THE BURNING SECRET
"What has made them so different?" the child pondered while sitting
opposite them in the carriage. "Why don't they behave toward me as they
did at first? Why does mamma avoid my eyes when I look at her? Why does
he always try to joke when I'm around and make a silly of himself? They
don't talk to me as they did yesterday or the day before yesterday.
Their faces even seem different. Mamma's lips are so red she must have
rouged them. I never saw her do that before. And he keeps frowning as
though he were offended. Could I have said anything to annoy them? No, I
haven't said a word. It cannot be on my account that they're so
changed. Even their manner toward each other is not the same as it was.
They behave as though they had been naughty and didn't dare confess.
They don't chat the way they did yesterday, nor laugh. They're
embarrassed, they're concealing something. They've got a secret between
them that they don't want to tell me. I'm going to find it out. I must,
I don't care what happens, I must. I believe I know what it is. It must
be the same thing that grown-up people always shut me out from when they
talk about it. It's what books speak of, and it comes in operas when the
men and women on the stage stand singing face to face with their arms
spread out, and embrace, and shove each other away. It must have
something to do with my French governess, who behaved so badly with papa
and was dismissed. All these things are connected. I feel they are, but
I don't know how. Oh, to find it out, at last to find it out, that
secret! To possess the key that opens all doors! Not to be a child any
longer with everything kept hidden from one and always being held off
and deceived. Now or never! I will tear it from them, that dreadful
secret!"
A deep furrow cut itself between the child's brows. He looked almost old
as he sat in the carriage painfully cogitating this great mystery and
never casting a single glance at the landscape, which was shading into
all the delicate colors of the spring, the mountains in the freshened
green of their pines, the valleys in the mistier greens of budding
trees, shrubbery and young grass. All he had eyes for were the man and
the woman on the seat opposite him, as though, with his hot gaze, as
with an angling hook, he could snatch the secret from the shimmering
depths of their eyes.
Nothing gives so keen an edge to the intelligence as a passionate
suspicion. All the possibilities of an immature mind are developed by a
trail leading into obscurity. Sometimes it is only a single light door
that keeps children out of the world that we call the real world, and a
chance puff of wind may blow it open.
Edgar, all at once, felt himself tangibly closer, closer than ever
before, to the Unknown, the Great Secret. It was right next to him,
still veiled and unriddled, but very near. It excited him, and it was
this that lent him his sudden solemnity. Unconsciously he sensed that he
was approaching the outer edges of childhood.
The baron and Edgar's mother were both sensible of a dumb opposition in
front of them without realizing that it emanated from the child. The
presence of a third person in the carriage constrained them, and those
two dark glowing orbs opposite acted as a check. They scarcely dared to
speak or look up, and it was impossible for them to drop back into the
light, easy conversational tone of the day before, so entangled were
they already in ardent confidences and words suggestive of secret
caresses. They would start a subject, promptly come to a halt, say a
broken phrase or two, make another attempt, then lapse again into
complete silence. Everything they said seemed always to stumble over the
child's obstinate silence and fall flat.
The mother was especially oppressed by her son's sullen quiescence.
Giving him a cautious glance out of the corners of her eyes, she was
startled to observe, for the first time, in the manner Edgar compressed
his lips, a resemblance to her husband when he was annoyed. At that
particular moment, when she was playing "hide-and-seek" with an
adventure, it was more than ordinarily discomfiting to be reminded of
her husband. The boy, only a foot or two away, with his dark, restless
eyes and that suggestion behind his pale forehead of lying in wait,
seemed to her like a ghost, a guardian of her conscience, doubly
intolerable there in the close quarters of the carriage. Suddenly, for
one second, Edgar looked up and met his mother's gaze. Instantly they
dropped their eyes in the consciousness that they were spying on each
other. Till then each had had implicit faith in the other. Now something
had come between mother and child and made a difference. For the first
time in their lives they set to observing each other, to separating
their destinies, with secret hate already mounting in their hearts,
though the feeling was too young for either to admit it to himself.
When the horses pulled up at the hotel entrance, all three were
relieved. The excursion had been a failure, each of them felt, though
thy did not say so. Edgar was the first to get out of the carriage. His
mother excused herself for going straight up to her room, pleading a
headache. She was tired and wanted to be by herself. Edgar and the baron
were left alone together.
The baron paid the coachman, looked at his watch, and mounted the steps
to the hall, paying no attention to Edgar and passed him with that easy
sway of his slim back which had so enchanted the child that he had
immediately begun to imitate the baron's walk. The baron brushed past
him, right past him. Evidently he had forgotten him and left him to
stand there beside the driver and the horses as though he did not belong
to him.
Something in Edgar broke in two as the man, whom in spite of everything
he still idolized, slighted him like that. A bitter despair filled his
heart when the baron left without so much as touching him with his cloak
or saying a single word, when he, Edgar, was conscious of having done no
wrong. His painfully enforced self-restraint gave way, the too heavy
burden of dignity that he had imposed upon himself dropped from his
narrow little shoulders, and he became the child again, small and
humble, as he had been the day before. At the top of the steps he
confronted the baron and said in a strained voice, thick with suppressed
tears:
"What have I done to you that you don't notice me any more? Why are you
always like this with me now? And mamma, too? Why are you always sending
me off? Am I a nuisance to you, or have I done anything to offend you?"
The baron was startled. There was something in the child's voice that
upset him at first, then stirred him to tenderness and sympathy for the
unsuspecting boy.
"You're a goose, Eddie. I'm merely out of sorts to-day. You're a dear
boy, and I really love you." He tousled Edgar's hair, yet with averted
face so as not to be obliged to see those great moist, beseeching
child's eyes. The comedy he was playing was becoming painful. He was
beginning to be ashamed of having trifled so insolently with the child's
love. That small voice, quivering with suppressed sobs, cut him to the
quick. "Go upstairs now, Eddie. We'll get along together this evening
just as nicely as ever, you'll see."
"You won't let mamma send me right off to bed, will you?"
"No, no, I won't, Eddie," the baron smiled. "Just go on up. I must dress
for dinner."
Edgar went, made happy for the moment. Soon, however, the hammer began
to knock at his heart again. He was years older since the day before. A
strange guest, Distrust, had lodged itself in his child's breast.
He waited for the decisive test, at table. Nine o'clock came, and his
mother had not yet said a word about his going to bed. Why did she let
him stay on just that day of all days, she who was usually so exact? It
bothered him. Had the baron told her what he had said! He was consumed
with regret, suddenly, that he had run after the baron so trustingly. At
ten o'clock his mother rose, and took leave of the baron, who, oddly,
showed no surprise at her early departure and made no attempt to detain
her as he usually did. The hammer beat harder and harder at Edgar's
breast.
Now he must apply the test with exceeding care. He, too, behaved as
though he suspected nothing and followed his mother to the door.
Actually, in that second, he caught a smiling glance that travelled over
his head straight to the baron and seemed to indicate a mutual
understanding, a secret held in common. So the baron had betrayed him!
That was why his mother had left so early. He, Edgar, was to be lulled
with a sense of security so that he would not get in their way the next
day.
"Mean!" he murmured.
"What's that?" his mother asked.
"Nothing," he muttered between clenched teeth.
He, too, had his secret. His secret was hate, a great hate for the two
of them.