In the Heart of a Fool Part 12

"But, Tom," answered the girl, "that wasn't pride, that was self-respect."

"Well, my dear," he squeezed her gloved hand and in the darkness put his arm about her, "let's not worry about him. All I know is that I wanted to square it with him for taking care of the horse and five dollars won't hurt his self-respect. And," said the bridegroom as he pressed the bride very close to his heart, "what is it to us? We have each other, so what do we care----what is all the world to us?"

As the midnight train whistled out of South Harvey Grant Adams sitting on a bedside was fondly unb.u.t.toning a small body from its clothes, ready to hear a sleepy child's voice say its evening prayers. In his heart there flamed the love for the child that was beckoning him into love for every sentient thing. And as Laura Van Dorn, bride of Thomas of that name, heard the whistle, her being was flooded with a love high and marvelous, washing in from the infinite love that moves the universe and carrying her soul in aspiring thrills of joy out to ride upon the mysterious currents that we know are not of ourselves, and so have called divine.

In the morning, in the early gray of morning, when Grant Adams rose to make the fire for breakfast, he found his father, sitting by the kitchen table, half clad as he had risen from a restless bed. Scrawled sheets of white paper lay around him on the floor and the table. He said sadly:

"She can't come, Grant--she can't come. I dreamed of her last night; it was all so real--just as she was when we were young, and I thought--I was sure she was near." He sighed as he leaned back in his chair. "But they've looked for her--all of them have looked for her. She knows I'm calling--but she can't come." The father fumbled the papers, rubbed his gray beard, and shut his fine eyes as he shook his head, and whispered: "What holds her--what keeps her? They all come but her."

"What's this, father?" asked Grant, as a page closely written in a fine hand fluttered to the floor.

"Oh, nothing--much--just Mr. Left bringing me some message from Victor Hugo. It isn't much."

But the Eminent Authority who put it into the Proceedings of the Psychological Society laid more store by it than he did by the sc.r.a.ps and incoherent bits of jargon which pictured the old man's lonely grief.

They are not preserved for us, but in the Proceedings, on page 1125, we have this from Mr. Left:

"The vice of the poor is cra.s.s and palpable. It carries a quick and deadly corrective poison. But the vices of the well-to-do are none the less deadly. To dine in comfort and know your brother is starving; to sleep in peace and know that he is wronged and oppressed by laws that we sanction, to gather one's family in contentment around a hearth, while the poor dwell in a habitat of vice that kills their souls, to live without bleeding hearts for the wrong on this earth--that is the vice of the well-to-do. And so it shall come to pa.s.s that when the day of reckoning appears it shall be a day of wrath. For when G.o.d gives the poor the strength to rise (and they are waxing stronger every hour), they will meet not a brother's hand but a glutton's--the hard, dead hand of a hard, dead soul. Then will the vicious poor and the vicious well-to-do, each crippled by his own vices, the blind leading the blind, fall to in a merciless conflict, mad and meaningless, born of a sad, unnecessary hate that shall terrorize the earth, unless G.o.d sends us another miracle of love like Christ or some vast chastening scourge of war, to turn aside the fateful blow."

CHAPTER XIII

IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE INTERIOR OF A DESERTED HOUSE

An empty, lonely house was that on Quality Hill in Elm Street after the daughter's marriage. It was not that the Doctor and Mrs. Nesbit did not see their daughter often; but whether she came every day or twice a week or every week, always she came as a visitor. No one may have two homes.

And the daughter of the house of Nesbit had her own home;--a home wherein she was striving to bind her husband to a domesticity which in itself did not interest him. But with her added charm to it, she believed that she could lure him into an acceptance of her ideal of marriage. So with all her powers she fell to her task. Consciously or unconsciously, directly or by indirection, but always with the joy of adventure in her heart, whether with books or with music or with comradeship, she was bending herself to the business of wifehood, so that her own home filled her life and the Nesbit home was lonely; so lonely was it that by way of solace and diversion, Mrs. Nesbit had all the woodwork downstairs "done over" in quarter-sawed oak with elaborate carvings. Ferocious gargoyles, highly excited dolphins, improper, pot-bellied little cupids, and mermaids without a shred of character, seemed about to pounce out from banister, alcove, bookcase, cozy corner and china closet.

George Brotherton pretended to find resemblances in the effigies to people about Harvey, and to the town's echoing delight he began to name the figures after their friends, and always saluted the figures intimately, as Maggie, or Henry, or the Captain, or John Kollander, or Lady Herd.i.c.ker. But through the wooden menagerie in the big house the Doctor whistled and hummed and smoked and chirruped more or less drearily. To him the j.a.panese screens, the huge blue vases, the ponderous high-backed chairs crawly with meaningless carvings, the mantels full of jars and pots and statuettes, brought no comfort. He was forever putting his cane over his arm and clicking down the street to the Van Dorn home; but he felt in spite of all his daughter's efforts to welcome him--and perhaps because of them--that he was a stranger there.

So slowly and rather imperceptibly to him, certainly without any conscious desire for it, a fondness for Kenyon Adams sprang up in the Doctor's heart. For it was exceedingly soft in spots and those spots were near his home. He was domestic and he was fond of home joys. So when Mrs. Nesbit put aside the encyclopedia, from which she was getting the awful truth about Babylonian Art for her paper to be read before the Shakespeare Club, and going to the piano, brought from the bottom of a pile of yellow music a tattered sheet, played a Chopin nocturne in a rolling and rather grand style that young women affected before the Civil War, the Doctor's joy was scarcely less keen than the child's.

Then came rare occasions when Laura, being there for the night while her husband was away on business, would play melodies that cut the child's heart to the quick and brought tears of joy to his big eyes. It seemed to him at those times as if Heaven itself were opened for him, and for days the melodies she played would come ringing through his heart. Often he would sit absorbed at the piano when he should have been practicing his lesson, picking out those melodies and trying with a poignant yearning for perfection to find their proper harmonies. But at such times after he had frittered away a few minutes, Mrs. Nesbit would call down to him, "You, Kenyon," and he would sigh and take up his scales and runs and arpeggios.

Kenyon was developing into a shy, lovely child of few noises; he seemed to love to listen to every continuous sound--a creaking gate, a waterdrip from the eaves, a whistling wind--a humming wire. Sometimes the Doctor would watch Kenyon long minutes, as the child listened to the fire's low murmur in the grate, and would wonder what the little fellow made of it all. But above everything else about the child the Doctor was interested in watching his eyes develop into the great, liquid, soulful orbs that marked his mother. To the Doctor the resemblance was rather weird. But he could see no other point in the child's body or mind or soul whereon Margaret Muller had left a token. The Doctor liked to discuss Kenyon with his wife from the standpoint of ancestry. He took a sort of fiendish delight--if one may imagine a fiend with a seraphic face and dancing blue eyes and a mouth that loved to pucker in a pensive whistle--in Mrs. Nesbit's never failing stumble over the child's eyes.

Any evening he would lay aside his Browning----even in a knotty pa.s.sage wherein the Doctor was wont to take much pleasure, and revert to type thus:

"Yes, I guess there's something in blood as you say! The child shows it!

But where do you suppose he gets those eyes?" His wife would answer energetically, "They aren't like Amos's and they certainly are not much like Mary's! Yet those eyes show that somewhere in the line there was fine blood and high breeding."

And the Doctor, remembering the kraut-peddling Muller, who used to live back in Indiana, and who was Kenyon's great-grandfather, would shake a wise head and answer:

"Them eyes is certainly a throw-back to the angel choir, my dear--a sure and certain throw-back!"

And while Mrs. Nesbit was climbing the Sands family tree, from Mary Adams back to certain Irish Sandses of the late eighteenth century, the Doctor would flit back to "Paracelsus," to be awakened from its spell by: "Only the Irish have such eyes! They are the mark of the Celt all over the world! But it's curious that neither Mary nor Daniel had those eyes!"

"It's certainly curious like," squeaked the Doctor amicably--"certainly curious like, as the treetoad said when he couldn't holler up a rain.

But it only proves that blood always tells! Bedelia, there's really nothing so true in this world as blood!"

And Mrs. Nesbit would ask him a moment later what he could find so amusing in "Paracelsus"? She certainly never had found anything but headaches in it.

Yet there came a time when the pudgy little stomach of the Doctor did not shake in merriment. For he also had his problem of blood to solve.

Tom Van Dorn was, after all, the famous Van Dorn baby!

One evening in the late winter as the Doctor was trudging home from a belated call, he saw the light in Brotherton's window marking a yellow bar across the dark street. As he stepped in for a word with Mr.

Brotherton about the coming spring city election, he saw quickly that the laugh was in some way on Tom Van Dorn, who rose rather guiltily and hurried out of the shop.

"Seegars on George!" exclaimed Captain Morton; then answered the Doctor's gay, inquiring stare: "Henry bet George a box of Perfectos Tom wouldn't be a year from his wedding asking 'what's her name' when the boys were discussing some girl or other, and they've laid for Tom ever since and got him to-night, eh?"

The Captain laughed, and then remembering the Doctor's relationship with the Van Dorns, colored and tried to cover his blunder with: "Just boys, you know, Doc--just their way."

The Doctor grinned and piped back, "Oh, yes--yes--Cap--I know, boys will be dogs!"

Toddling home that night the Doctor pa.s.sed the Van Dorn house. He saw through the window the young couple in their living-room. The doctor had a feeling that he could sense the emotions of his daughter's heart. It was as though he could see her trying in vain to fasten the steel grippers of her soul into the heart and life of the man she loved. Over and over the father asked himself if in Tom Van Dorn's heart was any essential loyalty upon which the hooks and bonds of the friendship and fellowship of a home could fasten and hold. The father could see the handsome young face of Van Dorn in the gas light, aflame with the joy of her presence, but Dr. Nesbit realized that it was a pa.s.sing flame--that in the core of the husband was nothing to which a wife might anchor her life; and as the Doctor clicked his cane on the sidewalk vigorously he whispered to himself: "Peth--peth--nothing in his heart but peth."

A day came when the parents stood watching their daughter as she went down the street through the dusk, after she had kissed them both and told them, and after they had all said they were very happy over it. But when she was out of sight the hands of the parents met and the Doctor saw fear in Bedelia Nesbit's face for the first time. But neither spoke of the fear. It took its place by the vague uneasiness in their hearts, and two spectral sentinels stood guard over their speech.

Thus their talk came to be of those things which lay remote from their hearts. It was Mrs. Nesbit's habit to read the paper and repeat the news to the Doctor, who sat beside her with a book. He jabbed in comments; she ignored them. Thus: "I see Grant Adams has been made head carpenter for all the Wahoo Fuel Companies mines and properties." To which the Doctor replied: "Grant, my dear, is an unusual young man. He'll have ten regular men under him--and I claim that's fine for a boy in his twenties--with no better show in life than Grant has had." But Mrs.

Nesbit had in general a low opinion of the Doctor's estimates of men.

She held that no man who came from Indiana and was fooled by men who wore cotton in their ears and were addicted to chilblains, could be trusted in appraising humanity.

So she answered, "Yes," dryly. It was her custom when he began to bestow knighthood upon common clay to divert him with some new and irrelevant subject. "Here's an item in the _Times_ this morning I fancy you didn't read. After describing the bride's dress and her beauty, it says, 'And the bride is a daughter of the late H. M. Von Muller, who was an exile from his native land and gave up a large estate and a t.i.tle because of his partic.i.p.ation in the revolution of '48. Miss Muller might properly be called the Countess Von Muller, if she chose to claim her rightful t.i.tle!'--what is there to that?"

The Doctor threw back his head and chuckled:

"Pennsylvania Dutch for three generations--I knew old Herman Muller's father--before I came West--when he used to sell kraut and cheese around Vincennes before the war, and Herman's grandfather came from Pennsylvania."

"I thought so," sniffed Mrs. Nesbit. And then she added: "Doctor, that girl is a minx."

"Yes, my dear," chirped the Doctor. "Yes, she's a minx; but this isn't the open season for minxes, so we must let her go. And," he added after a pause, during which he read the wedding notice carefully, "she may put a brace under Henry--the blessed Lord knows Henry will need something, though he's done mighty well for a year--only twice in eighteen months.

Poor fellow--poor fellow!" mused the Doctor. Mrs. Nesbit blinked at her husband for a minute in sputtering indignation. Then she exclaimed: "Brace under Henry!" And to make it more emphatic, repeated it and then exploded: "The cat's foot--brace for Henry, indeed--that piece!"

And Mrs. Nesbit stalked out of the room, brought back a little dress--a very minute dress--she was making and sat rocking almost imperceptibly while her husband read. Finally, after a calming interval, she said in a more amiable tone, "Doctor Nesbit, if you've cut up all the women you claim to have dissected in medical school, you know precious little about what's in them, if you get fooled in that Margaret woman."

"The only kind we ever cut up," returned the Doctor in a mild, conciliatory treble, "were perfect--all Satterthwaites."

And when the Doctor fell back to his book, Mrs. Nesbit spent some time reflecting upon the virtues of her liege lord and wondering how such a paragon ever came from so common a State as Indiana, where so far as any one ever knew there was never a family in the whole commonwealth, and the entire population as she understood it carried potatoes in their pockets to keep away rheumatism.

The evening wore away and Dr. and Mrs. Nesbit were alone by the ashes in the smoldering fire in the grate. They were about to go up stairs when the Doctor, who had been looking absent-mindedly into the embers, began meditating aloud about local politics while his wife sewed. His meditation concerned a certain trade between the city and Daniel Sands wherein the city parted with its stock in Sands's public utilities with a face value of something like a million dollars. The stocks were to go to Mr. Sands, while the city received therefor a ten-acre tract east of town on the Wahoo, called Sands Park. After bursting into the Doctor's political nocturne rather suddenly and violently with her feminine disapproval, Mrs. Nesbit sat rocking, and finally she exclaimed: "Good Lord, Jim Nesbit, I wish I was a man."

"I've long suspected it, my dear," piped her husband,

"Oh, it isn't that--not your politics," retorted Mrs. Nesbit, "though that made me think of it. Do you know what else old Dan Sands is doing?"

The Doctor bent over the fire, stirred it up and replied, "Well, not in particular."

"Philandering," sniffed Mrs. Nesbit.

"Again?" returned the Doctor.