A HALF-HEARD MESSAGE
Frederik rose slowly from his chair. His face was working. Instinctively
his glance lifted to Kathrien's door. His eyes grew bright and his weak
mouth strong with a wondrous resolve. He crossed the room to the
stair-foot; that light of pure sacrifice deepening in his whole upraised
face.
"Yes!" urged the Dead Man, keeping eager pace with him in body and in
thought. "Yes! Call her. Give her back her promise."
The flabby muscles of a self-indulgent man may sometimes perform a
single prodigious feat of strength. Wherein they have an infinite
advantage over the far flabbier resolutions of a self-indulgent man. And
Frederik Grimm's weak, atrophied better self was not equal to the strain
thrown upon it.
At the stair-foot, his step faltered. He halted irresolutely, while the
Dead Man watched him in an anguish of hope and fear.
Then came surrender to long habit; and with it a gush of weak rage. Not
at himself. He had not the strength left for that. But at the cause of
his distress. He brought down his fist upon the desk with a resounding
thwack. His eye fell on the open page with its pathetic scrawl of
appeal.
"Damn her!" he growled, snatching up the letter and tearing it across
and across. "I wish to God I'd never seen her!"
Peter Grimm gazed down upon him with eyes wherein lurked a slowly rising
fire.
"Frederik Grimm!" commanded the Dead Man. "Get up! Stand up before me!
Stand up, I say!"
Frederik made as though to rise, then swore under his breath and sat
down again.
"Stand up!" flashed the Dead Man.
Frederik got shamblingly to his feet, and looked around with a frown, as
though wondering why he had risen. His gaze swept the desk for some
cause for his action, then rested moodily on the dying embers in the
hearth.
The Dead Man at the far side of the desk confronted him like some
unearthly Judge from whose heart pity, humanity, and all else but
righteous wrath were banished.
"You shall not have my little girl!" thundered Peter Grimm. "I have come
back to take her away from you. And you cannot put me to rest. I have
come back. You cannot drive me from your thoughts."
He touched Frederik's damp forehead with his forefinger.
"I am _there_," he said. "I am looking over your shoulder as you read or
write or think. I am looking in at the window when you deem you are
alone and unseen. _I have come back._ You are breathing me in the air. I
am hammering at your heart in each of your pulse beats. Wherever you
are, I am there."
His forced calmness gave way to a gust of helpless rage as he felt his
words falling upon world-deafened ears.
"Hear me!" he commanded furiously. "_Hear_ me! You _shall_ hear me!"
At each frenzied repetition of the command, the Dead Man hurled his arms
aloft and brought down his clenched fist with all his power upon the
desk in mighty blows of utterly soundless violence.
Impotently he cried aloud:
"Oh, will _no_ one hear me? Has my journey been all in vain? Has it
been useless?--worse than useless?"
The Dead Man looked upward, in an anguish of desperation. He seemed to
be entreating the Unseen in his clamour of wild, hopeless appeal.
"Has it all been for nothing?" he wailed. "Must we forever stand or fall
by the mistakes we make in this world? Is there _no_ second chance?"
Frederik shook his head angrily as though to banish clinging unwelcome
thoughts from his brain, got up and crossed to the sideboard, where he
poured himself a double drink of liquor and swigged it down with
feverish eagerness.
As he left the desk, Marta entered from the kitchen with the light
supper he had ordered:--coffee, with sugar and cream, and a plate of
little cakes. She went to the desk and began clearing a space among the
scattered papers for the supper tray. As her free hand moved among the
papers, the Dead Man was at her elbow.
"Marta!" he whispered, as though fearing his words might reach Frederik.
"Look! _Look!_"
He pointed excitedly to the torn letter and the photograph that lay face
downward under her hand. And she picked up both letter and picture, to
make room for the tray.
"Marta!" urged the Dead Man, almost incoherent in his wild haste. "See
what you have there! Look down at that picture in your hand! Turn it
over and _look_ at it! Look at the hand-writing on that torn letter!
Look quickly! Then run with them to Miss Kathrien. Make her piece the
letter together and read it! Quick! It's the only way she can learn the
truth. Frederik will never tell her. Marta!--_Ah!_"
His wild plea broke off in a cry of chagrin. For Frederik, turning from
the sideboard, had seen the old woman.
"Your coffee, Mynheer Frederik," said she, laying down the photograph
and letter without a glance at them.
"Yes, yes. Of course," answered Frederik. "I forgot. Thanks."
She turned to leave the room. Frederik, coming over to the desk, caught
sight of the torn blue envelope and the picture, where she had laid
them.
Hurriedly covering them with his hand, he glanced at her in quick,
terrified suspicion. But the face she turned to him as she hesitated for
a moment at the kitchen door showed him at once that he was safe.
Nevertheless, Marta lingered on the threshold.
"Well?" queried Frederik, seating himself beside the tray.
"Is there," she stammered, "is there no--no word--no letter----?"
"Word? Letter?" he echoed nervously. "What do you mean?"
"From----" began the old woman in timid hesitation, then in a rush of
courage: "From my little girl. From Anne Marie."
"No!" he snapped. "Of course not. I----"
"But--at a time like this--if she knows--oh, I felt it,--I hoped--that
there would be _some_ message from her! Every day I have hoped----"
"No," he broke in. "Nothing's come. No letter. No word of any sort from
her. I'd have let you know if there had. By the way, I have an
appointment at the hotel in a few minutes. Tell Miss Kathrien, if she
asks for me."
He busied himself with the tray. Marta looked at him a moment longer,
held by some power that she could not explain. Then years of habit
overcame impulse. She courtesied and withdrew to her kitchen.
As the door shut behind her, Frederik caught up the torn blue letter.
Tossing it in a metal ash tray he struck a match. Peter Grimm, divining
his intent, sprang forward with a wordless cry to stop him. The Dead
Man's hands tore at the wrists of the Living; sought by main strength to
snatch the paper out of his reach; with pitiful helplessness tried to
thrust back the hand that held the lighted match.
Unknowingly, Frederik touched the flame to the paper, shook out the
match, and watched the torn letter blaze and curl. Then he tossed the
charred bits into a jardinière on the floor, and picked up the picture.
"There's an end to _that_!" he murmured, turning to throw the photograph
into the smoking embers of the fireplace.
Peter Grimm stood erect. A new hope drove the sick despair from his
face. Looking toward Willem's room he raised his arm and beckoned.
At once the door stealthily opened. A white little figure slipped out
onto the gallery and toward the stairs. Down the flight of steps, clad
in his white flannel pajama suit, his eyes wide, his yellow hair
tumbled, Willem ran.
Frederik, in the act of consigning the photograph to the fire, was
arrested by the sound of pattering feet. Laying the picture on the desk,
he turned guiltily, in time to see Willem speeding across the room
toward the bay window.
"What are you doing down here?" demanded Frederik. "If you're so sick,
you ought not to get out of bed. That's the place for sick boys."
"The circus!" mumbled Willem in the queer, strained voice of a sleep
walker. "The circus music waked me up. So I had to come and hear it."
"Circus music?" repeated Frederik amazedly, as he watched the boy
tugging at the rain-tightened window sash to force it upward.
"Yes, it woke me. I can see the parade if I can get this window open.
It----"
"Why, you're half asleep!" exclaimed Frederik. "The circus left town ten
days ago!"
"No, no!" insisted Willem, raising the window with one final wrench of
his frail arms. "The band's playing _now_. Hear it?"
A gust of chilly, wet air dashed in through the open window, sending a
sharp draught across the room and waking the boy wide as it beat into
his hot face.
"Why," babbled Willem, rubbing his eyes, and staring about him, "why,
it's _night_ time! I wonder what made me think the circus was here. I--I
guess it was a dream."
Frederik strode to the window impatiently and slammed it shut. As he
passed Willem on the way back to the desk the boy intuitively cowered
away from him.
"You've had a fever," said Frederik crossly, "and you're liable to catch
cold, wandering around this draughty old barn in your night clothes. Go
back to bed."
"Yes, sir," whimpered the boy, cringing under the sharp tone and
starting back for the stairs. But, before he reached the lowest step, he
halted. Peter Grimm stood barring his way. For a moment the Dead Man and
the child stood face to face. Then, still frightened but unable to
resist, Willem turned back toward Frederik, who had just picked up the
photograph once more; to put it in the smouldering ashes.
"Mynheer Frederik," asked the boy in a voice not his own, "where is Anne
Marie?"
"What?" barked Frederik with an uncontrollable start and whipping the
photograph around behind his back like a guilty child caught in theft.
"What's that? Anne Marie? Why do you ask _me_ about her? How should _I_
know?"
He turned his back on the boy and began to tear the photograph into tiny
bits. Willem hesitated, then went back to the stairway. Again at the
foot of the steps he confronted the Dead Man. Again they stood for an
instant, looking wordlessly into each other's eyes. And again Willem
turned back into the room.
"Mynheer Frederik," he asked in a sort of dazed bewilderment, "_where_
is Mynheer Grimm?"
"Eh? Mynheer Grimm? Dead, of course. Dead."
"Are--are you _sure_? Because just now----"
"Oh, go to bed! At once, do you hear! Go, or I'll have you punished!"
Under this dire threat and the scowl that went with it, not even the
Dead Man's power could stem Willem's defeat. Up the stairs he scuttled.
At the door of his room, the fever thirst in his hot, parched throat for
the moment overcame fear.
"Could--could I have a drink of water?" he whimpered, gazing longingly
down at the full ice-water pitcher on the sideboard.
An angry glance from Frederik sent him into his own room like a rabbit
into its warren.
Frederik, the fragments of the picture clenched in his sweat-damp hand,
glowered after the retreating lad and took a step toward the fire. The
movement brought him close to the desk. The lamp had suddenly burned
very low. But for the faint gleam of firelight the room was in almost
total darkness.
And out of that gloom leaped a Face. A Face close to Frederik's own;--a
Face indescribably awful in its aspect of unearthly menace. The face of
Peter Grimm. Not kindly and rugged as in life, or even as since the Dead
Man's return. But terrible, accusing, bathed in a lurid glow.
Frederik, with a scream of crass horror, reeled back. The bits of
cardboard tumbled from his fear-loosened grip and strewed the surface of
the desk.
"My God!" croaked Frederik, his throat sanded with terror. "My God! Oh,
my _God_!"
The Face was gone. The room was in shadow again and very silent. The
dropping of a charred ember from andiron to hearth made the
panic-stricken man jump convulsively.
Scarce breathing, crouched in a position of grotesque fright, the
fear-sweat streaming down his face, Frederik Grimm peered about him
through the flickering gloom. The place seemed peopled with elusive
Shapes. His teeth clicked together as his loosened jaw was nerve-racked.
He shivered from head to foot.
"I--I thought----" he began, half aloud.
Then he fell silent, afraid of his own voice in that dreadful silence.
For a moment he cowered, numb, inert. Then he remembered the fragments
of the photograph that still strewed the table.
"I must get rid of them," he thought.
He took an apprehensive step toward the desk. But the memory of what he
had seen there was too potent. He knew he could no more approach that
spot than he could walk into a den of rattlesnakes. He halted, sweating,
aghast. Again he crept forward,--a step--two steps--in the direction of
the torn picture. But his fears clogged his feet and brought him to a
shivering stand-still. Had the wealth of the world lain strewed on that
desk instead of a mere handful of scattered pasteboard bits he could not
have summoned courage to step forth and seize it.
The Dead Man, in the shadows, read his mind and smiled.
"No one's likely to come in here till I get back," Frederik told
himself, in self-excuse for his cowardice. "And if any one does, the
picture is too badly torn to be recognised. I----"
He found that his terror-ridden subconsciousness was backing his
trembling body toward the outer door. The door that led from that
haunted room--from the desk he dared not go near,--out into the safe,
peace-giving night of summer.
And, snatching up his hat and stick, the shuddering, white-faced young
master of the Grimm fortune half-stumbled, half-ran, from his home.
"Hicks's lawyer will be waiting," he said to his battered self-respect.
"I'm late as it is. I must hurry."
And hurry he did, nor checked his rapid pace until he had reached his
destination.
Scarce had the door banged shut after Frederik when Peter Grimm raised
his eyes once more toward Willem's room. And again the little white-clad
figure appeared, and tiptoed toward the stair head.
Willem paused a moment, looked over the banisters to make certain that
Frederik had gone, then stole down to the big living-room. His cheeks
were flushed with fever. He was tired all over. His head throbbed. And
his throat was unbearably dry. The perpetual thirst of childhood,
augmented by the gnawing, unbearable thirst of fever, sent him speeding
to the sideboard. He picked up the big ice-water pitcher,--chilled and
frosted by inner cold and outer dampness--and poured out a glassful of
the stingingly cold water. The boy gulped down the contents of the glass
in almost a single draught. Then he filled a second glass and, with
epicurean delight, let the water trickle slowly and coolingly down his
hot throat. Peter Grimm stood beside him, a gentle hand on the thin
little shoulder. His thirst slaked, Willem glanced fearfully toward the
front door.
"Oh, he won't come back for a long time," Peter Grimm soothed him.
"Don't be afraid. He went out in a hurry and he hasn't yet stopped
hurrying. He--thought he saw _me_."
Willem, reassured, laid his burning cheek against the frosted, icy side
of the pitcher. A smile of utter bliss overspread his face.
"My, but it feels good!" sighed the boy.
The Dead Man continued to look down at him with an infinite pity.
"Willem," said he, stroking the tousled head and smoothing away its
stabbing pain, "there are some little soldiers in this world who are
handicapped when they come into Life's battlefield. Their parents
haven't fitted them for the fight. Poor little moon-moths! They look in
at the lighted windows. They beat at the panes. They see the glow of
happy firesides,--the lamps of bright homes. But they can never get in.
You are one of those little wanderers, Willem. And children like you are
a million times happier when they are spared the truth. So it's the most
beautiful thing that can happen for you, that before your playing time
is over--before you begin a man's bitterly hard, grinding toil,--all the
care--all the tears, all the worries, all the sorrows are going to pass
you by forever. God is going to lay His dear hand on your head. There is
always a place for such little children as you at His side. There is
none in this small, harsh, unpitying old world. If people knew--if they
understood--I don't think they could be so cruel as to bring such
children into the world, to carry terrible burdens. They _don't_ know.
But God does. And that is why He is going to take you to Him. It will be
the most wonderful--the most beautiful thing that could happen to you."
Willem smiled dreamily. Then he took a long, ecstatic drink out of the
pitcher itself, set it down, and rose to his feet. He felt suddenly
better. For the time the water had cooled him. The racking headache was
smoothed away. And, child-like, he had no desire whatever to cut short
his surreptitious good time by going to bed. He looked about him for new
objects of interest.
"Willem," went on the Dead Man, "of all this whole household, you are
the only one who really feels I am here. The only one who can almost see
me. The only one who can help me. I have a little message for you to
give Katje, and I've something to show you."
He pointed toward the desk, where lay the fragments of the picture. The
firelight was strong enough now to make them plainly visible. Willem's
eyes followed the direction of the pointing hand. But his glance, as it
reached the desk, fell upon something infinitely more attractive than
any mere photograph. He saw the tray placed there by Marta and left
untouched by Frederik.
"I'm awful hungry!" observed the boy.
"H'm!" commented Peter Grimm, as Willem started across the room to
investigate the mysteriously alluring tray. "I see I can't get any help
from a youngster as long as his stomach is calling."
"Good!" ejaculated Willem as he spied the plate of cakes.
"Help yourself!" invited Peter Grimm.
The boy obeyed the suggestion before it was made. Already his mouth was
full of cake and his jaws were working rapturously.
"_Das is lecker!_" he murmured, biting into another of the cakes.
He picked a large and obese raisin from a third, swallowed it, then
reached for the sugar bowl. Two lumps of sugar went the way of the
raisin. After which a handful of sugar lumps were stuffed into his
night-clothes' pocket for future delectation in bed. The cream pitcher
next met the forager's eye. Willem looked at it longingly.
"Take it," said Peter Grimm. "It's good, thick, sweet cream. Drink it
down. That's right. It won't hurt you. Nothing can hurt you now."
"I haven't had such a good time," Willem confided to his inner
consciousness, "since Mynheer Grimm died. Why"--he broke off, his roving
gaze concentrating on the hat-rack--"there's his hat! It's--he's
_here_! Oh, Mynheer Grimm!" he wailed aloud in utter longing. "Take me
back with you!"
"You know I'm here?" asked the Dead Man joyously. "Can you see me?"
"No, sir," came the answer without a breath of hesitation or any hint of
misunderstanding.
"Here," ordered Peter Grimm, his face alight, "take my hand. Have you
got it?"
He placed his right hand around the boy's groping palm.
"No, sir," replied Willem.
"Now," urged Peter Grimm, enclosing the boy's hand in both his own, "do
you feel it?"
"I--I feel _something_," returned Willem, in doubt. "Yes, sir. But where
is your hand? There's--there's nothing there!"
"But you _hear_ me?" asked the Dead Man anxiously.
"I--I can't _really_ hear you. It's some kind of a dream, I suppose.
Isn't it? Oh, Mynheer Grimm!" he pleaded brokenly. "Take me back with
you!"
"You're not quite ready to go with me, yet," said the Dead Man in gentle
denial. "Not till you can _see_ me."
The boy reached out for another cake. Still looking straight ahead where
he imagined his unseen protector might be, he asked:
"What did you come back for, Mynheer Grimm? Wasn't it nice where you
went?"
"Oh, yes! Beyond all belief, dear lad. But I had to come back. Willem,
do you think you could take a message for me? Listen very carefully now.
Because I want you to remember every word of it. I want you to try to
understand. You are to tell Miss Kathrien----"
"It's too bad you died before you could go to the circus, Mynheer
Grimm," broke in Willem, munching the cake.
"Willem," persisted the Dead Man, patiently starting his plan of
campaign all over again from another angle, "there must be a great many
things you remember,--things that happened when you lived with your
mother. Aren't there?"
"I was very little," hesitated Willem, echoing a phrase he had once
heard Marta use in speaking of his earlier days.
"Still," pursued the Dead Man, "you remember?"
"I--I was afraid," replied the boy, groping back in the blurred past
for a fact and seizing on a gruesomely prominent one.
"Try to think back to that time," urged Peter Grimm. "You loved--_her_?"
"Oh, I _did_ love Anne Marie!" exclaimed the child.
"Now," pointed out the Dead Man, "through that one little miracle of
love you can remember many things that are tucked away in the back of
your baby brain. Hey? Things that a single spark could kindle and light
up and make clear to you. It comes back? Think! There were you--and Anne
Marie----"
"And the Other One," suggested Willem on impulse.
"So! And who was the 'Other One'?"
"I'm afraid----" babbled the child.
And again the Dead Man shifted the form of his questions to quiet the
nervous dread that had sprung into the big eyes.
"Willem," said he, "what would you rather see than anything else in all
this world? Think. Something that every little boy loves?"
"I--I like the circus," hazarded Willem, setting his tired wits to work
at this possible conundrum, "and the clowns, and----"
He hesitated. Peter Grimm motioned toward the photograph's fragments on
the desk.
"----and my mother," finished the boy.
Then, his gaze following the Dead Man's gesture, he caught sight of part
of a pictured face, torn diagonally across. With a cry he picked it up.
"Why," he exclaimed, "there she is! There's her face,--part of it. And,"
fumbling among the torn bits of cardboard, "there's the other part. It's
a picture of Anne Marie. All torn up."
"It would be fun to put it together," suggested Peter Grimm, "the way
you did with those picture puzzles I got you once. Suppose we try?"
The idea caught the child's fancy. With knitted brows and puckered lips
he bent over the desk and began the task of piecing the scraps into a
whole.
"That's right," approved the Dead Man. "Put it all together until the
picture is all perfect.--See, there's the bit you are looking for to
finish off the shoulder,--and then we must show it to everybody in the
house, and set them all to thinking."
With an apprehensive glance over his shoulder toward the front door
Willem proceeded more hurriedly with his work of joining the strewn
pieces.
"I must get it put together before _he_ comes back," he muttered.
"Ah!" mutely rejoiced the Dean Man, "I'm making you think about _him_ at
last! I'll succeed in getting your mind to connect him with Anne Marie
by the time the others----"
"'Uncle Rat has gone to town! Ha.-_H'M!_'"
chanted Willem under his breath as his fingers moved from part to part
of the nearly completed picture. "'_To buy his niece a wedding
gown._'--There's her hand!" he interrupted himself as an elusive scrap
of the photograph was at last discovered and put into place.
Peter Grimm's eyes were fixed on the door of Kathrien's room in a
compelling stare.
"Her other hand!" mused Willem. "'_What shall the wedding breakfast be?
Ha-H'M! What shall the----?_' Where's--here's the last two parts. There!
It's _done_! Oh, Anne Marie! Mamma! I----"
The door of Kathrien's room opened. The girl, under a spell of the Dead
Man's will, came out to the banisters.