The Road to Understanding Part 51

"_Fine--he--was?_" The words, as they fell from Burke Denby's dry lips were barely audible.

"Oh, yes. You see, all the way, ever since I could remember, daddy has been held up to me as so fine and splendid. Why, I learned to hold my fork--and my temper!--the way daddy would want me to. And there wasn't a song or a sunset or a beautiful picture that I wasn't told how daddy would have loved it. Mother was always talking of him, and telling me about him; so I feel that I know him, just as if he were alive."

"As--if--he--_were_--alive!" Burke Denby half started from his chair, his face a battle-ground for contending emotions.

"Yes. But he isn't, you see. He died many, many years ago."

There was the sudden tinkling of shattered gla.s.s on a polished floor.

"Oh, Mr. Denby!" exclaimed Betty in consternation. "Your beautiful vase!"

The man, however, did not even glance at the ruin at his feet. Still, he must have realized what he had done, thought Betty, for, as he crossed to his desk and sat down heavily, she heard him mutter:--

"To think I _could_ have been--such a fool!"

CHAPTER XXV

ENIGMAS

Not until Burke Denby became convinced that Miss Elizabeth Darling was not his daughter did he realize how deeply the thought that she might be had taken hold of his very life--how closely entwined in his affections she had become. From the first minute the electrifying idea of her possible relationship had come to him, he had (in spite of his determination to the contrary) reveled in pictures of what his home would be with a daughter like that to love--and to love him. Helen, too, was in the pictures--true, a vague, shadowy Helen, yet a Helen idealized and glorified by the remorseful repentance born of a bunch of worn little diaries. Then to have the beautiful vision shattered by one word from the girl's own lips--and just when he had attained the pinnacle of joyous conviction that she was, indeed, his little girl of the long ago--it seemed as though he could not bear it.

And, most anguishing of all, there was no chance that there was a mistake. Even if the incongruity of her description of her father as applied to himself could be explained away, there was yet the insurmountable left. With his own ears he had heard her say that her father was dead--had been dead for many years. That settled it, of course. There could be no mistake about--death.

After the first stunning force of the disappointment, there came to Burke Denby the reaction--in the case of Burke Denby a characteristic reaction. It became evident, to some extent, the very next day. For the first time in weeks he did not work with his secretary over the cataloguing at all during the day. He dictated his letters, then left at once for his office at the Works. At luncheon he relapsed into his old stern silence; and in the afternoon, beyond giving a few crisp directions, he showed no interest in Betty's work, absenting himself most of the time from the room.

Yet not in the least was all this consciously planned on his part. He felt simply an aversion to being with this girl. Even the sight of her bright head bent over her work gave him a pang, the sound of her voice brought bitterness. Above all, he dreaded a glance from her eyes--Helen's eyes, that had lured him for a brief twenty-four hours into a fool's paradise of thinking they might, indeed, be--Helen's eyes.

Burke was grievously disappointed, ashamed, and angry; and being accustomed always to acting exactly as he felt, he acted now--as he felt. He was grievously disappointed that his brief dream of a daughter in his home should have come to naught. He was ashamed that he should have allowed himself to be deluded into such a dream, and angry that the thing had so stirred him--that he could be so stirred by the failure of so absurd and preposterous a supposition to materialize into fact.

As the days pa.s.sed, matters became worse rather than better. Added to his disappointment and chagrin there came to be an unreasoning wrath that this girl was not his daughter, together with a rebellion at his lonely life, and an overmastering self-pity that he should be so abused of Fate. It was then that he began systematically to avoid, so far as was possible, being with the girl at all, save for the necessary dictation and instructions. This was the more easily accomplished, as the cataloguing now had almost arrived at the stage where it was a mere matter of copying and tabulating the ma.s.s of material already carefully numbered to correspond with the equally carefully numbered curios in the cabinets.

In spite of it all, however, Burke Denby knew, in his heart, that he was becoming more and more fond of this young girl, more and more interested in her welfare, more and more restless and dissatisfied when not in her presence, more and more poignantly longing to make her his daughter by adoption, now that it was settled beyond question that she was not his by the ties of flesh and blood. Outwardly, however, he remained the stern, unsmiling man, silent, morose, and anything but delightful as a daily companion.

To Betty he had become the unsolvable enigma. That this most unhappy change should have been brought about by the breaking of the Venetian Tear Vase, she could not believe--valuable and highly treasured as it was; yet, as she looked back, the change seemed to have dated from the moment of the vase's shattering on the library floor, the day after Christmas.

At first she had supposed the man's sudden reversion to gloom and silence was a mere whim of the mind or a pa.s.sing distemper of the body.

But when day after day brought no light to his eye, no smile to his lip, no elasticity to his step, she became seriously disturbed, particularly as she could not help noticing that he no longer worked with her; that he no longer, in fact, seemed to want to remain in the library even to hear her read to him.

She was sorely troubled. Not only did she miss the pleasure and stimulus of his presence and interest in the work, but she feared lest in some way she had disappointed or offended him. She began to question herself and to examine critically her work.

She could find nothing. Her work had been well done. She knew that.

There was absolutely no excuse for this sudden taciturn aloofness on his part. After all, it was probably nothing more than what might be expected of him--a going back to his usual self. Without doubt the strange thing was, not that he was stern and silent and morose now, but that, for a brief golden period, he had come out of his sh.e.l.l and acted like a human being. Doubtless it was under the sway of his interest in his curios, and his first delight at seeing them being brought into something like order, that he had, for a moment, as it were, stirred into something really human. And his going back to his original sour unpleasantness now was merely a reversion to first principles.

That it should be so vexed Betty not a little.

And when they were having such a good time! Surely, for a man that _could_ be so altogether charming and delightful to be habitually so extremely undesirable and disagreeable was most exasperating. And he had been such good company! How kind he had been, too, when she had told him so much of her own life and home! How interested he had shown himself to be in every little detail, just as if he really cared. And now--

With a tense biting of her lip Betty reproached herself bitterly for being so free to tell of her own small affairs. She ought to have known that any interest a man like that could show was bound to be superficial and insincere. What a pity she should lose, for once, her reserve! Well, at least she had learned her lesson. Never again would she be guilty of making a confidant of Mr. Burke Denby, no matter how suave and human-like he might elect to become for some other brief week in the future!

To her mother Betty said very little of all this. True, at the first, in her surprise at the remarkable change in her employer's att.i.tude, she had told her mother of his reversion to gloom and sternness; but it had seemed to worry and disturb her mother so much that Betty had stopped at once. And always since then she had avoided speaking of his continued disagreeableness, and skillfully evaded answering pertinent questions.

She told herself that she realized, of course, it was because her mother was so fearful that something would happen that this fine position, with the generous pay, should be lost. Dear mother--who thought she was hiding so shrewdly the fact of how poor they were!

There was something else that Betty did not tell her mother, also, and that was of her first peculiar and annoying experience with the woman at the newsstand at the station. It was about two weeks after Christmas that Betty had first seen the woman. Mr. Denby had asked her to go around by the station on her way home and purchase for him the December issue of "Research." He said it was not a very popular magazine, and that the woman was one of the few agents in town who kept it for sale.

There was an article on Babylonian tablets in the December number, and he wished to see it.

The station was not very far from her home, and Betty was glad to do the errand, of course; but when she arrived at the newsstand she found a most offensive person who annoyed her with questions--a large woman with unpleasantly prominent eyes and a wart on her chin.

"Yes, Miss, I've got the magazine right here," she said with alacrity, in reply to Betty's request. "But, say, hain't I seen you before somewheres?"

Betty shook her head.

"I don't think so," she smiled. "At least, I do not remember seeing you anywhere."

"Well, don't you come here often, to the station, or somethin'?"

persisted the woman.

"No, I have never been here before--except the day I arrived in town last September."

"H-m; funny!" frowned the woman musingly. "I'm a great case fur faces, an' I don't very often make a mistake. I could swear I'd seen you somewheres."

Betty smiled and shook her head again, as she turned away with her magazine.

Twice after that Mr. Denby had sent her to this same newsstand for a desired periodical; and on both occasions the woman had been cheerfully insistent in her questions, and in her reiterations that somewhere she certainly had seen her, as she never made mistakes in faces.

"An' yer workin' fur Burke Denby on the hill, ain't ye?" she asked at last.

Betty colored.

"I am working for Mr. Denby--yes."

"H-m; like him?"

"If you'll give me my change, please," requested Betty then, the flush deepening on her cheeks. "I am in some haste."

The woman laughed none too pleasantly.

"You don't want ter answer, an' I ain't sayin' I wonder," she chuckled.

"He's a queer bug, an' no mistake, an' I don't wonder ye don't like him."

"On the contrary, I like him very much," flashed Betty, hurriedly catching up her magazine, and almost s.n.a.t.c.hing the coins from the woman's hand, in her haste to be away.

Betty had not told her mother of these encounters. More and more plainly Betty was seeing how keenly averse to meeting people her mother was, and how evasive she was in her answers to the questions the market-men sometimes put to her. Instinctively Betty felt that these questions of the newsstand woman would distress her mother very much; so Betty kept them carefully to herself.

The conviction that her mother was fearful of meeting old friends in Dalton was growing on Betty these days, and it disturbed her greatly.