THE gambler went on her trembling legs back to her cluttered parlor and
sat down, panting and pallid. The throw of the dice had been in her
favor!
It was curious that she had no misgiving as to what she was doing in
thus closing the door of opportunity to Johnny--for of course, the new
Mr. Smith's protection would mean every sort of material opportunity for
him! If it had been his "grandfather's" protection which had been
offered, perhaps she might have hesitated, for that would have meant
material opportunity plus a love great enough to tell the truth; and
Miss Lydia's own love--which was but a spiritual opportunity--could not
compete with that! As it was, she tested opportunities by saying, "His
_grandfather_ can have him."
Of course it was just her old method of choosing the better part. . . .
All her life this gallant, timid woman had weighed values. She had
weighed the reputation of being a jilt as against marriage to a man she
did not respect--and she found the temporary notoriety of the first
lighter than the lifelong burden of the second. She weighed values
again, when she put her hundred dollars' worth of generosity on one side
of the scales, and William's meanness on the other--and when generosity
kicked the beam she was glad to be jilted. She had even weighed the
painful unrealities of concealed poverty as against open shabbiness, and
she saw that a dress she couldn't afford was a greater load to carry
than the consciousness of the spot on her old skirt--especially as the
spot was glorified by the memory of a friend's hospitality!
So now, when the new Mr. Smith considered adopting her boy, this simple
soul weighed values for Johnny: Mr. Smith--or Johnny's grandfather?
Pride--or love? And pride outweighed love. Miss Lydia put her hands over
her face and prayed aloud: "God, keep him proud, so I can keep Johnny!"
Apparently God did, for it was only "Mr. Smith" who made further efforts
to get her child. They were very determined efforts. Miss Lydia's
landlord saw her again, and urged. She met what he had to say with a
speechless obstinacy which made him extremely angry. When he saw her a
third time he offered her an extraordinary increase in the
honorarium--for which he had the grace five minutes later to apologize.
He saw her once more, and threatened he would "take" Johnny, anyhow!
"How?" said poor, shaking Miss Lydia. Then, as a last resort, he sent
his lawyer to her, which scared her almost to death. But the interview
produced, for Mr. Smith, nothing except legal assurance that he could
doubtless secure the person of his grandson by appealing to the courts
_in the character of a grandfather_--for Miss Lydia had never taken out
papers for adoption.
"The lady has nine-tenths of the law," said Mr. Smith's legal adviser,
who had been consulted, first, as to a hypothetical case, and then told
the facts. "The other one-tenth won't secure a child whom you don't
claim as a relative. And the law means publicity."
"The hussy!" said Mr. Smith. "She's put a spoke in my wheel."
"She has," said the lawyer, and grinned behind his hand.
Mr. Smith glared at him. "That little wet hen!"
Well! after one or two more efforts, he swallowed his defeat, and,
though for nearly a year he would not recognize Miss Lydia when he met
her in the street, he made fast friends with the freckled, very
pugnacious boy at his gates. He used to stop and speak to him and tell
him to say his multiplication table, and then give him a quarter and
walk off, greatly diverted. Sometimes when he saw his daughter in
Philadelphia, he would tell her, sardonically, that "that child" had
more brains than his father and mother put together!
"Not than his father," poor, cowering Mary would protest. And her
father, looking at her with unforgiving eyes, would say, "I wish I owned
him." ("I like to scare 'em!" he added to himself.) He certainly scared
Mary. Scared her, and made her feel a strange anger, because he had
something which did not belong to him; "after all, the boy is _ours_,"
she told her husband. She always went to bed with a headache after one
of Mr. Smith's visits. As for Carl, his face would grow crimson with
helpless mortification under the gibes of his father-in-law as Mary
repeated them to him.
Once, when she told him that her father had "taken the boy home to
supper with him," he swore under his breath, and she agreed, hurriedly:
"Father was simply mad to notice him! People will guess--"
But Carl broke in: "Oh, I didn't mean _that_. No one would ever suspect
anything. I meant, what right has _he_ to get fond of--the boy?"
"Not the slightest!" Mary said. And they neither of them knew that they
were beginning to be jealous.
The occasion of Mr. Smith's "madness" was one winter afternoon when,
meeting Johnny in the road, he took him into his carriage, then sent
word to Miss Lydia that he was keeping the child to supper. He put him
in a big chair at the other end of the table and baited him with
questions, and roared with laughter and pride at his replies. Also, he
gave him good advice, as a grandfather should:
"I hear you are a bad boy and get into fights. Never fight, sir, never
fight! But if you do fight, lick your man."
"Yes, sir," said Johnny.
"And don't be afraid to tackle a bigger man than yourself. Only cowards
are afraid to do that!"
"Yes, sir," said Johnny.
"But of course I don't approve of fighting. Only bad boys fight.
Remember that!"
"Yes, sir," said Johnny, and scraped his plate loudly to attract the
attention of old Alfred, his grandfather's man, who, familiar and
friendly from thirty years' service, said, as he brought the desired
flannel cakes, "The little man holds his fork just as you do, sir!" At
which Mr. Smith stopped laughing, and said:
"Miss Sampson ought to teach him better manners."
He did not invite Johnny to supper again, which would have been a relief
to Mary if she had known it; and was just as well, anyhow, for Miss
Lydia, quaking at her own supper table (while Johnny was "holding his
fork" in his grandfather's fashion!) had said to herself, "I'll tell him
to say, 'No, thank you, sir,' if Mr. Smith ever asks him again."
It was about this time that Miss Lydia's landlord softened toward her
sufficiently to bow to her as he passed her house. Once he even stopped
her in the street to ask the particulars of one of Johnny's escapades:
It appeared that a boy--one of the Mack boys, as it happened, who was
always in hot water in Old Chester--got the credit of a smashed sash in
Mr. Steele's greenhouse, which was really Johnny's doing; and in spite
of sniffling denials, the (for once) innocent Mack boy was just about to
get what the irate owner of the sash called a walloping, when Johnny
Smith, breathless, and mad as a hatter, rushed into the greenhouse to
say, "It was me done it!"--upon which the richly deserved walloping was
handed over to the real culprit. Later, for some private grudge, Johnny
paid it all back to young Mack, but for the moment--"I take my
medicine," said Johnny, showing his teeth. "I don't hide behind another
feller. But you bet I'll smash Andy Steele's hotbed sashes every chance
I get!" Poor little Miss Lydia was frightened to death at such a wicked
remark, and prayed that God would please forgive Johnny; and she was
very bewildered to have Mr. Smith, listening to this dreadful story,
chuckle with delight: "He'll come to a bad end, the scoundrel! Tell him
I say I expect he'll be hanged. I'll give him a quarter for every pane
he broke." After this interview Mr. Smith used to call on Miss Lydia
occasionally just to inquire what was Johnny's latest crime, and once he
invited his tenant to supper, "with your young scamp," his invitation
ran. She went, and wore her blue silk, and sat on the edge of her chair,
watching the grandfather and grandson, while the vein on her thin temple
throbbed with fright. But it took another year of longing for his own
flesh and blood before the new Mr. Smith reached an amazing, though
temporary, decision.
"I'll have him," he said to himself; "I _will_ have him! I'll swallow
the wet hen, if I can't get him any other way. I'll--I'll marry the
woman." . . . But he hesitated for still another month or two, for,
though he wanted his grandson, he did not hanker to make a fool of
himself; and a rich man in the late seventies who marries an impecunious
spinster in the fifties looks rather like a fool.
But when he finally reached the point of swallowing Miss Lydia he lost
no time in walking out from his iron gates one fine afternoon and
banging on her front door with his stick. When she opened it he
announced that he had something he wanted to say. In his own mind, the
words he proposed to speak were to this effect: "I'm going to marry
you--to get the boy." To be sure, he would not express it just that
way--one has to go round Robin Hood's barn in talking to females! So he
began:
"I have been planning more comfortable quarters for you, ma'am, than
this house. More suitable quarters for my--for the boy; and I--" Then he
stopped. Somehow or other, looking at Miss Lydia, sitting there so small
and frightened and brave, he was suddenly ashamed. He could not offer
this gallant soul the indignity of a bribe! "If I can't get the boy by
fair means, I won't by foul," he told himself; so instead of offering
himself, he talked about the weather; "and--and I want you to know that
Johnny shall be put down for something handsome in my will. It won't be
suspicious. Everybody in Old Chester knows that I like him--living here
at my gates; though he has the devil of a temper! Bad thing. Very bad
thing. He should control it. I've always controlled mine."
Miss Lydia felt a sudden wave of pity; he was so helpless, and she was
so powerful--and so lucky! All she said, in her breathless voice, was
that he "was very kind--about the will."
Johnny's grandfather, looking into her sweet, blue eyes, suddenly
said--and with no thought whatever of Johnny--"I wish I was twenty years
younger!" The wistful genuineness of that was the nearest he came to
asking her to marry him. He went home feeling, as he walked up to his
great, empty house, very old and forlorn, and yet relieved that he had
not offered an affront to Miss Lydia nor, incidentally, made a fool of
himself. Then he thought with the old, hot anger, of Carl Robertson, and
with a dreary impatience of his daughter; it was their doing that he
couldn't own his own grandson! "Well, the boy shall have his
grandfather's money," he said to himself, stumbling a little as he went
up the flight of granite steps to his front door. "Every bit of it! I
don't care whether people think things or not. Damn 'em, let them think!
What difference does it make? Robertson can go to hell." He was so
dulled that, for the moment, he forgot that if Robertson went to hell
Mary would have to go, too. Later that night his tired mind cleared, and
he knew it wouldn't do to let Johnny have his "grandfather's" money, and
that even Mr. Smith's money must be bestowed with caution.
"I'll leave a bequest that won't compromise Mary, but she and Robertson
must somehow do the rest. I'll send for her next week and tell her what
to do; and then I'll fix up a codicil."
But next week he said _next_ week; and after that he thought,
listlessly, that he wasn't equal to seeing her. "She's fond of
Robertson--I can't stand that! I never forgive."
So he didn't send for his daughter. But a week later William King
did. . . .
"I suppose I've got to go?" Mary told her husband, looking up from the
doctor's telegram with scared eyes.
"It wouldn't be decent not to," he said.
"But _he_ is right there, by the gate! I might see him. Oh--I don't
dare!"
"Women are queer," Johnny's father ruminated. "I should think you'd like
to see him. I guess all this mother-love talk is a fairy tale"; then,
before she could retort, he put his arms around her. "I didn't mean it,
dear! Forgive me. Only, Mary, I get to thinking about him, and I feel as
if I'd like to see the little beggar!"
"But how can I 'love' him?" she defended herself, in a smothered voice;
"I don't know him."
"Stop and speak to him while you're at your father's," he urged; "and
then you will know him."
"Oh, I couldn't--I couldn't! I'd be afraid to."
"But why? Nobody could possibly suppose--"
"Because," she said, "if I saw him once _I might want to see him
again_."
Carl frowned with bewilderment, but Johnny's mother began to pace up and
down, back and forth--then suddenly flew out of the room and upstairs,
to fall, crying, upon her bed.
However, she obeyed Doctor King's summons. The day the stage went
jogging and creaking past Miss Lydia's door the lady inside looked
straight ahead of her, and some one who saw her said she was very
pale--"anxious about her father," Old Chester said, sympathetically.
Then Old Chester wondered whether Carl was so unchristian as to refuse
to come and see his father-in-law--"on his deathbed!"--or whether old
Mr. Smith "on his death bed" was so unchristian as to refuse to see his
son-in-law. "What _did_ they quarrel about!" Old Chester said.
"Certainly Mr. Smith seemed friendly enough to the young man before
Mary married him."
[Illustration: "IF I SAW HIM ONCE I MIGHT WANT TO SEE HIM AGAIN"]
When Mary--she was in the early thirties now, and Johnny was
thirteen--came into her father's room and sat down beside him, the old
man opened his eyes and looked at her.
"Pleasant journey?" he said, thickly.
"Yes, father. I hope you are feeling better?"
His eyes closed and he seemed to forget her. Later, looking up at her
from the pillows of his great carved rosewood bed--the headboard looked
like the Gothic doors of a cathedral--he said, "Tell your husband"--he
lifted his upper lip and showed his teeth--"to educate him."
Mary said, "Who?"--then could have bitten her tongue out, for of course
there was only one "him" for these three people! She gave a frightened
glance about the room, but there was no one to hear that betraying
pronoun. She said, faintly: "Yes, father. Now try to rest and don't
talk. You'll feel better in the morning."
"He hates a coward as much as I do," Mr. Smith mumbled. "And he has
brains; doesn't get 'em from you two. Guess he gets 'em from me."
"Father! Please--_please_!" she said, in a terrified whisper. "Somebody
might hear."
"They're welcome. Mary . . . he handed me back my own quarter for my own
apples. No fool." He gave a grunt of laughter. "He said, 'Twelve times
twelve' like lightning--when he was only ten! . . . Last year he took
his own licking, though the Mack boy was in for it. . . . I'm going to
give him a pony."
After that he seemed to forget her and slept for a while. A day or two
later he forgot everything, even Johnny. The last person he remembered,
curiously enough, was Miss Lydia Sampson.
It was when he was dying that he said, suddenly opening those marvelous
eyes and smiling faintly: "Little wet hen! Damned game little party.
Stood right up to me. . . . Wish I'd married her thirteen years ago.
Then there'd have been no fuss about my grandson."
"_Grandson?_" said Doctor King, in a whisper to Mrs. Robertson. And she
whispered back, "He is wandering."
When Mary's husband arrived for the funeral and for the reading of the
will (in which there was nothing "handsome" for Johnny!) the doctor
told him of the new Mr. Smith's last words; and Mr. Robertson said,
hurriedly, "Delirious, of course."
"I suppose so," said Doctor King.
But when he walked home with Doctor Lavendar, after the funeral, he
said, "Have you any idea who Johnny Smith belongs to, Doctor Lavendar?"
"Miss Lydia," said Doctor Lavendar, promptly.
To which William King replied, admiringly, "I have never understood how
anybody _could_ look as innocent as you, and yet be so chock-full of
other people's sins! Wonder if his mother will ever claim him?"
"Wonder if Miss Lydia would give him up if she did?" Doctor Lavendar
said.
"She'd have to," William said.
"On the principle that a 'mother is a mother still, the holiest thing
alive'?" Doctor Lavendar quoted.
"On the principle of ownership," said William King. "As to a mother
being a 'holy thing,' I have never noticed that the mere process of
child-bearing produces sanctity."
"William," said Doctor Lavendar, "Mrs. Drayton would say you were
indelicate. Also, I believe you know that two and two make four?"
"I have a pretty good head for arithmetic," said William King, "but I
only added things up a day or two ago."