THE BIRTH OF A SOUL
September was nearly out. Mrs. Barrimore and Mr. Burns had been to
Scotland, where the latter had a shooting-box situated amid magnificent
scenery. They had returned to Hawk’s Nest browned and invigorated.
During their absence many things had happened. The coming out of “Wings
and Winds” was not among their number. The book was to see the light in
November.
One of the things that had happened was a great change in the
circumstances of Eweretta Alvin.
Unconscious actors in this drama of the young Canadian’s life had
practically brought about this change.
Disobedient to Mrs. Barrimore’s gentle direction that Phyllis should
not go alone to the bungalow at Gissing, that young woman had been
there constantly during the absence of her friends.
Eweretta, who had had no drugs given to her from the time that she and
Mrs. Le Breton became friends, had time after time seen Phyllis with
her Philip, apparently on very intimate terms. Added to this, Mattie,
the servant in whom she had once confided, and who had not believed her
story, told her that Pierre had heard at Pickett’s Farm that young Mr.
Barrimore was engaged to Miss Lane.
Clearly, Philip--Philip the ardent lover of other days--had forgotten.
This knowledge did not prostrate the young Canadian as might have been
expected. She was proud, proud and fearless, when herself, unaffected
by drugs.
She accepted the inevitable with amazing outward calm, and instantly
decided on her course of action.
Thomas Alvin, since that night when he had struck the girl, had been
very much ashamed of himself. Also, during his drunken bout, he had
firmly believed he had seen his brother’s ghost, the father of the
injured girl, which had left a great fear upon him. Consequently, he
had tried in his rough way to be kind to his niece.
Eweretta had a sweet and gentle nature despite her pride, and readily
forgave an injury, so she had not held herself aloof from her uncle.
This made the carrying-out of the plan she now conceived the easier.
She had been waiting near the entrance to the enclosed wood one morning
for her uncle to come out.
He was still at work constructing something in the wood. No one knew
what the thing was, and he locked the gate which led from the garden
carefully after him always.
About one o’clock Thomas Alvin came out, and seeing his niece waiting,
looked disconcerted.
“I want to talk with you for a few minutes, uncle,” Eweretta said in a
low voice, which lacked all emotion.
Alvin had become accustomed to Eweretta’s normal condition by now. He
concluded that she no longer struggled in an unequal contest, and had
succumbed to the inevitable. He was utterly unprepared, however, for
what followed.
He stood still, waiting for her to speak.
“Let me say all I have to say without interruption,” Eweretta began.
“To begin with, I accept the position in which you have placed me;
I shall trouble you no more to let me take my rightful place in the
world. All that would have made it of value to me is gone. Philip
Barrimore has consoled himself. For the future I am Aimée Le Breton.
But I ask you to let me be free as other girls to come and go. I
ask you to do away with the stigma that rests on me as poor Aimée’s
substitute. I do not wish to be treated as one mentally deranged. Give
it out that I have recovered if you will, but give me at least a chance
to make my life bearable. In return, I promise not to betray you.”
Alvin was astounded.
“Do you mean this, Eweretta? You will never attempt to--”
“I have already told you,” interrupted Eweretta. “Let me come and go as
other girls; it is all I ask. Why should I be kept a prisoner? You have
my fortune, and I shall not interfere with you.”
Alvin stared at the girl as if he could not believe his senses. At last
he spoke.
“It shall be as you say, Eweretta,” he said. “But if you play me
false--well, you know me.”
“I shall not play you false,” she said simply, “and from now never use
the name Eweretta again, or you will betray _yourself_.”
As she spoke she glanced over the garden hedge.
“Look,” she said, “and you will see why I must never rise from the
dead.”
Philip Barrimore and Phyllis Lane were crossing the field, walking
towards Pickett’s Farm. Phyllis had her arm linked through Philip’s.
Then Alvin understood.
Perhaps the first real pity he had ever felt for a human creature
possessed him just then. From his earliest infancy his hand had been
against everyone and everyone’s hand against him. Ill-luck had dogged
his every step and embittered him. He had come to think himself a sport
of the gods. All tenderness had been strangled in its birth. “Tooth and
claw, tooth and claw,” he had told himself; there was nothing else for
him. And he had stolen this girl’s fortune. He had wrecked her life. He
had treated her brutally.
As her hand indicated the two young people talking together
confidentially as if lovers, his heart smote him.
Eweretta, pale and beautiful, calm as one who knows there is nothing
left to hope for, moved him as he had never before been moved. He also
felt an intense self-pity. If anyone had ever loved him as Eweretta had
loved that man, he might not have been what he was.
“Eweretta, I am--sorry for you,” was all he found to say.
But the tone in which he spoke was one the girl had never before heard
from him.
With ready sympathy she extended her hand to the man who had so wronged
her.
“No! no!” he exclaimed. “I can’t! Eweretta, I have been a brute to you.”
“Let us forget it, uncle. Let us forget it all,” cried the girl,
genuinely touched. “You never had a chance. You never had a friend. I
will care for you.”
Never in the whole course of his life had Thomas Alvin had sympathy
shown him before, and now it came from his victim--the girl he had
defrauded of all.
It was as if a soul had agonized birth in him at that moment.
Such a divine forgiveness!
The thought of it filled him with a tempest of self-accusation, of
regret, of new-born devotion.
“Eweretta, I will make a clean breast of it. I will give up all. I will
tell Philip Barrimore. He will come back to you!” he exclaimed.
The girl’s face took on a look of pain.
“No, uncle, no,” she said very gently. “I would not again be Eweretta.
I would not spoil the happiness of those two. Philip believes me dead.
Let him go on believing it. Let him live his life. Don’t you see that
if Philip knew that I was myself, and not Aimée, he would feel obliged
to----Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! He has taught himself to forget.
We could never be what we were to each other. And how could I make that
other girl suffer what I have suffered? As to the money, I give it you
freely. I live here. I have all I want except my freedom. I want to go
out--to be as others.”
“And by heaven you shall!” exclaimed Alvin.
It was no passing emotion, this complete change of front in Alvin.
To the pariah, the outcast, who receives sympathy, comes a devotion
unimaginable to those who have always had friends. From that moment
Alvin became possessed of a dog-like devotion to Eweretta.
Mrs. Le Breton could not in the least understand it. She was not a
woman of great intelligence. To her mind Thomas Alvin had been born not
merely unlucky, but a “bad lot.” But to her mind his brother had been
a worse man than he. John Alvin had not been born an unlucky number.
He had succeeded in life. But what had he been? Had he not left her
and her child to starve? Had not his abandonment of herself in her
extremity caused poor Aimée to be what she had been?
The chance words of a midwife had cursed Thomas Alvin. When he had been
born, this woman had said, “The thirteenth child is always unlucky,”
and the silly mother had harped upon it, in the boy’s hearing, harped
on it constantly, till the boy had come to believe in it. From a very
early age he had decided that nothing he did greatly mattered, as he
was predestined to ill-luck. Neither he nor anyone else seemed to
realize that it was his attitude, his acceptance of a superstition that
accounted for the ill-luck that had ever pursued him.
Thomas Alvin had been bitterly envious of his brother John. All that
John touched had prospered. John had grown rich. Yet he had not been
immaculate. He had betrayed a trusting woman. He had forsaken her and
the child of their guilt. The woman had had to mend shoes to keep life
in herself and her half-witted daughter.
When Thomas had applied to his brother for a little help, after he had
been suffering from frost-bite, John had spurned him from the door.
Yet John had the good opinion of all. John had no doubt very good
reasons for refusing to help his good-for-nothing brother. (The story
of Mrs. Le Breton had not reached Montreal, where John’s fine house was
situated.)
John was handsome. It was from him that both Eweretta and Aimée had
got their looks. The girls were refined, feminine _répliqués_ of their
father.
The likeness Eweretta bore to the hated John had made the task of
Thomas the easier. He hated her because she looked at him with John’s
eyes. The plot to rob the girl of money and liberty had seemed to
Thomas a right and just retribution at the time when he conceived it.
The wrongs of both Mrs. Le Breton and himself would be avenged by the
substitution of Eweretta for Aimée. If Eweretta suffered, well and
good. Did not the Bible say that children had to suffer for the sins of
their fathers? Besides, had not Eweretta had all the sweets of life up
to the time of her father’s death? Had she not had education, travel,
fine dresses and a carriage to ride in? Let her taste what her father’s
victims had tasted!
This had been the attitude of Thomas Alvin, and Eweretta’s gentle
words, above all, the tone in which they had been uttered, had
completely changed it.
There are people who refuse to believe in “conversion,” which is the
sudden and complete over-turn of one kind of life for another. “Can the
leopard change his spots?” they ask.
Yet there is such a thing as moral earthquake. Some great emotion
sunders the hard rock of character; rifts appear, from which issue new
and altogether undreamt-of impulses.
As natural earthquakes change the conformation of the land, so moral
earthquake can change the characteristics of a human being.
“Let us forget it! You never had a chance!”
Few words and simple ones, yet a new man arose at the sound of them.