those earth persons whom he loved so dearly had sinned, committed some
act or other which they knew for themselves to be sinful, there would be
an opaque veil which neither his eyes nor theirs could pierce, nor the
words of their mouths.
But he was not _greatly_ worried.
As men count time he had been absent from the earth and from his loved
ones only for a very short time. They would still be in the depths of
mourning for him. And even if they were evilly disposed persons, which
they were not, they would hardly have had time to think of anything but
their grief and their loss.
IV
As he left the Place of the wonderful lights and shades and colours and
perfumes, he realized that he could not have been perfectly happy in it.
He could not have been _perfectly_ happy, because he now perceived that
by the mere act of leaving it behind he had become still happier, and
that perfect happiness could only be his when he reached “home” and
beheld his loved ones.
When he had been taken from his home to the hospital the buds on the
pear trees had been on the point of bursting. The pear trees would be in
full bloom now. When he had been taken away the shutters of the house
had been taken from their hinges, painted a pleasant apple green and
stood in the old carriage house to dry. They would be back on their
hinges now, vying in smartness with the two new coats of white paint
which the painters had been spreading over the low rambling house
itself. How sweet the house would look among the fresh young greens of
spring! Perhaps the peewees who came every year had already begun to
build in the veranda eaves.
The little river which tumbled over the old mill dam and for a mile
flowed tranquilly on with little slipping rushes through his farm, would
be very full of water now. It would be roaring and foaming among the
rocks at the foot of the dam. The elms which shaded the bridge and the
ford beside it would be at their best, before the leaves became
worm-eaten and cobwebby. Perhaps one of the cars would be in the ford to
its hubs getting washed, with one of the children sitting in the front
seat. The dark blue roadster with the special body looked especially gay
and sporty in the ford under the shadow of the elms.
He had no more than time to think these things before he had come to the
end of his journey.
Home had never looked so sweet or inviting. The garden was bounded on
the south by a little brook; and beyond this was a little hill planted
with kalmia and many species of native ferns.
It was on the top of this hill that he lighted, and here he paused for a
while and filled his eyes with the humble beauty of the home which his
earth mind had conceived and achieved.
Beyond the garden carpeted with jonquils and narcissuses between and
above graceful pyramids of pear blossoms, the house, low and rambling,
with many chimneys, gleamed in the sunlight. It was a heavenly day.
From the hill he could see not only the house, but to the left the
garage and beyond that the stable. It was about eleven o’clock in the
morning, and it seemed queer to him that at that hour and at that season
there should be no sign of life anywhere. Surely the gardener and his
assistant ought to be at work. He turned a puzzled and indignant glance
back upon the garden, and he observed a curious phenomenon.
A strip of soil in the upper left hand corner of the garden was being
turned and broken by a spade. Near by a fork was taking manure from a
wheelbarrow and spreading it over the roots of a handsome crab apple.
Both the spade and the fork appeared to be performing these meritorious
acts without the aid of any human agency.
And Derrick knew at once that McIntyre, the gardener, and Chubb, his
assistant, must, since his departure, have sinned in their own eyes, so
that they could now no longer show themselves to him, or he to them.
He started anxiously toward the house, but a familiar sound arrested
him.
The blue roadster, hitting on all its cylinders, came slowly out of the
garage and descended the hill and crossed the bridge and honked its horn
for the mill corner and sped off along the county road toward Stamford
_all by itself_.
There was nobody in the roadster. He could swear to that.
And this meant, of course, that Britton, the chauffeur, had done
something which he knew that he ought not to have done, and was for ever
separated from those who had gone beyond.
When Derrick reached the house he was in an exceedingly anxious state
of mind. He stepped into the entrance hall and listened. And heard no
sound. He passed rapidly through the master’s rooms downstairs and
upstairs. In the sewing room a thread and needle was mending the heel of
a silk stocking, but there did not seem to be anybody in the room.
He looked from the window and saw two fishing poles and a tin pail
moving eagerly toward the river. The boys, perhaps. Oh, what _could_
they have done to separate themselves from him? The window was open and
he called and shouted, but the fishing poles and the tin pail kept on
going.
He went downstairs, through the dining room and into the pantry.
His heart stood still.
On tiptoe on the seat of a chair stood his little girl, Ethel. Her hair
shone like spun gold. She looked like an angel. And his heart swelled
with an exquisite bliss; but before he could speak to her and make
himself known, she had reached down something from the next to the top
shelf and put it in her mouth.
At that instant she vanished.
He lingered for a while about the house and gardens, but it was no use.
He knew that. They had all sinned in some way or other, and therefore he
was indeed dead to them, and they to him.
Back of the stables were woods. From these woods there came a sudden
sound of barking. The sound was familiar to Derrick, and thrilled him.
“If I can hear Scoop,” he thought, “Scoop can hear me.” He whistled long
and shrill.
Not long after a little black dog came running, his stomach to the
ground, his floppy silk ears flying. With a sob, Derrick knelt and took
the little dog in his arms.
* * * * *
“Oh, Mumsey!” called Ethel. “Do come and look at Scoopie. He’s doing all
his tricks by himself, just as if somebody was telling him to do them.”
The two looked from a window, and saw the little dog sit up and play
dead and roll over--all very joyously--and jump as if through circled
arms. Then they saw his tail droop and his head droop and his left hind
leg begin to scratch furiously at his ribs. He always _had_ to do that
when anyone scratched his back in a particular place.
* * * * *
When Derrick returned to the Place of the wonderful lights and shadows
he was very unhappy and he knew that he must always be unhappy.
“Instead of coming to this Place,” he said to himself, “knowing what I
know now, I might just as well have gone to Hell.”
A voice, sardonic and on the verge of laughter, answered him.
“That’s just what you did.”
SHADOWED
BY MARY SYNON
From _Red Book_
All the way down from the Capitol, Stroude knew that he was being
followed. From the moment he had come out of the Senate office building
upon the plaza, fragrant with forsythia in the March moonlight, he had
been conscious of the man who trailed his sauntering footsteps. He had
led him down a winding way past the Marshall statue and into the
deserted wideness of Pennsylvania Avenue. He had thought to lose him
when he stepped into the lobby of a big hotel, pausing for a word there
with men he knew, men who made their greetings casual or portentous,
according to their knowledge of the turning of the inner wheels of
Washington; but he found the other man some twenty paces behind him as
he crossed Lafayette Square, and his amused acceptance of the situation
curdled to annoyance at the possibility of having to deal with an
irresponsible crank determined on an interview.
The day had been more than ordinarily difficult, one of the hardest
Stroude had known since the turmoiled times of war. He had suffered
under the sense of impending crisis knowing that his future hung on
to-morrow’s balance; and his temper, always drawn like a taut bow, had
been ready to snap a hundred times through the afternoon’s battle in the
Senate chamber. Now, at the doorway of his house, that limestone palace
of Georgian severity which loomed in stately classicism among the older
residences of the neighbourhood, he poised the arrow of his wrath as he
turned to confront the man behind him. “What do you want?” he snapped at
him.
The man came nearer. By the dim light of the hall lantern Stroude saw
his shambling listlessness, and his hand went to his pocket with a
thought of relief that the other sought only alms. The man, seeing the
gesture, put up his hand arrestingly. “Remember me?” he inquired, almost
too nonchalantly. His voice for all its soft slurring of the consonants,
was threaded with a fibre of steel which edged the menace of his quiet
poise.
“Why not?” Stroude asked sharply, his shoulders lifting as if for
defence.
“Then I reckon you’re none too glad to see me?”
“You haven’t come here to ask me that. You might as well tell me first
as last what you want from me.”
“Nothing you’ll call the sheriff about,” the man told him. He faced the
Senator squarely, revealing even in the half-darkness a certain racial
resemblance to him which made them equals on the instant. For all
Stroude’s grooming and the stranger’s shabbiness, they were strangely
akin in their antagonism, bound not by family ties but by broader, more
basic associations. Each of them, tall, thin, lithe, gazed on the other
with unflinching blue eyes. Each of them kept watch with wildcat
tenacity. From each of them emanated the recklessness of personal
courage that takes no count of law beyond its own code. In their sudden
springing to guard, the predominant characteristics of the two men, the
Senator and the shambling shadower, flared up stronger than their
setting, and although the lights of the White House gleamed golden
across the Square, they were mountaineers facing each other in the hate
of vendetta. The years and the place fell away from Stroude, leaving him
stripped to the bone of his clan’s creed.
“We’ve settled our own affairs before,” Stroude said. “We can do it
now.”
As if the words gave him advantage, the other man seized them swiftly.
“Let’s do it, then,” he replied. “I’ve come here to get you to do
something you won’t want to do. Will you fight me for it?”
“Not till I know the stake.”
“Didn’t you get her letter?”
“Whose?”
“There’s only one woman I’d be coming to you about, I reckon.”
“I’ve never heard from her since the day she went back to you. That was
twenty-six years ago last May.”
“The fourteenth.”
“Why should she have written me now?”
“She’s dying.” The man’s voice sounded in a softer timbre. “A month ago
the doctor from the moonlight school told her that she had only a little
while to live. She’s been pining ever since, not about dying, for she’s
brave as any man, but for something I couldn’t guess until she told me.
She wants to see _you_. She wrote you a letter, but she was afraid you
might not get it, and so she sent me. ‘Tell him,’ she said, ‘that I
won’t rest easy in my grave over there on the side of Big Stony, if he
don’t come to me before I die. He told me once,’ she said, ‘that he’d
come when I’d call. I’m calling now.’ That’s her message.” His tone
lifted from its softer depth. “Are you coming to her?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve a thousand duties. I’ve---- It’s ridiculous.”
“Then you’re not coming?”
“How can I, Martin? I’m not my own man. I’m here for my state, for my
country. I have work to do. I can’t let any personal obligation
interfere with it. Besides----”
“It couldn’t hurt your wife, not even if she knew it. And Dell’s dying.”
“I’m sorry, Martin. I am, honestly. Will you tell Dell that I----”
“I’ll tell her nothing but that you wouldn’t come. Nothing else matters.
And I think you owe her that, at least.”
“But----”
The other man turned away, crossed the street, and walked back across
the Square. Stroude could see him swinging on between the bushes, and
the remembrance of another trail which Boyce Martin would climb rushed
over him. More plainly than the crocus-bordered path to the White House
shone the moonlit path up to the cabin on Pisgah where Dell Martin used
to wait for his own coming, the cabin where she now waited for death.
The memory of that way, twisting among laurel and rhododendrons, stabbed
him more sharply than had Boyce Martin’s words; but with the old habit
of setting aside disturbing thoughts, he tried to thrust the memory
from his brain as he unlocked the door of his house.
A servant, coming forward at the sound of his key in the lock, gave him
a message with a careful precision which bespoke respect for the
executive management that directed his tasks. “Mrs. Stroude wishes you
to be told, sir, that she is at the theatre and will see you when she
comes in. And she made an appointment, sir, for Senator Manning and two
other gentlemen to see you to-night on their way from the Pan-American
dinner. She said it was very important.”
He thanked the man and went upstairs to the library, switching on light
after light to dispel its shrouding gloom. He tried to read, but the
pages of the periodicals he took up ran into dullness. He chewed his
cigar savagely, finding it flavourless. He strove to concentrate on his
impending interview with Manning and his companions, realizing its
portent, but he could not focus his attitude. Impatiently he thrust away
the work which always waited his attention on his homecoming--findings
of committees, digests of newspaper editorials, confidential reports on
public interests in various measures, letters from men who had
constituted themselves his captains. He frowned at the framed photograph
of his wife, the only decoration she had placed upon his table; and he
grimaced at the portrait of himself which Rhoda had set above the
immaculate mantel. He was weary with work, he told himself, crossing the
room and flinging wide open the windows which looked down on the Square.
The thrill of the night wind, prematurely warm as it crossed the
Potomac, and burdened with elusive odours of a Southern March, caught
him unawares. For a moment he stood drinking deeply of the immortal
beauty of the recurrent springtime. Memories he had thought long dead
and buried went over him. Pictures more vivid than those on the walls
framed themselves in the darkened greenery of the little park: a girl in
a faded gingham dress waving him welcome on a hill road, a girl with
eyes brighter than mountain stars telling him her love, flinging away
all thought or care of herself, giving him everything and glorying in
the gift, even to the last sacrifice of her departure from him. Not as
she was now, Boyce Martin’s wife dying in that far-away little
community of his native hills, but as she had been when she had defied
their little world to come to him, Stroude saw her. In the thought of
what she had been to him, he flung out his arms. “After all these
years,” he muttered, “after all these years!” And as if drawn by a power
stronger than his will, he crossed to the table, and picking up the
telephone, called the information desk of the Union Station. “What time
does the Mountain Mail on the C. & O. go out now?” he asked. “One
o’clock? One-fifteen.” He hung up the receiver and saw again the
photograph of his wife.
He studied it with suddenly arrested attention. What would she think of
his desire to leave Washington at a time when, according to her
fundamental ideas, his presence was imperative for the fulfillment of
his ambition? Or was it her ambition? He gazed at the pictured
countenance, seeing the determination of the uplifted chin, meeting the
challenge in the steady eyes. Rhoda was certainly her father’s daughter.
Old Peter Armond’s indomitable will and shrewdly calculating brain lived
on in her. For the fourteen--or was it fifteen?--years of their marriage
she had managed Stroude’s career as cleverly as ever her father had
directed one of his lieutenants, and he had acknowledged his debt to her
with a certain attitude of amusement. Now, facing the last triumphal
stage of its development, he felt an angry distaste of Rhoda’s
manœuvring. It might bring him, he conceded, to the goal but he wished
he might have travelled a simpler path.
He had been an obscure Congressman of fiery political rectitude when he
had met Rhoda Armond. She, and her group, and the circumstances the
Armond connection had conjured for him, had made him into a statesman.
Or was it only that they had made it possible for him to plant his own
standards on the heights? At any rate, he owed her something, he
thought. She was his wife, even though her attitude toward him was that
of a director of destinies. She had given him, after all, what he had
desired from her. She had made the upward road smooth, and she had
dowered him with loyal faith in his ability. It wasn’t fair to compare
her attitude toward him with Dell’s. He had never given to Rhoda what he
had given Dell. Poor little Dell! But what good could he do her now by
going to her? Twenty-five years would have changed her as they had
changed him. They had had their day, and the sun of it had set long
since. “I won’t go; I can’t,” he said, and turned back to the work on
his desk, not looking up until his wife entered the room.
She came, a tall, consciously beautiful woman, bringing with her an
aroma of power as subtle and as pervasive as the perfume of her toilet.
She gave to Stroude the greeting of a perfunctory kiss on his brow, and
stood off for his admiration. It was, however, not the product of her
personality as much as her satisfaction in the work which struck him as
he watched her. Rhoda’s thought of herself as well as of him was that of
a sculptor of his masterpieces. Stroude accepted it with the
affectionate tolerance of a long marital relationship, feeling somehow
sorrier for Rhoda than she would ever feel for herself, since she would
never know what she had missed from life. “I was playing your game
to-night,” she told him.
“Isn’t it yours too?” he smiled.
“In a way, yes,” she acknowledged, “but this involved real sacrifice and
I want reward. I went to the theatre with the Covingers.”
“Was the play deadly?”
“No, but the Covingers are.”
“He isn’t a bad sort, and----”
“Oh, I know that he’ll have the delegation from his state, and that it’s
one of the big states; but oh, my dear, have you ever had to listen to
his wife?”
“She isn’t so terrible, Rhoda.”
“Oh, of course, if you will look at people as characters rather than as
social factors, you won’t see the awfulness of the Mrs. Covingers of
Washington. But really----”
“Did Manning hint at why he had to see me to-night?”
“At nothing but the importance of seeing you. He is bringing he said,
Mr. Laflin and Senator Wilk.”
“He probably said Senator Wilk and Mr. Laflin, but you know the field
well enough to put them in the order of their importance. Laflin’s the
new factor, a shrewd wolf raised in a wild forest.”
“Does it mean”--she leaned forward, tapping the table with her fan in
eagerness--“that they are going to ask you to take the nomination?”
“They haven’t the entire giving of it, my dear.”
“Don’t be silly, Burton. You know that they are the architects of
presidential nominations.”
“But even architects----”
“Oh, Burt, don’t quibble. You know that you’re the logical man for the
place. You’re squarely based in party policies----”
“Safe, and steady.” His tone was whimsical.
“But picturesque enough to be a good campaigner.”
“Barefoot boy from the mountains. Good American stock with fine
traditions. Reads rhetorically, doesn’t it?”
“And a border state gives you strategic advantage.”
“Some one has coached you well.”
“I was coached before I ever knew you, Burt dear. My father taught us
politics as religiously as my mother taught us sewing. It wasn’t as
practical, perhaps, as yours, but----”
“There haven’t been many men more practical in their politics than Peter
Armond,” Stroude said dryly.
“Even if he did grow wealthy,” his daughter defended, “you know how high
he kept his standards.”
“I can guess,” Stroude said, but his tone gave her no handle to catch
for controversy, and she swung into off-side statement. “Mrs. Covinger
let slip something that may be vital to us,” she told him.
“If it’s vital, she let it slip with due deliberation,” he declared.
“Don’t underestimate her brains, Rhoda, even if she wasn’t raised by the
Armond code. What did she say?”
“I don’t believe I’ll tell you.”
“Yes, you will.”
“We do run in double harness, don’t we? Well, she said that Covinger
wasn’t going back to New York until to-morrow night, as there was a
tremendously important conference at noon to-morrow. Seven men will be
there, and they will decide the fate of the nation. That’s exactly what
she said. She’s bombastic, you know.”
“Seven? Then they’re letting Covinger in?”
“You knew about it?”
“Not that it would be to-morrow.”
“Is that why Senator Manning is coming to-night?”
“Probably.”
“Then that means----” Her voice broke in excitement.
“That our fate hangs in the balance.”
“Does it?”
“It looks like it.” He smiled at her through the smoke of his cigar. Her
eyes shone with myriad points of light. “Not planning what you’ll wear
at the inauguration, are you?” he teased her.
“No,” she said, “but wondering what you’ll say. It’s wonderful, isn’t
it?”
“Don’t count your chickens yet, Rhoda,” he warned her. “We, both of us,
know the thousand slips between the cup of consideration and the lip of
nomination. We’ve gone through it all for other offices.”
“But we’ve won every time,” she said solemnly. “You’ve never been
beaten, Burt. Don’t you see what an advantage that is, now? You’ve been
going up, and up, and up.”
“The Senate’s a rather high plateau, at that.”
“But not the high mountain. Oh, Burt, think of it! It seems almost
unbelievable, and yet I’ve always known you were destined for it. I knew
you’d be great. Why, even in those first days here, you promised it. You
knew it, too. You had the look of a man who was dedicated to something
beyond the immediate, the look of one who is going to travel far and
high. I believe that was one of the reasons why I loved you. And
you----” She leaned over the table, and spread out the brilliant
feathers of her fan, gazing at their splendour and not at her husband as
she went on: “Did you love me when you married me?”
“Why else do men marry women?” he countered, letting the smoke veil his
eyes.
“To put other women out of their lives, sometimes,” she said.
“Well?” He drew hard on the cigar.
“I never knew until to-day who she was,” she said. “I opened a letter by
mistake. You may see from the envelope how easy it was for me to think
it was addressed to me when I found it in my mail. It was directed
merely to Washington, and the post office sent it to the house here.”
“I quite understand,” he said, and held out his hand for Dell Martin’s
letter.
His wife drew it from the gay bag she had borne, and gave it to him. For
a moment he looked at the pitiful missive, contrasting it with the
appointments of the table before him.
“She’s dying,” Rhoda said, “and she asks you to go to her.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know it.”
“But----”
“How did I know? Her husband followed me down from the Hill to-night. He
demanded that I return with him.”
“Then she married, after----”
“She was married,” he said, “when I met her.”
“Oh!” She snapped shut the great fan, twisting its tortoise-shell handle
between her lithe fingers. “When was that?”
“Before I knew you.” He sank down into his chair, staring forward as if
he were a judge considering a decision. “I was twenty-two years old,
teaching school in the mountains and studying law with old Judge
McLaurin, when I met Dell Martin. She had been married to Boyce against
her will, as plenty of the girls in the hills are married. She was
lonely and wretched, and lovelier than a wild rose. I was young and
reckless. I fell in love with her and I made her love me. Boyce found it
out. He drew me into a fight and I won it. He shot me then. Dell came to
nurse me and I wouldn’t let her go. Boyce wouldn’t get a divorce and she
couldn’t, but she stayed with me. We had two years of utter happiness.
I’d have gone through hell to win them.”
A stick of the tortoise-shell handle of the fan broke in Rhoda’s hands.
“But you left her?”