OLD LETTERS
The week before Terence O'Brien's trial Watts had gone for one of his
rare visits to Eleanor Ledyard's home in its low valley of the Ramapos.
He found Pudge's home a tangle of lovely flowers, rich in smears of
gaudy color, and the long waves of canterbury bells bowed to him in
many tints as he paused at the white gate. Pudge, himself, ran down the
paved garden path, a small turtle in one hand, a little willow whistle
in the other. Both of these were proudly exhibited to his friend; also,
mysterious news, the guinea pigs had now several little guinea pigs of
their own and the doings of these piebald sacks of fur and ears were
rehearsed. Watts listened with interest.
"Mother's up in the garret," said Pudge. "She's looking at
letters--they make her cry."
Watts frowned. "They do, do they?"
"Yes, some more," the little fellow heaved a great sigh and took hold
of Watts' trouser leg. "I'm glad you've come; when you come Mother
doesn't cry as much; sometimes she looks in the glass and smiles."
"H'm," said the lawyer. "I say, Pudge, do you ever look in the glass?"
Pudge nodded. "When I'm playing Jack the Giant Killer, first I'm Jack
and then I look in the glass; and then I'm the two-headed giant and
then I look in the glass and try to see two heads on me."
Watts was interested. "A great game," he agreed. "Now suppose you shin
up my leg as far as my vest pocket and see what's in it."
Pudge immediately essayed the shin, his little fat form clinging and
groping. The vest pocket and its candy trove having been achieved, his
friend put him on a shoulder and galloped around the garden with him.
"I'm sailing," crowed Pudge with delight, "I'm flying through the air,
I'm a pigeon." The little hands ran into Watts' neck. "I like fathers,"
said Pudge with satisfaction.
"What!" gasped the lawyer. They paused by the water barrel and Watts,
looking in the smooth surface, saw himself with the little face looking
over his head.
"I like fathers," repeated Pudge; "they come and play with you like
this. Greddy Martin's father, he comes and plays with him like this."
"But, old scout, I'm not your father." Watts looked at himself in the
rain barrel, and a thought came to him. Guiltily he peered to see if it
was in his face.
"Oh, my father's dead," said little Pudge, practically. "But you are
something like Greddy's father, and so I don't care."
The rain barrel image wavered a little; the lawyer chuckled slightly.
"Huh!" he growled, "I'm not a father, I am a camel. I'm carrying you
on my back across the Algerian desert. Do you know what that is, Pudge?"
"Yes," said Pudge, "we have it for dinner."
"Well," smiled the "Camel," "I've carried you all across the Algerian
desert and this rain barrel is an oasis where you stop and pick a date
off this little peach tree." The two gravely picked imaginary dates
and drank out of the spring. "But you must be careful when I drink out
of the spring not to fall off my back into the rain barrel." The camel
pretended to drink from the oasis rain barrel with dramatic effects of
allowing the small rider to fall into it, and only by a miracle as it
seemed did Pudge escape that awful fate.
The little boy, his eyes shining, looked into his friend's face. "Oh!
we're having fun," he cried, "fun like other boys with their fathers. I
wish you'd come every day! I like you."
"Supposing," said Watts, "I was to pitch my tent just outside your gate
here, would Mother let me stay?"
Pudge deliberated. "She might, perhaps. I could ask her," and
hopefully, "Maybe she wouldn't say no; maybe she would say, 'We'll
see.'"
Watts smiled to himself. "How about food; my black horse and Friar
Tuck, my big dog, would you bring us things to eat every morning?"
Now Pudge was slightly taken back. "You could have half my breakfast,"
he promised as man to man, "and one graham cracker," but the thing grew
to present difficulties to Pudge; "and one baked apple on Sundays," he
faltered slowly.
"Nothing more?" The man standing there squeezed the fat legs hungrily.
"Why," said Watts, "you'd surely let me have a little milk"; this camel
was becoming a responsibility.
Now the desert rider hedged a little. "Well, you see," urged Pudge,
"Mother wants me to drink all my milk; you see," he explained, "the
more good milk I drink the more good boy I am."
"Sure." Watts slid him down to terra firma. "Well, I guess we can fix
it up some way. Now about this mother of yours; let's stand down here
and call up all sorts of nice names to her and see which one she'll
answer, which one will make her come down to us."
Together they stood, the tall man with the dark dappled hair and the
little shaver in blue linen, shouting such names as occurred to them up
to the little garret window.
"Lady of Shalot," called Watts; he cast an eye about the sweet summer
garden at a seat under a big horse-chestnut, "Lady of Shalot, come down
and speak to Pudge's Camel."
"Oh, Mrs. Pudge's mother," sang out the little fellow, "come down and
see my Watts Shipman."
"Blessed Damosel," Watts liked this game; his voice held something
whimsically tender.
"Dearest Honey-bug," this with a masculine swagger from Pudge. But
there was silence; no one appeared at the little window. Could the
lawyer have known it Eleanor Ledyard had stopped reading the letters;
an instinctive feminine hand went to her hair, then a curious look of
restlessness came to her face; she did not, however, go at once to the
window, though the calling voice of her little son drew her away from
the trunk full of letters.
"That doesn't bring her." Watts' voice, purposely raised, held the
note of injury. "Why, I don't believe she wants to see us," the lawyer
spoke distinctly. "I think she knows I've come around with my tiresome
questions. I say, Pudge, you know some people don't care for me the way
you do."
"But Mother does," came the little voice eagerly. "She has your picture
and she tells me long stories about----" A hand must have gone over
Pudge's mouth. Up-stairs listening, Eleanor Ledyard felt the slow color
burn in her face.
"Darling," she whispered softly--"you mustn't." Pudge's mother quailed.
Watts, holding the little fat hand, squeezed it; he looked up at the
window steadily and something mounted in his throat. He felt the
desolate sense of that trunk full of letters, of the woman patiently
trying to read and destroy and--forget. "Our names don't seem to
mean anything to that mother of yours. Let's try others, let's call
her--well--just the dearest ones we know."
"I have," said Pudge stoutly. "Mrs. Honey-bug is my dearest; I haven't
any more dear names."
"Well, I have," said the lawyer decidedly. "I haven't used up mine,
not all the dearest ones I could think of, only if I called up some,"
Watts was eyeing the window, "your mother might scold me."
Pudge looked serious, then he clasped anew the hand that held his.
"I don't believe she would," encouragingly; "you try it."
As they stood thus hand in hand, Watts, knowing that every word was
heard, essayed his mischievous worst.
"Dear Know-not-thine-own-heart," he called, "Lady of Denial"--"Heart's
Sorrow."
Her head, shining with its coils of brown hair, appeared at the little
oriel opening. Eleanor Ledyard smiled down her reproof. "Watts, how am
I to keep at this thing which you know I must do if you two don't go
away and amuse yourselves quietly; have I two children instead of one?"
"I wish you had----" murmured the man. He let something come into his
eyes that Eleanor had often seen there; the deep blue eyes with the
black lashes tried to meet this with womanly severity. Somehow this
morning the look failed. Watts Shipman had come far to see a fair
woman, and a spark of the tradition of the cavaliers and men of romance
was in his blood. A lady at an oriel window was a person who must
ultimately do one thing. Come down! The lawyer, his head bared, looked
belligerently back, and something in his gaze had made Eleanor turn
from the window quickly.
"I guess my mother is coming down," said little Pudge.
"She'd better," said Watts grimly, "or I'd have had to go and get her."
"But you couldn't," said Pudge earnestly, "not if she didn't want you
to." Watts turned and looked at the small, earnest face.
"Dear lamb, I know that," groaned the man. "I know that; don't rub it
in."
He called up to the empty window. "I say, Eleanor, please bring that
letter stuff down and read it here; if you've got to do the deadly
thing, let me help!"
So the morning ended by her coming down, and they sat very contentedly
with Pudge making paper dolls out of the envelopes his mother gave
him. Eleanor, with a sort of desperate haste, tore packet after packet
of letters. All those relating to her husband's early life she had
said she would set aside, "something for Pudge to have." Others she
tore up so vehemently, into such small pieces, that the lawyer, a mere
man, wondered, and little Pudge, carrying baskets of fragments to the
trash-box, thought how much Hop-o'-My-Thumb would have liked these
paper fragments for his trail back to his mother. That the fragments
were in reality part of the trail of a weak man, father to her sturdy
little boy, made a drift like falling snow in Eleanor's heart. One
letter she had saved to show to Watts, and as the lawyer read it his
eyebrows went up.
When at last Shipman put down the closely written sheets he bent his
deep gaze on her.
"Well, that does look as if----" he turned questioningly. "You surely
don't believe Ledyard is alive," incredulously, "Martin Ledyard, the
great scientific adventurer, alive and the world not know it!"
Eleanor nodded. "I've always believed it." Her eyes wandered to the
bloomy-purple of the line of mountains back of them. "Of course, I
never could understand why, if he was anywhere in the world, why, when
that happened he didn't come to us, to George and me. And after George
went, I wondered more but I've always felt him alive, in the world,
somewhere."
Watts was thoughtful. "He might have been afraid; he might have thought
it would hurt him some way, do you think that?"
"No," the woman lifted her head decidedly. "That's not a Ledyard trait.
Martin was as devoted to George as I--almost----" She shivered a little
on the word and the lawyer sadly watching her realized that that word
"almost" regulated the great gulf between the deep faith of a man's
loving, and the shattering blasts of a woman's power of sorrow. Eleanor
was silent a moment; then she said dreamily, "They adored each other at
college, camping, on expeditions, everywhere. Martin might have been
crushed by George's trouble, saddened beyond words, but he wouldn't
have deserted; he would have come to us if he could have!"
"But," the lawyer turned to the letter in his hand, "this chap says
that nearly all of the men in that West African expedition died of
smallpox. I remember that year; it was fearful along the Niger; there
was a lot of red tape and the Entente governments fought over whose job
it was to stamp the thing out. It swept the Congo, I know. They all
died, this chap Morrow says."
Eleanor Ledyard assented. "Nearly all, but they never accounted for
all. Tarrant, the man Martin loved so, went first; and after that
McCall, their surgeon; very bravely, I believe. Then the Southerner
who partly financed the thing, did you read that awful part where they
had to send them down the Niger in the canoes made of hollowed out
trees? Well, they and the natives say that six canoes came down and
that they burned all the smallpox victims in quick-lime. But, you see,
there was one letter from Martin himself, very distressed, out of West
Africa, at Monrovia, I think, as he waited to embark for England, and
he says--this letter, dated long after, sounds pretty nearly out of his
head--'they are all gone but me, and I was taken from the same canoe as
Tarrant. I was trying to paddle him down to a village for burial; he
had been dead four days when we got there, a putrid corpse! Tarrant, my
friend, my beloved brother-in-science.'"
For a long time there was silence. The man and woman sat staring at the
blue Ramapo as the strange scenes of the stricken men in the tropical
river drifted through their minds. At last Eleanor spoke: "And then
came 'George's Trial.'" Watts saw the terrible effort it was to her to
say the words, how she glanced at Pudge at her feet, and then, "George
went and Martin never came to me. Nobody came to me."
Watts sat there, the letter in his hand. "I came to you," he said
simply. She flashed him a look of passionate gratitude.
"As Christ might have," she said with equal simplicity.
The lawyer, half irritably, turned away. "I wish you'd drop that Christ
idea," he muttered. "I'm a man, I'm not a god. I am a man, and I want a
dear woman who doesn't want me."
She looked at him; her hands went out, her eyes soft, pleading. "Watts,
dear, I am always ready to come from gratitude; indeed, dear friend, I
would come trustingly ... in memory of what you did."
"No," he said firmly, "I want love, I don't want your trust and
gratitude, not even your dear hands and lips." His soul leaped into his
eyes, and he faced her implacably. "I want the thing I don't believe
George got, but which you won't let me have. I want you. Your whole
being, _you_, Eleanor."
She sat there like a person stunned. The thing that he had said went
to some hidden place in her and pulled aside a temple curtain; for
a moment her eyes flashed, outrage stiffened her form; then with a
dignity the man could not fathom, the woman who had been a wife looked
at him.
"I think," she said gently, "that you could not have meant to say that,
that you have forgotten yourself."
It was the veiled woman of ice. Watts knew her well. The man got up,
paced back and forth, his passionate heart pounding. Then he stood
before her. "I'm sorry," he said, "order me out of here if you want to;
I know I'm a cad." Watts, the self-controlled man of the world, felt
his lips tremble. "Order me out," he blurted clumsily. "I'm--I'm----"
But she looked up, smiling gravely, and took his hand. "Sit down, Watts
dear, don't be impatient and try," her dark blue eyes filled with
tears, "try to understand."
"I do," said the man miserably, "I do understand. I'm a hound, Eleanor."
With a sigh the lawyer turned back to the letter. "There ought to be
a search for Martin," he said thoughtfully. "What clues have you? Did
he wear any one ring or anything; was there any peculiarity about him,
scars or blemishes? Have you a photo of him?"
Eleanor could remember a very slight defect, a front tooth slightly
broken. "He had fine teeth," she said, "and that break was teasingly
noticeable." George Ledyard's widow took from the chain about her neck
a rather large old-fashioned locket which she drew up from beneath her
lace collar and silently she handed the thing to him. Its slight warmth
came to the man's fingers in a way that made him glance suddenly at
her, wondering at the calm, unconscious face. Keeping his thoughts down
as best he might, Shipman opened the side opposite from the reckless
face of George Ledyard, that face he had seen go through, at the
trial, every swift change of the reckless speculator and desperate
trapped man; he glanced for an instant upon the lips that Ledyard's
own wife had said, "Lured one until one was wrecked upon them." "With
such a face," thought Watts bitterly, "a man can beckon a woman down to
hell or up to heaven." Watts dared not look again at the wife drooping
there, her little boy's head against her knee. He turned to the other
side of the locket. Something, as he looked, rose like a finger post
in his heart; it pointed to a set of conditions, a tangled net of
human things he had recently known; but the lawyer did not instantly
recognize it, only slowly came the gradual shaping of curious mists,
and these settled in his mind like fog settling around the tops of
houses.
The other face was younger than George's, finer and firmer, singularly
a tempered man's face, free from recklessness, but with the look of
adventure and an illumined look of pure kindness and intelligence,
very unusual in a face so dominant and assured. The eyes, a little
wide apart, were set under brows of resolution; the build of chin and
cheek were of a spare sobriety; the lips, mobile and gracious, were a
scholar's lips.
"Do you suppose he's gray now, if he's alive? Same hair as George's?
No?"
Eleanor shook her head. "I don't believe hair like that can change,
the curious red chestnut; we used to think that the birds and animals
he tamed so easily came to him because he had that crest, a fine
glittering plumage like their own."
"He must have seen strange birds in West Africa," Watts said dreamily,
"strange men and things." The lawyer looked at her. "He might have
gone crazy," he said suddenly. "He may be shut up somewhere; have you
thought of that? The man's rotten cowardly, else why should he have
left you to face this alone?"
Her eyes, deep and misty, looked at him. "He loved George," she said
quietly; "he would have come if he could have; he loved George. Even
you," she looked at him a little childishly, "never did that."
Watts smiled at the feminine pettishness.
"No," he said gravely, "I just loved George's wife, and I do still, God
help me!"
She half rose; but his look held her. "I hoped not," she said almost
defiantly. "I hoped that that girl might have----"
Watts, however, steadily met her glance. "Sard Bogart," he said, "is,
well, she's----" he broke off, looking earnestly at his friend. "That
girl is going to need friends," said the lawyer decidedly. He handed
the locket back to Eleanor, and with a curious look, half awe, half
ache, saw it slip into its place. He stopped, something trivial on his
lips. He was glad at Eleanor's next remark.
"I wish I might help her." Her voice was calm, sympathetic.
The lawyer was a little dubious, a little uncertain. "I don't know;
I've told her about you," he hesitated. Eleanor half shrank and
Watts added coolly, "That you are my dearest friend." He stood up
thoughtfully. "Unless you are going to ask me to lunch, I must go. Are
you going to ask me to lunch?" he asked her.
The old drama began instantly between them. The masterful, pursuing man
and the retreating, doubting woman. The thing itself took hold of them,
but resolutely, like people tempered to the grave concerns of life,
they put it aside.
Eleanor shook her head. "I am not going to ask you," she said gently.
"Punishment, I suppose," murmured Watts.
There was a moment's silence. She also rose and he thought that in her
white gown with the rows of blue larkspur and the canterbury bells as
background she was a wondrous fair thing that had almost too much power
over him. The man's mind flew to the bright impulse of the girl they
spoke of. Eleanor saw this and her hand went out to his. "Bring Sard to
see me," she said it very kindly, "and that funny little Cousin Minga.
I used to see a good deal of the 'Mede and the Persian'; they are
dears." She looked at him, casting about for something that should give
him comfort. "Next week you take up the O'Brien case, don't you? Tell
me, has the boy any chance? Can you save him? Is it to be for life?"
Watts turned; he looked long and silently at the sun descending, at
all the colors and life of the flowers about them, at the mountains
standing like great blocks of sapphire beyond the green fields awash
with daisies. Suddenly, he pointed to a little cedar tree reaching its
infant head close by their side.
"How long do you think that little thing has been there?"
Mrs. Ledyard thought about two years. "It's so cunning; it's planted
itself. I haven't had the heart to have it taken out."
"When it is a big tree," said Shipman slowly, "and when his bones are
brittle and when only images of sin and failure and disease are graven
on his soul, Terence O'Brien will be called 'free.'"
"Free," she murmured; her eyes, fixed on her friend's, read anew that
greatest and deepest thing in him, the passion for humanity.
She saw him fighting for a boy as she had seen him fight for her own
husband; saw his stern face and iron gray head raised in its superb
appeal to the pity and understanding of the so-called "good" who
control the so-called "bad." Something surged up in the woman, a deep
something that was a triumph and a shame. "_I could make this man
happy_," her soul said. "I could make him happy!" Then into the strange
quietude of a wife's memory, she withdrew even as she gave him her hand
and eyes. She was a cold statue, a gracious being, a woman who had
known.
Pudge ran up. "Mother," the little blue figure shouted, "I've caught a
butterfly. He wiggles his wings; he doesn't like it; he wants to get
away."
The man and woman smiled. They showed Pudge the meaning of wings, the
reason things want to get away and in showing, they were tender of each
other. When the little orange and black fans again wavered against the
great wall, the blue vast of the morning sky, Pudge himself got the
sense of your true liberator!
"My, I like to let him go!" he breathed. He gazed a little wistfully
after his silken-fanned treasure, insisting stoutly, "I like to let him
go!" Pudge looked earnestly up into the two faces, smiling at him. "I
want everything to go free," said Pudge, "except guinea pigs!"
Watts waited a moment; then he took Eleanor's hand in both of his. He
waited until she lifted her eyes to him. "I shall not come again," he
said very gently, "until--you send for me."
She was silent. "If I am ever to come," said the man, "send me only the
message that you need me."
He turned and was gone.