“Oh, I don’t mind that. We arrived only this afternoon. You see, my
father can’t get back from California, and mother wouldn’t spend
Christmas in town. We’re not going to have any Christmas, and so—”
We struggled across the walk to the pavilion, which, though open on all
sides, afforded at least an overhead protection.
“How did you know where to find me?” I asked, stupidly.
“Ralph Coningsby told me—and the time you would be coming out. I—I’ve
something—something rather special to—to say to you.”
I stood looking down at her. In the wooden ceiling above our heads there
was an electric light that shed its beams through the whirl of mist right
into her upturned face. There was a piteous quiver in the scarlet lips,
and to the eyes had returned that mingling of compassion and amazement
with which she had watched me when I pulled out her trinkets and threw
them on the desk. It was the first time I had seen it since that night.
As I look back we seem to have gazed at each other in this way for an
immeasurably long while, but I suppose it was only for some seconds. I
knew why she was there. The truth had dawned on her at last, and she had
come to tell me it wouldn’t make any difference.
But it would.
I had left the revolver in my desk in town; but I reminded myself that
there was a train between eight and nine and that I should have plenty of
time to catch it.
_CHAPTER XIV_
For my own sake, rather than for Regina Barry’s, I made an effort to
escape from the pitiless pavilion light overhead.
“You’ll need to go back to your hotel. Sha’n’t we walk along? Then you
can tell me as we go.”
The tramp through the gale and spray would have been exhilarating were
it not that confidential things had to be thrown out into the tempest.
As we left the pavilion, however, a voice floated toward me from the
semi-darkness.
“Chair, boss?”
Another minute and we were seated side by side in the odd little
vehicle—something between a baby’s perambulator and a touring-car—with
the leather curtains buttoned to protect us, and a view through the
wind-shield of a long line of lights shining into fog. There was a
minute of surprise in the fact that, involuntarily expecting to go at a
heightened speed, we found ourselves literally creeping at the snail’s
pace which was the customary gait of our pusher.
But that was only subconscious. I took note of it without taking note of
it, to remember it when I pieced the circumstances together on returning
home. The one thing of which I was really aware was that in this curious
conveyance I was seated at her side, and able, as she sat half turned
toward me, to look her in the eyes.
Now that we were there, she lost some of her self-possession. After the
months in which I had been afraid of her she seemed suddenly to have
become afraid of me. Crouching back into her corner of the chair, she
grew small and apologetic.
“Mother made me come. She said some one ought to tell you.”
It was like a little cry—the cry of a child confessing before it is
accused. I could follow her mental action. She wanted me to understand
that nothing but _force majeure_ would have induced her to waylay a man
as he was coming home from work and take him in a kind of ambush.
Having once already talked with her at cross-purposes, I was careful to
let her state her message before betraying my conviction of what it was
to be.
“It’s very kind of Mrs. Barry,” I began, vaguely.
“You see, she likes you,” she broke in, impulsively. “If you had any
one belonging to you in this country I dare say she—But she’s awfully
maternal, mother is; and when Annette told her—”
“What did Annette tell her?”
“That’s it. Oh, Mr. Melbury, I’m so sorry that I should be the one to
bring the news.”
“If it’s bad news,” I said, encouragingly, “I’d rather have you to share
it with me than any one else in the world.”
She asked, abruptly, “Have you heard anything from home—lately?”
I had once more the sensation of the blood rushing back to my heart and
staying there. All I could do was to shake my head.
“That’s what Annette thought. We told her she ought to write to you.”
In my excitement I clutched her by the hand, but I think she was hardly
aware of the act any more than I.
“But what is it?”
“It’s—it’s about your father.”
“He’s not—he’s not—dead?”
She fell back again into her corner of the chair, withdrawing her hand.
I, too, fell back into my corner, staring out through the wind-shield.
Knowing that by not saying no she was really saying yes, I was obliged
not only to get possession of the fact, but to control my sense of it.
I may say at once that it was the first sudden shock of my life. Every
other trial had come to me by degrees—I had more or less seen it on the
way and had been ready to meet it. This was something I had hardly ever
thought of. That it might happen some time had been vaguely in the back
of my mind, of course; but I had never considered it as an event of the
day and hour. Now that it had occurred, my mental heavens seemed to fall.
I have told you so little of my family life that you hardly realize the
degree to which my father was its center and support. My memory cannot
go back to the time when he was not an important man, not only in the
estimation of his children, but in that of the entire country. One of the
youngest of that group of men who in the ’sixties and ’seventies took
the scattered colonies of Great Britain lying north of the border of the
United States and welded them into a gigantic, prosperous whole, he had
outlived all but the sturdiest of his contemporaries. With Macdonald,
Mount Stephen, Strathcona and a few others he had had the vision of a
new white man’s empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and
from the Great Lakes to the Arctic, and through good times and evil he
had never let it go. That there were evil times as well as good ones is
a matter of history; but however dark the moment, my father was one of
those who never lost for a fraction of an instant his belief in ultimate
success. In helping to build up the vast financial system of the Canadian
Pacific Railway there was no door, in Europe or America, where money
could be borrowed at which he did not knock. There were days when the
prospect was so hopeless and the treasury so empty that he was obliged
to pledge everything he possessed, and after that to use nothing but his
honor and his name. The winning out is one of the fairy-tales of the
modern world. He had begun to reap his reward just as my memory of him
opens. Of his days of struggle I knew only by hearsay. By the time I was
five he was already a man of considerable wealth, honored throughout the
Dominion, honored in Great Britain, and one of the eight or ten Canadian
baronets created by the Queen.
I see him as tall, spare, and vigorous, with thin, clear-cut,
clean-shaven features, a piercing eye, and a mouth that sagged at the
corners not from dejection, but from determination. Spartan in his own
life, he required his children to be Spartan in theirs. Though with our
added means our manner of living increased in dignity, it gained little
in the way of luxury; and many were the shifts to which my brothers and I
were pushed to indulge the follies of young men.
My brothers did this no more than experimentally, covering their tracks
and returning to right ways before their digressions could be noticed.
I was invariably caught, coming in for some dramatic moments with my
father, which increased in tension with the years. I have often wondered
what his own youth could have been that he had so little mercy on what
was at first not much worse than high spirits and boisterousness. Though
I am far from blaming any one but myself for my ultimately going wrong, I
have sometimes thought that a gentler handling might have led me aright
when sheer repression only made me obstinate. That gentler handling my
mother would have given me had not my father felt that it was weak.
This knowledge only added to my perversity, the result being a state of
continuous rebellion on my part and permanent displeasure on his.
“You’re getting in worse and worse with the old man,” my brother Jack
warned me a few months before I left Montreal for good. “I heard him
telling mother that if you didn’t turn over a new leaf he’d cut you out
of his will.”
The information that he had so cut me out was the last form of appeal
he ever made to me. I didn’t believe he meant it otherwise than as
a bluff—a stroke of the pen could have reinstated me; but merely as
a bluff it angered me. It implied that I might be induced to do for
money what I hadn’t done for love or duty, and I was foolish enough to
consider it part of my manhood to prove that any one who so judged me was
mistaken. In that phase of my misguided life there was a kind of crazy,
Cordelia-like attempt to show my father that it was not because of his
money that I cared for him—or didn’t care for him; but all I succeeded
in doing was to rouse the resentment of a man who had hardly ever been
defied.
But I had repented of that kind of bravado long before I had repented of
anything else. My letter to him in October had been quite sincere. To be
cut out of his will had never meant anything to me but the loss of his
affection. I was sorry for that loss, sorrier than any words I have could
tell you. But when he wrote to me, in answer to my October letter, I knew
from his tone that I had definitely killed whatever had once existed
between him and me, and that all that was left for me was to bury it. I
had been trying to bury it for the past eight weeks, and I do not deny
that the effort was a bitter one.
You must understand that I had now come in for a set of emotions that
had not belonged to me before I went to the Down and Out. I can explain
it only on the ground that months of abstinence from anything that
could inflame the senses or disturb the poise of the mind had induced a
sanity of judgment to which I had been a stranger. In this new light I
was really a prodigal son—not from any hope of a ring on my hand or the
fatted calf, but genuinely from affection for the parents I had wronged.
To have this impulse to arise and go to my father thrown back on itself
was the hardest thing in my experience. Somehow I had kept the conviction
that if ever I repented that door would be open to my return. It had
not really occurred to me that they wouldn’t say at home, “It is meet
that we should make merry and be glad.” That my brothers might refuse
to join in the chorus was a possibility. That my sister might not be
over-enthusiastic in doing so I should be able to understand. But that
my father and mother.... Throughout my stay in Atlantic City I had been
saying to myself, “Well, if I’ve thrust a sword into your hearts, old
dears, you’ve jolly well thrust one into mine; and so we’re quits.”
“When did it happen?” was the first question I was sufficiently master of
myself to ask.
“Annette heard yesterday. I think it was the day before.”
“Do you know if—if he’d been ill?”
“He hasn’t been well for a long time, Annette says—not for two or
three years; but the end was—well, it was heart failure. He was in his
motor—going home. When the car drove up to the door they found him—”
It was the picture thus presented that made me put my hand to my forehead
and bow my head. I was thinking of him seated in his corner of the car,
stately, unbending, unpardoning, dead. I was thinking of the plight of
my poor little mother when the man she had for so many years worshiped
and obeyed was no longer there to give her his commands. I was thinking
of the commotion in the family, of the stir of interest throughout the
community. A prince and a great man would have fallen in Israel, and all
our Canadian centers would be aquiver with the news. Jerry and Jack would
cable to my sister in England, as well as to our uncles and aunts in that
country and in the United States. There were cousins and friends who
wouldn’t be forgotten. I alone was left out.
That was, however, more than I could believe. It was more, too, than I
was willing to allow Regina Barry to suppose.
“There must be a telegram for me at my rooms in New York,” I managed to
stammer, though I fear my tone lacked conviction.
To this she said nothing. She had, in fact, as Cantyre informed me later,
already ascertained that up to the hour of her departure from New York
there was none.
I talked to Cantyre on the telephone immediately on returning to my
hotel. He said that, though in my rooms there were some odds and ends
of mail matter which he hadn’t yet forwarded, there was no telegram or
Canadian letter. Having called up Annette, I got a repetition of the
meager information Miss Barry had given me, though I learned in addition
that the funeral was to take place on the following day, which would be
Christmas Eve. Her father had already gone to Montreal to take part in
the ceremony. The embarrassment of her tone in saying she was surprised
that I had received no announcement told me that she was not surprised.
It was the last touch to the certainty that I had been omitted with
intention.
After that, for a time, my grief gave place to rage. The punishment
was so much greater than the crime that my heart cried out against its
injustice. Had I stayed down in the depths where I was I should have
accepted it phlegmatically; but having made the effort to rise, and made
it with some success....
I acquitted my mother and my sister of any share in the injury done to
me. My mother was the tenderest little creature God ever made, but she
had always been under the domination of my father, and had now come under
that of her sons. Never having asserted herself, she would hardly begin
to do it at this date, though she might weep her heart out in secret. I
knew my sister would put in a good word for me, but as the youngest of
the family and a girl she would easily be overruled.
Jack might be mercifully inclined, but he would do as Jerry insisted.
Jerry—who as Sir Gerald Melbury would now cut a great swath as head of
the family—Jerry would be my father over again. He would be my father
over again, only on a smaller scale. My father was tyrannical by
instinct; Jerry would be so by imitation. My father believed his word
to be law because he didn’t know how to do anything else; Jerry would
believe his word to be law in order to be like my father. My father
wouldn’t forgive me because I had outraged his affections; Jerry wouldn’t
forgive me because my father hadn’t done it first. As far as he could
bring it about, my future would be locked and sealed with my father’s
death, not because he, Jerry, would be so shocked at my way of life, but
because the laws of the Medes and Persians alter not.
Nothing remained for me, then, but to grin and bear it, and bide my
time. That I had friends of my own was to me a source of that kind of
consolation which is largely pride. Cantyre and the Coningsbys, Regina
Barry and her mother—came closer to me now than any one with whom I had
ties of blood. “Our relatives,” George Sand writes somewhere, “are the
friends given us by Nature; our friends are the relatives given us by
God.”
As relatives given me by God I regarded Lovey and Christian and Colonel
Straight and Pyn and Beady Lamont and all that band of humble, helpful
pals to whom I was knit in the bonds of the “robust love” which was the
atmosphere of brave old Walt Whitman’s City of Friends. There was no pose
among them, nor condemnation, nor severity. Forgiveness was exercised
there till seventy times seven. They forbore one another in love, and
endeavored to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace to a
degree of which Some One would have said that He had not found the like,
no, not in Israel.
My family were all of Israel, and of the strictest sect. They fasted
twice in the week, so to speak; in theory, if not in practice, they
gave tithes of all that they possessed; they could sincerely thank God
that they were not as such men as composed the Down and Out; and yet it
was precisely among those who smote their breasts and didn’t dare so
much as to lift up their eyes unto heaven that I found the sympathy that
raised me to my feet and bade me be a man. No wonder, then, that that
evening I kept poor old Lovey near me, that I took him down to the café,
where there were only men, and made him dine with me, and told him of my
bereavement.
“Is he, now?” he said, drawing a melancholy face. “No one can’t live
forever, can they? He’d have been an old, aged man, I expect.”