From the window of his office Blakie saw them coming, hand in hand,
looking very neat in their white dresses, shiny black pumps, and big
straw hats. They came quickly, eyes front, with a rigid, frightened air,
among the hurrying crowds of the down town street.
“What’s she thinking of, to let them come alone?” he cried to himself.
Snatching up his hat, he went out to meet them. A man jostled them, and
they stepped aside, directly in the path of another man in a hurry, who
ran into Irene and went on, frowning. Her hat fell off. She stooped to
pick it up, still holding fast to Martha’s hand.
Blakie swung her up and kissed her hot, anxious little face.
“Well, Renie!” he said.
“Daddy!” she answered, with a sigh of relief.
“And Marty!”
“Oh, daddy _dear_!”
Taking a hand of each, he turned back toward the office. No one would
jostle them now--not with his strength to protect them. Poor little
devils!
There came back to him, in a rush, all the old savage exasperation he
thought he mastered. Just like Katherine, to send them alone!
“Daddy, I’ve got a kitten!” said Martha. “It’s a gray, fluffy one!”
But he was not listening.
“You shouldn’t have come alone,” he said curtly.
“Only just from the corner, daddy! Madge brought us to the corner, and
then she pointed where your office was, and there weren’t any streets to
cross or anything.” Something in Martha’s voice made him glance down at
her. He found her looking up at him with a queer, anxious little frown
knitting her brows. “She brought us right to the very corner, daddy!”
“That’s all right, chick!” he said, squeezing her hand. “I mustn’t even
hint anything against--Katherine,” he thought. “Poor little kid--she’s
worried. This way!” he said aloud. “In here!”
He opened the door of his new suite of offices. A fine suite it was, and
he was proud of it.
“Rather different from the old place, eh?” he said.
“Oh, yes!” said Martha.
She had taken Renie’s hand again, and they stood stiff and straight,
terribly conscious of so many strange eyes regarding them. They were
beautiful children, dark as gypsies, with a lovely color in their
sunburned cheeks. Both of them were straight and sturdy, like himself.
They were unmistakably his children.
“Dead image of you, Blakie!” said Crisson, his partner. “Fine kids!
Let’s see--how old are they?”
“Martha’s ten and Irene is eight.”
“Lord! How time flies!” said Crisson.
The past six months had not flown for Blakie.
Katherine was to have the children for six months of the year and he for
the other six months.
“But you won’t really do that, Lew?” she had said. “You won’t take them
away from me?”
Just like her, when she had tried to take them away from him! She had
come to his office--that was just like her, too; an outrageous thing to
do. They were divorced, by her wish. She had a generous allowance, and
he had agreed to everything she wanted, except to give up his children.
“I won’t discuss it,” he had said to her.
At first she had begged and pleaded, with tears streaming down her face.
When he remained unmoved, she had grown angry in her reckless, vehement
way. He was pretty sure that Crisson had heard her that day, and he
often wondered how much Miss Deering had heard. Certainly every one in
the outer office had seen her when she went out, with the marks of tears
on her face.
He could never think of that day without growing hot with shame. For a
moment he even felt ashamed of the children, living reminders of his
disgrace. His wife had left him--every one knew that.
“Miss Deering!” he said.
He felt a little thrill of pleasure at the girl’s instant response. She
was always so eager, so willing. She answered his call with a smile on
her grave young face and a quick glance at him, as if she were trying to
read in his face what he wanted.
“Do you think you could entertain these two young ladies for half an
hour?” he asked.
“Oh, I think so!” she replied cheerfully. He saw the color rise in her
cheeks. She was proud to be chosen for this duty.
She took the little girls by the hand and went off, and Blakie stood for
a moment, looking after them. Then he went into his private office and
shut the door. There was some work he wanted to do before lunch; but he
could not do it. The feel of those little hot hands had stirred him
intolerably. His children! He loved them so, he wanted them so! His
children!
“I’ll never forgive her!” he cried in his heart. “It was a damnable
thing to do, to break up their home! They’re worried and puzzled. Poor
little kids!”
His life with Katherine had been a misery to him, but he would have
endured it all his days rather than hurt his children. It was she who
had left her home. She had told him often enough that she “couldn’t
stand it,” but he had never expected that.
“Heartless,” she had called him, and “a stiff, solemn prig.” That had
been her standard reproach for him--that he was a prig. When, coming
home late, he had found the children still up, romping with Katherine
and mad with excitement, and he had protested, she had called him a
prig. When he had asked her not to come down to breakfast in a dressing
gown, and when he had asked her to be more careful of her gossip before
the children, she had said the same thing.
He had wanted to give them a normal, decent life, to assure them a good
start.
“And, by Heaven, I will!” he thought. “I’ll have them, alone, for half
the year. I can give them some sort of idea!”
Then, at the end of his six months, they would go back to Katherine and
her careless, rebellious life--breakfast in a dressing gown; old Madge
doing the work of the house just as it suited her; the telephone ringing
and people dropping in; Katherine, with her shining black hair in a
great, untidy knot, sitting at the piano, singing.
He could never think of her singing without a twinge of pain, because of
what it had once meant to him--the big, glorious voice that came pouring
from her throat without effort; the feeling in it, the pity, the
tenderness. “Theatrical,” he had learned to call it, just as he had
learned to look upon her beauty with a fastidious detachment. Certainly
she was beautiful--a tall, full-bosomed, long-limbed creature, with a
lazy grace in every movement, and a face indestructibly lovely, with
dark gray eyes, clear, fine features, and a mouth too wide, too
generous, unforgetably sweet.
It seemed to him that whatever Katherine took in her careless hands she
ruined. She wasted everything. She had had a magnificent career before
her, in light opera, and she had thrown it aside to marry him; and now
she had thrown him aside, hurt beyond healing. His love for her had been
a madness. He had been swept off his feet, infatuated, desperate; and
she had been so kind in the beginning--kinder than any other woman could
be.
“Because she had her own way,” he thought.
He had never criticized her then. He had not been doing so well in
business. They had lived in a tiny house in Brooklyn, with only old
Madge to help; and he had come home there at the end of the day like a
soul to Paradise. He remembered how he used to open the door with his
latchkey and go in; and no matter how quiet he was, she would always
hear him.
“It’s himself!” she would call to Madge, with the trace of brogue that
never quite left her. “Put the dinner on the table, Madge darlin’!”
Then she would come running to him, fling her arms around him, and draw
his head down on her breast.
“You’re tired, my heart’s darlin’! There! Don’t you talk! Come in and
see what Madge and I have got for you!”
“I’ve got to wash, Katherine.”
“Wash in the kitchen, so you’ll not have to go upstairs, and you so
tired, my dearest!”
But he never would wash in the kitchen.
Then they would have dinner, old Madge joining in the conversation as
she waited on the table. Katherine had spoiled Madge from the start,
calling her “darling,” and sitting in the kitchen to talk with her; but
still, how Madge could cook!
After dinner people would usually come in--friends of Katherine’s, whom
he did not much like, theatrical people, some of them charming, some of
them queer old friends whom she would not abandon. To show her husband
that he was supremely important, that he was not left out, she would sit
on the arm of his chair, with her hand on his shoulder, bending now and
then and kissing the top of his head.
“Talk now, Lew darlin’!” she would say. “Listen now, will you, to what
Lew’s got to say!”
But he had not liked such public demonstrations.
“I loved her, though,” he thought. “I was happy.”
He did not want to remember all that. It was intolerable to remember, in
his bitterness, those warm, glowing years of love and delight; and yet
it seemed to him that it would be wrong and cowardly to shirk the
memory, to shut his mind to any of the vivid little pictures that rose
before him. He closed his eyes, to see more clearly, and let the full
tide of the old pain rush over him. He was a man, and he could bear it.
He must bear it.
Katherine had spoiled everything. As he got on in the world, he had had
to live differently, and she would not help him. Once he had asked
Crisson and his wife to dinner. He was not a partner then, and it was an
important occasion for him; but Katherine took it with her usual
careless good humor. When her guests arrived, she was not dressed. After
a very awkward wait of nearly half an hour, down she came, laughing and
lovely--and untidy.
Blakie saw her through the Crisson’s eyes that night. He got a fresh
view of things to which he had grown almost accustomed--Madge’s casual
fashion of waiting, and the badly ironed napkins.
After dinner she sat down at the piano and sang for them, and her coil
of shining hair came loose and slipped down. Mrs. Crisson, with a tight
smile, rose and put the pins in firmly, while Katherine went on singing.
They had their first real quarrel that night.
“Can’t you do your hair decently?” he said. “Mrs. Crisson--”
“And her with a wisp of hair that looks like nothing at all!” Katherine
cried indignantly.
“That’s not the point,” he told her, but she would not listen, and they
said cruel things to each other.
In the morning she was her usual jolly self again, but it was harder for
him.
That had been the beginning. Later there had been more and more
quarrels--when she had bought things they couldn’t afford, or, in one of
her fits of repentant economy, had insisted upon going shabby.
“What do you care at all what people will be saying?” she would say,
when he protested.
For she never cared. She came of a good family; her father had been
aid-de-camp to the governor of a British colony, but she had never
cared.
“No!” she assured him, laughing. “Nobody else cared, either. They all
loved me. I could have gone to a ball in a flour sack, and nobody would
have cared!”
“But, see here, for my sake, Katherine--”
“I’ll try,” she said, and that same day she bought herself a huge
plum-colored velvet hat that appalled him. They had quarreled about
that, too.
At first she had only laughed at his criticisms, but as time went on she
grew to resent them. In her girlhood, and during her brief time on the
stage, no one had criticized her. Every one had loved her.
“And you!” she had cried once. “You’re the one ought to love me best of
all, and you do not, Lewis!”
“What about your loving me a little? Won’t you just try?”
There were years and years of that. Even after they had two servants,
the house was always a little untidy--not dirty, but with a
disorderliness that tormented him. The meals were often late, and she
herself was always late. Her friends were forever dropping in. They came
to her with all their troubles, and she would lend them money, or give
them warm-hearted, prejudiced advice, or just sit listening and crying
gallons of tears over some sad tale. Then she would want to tell her
husband all about it, and would grow angry at his lack of sympathy.
All this went on until there was nothing left but bitterness between
them; and then she had gone away with the children and had written him a
letter to say that she was not coming back.
He remembered that first night in the house. He had gone into her room,
all in disorder from her packing, and then into the empty nursery, where
Renie’s despised and ill-used rag doll sat in a broken rocking chair. If
he could have seen Katherine then he would have begged her to come back;
but when it came to writing a letter, that was a different matter. He
had his pride to consider.
He had written briefly, asking her to come back for the sake of the
children, and he had had an answer from her lawyer. He had not been
sorry. Lonely as he was, there was an immense relief in that loneliness,
and there was a dignity which had long been lacking. It was as if he had
found his soul again.
Finished now all their life together; but life itself was not finished.
Blakie was only forty-five, and there were years and years ahead of him.
He thought of Frances Deering, with the curious uneasiness that the
thought of her always caused him. He couldn’t help knowing! She was very
grave, very businesslike in her manner, but he couldn’t help knowing!
Sometimes, when he caught her looking at him, the honest, innocent
admiration in her eyes gave him a thrill of pride and pleasure. At other
times it troubled and irritated him. Twenty-two she was, not much more
than a kid--a good girl, and a pretty one, but he was not interested in
that sort of thing. He had loved Katherine with a love that would never
come again, and he wanted no more of that.
Yet sometimes, in his hours of dejection and loneliness, he would think
of the solace of an honest, faithful affection, of what it would mean to
have some one waiting for him at home, some one to care if he were ill,
a companion for his older years.
With an impatient frown he pushed away his papers and rose. He couldn’t
work now.
As he went into the outer office he saw Frances sitting at her desk,
with the little girls beside her, all of them busy cutting out rabbits
from colored memorandum pads, and talking quietly together. Something in
the sight displeased him. The girl’s fair head, as it bent down toward
the children, had a meek look about it. Her quick and whole-hearted
acceptance of all Blakie’s orders made him feel like a sort of sultan, a
very lonely autocrat. He didn’t like that.
“Thanks, very much, Miss Deering,” he said. “Now, kids!”
Her eyes sought his face, as if to read there the meaning of his crisp,
impersonal tone.
“What have I done that you don’t like?” her eyes asked.
“You are not the one,” his heart answered. “You are good and pretty and
young, but you are not the one. What you want to see in my face no woman
will ever see again!”