CHAPTER XVIII
ON the day following her second meeting with the stranger who called himself John Converse, Alice Lorraine was in a sad state of mind when she reached the lane. Shehadto see the man again. She told herself that ordinary civility as well as her own desire demanded that. Chance had brought them together and put upon her the duty of aiding him so far as possible in looking up old associations without making himself known in the village of his birth and boyhood. She had somehow lost her head and become involved in a warm dispute. That made it hard for her to act to-day. But she told herself that she was not going back as the girl who had been vehement over—nothing! She was simply going to meet John Converse (for the last time, probably) in the odd little shop, give him such information as she was able, and if he should wish, help him plan his course of action. Then they would part in the polite way of people who have become acquainted in the course of a long railway journey and offered one another kindly civilities.
It would be simple enough, she told herself, if she could only remember that he belonged to an older generation. He didn’t look young and he couldn’t be,with a memory reaching back as far as his did. It was only his sad eyes which could become so merry and the whimsical smile that transformed his gaunt face that had made her feel as if he were a companion of her own years.
As the girl stole around the cottage towards the path leading to the shop, John Converse rose quickly from the step of the back porch and joined her. He held out his hand eagerly and she put hers shyly into it, her face expressing the relief she felt to find that he was not resentful. She realised now that she had feared that if he were about at all he would be stiff and cold.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said with a frank smile. “I have had a nasty night, I can tell you. And now I want to explain to you right away what must have seemed to you inexcusable behaviour. Shall we sit down here?”
Alice thought of his safety. And she suggested that they might as well go into the shop. As they entered, she noted that there was a fire and the same preparations for tea he had made the day before.
He took her jacket, made her comfortable, prepared the tea and served her. Alice, with a sense of relief that was like happiness, leaned back in her chair and watched him admiringly. She had never known a man to be so deft, and gazing at his hands she noticed that, though the skin was hard and rough and they must have done the work of a labourer, they were the long, sensitive, slender hands of the sculptoror musician—probably the latter. And suddenly her lips puckered in an involuntary smile.
“What pleases you, if I may ask?” he said wonderingly. He himself was very serious,—sad, almost. There was no hint now of the whimsicality that made him so young—nor of the youthful impulsiveness with which he had met her to-day.
Alice looked into his eyes ingenuously. “I wouldn’t dare tell anyone else of the thought that came to me and made me smile,” she declared. “They would mob me, I am quite sure. You see everyone in this village—or everyone I happen to know—is simply mad about Reuben Cartwright. Honestly, I believe they consider him perfect—incapable of doing anything that’s not exactly the right thing. And I have heard so much raving about him that I believe I am catching the madness, or whatever you call it. Just now as you were handling the cups so skilfully it came suddenly to me that your hands were like Reuben’s—and mind you, I never saw the boy!”
He did not smile. He only looked at her curiously. Then he sat down opposite her.
“It wouldn’t be strange if they were alike,” he said quietly. “It’s odd, but you have led up to the explanation I was about to make. I feel, Miss Lorraine, that I owe it to you to tell you who I really am. You trusted me without a shred of evidence of my integrity, and you granted my wish for secrecy. I ought to have told you, anyhow. But having lost my temper and made shockingly uncivil remarks to you, Icannot do otherwise. The reason I fired up when you were ready to believe ill—the worst—of Dick Cartwright is the same reason that Reuben Cartwright’s hands and mine may look alike, though I trust his aren’t so calloused and generally bunged up. I am Reuben Cartwright’s father.”
It wasn’t, of course, the same shock to Alice Lorraine the announcement would have been to one who had known Richard Cartwright or his son Reuben. But the girl paled.
“But I thought he was dead—you, I mean,” she said so naively that he smiled.
“I may be lean and lank, but I am a right husky ghost for all that,” he said. Then he grew serious. “You were right in thinking so. I wanted everyone to believe me dead, and now I feel the same, except for you. It wasn’t only because I wouldn’t seem so rude if you understood that I wanted you to know, Miss Lorraine; but you seemed to think I was such a bad lot that I wanted you to know the truth. Not that I wasn’t a bad lot, you know, only I wasn’t quite such a scoundrel as you apparently think. Do you mind telling me just what impression Mr. Langley gave you of me? I believe under the circumstances you have the right to speak freely.”
Alice complied briefly. Cartwright wiped his brow more than once.
“I went through a lot for nothing, then,” he said almost bitterly. “If I had given my real name, I could have gotten off; but I feared the notoriety for Reubenand took the name of a man that was killed, for the sake of giving him mine and having Reuben’s father die a comparatively decent death instead of being a convict. I was on that train but the only thing wrong about my being there was that I didn’t pay my fare. I was a tramp at that time and another tramp and I were riding the bumpers—he initiated me into the mysteries of the practise. He was killed and in the confusion of the wreck I was arrested as one of the gang that was responsible for it and for the deaths of the mail clerk and engineer. They couldn’t prove anything, but circumstantial evidence implicated me as an accessory. My one hope of clearing myself would have been to establish my identity as Richard Cartwright, which, as I said, I did not choose to do. Wherefore I landed in the penitentiary.”
The girl gave a little involuntary, startled, deprecating cry. Richard Cartwright faced her almost sternly with folded arms.
“You have been there—not ever since?” she protested. He told her that he had served two years of a sentence of five when the confession of a member of the gang who died of consumption had freed him.
“But why didn’t you come back here then?” she cried.
“If you could have seen me the day after I left the prison, you wouldn’t ask,” he said bitterly. “I became a bum on the spot. I deliberately took up the drink habit again and became a drunkard and a tramp. I kept at it for three years—years that are almost ablank to me now. Then something happened—I don’t know what it was—that set me thinking of Reuben and Farleigh and Russell Langley and I decided to stop long enough to put myself into shape to come East and see if they were alive and how things were going on and all that. That was nearly a year ago. I stopped drinking, went to work, earned and saved money enough to clothe myself decently and to take this sight-seeing trip, and—here I am.”
Again he wiped his damp brow with his pocket handkerchief and looked at the girl—defiantly, bitterly, yet deprecatingly and wistfully.
“But why don’t you stay, now?” she cried. “And why don’t you see Mr. Langley and Reuben? Though I know Reuben only by hearsay, I know enough of him to know that he would be—crazyto see you.”
She smiled tremulously. “He’s the faithful sort, if I’m not,” she said.
“O Miss Lorraine, don’t hit a fellow who’s down,” he begged.
“But you will—you will stay and—you will see them, Reuben and Mr. Langley?”
“No, Miss Lorraine, I cannot stay. And I’ll see them, but I won’t let them see me and I will remain dead to everyone but you just the same. I will roam about dear old Farleigh and see the changes, and I won’t hurry, but—I’ll go back presently. This is only a vacation,—a sight-seeing trip on the part of John Converse.”
“Back to what?” asked the girl imperiously.
“Back to being a good, honest day-labourer, if you say so, Miss Lorraine,” he assured her.
“Well, but I don’t say so,” she retorted. “I want you to be a musician. I want you to have your old house back and to build——”
Her voice broke. He was silent a little. Then he reached forth his hard, beautifully shaped hands.
“Look at those—hoofs!On nearer view do they look like a musician’s?” he asked.
“The hands do and you could easily soften the skin,” she declared.
“I learned cobbling in prison and did it for two years,” he remarked, and the girl paled sensitively, and her eyes fell.
“And my job now is work in a shoe factory, and so it must be for——”
“So it must not! No such thing!” she interrupted.
He smiled at her fire, and she thought he was ready to be persuaded. And for some little time, Alice Lorraine urged him to alter what she found to be a bitterly fixed determination. But she was still shaken and confused by the excitement and emotion she had undergone, and presently she gave over for the moment, feeling that she could do better by waiting until she should have pondered over the matter alone. However, she secured his promise not to return to the West without letting her know nor without seeing her. By that time it was late and agreeing to meet him the next day, she took leave.
The next day Dick Cartwright told her that he haddecided to remain hereabouts for a fortnight if he was lucky enough to escape detection, after which he would go to the town where Reuben was attending college, preferring to see him there rather than in Farleigh at the Christmas holidays. Then he would stop here and tell her about it on his way West. He begged her earnestly not to try to dissuade him. His purpose was fixed, and it only caused him intense pain to have her attempt to alter it.
Warm-hearted Alice agreed to desist temporarily at least and to help make his days in Farleigh successful whether they were only holidays or, as she continued secretly to hope, the beginning of a second residence. She learned all she could about Reuben to relate to his father when she met him, which was daily except when Alice was prevented from getting away, which happened only twice. She told him something more of Mr. Langley almost every time she saw him and learned the history of every person he mentioned any desire to know about. She helped him plan his nightly wanderings about the place, shared one of them and listened eagerly to what he told her of his experiences. She even managed to get him into the church one Sunday afternoon and to coax him to play a few bars on the familiar organ, the sight of which brought tears to his eyes. At moments when they were in good spirits they called themselves a pair of conspirators and wondered at the success which attended Dick Cartwright. For Alice assured him again and again thatno one dreamed of there being any stranger in the place.
The days flew over Alice Lorraine’s head, her only regret being that she had no opportunity to plead with Dick Cartwright to reconsider his resolve. At home, as was perhaps not unnatural, she appeared nervous and was ready to be irritable as she had never been before. She was careless of others and remiss in her duties. And yet she was not utterly so. For a new feeling for her father had been aroused in her, a pity and sympathy the girl could never have experienced otherwise. She thought much of him and wrote him two long letters in the fortnight that elapsed before Dick Cartwright left Farleigh to go in search of Reuben.
On the night he was to leave, Alice, who was supposed to be in her room whither she had withdrawn early, met him at a point in the South Hollow which they had agreed upon. She entreated him to make himself known to his son and let him help make the final decision, but Cartwright was adamant.
“I couldn’t explain to Reuben without letting him know that I have been in prison,” he finally explained reluctantly and quite as if that ended the argument.
“Yes, butinnocently!” she cried.
“That makes little difference. I would rather die than have Reuben know he is the son of one who has been a prisoner,” he declared proudly.
Alice withdrew her arm from his. “You think it soterrible a stigma as all that, Mr. Cartwright?” she demanded.
“I would rather die than have Reuben know it,” he repeated warmly.
“Myfather is in prison now!” she cried. “And he—he is—he isn’t innocent!”