_LITTLE NOVELS BY
FAVOURITE AUTHORS_
Their Child
ROBERT HERRICK
[Illustration]
[Illustration: _Robert Herrick_]
Their Child
BY
ROBERT HERRICK
AUTHOR OF “THE WEB OF LIFE,” “THE MAN
WHO WINS,” “THE GOSPEL OF FREEDOM,”
ETC.
[Illustration]
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1903
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1903,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up, electrotyped, and published October, 1903.
Norwood Press
J. B. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood Mass., U.S.A.
MR. ROBERT HERRICK, the author of “The Gospel of Freedom,” “The
Web of Life,” and “The Real World,” was born in Cambridge, Mass.,
April 26, 1868. His father was a lawyer, practising in Boston. His
people on both sides were of New England stock, the Herricks running
back in New England to 1632, and the Emerys, Mannings, Hales, and
Peabodys, with whom among others his genealogy is connected, having
much the same history. Mr. Herrick was educated at the Cambridge
public schools, and at Harvard University, graduating in 1890. His
freshman year and part of his sophomore year were spent in travelling
in the West Indies, Mexico, California, Alaska, and other regions, in
company with his classmate, Philip Stanley Abbot. While in college
Mr. Herrick paid special attention to English studies, attending
courses of lectures delivered by the late Professor Child, Professor
James, and Professor Barrett Wendell, among others.
For a year he was one of the editors of the _Harvard Advocate_,
and contributed several stories to that magazine. Later he was
editor of the _Harvard Monthly_--the purely literary magazine of
the University,--contributing frequently to its pages. One of his
fellow-editors was Norman Hapgood, the author of “Abraham Lincoln:
the Man of the People,” and “George Washington.”
After graduation Mr. Herrick began to teach English at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under Professor George R.
Carpenter (now of Columbia University), and continued to correct
themes and to give an occasional course in literature until 1893,
when he resigned his position in Boston to accept an instructorship
in English at the University of Chicago. In 1895 he was appointed
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the University, and he has since
taught chiefly Rhetoric and English Composition.
The summer of 1892 he spent in England and on the Continent. In 1895
he went abroad for fifteen months, for rest and literary work, living
in Paris and Florence during most of the period. While in Europe he
wrote the first draft of “The Man Who Wins,” which was published two
years later; also the first form of “The Gospel of Freedom,” and
various short stories, which were first published in the magazines
and afterward reprinted in “Literary Love Letters and Other Stories,”
and in “Love’s Dilemmas.” In addition to his writing in the line of
fiction, Mr. Herrick has done a great deal of work on more or less
professional topics. Magazine articles about methods of teaching
rhetoric, introductions and notes for school editions of classics,
one or two text-books on rhetoric,--these items give an idea of the
sort of work which has occupied Mr. Herrick’s attention apart from
fiction. He is one of the few modern American writers who have the
courage and the strength to paint life exactly as they see it,--in
its joy, its beauty, its sombreness, and its sorrow alike,--without
making it seem happier or nearer the ideal than it is.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Robert Herrick _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
“His wife was ... hurriedly undressing the child” 50
“She knelt beside him and took his head in her hands” 90
THEIR CHILD
[Illustration]
THEIR CHILD
I
“There he comes with Dora! I am so glad. I wanted you to see him so
much--all of you.”
The company gathered in the drawing-room smiled sympathetically at the
mother’s pride. They craned their necks about the window to get sight
of the small boy. He was a white speck in the long green lawn.
“Comes rather reluctantly,” observed Dr. Vessinger, with a touch of
irony. “Doesn’t seem to have his mother’s taste for society!”
“The little dear! How cunning! A perfect dear!” the women exclaimed
with more or less animation.
“Why, he is in such a temper! Little Oscar! What is the matter with
little Oscar?”
The child’s screams could be heard plainly, coming upward from the
lawn, in shrill bursts of infantile passion. Mrs. Simmons was troubled
with a mother’s confusion and distress. The nurse was holding little
Oscar at arm’s length, for safety, while the child circled about her,
kicking and thrusting with legs and arms. Mrs. Simmons stepped through
the open window to the terrace and called:
“Oscar! Oscar!” But neither nurse nor child paid any attention to her.
“He is occupied with a greater passion,” the doctor laughed.
“Unconscious little animals, children,” observed one of the women.
“He has temperament--”
“His mother’s?” another woman suggested slyly. She was large, very
blonde, very well preserved, and was known by her intimates as “the
Magnificent Wreck.”
The shrill cries penetrated at last even the room beyond the large
drawing-room where the people were gathered, and aroused the father,
who had been called on a matter of business into the study. He stepped
briskly into the room,--a handsome man of forty, with black curling
hair and crisp black beard cut to a point. His cheek-bones were high,
and the skin of his upper face was ruddy, as from much living in the
open air.
“What is the matter with the boy?” he demanded abruptly.
“Just a case of ‘I don’t want to,’” observed Dr. Vessinger. “When we
are young and feel that way, we let the world know it all of a sudden.”
“And when we are grown,” joined in the large, blonde woman, smiling at
the doctor, “we say nothing, but do as we like.”
“If we can,” added a young woman, with nervous anxiety to be in the
conversation.
Mrs. Simmons had disappeared through the French window that opened
to the terrace. Her husband followed, and the others lounged, after
bandying words on the occasion. They could see below them on the slope
of the lawn the young mother, the nurse, the child.
“Why, Dora! What is the matter?” they could hear her say. “Oscar, be
still. Be quiet and come to me.”
She must have spoken reprovingly to the nurse, for next came in injured
Irish tones:
“What have _I_ done, mum? The boy was pounding the breath of life out
of the Vance child. I could not keep his fists from his face. What have
I done? Indeed!”
“There, don’t answer any more. Take Oscar to the nursery, and wash his
face, and bring him down. I want these ladies and gentlemen to see him.”
Little Oscar, who had much the same coloring and shape of head as his
father, listened quietly while his mother spoke to the nurse. When she
had finished and Dora tugged at his hand, he shouted:
“I won’t! Do you hear? I won’t! Don’t you touch me! I say, don’t you
touch me!”
He enunciated with great distinctness, with mature deliberation. When
the nurse tried to take his arm, she received a well-aimed blow in the
pit of her stomach, delivered with all the vigor of a lusty five years.
“Oscar! Why, my little man!” the mother exclaimed helplessly.
Mr. Simmons, who had been watching the group, vaulted over the terrace
wall and strode rapidly down the slope. Little Oscar, at the apparition
of his long-legged father, turned and fled around the wing of the
house. His nurse followed grumblingly.
“Bravo!” exclaimed Dr. Vessinger, satirically. “Young Hercules needs
the chastening hand of his sire.”
“We shall have to call _you_ in, I guess, Vessinger, if the kid’s
temper gets worse. It’s too much for his mother now, and he is only
afraid of me because I am home so little he doesn’t exactly realize I
am his father. When he does, he will be boxing _me_.”
“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Simmons, red with annoyance. “It has come all of a
sudden, too. He was so gentle as a baby, so sweet. I think it must be
the nurse, Dora.”
The company looked sympathetic, and she continued apologetically: “She
is a good woman, but she is so tactless. She doesn’t know how to manage
the little fellow. She should appeal to his reason, I think.”
“It is sometimes difficult to get a quiet hearing,” observed the doctor.
“Tiresome creatures, nurses,” the Magnificent Wreck added
sympathetically. “I can remember how I hated _mine_.”
“Can you?” the younger woman put in inadvertently, as though called
upon to applaud a triumph of memory.
“But what a beautiful child!” exclaimed the Magnificent one, declining
issue with the other. “So like his father, as he stood there, his head
thrown back. When he whirled past us just now, there was the gleam of
the Viking in his eyes!”
“Yes, all he needed was a carving-knife to be a first-class pirate,”
Vessinger added lightly.
The father laughed, but not heartily; and Vessinger, feeling the topic
exhausted, turned to his blonde neighbor:
“Mrs. Bellflower, there are real clouds in the sky out there. What do
you think of our chances with the rain?”
“You mustn’t go!” their host and hostess protested. Mrs. Simmons added
in an undertone: “I wonder if it _could_ be the thunder-storm that
upset poor little Oscar so completely? Thunder affects me, always.”
Dr. Vessinger was at her elbow to say good-by.
“It is charming to find you again,” he said, taking her hand and
looking boldly into her face. “To find you in this--this splendid
scene, with your charming child and your husband. You are looking so
young that, if it were not for us others, I might shut my eyes and
believe I was in Sicily!”
He spoke deliberately, as though he wished to give two meanings to
every word he uttered. The young woman’s color changed, and her hands
played with the leaves of a book she had taken at random from the table.
“You must come again, often--I want to see you,” she said abruptly,
looking at him honestly. “I know you have done some things since that
time, and I am glad of it!”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, come! This is nonsense. You aren’t going to slip away on any such
easy excuse as that,” burst in Simmons. “See, your storm is passing
around. And if it comes, what could be finer than a gallop back in the
clear air after the rain has washed the dirt out? It will lay the dust,
too.”
“No, no!” delivered Mrs. Bellflower. “We don’t want to go yet, doctor.
Maybe we can stay to dinner if it rains. Let’s go out to the terrace.”
They stepped out of the open windows to the broad brick terrace that
completed the east side of the house. Beneath them in the distance,
to the eastward, lay the great city, and beyond they knew there was
the sea. Over the lofty chimneys and massy ramparts of houses lowered
the storm, which was spreading in two forks about the horizon. Slowly
it was climbing up the dome of the sky toward them. An edging of gold
fired the black mass from time to time.
“Grand place you have here, Simmons,” Dr. Vessinger observed. “The top
of a hill not too high,--that’s the right place for a country house.”
“If Olaf were only here oftener,” the wife remarked. “He’s just come
home, and he says he must leave soon again.”
“Yes, those Jews I work for, the Techheimer Brothers, mean that I shall
earn my salary. They are dickering for some new mines in Mexico, and
want me to look them over.”
“But you are promised to me for the tenth,” Mrs. Bellflower protested.
“What are the Techheimers to that?” commented the doctor.
“Nothing! I shall put them off until the eleventh,” Simmons responded
heartily. “It’s going to be a fierce jaunt, and I am not keen to start.”
“Take us! We would all go, wouldn’t we, Mrs. Simmons?” the younger
woman put in.
“I am afraid the hotels wouldn’t please you down there. And queer
things happen sometimes. The last time I was there--it was ticklish. I
never wanted to go back. You wouldn’t have liked it, not you women.”
“Tell it! Tell us!” they chorused. Vessinger lit a cigarette and
resigned himself to watching the assembling clouds. Imperceptibly he
drew away from the group, as if declining to be one where he was not
first.
“I _adore_ adventures!” the Magnificent Wreck added sentimentally,
encouragingly. Simmons folded his arms across his breast. His eyes
flashed pleasantly. The story interested him, too:--
“Well, it was in ’91, for the Techheimer Brothers. One of the first
jobs I did for them. They wired me from St. Louis that a certain old
Don from whom I had bought several car-loads of ore, which had been
forwarded to their smelter, had done us very prettily. He had salted
his cars very cleverly. The ore ran short of the assay by several
thousand dollars, all told. I had made the assay--you understand?
“It was my duty to take the three days’ journey from the City of
Mexico to Don Herara’s headquarters in the little town of Los Puertos,
see the old rascal, and without having a quarrel, induce him to refund
the money he had cheated us out of.
“Los Puertos is almost the loneliest spot I ever got into, for a town.
It is at the end of a two days’ stage-ride from the railroad. It is
hell! Just peons, a great adobe barracks where my old thief lived, a
swift river rushing down from the mountains behind the town--nothing
more.
“You should have seen us the afternoon of my arrival, sitting in the
old Don’s office, drinking _petits verres_ and swapping compliments.
‘Your honorable excellency,’ said I; ‘Your noble courtesy,’ said he.
And so on. The Don had white hair, a hawk nose, brown eyes, that had
slunk deep under his brows, and the long white beard of a patriarch. He
was a most respectable sinner!
“Every time some one stepped across the room above I wanted to jump.
I thought he must have a dozen or so of his peons hidden up there
to slice me with their great _machetes_ when he gave the signal. As
the afternoon grew mellow, I began to suggest in ten-foot sentences
that some rascally servant of his honorable right-mindedness had been
deceiving his grace, and had caused my poor masters the loss of some
thousands of dollars, the loss of which was nothing to them compared
with the sorrow they felt that his honorable good name was thus sullied
by an unworthy servant.
“My old Don gulped my compliments without a wink: he had known what I
was after all along, of course. When I had turned the corner of the
last Spanish sentence, he nodded at me pleasantly, but his brows were
stretched like catgut. He cleared his throat and spat, and I seemed to
hear all sorts of things going on over my head. That little room was
the loneliest place on the earth just then.”
“Had you a pistol?” broke in Mrs. Bellflower, breathlessly.
“I carefully left that behind me in the City of Mexico. For if it
should come to that, it would only have complicated matters. I rarely
travel with a revolver.”
Mrs. Bellflower regretted this lack of picturesqueness.
“Well, my Don looked at me for a few minutes. Then he said, ‘Shall we
enjoy the cool of the evening in a gentle stroll?’ We went out on the
stony trail up toward the black mountains. They looked cold and bare.
“‘Los Puertos,’ he remarked philosophically, ‘is a very small place. It
is very far away from your home, Señor Simmons.’ ‘I have been in places
farther away, sir, and got back, too.’ ‘I own it all, Señor Americano;
every soul of these people is mine.’ ‘So,’ I answered, as stiff for the
boast as he, ‘the Techheimers are great people.’ And I blew a lot about
my bosses, how they watched their men and took an eye for an eye,
every time. Finally, we turned back toward the town and came through a
patch of cactus to the river, which was brawling along over big stones.
There was a narrow foot-bridge across. ‘After you,’ says the Don. I
looked him in the eye, and thought I saw the twinkle of mischief.
“I never wanted to do murder before or since. But there in the dusk,
beside that dirty river of mud and stones from the mountains, where he
meant to drown me, I came near wringing his neck. I guess my nerves
had got tired of expecting things to happen. I walked up to him, and I
must have looked fierce, for he whistled, and one or two men who were
skulking about joined us. I was so mad that a moment more and I should
have had my hands about his windpipe, no matter whether they cut me
into mince-meat the next minute. Do you know what it is to feel like
doing murder? It’s the drunkest kind of feeling you can have--you
don’t know yourself at all--”
“I should like to try that!” sighed Mrs. Bellflower.
At this point there seemed to come somewhere from the rooms above a
frightened cry.
“Mercy!” exclaimed the young woman, “what’s that?”
Mrs. Simmons sprang up, and stood listening. Then they could all hear
distinctly in a woman’s voice:
“Oh, oh! He has killed me! Oh, oh!” Then silence.
Before the last groans reached their ears Mrs. Simmons had darted into
the dark drawing-room, calling as she sped, “Oscar! my little Oscar!”
On the terrace they could hear again more faintly the “Oh, oh, oh!”
from above.
“And what _did_ happen to your old Don?” Mrs. Bellflower asked with a
show of unconcern.
“Why, nothing much. I--”
“Oh, Olaf! Come, Olaf!”
It was Mrs. Simmons’s voice this time. Simmons bounded from the
terrace, calling:
“Yes, Evelyn! Coming, Evelyn!”
The others jumped from their chairs.
“Come, Dr. Vessinger!” exclaimed the Magnificent Wreck. “I think it is
time you and I and Miss Flower were gone. Where are the horses?”
“Do you think we should leave quite yet?” the doctor asked, somewhat
cynically. “It seems to me the story has just begun.”
“Well, you may stay for the end. But I am going!”
[Illustration]
II
Simmons stumbled across the hall and up the dark staircase. The
coming storm had suddenly blackened all the house. The open doors of
the bedrooms sucked out the swaying air that came in puffs from the
windows. In the eastern room, above the terrace where they had been
sitting, Simmons found his wife, clasping their child in a hysterical
embrace.
“What have you done? My darling--my one--my Oscar!” A dry sob ended the
broken exclamations.
They were huddled in a heap upon the floor beside the window. The
child’s face had a look of intense wonder, of concentrated thought upon
some difficult idea which eluded his baby mind. Across the iron cot at
one side of the room was stretched the inert form of the nurse.
“Look at her, Olaf,” said Mrs. Simmons. “He has--cut her--stabbed her
with the knife.”
As Simmons approached the bed, he kicked something with his foot. It
fell upon the tiled fireplace with the tinkle of steel. The woman on
the bed groaned. Simmons turned on the electric light, and hastily
examined the nurse.
“She’s not badly hurt, Evelyn. A scratch along the neck. She fainted at
the sight of blood, I guess. But what was the knife?”
He picked up the thing from the fireplace and examined it. It was a
long, dull, sharp-pointed knife, brought from the kitchen to cut bread
with. Along the edge it was faintly daubed with blood. Simmons, still
holding it in his hands, stepped to the window. His wife was crouching
there, sobbing over the child, whom she held in her arms tightly.
Little Oscar’s eyes were fixed upon the thunder-clouds outside. He
neither saw nor heard what was passing in the room. The father leaned
over and touched his forehead with his hand. The child shrank away.
“You must take him out of here, Evelyn!” he said. “I will look after
her.”
“She must have been cutting the bread for his supper, and laid the
knife down on the table for a moment. I--I told her never to leave it
about. I have been afraid--of something!”
“You have been afraid?” her husband asked quickly. “Why so?”
The boy moved uneasily and turned his head to watch his father.
“What you got my knife for?” he demanded. “Give me my knife!”
“You shall never, never have it again!” his mother moaned, clasping him
more tightly.
“Why not?” he asked curiously. “What’s the matter with Dora? Why’s she
lying on my bed? Tell her to get up. I am tired. Oscar wants to go to
bed.”
His eyelids fell and rose, as though the long search for the mysterious
thing in his mind had put him into a doze.
“He does not seem to know what he has done. What is it? Olaf, what is
the matter with him?”
“Ssh, hush! Don’t rouse him. Get him to bed. _Don’t_ let him know. I’ll
look after Dora--she’s coming around now--and then I’ll call Vessinger,
if it is necessary.”
“No! no! not him,” she protested vehemently. “I don’t want him to see,
to know anything about it,--no one, but he least of all.”
Simmons looked mystified by her vehemence.
“It all seems dark around me!” she moaned.
“There,” he said soothingly. “Wrap him in that dressing-gown and take
him to your room. I must attend to this woman.”
In spite of his wife’s objections, however, he went downstairs to look
for the doctor. The room and the terrace were both empty; he could see
the party riding, like a group of scuttled birds, at a hard gallop down
the lane at the end of the lawn.
“They might have waited to find out!” he muttered. Great drops of rain
splashed on the bricks about him. They had fled from his house even in
the teeth of the storm. He returned hastily to the nurse, bathed the
wound in the neck, and gave her some liquor from his flask. When she
had gone to her room, he went downstairs once more, without crossing
the hall to his wife’s room. That took a kind of courage which he did
not have. Servants had lit the lamps in the long room and pulled the
shades. Outside the rain swept across the terrace and beat upon the
French windows. He waited, listening, irresolute, unwilling to take the
future in his hands.
Finally he detected a dragging step on the stairs. His wife came slowly
toward him, her erect young woman’s head crushed under a weight of fear.
“They have gone,” she sighed with relief.
“Yes, they cleared out in the face of the storm!”
“I am so glad!”
“Sit down, dear,” he urged, taking her cold hands.
She disengaged herself from him before he could kiss her, and sat down
beside the long table in a straight stiff chair. She clasped her hands
tightly and looked at her husband with a face of misery and horror.
“What is it, Olaf? Tell me what it is. Tell me!”
“Why, what do you mean by _it_?” he stammered.
“You know!” she exclaimed passionately. “Don’t let us hide it any
longer. What is the matter with little Oscar, with _our_ child?”
“What do you mean?” He was still looking for subterfuges.
“It wasn’t Dora. I knew he would do it some day, and I have tried
to keep things that he could do harm with from him. I dreaded this.
Something seized him,--something inside him,--and he snatched the knife
out of her hand. When I got there, he was looking at the knife. It
was--all bloody. Oh, Olaf! He was talking to himself. Then he dropped
the knife, and he didn’t seem to remember. He is sleeping now, just as
if it had never happened.”
“It’s just his fearful temper, Evelyn,” the man answered with an
effort. “Dora irritates him, and the thundery air and all. You must
pack up and get to the seashore or mountains, where it’s more bracing.
He’s just nervous like you and me, only more so, because he’s smaller.”
She shook her head wearily. What was the use of self-deception? Hadn’t
she watched this habit of rage for months? The child was a part of
her; and more than she knew her hand or her foot she knew him. Doctors
talked of nerves and diet. But she had seen the storms gather in the
child and watched them burst.
“No! That is no use, Olaf. I can’t tell myself those things any more
and be contented. It is worse!”
Simmons was walking up and down the room, hands thrust in his pockets,
his face knit over the problem.
“All the world like old Oscar,” he muttered, talking to himself.
His wife caught up the words greedily.
“Old Oscar Svenson, your step-father, the one who brought you up and
gave you your education? The one we named him after?”
The man nodded half guiltily.
“Yes, old Oscar,--the man who gave me everything,--the chance to live,
to win you--all.”
He resumed his tramp to and fro across the rug, scrupulously
refraining from stepping beyond the border. His wife still kept her
eyes fixed on him, as though resolved to win from him the secret of the
matter. Suddenly she rose and went to him, putting her arms about his
neck.
“Let me look at you! You have always been a good man, I know. You need
not tell me so. This cannot be some terrible revenge for your weakness
or wickedness. Have I not held you in my arms? I should have known, if
it had been you, for whom our boy suffers.”
He kissed her tenderly and led her to a couch; then knelt down beside
her.
“No, Evelyn--not that. But you must be calm or you will lose your
head. You take it too seriously. Oscar is a baby five years old. A
five-year-old baby!”
“And some day he will commit murder. My God, will you tell me to be
quiet and not think of that!”
A maid entered the room to announce dinner.
[Illustration]
III
Mrs. Simmons sat through the meal, white faced and silent. Her eyes
followed her husband’s nervous movements, but she did not seem to
be listening to his incessant talk. He was trying to talk away the
disagreeable thing between them, and apparently she had not the
strength to join him in the effort. She saw him across the table,
strangely apart from her,--not the lover and husband who had been
woven into her life. He was a large, tall man, with clear black eyes,
a resounding laugh, and vehement, expressive movements. Compared with
Dr. Vessinger he had almost a foreign intensity and emotionality about
him, which it occurred to her suddenly had become more prominent
during the years of their marriage, just as his chest had broadened,
his arms and hands had become thicker, his whole person had grown
mature.
She recalled him as he was when she had first seen him, in Colorado
Springs, eight years before, tall, large-boned, awkward. He had gained
from civilization. The power that she had felt then in the rough, she
had tested in the common manner of marriage and had never found it
wanting--until now!
Now, from this fear which beset her, this trouble growing from them
both in the person and soul of the child, she could feel no help in
him. He was turning away his gaze and chattering, believing only in
gross physical ills, such as sickness and sudden death, loss of money
and accident,--calamities which one might name to one’s neighbors,
discuss with one’s doctor, and bemoan quite aloud. But for this which
was unnamable, the fear of destiny, he had no courage: he refused to
see! She must grope her way to the understanding of the riddle; she
must begin, alone, the struggle with the future....
The maid poured Simmons a second glass of whiskey and water, and handed
him a box of cigars. He leaned back in his chair, stretching forward
his feet in physical comfort, emphasized by the roar of the summer
tempest, which had finally broken in full fury outside. Forked streaks
of light illumined the pallid curtains; furious bursts of rain hit
sharply the casement windows, as with the thongs of whips. Lull and
sullen quiet; then the fury of the tempest--thus it repeated itself.
Mrs. Simmons left the room, noiselessly crossing the hall and mounting
the stairs. By the time her husband finished his cigar she had
returned, with the same stealthy, restless step, the same questioning
eyes.
“He is lying so quietly, Olaf,” she said. “His arm is doubled under
his head, and his little fingers are open. His lips tremble with his
breath. He is my angel again! I cannot believe anything else. Why
should _my_ child be that demon?”
Her husband put his arm about her affectionately and led her into the
drawing-room.
“There! You are coming to look at it sensibly, Evelyn,” he said
encouragingly.
She drew away from his caress.
“No, no! I know what is there. I had rather see him dead in his bed
there to-night than to see that fire in his eyes grow and burn and kill
him!”
Suddenly she burst into tears.
“To fear it always. To think of it day and night. To know that it will
come back and seize him some hour when I am not there to help him! O
God, why did it come to me? What have I done?”
She wept miserably, but when he tried to comfort her she held herself
aloof. In their misery they were apart, God dealing with each one in
his sorrow separately.
“Come, Evelyn!” the husband broke out. “Enough of this! To-morrow we’ll
have in a doctor, the best you can find in the city. Maybe he’ll just
give him a dose of something and jog his liver.”
But his wife, who had been standing beside the window, her forehead
pressed against the cold pane, whirled about and faced him.
“Did you--ever think--that--you were old Oscar’s son?”
“What put that into your head? I told you all I knew--the story old
Oscar told me. The whole camp had it the same way.”
“That he found you in the frozen cabin of those Vermonters up among the
Rockies? Your father and mother had died from cold and hunger, and he
found you just in time?”
“Yes, that was it.”
He hesitated a moment; and then he added honestly:
“It must have been so; but I have never found a man who knew anything
about the cabin, or those Vermonters. Well, it made no difference--so
long as you took me.”
“No, it made no matter to me. I said so then when you asked me to marry
you.” She waited a moment before adding, “And I say so now. _Nothing_
can make it any different!”
“Bless you for that!”
But she quickly parted from his kiss.
“Tell me about old Oscar. He was rough and bad at times, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, rough,--not bad--a fierce customer, a regular Berserker, when he
was taken that way,--when he was drunk or in a bad humor. But I don’t
want to think of that--he was so good to me, brought me up, gave me my
education, taught me my profession himself, and put me in the way of
having a happy life. It isn’t right to remember his bad side.”
“What do you mean? You never told me he was bad. I thought you meant he
was rough and uneducated--that he made his way without a cent from the
time he landed in New York. What else do you mean? Was he a bad man?
Was he wicked?”
The man walked to and fro, disturbed and puzzled. He had stumbled on
the worst idea in the world for his wife to feed her imagination upon,
and yet he knew that she was aroused--he could not put her off with
excuses. He had never told her of his old barbarian benefactor’s darker
side, partly because he did not like to mention rude vices to her and
partly because it seemed disloyal to his kindest friend. And he was not
skilful in handling the truth. What he had to say, he was forced to
blurt out plainly.
“Why, it wasn’t drawing-room life in a Colorado camp in those days,
anyway, and the older crowd were a pretty rough lot, all of them.
Oscar Svenson was better than most, generally. But he would have his
times of being drunk and disorderly, and he was such a big fellow and
so strong that when he got violent the camp generally knew it. I can
remember once when I was a little fellow sitting in the corner of the
saloon when he had one of his fits. He was a giant, a head taller than
I am, with a great mane of hair all over his head, growing down the
nape of his neck in a thick mat under his shirt.”
Mrs. Simmons started, and twisted her hands nervously. But she
controlled herself.
“Go on!”
“When he was drunk, he didn’t shoot--that wasn’t his way. He would use
his knife, or take up a man in his arms and crush him like a bear with
his two hands. That day--but, pshaw! It’s all nonsense, my sitting here
and telling you fool stories to make you creepy. The rain has stopped.
I’ll tell Tom to harness up, and we’ll drive over to the Country Club
to see if they’ve got the election returns yet. Come, dear! Try to be
strong and patient.”
“No! I shall not go out to-night one single step. I can’t get that cry
out of my head, and I should hear it worse if I were away from the
house. Tell me about that terrible old man. Did he kill a man before
your eyes?”
“I hate to have you think of him so. He gave me everything, even _you_.”
She smiled forlornly.
“He was different in nature from us tame folk in the States. He came
from a people that drink deep and have fiery passions,--big-boned,
strong-hearted people, as gentle as women and as savage as bulls. I’ve
seen him--”
“What makes you stop so short, when you are just ready to tell
something? I want to hear the worst thing you remember.”
He stammered and hunted for an excuse.
“Come, come. It’s all rot. They tell stories about men. Such a fellow
as old Oscar Svenson you must make allowances for, take the good
with the bad. There were plenty of better men than he at his worst,
but few as good as he at his best. You can’t line such men up with
meeting-house folk. I’ll tell you how he saved the Irish family off
Keepsake trail, all alone. But it is stifling here. Come out to the
terrace, now the rain has stopped.”
There they sat together on a bench in the corner of the terrace, while
he told the story of old Oscar’s magnificent courage and will. The
big Norwegian had ploughed his way ten miles up the mountains in a
blinding snowstorm to carry food to a woman and some children. The
woman’s husband was too cowardly to leave the camp. And when old Oscar
had reached the cabin, finding one child sick, he had gone back to the
camp for medicine.
As Simmons told the story, the stars came out in the soft summer
heavens; the damp odor of cut grass filled the air. The parched
earth, having drunk, breathed forth. But the woman’s tense gaze never
softened. When he had finished, she said:
“Now you must tell me the worst thing he ever did. I will know it!”
“They say he threw a man over a precipice once, and nearly broke his
back. The fellow had been stealing water, when there wasn’t enough to
go around, and he had had his share. He lied about it, too. Old Oscar
just chucked him off the trail like a rat. He would call that justice.
I don’t know. That was before I knew him.”
She shivered, and held her husband’s hand more tightly.
“Go on!”
“There were other stories of the same thing; well, we’d call it murder
now, maybe!”
And she forced him to tell much--the dark deeds of this old Berserker
in his mad rages,--swift, brutal love, murder--all that the furies
of blood drive a man to do. Bit by bit, she had them all,--stories
whispered here and there on the slopes of mountains, in far-off
mining camps and towns, where the Norseman had spent his life; things
remembered out of that rough childhood for which she had pitied her
husband, for which she had loved him the more, with a woman’s desire
to make the bitter sweet. As the soft summer night got on, she heard
the story of that killing, the sole one which he had seen with his own
eyes. He had locked it tight within his breast all the years since: the
quarrel with a friend about some insignificant trifle, the burst of
anger, the sudden blow, and then, while the boy tried to part the men,
a strange look of wonder on the fierce face from which the red passion
was paling. And the next morning forgetfulness of it all!
“But it troubled him always like a bad dream--he could never remember
exactly what he had done. He never thought _I_ knew.”
She rose from the bench and walked away from him to the end of the
terrace.
“And, my Evelyn,” he pleaded, “you loved me first because _he_ had
been all I had had. You asked nothing of me--you gave me all your love
gladly.”
He had an uneasy feeling that something strange and impalpable was
pushing its way between them.
“Yes,” she murmured. “It was--a long time ago.”
“Seven years. Is that a long time?”
“Yes. I was a girl then. It is always a long time to when one was a
girl.”
“It doesn’t seem to me a long time!”
“Well, it’s a great while since, since _this_ came up--like a
mountain. The past is on the other side.”
“I don’t know what you mean. No kind of trouble should divide man and
wife!”
For a few moments there was silence; then she cried, in the accent of
reproach, of accusation:
“Can’t you see? You were _his_ child!”
“Old Oscar’s?... Sometimes I have thought it might be so. I am dark
like him. But we can never know it now.”
“_I_ know it! The devil in that bad old man has slept in you and is
waking in little Oscar,--my child, _my_ child! That is what you have
brought me for my love. I took you because I loved you, because I was
mad to have you. I wanted you just for myself, just to give me joy.
Now! Now!... I can sit and watch the child who is me fight with that
devil. Oh! there is nothing but pain!”
[Illustration]
IV
Moods of the night pass with their tragic glooms, and the first lines
of sorrow fade into dull distaste and distant apprehension. Husband and
wife met day by day, and slowly the black cloud between them became
imperceptibly mist: the man dared raise his eyes to that pitiable
face, and the silent wife began to speak. Doctors had come and applied
their poultices against panic,--the vast circle of probabilities, the
excellences of regimen.
Then the engineer, in the fulfilment of his business engagements, had
gone away for six weeks, which the mother and child had spent at the
seacoast for a change of air. Early in September they were living once
more in the pleasant country house outside the great city, and husband
and wife were talking almost confidently of what they should do in this
matter and that, speaking with more and more certainty as the days
slipped past. Something grave in the woman’s voice, a touch of doubt in
the glance between them--those signs alone remained, and the memory.
Another trip to the mines was to be made; the date of departure Simmons
put off, in order that he might take his wife to the large dance at
the Bellflowers’. On this day he returned from the city by an early
afternoon train. When the coachman drew up before the house, no one
could be seen about the place. Simmons called out heartily:
“I say, where are you? Is any one about? Evelyn!”
Windows and doors were open; the summer wind blew through the house.
There was a vacancy about it all which impressed the man.
“There was somethin’ or other goin’ on when I hitched up,” the coachman
ventured to remark. “There were a lot of hollerin’ and screamin’, sir;
somethin’ up with the children.”
He had the air of being able to tell more if necessary. Mr. Simmons
jumped to the ground and entered the house. A servant, who finally
appeared in answer to his repeated calls, told him that she had seen
Mrs. Simmons crossing the meadow below the lawn, in the direction of
the little river at the bottom of the grounds. She had little Oscar
with her, so said the maid, and she seemed to be hurrying.
He hastened to the little boat-house on the river. Hot summer
afternoons it was a common thing for his wife to row upon the river,
yet every moment he quickened his steps until he was on the run. From
the meadow wall he could see his boat tied to a stake in the stream,
riding tranquilly. Evelyn was not on the river. He followed the
foot-path, hesitatingly, beside the sluggish stream, calling in a
voice which he tried to make quite natural:
“Evelyn! Oscar! Evelyn--where are you?”
There was a yard or two of sandy beach beside the boat-house, and there
he found them. His wife was kneeling down on the sand, her face to the
river, engaged in hurriedly undressing the child. She had him almost
stripped of his clothes, and she was talking to him, while he listened
with the attention, the thoughtfulness, of a man. Suddenly spying his
father, he laughed and broke from his mother’s arms.
“There’s Dad!” he cried. “Are you going away, too, with mamma and me?
She’s going to take me far out into the river, away and away, and we
are never coming back any more, never going to play any more up there
on the lawn!”
His voice rose in the childish treble of wonder, and he added, after a
moment:
[Illustration: “HIS WIFE WAS ... HURRIEDLY UNDRESSING THE CHILD.”]
“Now you come, too, Dad.”
“Evelyn! What does this mean?”
She had risen hastily when little Oscar called out to his father. Her
eyes were red with tears, and her hands shook with nervousness.
“I thought it would be all done, all over, before you came,” she
murmured. “But he would not come with me unless I took off his clothes.
I tried to take him in my arms, but he broke away.”
The man shuddered as he gradually comprehended what it meant. Little
Oscar ran back to his mother and put his face close to hers.
“Mamma is sick,” he said gently. “You must take her home and put her to
bed and have Dora sing to her.”
His lithe little body danced up and down. The hot wind waved his black
curls around his neck. His mother pushed him away.
“Take him,” she groaned. “It kills me to look at him.”
Simmons gathered up the child’s clothes and began to put them on the
dancing figure.
“What has crazed you?” he demanded roughly of his wife.
“I will tell you--when he is gone,” she answered wearily, leaning her
head against the shingled wall of the boat-house.
Little Oscar ran to and fro in his drawers, wet the tips of his feet,
and threw sand into the water, while his father was trying to dress
him. Finally the mother took the child, put on his shirt, and told him
to run home. He dashed into the thicket of alders beside the river with
a shout. Soon they heard his voice in the meadow, ringing with the joy
of living, the animal utterance of life.
“It was this afternoon,” the mother explained. “The Porters’ children
and the Boyces’ boy were playing on the terrace. Dora was away. I was
reading in my bedroom--I had told Dora I would look after the children.
I must have dropped asleep with the heat--perhaps a minute, perhaps
longer. Suddenly, I _felt_ something fearful. I seemed to hear a
choking, a gurgling. When I jumped up, awake, everything was still,
quiet,--too quiet, I thought; and I ran to the window over the terrace.”
She covered her face with her hands to shut out the sight of it, and
the rest came brokenly through her smothered lips:
“Oscar was there--he and little Ned Boyce. Ned was lying--down on the
brick floor--and Oscar had his hands about his throat choking him. I
must have screamed. Oscar jumped up, and looked around. He said--he
said just like himself,--‘What is it, mamma?’”
She stopped again and swallowed her tears.
“When I got down there, Ned was white and still. I thought he was
dead. It was a long, long time before he got his breath, before he was
himself. If, if I hadn’t wakened just then--”
Above them in the mottled sunshine on the lawn they could see little
Oscar running, then stopping and listening, like some sprite escaped
from the river alders. The man watched him springing over the turf, his
little shirt fluttering in the breeze, and gradually his head sank.
Then he straightened himself, and taking his wife’s hand led her back
along the river path into the meadow.
“Ned Boyce is a bad-tempered little fellow: he irritated and
exasperated Oscar until with the heat and all that he clutched him. We
must think so at any rate. I’ll lick it out of him, if I catch him at
it!” He ended with this feeble, masculine threat, this desire to take
his exasperation out on somebody else--to be paid for his distress of
mind. “But it frightens me to think of your coming here and thinking of
doing such a thing!”
He turned his mood of reproach directly to her.
“If you had seen Ned lying there so white--it was whole minutes before
he opened his eyes,”--she protested; and then it seemed to come over
her in a wave that in her struggle with this evil she was alone,--her
husband did not really understand what it meant. To him it was trouble,
like difficulty with servants,--something which his buoyant nature
refused to take altogether seriously. For him there was always a way
out of a situation: to her there was no avenue out in this situation.
She took her hand from his arm and stepped forth steadily by herself.
She had done him wrong! In his slower, less vivid mind, the tragedy was
printing itself. He no longer could talk comfort. Something heavy and
hard settled down on his spirit: he saw himself and this tender woman
caught in a rocky bed of circumstance. In the gloom of his mind he
could see no light, and he groaned.
Thus, together they mounted the slope of the lawn to the pleasant
cottage, side by side and yet withdrawn from one another. As they
reached the terrace little Oscar darted out, like a fleet arrow, from
the big syringa where he had lain hidden. His voice rippled with joy:
“You’re so slow, you two! Do you see what I got? A piece of Mary’s
Sunday cake. And _that’s_ what’s left. I’ll give you that, mamma, if
you’ll be good.”
“Take him away!” his mother exclaimed fretfully. “I can’t look at him
yet. I have had enough for one day.”
She entered the house and locked herself in her room. Later, when her
husband knocked, she opened the door; she had been sitting before her
dressing-table, looking vacantly into the mirror.
“I don’t suppose you want to go over there to their party?” he ventured
timidly. “I’ll send Tom over with a note.”
“Why would I not go? Why should I stay at home? Is this the sort
of place a woman would want to stay in all the time, do you think?
Heavens! if anything could make me forget for one quarter of an
hour _this_ idea,--anything, I would go--and sin for it too! Do you
understand?”
The man’s face winced for the pain she had to bear. Again she burst
out, looking into the mirror, her hair fallen about her strong young
breast and shoulders:
“You brought this to me, you! Why didn’t something tell me of all that
was hidden away in you, all that some day would come out from you and
be mine? You did not let me know. Now I cannot get away from it! O my
God! Why do you make me live? What right have you to make me live and
endure?”
He did not resent her bitter reproaches. It was the instinctive recoil
of her young body from terrible suffering, the first twitch of the
flesh from the knife. There were no tears left in the eyes now;
nothing shone there but passion and resentment.
“Stay at home? It’s the night of all others I’d go somewhere--get
something. No! I won’t give in. I’ll get away from it, forget it, and
be happy again. I will--see me do it.... They dine at half-past eight.
Have the carriage at eight. I shall be ready.”
He walked to and fro in the dressing-room, wishing to say something
that could soften her mood. At last he put his hand gently on her
beautiful bare shoulders and lowered his face to hers.
“We must take this together, love,” he whispered simply.
“Don’t speak of it!” she cried, drawing herself from his touch. “Don’t
touch me. I shall go mad, mad! You will have two instead of one, then.”
[Illustration]
V
“Your husband seems to be having a good time,” Dr. Vessinger observed,
twirling his champagne glass between his strong bony fingers. “Does he
often enjoy--these good spirits--this--enthusiasm?”
Below them in the main portion of the large dining-room of Mrs.
Bellflower’s house, the guests were supping at small tables. Dr.
Vessinger had captured one of the few tables in the breakfast room at
one side. Simmons was seated next to Mrs. Bellflower. His good-natured,
bearded face was thrown back, and his eyes shone with champagne. His
wife looked at him with surprise; she had not noticed him before. He
was talking a great deal, and repeating what he said to right and left,
in a loud voice, with much laughter. She could not hear what he was
saying, but she divined that it was silly.
“No! I never saw him so--excited, before,” she answered her companion.
“He doesn’t usually drink champagne.”
“He seems to like it rather well,” the doctor replied, watching him
drain a fresh glass. “It’s a good thing to have such good spirits,
isn’t it?” He turned his eyes to hers, and raised his glass. “To your
beautiful self, Evelyn!”
She could feel the warmth of her blood as it rushed over her face and
neck, at his deliberate words.
“Why do you call me that?” she asked brusquely.
“You may remember that I called you that once before,” he replied,
unperturbed; “and then you had no objection to my familiarity.”
They were both silent, while in their minds rose that “once before”:
the roses blooming in the Sicilian garden, husbanded by bees; the young
American doctor sent south to recover from a sickness; the romance of
their hearts beating in unison with the romance of the place.
Gradually her eyes fell from the doctor’s face. For, later, she had
forgotten him, measured him by another and found him less than she
desired. She had sent him away, the young American doctor of the
Sicilian garden, and had never thought to ask herself before, whether
she could regret it. Now she raised her eyes to his face and wondered
whether she were regretting it.
He was handsome and mundane. In those eight years he had pushed himself
from obscurity to a point of worldly ease. Perhaps she had done that
for him by sending him away! To her, now, though married, he was more
interesting than ever before. What she had done to him then he had
surmounted; and now, somehow, it seemed the gods had put the cards
into his hands.
Suddenly, while she was wondering, he leaned nearer to her and said: