“Ah, well, at that time of life they gits carried off. Too bad you didn’t
know in time for the funeral. Ye’d ’ave liked to see him laid away safe
underground, wouldn’t ye, Slim? I ’ope he was in some good benefit club,
like, that’ll take care of the expenses of burial. Awful dear, coffins
is; but I suppose your family has a plot in some churchyard.”
When I had assured him that this was the case he continued: “And as for
goin’ off sudden—well, it’s awful ’ard on relations when a old, ancient
man’ll lay round sick and don’t know when ’is time’s come. I’ve knowed
’em when you’d swear they hung on a-purpose, just to spite them as ’ad to
take care of ’em. I ’ad a grandfather o’ me own—well, you’d think that
old man just couldn’t die. Ninety, I believe he was, and a wicked old
thing when he got silly, like. Take the pepper, he would, and pour it
into the molasses-jug, and everything like that. Terr’ble fun he was for
us young ones, especially one day when he dressed all up in ’is Sunday
clothes and went out in the street without ’is pants. I don’t suppose yer
guv’nor ever did the like o’ that, Slim. Don’t seem as if old people on
this side ’ad them playful ways.”
In this sort of reminiscence the evening went by, and in the morning I
received a note that did much to comfort me. It was no more than the
conventional letter of condolence from Mrs. Barry, but it was tactfully
couched.
“A loss like yours,” she wrote, “painful as it is at all times, becomes
tragically so when the support one finds in family ties is too far away
to sustain one. I have often found in my own experience that loneliness
added a more poignant element to grief. I wish you would remember, dear
Mr. Melbury, that you have friends at this Christmas-time quite near you.
Run in and see us whenever you feel the need of a friendly word. We are
leading a life here absolutely without engagements, and you will cheer us
up more than we can cheer you. If on Christmas Eve you would care to look
in between four and five you would find us here, and we could give you a
cup of tea.”
Needless to say all through the day of Christmas Eve my thoughts were
with the gathering in our house on the slopes of Mount Royal. I saw
in fancy every detail of the lugubrious pomp through which Christians
contradict their Saviour in his affirmation that there is no death.
Solemnity, blackness, muffled drums, and long lines of men throwing awe
into their faces—would smite the heart with a sense of the final, the
irreparable, the gone and lost. Flowers would lend a timid touch of
brightness, but they would bloom in little more than irony. The roll of
many wheels, the tramp of many feet, and a funeral service in which the
triumphant note itself would be turned into a dirge, these would be the
massive accompaniment to the few sobs welling up from hearts in which
they would be irrepressible. Though shut out in person, in spirit I was
there, standing in the shrouded room, witnessing my mother’s farewell
kiss, watching the lid placed on the coffin, marching with my brothers,
kneeling in the church, hearing the clods fall in the grave. At the very
moment when Mrs. Barry handed me a cup of tea I was saying to myself,
“Now it is all over, and they are coming back to the darkened, empty
house.”
I was not cheerful as a companion, and apparently no one expected me to
be so. We can scarcely be said to have talked; we merely kept each other
company. It was Miss Barry herself who suggested, when we had finished
tea, that she and I should take a walk.
The weather had grown clear, bright, and windless. All along the
promenade there was Christmas in the shops and in the air. It was not
like any Christmas I had ever known before, with the blare, the lights,
the gay, homeless people, and the thundering of breakers under starlight;
but some essential of the ancient festival was present there, and it
reached me. It reached me with a yearning to have something belonging to
me that I could claim as my own—something to which I should belong and
that wouldn’t cast me off—something that would love me, something that I
should love, with a love different from that with which even the City of
Friends could supply me.
But out on the crowded, starry sea-front we neither walked nor talked. We
sauntered and kept silent. On my side, I had the feeling that there was
so much to say that I could say nothing; on hers, I divined that there
was the same. I will not affirm that in view of all the circumstances
I could be anything but uneasy; and yet I was ecstatic. This wonderful
creature was beside me, comforting me, liking to be with me! But if she
knew exactly who I was....
I was swept by an intense longing that she should be told. It was a
longing I was never free from, though it didn’t often seize me so
imperiously as to-night. It seized me the more imperiously owing to
the fact that I could see her moving farther and farther away from any
recollection and realization coming through herself. I had hoped that
both would occur to her without my being obliged to say in so many words,
“I am the man who tried a few months ago to steal your jewelry.”
But if ever the shadow of this suggestion crossed her mind, it didn’t
cross it now. From the beginning the face and figure of that man had been
blurred behind the memory of my brother Jack. Recent events had fixed me,
just as she saw me, definitely in conditions in which sneak-thieving is
unimaginable. I was the son of Sir Edward Melbury, Baronet, of Montreal
and Ottawa, a man who would rank among the notables of the continent.
Though a son in disfavor, I was still a son, and moreover I was
exercising an honorable craft with some credit. I might propose to her,
I might marry her, I might live my whole life with her, and the chances
were that she would never connect me with the man she had seen for a few
hurried minutes on pulling the rose-colored hangings aside.
For this very reason it seemed to me I must tell her before our
friendship went any further. It was an additional reason that I began
to think that the information would be a shock to her. How I got that
impression I can scarcely tell you; the ways in which it was conveyed to
me were so trifling, so infinitesimal.
For example, I asked her one day what she meant by her oft-repeated
statement that I was different from other men.
“Our men,” she explained, promptly, “have no life apart from their
businesses and professions. Business and profession are stamped all
over them. They are in their clothes, their faces, the tones of their
voices. You’d know Ralph Coningsby was an architect, and Stephen Cantyre
a doctor, and Rufus Legrand a clergyman, the minute you heard them speak.
Now you wouldn’t know what you were. You might be anything—anything a
gentleman can be, that is. I’ve heard some one say that Oxford is a
town in a university, and Cambridge a university in a town. In just the
same way my father, for instance, is a man in an architect. You’re an
architect in a man. With you the man is the bigger. With us he’s the
smaller. It isn’t merely business before pleasure; it’s business before
human nature; and somehow I’ve a preference for seeing human nature put
first.”
There was little in this to say what I have just hinted at. There was
barely sufficient to let me see that she was putting me above most of her
men acquaintances, in a place in which I had no right to be. Though it
was as far as she ever went, it was far enough to create my suspicion and
to make me feel that the earliest confession would not come too soon.
When we got down to the less frequented end of the Board Walk the moment
seemed to have arrived. The crowd had thinned out to occasional groups
of stragglers or lovers going two and two. Only here and there one came
on a shop; only here and there on a hotel. One got an opportunity to see
the stars, and to hear the ocean as something more than a drumbeat to the
blare.
By a simultaneous movement we paused by the rail, to look down on the
dim, white, moving line of breakers. It was one of those instants when
between two people drawn closely to each other something leaps. Had there
been nothing imperative to keep us apart I should have seized her in my
arms; she would have nestled there. I had distinctly the knowledge that
she would have responded to anything—and that the initiative was mine.
As a rocket that bursts into cascades of fire suddenly goes out, so
suddenly the moment passed, leaving us with a sense of coldness,
primarily due to me.
Somewhat desperately I began: “Do you know what has made the difficulties
between me and my family?”
She was gazing off toward the dark horizon.
“Vaguely.”
“Do you know that for years I gave them a great deal of trouble?”
“Vaguely.”
“Do you know that—”
“Do you know,” she interrupted, quietly, “that I used to have a brother?”
The question so took me by surprise that I answered, blankly, “No.”
“Yes, I had. He was nearly ten years older than I, which would make him
about your age. He was—he was wild.”
“And is he—is he dead?”
“He shot himself—about five years ago. It was a terrible story, and I
don’t want to tell it to you. I only want to say that my mother feels
that if—if father hadn’t been so hard on him—if he’d played him along
gently—he might easily have been saved. It’s what Mr. Christian—he’s had
great experience in that sort of thing—he does a wonderful work among men
that have gone under—but it’s what he used to tell father; only father
hadn’t nearly so much patience with his own son as he would have had with
some one else’s, and so— I wonder if you can understand that when mother
heard that you had been—had been—well, a little like my brother—”
“Who told her?”
“Oh, I don’t know. These things get about. It might have been Annette.”
“And assuming that I was what you call wild, have you any idea how wild I
was?”
Her response to this was to say: “I like a man to have spirit. The men
who always keep on the safe side—” She left this sentiment there, to add,
less irrelevantly than it sounded: “Mother wants you to come and dine
with us to-morrow evening. It will be Christmas Day, but we sha’n’t keep
it as Christmas. We don’t have any Christmases since—since Tony died. We
simply—we simply sha’n’t be alone.”
In the turn our talk had taken there was so much human need that I found
my efforts at confession paralyzed. That a family whom I had regarded as
enviably care-free should be living in the shadow of a great tragedy,
and nursing a sorrow in which there was this element of remorse, was
curiously illuminating as a discovery. It seemed to cast into other
people’s lives the sort of sharp revealing ray that a flash of lightning
throws on a dark road. Here was a girl whom I had thought of hitherto as
immune from the more sordid varieties of trial; and yet she had at least
tasted of their cup. It gave me a new conception of her. I began to see
her not as a flat surface or as static like a portrait, but as a living,
palpitating human being with duties round her and a vista of experiences
as background.
The immediate inference was that I must assist them over Christmas, as
they would assist me; and to do that I must put off telling Regina Barry
where she had seen me first.
To be quite free, however, I had to get a kind of permission from Lovey.
My relations with him had grown to be peculiar. He seemed to develop two
personalities, from the one to the other of which he glided more or less
unconsciously. Though even in our privacy he refused any longer to speak
of us as buddies and fellas together, he called me Slim and sonny, and
referred without hesitation to our fraternal past. On my part I found it
almost consoling, in view of the bluff I was putting up, to have some one
near me who knew me at my worst. Where I had to pretend before others
there was no pretense at all with him; and so I got the relief that comes
at any time when one can drop one’s mask.
Here in Atlantic City I was paying all his expenses, but no wages. In New
York I offered him nothing but his room. How he lived I didn’t always
know, beyond the fact that it was honestly. As to this he was so frank
that I could have little doubt about it.
“There’s many a good thing I lets go by, Slim, all on account o’ you.
Washin’ windows ain’t nothink but old woman’s work when a man’s been a
’atter. If it wasn’t to save you, sonny—”
“Yes, I know, Lovey. One of these days I may get a chance to make it up
to you.”
“Oh, well, as for makin’ it up, so long as you goes on with the fancy
you took to me that night at Stinson’s, like—”
“Oh, I do. You see that, don’t you?”
“Yes; I see it right enough, Slim. It kind o’ passes the buck on me, as
you might say. But there! Lord love ye, I don’t complain! Ye’re a fine
young fella, and what I does for you—self-denial ye might call it—I don’t
grudge. When I sees ye goin’ round like a swell with other swells I just
says to myself, ‘Lovey, that’s your work, old top’; and I feels kind o’
satisfied.”
It was kind o’ satisfied that he showed himself when I told him I had
been asked to eat my Christmas dinner with Mrs. and Miss Barry.
“Ain’t that grand!” he commented, exultingly. “Ye’ll put on them swell
togs—”
“But it will leave you alone, Lovey,” I reminded him.
“Lord love ye, Slim, I don’t mind that! What’s Christmas to me? I don’t
pay no attention to all that foolishness—except the plum puddin’.”