THE HEART OF A MAN
An hour later Harry sat in the same pleasant room, looking out where
curdled clouds set their silver sails in the pale shimmer of sky. A
light breeze fluttered the figured-silk curtains, a blue-bottle buzzed
tentatively to and fro outside, and birds were fluting in the trees of
the small park and splashing joyously in the fountain.
The encounter with Chilly had broken into his mood, which had been
occupied with more inviting things. Now, alone, the thought of what
this day held for him absorbed him. "One year!" he had said to himself
on the day of that old court-house trial. "That is the test I will
give myself. It is enough. If I can beat the brandy for a year, I can
beat it forever!" To-day was an anniversary; this afternoon the year
was up. The period had called up all his courage, had searched out
with prying fingers every crevice of weakness, explored insistently
each avenue of uncontrol. But he had won the long battle, and the
resurgence of the old power that had come to him in his yesterday's
speech had crowned the victory with confidence. Yesterday he would
have died sooner than to have wrung from his lips what he should say to
her--to Echo--to-day!
When the tall old clock in the corner next chimed he rose and called,
"Suzuki!"
The Japanese servant of spotless raiment entered with noiseless
footsteps.
"Tell Aunt Judy I sha'n't want dinner to-night," said Sevier; "I'll
dine at the club. You can take the night off, if you like; I'll let
myself in."
"_Hai-e!_" Suzuki sucked in his breath and his oval eyes allowed
themselves a gleam of satisfaction. As he brought his master's hat and
stick Harry looked at him meditatively, wondering, as he had wondered a
thousand times, what lay behind that secret-keeping, brown face with
its perpetual, half-smiling gravity. He had picked him up a half-dozen
years before in his travels, a shabby and abject adventurer with an
English dialect that was fearfully and wonderfully made; and the
youthful flotsam had speedily and without apparent tuition blossomed
forth into that inestimable jewel, a perfect valet. With Aunt Judy the
cook, who had been a servant of his father's, Bob the chauffeur who was
her son, and Suzuki, Harry's bachelor _menage_ in the city stood a
model of its kind, and the despair of his associates.
Harry walked slowly along the street clanging with cars, on pavements
busy and sunny at first and giving place gradually to wedges of lawn
and stretches of deserted foliaged flagging as he approached the
suburbs. At the big gate of Midfields he lifted his eyes. Mrs. Allen
was just stepping from her electric at the curb, cool and statuesque
and smiling.
"A penny for your thoughts!" she said. "I really believe you were
counting the flag-stones. I hope you were coming in--you've been
shamefully oblivious of our pleasure this season!"
"I've been oblivious of my own," he countered, opening the gate for
her. "But I'm going to make amends in future."
They walked leisurely up the drive under the acacias, chatting. She
had often wondered, in the old days, whether there were not some
understanding between him and Echo, and his long absence had puzzled
her. But he had apparently gone nowhere else, and she welcomed his
return. He was a distinctly eligible _parti_, and Echo had reached a
point where the future was a pertinent thing. There had never been
between the mother and daughter that close _rapport_ which existed
between daughter and father; Mrs. Allen had never felt that she
understood Echo. She had never known for her, even as a child, the
fierce and excluding yearning which she had lavished on Chisholm, and
which had grown even stronger with the latter's increasing years and
delinquencies. But she had Echo's interests thoroughly at heart, and
Harry Sevier--particularly since his speech at the Opera House--had
attained to importance in her worldly estimation.
"I haven't congratulated you," she said presently. "Your speech! It
was a masterly thing."
"You were there? I'm glad I didn't know it. It would have deepened
the blueness of my funk."
"Flatterer!" She tapped him on the arm with her parasol. "But I'm not
wholly pleased, I assure you. The headlines are prophetic, I'm afraid.
Presently the politicians will seize upon you, and the first we know
you will be in Congress--or the Senate--and the town will have lost
you. That's the way it goes!"
"Ah," he said, shaking his head, "who is the flatterer now?"
They had reached the big porch and she drew him into the hall and to
the blue parlour, where the Judge sat with Echo, leisurely munching
toast. "I've brought Mr. Sevier," she announced, "with his laurels
thick upon him, just in time for tea. For my part, I am a wreck from
the sun and I shall take mine in my room. But you'll come soon again,
won't you?"
She passed out, faintly smiling and leaving a perfume of heliotrope
behind her, without waiting Harry's answer, which seemed indeed to be
given to Echo, since his hand held hers at the moment and his eyes were
on her face. The sight for him had blotted everything else. The
restful room with its cool shadows, the Judge--all seemed to retire
into an inextinguishable and meaningless background, leaving only them
two, together. In the year past he had never been so near her; now he
marked that while her hair had the same familiar whorl and golden
under-lights, her face seemed more serious than of old, her eyes deeper
and more wistful.
Since that far-away evening at the Country Club, Echo had passed
through a confusion of experiences, the more trying as they had been
locked in her own breast. It had been more than Harry Sevier: it was
her love for him that had been fought over during that long year. When
he had left her that night with his kiss burning on her hand, she had
known instinctively that he had gone to do battle. What she had said
had stung him deeply, yet she could not have recalled a word. It had
been the cry of wounded pride, of stricken ideals, of reproach, of
protest against the dominancy of the thing she hated over the man she
loved. As the long months of autumn and winter wore away she had
seemed, with a singular clarity of vision, to see his temptation and to
enter spiritually into his struggle. They had met only a few times and
then in public places and more than once her eye had distinguished the
traces of the conflict. Something deep in her had told her that when
he came to her again that conflict would be ended. So, at sight of him
on the threshold, Echo's heart had leaped into turbulent beating.
Here, at last, they were face to face--it was the closure of the past,
the burgeoning of the new!
There was a desultory conversation over the tea, and then the Judge
went back to his chair in the library, and they two strayed out through
the open French-window to the wide porch. There, on the top step, she
sat down, leaning back against one of the big columns, up which a
crimson rambler climbed. He sat lower, at her feet. The smile had
faded from both their faces, and a rose that was on her breast, from
the tumult of her heart, showered its petals on the stone. He could
see the old sun-dial gleaming from its tangle of ivy. He knew its
quaint motto:
_Hours fly, flowers die.
New men, new ways,
Pass by;
Love stays._
After a silence he lifted his gaze.
"You didn't think," he said in a low voice, "that I stayed away because
I--because that same thing had ever happened since the day of the
trial?"
"No," she answered, gently, "I knew it hadn't."
A uniformed imp on a bicycle--a postal messenger--careened wildly up
the drive with a special delivery letter. They saw him deliver it to
old Nelson at the side portico and pedal whistling down a by-path.
"Then," he said quickly, "you know now that it never can again? It has
been a year, a round year to-day. I made up my mind that I would not
come to you till the last day was out."
"I felt that, too," she said. "I knew what you were thinking. I--I
even guessed the year. Was it--so hard?"
"Yes," he answered. "But it would have been harder if I hadn't found
it out when I did. The sting of all these months," he went on, "has
been your thought of me! Every day, every hour, I have seen you as you
looked that night at the 'Farm.' I shall never deserve that look
again--Echo!"
She turned toward him at that, as if with a sudden impulse, her eyes
like sapphire stars, her lips parted, but she did not speak. The
failing sunlight spattered down through the moving foliage in
green-gilt flashes that tinged her face and touched her hair with the
soft burnish of Venetian gold, like that of a figure he remembered in
St. Mark's. Behind her reared the seamed and grey old column--a faded
background of age for a figure of immortal youth--and he knew suddenly
that the picture of her, as he saw her at that moment, had covered
forever the painful memory. There was only the ardent, unconditional
now: only Echo and the dear old porch and the dimming daylight--and a
bluebird singing from the heart of a tree--ever henceforward to be
symbols to him of woman's love and--home!
He leaned toward her, his hand groping for hers, outstretched on the
cool stone beside her, and said in a voice shaken, in spite of himself:
"Echo--it _is_ just as it was a year ago, isn't it?"
She caught her hand--the one he groped for--to her cheek. She rose,
and for an instant it seemed as if she had not heard. Then her glance
wavered and fell and a bright, rich colour stained her cheeks like a
sudden flush of rosy sun-set. But she had slightly turned away and he
did not see it.
"Ah!" he said, looking up at her. "I may say it now--may I not?--what
you must have known all along. I love you, I love you! Only you and
your love, dear--that is all I ask of God!... Echo--"
There was a sudden sound behind them, a hoarse cry from the room they
had left. Both turned sharply toward the French-window. Then she was
down the long porch like a flying shadow.
He followed, to find her bending over the form of her father, slipped
sideways on the leathern sofa, his face bluish-white and a paper
crumpled in his rigid hand. At the same moment Nelson thrust his
woolly head through the rear door.
"Quick!" she cried, kneeling beside the couch. "He has fainted. Call
mother." He went, his aged features twitching with fright.
"I will send Doctor Southall," said Harry quickly. He touched her
hand, and with a single backward look at her, hurried out. She heard
his step speeding down the gravel drive.
Echo laid a tremulous hand upon her father's, and at the touch the
tense fingers relaxed and a crumpled brown paper dropped from them.
She snatched it up--was that what had made him faint? She spread it
out: it was a photographic print, unmounted, of the last page of a
letter, in his own handwriting. Across the top was printed, in the
purple, noncommittal lettering of a typewriter, "For possible release
May 3rd."
Then as she gazed, over the agitation of her face grew a shocked
bewilderment that rushed headlong to realisation. She started to her
feet, and a vivid scarlet flooded her pale face from chin to brow, then
slowly ebbed, leaving behind it a frozen anguish. The print fell from
her hand. At the same moment the Judge stirred and opened his eyes.
He saw her standing before him; knowledge slipped back.
"Echo--"
She turned swiftly. He had struggled to a sitting posture--his gaze
fastened on the crumpled paper on the rug. A little spasm crossed his
face. "Reach me that," he said.
She picked it up and laid it in his hand, and he put it into his pocket
with shaking fingers. He passed his hand across his forehead.
"Where's Sevier?" he asked dully.
"He went to send the doctor. We were on the porch and heard you cry
out."
"Ah, yes, I--remember. I tried to call you. I lost track of things
for a minute or two, I reckon, But it's nothing. I've had little
spells like this before. I don't need Southall--send Nelson to tell
him not to come. I'm all right."
Unheeding her protests, he rose and went to his chair, as Mrs. Allen,
with unaccustomed agitation on her face, swept into the room.