In the Heart of a Fool Part 13

"No," snapped Mrs. Nesbit--"as usual!"

The Doctor had no opinion to express; one of the family specters was engaging his attention at the moment. Presently his wife put down her paper and sat as one wrestling with an impulse. The specter on her side of the hearth was trying to keep her lips sealed. They sat while the mantel clock ticked off five minutes.

"What are you thinking?" the Doctor asked.

"I'm thinking of Dan Sands," replied the wife with some emotion in her voice.

The foot tap of Mrs. Nesbit became audible. She shook her head with some force and exclaimed: "O Jim, wouldn't I like to have that man--just for one day."

"I've noticed," cut in the Doctor, "regarding such propositions from the gentler s.e.x, that the Lord generally tempers the wind to the shorn lamb."

"The shorn lamb--the shorn lamb," retorted Mrs. Nesbit. "The shorn tom-cat! I'd like to shear him." Wherewith she rose and putting out the light led the Doctor to the stairs.

Both knew that the spectral sentinels had used Daniel Sands and his amours only as a seal upon their lips.

The parents could speak in parables about what they felt or fancied because there was so little that was tangible and substantial for them to see. Of all the inst.i.tutions man has made--the state, the church, his commerce, his schools,--the home is by far the most spiritual. Its successes and its failures are never material. They are never evidenced in any sort of worldly goods. Only in the hearts of those who dwell in a home, or of those to whom it is dear, do its triumphs and its defeats register themselves. But in Tom Van Dorn's philosophy of life small s.p.a.ce was left for things of the spirit alone, to register. He was trying with all his might to build a home upon material things. So above all he built his home around a beautiful woman. Then he lavished upon her and about the house wherein she dwelled, beautiful objects. He was proud of their cost. Their value in dollars and cents gave these objects their chief value in his balance sheet of gain or less in footing up his account with his home. And because what he had was expensive, he prized it. Possibly because he had bought his wife's devotion, at some material sacrifice to his own natural inclinations toward the feminine world, he listed her high in the a.s.sets of the home; and so in the only way he could love, he loved her jealously. She and the rugs and pictures and furniture--all were dear to him, as chattels which he had bought and paid for and could brag about. And because he was too well bred to brag, the repression of that natural instinct he added to the cost of the items listed,--rugs, pictures, wife, furniture, house, trees, lot, and blue gra.s.s lawn. So when toward the end of the first year of his marriage, he found that actually he could turn his head and follow with his eyes a pretty petticoat going down Market Street, and still fool his wife; when he found he could pry open the eyes of Miss Mauling at the office again with his old ogle, and still have the beautiful love which he had bought with self-denial, its value dropped.

And his wife, who felt in her soul her value pa.s.sing in the heart she loved, strove to find her fault and to correct it. Daily her devotion manifested itself more plainly. Daily she lived more singly to the purpose of her soul. And daily she saw that purpose becoming a vain pursuit.

Outwardly the home was unchanged as this tragedy was played within the two hearts. The same scenery surrounded the players. The same voices spoke, in the same tones, the same words of endearment, and the same hours brought the same routine as the days pa.s.sed. Yet the home was slowly sinking into failure. And the specters that sealed the lips of the parents who stood by and mutely watched the inner drama unfold, watched it unfold and translate itself into life without words, without deeds, without superficial tremor or flinching of any kind--the specters pa.s.sed the sad story from heart to heart in those mysterious silences wherein souls in this world learn their surest truths.

CHAPTER XIV

IN WHICH OUR HERO STROLLS OUT WITH THE DEVIL TO LOOK AT THE HIGH MOUNTAIN

The soup had come and gone; great platters of fried chicken had disappeared, with incidental spinach and new peas and potatoes. A bowl of lettuce splashed with a French dressing had been mowed down as the gra.s.s, and the goodly company was surveying something less than an acre of strawberry shortcake at the close of a rather hilarious dinner--a spring dinner, to be exact. Rhoda Kollander was reciting with enthusiasm an elaborate and impossible travesty of a recipe for strawberry shortcake, which she had read somewhere, when the Doctor, in his nankeens, putting his hands on the table cloth as one who was about to deliver an oracle, ran his merry eyes down the table, gathering up the Adamses and Mortons and Mayor Brotherton and Morty Sands; fastened his glance upon the Van Dorns and cut in on the interminable shortcake recipe rather ruthlessly thus in his gay falsetto:

"Tom, here--thinks he's pretty smart. And George Brotherton, Mayor of all the Harveys, thinks he is a pretty smooth article; and the Honorable Lady Satterthwaite here, she's got a Maryland notion that she has second sight into the doings of her prince consort." He chuckled and grinned as he beamed at his daughter: "And there is the princess imperial--she thinks she's mighty knolledgeous about her father--but," he c.o.c.ked his head on one side, enjoying the suspense he was creating as he paused, drawling his words, "I'm just going to show you how I've got 'em all fooled."

He pulled from his pocket a long, official envelope, pulled from the envelope an official doc.u.ment, and also a letter. He laid the official doc.u.ment down before him and opened the letter.

"Kind o' seems to be signed by the Governor of the State," he drolled: "And seems like the more I look at it the surer I am it's addressed to Tom Van Dorn. I'm not much of an elocutionist and never could read at sight, having come from Eendiany, and I guess Rhody here, she's kind of elocutionary and I'll jest about ask her to read it to the ladies and gentlemen!" He handed Mrs. Kollander the letter and pa.s.sed the sealed doc.u.ment to his son-in-law.

Mrs. Kollander read aloud:

"I take pleasure in handing you through the kindness of Senator James Nesbit your appointment to fill the vacancy in your judicial district created to-day by the resignation of Judge Arbuckle of your district to fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court of this State created there by the resignation of Justice Worrell."

Looking over his wife's shoulder and seeing the significance of the letter, John Kollander threw back his head and began singing in his roaring voice, "For we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again, shouting the battle cry of freedom," and the company at the table clapped its hands. And while George Brotherton was bellowing, "Well--say!" Judge Thomas Van Dorn kissed his wife and beamed his satisfaction upon the company.

When the commotion had subsided the chuckling little man, all a-beam with happiness, his pink, smooth face shining like a headlight, explained thus:

"I jest thought these Maryland Satterthwaites and Schenectady Van Dorns was a-gittin' too top-lofty, and I'd have to register one for the Grand Duke of Griggsby's Station, to sort of put 'em in their place!" He was happy; and his vernacular, which always was his pose under emotional stress, was broad, as he went on: "So I says to myself, the Corn Belt Railroad is mighty keen for a Supreme Court decision in the Missouri River rate case, and I says, Worrell J., he's the boy to write it, but I says to the Corn Belt folks, says I, 'It would shatter the respect of the people for their courts if Worrell J. should stay on the bench after writing the kind of a decision you want, so we'll just put him in your law offices at twelve thousand per, which is three times what he is getting now, and then one idear brought on another and here's Tom's commission and three men and a railroad all made happy!" He threw back his head and laughed silently as he finished, "and all the justices concurring!" After the hubbub of congratulations had pa.s.sed and the guests had moved into the parlor of the Nesbit home, the little Doctor, standing among them, regaled himself thus:

"Politics is jobs. Jobs is friends. Friends is politics. The reason why the reformers don't get anywhere is that they have no friends in politics. They regard the people as sticky and smelly and low. Bedelia has that notion. But I love 'em! Love 'em and vote 'em!"

Amos Adams opened his mouth to protest, but the Doctor waved him into silence. "I know your idear, Amos! But when the folks get tired of politics that is jobs and want politics that is principles, I'll open as fine a line of principles as ever was shown in this market!"

After the company had gone, Mrs. Nesbit faced her husband with a peremptory: "Well--will you tell me why, Jim Nesbit?" And he sighed and dropped into a chair.

"To save his self-respect! Self-respect grows on what it feeds on, my dear, and I thought maybe if he was a judge"--he looked into the anxious eyes of his wife and went on--"that might hold him!" He rested his head on a hand and drew in a deep breath. "'Vanity, vanity,' saith the Preacher--'all is vanity!' And I thought I'd hitch it to something that might pull him out of the swamp! And I happened to know that he had a sneaking notion of running for Judge this fall, so I thought I'd slip up and help him."

He sighed again and his tone changed. "I did it primarily for Laura," he said wearily, and: "Mother, we might as well face it."

Mrs. Nesbit looked intently at her husband in understanding silence and asked: "Is it any one in particular, Jim--"

He hesitated, then exclaimed: "Oh, I may be wrong, but somehow I don't like the air--the way that Mauling girl a.s.sumes authority at the office.

Why, she's made me wait in the outer office twice now--for nothing except to show that she could!"

"Yes, Jim--but what good will this judgeship do? How will it solve anything?" persisted the wife. The Doctor let his sigh precede his words: "The office will make him realize that the eyes of the community are on him, that he is in a way a marked man. And then the place will keep him busy and spur on his ambition. And these things should help."

He looked tenderly into the worried face of his wife and smiled.

"Perhaps we're both wrong. We don't know. Tom's young and--" He ended the sentence in a "Ho--ho--ho--hum!" and yawned and rose, leading the way up stairs.

In the Van Dorn home a young wife was trying to define herself in the new relation to the community in which the evening's news had placed her. She had no idea of divorcing the judgeship from her life. She felt that marriage was a full partnership and that the judgeship meant much to her. She realized that as a judge's wife her life and her duties--and she was eager always to acquire new duties--would be different from her life and her duties as a lawyer's wife or a doctor's wife or a merchant's wife, for example. For Laura Van Dorn was in the wife business with a consuming ardor, and the whole universe was related to her wifehood. To her marriage was the development of a two-phase soul with but one will. As the young couple entered their home, the wife was saying:

"Tom, isn't it fine to think of the good you can do--these poor folk in the Valley don't really get justice. And they're your friends. They always help you and father in the election, and now you can see that they have their rights. Oh, I'm so glad--so glad father did it. That was his way to show them how he really loves them."

The husband smiled, a husbandly and superior smile, and said absently, "Oh, well, I presume they don't get much out of the courts, but they should learn to keep away from litigation. It's a rich man's game anyway!" He was thinking of the steps before him which might lead him to a higher court and still higher. His ambition vaulted as he spoke.

"Laura, Father Jim wouldn't mind having a son-in-law on the United States Supreme Court, and I believe we can work together and make it in twenty years more!"

As the young wife saw the glow of ambition in his fine, mobile face she stifled the altruistic yearnings, which she had come to feel made her husband uncomfortable, and joined him as he gazed into the crystal ball of the future and saw its glistening chimera.

Perhaps the preceding dialogue wherein Dr. James Nesbit, his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law have spoken may indicate that politics as the Doctor played it was an exceedingly personal chess game. We see him here blithely taking from the people of his state, their rights to justice and trading those rights cheerfully for his personal happiness as it was represented in the possible reformation of his daughter's husband. He thought it would work--this curious bartering of public rights for private ends. He could not see that a man who could accept a judgeship as it had come to Tom Van Dorn, in the nature of things could not take out an essential self-respect which he had forfeited when he took the place. The Doctor was as blind as Tom Van Dorn, as blind as his times. Government was a personal matter in that day; public place was a personal perquisite.

As for the reformation of Tom Van Dorn, for which all this juggling with sacred things was done, he had no idea that his moral regeneration was concerned in the deal, and never in all the years of his service did the vaguest hint come to him that the outrage of justice had been accomplished for his own soul's good.

The next morning Tom Van Dorn read of his appointment as Judge in the morning papers, and he pranced twice the length of Market Street, up one side and down the other, to let the populace congratulate him. Then with a fat box of candy he went to his office, where he gave the candy and certain other tokens of esteem to Miss Mauling, and at noon after the partnership of Calvin & Van Dorn had been dissolved, with the understanding that the young Judge was to keep his law books in Calvin's office, and was to have a private office there--for certain intangible considerations. Then after the business with Joseph Calvin was concluded, the young Judge in his private office with his hands under his coattails preened before Miss Mauling and talked from a shameless soul of his greed for power! The girl before him gave him what he could not get at home, an abject adoration, uncritical, unabashed, unrestrained.

The young man whom the newly qualified Judge had inherited as court stenographer was a sadly unemotional, rather methodical, old maid of a person, and Tom Van Dorn could not open his soul to this youth, so he was wont to stray back to the offices of Joseph Calvin to dictate his instructions to juries, and to look over the books in his own library in making up his decisions. The office came to be known as the Judge's Chambers and the town c.o.c.ked a gay and suspicious eye at the young Judge. Mr. Calvin's practice doubled and trebled and Miss Mauling lost small caste with the n.o.bility and gentry. And as the summer deepened, Dr. James Nesbit began to see that vanity does not build self-respect.

When the young Judge announced his candidacy for election to fill out the two years' unexpired term of his predecessor, no one opposed Van Dorn in his party convention; but the Doctor had little liking for the young man's intimacy in the office of Joseph Calvin and less liking for the scandal of that intimacy which arose when the rich litigants in the Judge's court crowded into Calvin's office for counsel. The Doctor wondered if he was squeamish about certain matters, merely because it was his own son-in-law who was the subject of the disquieting gossip connected with Calvin's practice in Van Dorn's court. Then there was the other matter. The Doctor could notice that the town was having its smile--not a malicious nor condemning smile, but a tolerant, amused smile about Van Dorn and the Mauling girl; and the Doctor didn't like that. It cut deeply into the Doctor's heart that as the town's smile broadened, his daughter's face was growing perceptibly more serious. The joy she had shown when first she told him of the baby's coming did not illumine her face; and her laughter--her never failing well of gayety--was in some way being sealed. The Doctor determined to talk with Tom on the Good of the Order and to talk man-wise--without feeling of course but without guile.

So one autumn afternoon when the Doctor heard the light, firm step of the young man in the common hallway that led to their offices over the Traders' Bank, the Doctor tuned himself up to the meeting and cheerily called through his open door:

"Tom--Tom, you young scoundrel--come in here and let's talk it all over."

The young man slipped a package into his pocket, and came lightly into the office. He waved his hand gayly and called: "Well--well, pater familias, what's on your chest to-day?" His slim figure was clad in gray--a gray suit, gray shirt, gray tie, gray shoes and a crimson rose bud in his coat lapel. As he slid into a chair and crossed his lean legs the Doctor looked him over. The young Judge's corroding pride in his job was written smartly all over his face and figure. "The fairest of ten thousand, the bright and morning star, Tom," piped the Doctor. Then added briskly, "I want to talk to you about Joe Calvin." The young man lifted a surprised eyebrow. The Doctor pushed ahead as he pulled the county bar docket from his desk and pointed to it. "Joe Calvin's business has increased nearly fifty per cent. in less than six months!

And he has the money side of eighty per cent. of the cases in your court!"

"Well--" replied Van Dorn in the mushy drawl that he used with juries, "that's enough! Joe couldn't ask more." Then he added, eying the Doctor closely, "Though I can't say that what you tell me startles me with its suddenness."

"That's just my point," cried the Doctor in his high, shrill voice.

"That's just my point, Thomas," he repeated, "and here's where I come in. I got you this job. I am standing for you before the district and I am standing for you now for this election." The Doctor wagged his head at the young man as he said, "But the truth is, Tom, I had some trouble getting you the solid delegation."