"ARRIVED SAFE; WELL"
As the door closed behind Sherrill, Alan went over to the dresser and
picked up the key which Sherrill had left. It was, he saw, a flat key
of a sort common twenty years before, not of the more recent corrugated
shape. As he looked at it and then away from it, thoughtfully turning
it over and over in his fingers, it brought no sense of possession to
him. Sherrill had said the house was his, had been given him by his
father; but that fact could not actually make it his in his
realization. He could not imagine himself owning such a house or what
he would do with it if it were his. He put the key, after a moment, on
the ring with two or three other keys he had, and dropped them into his
pocket; then he crossed to a chair and sat down.
He found, as he tried now to disentangle the events of the afternoon,
that from them, and especially from his last interview with Sherrill,
two facts stood out most clearly. The first of these related more
directly to his father--to Benjamin Corvet. When such a man as
Benjamin Corvet must have been, disappears--when, without warning and
without leaving any account of himself he vanishes from among those who
knew him--the persons most closely interested pass through three stages
of anxiety. They doubt first whether the disappearance is real and
whether inquiry on their part will not be resented; they waken next to
realization that the man is actually gone, and that something must be
done; the third stage is open and public inquiry. Whatever might be
the nature of the information Sherrill was withholding from him, Alan
saw that its effect on Sherrill had been to shorten very greatly
Sherrill's time of doubt as to Corvet's actual disappearance. The
Sherrills--particularly Sherrill himself--had been in the second stage
of anxiety when Alan came; they had been awaiting Alan's arrival in the
belief that Alan could give them information which would show them what
must be "done" about Corvet. Alan had not been able to give them this
information; but his coming, and his interview with Sherrill, had
strongly influenced Sherrill's attitude. Sherrill had shrunk, still
more definitely and consciously, after that, from prying into the
affairs of his friend; he had now, strangely, almost withdrawn himself
from the inquiry, and had given it over to Alan.
Sherrill had spoken of the possibility that something might have
"happened" to Covert; but it was plain he did not believe he had met
with actual violence. He had left it to Alan to examine Corvet's
house; but he had not urged Alan to examine it at once; he had left the
time of the examination to be determined by Alan. This showed clearly
that Sherrill believed--perhaps had sufficient reason for
believing--that Corvet had simply "gone away." The second of Alan's
two facts related even more closely and personally to Alan himself.
Corvet, Sherrill had said, had married in 1889. But Sherrill in long
knowledge of his friend, had shown firm conviction that there had been
no mere vulgar liaison in Corvet's life. Did this mean that there
might have been some previous marriage of Alan's father--some marriage
which had strangely overlapped and nullified his public marriage? In
that case, Alan could be, not only in fact but legally, Corvet's son;
and such things as this, Alan knew, had sometimes happened, and had
happened by a strange combination of events, innocently for all
parties. Corvet's public separation from his wife, Sherrill had said,
had taken place in 1897, but the actual separation between them might,
possibly, have taken place long before that.
Alan resolved to hold these questions in abeyance; he would not accept
or grant the stigma which his relationship to Corvet seemed to attach
to himself until it had been proved to him. He had come to Chicago
expecting, not to find that there had never been anything wrong, but to
find that the wrong had been righted in some way at last. But what was
most plain of all to him, from what Sherrill had told him, was that the
wrong--whatever it might be--had not been righted; it existed still.
The afternoon had changed swiftly into night; dusk had been gathering
during his last talk with Sherrill, so that he hardly had been able to
see Sherrill's face, and just after Sherrill had left him, full dark
had come. Alan did not know how long he had been sitting in the
darkness thinking out these things; but now a little clock which had
been ticking steadily in the blackness tinkled six. Alan heard a knock
at his door, and when it was repeated, he called, "Come in."
The light which came in from the hall, as the door was opened, showed a
man servant. The man, after a respectful inquiry, switched on the
light. He crossed into the adjoining room--a bedroom; the room where
Alan was, he thought, must be a dressing room, and there was a bath
between. Presently the man reappeared, and moved softly about the
room, unpacking Alan's suitcase. He hung Alan's other suit in the
closet on hangers; he put the linen, except for one shirt, in the
dresser drawers, and he put Alan's few toilet things with the
ivory-backed brushes and comb and other articles on the dressing stand.
Alan watched him queerly; no one except himself ever had unpacked
Alan's suitcase before; the first time he had gone away to college--it
was a brand new suitcase then--"mother" had packed it; after that first
time, Alan had packed and unpacked it. It gave him an odd feeling now
to see some one else unpacking his things. The man, having finished
and taken everything out, continued to look in the suitcase for
something else.
"I beg pardon, sir," he said finally, "but I cannot find your buttons."
"I've got them on," Alan said. He took them out and gave them to the
valet with a smile; it was good to have something to smile at, if it
was only the realization that he never had thought before of any one's
having more than one set of buttons for ordinary shirts. Alan
wondered, with a sort of trepidation, whether the man would expect to
stay and help him dress; but he only put the buttons in the clean shirt
and reopened the dresser drawers and laid out a change of things.
"Is there anything else, sir?" he asked.
"Nothing, thank you," Alan said.
"I was to tell you, sir, Mr. Sherrill is sorry he cannot be at home to
dinner to-night. Mrs. Sherrill and Miss Sherrill will be here. Dinner
is at seven, sir."
Alan dressed slowly, after the man had gone; and at one minute before
seven he went down-stairs.
There was no one in the lower hall and, after an instant of
irresolution and a glance into the empty drawing-room, he turned into
the small room at the opposite side of the hall. A handsome, stately,
rather large woman, whom he found there, introduced herself to him
formally as Mrs. Sherrill.
He knew from Sherrill's mention of the year of their marriage that Mrs.
Sherrill's age must be about forty-five, but if he had not known this,
he would have thought her ten years younger. In her dark eyes and her
carefully dressed, coal-black hair, and in the contour of her youthful
looking, handsome face, he could not find any such pronounced
resemblance to her daughter as he had seen in Lawrence Sherrill. Her
reserved, yet almost too casual acceptance of Alan's presence, told him
that she knew all the particulars about himself which Sherrill had been
able to give; and as Constance came down the stairs and joined them
half a minute later, Alan was certain that she also knew.
Yet there was in her manner toward Alan a difference from that of her
mother--a difference which seemed almost opposition. Not that Mrs.
Sherrill's was unfriendly or critical; rather, it was kind with the
sort of reserved kindness which told Alan, almost as plainly as words,
that she had not been able to hold so charitable a conviction in regard
to Corvet's relationship with Alan as her husband held, but that she
would be only the more considerate to Alan for that. It was this
kindness which Constance set herself to oppose, and which she opposed
as reservedly and as subtly as it was expressed. It gave Alan a
strange, exhilarating sensation to realize that, as the three talked
together, this girl was defending him.
Not him alone, of course, or him chiefly. It was Benjamin Corvet, her
friend, whom she was defending primarily; yet it was Alan too; and all
went on without a word about Benjamin Corvet or his affairs being
spoken.
Dinner was announced, and they went into the great dining-room, where
the table with its linen, silver, and china gleamed under shaded
lights. The oldest and most dignified of the three men servants who
waited upon them in the dining-room Alan thought must be a butler--a
species of creature of whom Alan had heard but never had seen; the
other servants, at least, received and handed things through him, and
took their orders from him. As the silent-footed servants moved about,
and Alan kept up a somewhat strained conversation with Mrs. Sherrill--a
conversation in which no reference to his own affairs was yet made--he
wondered whether Constance and her mother always dressed for dinner in
full evening dress as now, or whether they were going out. A word from
Constance to her mother told him this latter was the case, and while it
did not give complete answer to his internal query, it showed him his
first glimpse of social engagements as a part of the business of life.
In spite of the fact that Benjamin Corvet, Sherrill's close friend, had
disappeared--or perhaps because he had disappeared and, as yet, it was
not publicly known--their and Sherrill's engagements had to be
fulfilled.
What Sherrill had told Alan of his father had been iterating itself
again and again in Alan's thoughts; now he recalled that Sherrill had
said that his daughter believed that Corvet's disappearance had had
something to do with her. Alan had wondered at the moment how that
could be; and as he watched her across the table and now and then
exchanged a comment with her, it puzzled him still more. He had
opportunity to ask her when she waited with him in the library, after
dinner was finished and her mother had gone up-stairs; but he did not
see then how to go about it.
"I'm sorry," she said to him, "that we can't be home to-night; but
perhaps you would rather be alone?"
He did not answer that.
"Have you a picture here, Miss Sherrill, of--my father?" he asked.
"Uncle Benny had had very few pictures taken; but there is one here."
She went into the study, and came back with a book open at a half-tone
picture of Benjamin Corvet. Alan took it from her and carried it
quickly closer to the light. The face that looked up to him from the
heavily glazed page was regular of feature, handsome in a way, and
forceful. There were imagination and vigor of thought in the broad,
smooth forehead; the eyes were strangely moody and brooding; the mouth
was gentle, rather kindly; it was a queerly impelling, haunting face.
This was his father! But, as Alan held the picture, gazing down upon
it, the only emotion which came to him was realization that he felt
none. He had not expected to know his father from strangers on the
street; but he had expected, when told that his father was before him,
to feel through and through him the call of a common blood. Now,
except for consternation at his own lack of feeling, he had no emotion
of any sort; he could not attach to this man, because he bore the name
which some one had told him was his father's, the passions which, when
dreaming of his father, he had felt.
As he looked up from the picture to the girl who had given it to him,
startled at himself and believing she must think his lack of feeling
strange and unnatural, he surprised her gazing at him with wetness in
her eyes. He fancied at first it must be for his father, and that the
picture had brought back poignantly her fears. But she was not looking
at the picture, but at him; and when his eyes met hers, she quickly
turned away.
His own eyes filled, and he choked. He wanted to thank her for her
manner to him in the afternoon, for defending his father and him, as
she had at the dinner table, and now for this unplanned, impulsive
sympathy when she saw how he had not been able to feel for this man who
was his father and how he was dismayed by it. But he could not put his
gratitude in words.
A servant's voice came from the door, startling him.
"Mrs. Sherrill wishes you told she is waiting, Miss Sherrill."
"I'll be there at once." Constance, also, seemed startled and
confused; but she delayed and looked back to Alan.
"If--if we fail to find your father," she said, "I want to tell you
what a man he was."
"Will you?" Alan asked. "Will you?"
She left him swiftly, and he heard her mother's voice in the hall. A
motor door closed sharply, after a minute or so; then the house door
closed. Alan stood still a moment longer, then, remembering the book
which he held, he drew a chair up to the light, and read the short, dry
biography of his father printed on the page opposite the portrait. It
summarized in a few hundred words his father's life. He turned to the
cover of the book and read its title, "Year Book of the Great Lakes,"
and a date of five years before; then he looked through it. It
consisted in large part, he saw, merely of lists of ships, their kind,
their size, the date when they were built, and their owners. Under
this last head he saw some score of times the name "Corvet, Sherrill
and Spearman." There was a separate list of engines and boilers, and
when they had been built and by whom. There was a chronological table
of events during the year upon the lakes. Then he came to a part
headed "Disasters of the Year," and he read some of them; they were
short accounts, drily and unfeelingly put, but his blood thrilled to
these stories of drowning, freezing, blinded men struggling against
storm and ice and water, and conquering or being conquered by them.
Then he came to his father's picture and biography once more and, with
it, to pictures of other lakemen and their biographies. He turned to
the index and looked for Sherrill's name, and then Spearman's; finding
they were not in the book, he read some of the other ones.
There was a strange similarity, he found, in these biographies, among
themselves as well as to that of his father. These men had had, the
most of them, no tradition of seamanship, such as Sherrill had told him
he himself had had. They had been sons of lumbermen, of farmers, of
mill hands, miners, or fishermen. They had been very young for the
most part, when they had heard and answered the call of the lakes--the
ever-swelling, fierce demand of lumber, grain, and ore for outlet; and
they had lived hard; life had been violent, and raw, and brutal to
them. They had sailed ships, and built ships, and owned and lost them;
they had fought against nature and against man to keep their ships, and
to make them profitable, and to get more of them. In the end a few, a
very few comparatively, had survived; by daring, by enterprise, by
taking great chances, they had thrust their heads above those of their
fellows; they had come to own a half dozen, a dozen, perhaps a score of
bottoms, and to have incomes of fifty, of a hundred, of two hundred
thousand dollars a year.
Alan shut the book and sat thoughtful. He felt strongly the immensity,
the power, the grandeur of all this; but he felt also its violence and
its fierceness. What might there not have been in the life of his
father who had fought up and made a way for himself through such things?
The tall clock in the hall struck nine. He got up and went out into
the hall and asked for his hat and coat. When they had been brought
him, he put them on and went out.
The snow had stopped some time before; a strong and increasing wind had
sprung up, which Alan, with knowledge of the wind across his prairies,
recognized as an aftermath of the greater storm that had produced it;
for now the wind was from the opposite direction--from the west. He
could see from the Sherrills' door step, when he looked toward the
lighthouse at the harbor mouth winking red, white, red, white, at him,
that this offshore wind was causing some new commotion and upheaval
among the ice-floes; they groaned and labored and fought against the
opposing pressure of the waves, under its urging.
He went down the steps and to the corner and turned west to Astor
Street. When he reached the house of his father, he stopped under a
street-lamp, looking up at the big, stern old mansion questioningly.
It had taken on a different look for him since he had heard Sherrill's
account of his father; there was an appeal to him that made his throat
grow tight, in its look of being unoccupied, in the blank stare of its
unlighted windows which contrasted with the lighted windows in the
houses on both sides, and in the slight evidences of disrepair about
it. He waited many minutes, his hand upon the key in his pocket; yet
he could not go in, but instead walked on down the street, his thoughts
and feelings in a turmoil.
He could not call up any sense that the house was his, any more than he
had been able to when Sherrill had told him of it. He own a house on
that street! Yet was that in itself any more remarkable than that he
should be the guest, the friend of such people as the Sherrills? No
one as yet, since Sherrill had told him he was Corvet's son, had called
him by name; when they did, what would they call him? Alan Conrad
still? Or Alan Corvet?
He noticed, up a street to the west, the lighted sign of a drug store
and turned up that way; he had promised, he had recollected now, to
write to ... those in Kansas--he could not call them "father" and
"mother" any more--and tell them what he had discovered as soon as he
arrived. He could not tell them that, but he could write them at least
that he had arrived safely and was well. He bought a postcard in the
drug store, and wrote just, "Arrived safely; am well" to John Welton in
Kansas. There was a little vending machine upon the counter, and he
dropped in a penny and got a box of matches and put them in his pocket.
He mailed the card and turned back to Astor Street; and he walked more
swiftly now, having come to his decision, and only shot one quick look
up at the house as he approached it. With what had his father shut
himself up within that house for twenty years? And was it there still?
And was it from that that Benjamin Corvet had fled? He saw no one in
the street, and was certain no one was observing him as, taking the key
from his pocket, he ran up the steps and unlocked the outer door.
Holding this door open to get the light from the street lamp, he fitted
the key into the inner door; then he closed the outer door. For fully
a minute, with fast beating heart and a sense of expectation of he knew
not what, he kept his hand upon the key before he turned it; then he
opened the door and stepped into the dark and silent house.