THE COMING OF A PRODIGAL
The later night was very still and the moon, lifting like a paper
lantern over the aspen tops, silvered all the landscape. In its placid
radiance the white house loomed in a ghostly pallor. The windows of one
side were blank, but behind the library shade the bulbous lamp still
drowsed like a monster glow-worm. From the shadowy side of the building
stretched a narrow L, its front covered by a rose-trellis, whose pale
blossoms in the soft night air mingled their delicate fragrance with
that of the jasmin.
Save for the one bright pane, there seemed now no life or movement in
the house. But outside, in the moonlight, a lurching, shabbily-clothed
figure moved, making his uncertain way with the deliberation of composed
inebriety. The sash of the window was raised a few inches and he nodded
sagely at the yellow shade.
"Gay old silver-top!" he hiccoughed; "see you in the morning!"
He capsized against an althea bush and shook his head with owlish
gravity as he disentangled himself. Then he staggered serenely to the
rose-trellis, and, choosing its angle with an assurance that betrayed
ancient practice, climbed to the upper window, shot its bolt with a
knife, and let himself in. He painstakingly closed both windows and
inner blinds, before he turned on an electric light.
In the room in which he now stood he had stored his boyish treasures and
shirked his maturer tasks. It should have had deeper human associations,
too, for once, before the house had been enlarged to its present
proportions, that chamber had been his mother's. The _Marechal Niel_
rose that clambered to the window-sill had been planted by her hand. In
that room he had been born. And in it had occurred that sharp, corrosive
quarrel with his father on the night he had flung himself from the house
vowing never to return.
As Hugh Stires stood looking about him, it seemed for an instant to his
clouded senses that the past six months of wandering and unsavory
adventure were a dream. There was his bed, with its clean linen sheets
and soft pillows. How he would like to lie down just as he was and sleep
a full round of the clock! Last night he had slept--where had he slept?
He had forgotten for the moment. He looked longingly at the spotless
coverlid. No; some one might appear, and it would not do to be seen in
his present condition. It was scarcely ten. Time enough for that
afterward.
He drew out the drawer of a chiffonier, opened a closet and gloated over
the order and plenty of their contents. He made difficult selection from
these, and, steadying his progress by wall and chair, opened the door of
an adjoining bath-room. It contained a circular bath with a needle
shower. Without removing his clothing, he climbed into this, balancing
himself with an effort, found and turned the cold faucet, and let the
icy water, chilled from artesian depths, trickle over him in a hundred
stinging needle-points.
It was a very different figure that reentered the larger room a
half-hour later, from the slinking mud-lark that had climbed the
rose-trellis. The old Hugh lay, a heap of soiled and sodden garments;
the new stood forth shaven, fragrant with fresh linen and clean and fit
apparel. The maudlin had vanished, the gaze was unvexed and bright, the
whole man seemed to have settled into himself, to have grown trim,
nonchalant, debonair. He held up his hand, palm outward, between the
electric globe and his eye--there was not a tremor of nerve or muscle.
He smiled. No headache, no fever, no uncertain feet or trembling hands
or swollen tongue, after more than a week of deep potations. He could
still "sober-up" as he used to do (with Blake the butler to help him)
when it had been a mere matter of an evening's tipsiness! And how fine
it felt to be decently clad again!
He crossed to a cheval-glass. The dark handsome face that looked out at
him was clean-cut and aristocratic, perfect save for one blemish--a pale
line that slanted across the right brow, a birth-mark, resembling a
scar. All his life this mark had been an eyesore to its owner. It had a
trick of turning an evil red under the stress of anger or emotion.
On the features, young and vigorous as they were, subtle lines of
self-indulgence had already set themselves, and beneath their
expression, cavalier and caressing, lay the unmistakable stigmata of
inherited weakness. But these the gazer did not see. He regarded himself
with egotistic complacency. Here he was, just as sound as ever. He had
had his fling, and taught "the Governor" that he could get along well
enough without any paternal help if he chose. Needs must when the devil
drives, but his father should never guess the coarse and desperate
expediences that had sickened him of his bargain, or the stringent
calculation of his return. He was no milksop, either, to come sneaking
to him with his hat in his hand. When he saw him now, he would be
dressed as the gentleman he was!
He attentively surveyed the room. It was clean and dusted--evidently it
had been carefully tended. He might have stepped out of it yesterday.
There in a corner was his banjo. On the edge of a silver tray was a
half-consumed cigar. It crumbled between his fingers. He had been
smoking that cigar when his father had entered the room on that last
night. There, too, was the deck of cards he had angrily flung on to the
table when he left. Not a thing had been disturbed--yes, one thing. His
portrait, that had hung over his bed, was not in its place. A momentary
sense of trepidation rushed through him. Could his father really have
meant all he had said in his rage? Did he really mean to disown him?
For an instant he faced the hall door with clenched hands. Somewhere in
the house, unconscious of his presence, was that ward of whose coming he
had learned. Moreau was a good friend to have warned him! Was she part
of a plan of reprisal--her presence there a tentative threat to him?
Could his father mean to adopt her? Might that great house, those
grounds, the bulk of his wealth, go to her, and he, the son, be left in
the cold? He shivered. Perhaps he had stayed away too long!
[Illustration]
As he turned again, he heard a sound in the hall. He listened. A light
step was approaching--the swish of a gown. With a sudden impulse he
stepped into the embrasure of the window, as the figure of a girl paused
at the door. He felt his face flush; she had thrown a crimson kimono
over her white night-gown, and the apparition seemed to part the dusk of
the doorway like the red breast of a robin. She held in her hands a
bunch of the pale _Marechal Niel_ roses, and his eye caught the long
rebellious sweep of her bronze hair, and the rosy tint of bare feet
through the worsted meshes of her night-slippers.
To his wonder the sight of the lighted room seemed to cause her no
surprise. For an instant she stood still as though listening, then
entered and placed the roses in a vase on a reading-stand by the
bedside.
Hugh gasped. To reach the stand the girl had passed the spot where he
stood, but she had taken no note of him. Her gaze had gone by him as if
he had been empty air. Then he realized the truth; Jessica Holme was
blind! Moreau's letter had given him no inkling of that. So this was the
girl with whom his father now threatened him! Was she counting on his
not coming back, waiting for the windfall? She was blind--but she was
beautiful! Suppose he were to turn the tables on the old man, not only
climb back into his good graces through her, but even--
The thin line on his brow sprang suddenly scarlet. What a supple,
graceful arm she had! How adroit her fingers as they arranged the
rose-stems! Was he already wholly blackened in her opinion? What did she
think of him? Why did she bring those flowers to that empty room? Could
it have been she who had kept it clean and fresh and unaltered against
his return? A confident, daring look grew in his eyes; he wished she
could see him in that purple tie and velvet smoking-jacket! What an
opportunity for a romantic self-justification! Should he speak? Suppose
it should frighten her?
Chance answered him. His respiration had conveyed to her the knowledge
of a presence in the room. He heard her draw a quick breath. "Some one
is here!" she whispered.
He started forward. "Wait! wait!" he said in a loud whisper, as she
sprang back. But the voice seemed to startle her the more, and before he
could reach her side she was gone. He heard her flying steps descend the
stair, and the opening and closing of a door.
The sudden flight jarred Hugh's pleasurable sense of novelty. He thrust
his hands deep into his pockets. Now he was in for it! She would alarm
the house, rouse the servants--he should have a staring, domestic
audience for the imminent reconciliation his sobered sense told him was
so necessary. Why could he not slip back into the old rut, he thought
sullenly, without such a boring, perfunctory ceremony? He had intended
to postpone this, if possible, until a night's sleep had fortified him.
But now the sooner the ordeal was over, the better! Shrugging his
shoulders, he went quickly down the stair to the library.
He had known exactly what he should see there--the vivid girl with the
hue of fright in her cheeks, the shaded lamp, the wheel-chair, and the
feeble old man with his furrowed face and gray mustaches. What he
himself should say he had not had time to reflect.
The figure in the chair looked up as the door opened. "Hugh!" he cried,
and half lifted himself from his seat. Then he settled back, and the
sunken, indomitable eyes fastened themselves on his son's face.
Hugh was melodramatic--cheaply so. He saw the girl start at the name,
saw her hands catch at the kimono to draw its folds over the bare white
throat, saw the rich color that flooded her brow. He saw himself
suddenly the moving hero of the stagery, the tractive force of the
situation. Real tears came to his eyes--tears of insincere feeling, due
partly to the cheap whisky he had drunk that day, whose outward
consequences he had so drastically banished, and partly to sheer nervous
excitation.
"Father!" he said, and came and caught the gaunt hand that shook against
the chair.
Then the deeps of the old man's heart were suddenly broken up. "My son!"
he cried, and threw his arms about him. "Hugh--my boy, my boy!"
Jessica waited to hear no more. Thrilling with gladness, and flushing
with the sudden recollection of her bare throat and feet, she slipped
away to her room to creep into bed and lie wide-eyed and thinking.
What did he look like? Of his face she had never seen even a counterfeit
presentment. Through what adventures had he passed? Now that he had come
home, forgiving and forgiven, would he stay? He had been in his room
when she entered it with the roses--must have guessed, if he had not
already known, that she was blind. Would he guess that she had cared for
that room, had placed fresh flowers there often and often?
Since she had come to the house in the aspens Jessica had found the
imagined figure of Hugh a dominant presence in a horizon lightened with
a throng of new impressions. The direful catastrophe of her
blindness--it had been the sudden result of an accident--had fallen like
a thunderbolt upon a nature elastic and joyous. It had brought her face
to face with a revelation of mental agony, made her feel herself the
hapless martyr of that curt thing called Chance; one moment seeing a
universe unfolding before her in line and hue, the next feeling it
thrust rudely behind a gruesome blank of darkness. The two years that
followed had been a period when despair had covered her; when
specialists had peered with cunning instruments into her darkened eyes,
to utter hopeful platitudes--and to counsel not at all. Then into her
own painful self-absorption had intruded her father's death, and the
very hurt of this, perhaps, had been a salving one. It had of necessity
changed her whole course of living. In her new surroundings she had
taken up life once more. Her alert imagination had begun to stir, to
turn diffidently to new channels of exploration and interest. She had
always lived largely in books and pictures, and her world was still full
of ideals and of brave adventures. Gratitude had made her love the
morose old invalid with his crabbed tempers; and the wandering son,
choosing for pride's sake a resourceless battle with the world--the
very mystery of his whereabouts--had taken strong hold of her
imagination. Of the quarrel which had preceded Hugh's departure, she had
made her own version. That he should have come back on this very night,
when the disinheritance she had dreaded had been so nearly consummated,
seemed now to have an especial and an appealing significance.
Presently she rose, slipped on the red kimono, and, taking a key from
the pocket of her gown, stole from the room. She ascended a stairway and
unlocked the door of a wide, bare attic where the moonlight poured
through a skylight in the roof upon an unfinished statue. In this statue
she had begun to fashion, in the imagined figure of Hugh, her conception
of the Prodigal Son; not the battered and husk-filled wayfarer of the
parable, but a figure of character and pathos, erring through youthful
pride and spirit. The unfinished clay no eyes had seen, for those walls
bounded her especial domain.
Carefully, one by one, she unwound the wet cloths that swathed the
figure. In the streaming radiance of the night, the clay looked white as
snow and she a crimson ghost. She passed her fingers lightly over the
features. Was the real Hugh's face like that? One day, perhaps, her own
eyes would tell her, and she would finish it. Then she might show it to
him, but not now.
She replaced the coverings, relocked the door, and went softly down to
her bed.
When Hugh went shamefacedly up the stair from the library, the
artificial glow that had tingled to his finger-tips had faded. The poise
of mind, the certitude of all the faculties of eye and hand that his icy
bath had given him, were yielding. The penalties he had dislodged were
returning reinforced. He was rapidly becoming drunk.
He groped his way to his room, turned out the light, threw himself fully
dressed upon the bed, and slept the deep sleep of deferred intoxication.