"Because I wanted to say _that_. I was afraid, if any one else did it,
they'd leave it out."
He gazed at her long with a dull, unintelligent, unseeing expression.
When he spoke he was like a man who tries to get his wits together after
delirium or unconsciousness. "Do you think I am--strong enough?"
"I _know_ you are."
He lumbered to his feet, staggering heavily to the chimney-piece, where
he, too, laid his hands upon the mantel-board, which was just on a level
with his height, bowing his forehead upon them. As he did so she moved
away. Seeing his broad shoulders heave, and fearing she heard something
smothered--was it a groan or a sob?--she slipped out of the room,
closing the door behind her.
But when, some twenty minutes later, he himself came forth, his head
bent, perhaps to hide his red eyes and his convulsed visage, he found
her at the door of the dining-room, with a cup of tea in her hand.
"Drink this," she said, with gentle command.
He declined it with a shake of his head and an impatient wave of the
hand.
"Yes, do," she insisted. "It's nice and hot. I'll have one, too."
Obediently he went into the dining-room. He drank the tea standing and
in silence, in two or three gulps, while she, standing likewise, made a
feint of pouring a cup for herself. He left without a good-night, beyond
a hard, speechless wringing of her hand on his way to the door.
Two things seemed strange to Chip after that evening--the one, that the
fight with Old Piper was ended; and the other, that in the matter of
Edith's marriage, once the immediate shock had spent its strength, he
bowed to the accomplished fact with a docility he himself could not
understand. As for the fight with Old Piper, there was no longer a
reason for waging it. In the new situation Old Piper had lost its
appeal, from sheer inadequacy to meet the new need. The fact of the
marriage he contrived to keep at a distance. He could do this the more
easily because it was so monstrous. It was so monstrous that the mind
refused to take it in, and he made no attempt to force himself. He asked
neither whom she had married nor why she had married, nor anything else
about her. It was a measure of safety. As long as he didn't know he was
able to create a pretended fool's paradise of ignorance which, in his
state of mind, was none the less a fool's paradise for being a pretense.
Even a fool's paradise was a protection. If it hadn't been for the
children, he might not have heard so much as the man's name.
The children called him "papa Lacon." Chip was obliged to swallow that.
They spoke of him simply and spontaneously, taking "papa Lacon" as a
matter of course. They varied the appellation now and then by calling
him "our other papa."
It had been intimated to him, not long after the second marriage, that
he might see the children with reasonable frequency, through the good
offices of Mr. and Mrs. Bland. He soon saw that the arrangements were
really in charge of Lily Bland, who brought the children to her house,
and took them home again. Chip saw them in the library.
The first meeting was embarrassing. Tom was nearly eight, and Chippie on
the way to six. They entered the library together, dressed alike in
blouses and knickerbockers, their caps in their hands. They approached
slowly to where he had taken up a position he tried to make nonchalant,
standing on the hearth-rug with his hands behind him. He felt curiously
culpable before them, like a convict being visited by his friends in
jail. He felt childish, too, as though they were older than, and
superior to, himself. The childishness was shown in his standing on his
guard, determined not to be the first to make the advances. He wouldn't
be even the first to speak.
They came forward slowly, with an air judicial and detached. Tom's eyes
observed him more closely than his brother's, who looked about the room.
Tom, as the elder, seemed to feel the responsibility of the meeting to
be on his shoulders. He came to a halt, on reaching the end of the
library table, Chippie by his side.
"Hello, papa."
"Hello, Tom."
Encouraged by this exchange of greetings, Chippie also spoke up. "Hello,
papa."
"Hello, Chippie."
There followed a few seconds during which the interview threatened to
hang fire there, when the protest in Chip's hot heart--which was
essentially paternal--broke out almost angrily:
"Aren't you going to kiss me?"
It was Tom who pointed out the unreasonableness of emotion in making
this demand. His brows went up in an expression of surprise, which
hinted at protest on his own part. "Well, you're not sitting down."
Of course! It was obviously impossible for two little mites to kiss a
man of that height at that distance. Chip dropped into an arm-chair,
waiting jealously for the two dutiful little pecks that might pass as
spontaneous, and then throwing his big arms about his young ones in a
desperate embrace. After that the ice was broken, and, with the aid of
the games and the picture-books provided by Lily Bland, the meeting
could go forward to a glorious termination in ice-cream. Now and then
there were difficult questions or observations, but they were never
pressed unduly for reply.
"Papa, why don't you live with us any more?"
"Papa, shall we have another papa after this one?"
"Papa, our other papa has a funny nose."
"Papa, are you our real papa, or is papa Lacon?"
In general it was Chippie who put these questions or made the remarks.
Tom seemed to understand already that the situation was delicate, and
had moments of puzzled gravity.
But, taking one thing with another, the occasion passed off well, as did
similar meetings through the rest of that winter and whenever they were
possible--which was not often--in the summer that followed. It was a joy
to Chip when they began again in the autumn, with a promise of
regularity. But that joy, too, was short-lived.
It was his second time of seeing them after the general return to town.
Tom was hanging on his shoulder, while Chippie was seated on his knee.
Chippie was again the spokesman.
"We've got a baby sister at our house."
It seemed to Chip as if all the blood in his body rushed back to his
heart and stayed there. He felt dizzy, sick. The walls of his fool's
paradise were dissolved as mist, revealing a picture he had seen twice
already, each time with an upleaping of the primal and the fatherly in
him; but now ... Edith had been lying in bed, wan, bright-eyed, happy,
with a little fuzzy head just peeping at her breast!
He put the boy from off his knee. Tom seemed to divine something and
stole away. For a second or two both lads watched him--Chippie looking
up straight into his face, Tom gazing from the distant line of the
bookcase, with his habitual expression of troubled perplexity. Chip
managed to speak at last, getting out the words in a fairly natural
tone.
"Look here, boys; I can't stay to-day. I've got a--I've got a pain. Just
play by yourselves till Miss Bland comes for you. Be good boys, now, and
don't touch any of Mr. Bland's things."
He was hurrying to the door when Chippie interrupted him. "Where have
you got a pain, papa?"
He tapped himself on the heart. "Here, Chippie, here; and I hope you may
never have anything so awful."
As he went down the steps he found himself saying: "Will this
crucifixion never end? Have I deserved it? Was the crime so terrible
that I must be tortured by degrees like this?"
He was unable to answer his questions, or even to think. His mind seemed
to go blank till as he tramped down the street he came again to the
consciousness that he was speaking inwardly.
"Damn her! Damn her! She's nothing to me any more."
He was shocked, but he repeated the imprecation. He repeated it because
it shocked him. It struck at what he held to be most sacred. It profaned
his holy of holies, and left it bare to sacrilege. It gave him a fierce,
perverted joy to feel that she whom he would have loved to shield with
everything that was most tender was now exposed to his cursing. It was
rifling his own sanctuary and trampling its treasures in the streets.
He had never had a sanctuary but in her. Other people's temples were to
him not so much objects of contempt as of dim, vague astonishment. Such
words as righteousness and sacrament and Saviour had no place in his
speech. Edith had been the holiest thing he knew. She was both shrine
and goddess. Now that the shrine had been proven empty, and the goddess
irrevocably flown, he got an impious satisfaction from battering down
the altars and blaspheming the deity to whom they had been raised.
"Damn her! Damn her!"
He repeated the curse at intervals till he reached his rooms, the
hateful rooms that he rarely visited at this hour of the day. He was
not, however, thinking of their hatefulness now, as he had come with an
intention.
There was a fire laid in the fireplace, and he lighted it. When it was
crackling sufficiently he drew Edith's photograph from its frame and,
after gazing at it long and bitterly, tossed it into the blaze. He
watched it blister and writhe as though it had been a living thing. The
flame seized on it slowly and unwillingly, biting at the edges in a
curling wreath of blue, and eating its way inward only by degrees. But
it ate its way. It ate its way till the whole lovely person
disappeared--first the hands, and then the bosom, and then the throat
and the features. The sweet eyes still gazed up at him when everything
else was gone.
He had hoped to get relief by this bit of ritual, but none came. When
that which had been the semblance of his wife was no more than a little
swollen rectangle of black ash, and the fire itself was dying down, he
threw himself into a chair.
The reaction was not long in setting in. It set in with a voice that
might have come from without, but which he nevertheless recognized as
his own:
"You fool! Oh, you fool! What difference does this make to your love for
her? You know you love her, and that you will never cease loving her,
and that what you envy her is--the child."
What you envy her is--the child! He pondered on this. It was like an
accusation. The admission of it--when admission came--was the point of
departure in his heart of a new conscious yearning.