Tom went back to his seat beside Hildred, where he watched Mrs.
Whitelaw as she poured the tea. It was the first time he had seen her
in indoor dress, all lace and soft lavender, her pearls twisted once
around her neck and descending to her waist, a great jewel on her
breast. It was the first time, too, that he had seen her hair, which
was fair and crinkly, like his own. Except for a slight portliness, she
was too young to seem like the mother of Lily and Tad, while she was
still less like his. That she should be his mother, this woman who had
never known anything but what love and money could enrich her with, was
too incongruous with everything else in life to call for so much as
denial.
And as for the hundredth time he was saying this to himself Whitelaw
spoke. He spoke without looking up from his papers except to take a sip
of tea from the cup on the table beside him. He spoke casually, too, as
if broaching something not of much importance.
"Now that we're all here I think that perhaps it's as good a time as
any to go over the matter we've talked about separately--and settle it."
There was no one in the room who didn't know what he meant. Tad smoked
listlessly; Lily set down her cup and lighted a cigarette; Mrs.
Whitelaw's jeweled fingers played among the tea-things, as if she must
find something for her hands to do or shriek aloud. Tom's heart seemed
turned to stone, to have no power of emotion. Hildred was the only one
who said anything.
"Hadn't I better go, Mr. Whitelaw? I haven't been up to my room yet."
"No, Hildred. I'd rather that you stayed, if you don't mind. It's the
reason we've asked you to come."
He looked at no one. His face was a little white, though he was master
of himself.
"This is the tenth of May. It's twenty-three years ago to-day since
we lost our little boy. I want to ask the family, now that we're all
together, what they think of the chances of our having found him again."
Though he knew it was an anniversary in the family, it was Tom's first
recollection of the date. In as far as it was his birthday, birthdays
had been meaningless to him, except as he remembered that they had come
and gone, and made him a year older.
"Personally," Whitelaw went on, "I've fought this off so long that I
can't do it any longer. It will be five years this summer since I first
saw him, at Dublin, New Hampshire, and was struck with his looks and
his name, as well as with the little I learned of his history."
"Why didn't you do something about it then," Tad put in, peevishly, "if
you were going to do anything at all?"
"You're quite right, Tad. It's what I should have done. I was dissuaded
by the rest of you. I must confess, too, that I was afraid to take it
up myself. We'd followed so many clues that led to nothing! But perhaps
it's just as well, as it's given me time to make all the investigation
that, it seems to me, has been possible."
Apart from the motion of Tad's and Lily's hands as they put their
cigarettes to their lips, everyone sat motionless and tense. Even Mrs.
Whitelaw tamed her feverish activity to a more feverish stillness.
Hildred put her hand lightly on Tom's sleeve to remind him that she was
there, but the power of feeling anything had gone out of him. While
Whitelaw told his facts he listened as if the case had nothing to do
with himself.
His agents, so the banker said, had probably unearthed every detail in
the story that was now to be known.
On August 5, 1895, Thomas Coburn had been married in The Bronx, to
Lucy Speight. Coburn was a carpenter who had fallen from a roof in the
following October, and had died a few days later of his injuries. Their
child, Grace Coburn, had been born in The Bronx on March 5, 1896, and
had died on April 21, 1897. After that all trace of the mother had been
lost, though a woman who killed herself by poisoning in the Female
House of Detention in the suburb of New Rotterdam, after having been
arrested for shop-lifting, on December 24, 1904, might be considered as
the same person. This woman had been known to such neighbors as could
remember her as Mrs. Lucy Coburn, though at the time of her arrest she
had claimed to be the widow of Theodore Whitelaw, after having married
Thomas Coburn as her first husband. The wardress who had talked to
her on taking her to a cell recalled that she had been incoherent and
contradictory in all her statements about herself, her husband, and her
child.
As a matter of fact, the early history of Lucy Speight had been traced.
She was the daughter of a laboring man at Chatham, in the neighborhood
of Albany. Her mental inheritance had been poor. Her father had been
the victim of drink, her mother had died insane. One of her sisters
had died insane, and a brother had been put at an early age in a home
for the feeble-minded. A brother and two sisters still lived either
at Chatham or at Pittsfield. He had in his hand photographs of all
the living members of the family, and copies of photographs of those
deceased, including two of Lucy Speight as she was as a young girl.