Isabelle had not succeeded in bringing Vickers home with her that first
time she had gone abroad. They had had a very pleasant month in the
Dolomites, and he had taken her to Paris to join the Woodyards, with whom
she returned. Whenever she had spoken to Vickers of coming home he had
smiled and made a little joke. Once he said, "Not yet,--I cannot go yet,
Belle," and she understood that it was "that beast of a woman," as she
called Mrs. Conry, who kept him. She wanted to say to him, "Well, Vick, if
you won't leave her, why don't you marry her then!" But gentle as her
brother was to her, she did not like to touch on that topic.
She had meant to go over the next spring, but the new house was under way
then. A year later a letter from Fosdick, who was returning from Russia by
the way of Venice, made her start for Europe at once.
... "Madam," Fosdick wrote, "having sucked our Vickers dry, has left him at
last, I am happy to say. Gone off with a fresh orange. Vick doesn't realize
his luck,--he's plain dazed. Before the other orange becomes dry, it is our
simple duty--yours and mine--to remove the stranded hero out of reach. I
think you can do it now.... I forgot to say that the Conry left with him a
pledge of her return in the shape of a lump of a girl, her daughter by
Conry. Vick seems idiotically tied to this little Conry.... Oh, it is a
shame, a shame!"
Isabelle cabled Fosdick to bring Vickers with him to Paris and started with
her mother. "No sermons, you know, mother," she warned Mrs. Price. "It's
something you and I don't understand."
When Vickers came to their hotel in Paris, it seemed to Isabelle that the
last two years had worked more damage than the previous six. There was a
dazed and submissive air about her brother that brought the tears to her
eyes. In the languid, colorless face before her, she could scarcely find a
trace of the pale, tense boy, who had roused her in the middle of the night
the day before he left St. Louis....
"Why don't you come to this hotel?" Mrs. Price had demanded.
Vickers had made an excuse, and when his mother had left the room, he said
to Isabelle, "You will have to explain to mother that I am not alone."
Isabelle gasped, and Vickers hastened to say, "You see Delia is with me."
"Dick wrote me that she left her child!"
"Yes.... I am really very fond of the poor little thing."
"The beast!" Isabelle muttered.
Vickers shuddered, and Isabelle resolved that no matter what happened she
would not allow herself to refer again to either mother or child. Later she
walked back with him to his rooms and saw the girl. Delia Conry was a
heavily built and homely girl of thirteen, with light gray eyes. All but
the eyes were like her father, the builder. There was no hint of the
mother's soft, seductive physique.
"Delia," Vickers said gently, "come and speak to my sister, Mrs. Lane."
As the child awkwardly held out a hand, Isabelle felt the tears come into
her eyes. Here was her old Vickers,--the gentle, idealistic soul she had
loved, the only being it seemed to her then that she had ever really loved.
"Delia and I have been tramping the Louvre," Vickers remarked. "That's the
way we are learning history."
Isabelle glanced about the forlorn little sitting-room of the third-class
hotel.
"Why did you come here?"
"It does well enough, and it's near the Louvre and places.... It is very
reasonable."
Then Isabelle remembered what Fosdick had said about Vickers's gift of half
his fortune to Mrs. Conry. "You see the idiot hadn't sense enough to run
off with a man who had money. Some damn fool, artist! That's why you must
pack Vick away as soon as you can get him to go."
With this in her mind she exclaimed impulsively:--
"You are coming back with us, Vick!"
"To live in America?" he queried with bitter humor. "So you came out as a
rescue party!"
"You must get back into life," Isabelle urged vaguely.
"What life? You don't mean the hardware business?"
"Don't be silly! ... You can't go on living over here alone by yourself
with that child."
"Why not?"
"Oh, because--you must _do_ something, Vick! I want you to be famous."
"That doesn't seem quite possible, now," he replied gently.
"You'll come and live with me--oh, I need you, Vick!"
She threw her arms about him and hugged him tightly to her as she had as a
girl. The intensity of her feeling moved him strangely, and her words also.
What was it she meant by "needing him"?
"You must--that's the thing!"
Holding her head away she searched his face critically, and her heart was
wrung again by the sense of waste in it all. "Poor brother," she murmured,
tightening her clasp.
"I'm not going over as a helpless dependent!" he protested, and suddenly
without warning he shot out his question,--"And what have _you_ made out of
it? How have the years been?"
"Oh, we jog on, John and I,--just the usual thing, you know,--no heights
and no depths!"
An expression of futility came momentarily into her eyes. It wasn't what
she had pictured to herself, her marriage and life. Somehow she had never
quite caught hold of life. But that was a common fate. Why, after all,
should she commiserate her brother, take the 'poor Vick' tone that
everybody did about him? Had she attained to a much more satisfactory level
than he, or had the others who 'poor Vickered' him? There was something in
both their natures, perhaps, at jar with life, incapable of effectiveness.
Vickers finally consented to return to America with his mother and sister
"for a visit." Delia, he said, ought to see her father, who was a broken
man, living in some small place in the West. (Isabelle suspected that
Vickers had sent him also money.) Conry had written him lately, asking for
news of his daughter.
"Does Vick intend to tote that lump of a girl around with him for the next
twenty years?" Mrs. Price demanded of Isabelle, when she heard that Delia
was to be of their party.
"I suppose so, unless she totes herself off!"
"The woman dumped her child on him! Well, well, the Colonel had something
of the fool in him where women were concerned,--only I looked after that!"
"Mother," Isabelle retorted mischievously, "I am afraid you'll never be
able to keep down the fool in us; Vick is pretty nearly all fool, the
dear!"
Her brother's return being settled, Isabelle plunged into her shopping,
buying many things for both the houses, as well as her dresses. There were
friends flitting back and forth, snatches of sight-seeing, and theatres. By
the time they took the steamer Isabelle confessed she was a "wreck." Yet
she talked of taking an apartment in Paris the next spring and sending her
child to a convent, as Mrs. Rogers had done. "It would be nice to have my
own corner over here to run to," she explained. "Only Potts wants me to
bury myself at Schwalbach."
Cairy joined them at Plymouth. He had been in London making arrangements
for the production of a play there, and had hopes of enlarging his sphere.
"Coming home?" he asked Vickers. "That's good!"
"Thank you," Vickers replied dryly.
Cairy had already the atmosphere of success about him. He still limped in a
distinguished manner, and his clothes marked him even in the company of
well-dressed American men. He had grown stouter,--was worried by the fear
of flesh, as he confided to Vickers,--and generally took himself with
serious consideration. It was a far call from the days when he had been
Gossom's ready pen. He now spoke of his "work" importantly, and was kind to
Vickers, who "had made such a mess of things," "with all that money, too."
With his large egotism, his uniform success where women were concerned,
Vickers's career seemed peculiarly stupid. "No woman," he said to Isabelle,
"should be able to break a man." And he thought thankfully of the square
blow between the eyes that Conny had dealt him.
In the large gay party of returning Americans that surrounded Isabelle and
Cairy on the ship Vickers was like a queer little ghost. He occupied
himself with his small charge, reading and walking with her most of the
days. Isabelle was conscious of the odd figure Vickers made, in his
ill-fitting Italian clothes, with an old Tyrolean cloak of faded green
hanging about him, his pale face half hidden by a scrubby beard, his
unseeing eyes, wandering over the great steamer, a little girl's hand in
his, or reading in a corner of the deserted dining hall.
Vickers was not so dull of eye, however, that he did not observe Isabelle
and Cairy, sitting side by side on the deck, talking and reading. They
tried to "bring him in," but they had a little language of jokes and
references personal to themselves. If Vickers wondered what his sister, as
he knew her, found so engrossing in the Southerner, he was answered by a
remark Isabelle made:--
"Tom is so charming! ... There are few men in America who understand how to
talk to a woman, you know."
When Vickers had left his native land, the art of talking to a woman as
distinguished from a man had not been developed....
Lane met the party at Quarantine. That was his domestic office,--"meeting"
and "seeing off." As he stood on the deck of the bobbing tug waving to his
wife, he was a symbol of the American husband, Cairy jokingly pointed out.
"There's John holding out the welcoming arms to roving wife." And there
were hundreds of them, roving wives, on the deck, very smartly dressed for
their return to domesticity, with laden trunks coming up out of the holds,
and long customs bills to pay, the expectant husbands waiting at the pier
with the necessary money. And there were others with their husbands beside
them on the decks, having carried them through Europe, bill-payers and
arrangers extraordinary for their majesties, the American wives. Cairy was
writing a farce about it with the title, "Coming Home."
Vickers, who scarcely remembered his brother-in-law, looked curiously at
the self-possessed, rather heavy man on the tug. He was an effective
person, "one who had done something," the kind his countrymen much admired.
"Had a pleasant voyage, I suppose, and all well?" Then he had turned to
Vickers, and with slight hesitation, as if not sure of his ground,
observed, "You will find considerable changes, I suppose."
"I suppose so," Vickers assented, feeling that conversation between them
would be limited. In the confusion at the pier while the numerous trunks
were being disgorged, Vickers stood apart with Delia Conry and had an
opportunity to observe the quiet, efficient manner in which John Lane
arranged everything. He had greeted Isabelle and his mother impartially,
with a family kiss for both. Vickers caught his brother-in-law's eye on him
several times as they were waiting, and once Lane made as if to speak and
was silent. Vickers was sensitively aware that this man of affairs could
not pretend to understand him,--could at the best merely conceal under
general tolerance and family good feeling his real contempt for one who had
so completely "made a mess of things." He had foreseen the brother-in-law,
and that had been one reason why he had hesitated to return, even for a
visit. Lane soon made another effort, saying: "You will find it rather warm
in the city. We have had a good deal of hot weather this summer."
"Yes," Vickers replied; "I remember New York in September. But I am used to
long summers."
As the stranger's eyes roved over the noisy pier, Lane looked at the little
girl, who was rendered dumb by the confusion and clung to Vickers's hand,
and then he eyed his brother-in-law again, as if he were recollecting the
old Colonel and thinking of the irony in the fact that his only surviving
son should be this queer, half-foreign chap.
A large motor waited outside the pier to take the party to the hotel.
"Aren't you coming, Tom?" Isabella asked, as Cairy made for a cab with his
luggage.
"I will meet you at the station to-morrow," Cairy called back. "Business!"
"Well,--how is everything?" she asked her husband. "Glad to see me back?"
"Of course."
They darted swiftly up town to an immense hotel, where Lane had engaged
rooms for the party. Having seen them into the elevator, he returned by the
motor to his office.