"MY BROTHER BASIL WAS DIFFERENT!"
In the morning Utterly sought Thomasina early. He looked about her
beautiful room and out into the quiet garden and his hopes rose. Here
was atmosphere! If he had only seen Miss Davis first, he might have
saved a great deal of time. He had accounted to himself for her sudden
silence the evening before. Mrs. Lister was within hearing and her
morbid attitude toward the memory of her brother was doubtless known to
her friends. He had brought with him the copies of "Willard's Magazine"
and had laid them on the table beside him.
Thomasina, cool and pretty in a white dress, sat in a winged chair
inside her garden door and rested her slippered feet on a footstool. The
excitement had disappeared from her brown eyes, and she had evidently
slept in the few hours which she had allowed herself.
Utterly, who arrived with such high hopes, went away in anger. Thomasina
either would or could tell him nothing; insisted, indeed, that there was
nothing to tell.
"He was brighter than other people and he did things in a different
way--if Mrs. Scott really thinks he was 'wild' as you say, that is the
source of her impression. But she is a newcomer, and--" Thomasina
hesitated, flushed, and then said exactly what she had determined not to
say--"if it were not for her husband's position she would be entirely
outside the circle in which Basil Everman moved."
"But Mrs. Lister does not speak of him frankly; there's no gainsaying
that!"
"I dare say she didn't approve of everything he said or did. Few sisters
do wholly approve of their brothers. The style of Basil's writing would
probably not have been appreciated by one brought up on Maria Edgeworth.
But she loved him with her whole soul. Did you ever read Maria
Edgeworth, Mr. Utterly? Do you know about 'Rosamund and the Purple
Jar'?"
Utterly brushed Maria Edgeworth aside. He was certain that while Mrs.
Lister had risen up like a stone wall against him, this person was
laughing at him.
"Did Basil Everman come here?"
"A thousand times. I chased him under the piano usually. He was a very
dignified, polite little boy, and I was a very undignified and impolite
little girl."
"Miss Davis--" Utterly moved impatiently in his chair--"I have journeyed
all the way from New York to be told that this really extraordinary
young man, of whom this whole community ought to be proud, was chased
round the leg of the piano and that he had gray eyes. What do you
suppose would become of literary biography or of any sort of biography
if all the relatives and friends of talented men acted as you do?"
"I dare say it would be greatly improved," said Thomasina, smiling. "I
dare say many of the facts which make biographies interesting are
inventions."
The nearer Utterly approached the railroad station and the farther the
B. & N. train drew him from Waltonville, the more certain did he become
that he had been cheated.
During the days following his visit, Mrs. Lister told her husband more
about Basil. The facts came out gradually. To Dr. Lister the revelation
was almost incredible. It was not that the facts were so startling, but
that Mary Alcestis could have remained silent all these years of their
married life: she who was so open, so confiding, so dependent upon him
for advice and sympathy in everything.
As she proceeded with her story, he was still more astonished at her
amazing conclusions.
"Basil was different from other children even when he was a little boy.
I remember that my mother said that he used to require less sleep than
other children, and that when she would go to his crib, she would find
him lying awake and staring in the strangest way at nothing. She used to
be afraid when he was a little boy that he might go blind, he looked at
her so steadily. He never cried loudly like other children when he was
tired or hungry, but sat with great tears rolling down his cheeks. Even
as a little boy he liked to be alone. He was forever disappearing and
being found in queer places, such as a pew in the college church in the
dark. Sometimes he would sit alone in the dark tank room in the third
story. He said he had 'strange thoughts' there.
"As he grew older, he would not accommodate himself to the ways of the
household, would not come to meals regularly. He didn't seem to care
whether he ate or not. He didn't come to breakfast on time, and he would
not go to bed at the proper hour. Then my father said he could not have
any breakfast, and my father took his lamp away at nine o'clock.
"He would not study the subjects which were assigned to him. It was
almost intolerable to my father as president of the college. He would
not even open his mathematics. He said life was too short. I believe
that was the only time he ever said anything in answer to my father. He
took punishment without even crying out."
"Punishment!" repeated Dr. Lister.
Mrs. Lister gasped. "Once or twice my father punished him--corporally.
"Once he went away on a walking trip to the Ragged Mountains alone. We
didn't know where he had gone, and when people asked where he was, we
had to--to invent. My father used to try to pretend that it made no
difference, that he had done his best and that God would not hold him
responsible. But I used to hear him at his window at night. He used to
pray there.
"Basil used to go down and sit at the edge of the colored settlement and
hear them sing. It was as though he let himself dwell on all evil
things."
"Oh, mother, not evil things!" protested Dr. Lister.
"Some of the songs were evil. You could hear him singing them
afterwards in his room. They were songs that made you shiver."
"Did he ever drink or gamble, or do anything of that kind?"
"I don't know certainly. My father kept some things from me. I know,
though, that my father fetched him from the tavern once. He used to sing
sometimes as he came home. You could hear him coming from far away."
"But, mother, surely you can see in 'Bitter Bread' why he went walking
to the Ragged Mountains! He wanted new impressions, different
impressions from those of humdrum people. Did you never suspect that he
was trying to write? Did you never see anything he wrote? Didn't your
father realize that here was no ordinary boy, here no ordinary talent?"
"My father found one of his stories and read it. It was then that he
told Basil that he could not stay if he continued in his course. My
father really didn't mean that he was to go away, but he took him at his
word. Then we tried to find him again and again. His going away killed
my father. All the clues led nowhere. We didn't hear anything about him
till he was dead and buried. Then my father died." Mrs. Lister became
excited. "I feel as though it would kill me. I thought at the time I
couldn't live. Everything came at once."
"But, mother, it is all so long ago!"
"It is all as plain and dreadful as though it were yesterday. I have
been afraid for twenty years that people would find out about Basil,
that they would put this and that together. I have thought of Mrs.
Scott finding it out and of how she would talk and talk and of all the
tradespeople knowing, and--"
"But, my darling, what could they know?"
Mrs. Lister seemed suddenly to repent her vehemence.
"That he was alienated from us," said she. "Isn't that enough? And I
shall never get over grieving for him. If he had done as my father
wished he might have been here with us yet, and not be lying in his
grave!"
"But he did live intensely. He probably got more happiness out of a day
than ordinary mortals get out of a month. And you must learn not to
grieve. It's unnatural. You have Richard and all your friends--and me!"
Mrs. Lister was slow to take comfort. For several days she did little
but wander round the quiet house. It dawned upon her presently that the
house was unusually quiet and that she had seen little of Richard since
Commencement. In the thought of him she found at last her accustomed
consolation. He was normal; he would give her no hours of misery as
Basil had. He would do just what she wanted him to do--he was
_darling_--even to think of him healed.
But where was Richard? Probably at Thomasina's. Mrs. Lister put on her
bonnet and walked thither.
Richard was not there, and Thomasina in her trying way would talk of
nothing but his musical talent. She had an annoying fashion of assuming
that people agreed with her. When Mrs. Lister reached home, Richard had
not come.
During the absence of his wife, Dr. Lister had visited the third story
and looked through some of Basil's belongings. In the bottom of his
little trunk lay his books, his tiny Euripides and his Æschylus with
their poor print and their many notes. How strange it was to think of
these books as the pocket companions of a young man! How mad to pick
quarrels with any young man who went thus companioned!
The old bureau in which Mrs. Lister kept Basil's clothing was locked.
From it came still a faint, indeterminate, sickening odor of
disinfectants, and more faintly still that of tobacco. In the corner
stood his stick, that stick which he had doubtless carried with him into
the Ragged Mountains. Dr. Lister saw him suddenly, his cane held aloft
like a banner, his eyes shining. He felt a chilling sensation along his
spine. Then he smiled. Thus traditions of haunted rooms were
established. The boy was dead, _dead_. Dr. Lister said the word aloud.
The shrine was empty, deserted, forlorn.
For a long time he sat by the window in the dim, hot room. He meant to
shake off the vague, uncanny sensations which he felt; he said to
himself that he was too sober and too old for any such nonsense as this.
But while he sat still, his eyes now on the smooth white bed, now on a
faded picture of Basil's mother above the bed, now on the bureau with
its linen cover and its beadwork pincushion, his heart began to throb.
He remembered a picture of Basil somewhere in the house, a picture
brighter, younger, less severe than the one in the family album; he must
ask Mary Alcestis to find it for him. He saw the boy, eager, alert, with
a sort of strangeness about him as his sister had said, the unnatural
product of this puritanic household in which he was set to grow. He did
not like regular meals--even Dr. Lister had hated them in his youth. He
had not liked to go to bed when other people went or to get up when they
got up. Did any boy ever like it in the history of the world? His father
had once or twice punished him--"corporally." A portrait of Dr. Everman
hung in the library--it was difficult to fancy that delicate hand
clutching a weapon, especially a weapon brandished over his own flesh
and blood!
Dr. Lister was a placid person to whom the consciousness of immortality
was not ever present. He had had few personal griefs; he had had little
Christian experience; he was not quite certain, indeed, that immortality
was desirable. But now there swept into his heart, along with a
passionate grief for this forgotten lad, a passionate demand that he
should not be dead, but that he should have made up to him somewhere,
somehow, his loss of the sunshine and the pleasant breeze and the chance
to go on with what was unquestionably remarkable work.
He wished, though from quite another reason than Mrs. Lister's, that the
stranger had not come. The search could lead nowhere; the boy was dead
and all his unborn works had perished with him. The thought of him hurt,
and in spite of his admonitions to his wife, Dr. Lister mourned him.