His Family Part 5

"Then let's take it in sections," the youngster replied. Confound his boyish a.s.surance! "To begin with," he was saying, "I rather think I have money enough. We'd better go into that, hadn't we?"

"Yes," said Roger indifferently. "We might as well go into it." Of course the chap had money enough. He was a money maker. You could hear it in his voice; you could see it in his jaw, in his small aggressive blonde moustache. Now he was telling briefly of his rich aunt in Bridgeport, of the generous start she had given him, his work downtown, his income.

"Twenty-two thousand this year," he said. "We can live on that all right, I guess."

"You won't starve," was the dry response. Roger walked for a moment in silence, then turned abruptly on young Sloane.

"Look here, young man, I don't want to dig," he continued very huskily.

"But I know little or nothing of what may be behind you. I don't care to ask you about it now--unless it can make trouble."

"It can't make trouble." At this answer, low but sharp, Roger wheeled and shot a glance into those clear and twinkling eyes. And his own eyes gleamed with pain. Laura had been such a little thing in the days when she had been his pet, the days when he had known her well. What could he do about it?

This was only the usual thing. But he felt suddenly sick of life.

"How soon do you want to get married?" he demanded harshly.

"Next month, if we can."

"Where are you going?"

"Abroad," said Sloane. Roger caught at this topic as at a straw. Soon they were talking of the trip, and the tension slackened rapidly. He had never been abroad himself but had always dreamed of going there. With maps and books of travel Judith and he had planned it out. In imagination they had lived in London and Paris, Munich and Rome, always in queer old lodgings looking on quaint crooked streets. He had dreamed of long delicious rambles, glimpses into queer old shops, vast, silent, dark cathedrals. For Laura how different it would be. This boy of hers knew Europe as a group of gorgeous new hotels.

The moment Laura joined them, her father's eye was caught and held by the ring upon her finger. Roger knew rings, they were his hobby, and this huge yellow solitaire in its new and brilliant setting at once awakened his dislike. It just fitted the life they were to lead! What life? As he listened to his daughter he kept wondering if she were so sure. Had she felt no uneasiness? She must have, he decided, for all her gay excitement.

One Laura in that smiling face; another Laura deep inside, doubting and uncertain, reaching for her happiness, now elated, now dismayed, exclaiming, "Now at last I'm starting!" Oh, what an ignorant child she was.

He wanted to cry out to her, "You'll _always_ be just starting! You'll never be sure, you'll never be happy, you'll always be just beginning to be! And the happier you are, the more you will feel it is only a start!...

And then-"

More and more his spirit withdrew from these two heedless children. Later on, when Deborah came, he barely noticed her meeting with Sloane. And through dinner, while they talked of plans for the wedding, the trip abroad, still Roger took no part at all. He felt dull and heavy. Deborah too, he noticed, after her first efforts to be welcoming and friendly, had gradually grown silent. He saw her watching Laura with a mingled look of affection and of whimsical dismay. Soon after dinner she left them, and Roger smoked with the boy for a while and learned that he was twenty-nine.

Both had grown uneasy and rather dull with each other. It was a relief when again Laura joined them, dressed to go out. She and her lover left the house.

Roger sat motionless for some time. His cigar grew cold unheeded. One of the sorrows of his life had been that his only son had died. Bruce had been almost like a son. But this young man of Laura's? No.

Later he went for his evening walk. And as though drawn by invisible chains he strayed far down into the ghetto. Soon he was elbowing his way through a maze of uproarious tenement streets as one who had been there many times. But he noticed little around him. He went on, as he had always gone, seeing and hearing this seething life only as a background to his own adventure. He reached his destination. Pushing his way through a swarm of urchins playing in front of a p.a.w.nshop, he entered and was a long time inside, and when he came out again at last the whole expression of his face had undergone a striking change. As one who had found the solace he needed for the moment, his pace unconsciously quickened and he looked about him with brighter eyes.

Around the corner from his home, he went into a small jewelry shop, a remnant of the town of the past. There were no customers in the place, and the old Galician jeweler sat at the back playing solitaire. At sight of Roger he arose; and presently in a small back room, beneath the glare of a powerful lamp, the two were studying the ring which Roger had found in the ghetto that night. It was plain, just a thin worn band of gold with an emerald by no means large; but the setting was old and curious, and personal, distinctive. Somebody over in Europe had worked on it long and lovingly. Now as the Galician gently rubbed and polished and turned the ring this way and that, the light revealed crude tiny figures, a man and a woman under a tree. And was that a vine or a serpent? They studied it long and absorbedly.

At home, up in his bedroom, Roger opened a safe which stood in one corner, took out a large shallow tray and sat down with it by his lamp. A strange array of rings was there, small and delicate, huge, bizarre; great signet rings and poison rings, love tokens, charms and amulets, rings which had been worn by wives, by mistresses, by favorite slaves and by young girls in convents; rings with the Madonna and rings with many other saints graven on large heavy stones; rings French and Russian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Syrian. Some were many centuries old. In nine shallow metal trays they filled the safe in Roger's room. Although its money value was small, the Gale collection was well known to a scattered public of connoisseurs, and Roger took pride in showing it. But what had always appealed to him most was the romance, the mystery, stored up in these old talismans that had lived so many ages, travelled through so many lands, decked so many fingers. Roger had found every one of them in the p.a.w.nshops of New York.

What new recruits to America had brought them here and p.a.w.ned them? From what old cities had they come? What pa.s.sions of love and jealousy, of hatred, faith, devotion were in this glittering array? Roger's own love affair had been deep, but quiet and even and happy. All the wild adventures, the might-have-beens in his s.e.x life, were gathered in these dusky trays with their richly colored glints of light.

Of his daughters, Laura had been the one most interested in his rings, and so he thought of Laura now as he placed in the tray the new ring he had bought, the one he would have liked for her. But a vague uneasiness filled his mind, for he knew she had the same craving as he for what gleamed out of these somber trays. The old Galician jeweler had long been quite a friend of hers, she had often dropped in at his shop to ask him curious questions about his women patrons. And it was just this side of him that Roger did not care for. So many of those women were from a dubious glittering world, and the old Galician took a weird vicarious joy in many of the gay careers into which he sent his beloved rings, his brooches, earrings, necklaces, his clasps and diamond garters. And Laura loved to make him talk.... Yes, she was her father's child, a part of himself. He, too, had had his yearnings, his burning curiosities, his youthful ventures into the town. "You will live on in our children's lives." With her inheritance what would she do? Would she stop halfway as he had done, or would she throw all caution aside and let the flames within her rise?

He heard a step in the doorway, and Deborah stood there smiling.

"A new one?" she inquired. He nodded, and she bent over the tray. "Poor father," Deborah murmured. "I saw you eyeing Laura's engagement ring at dinner to-night. It wasn't like this one, was it?" He scowled:

"I don't like what I see ahead of her. Nor do you," he said. "Be honest."

She looked at him perplexedly.

"We can't stop it, can we? And even if we could," she said, "I'm not quite sure I'd want to. It's her love affair, not yours or mine--grown out of a life she made for herself--curious, eager, thrilled by it all--and in the center of her soul the deep glad growing certainty, 'I'm going to be a beautiful woman--I myself, I, Laura Gale!' Oh, you don't know--nor do I.

And so she felt her way along--eagerly, hungrily, making mistakes--and you and I left her to do it alone. I'm afraid we both rather neglected her, dad," Deborah ended sadly. "And all we can do now, I think, is to give her the kind of wedding she wants."

Roger started to speak but hesitated.

"What is it?" she inquired.

"Queer," he answered gruffly, "how a man can neglect his children--as I have done, as I do still--when the one thing he wants most in life is to see each one of 'em happy."

CHAPTER VI

Roger soon grew accustomed to seeing young Sloane about the house. They could talk together more easily, and he began to call him Harold. Harold asked him with Laura to lunch at the Ritz to meet the aunt from Bridgeport, a lady excessively stout and profound. But that ended the formalities. It had all been so much easier than Roger had expected. So, in its calm sober fashion, the old house took into its life this new member, these new plans, and the old seemed stronger for the new--for Laura and Edith and Deborah drew together closer than they had been in many years. But only because they felt themselves on the eve of a still deeper and more lasting separation, as the family of Roger Gale divided and went different ways. At times he noticed it sadly. Laura, who had scarcely ever been home for dinner, now spent many evenings here. She needed her home for her wedding, he thought. Each daughter needed it now and then. But as the years wore slowly on, the seasons when they needed it grew steadily wider and wider apart....

Early in May, when Roger came home from his office one night he found Edith's children in the house. From the hallway he could hear their gay excited voices, and going into the dining room he found them at their supper. Deborah was with them, and at once her father noticed how much younger she appeared--as she always did with these children who all idolized her so. She rose and followed him into the hall, and her quiet voice had a note of compa.s.sion.

"Edith's baby is coming," she said.

"Good Lord. Is anything wrong?" he asked.

"No, no, it's all right--"

"But I thought the child wasn't due for three weeks."

"I know, and poor Edith is fearfully worried. It has upset all her plans.

I'd go up and see her if I were you. Your supper is ready; and if you like you can have it with the children."

There followed a happy boisterous meal, with much expectant chatter about the long summer so soon to begin at the farm up in the mountains. George, whose hair was down over his eyes, rumpled it back absorbedly as he told of a letter he had received from his friend Dave Royce, Roger's farmer, with whom George corresponded. One of the cows was to have a calf, and George was anxious to get there in time.

"I've never seen a real new calf, new absolutely," he explained. "And I want a look at this one the very minute that he's born. Gee, I hope we can get there in time--"

"Gee! So do I!" cried Bobby aged nine. And then Tad, the chubby three-year-old who had been intently watching his brothers, slowly took the spoon from his mouth and in his grave sweet baby voice said very softly, "Gee." At her end of the table, Elizabeth, blonde and short and rather plump, frowned and colored slightly. For she was eleven and she knew there was something dark and shameful about the way calves appear in barns. And so, with a quick conscious cough, she sweetly interrupted:

"Oh, Aunt Deborah! Won't you please tell us about--about--"

"About--about," jeered the ironical George. "About what, you little ninny?"

Poor Elizabeth blushed desperately. She was neither quick nor resourceful.

"Now, George," said his aunt warningly.

"Wasn't I talking?" the boy rejoined. "And didn't Betsy b.u.t.t right in--without even a thing to b.u.t.t in about? About--about," he jeered again.

"About Paris!" cried his sister, successful at last in her frantic search for a proper topic of conversation. "Aunt Deborah's trip to Paris!"

"How many times has she told it already?" her brother replied with withering scorn. "And anyhow, I was talking of cows!"

"Very well," said his aunt, "we'll talk about cows, some cows I saw on a lovely old farm in a little village over in France."