“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of you,” remarked the Poet.
He rose and moved quickly toward the door, as though to escape from Fulton’s renewed thanks for his kind offices in disposing of the verses.
“Don’t work yourself to death,” he warned Fulton in the hall. “I’m glad Marian’s influence is so beneficent. When your proof comes, hold it a day or two: there’s always the chance of bettering a thing.”
AsSeptember waned, Fulton heard disquieting news touching Redfield. It was whispered in business circles that the broker had, the previous year, sold stock in a local industrial venture that had already come to grief. Redfield’s friends were saying that he had been misled by the enthusiasm of the men who had promoted the company, but this was not accepted at face value by some of his business rivals. Fortunately the amount was not large—a mitigating circumstance for which he was not responsible; he would have sold more, it was said, if investors had proved less wary. The story was well calculated to injure if it didn’t at once destroy Redfield’s chances of success as a dealer in securities.
Fulton was a good deal disturbed by these reports, which it became his duty to sift for the “Chronicle.” Fulton liked Redfield; Redfield was a likable person, a good fellow. The effectupon his future of this misfortune, attributable to his new-born zeal for money-making, was not to be passed lightly. There was nothing for the papers to print, as the complaining purchasers had been made whole and were anxious to avoid publicity. Fulton had watched matters carefully with a view to protecting Redfield if it became necessary, and he was confident that the sanguine promoters were the real culprits, though it was pretty clear that any scruples the broker might have had had gone down before the promise of a generous commission.
When quite satisfied that Redfield was safe so far as prosecution was concerned, Fulton spoke of Redfield’s difficulties to the Poet on an evening when he called ostensibly to report the completion of his romance. The Poet listened attentively, but the reporter accepted his mild expressions of regret as indicating indifference to Redfield’s fate. The young man’s remark that if it hadn’t been for the Poet he wouldhave shared Redfield’s collapse elicited no comment. The Poet, imaginably preoccupied with less disagreeable speculations, turned at once to Fulton’s manuscript. After the final draft had been discussed and publishers had been considered, the young man left in the cheerful mood he always carried away from his talks with the Poet.
But the Poet spent a restless evening. He listlessly turned over many books without finding any to arrest his interest. He was troubled, deeply troubled, by what Fulton had told him of Redfield. And he was wandering whether there might not be some way of turning his old friend’s humiliation to good account. A man of Redfield’s character and training would feel disgrace keenly; and coming at a time when he believed himself well launched toward success, the shock to his pride would be all the greater.
Nothing in the Poet’s creed was more brightly rubricated than his oft-repeated declarationsthat the unfortunate, the erring, the humbled, are entitled to mercy and kindness. The Redfields’ plight had roused him to a defense of his theory of life; but Fulton’s story had added a new integer that greatly increased the difficulty of solving this problem. Seemingly Fate was using these old friends to provide illustrations for many of the dicta that were the foundation of his teachings. Inspiration did not visit the quiet street that night. The Poet pondered old poems rather than new ones. “Life is a game the soul can play,” he found in Sill; but the chessmen, he reflected, are sometimes bafflingly obstinate and unreasonable.
“To-morrow is All-Children’s Day,” remarked the Poet a few days later when, seemingly by chance, he met Fulton in the street; and when the young man asked for light the Poet went on to explain. “When Marjorie was born her father and I set apart her birthday tobe All-Children’s Day—a crystallization of all children’s birthdays, from the beginning of time, and we meant to celebrate it to the end of our days. It just occurs to me that you and I might make it an excuse for calling on Mrs. Redfield and Marian and Marjorie to-morrow afternoon, the same being Sunday. Very likely you have another engagement—” he ended, with provoking implications that caused Fulton, who was already pledged to visit Marjorie and inferentially Marian and Mrs. Redfield on this very Sunday afternoon, to stammer in the most incriminating fashion.
“Then if you haven’t anything better to do we can call together,” said the Poet.
It would have been clear to less observant eyes than the Poet’s that the reporter was on excellent terms with the household, and even if the elders had tried to mask the cordiality of their welcome, Marjorie’s delight in Fulton was too manifest for concealment. She transparentlydisclosed the existence of much unfinished business between herself and the young man that pointed irrefutably to many previous and recent interviews.
“Inside is no good for houses,” Marjorie was saying, as the Poet accommodated himself to the friendly atmosphere; “nobody builds houses inside of houses.”
This suggestion of the open was promptly supported by Fulton; and in the most natural manner imaginable Marian was pressed into service to assist in transferring building-materials to the few square yards of lawn at the side of the house. September was putting forth all her pomp and the air was of summer warmth. Marjorie’s merry treble floated in with the laughter of Marian and Fulton. They were engaged with utmost seriousness in endeavoring to reproduce with blocks the elaborate château of sand, sticks, and stones that had been their rallying-point on the shores of Waupegan.
The Poet, left alone with Mrs. Redfield, noted the presence in the tiny parlor of some of the lares and penates that had furnished forth the suburban bungalow and that had survived the transfer to the flat and the subsequent disaster. They seemed curiously wistful in these new surroundings. As though aware that this was in his mind, Mrs. Redfield began speaking of matters as far removed from her own affairs as possible. The Poet understood, and, when the topics she suggested gave opportunity, played upon them whimsically. The trio in the yard were evidently having the best of times; and their happiness stirred various undercurrents of thought in the Poet’s mind. He was not quite sure of his ground. It was one thing to urge charity, mercy, and tolerance in cloistral security; to put one’s self forward as the protagonist of any of these virtues was quite another.
The Poet rose, picked up a magazine fromthe center table, scanned the table of contents, and then said, very quietly,—
“Miles is in trouble.”
He watched her keenly for the effect of this, and then proceeded quickly:—
“It’s fortunate that the jar came so soon; a few years later and it mightn’t have been possible for him to recover; but I think there’s hope for him.”
“What Miles does or what he becomes is of no interest to me,” she answered sharply. “He didn’t feel that there was any disgrace to him in casting Marjorie and me aside; his pride’s not likely to suffer from anything else that may happen to him.”
“He’s down and out; there’s no possibility of his going on with the brokerage business; he’s got to make a new start. It’s to be said for him that he has made good the losses of the people who charged him with unfair dealing. I’m disposed to think he was carried awayby his enthusiasm; he was trying to get on too fast.”
In spite of her flash of anger at the mention of her husband’s name, it was clear that her curiosity had been aroused. Nor was the Poet dismayed by a light in her dark eyes which he interpreted as expressing a sense of triumph and vindication.
“I suppose he’s satisfied now,” she said.
“I fancy his state of mind isn’t enviable,” the Poet replied evenly. “Life, when you come to think of it, is a good deal like writing a sonnet. You start off bravely with your rhyme words scrawled at the top of the page. Four lines may come easily enough; but the words you have counted on to carry you through lead into all manner of complications. You are betrayed into saying the reverse of the thing you started out to say. You begin with spring and after you’ve got the birds to singing, the powers of mischief turn the seasons upsidedown, and before you know it the autumn leaves are falling; it’s extremely discouraging! If we could only stick to the text—”
His gesture transferred the illustration from the field of literary composition to the ampler domain of life.
She smiled at his feigned helplessness to pursue his argument further.
“But when the rhyme words won’t carry sense, and you have to throw the whole thing overboard—” she ventured.
“No, oh, no! That’s the joy of rhyming—its endless fascination! The discreet and economical poet never throws away even a single line; there’s always a chance that it may be of use.” He was feeling his way back to his illustration of life from the embarrassments of sonneteering, and smiled as his whimsical fancy caught at a clue. “If you don’t forget the text,—if you’re quite sure you have an idea,—or an ideal!—then it’s profitable tokeep fussing away at it. If a bad line offend you, pluck it out; or maybe a line gets into the wrong place and has to be moved around until it fits. It’s all a good deal like the work Marjorie’s doing outside—fitting blocks together that have to go in a certain way or the whole structure will tumble. It’s the height of cowardice to give up and persuade yourself that you’ve exhausted the subject in a quatrain. The good craftsman will follow the pattern—perfect his work, make it express the best in himself!”
And this referred to the estrangement of Miles Redfield and his wife or not; just as one might please to take it.
“Miles has gone away, I suppose,” she remarked listlessly.
This made the situation quite concrete again, and any expression of interest, no matter how indifferent, would have caused the Poet’s heart to bound; but his face did not betray him.
“Oh, he will be back shortly, I understand.I rather think he will show himself a man and pull his sonnet together again! There’s a fine courage in Miles; unless I’ve mistaken him, he won’t sit down and cry, even if he has made a pretty bad blunder. A man hardly ever loses all his friends; there’s always somebody around who will hand a tract in at the jail door!”
“You don’t mean,” she exclaimed, “that Miles has come to that!”
“Bless me, no!” the Poet cried, with another heart throb. “The worst is over now; I’m quite satisfied of that!” he answered with an ease that conveyed nothing of the pains he had taken, by ways devious and concealed, to assure himself that Miles had made complete restitution.
“A man of cheaper metal might have taken chances with the law; I’m confident that Miles was less the culprit than the victim. He sold something that wasn’t good, on the strength of statements he wasn’t responsible for. I believethat to be honestly true, and I got it through men who have no interest in him, who might be expected to chortle over his misfortune.”
“In business matters,” she replied, with an emphasis that was eloquent of reservations as to other fields, “Miles was always perfectly honorable. I don’t believe anybody would question that.”
It hadn’t entered into the Poet’s most sanguine speculations that she would defend Miles, or speak even remotely in praise of him. Wisdom dictated an immediate change of topic. He walked to the open window and established communication with the builders outside, who had reproduced the Waupegan château with added splendors and were anxious to have it admired.
Indirectionas a method and means to ends has its disadvantages; but it is not to be scornedutterly. A week following Marjorie’s birthday children idling on their way home from school in Marston grew silent and conferred in whispers as a gentleman whose name and fame had been interwoven in their alphabet lounged by. He turned with a smile to lift his hat to an urchin bolder than the rest who shouted his name from a discreet distance.
Within a few days the signs had vanished from the Redfield cottage and the weeds had been cut. As the Poet opened the gate, Fulton came out of the front door: neither seemed surprised to see the other. The odor of fresh paint elicited a sniff of satisfaction from the Poet, a satisfaction that deepened a moment later as he entered the studio and noted its neatness and order.
“Mrs. Waring sent a maid out to do all this, and lent me the things we needed for the tea-table,” Fulton explained. “I had hard work to persuade her this wasn’t one of your jokes.I had harder work to get Mrs. Redfield to come and bring Marjorie; but Marian supported the scheme, and brought Mrs. Redfield round. I fell back heavily on your argument that Marjorie ought to have a final picnic before the turn o’ the year—a last chance to build a shotum ready for knights to come widing.”
“Marian is a persuasive person, I imagine,” the Poet remarked. “By the way, I shall be a little late arriving. Myers, the artist, lives a little farther down Audubon Road and I want to have a look at his summer’s work. Nice fellow; good workman. Redfield promised to meet me there; I want to be sure he doesn’t run away. We don’t want the party spoiled after all the work we’ve done on it.”
“I wonder,” Mrs. Redfield remarked, over the tea-table, “who has bought the place?”
“A trust company, I think,” replied Fulton, glancing through the broad north window ofthe studio with careful dissimulation. “As I passed the other day I saw that the grounds had been put in order, and decided that this would be just the place for a picnic.”
“This little house would be nice for my playhouse; and we could use that big window to watch ums knights come widing.”
“That chimney used to roar the way you read about,” remarked Marian. “I think every house ought to have a detached place like this, for tea and sewing and children to play in.”
Mrs. Redfield, ill at ease, was attending listlessly to the talk. Fulton’s explanation had not wholly explained. She had agreed to the excursion only after Marjorie had clamorously insisted upon the outing her devoted cavalier had proposed. Marjorie’s comments upon the broad yard, her childish delight in the studio playhouse, touched chords of memory that jangled harshly.
Fulton was in high spirits. His romance had been accepted and a representative of the publishing house was coming to confer with him about illustrations.
“They say it won’t break any best-selling records, but it will give me a start. The scoundrels had the cheek to suggest that I cut out some of my jingles, but I scorned such impiousness in an expensive telegram.”
“I should hope so!” cried Marian approvingly. “The story’s only an excuse for the poems. Even the noblest prose wouldn’t express the lake, the orchard, and the fields; if you cut out your verses, there wouldn’t be much left but a young gentleman spraying apple trees and looking off occasionally at the girls paddling across the lake.”
“You do my orchardist hero a cruel injustice,” protested Fulton, “for he saw only one girl—and a very nice girl she was—or is!”
“What on earth are you two talking about?”asked Mrs. Redfield, looking from one to the other, while thwarting Marjorie in a forbidden attack upon the cookies. “It seems to me that you’ve been talking for years about this story, and I don’t know yet what it’s all about.”
“Hims witing books like the funny poetry man, and hims told me if I’m good and nice to you and Aunt Marian he’ll wite a book all about me, and my dollies, and how we builded shotums by the lake and in our yard; and Marian can’t be in any more books, but just be sitting on a wock by the lake, having ums picture painted.”
“Thank you, Marjorie; I knew he was a deceiver and that proves it,” laughed Marian, avoiding her sister’s eyes. “Let’s all go out and see the sun go down.”
Marjorie toddled off along the walk that bisected what had once been a kitchen-garden.
The sun was resting his fiery burden on the dark edge of a wood on the western horizon.The front door of the bungalow was ajar and Mrs. Redfield crossed the piazza and peered in. The place was clean and freshly papered: a fire burned m the fireplace—no mere careless blaze of litter left by workmen, but flaming logs that crackled cheerily. Her memory distributed her own belongings; here had been the table and there the couch and chair; and she saw restored to the bare walls the pictures that now cluttered the attic of the home she had established with Marian, that had once hung here—each with its special meaning for the occupants.
She stood, a girlish figure, with her hands thrust into the pockets of her sweater, staring with unseeing eyes at the mocking flames.
The Poet had spoken of the visits he paid in fancy to his house of dreams, and she half-wondered whether she were not herself a disembodied spirit imprisoned in a house of shadows. A light, furtive step on the piazzastartled her, and lifting her eyes with the Poet still in her mind she saw him crossing the room quickly, like a guest approaching his hostess.
“It’s pleasant to find the mistress back in the house of dreams,” he said. “And she brings, oh, so many things with her!”
He glanced about the empty room as though envisaging remembered comforts.
“I might have known,” she murmured, “that this was your plan.”
“No,” he replied, with a smile that brought to his face a rare kindliness and sweetness, “it wasn’t mine; I’m merely an inefficient agent. It’s all born of things hoped for—”
He waved his hand to the bare walls, brought it round and placed something in her palm.
“There’s the key to my house of dreams. As you see, it needs people—its own people—Marjorie and you, for example, to make it home again. I shall be much happier to know you’re back....”
ELIZABETH!
He was gone and she gazed after him with a deepened sense of unreality. A moment later she heard Marjorie calling to him in the garden.
She stood staring at the flat bit of metal he had left in her hand, the key of his house of dreams; then she laid her arms upon the long shelf of the mantel and wept. The sound of her sobbing filled the room. Never before—not when the anger and shame of her troubles were fresh upon her—had she been so shaken.
She was still there, with her head bowed upon her arms, when a voice spoke her name, “Elizabeth,” and “Elizabeth,” again, very softly.
The sun flamed beyond the woodland. The Poet joined with Marian and Fulton in praising the banners of purple and gold that were flung across the west, while Marjorie tugged at his umbrella.
“It’s all good—everything is good! Apretty good, cheerful kind of world when you consider it. I think,” he added with his eyes on Marian, “that maybe Miles can find time to do the pictures for Fred’s book. His old place at the bank won’t be ready until the first of the year, and that will give him a chance to work up something pretty fine. I’ll see that publisher about it when he comes; and—” He withdrew several steps, and looked absently at the glories of the dying day before concluding, “it’s just as well to keep all the good things in the family.”
When they hurried to the gate, they saw him walking in his leisurely fashion toward the trolley terminus, swinging his umbrella. The golden light enfolded him and the scarlet maples bent down in benediction.
THE END
The Riverside PressCAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTSU . S . A