safestside. He had come there as a clerk; as a clerk shown in among the family he would conduct himself. He bowed to Mrs. Whitelaw, who let him take her hand, though that too seemed to suffer at his touch; he bowed to Lily; he nodded respectfully to Tad. He turned to salute distantly the other person in the room, and found her coming towards him.
He knew her free swinging motion before he had time to see her face.
"Oh, Tom!"
"Why, Hildred!"
Her manner was the protecting one he had often seen in other years, when she thought he might be hurt, or be ignorant of small usages. She was subtle, tactful, and ready, all at once.
"Come over here." She drew him to a seat on a sofa, beside herself. "Mrs. Whitelaw won't mind, will you, Mrs. Whitelaw? You know, Tom and I are the greatest friends—have been for years."
He forgot everyone else who was present in the joy and surprise of seeing her. "When did you come? Why didn't you let me know?"
"I didn't know myself till late last night, did I, Mrs. Whitelaw? Mrs. Whitelaw only wired to invite me after Mr. Whitelaw came back from Boston. Of course I wasn't going to miss a chance like that. I don't see New York oftener than once in two years or so. Then there was the chance of seeing you. I was ready in an hour. I took the ten o'clock train this morning, and have just this minute arrived."
Only when these first few bits of information had been given and received did Tom feel the return of hisembarrassment. He was in a room where three of the five others were troubled by his presence. He wasn't there of his own free will, and since he was a clerk he couldn't leave till he was dismissed. He would not have known what to do if Hildred hadn't kept a small conversation going, drawing into it first one and then another, till presently all were discussing the weather or something of equal importance. In spite of her emotion Mrs. Whitelaw did her best to sustain her rôle of hostess, Tad and Lily speaking only when they were spoken to. At a given minute Tad got up, sauntering toward the door.
He was stopped by his father. "Don't go, Tad. Tea will be here in a minute." The voice grew pleading. "Stay with us to-day."
Lighting a cigarette, Tad sank back into his chair, doing it rather sulkily. Whitelaw continued to draw papers from the brief-case, arranging them before him on the table.
When Dadd appeared with the tea-tray Tom made a push for escape. "If you've nothing else for me to do, sir...."
Whitelaw merely glanced up at him. "Wait a minute. Sit down again."
Tom went back to his seat beside Hildred, where he watched Mrs. Whitelaw as she poured the tea. It was the first time he had seen her in indoor dress, all lace and soft lavender, her pearls twisted once around her neck and descending to her waist, a great jewel on her breast. It was the first time, too, that he had seen her hair, which was fair and crinkly, like his own. Except for a slight portliness, she wastoo young to seem like the mother of Lily and Tad, while she was still less like his. That she should be his mother, this woman who had never known anything but what love and money could enrich her with, was too incongruous with everything else in life to call for so much as denial.
And as for the hundredth time he was saying this to himself Whitelaw spoke. He spoke without looking up from his papers except to take a sip of tea from the cup on the table beside him. He spoke casually, too, as if broaching something not of much importance.
"Now that we're all here I think that perhaps it's as good a time as any to go over the matter we've talked about separately—and settle it."
There was no one in the room who didn't know what he meant. Tad smoked listlessly; Lily set down her cup and lighted a cigarette; Mrs. Whitelaw's jeweled fingers played among the tea-things, as if she must find something for her hands to do or shriek aloud. Tom's heart seemed turned to stone, to have no power of emotion. Hildred was the only one who said anything.
"Hadn't I better go, Mr. Whitelaw? I haven't been up to my room yet."
"No, Hildred. I'd rather that you stayed, if you don't mind. It's the reason we've asked you to come."
He looked at no one. His face was a little white, though he was master of himself.
"This is the tenth of May. It's twenty-three years ago to-day since we lost our little boy. I want to askthe family, now that we're all together, what they think of the chances of our having found him again."
Though he knew it was an anniversary in the family, it was Tom's first recollection of the date. In as far as it was his birthday, birthdays had been meaningless to him, except as he remembered that they had come and gone, and made him a year older.
"Personally," Whitelaw went on, "I've fought this off so long that I can't do it any longer. It will be five years this summer since I first saw him, at Dublin, New Hampshire, and was struck with his looks and his name, as well as with the little I learned of his history."
"Why didn't you do something about it then," Tad put in, peevishly, "if you were going to do anything at all?"
"You're quite right, Tad. It's what I should have done. I was dissuaded by the rest of you. I must confess, too, that I was afraid to take it up myself. We'd followed so many clues that led to nothing! But perhaps it's just as well, as it's given me time to make all the investigation that, it seems to me, has been possible."
Apart from the motion of Tad's and Lily's hands as they put their cigarettes to their lips, everyone sat motionless and tense. Even Mrs. Whitelaw tamed her feverish activity to a more feverish stillness. Hildred put her hand lightly on Tom's sleeve to remind him that she was there, but the power of feeling anything had gone out of him. While Whitelaw told his facts he listened as if the case had nothing to do with himself.
His agents, so the banker said, had probably unearthed every detail in the story that was now to be known.
On August 5, 1895, Thomas Coburn had been married in The Bronx, to Lucy Speight. Coburn was a carpenter who had fallen from a roof in the following October, and had died a few days later of his injuries. Their child, Grace Coburn, had been born in The Bronx on March 5, 1896, and had died on April 21, 1897. After that all trace of the mother had been lost, though a woman who killed herself by poisoning in the Female House of Detention in the suburb of New Rotterdam, after having been arrested for shop-lifting, on December 24, 1904, might be considered as the same person. This woman had been known to such neighbors as could remember her as Mrs. Lucy Coburn, though at the time of her arrest she had claimed to be the widow of Theodore Whitelaw, after having married Thomas Coburn as her first husband. The wardress who had talked to her on taking her to a cell recalled that she had been incoherent and contradictory in all her statements about herself, her husband, and her child.
As a matter of fact, the early history of Lucy Speight had been traced. She was the daughter of a laboring man at Chatham, in the neighborhood of Albany. Her mental inheritance had been poor. Her father had been the victim of drink, her mother had died insane. One of her sisters had died insane, and a brother had been put at an early age in a home for the feeble-minded. A brother and two sisters still lived either at Chatham or at Pittsfield. He had in hishand photographs of all the living members of the family, and copies of photographs of those deceased, including two of Lucy Speight as she was as a young girl.
He turned toward Tom. "Would you like to look at them?"
The power of emotion came back to him with a rush. He remembered his mother, vividly in two or three attitudes or incidents, but otherwise faintly. A flush that stained his cheek with the same dark red which dissipation stamped on Tad's made the brothers look more than ever alike as he crossed the room to take the pictures from his father's hand.
There were a dozen or fourteen of them, all of poor rustic boys and girls, or men and women, feebleness in the cast of their faces, the hang of their lips, the vacancy of their eyes. Standing to sort them out, he put aside quickly the two of Lucy Speight. One of them must have dated from 1894, or thereabouts, because of the big sleeves; the other, with skin-tight shoulders, was that of a girl perhaps in 1889. In their faded simper there was almost nothing of the wild dark prettiness with which he saw her in memory, and yet he could recreate it.
He stood and gazed long, all eyes fixed on him. Moving to the table where Mrs. Whitelaw sat behind the tray, he held the two pictures before her.
"That's my mother."
Though he said this without thought of its significance, and only from the habit of thinking of Lucy Speight as really his mother, he saw her shrink. With a glance at the photographs, she glanced up at him,piteously, begging to be spared. Even such contact as this, remote, pictorial only, with people of a world she had never so much as touched, hurt her fastidiousness. That the son of this poor half-witted creature, this Lucy Speight, should also be her son ... but the only protest she could make was in her eyes.
Tom did not sit down again as Whitelaw continued with his facts; he stood at the end of the mantelpiece, with its candelabra inbiscuit de Sèvres. Leaning with his elbow on the white marble edge, he had all the others facing him, as all the others had him. The attitude seemed best to accord with the position in which he felt himself, that of a prisoner at the bar.
"We've found no record in any State in the Union," Whitelaw went on, "or in any Province in Canada, of a marriage between a Theodore Whitelaw and a Lucy Coburn or Speight. The search has been pretty thorough. Moreover, we find no birth recorded in The Bronx of any Thomas Whitelaw during all the decade between 1890 and 1900. No such birth is recorded in any other suburb of New York, or in Manhattan. In years past I've been on the track of three men of the name of Theodore Whitelaw, one in Portland, Maine, one in New Orleans, and one in Vancouver; but there's reason for thinking that all three were one and the same man. He was a Scotch sailor, who died on the Pacific coast, and was never known to be in or about New York longer than the two or three days in which his ship was in port."
He came to the circumstances, largely gathered from Tom himself, of the association of the womanwith the child. She had harped on the statements, first, that she had not stolen him; secondly, that he was not to think that his name was Whitelaw. And yet on the night before her death she had not only given him that very name, but claimed it as legally her own. The boy—the man, as he was now—could remember that at different times she had called herself by different names, chiefly to escape detection for her thefts; but never before that night had she taken that of Whitelaw.
Those who had worked on the case, the most skilful investigators in the country, were driven to a theory. It was a theory based only on the circumstantial, but so broadly based that the one unproven point, that which absolutely showed identity, seemed to prove itself.
Lucy Coburn, feeble in mind from birth, half demented by the death first of her husband and then of her child, had prowled about the Park, looking for a baby that would satisfy her thwarted mother-love. Any baby would have done this, though she preferred a girl.
"My son, Henry Elphinstone Whitelaw, was born on September 24, 1896. He was eight months old when on May 10, 1897, he was wheeled into the Park by Miss Nash, who is still with us. What happened after, as she supposed, she wheeled him back, we all know about."
But the theory was that, at some minute when Miss Nash's attention was diverted, the prowling woman got possession of the child, through means which were still a matter of speculation. She had money,since it was known that five thousand dollars had been paid to her by a life-insurance company on her husband's death, and, therefore, the power of flitting about, and covering up her traces. Discovering that she had a boy and not a girl, she had given him the first name she could think of, which was that of her late husband. She could easily have learned from the papers that the child she had stolen was the son of Henry Theodore Whitelaw, though the full name may or may not have remained in a memory probably not retentive at its best. But on the night of her arrest, knowing that she was about to forsake the child for whom she had come to feel a passionate affection, she had made one last wild effort to connect him with his true inheritance. Why she had done this but partially was again a matter of conjecture. She may have given all of the name she remembered; she may have been kept from giving the full name through fear. It was impossible to tell. But she gave the name—with some errors, it was true—but still the name. The name taken with the extraordinary family resemblance—everyone would admit that—was one of the main points in the reconstruction of the history.
He reviewed a few more of the proofs and the half-proofs, asking at last, timidly, and as if afraid of the family verdict:
"Well, what does everyone say?"
The silence was oppressive. The only movement on anyone's part came when Lily stretched out her hand to a tray and with her little finger knocked off the ash from her cigarette. It seemed to Tom as ifnone of them would speak, as if he himself must speak first.
"I vote we take him in." This was Tad. "Since we all know you want him, father—well, that settles it. As far as I'm concerned I'll—I'll crawl down."
Lily shrugged her slim shoulders. "I don't care one way or another. I've got my own affairs to think of. If he doesn't interfere with me I won't interfere with him." Again she knocked off the ash of her cigarette. "Have him, if you want to."
It was Mrs. Whitelaw's turn. She sat still, pensive. The clock could be heard ticking. Her husband gazed at her as if his life would depend on what she had to say. Tom himself went numb again. She spoke at last.
"If you're satisfied, Henry, I'm satisfied. All I ask in the world is that you—" she gasped her little sob—"is that you shall be happy." Rising she walked straight up to Tom. "I want to kiss you."
When he had bent his head she kissed him on the forehead, formally, sacramentally. She went back to her seat.
Without moving from his place at the table, Whitelaw smiled across the room at Tom, a smile of relief and tenderness.
"Well, what do you say?"
Tom looked down at Hildred, noting her strange expression. It was not a satisfied expression; rather it was challenging, defiant of something, he didn't know of what. But he couldn't now consider Hildred; he couldn't consider anyone but himself. He did not change his position, leaning on the whitemarble mantelpiece; nor was his tone other than conversational.
"I'm awfully sorry, sir—I'm sorry to say it to you especially—but it's—it's not good enough."
With the slightest possible movement of the head Hildred made him a sign of proud approval. Whitelaw's smile went out.
"What's not good enough?"
"The—the welcome—home."
Tad spluttered, indignantly. "What the devil do you want? Do you expect us to put up an arch?"
"No; I don't expect anything. I should only like you to understand that though it isn't easy for you, it's easier for you than for me."
Tad turned to his father. "Now you're getting it! I could have told you beforehand, if you'd consulted me."
"You see," Tom continued, paying no attention to the interruption, "you're all different from me. You're used to different things, to different standards and ways of thinking. If I were to come in among you the only phrase that would describe me is the homely one of the fish out of water. I should be gasping for breath. I couldn't live in your atmosphere."
Tad was again the only one to voice a comment. "Well, I'll be damned!"
Tom's legs which had quaked at first, began to be surer under him. "Please don't think I'm venturing to criticize anyone or anything. This is your life, and it suits you. It wouldn't suit me because it isn't mine. The past makes me as it makes you, and it's too late now to unmake us. It's possible that I maybe Harry Whitelaw. When I hear the evidence that can be produced I can almost think I am. But if IamHarry Whitelaw by birth, I'mnotHarry Whitelaw by life and experience. I can't go back and be made over. I'm myself as I stand." Still having in his hand the pictures of Lucy Speight, he held them out. "To all intents and purposes this is—my mother."
"And I kissed you!"
Tom smiled. "Yes, but you don't know how she kissed me. I do. She loved me. I loved her. I've tried—I've tried my very best—to turn my back on her—to call her a thief—and any other name that would blacken her—and—and I can't do it."
The sleeping lioness in the mother was roused suddenly. Leaving her place behind the tea-table, she advanced near enough to him to point to the two photographs.
"Do you mean to say that—having the choice between—that—and me—you choose—that?"
"I don't choose. I can't do anything else. It isn't what you think that rules your life; it's what you love. I'm one of the people to whom love means more than anything else. I daresay it's a weakness—especially in a man—but that's the way it is."
"If your first stipulation is love...."
"Wouldn't it be yours, Onora?"
"I'd try to be reasonable—when so many concessions have been made."
"Yes," Tom hastened to say, "but that's just my point. I'm not asking for concessions. The minutethey must be made—well, I'm not there. I couldn't come into your family—on concessions."
Whitelaw spoke up again. "I don't blame you."
Tom tried to make his position clearer. "It's a little like this. A long time ago I was coming along by the Hudson in the train. I was on my way to New York with the man who had adopted me, after I'd been a State ward. There was a steamer on the river, and I watched her—comingfromI didn't know where—goingtoI didn't know where. And it came to me then that she was something like myself. I didn't know what port I'd sailed from; nor what port I was making for. But now that I'm twenty-three—if that's my age—I see this: that once in so often I touched at some happy isle, where the people took me in and were good to me. It was what carried me along."
The mother broke in, reproachfully. "Happy isles—full of convicts and murderers!"
"Yes; but they were happy. The convicts and murderers were kind. A homeless boy doesn't question the moral righteousness of the people who give him food and shelter and clothes, and, what's more, all their best affection. What it comes to is this, that having lived in those happy isles—awhile in one, awhile in another—I don't want to go ashore at an unhappy one, even though I was born there."
Springing to his feet, Tad bore down on him. "Do you know what I call you? I call you an ass."
"Very likely. I'm only trying to explain to you why I can't be your brother—even if I am—your brother."
"It's because you don't want to be—and you damn well know it."
"That may be another way of putting it; but I'm not putting it that way."
Lily rose languidly, throwing out her words to nobody in particular. "I think he's a good sport, if you ask me. I wouldn't come into a family like us—not the way we are."
"Wait, Lily," Whitelaw cried, as she was sauntering out. He too got to his feet. "You've all spoken. You've done the best you could. I'm not blaming anyone. Now I want you all to understand—" He indicated Tom—"that this ismy son. I know he's my son. I claim him as my son. Not even what he says himself can make any difference to me."
Tom strode across the room, grasping the other's hand. "Yes, sir; and you're my father. I know that too, and I claim you on my side. But we'll stop right there. It's as far as we can go. I'll be your son in every sense but that of—" He looked round about on them all—"but that of being your heir or a member of your family. I can't do that; but—between you and me—everything is understood."
He got out of the room with dignity. Passing Tad, he nodded, and said, "Thanks!" To Lily he said, "Thank you too. It was bully, what you said." Reaching the mother whom he didn't know and who didn't know him, he bowed low. Sitting again behind the tea-table, she lifted her hand for him to take it. He took it and kissed it. Her little soblike gasp followed him as he passed into the big dim hall.
He had taken no leave of Hildred, because he knewshe would do what actually she did; but he didn't know that she would speak the words he heard spoken.
"I'm going with him, dear Mrs. Whitelaw; but I shan't be long. I just don't want him to go away alone because—because I mean to marry him."
XLVII
Asthey went down the steps she took his arm. "Tom, darling, I'm proud of you. Now they know where we stand, both of us."
"It was splendid of you, Hildred, to play up like that. It backs me tremendously that you're not afraid to own me. But, you know, what I've just said will put us farther apart."
"Oh, I don't know about that. Father said we couldn't be engaged unless you were acknowledged as Mr. Whitelaw's son; and you have been. He never said anything about your being Mrs. Whitelaw's son. This is a case in which it's the father that counts specially."
"But I couldn't take any of his money beyond what I earned."
"Oh, but that wouldn't make any difference."
They crossed the Avenue and entered the Park. They entered the Park because it was the obvious place in which to look for a little privacy. All the gay sweet life of the May afternoon was at its brightest. Riders were cantering up and down the bridle-path; friends were strolling; children were playing; birds were flying with bits of string or straw for the building of their nests. To Tom and Hildred the gladness was thrown out by the deeper gladness in themselves.
"But you don't know how poor we'll be."
"Oh, don't I? Where do you think I keep my eyes? Why, I expect to be poor when I marry—for a while at any rate. I expect to do my own housework, like most of the young married women I know."
"Oh, but you've always talked so much about servants."
"Yes, dear Tom, but that was to be on a desert island where we were to be all alone. We shan't find that island except in our hearts."
"But even without the island, I always supposed that when a girl like you got married she...."
"She began with an establishment on the scale of ours in Louisburg Square, at the least. Yes, that used to be the way, twenty or thirty years ago. But I'm sorry to say it isn't so any longer. Talk about revolution! We've got revolution as it is. With rents and wages as they are, and all the other expenses, why, a young couple must begin with the simple life, or stay single. I'd rather begin with the simple life, and I know more about it than you think."
He laughed. "So I see."
"Oh, I can cook and sew and make beds and wash dishes...."
They sauntered on, without noticing where they were going, till they came to a dell, where in the shade of an elm there was a seat, and another near a heart-shaped clump of lilacs, all in bloom. They sat in the shade of the elm. They were practical young lovers, and yet they were young lovers. They were lovers for whom there had never been any lovers but themselves. The wonderful thing was that each felt what the other felt; the discoveries by which they had cometo the knowledge of this fact were the first that had ever been made.
"Oh, Tom, do you feel like that? Why, that's just the way I feel."
"Is it, Hildred? Well, it shows we were made for each other, doesn't it, because I never thought that anyone felt like that but me?"
"Well, no one ever did but me. Only Tom, dear, tell me when it was that you first began to fall in love with me."
"It was the night—a winter's night—five, six, seven years ago—when I found Guy in a mix-up with a lot of hoodlums in the snow."
"And you brought him home. That was the first time you ever saw me."
"Yes, it was the first time I ever saw you that I began...."
"And I began then, too. Since that evening, there's never been anybody else. Oh, Tom, was there ever anybody else with you?"
Tom thought of Maisie. "Not—not really."
"Well, unreally then?"
As he made his confession she listened eagerly. "Yes, thatwasunreally. And you never heard anything more about her?"
"Oh, yes. When I was in Boston a few weeks ago I went to see her aunt. She told me that Maisie had been married for the last two years to a traveling salesman she'd been in love with for a long time, and that she had a baby."
The thought of Maisie brought back the thought ofHoney; and the thought of Honey woke him to the fact that he had been on this spot before.
"Why—why, Hildred! This is the very bench on which Miss Nash and the other nurse were sitting—"
"When you were stolen?"
"When somebody was stolen." He looked round him. "And there's Miss Nash over there!"
On the bench near the lilacs Miss Nash was seated with a book.
"We ought to go and speak to her," Hildred suggested.
Miss Nash received them with her beatific look. "I saw you leave the house. I thought you'd come here. I followed you. I had something to do, something I swore to God I'd do the day my little boy came back. I'd—" She held up a novel of which the open pages were already yellowing—"I'd finish this.Juliet Allingham's Sinis the name of it. I was just at the scene where the lover drowns when my little boy was taken. I've never opened the book since; but I've kept it by me." She rose, weeping. "Now I can finish it—but I'll go home."
Sitting down on the seat she had left free for them, they began to talk of the scene of the afternoon, which as yet they had avoided.
"I hope I didn't hurt their feelings."
"They didn't mind hurting yours."
"They didn't mean to. They thought they were generous."
"Which only shows...."
"Buthe'sall right. Hildred, he's a big man."
"And you really think he's your father, Tom?"
"I know he is. Everything makes me sure of it."
"Well, then, if he's your father, she must be your mother."
"Yes, but I don't go that far. It isn't what must be that I think about; it's whatis."
She persisted in her logic. "And Tad and Lily must be your brother and sister."
"They can be what they like. I don't care anything about them."
"It's only your mother that you don't...."
He got up, restlessly. It was easier to reconstruct the scene which Honey had described to him than to let her bring what she was saying too sharply to a point.
"It was over here that the baby carriage stood, right in the heart of this little clump." She followed him into it. "Miss Nash and the other nurse were over there, where we were sitting first. And right here, just where I'm standing, the queer thing must have happened."
"Are you sorry it happened, Tom?"
"You mean, if it actually happened to me. Why, no; and yet—yes. I can't tell. I'm sorry not to have grown up with—with my father. And yet if I had, I should have missed—all the other things—Honey—and perhaps you."
"Oh, you couldn't have missed me, I couldn't have missed you. We might not have met in the way we did meet, but we'd have met."
He hardly heard her last words, because he was staring off along the path by which they themselveshad come down. His tone was puzzled, scarcely more than a whisper.
"Hildred, look!"
"Why, it's Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw. She's changed her dress. How young she looks with that kind of flowered hat. I remember now. They always come here on the tenth of May. They've been here already this morning. Lily told me so. I know what it is. They're looking for you. Miss Nash has told them where we are. I'm going to run."
"Don't run far," he begged of her. "I can't imagine what's up."
He stood where he was, watching their advance. It was not his place to go forward, since he wasn't sure that he was wanted. He only thought he must be when, as they reached the bench beneath the elm, Whitelaw pointed him out and let his wife go on alone.
She came on in the hurried way in which she did everything, her great eyes brimming, as they often were, with unshed tears. At the entrance among the lilacs she held out both her hands, their diamonds upward, as if he was to kiss them. He took the hands, but lightly, barely touching them, keeping on his guard.
"Harry!" The staccato sentences came out as little breathless cries torn from a heart that tried to keep them back. "Harry! You—you needn't—love me—or be my son—or live with us—unless—unless you like—but I want you to—to let me kiss you—just once—the way—the way your other—mother—used to."