Hedrick Madison's eyes were not of marble; his heart was not flint
nor his skin steel plate: he was flesh and tender; he was a
vulnerable, breathing boy, with highly developed capacities for
pain which were now being taxed to their utmost. Once he had loved
to run, to leap, to disport himself in the sun, to drink deep of
the free air; he had loved life and one or two of his fellowmen.
He had borne himself buoyantly, with jaunty self-confidence, even
with some intolerance toward the weaknesses of others, not
infrequently displaying merriment over their mischances; but his
time had found him at last; the evil day had come. Indian Summer
was Indian for him, indeed: sweet death were welcome; no charity
was left in him. He leaped no more, but walked broodingly and
sought the dark places. And yet it could not be said that times
were dull for him: the luckless picket who finds himself in an
open eighty-acre field, under the eye of a sharpshooter up a tree,
would not be apt to describe the experience as dull. And Cora
never missed a shot; she loved the work; her pleasure in it was
almost as agonizing for the target as was the accuracy of her
fire.
She was ingenious: the horrible facts at her disposal were
damaging enough in all conscience: but they did not content her.
She invented a love-story, assuming that Hedrick was living it: he
was supposed to be pining for Lolita, to be fading, day-by-day,
because of enforced separation; and she contrived this to such an
effect of reality, and with such a diabolical affectation of
delicacy in referring to it, that the mere remark, with gentle
sympathy, "I think poor Hedrick is looking a little better
to-day," infallibly produced something closely resembling a spasm.
She formed the habit of never mentioning her brother in his
presence except as "poor Hedrick," a too obvious commiseration of
his pretended attachment--which met with like success. Most
dreadful of all, she invented romantic phrases and expressions
assumed to have been spoken or written by Hedrick in reference to
his unhappiness; and she repeated them so persistently, yet always
with such apparent sincerity of belief that they were quotations
from him, and not her inventions, that the driven youth knew a
fear, sometimes, that the horrid things were actually of his own
perpetration.
The most withering of these was, "Torn from her I love by the
ruthless hand of a parent. . . ." It was not completed; Cora never
got any further with it, nor was there need: a howl of fury
invariably assured her of an effect as satisfactory as could
possibly have been obtained by an effort less impressionistic.
Life became a series of easy victories for Cora, and she made them
somehow the more deadly for Hedrick by not seeming to look at him
in his affliction, nor even to be aiming his way: he never could
tell when the next shot was coming. At the table, the ladies of
his family might be deep in dress, or discussing Mr. Madison's
slowly improving condition, when Cora, with utter irrelevance,
would sigh, and, looking sadly into her coffee, murmur, "Ah,
_fond_ mem'ries!" or, "_Why_ am I haunted by the dead past?" or,
the dreadful, "Torn from her I love by the ruthless hand of a
parent. . . ."
There was compassion in Laura's eyes and in his mother's, but Cora
was irresistible, and they always ended by laughing in spite of
themselves; and though they pleaded for Hedrick in private, their
remonstrances proved strikingly ineffective. Hedrick was the only
person who had ever used the high hand with Cora: she found
repayment too congenial. In the daytime he could not go in the
front yard, but Cora's window would open and a tenderly smiling
Cora lean out to call affectionately, "Don't walk on the
grass--darling little boy!" Or, she would nod happily to him and
begin to sing:
"Oh come beloved, love let me press thee,
While I caress thee
In one long kiss, Lolita. . . . "
One terror still hung over him. If it fell--as it might at any
fatal moment--then the utmost were indeed done upon him; and this
apprehension bathed his soul in night. In his own circle of
congenial age and sex he was, by virtue of superior bitterness and
precocity of speech, a chief--a moral castigator, a satirist of
manners, a creator of stinging nicknames; and many nourished
unhealed grievances which they had little hope of satisfying
against him; those who attempted it invariably departing with more
to avenge than they had brought with them. Let these once know
what Cora knew. . . . The vision was unthinkable!
It was Cora's patent desire to release the hideous item, to spread
the scandal broadcast among his fellows--to ring it from the
school-bells, to send it winging on the hot winds of Hades! The
boys had always liked his yard and the empty stable to play in,
and the devices he now employed to divert their activities
elsewhere were worthy of a great strategist. His energy and an
abnormal ingenuity accomplished incredible things: school had been
in session several weeks and only one boy had come within
conversational distance of Cora;--him Hedrick bore away bodily, in
simulation of resistless high spirits, a brilliant exhibition of
stagecraft.
And then Cora's friend, Mrs. Villard, removed her son Egerton from
the private school he had hitherto attended, and he made his
appearance in Hedrick's class, one morning at the public school.
Hedrick's eye lighted with a savage gleam; timidly the first joy
he had known for a thousand years crept into his grim heart. After
school, Egerton expiated a part of Cora's cruelty. It was a very
small part, and the exploit no more than infinitesimally soothing
to the conqueror, but when Egerton finally got home he was no
sight for a mother.
Thus Hedrick wrought his own doom: Mrs. Villard telephoned to
Cora, and Cora went immediately to see her.
It happened to Hedrick that he was late leaving home the next
morning. His entrance into his classroom was an undeniable
sensation, and within ten minutes the teacher had lost all control
of the school. It became necessary to send for the principal.
Recess was a frantic nightmare for Hedrick, and his homeward
progress at noon a procession of such uproarious screamers as were
his equals in speed. The nethermost depths were reached when an
ignoble pigtailed person he had always trodden upon flat-footed
screamed across the fence from next door, as he reached fancied
sanctuary in his own backyard:
"Kiss me some _more_, darling little boy!"
This worm, established upon the fence opposite the conservatory
windows, and in direct view from the table in the dining-room,
shrieked the accursed request at short intervals throughout the
luncheon hour. The humour of childhood is sometimes almost
intrusive.
And now began a life for Hedrick which may be rather painfully but
truthfully likened to a prolongation of the experiences of a rat
that finds itself in the middle of a crowded street in daylight:
there is plenty of excitement but no pleasure. He was pursued,
harried, hounded from early morning till nightfall, and even in
his bed would hear shrill shouts go down the sidewalk from the
throats of juvenile fly-by-nights: "Oh dar-ling lit-oh darling
lit-oh _lit_-le boy, _lit_-le boy, kiss me some _more_!" And one
day he overheard a remark which strengthened his growing
conviction that the cataclysm had affected the whole United
States: it was a teacher who spoke, explaining to another a
disturbance in the hall of the school. She said, behind her hand:
"_He kissed an idiot_."
Laura had not even remotely foreseen the consequences of her
revelation, nor, indeed, did she now properly estimate their
effect upon Hedrick. She and her mother were both sorry for him,
and did what they could to alleviate his misfortunes, but there
was an inevitable remnant of amusement in their sympathy. Youth,
at war, affects stoicism but not resignation: in truth,
resignation was not much in Hedrick's line, and it would be far
from the fact to say that he was softened by his sufferings. He
brooded profoundly and his brightest thought was revenge. It was
not upon Cora that his chief bitterness turned. Cora had always
been the constant, open enemy: warfare between them was a regular
condition of life; and unconsciously, and without "thinking it
out," he recognized the naturalness of her seizing upon the
deadliest weapon against him that came to her hand. There was
nothing unexpected in that: no, the treachery, to his mind, lay in
the act of Laura, that non-combatant, who had furnished the
natural and habitual enemy with this scourge. At all times, and
with or without cause, he ever stood ready to do anything possible
for the reduction of Cora's cockiness, but now it was for the
taking-down of Laura and the repayment of her uncalled-for and
overwhelming assistance to the opposite camp that he lay awake
nights and kept his imagination hot. Laura was a serene person, so
neutral--outwardly, at least--and so little concerned for herself
in any matter he could bring to mind, that for purposes of revenge
she was a difficult proposition. And then, in a desperate hour, he
remembered her book.
Only once had he glimpsed it, but she had shown unmistakable
agitation of a mysterious sort as she wrote in it, and, upon
observing his presence, a prompt determination to prevent his
reading a word of what she had written. Therefore, it was
something peculiarly sacred and intimate. This deduction was
proved by the care she exercised in keeping the book concealed
from all eyes. A slow satisfaction began to permeate him: he made
up his mind to find that padlocked ledger.
He determined with devoted ardour that when he found it he would
make the worst possible use of it: the worst, that is, for Laura.
As for consequences to himself, he was beyond them. There is an
Irish play in which an old woman finds that she no longer fears
the sea when it has drowned the last of her sons; it can do
nothing more to her. Hedrick no longer feared anything.
The book was somewhere in Laura's room, he knew that; and there
were enough opportunities to search, though Laura had a way of
coming in unexpectedly which was embarrassing; and he suffered
from a sense of inadequacy when--on the occasion of his first new
attempt--he answered the casual inquiry as to his presence by
saying that he "had a headache." He felt there was something
indirect in the reply; but Laura was unsuspicious and showed no
disposition to be analytical. After this, he took the precaution
to bring a school-book with him and she often found the boy seated
quietly by her west window immersed in study: he said he thought
his headaches came from his eyes and that the west light "sort of
eased them a little."
The ledger remained undiscovered, although probably there has
never been a room more thoroughly and painstakingly searched,
without its floor being taken up and its walls torn down. The most
mysterious, and, at the same time, the most maddening thing about
it was the apparent simplicity of the task. He was certain that
the room contained the book: listening, barefooted, outside the
door at night, he had heard the pen scratching. The room was as
plain as a room can be, and small. There was a scantily filled
clothes-press; he had explored every cubic inch of it. There was
the small writing table with one drawer; it held only some
note-paper and a box of pen-points. There was a bureau; to his
certain knowledge it contained no secret whatever. There were a
few giltless chairs, and a white "wash-stand," a mere basin and
slab with exposed plumbing. Lastly, there was the bed, a very
large and ugly "Eastlake" contrivance; he had acquired a close
acquaintance with all of it except the interior of the huge
mattress itself, and here, he finally concluded, must of necessity
be the solution. The surface of the mattress he knew to be
unbroken; nevertheless the book was there. He had recently
stimulated his deductive powers with a narrative of French
journalistic sagacity in a similar case; and he applied French
reasoning. The ledger existed. It was somewhere in the room. He
had searched everything except the interior of the mattress. The
ledger was in that interior.
The exploration thus become necessary presented some difficulties.
Detection in the act would involve explanations hard to invent; it
would not do to say he was looking for his knife; and he could not
think of any excuse altogether free from a flavour of insincerity.
A lameness beset them all and made them liable to suspicion; and
Laura, once suspicious, might be petty enough to destroy the book,
and so put it out of his power forever. He must await the right
opportunity, and, after a racking exercise of patience, at last he
saw it coming.
Doctor Sloane had permitted his patient to come down stairs for an
increasing interval each day. Mr. Madison crept, rather than
walked, leaning upon his wife and closely attended by Miss Peirce.
He spoke with difficulty and not clearly; still, there was a
perceptible improvement, and his family were falling into the
habit of speaking of him as almost well. On that account, Mrs.
Madison urged her daughters to accept an invitation from the
mother of the once courtly Egerton Villard. It was at breakfast
that the matter was discussed.
"Of course Cora must go," Laura began, "but----"
"But nothing!" interrupted Cora. "How would it look if I went and
you didn't? Everybody knows papa's almost well, and they'd think
it silly for us to give up the first real dance since last spring
on that account; yet they're just spiteful enough, if I went and
you stayed home, to call me a `girl of no heart.' Besides," she
added sweetly, "we ought to go to show Mrs. Villard we aren't hurt
because Egerton takes so little notice of poor Hedrick."
Hedrick's lips moved silently, as in prayer.
"I'd rather not," said Laura. "I doubt if I'd have a very good
time."
"You would, too," returned her sister, decidedly. "The men like to
dance with you; you dance every bit as well as I do, and that
black lace is the most becoming dress you ever had. Nobody ever
remembers a black dress, anyway, unless it's cut very
conspicuously, and yours isn't. I can't go without you; they love
to say nasty things about me, and you're too good a sister to give
'em this chance, you old dear." She laughed and nodded
affectionately across the table at Laura. "You've got to go!"
"Yes, it would be nicer," said the mother. And so it was settled.
It was simultaneously settled in Hedrick's mind that the night of
the dance should mark his discovery of the ledger. He would have
some industrious hours alone with the mysterious mattress, safe
from intrusion.
Meekly he lifted his eyes from his plate. "I'm glad you're going,
sister Laura," he said in a gentle voice. "I think a change will
do you good."
"Isn't it wonderful," exclaimed Cora, appealing to the others to
observe him, "what an improvement a disappointment in love can
make in deportment?"
For once, Hedrick only smiled.