When Michael presented himself at the appointed hour the next morning
he was shown into a small reception room by a maid, and there he waited
for a full half hour. At the end of that time he heard a discreet
rustle of garments in the distance, and a moment later, became aware of
a cold stare from the doorway. Mrs. Endicott in an elaborate morning
frock was surveying him fixedly through a jewelled lorgnette, her chin
tilted contemptuously, and an expression of supreme scorn upon her
handsome features. Woman of the world that she was, she must have noted
the grace of his every movement as he rose with his habitual courtesy
to greet her. Yet for some reason this only seemed to increase her
dislike.
There was no welcoming hand held out in response to his good morning,
and no answering smile displaced the severity of the woman’s expression
as she stood confronting the boy, slowly paralyzing him with her
glance. Not a word did she utter. She could convey her deepest meaning
without words when she chose.
But Michael was a lad of great self-control, and keen logical mind. He
saw no reason for the woman’s attitude of rebuke, and concluded he must
be mistaken in it. Rallying his smile once more he asked:
“Is Miss Starr ready to ride, or have I come too early?”
Again the silence became impressive as the cold eyes looked him
through, before the thin lips opened.
“My daughter is not ready to ride—with YOU, this morning or at any
other time!”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” said Michael now deeply astonished, and
utterly unable to fathom the woman’s strange manner. “Have I
misunderstood? I thought she asked me to ride with her this morning.
May I see her, please?”
“No, you may not see Miss Endicott!” said the cold voice. “And I have
come down to tell you that I consider your coming here at all a great
impertinence. Certainly my husband has fully discharged any obligations
for the slight service he is pleased to assume that you rendered a good
many years ago. I have always had my doubts as to whether you did not
do more harm than good at that time. Of course you were only a child
and it was impossible that you should have done any very heroic thing
at that age. In all probability if you had kept out of things the
trouble never would have happened, and your meddling simply gave you a
wound and a soft bed for a while. In my opinion you have had far more
done for you than you ever deserved, and I want you to understand that
so far as my daughter is concerned the obligation is discharged.”
Michael had stood immovable while the cruel woman uttered her harangue,
his eyes growing wide with wonder and dark with a kind of manly shame
for her as she went on. When she paused for a moment she saw his face
was white and still like a statue, but there was something in the depth
of his eyes that held her in check.
With the utmost calm, and deference, although his voice rang with
honest indignation, Michael spoke:
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Endicott,” he said, his tone clear and
attention-demanding, “I have never felt that there was the slightest
obligation resting upon any of this family for the trifling matter that
occurred when, as you say, I was a child. I feel that the obligation is
entirely the other way, of course, but I cannot understand what you
mean. How is my coming here at Mr. Endicott’s invitation an
impertinence?”
The woman looked at him contemptuously as though it were scarcely worth
the trouble to answer him, yet there was something about him that
demanded an answer.
“I suppose you are ignorant then,” she answered cuttingly, “as you seem
to be honest. I will explain. You are not fit company for my daughter.
It is strange that you do not see that for yourself! A child of the
slums, with nothing but shame and disgrace for an inheritance, and
brought up a pauper! How could you expect to associate on a level with
a gentleman’s daughter? If you have any respect for her whatever you
should understand that it is not for such as you to presume to call
upon her and take her out riding. It is commendable in you of course to
have improved what opportunities have been given you, but it is the
height of ingratitude in a dependent to presume upon kindness and take
on the airs of an equal, and you might as well understand first as last
that you cannot do it. I simply will not have you here. Do you
understand?”
Michael stood as if rooted to the floor, horror and dismay growing in
his eyes; and stupor trickling through his veins. For a minute he stood
after she had ceased speaking, as though the full meaning of her words
had been slow to reach his consciousness. Yet outwardly his face was
calm, and only his eyes had seemed to change and widen and suffer as
she spoke. Finally his voice came to him:
“Madam, I did not know,” he said in a stricken voice. “As you say, I am
ignorant.” Then lifting his head with that fine motion of challenge to
the world that was characteristic of him whenever he had to face a hard
situation, his voice rang clear and undaunted:
“Madam, I beg your pardon. I shall not offend this way again. It was
because I did not understand. I would not hurt your daughter in any
way, for she has been the only beautiful thing that ever came into my
life. But I will never trouble her again.”
The bow with which he left her and marched past her into the hall and
out of the great door where once his boy life had been freely laid down
for her child, could have been no more gracefully or dramatically
effected if he had been some great actor. It was natural, it was full
of dignity and reproach, and it left the lady feeling smaller and
meaner than she had ever felt in all of her rose-colored, velvet-lined
existence. Somehow all the contempt she had purposely prepared for the
crushing of the lad, he had suddenly flung from him as a hated garment
and walked from her presence, leaving it wrapped about herself.
“Well, really!” she gasped at last when she realized that he was gone
and her eloquence not half finished, “Well, really! What right had he
to go away like that without my permission. Impertinent to the end! One
would suppose he was a grand Duke. Such airs! I always told Delevan it
was a mistake to educate the masses. They simply don’t know their place
and will not keep it.”
Nevertheless, the selfish woman was much shaken. Michael had made her
feel somehow as if she had insulted a saint or a supernal being. She
could not forget how the light had sifted through his wonderful hair
and glinted through the depths of his great eyes, as he spoke those
last words, and she resented the ease with which he had left her
presence. It had been too much like the going of a victor, and not like
one crushed back into his natural place. She was cross all day in
consequence.
Starr meanwhile was lingering upstairs waiting for Michael. She had
been purposely kept busy in a distant room at the back of the house by
her mother, and was not told of his coming. As an hour went by beyond
the appointed time she grew restless and disappointed; and then annoyed
and almost angry that he should have so easily forgotten her; but she
did not tell her mother, and the old Scotch nurse who would have been
her confidante had been sent on an errand to another part of the city.
Thus, as the days went by, and Michael came no more to the house, the
girl grew to think he did not want to come, and her slight
disappointment and mortification were succeeded by a haughty
resentment, for her mother’s teaching had not been without some result
in her character.
Michael had gone into the door of the Endicott mansion a boy with a
light heart and a happy vision of the future. He came out from there an
hour later, a man, with a heavy burden on his heart, and a blank vision
of the future. So much had the woman wrought.
As he walked from the house his bright head drooped, and his spirit was
troubled within him. He went as one in a terrible dream. His face had
the look of an angel newly turned out of paradise and for no fault of
his own; an angel who bowed to the Supreme mandate, but whose life was
crushed within him. People looked at him strangely, and wondered as
they passed him. It was as if Sorrow were embodied suddenly, and
looking through eyes intended for Love. For the first time Michael,
beloved of all his companions for his royal unselfishness, was thinking
of himself.
Yet even so there was no selfishness in his thought. It was only as if
that which had always given him life and the breath of gladness had
suddenly been withdrawn from him, and left him panting, gasping in a
wide and unexpected emptiness.
Somehow he found his way to his room and locked the door.
Then the great spirit gave way and he flung himself upon the bed in
supreme exhaustion. He seemed not to have another atom of strength left
wherewith, to move or think or even breathe consciously. All his
physical powers had oozed away and deserted him, now in this great
crisis when life’s foundations were shaken to their depths and nothing
seemed to be any more. He could not think it over or find a way out of
the horror, he could only lie and suffer it, fact by fact, as it came
and menaced him, slowly, cruelly throughout that length of day.
Gradually it became distinct and separated itself into thoughts so that
he could follow it, as if it were the separate parts of some great
dragon come to twine its coils about him and claw and crush and
strangle the soul of him.
First, there was the fact like a great knife which seemed to have
severed soul from body, the fact that he might not see Starr, or have
aught to do with her any more. So deeply had this interdiction taken
hold upon him that it seemed to him in his agitation he might no longer
even think of her.
Next, following in stern and logical sequence, came the reason for this
severing of soul from all it knew and loved; the fact of his lowly
birth. Coming as it did, out of the blue of a trustful life that had
never questioned much about his origin but had sunnily taken life as a
gift, and thought little about self; with the bluntness and directness
of an un-lovingkindness, it had seemed to cut and back in every
direction, all that was left of either soul or body, so that there came
no hope of ever catching things together again.
That was the way it came over and over again as the boy without a
friend in the whole wide world to whom he could turn in his first great
trouble, lay and took it.
Gradually out of the blackness he began to think a little; think back
to his own beginning. Who was he? What was he? For the first time in
his life, though he knew life more than most of the boys with whom he
had associated, the thought of shame in connection with his own birth
came to him, and burrowed and scorched its way into his soul.
He might have thought of such a possibility before perhaps, had not his
very youngest years been hedged about by a beautiful fancy that sprang
from the brain of an old Irish woman in the slums, whose heart was wide
as her ways were devious, and who said one day when little Mikky had
run her an errand, “Shure, an’ then Mikky, yer an angel sthraight frum
hiven an’ no misthake. Yer no jest humans like the rist av us; ye must
av dhropped doon frum the skoy.” And from that it had gone forth that
Mikky was the child of the sky, and that was why no one knew who were
his parents.
The bit of a fancy had guarded the boy’s weird babyhood, and influenced
more than he knew his own thought of existence, until life grew too
full to think much on it.
Out of the darkness and murk of the slums the soul of Mikky had climbed
high, and his ambitions reached up to the limitless blue above him. It
had never occurred to him once that there might be an embargo put upon
his upward movements. He had taken all others to be as free hearted and
generous as himself. Heir of all things, he had breathed the atmosphere
of culture as though it were his right. Now, he suddenly saw that he
had no business climbing. He had been seized just as he was about to
mount a glorious height from which he was sure other heights were
visible, when a rude hand had brushed him back and dropped him as
though he had been some crawling reptile, down, down, down, at the very
bottom of things. And the worst of all was that he might not climb
back. He might look up, he might know the way up again, but the honor
in him—the only bit of the heights he had carried back to the foot with
him—forbade him to climb to the dizzy heights of glory, for they
belonged to others: those whom fortune favored, and on whose escutcheon
there was no taint of shame.
And why should it be that some souls should be more favored than
others? What had he, for instance, to do with his birth? He would not
have chosen shame, if shame there was. Yet shame or not he was branded
with it for life because his origin was enveloped in mystery. The
natural conclusion was that sin had had its part.
Then through the boy’s mind there tumbled a confusion of questions all
more or less unanswerable, in the midst of which he slept.
He seemed to have wandered out into the open again with the pines he
loved above him, and underneath the springy needles with their slippery
resinous softness; and he lay looking up into the changeless blue that
covered all the heights, asking all the tumultuous questions that
throbbed through his heart, asking them of God.
Silently the noises of the city slunk away and dropped into the
ceaseless calm of the southland he had left. The breeze fanned his
cheek, the pines whispered, and a rippling bird song touched his soul
with peace. A quietness came down upon his troubled spirit, and he was
satisfied to take the burden that had been laid him and to bear it
greatly. The peace was upon him when he awoke, far into the next
morning.
The hot June sun streamed into his stuffy room and fell aslant the bed.
He was sodden and heavy with the heat and the oppression of his
garments. His head ached, and he felt as nearly ill as he had ever felt
in his life. The spectre of the day before confronted him in all its
torturing baldness, but he faced it now and looked it squarely in the
eyes. It was not conquered yet, not by any means. The sharp pain of its
newness was just as great, and the deep conviction was still there that
it was because of wrong that this burden was laid upon him, but there
was an adjustment of his soul to the inevitable that there had not been
at first.
The boy lay still for a few minutes looking out upon a new life in
which everything had to be readjusted to the idea of himself and his
new limitations. Heretofore in his mind there had been no height that
was not his for the climbing. Now, the heights were his, but he would
not climb because the heights themselves might be marred by his
presence. It was wrong, it was unfair, that things should be so; but
they were so, and as long as Sin and Wrong were in the world they would
be so.
He must look upon life as he had looked upon every contest through his
education. There were always things to be borne, hard things, but that
only made the conquest greater. He must face this thing and win.
And what had he lost that had been his before? Not the beautiful girl
who had been the idol of his heart all these years. She was still
there, alive and well, and more beautiful than ever. His devotion might
yet stand between her and harm if need arose. True, he had lost the
hope of companionship with her, but that had been the growth of a day.
He had never had much of it before, nor expected it when he came North.
It would have been a glory and a joy beyond expression, but one could
live without those things and be true. There was some reason for it all
somewhere in the infinite he was sure.
It was not like the ordinary boy to philosophize in this way, but
Michael had never been an ordinary boy. Ever his soul had been open to
the greatness of the universe and sunny toward the most trying
surroundings. He had come out of the hardest struggle his soul had yet
met, but he had come out a man. There were lines about his pleasant
mouth that had not been there the day before, which spoke of strength
and self-control. There were new depths in his eyes as of one who had
looked down, and seen things unspeakable, having to number himself with
the lowly.
A new thought came to him while he lay there trying to take in the
change that had come to him. The thought of his childhood companions,
the little waifs like himself who came from the offscourings of the
earth. They had loved him he knew. He recalled slowly, laboriously,
little incidents from his early history. They were dim and uncertain,
many of them, but little kindnesses stood out. A bad cut on his foot
once and how Buck had bathed it and bound it up in dirty rags, doing
double duty with the newspapers for several days to save his friend
from stepping. There was a bitter cold night way back as far as he
could remember when he had had bad luck, and came among the others
supperless and almost freezing. Buck had shared a crust and found a
warm boiler-room where they crawled out of sight and slept. There were
other incidents, still more blurred in his memory, but enough to recall
how loyal the whole little gang had been to him. He saw once more their
faces when they heard he was going away to college; blanched with
horror at the separation, lighting with pleasure when he promised to
return!
The years, how they had changed and separated! Where were they, these
who really belonged to him; who were his rightful companions? What had
the years done to them? And he had a duty toward them unperformed. How
was it that he had been in the city all these hours and not even
thought of going to look for those loyal souls who had stood by him so
faithfully when they were all mere babies? He must go at once. He had
lost his head over attempting to reach things that were not for him,
and this shock had come to set him straight.
Gravely he rose at last, these thoughts surging through his brain.
The heat, the stifling air of the room, his recent struggling and the
exhausting stupor made him reel dizzily as he got up, but his mettle
was up now and he set his lips and went about making himself neat. He
longed for a dip in the crystal waters of the little lake at college.
The tiny wash-bowl of his room proved a poor substitute with its tepid
water and diminutive towel.
He went out and breakfasted carefully as if it were a duty, and then,
with his map in his pocket, started out to find his old haunts.