feeding a dilapidated feather-molting bird, who was in a most
scandalous temper. Rajah scattered the seeds about, spurned the
banana-tip, tilted the water-cup and swashbuckled generally. By and
by, above the clack-clack of wheels and rails, came a crooning song.
The baggage-man looked up from his way-book and lowered his pipe. He
saw the little green bird pause and begin to keep time with its head.
It was the Urdu lullaby James used to sing. It never failed to quiet
the little parrot. Warrington went back to his Pullman, where the
porter greeted him with the information that the next stop would be
his. Ten minutes later he stepped from the train, a small kit-bag in
one hand and the parrot-cage in the other.
He had come prepared for mistake on the part of the natives. The
single smart cabman lifted his hat, jumped down from the box, and
opened the door. Warrington entered without speaking. The door
closed, and the coupé rolled away briskly. He was perfectly sure of
his destination. The cabman had mistaken him for Arthur. It would be
better so. There would be no after complications when he departed on
the morrow. As the coupé took a turn, he looked out of the window.
They were entering a driveway, lined on each side of which were
chestnuts. Indeed, the house was set in the center of a grove of these
splendid trees. The coupé stopped.
"Wait," said Warrington, alighting.
"Yes, sir."
Warrington went up the broad veranda steps and pulled the old-fashioned
bell-cord. He was rather amazed at his utter lack of agitation. He
was as calm as if he were making a call upon a casual acquaintance.
His mother and brother, whom he had not seen in ten years! The great
oak-door drew in, and he entered unceremoniously.
"Why, Marse A'thuh, I di'n't see yo' go out!" exclaimed the old negro
servant.
"I am not Arthur; I am his brother Paul. Which door?"
Pop-eyed, the old negro pointed to a door down the hall. Then he
leaned against the banister and caught desperately at the spindles.
For the voice was not Arthur's.
Warrington opened the door, closed it gently and stood with his back to
it. At a desk in the middle of the room sat a man, busy with books.
He raised his head.
"Arthur, don't you know me?"
"Paul?"
The chair overturned; some books thudded dully upon the rug. Arthur
leaned with his hands tense upon the desk. Paul sustained the look,
his eyes sad and his face pale and grave.
XXI
HE THAT WAS DEAD
"Yes, it is I, the unlucky penny; Old Galahad, in flesh and blood and
bone. I shouldn't get white over it, Arthur. It isn't worth while. I
can see that you haven't changed much, unless it is that your hair is a
little paler at the temples. Gray? I'll wager I've a few myself."
There was a flippancy in his tone that astonished Warrington's own
ears, for certainly this light mockery did not come from within. At
heart he was sober enough.
To steady the thundering beat of his pulse he crossed the room, righted
the chair, stacked the books and laid them on the desk. Arthur did not
move save to turn his head and to follow with fascinated gaze his
brother's movements.
"Now, Arthur, I've only a little while. I can see by your eyes that
you are conjuring up all sorts of terrible things. But nothing is
going to happen. I am going to talk to you; then I'm going away; and
to-morrow it will be easy to convince yourself that you have seen only
a ghost. Sit down. I'll take this chair at the left."
Arthur's hands slid from the desk; in a kind of collapse he sat down.
Suddenly he laid his head upon his arms, and a great sigh sent its
tremor across his shoulders. Warrington felt his heart swell. The
past faded away; his wrongs became vapors. He saw only his brother,
the boy he had loved so devotedly, Arty, his other self, his scholarly
other self. Why blame Arthur? He, Paul, was the fool.
"Don't take it like that, Arty," he said.
The other's hand stretched out blindly toward the voice. "Ah, great
God, Paul!"
"I know! Perhaps I've brooded too much." Warrington crushed the hand
in his two strong ones. "The main fault was mine. I couldn't see the
length of my nose. I threw a temptation in your way which none but a
demi-god could have resisted. That night, when I got your note telling
me what you had done, I did a damnably foolish thing. I went to the
club-bar and drank heavily. I was wild to help you, but I couldn't see
how. At two in the morning I thought I saw the way. Drunken men get
strange ideas into their heads. You were the apple of the mother's
eyes; I was only her son. No use denying it. She worshiped you;
tolerated me. I came back to the house, packed up what I absolutely
needed, and took the first train west. It all depended upon what you'd
do. You let me go, Arty, old boy. I suppose you were pretty well
knocked up, when you learned what I had done. And then you let things
drift. It was only natural. I had opened the way for you. Mother,
learning that I was a thief, restored the defalcation to save the
family honor, which was your future. We were always more or less
hard-pressed for funds. I did not gamble, but I wasted a lot. The
mother gave us an allowance of five thousand each. To this I managed
to add another five and you another four. You were always borrowing
from me. I never questioned what you did with it. I would to God I
had! It would have saved us a lot of trouble."
The hand in his relaxed and slipped from the clasp.
"Some of these things will sound bitter, but the heart behind them
isn't. So I did what I thought to be a great and glorious thing. I
was sober when I reached Chicago. I saw my deed from another angle.
Think of it; we could have given our joint note to mother's bank for
the amount. Old Henderson would have discounted it in a second. It
was too late. I went on. The few hundreds I had gave out. I've been
up against it pretty hard. There were times when I envied the
pariah-dog. But fortune came around one day, knocked, and I let her
in. I returned to make a restitution, only to learn that it had been
made by you, long ago. A trick of young Elmore's. I shouldn't have
come back if I could have sent the money."
Arthur raised his head and sat up. "Ah, why did you not write? Why
did you not let me know where you were? God is my witness, if there is
a corner of this world unsearched for you. For two years I had a man
hunting. He gave up. I believed you dead."
"Dead? Well, I was in a sense."
"You have suffered, but not as I have. Always you had before you your
great, splendid, foolish sacrifice. I had nothing to buoy me up; there
was only the drag of the recollection of an evil deed, and a moment of
pitiful weakness. The temptation was too great, Paul."
"How did it happen?"
"How does anything like that happen? Curiosity drew me first, for at
college I never played but a few games of bridge. Curiosity, desire,
then the full blaze of the passion. You will never know what that is,
Paul. It is stronger than love, or faith, or honor. God knows I never
thought myself weak; at school I was the least impetuous of the two.
Everything went, and they cheated me from the start. Roulette and
faro. Then I put my hand in the safe. To this day I can not tell why.
I owed nothing to those despicable thieves, Craig least of all."
"Craig. I met him over there. Pummeled him."
"I didn't act like a man. Some day a comfortable fortune would fall to
the lot of each of us. But I took eight thousand, lost it, and came
whining to you. You don't belong to this petty age, Paul. You ought
to have been a fellow of the Round Table." Arthur smiled wanly. "To
throw your life away like that, for a brother who wasn't fit to lace
your shoes! If you had written you would have learned that everything
was smoothed over. The Andes people dropped the matter entirely. You
loved the mother far better than I."
"And she must never know," quietly.
"Do you mean that?"
"I always mean everything I say, Arty. Can't you see the uselessness
of telling her now? She has gone all these years with the belief that
I am a thief. A thief, Arty, I, who never stole anything save a
farmer's apples. They would have called you a defaulter; that's
because you had access to the safe, whereas I had none." Arthur
winced. "I don't propose to disillusion the mother. I am strong
enough to go away without seeing her; and God knows how my heart
yearns, and my ears and eyes and arms."
Warrington reached mechanically for the portrait in the silver frame,
but Arthur stayed his hand.
"No, Paul; that is mine."
Warrington dropped his hand, puzzled. "I was not going to destroy it,"
ironically.
"No; but in a sense you have destroyed me. Compensation. What
trifling thought most of us give that word! The law of compensation.
For ten years Elsa has been the flower o' the corn for me. She almost
loved me. And one day she sees you; and in that one day all that I had
gained was lost, and all that you had lost was gained. The law of
compensation. Sometimes we escape retribution, but never the law of
compensation. Some months ago she wrote me a letter. She was always
direct. It was a just letter."
A pause. Arthur gazed steadily at the portrait, while Warrington
twisted his yellow beard.
"The ways of mothers are mysterious," said the latter, finally. He
wondered if Arthur would confess to the blacker deed, or have it forced
from him. He would wait and see. "The father and the mother weren't
happy. Money. There's the wedge. It's in every life somewhere. A
marriage of convenience is an unwise thing. When we were born the
mother turned to us. Up to the time we were six or seven there was no
distinction in her love for us. But on the day the father set his
choice upon me, she set hers upon you. You'll never know how I
suffered as a boy, when I saw the distance growing wider and wider with
the years. Perhaps the father understood, for he was always kind and
gentle to me. I expect to return to China shortly. The Andes has
taken me back. Sounds like a fairy-tale; eh? I shall never return
here. But did you know who Elsa Chetwood was?"
"Not until that letter came."
Neither of them heard the faint gasp which came from behind the
portières dividing the study and the living-room. The gasp had
followed the invisible knife-thrusts of these confidences. The woman
behind those portières swayed and caught blindly at the jamb. With
cruel vividness she saw in this terrible moment all that to which she
had never given more than a passing thought. No reproaches; only a
simple declaration of what had burned in this boy's heart. And she had
almost forgotten this son. A species of paralysis laid hold of her,
leaving her for the time incapable of movement.
She heard the deep voice of this other son say:
"Lots of kinks in life. There is only one law that I shall lay down
for you, Arty. You must give up all idea of marrying Elsa Chetwood."
"It will be easy to obey that. Are you playing with me, Paul?"
"Playing?" echoed Warrington.
"Yes. Do you mean to sit there and tell me that you don't know why I
shall never marry her?"
"Arty, I don't understand what you're talking about."
Arthur read the truth in his brother's eyes. He smiled weakly, the
anger gone. "Same old blind duffer you always were. I wrote an answer
to her letter. In that letter I told her . . . the truth."
"You did that?"
"I am your brother, Paul. I couldn't be a cad as well as a thief.
Yes, I told her. I told her more, what you never knew. I let Craig
believe that I was you, Paul. I wore your clothes, your scarf-pins,
your hats. In that I was a black villain. God! What a hell I lived
in. . . . Ah, mother!" Arthur dropped his head upon his arms again.
"Paul, my son!"
It was Warrington's chair that toppled over. Framed in the portières
stood his mother, white-haired, pale but as beautiful as of old.
"I am sorry. I had hoped to get away without your knowing."
"Why?"
"Oh, because there wasn't any use of my coming at all. I'd passed out
of your life, and I should have stayed out. Don't worry. I've got
everything mapped out. There's a train at midnight."
Arthur stood up. "Mother, I am the guilty man. I was the thief. All
these years I've let you believe that Paul had taken the money. . . ."
"Yes, yes!" she interrupted, never taking her eyes off this other son.
"I heard everything behind these curtains. You were going away, Paul,
without seeing me?"
"What was the use of stirring up old matters? Of bringing confusion
into this house?" He did not look at her. He could not tell her that
he now knew what had drawn him hither, that all along he had deceived
himself.
"Paul, my son, I have been a wicked woman."
"Why, mother, you mustn't talk like that!"
"Wicked! My son, my silent, kindly, chivalric boy, will you forgive
your mother? Your unnatural mother?"
He caught her before her knees touched the floor; and, ah! how hungrily
her arms wound about him.
[Illustration: He That Was Dead.]
"What's the use of lying?" he cried brokenly. "My mother! I wanted to
hear your voice and feel your arms. You don't know how I have always
loved you. It was a long time, a very long time. Perhaps I was to be
blamed. I was proud, and kept away from you. Don't cry. There,
there! I can go away now, happy." Over his mother's shoulders, now
moving with silent stabbing sobs, he held out his hand to his brother.
Presently, above the two bowed heads, Warrington's own rose,
transfigured with happiness.
The hall-door opened and closed, but none of them regarded it.
By and by the mother stood away, but within arm's length. "How big and
strong you have grown, Paul."
"In heart, too, mother," added Arthur. "Old Galahad!"
"You must never leave us again, Paul. Promise."
"May I always come back?"
"Always!" And she took his hand and pressed it tightly against her
cheek. "Always! Ah, your poor blind mother!"
"Always to come back! . . . I am going to China in a little while, to
take up the work I have always loved, the building of bridges."
"And I am going, too!" It was Elsa, at her journey's end.
Jealous love is keen of eye. There was death in Arthur's heart, but he
smiled at her. After all, what was more logical than that she should
appear at this moment? Why sip the cup when it might be drained at
once, over with and done with?
"Elsa!" said the mother, holding Warrington's hand in closer grasp.
"Yes, mother. Ah, why did you not tell me all?"
Arthur walked to the long window that opened put upon the garden.
There, for a moment, he paused, then passed from the room.
"Go to him, mother," said Elsa, wisely and with pity.
The mother hesitated, pulled by the old and the new love, by the fear
that the new-found could be hers but a little while. Slowly she let
Paul's hand fall, and slower still she followed Arthur's footsteps.
"I wasn't quite brave enough," he said, when she found him. "They
love. And love me well, mother, for I am the broken man."
She pressed his head against her heart. "My boy!" But her glance was
leveled at the amber-tinted window through which she had come.
To Warrington, Elsa was a little thinner, and of color there was none;
but her eyes shone with all the splendor of the Oriental stars at which
he had so often gazed with mute inquiry.
"Galahad!" she said, and smiled. "Well, what have you to say?"
"I? In God's name, what can I say but that I love you?"
"Well, say it, and stop the ache in my heart! Say it, and make me
forget the weary eighteen thousand miles I have journeyed to find you!
Say it, and hold me close for I am tired! . . . Listen!" she
whispered, lifting her head from his shoulder.
From out the stillness of the summer night came a jarring note, the
eternal protest of Rajah.