The Sins of the Children Part 22

"Because it was unjust and no man is hanged in these times before he's given a chance to defend himself."

"No one is going to hang you, Peter Guthrie. You've hanged yourself."

"No, no," said Peter, "that won't do. It isn't like you to adopt this att.i.tude and I must ask you to treat me properly."

Townsend shot out a short laugh. "There's no need for you to ask me to do that. My treatment of you is going to be so proper that this is going to be the last time you'll come into this studio. I've done with you. So far as I'm concerned you're over. Betty isn't going to see you or hear from you again. I consider that it was a mighty good accident that took me into Fortieth Street last night. That's all I have to say."

Peter didn't budge. He just squared his shoulders and tilted his chin a little more. "I don't think that's all you've got to say," he said. "I quite understand that you had a bad shock when you saw me coming out of that place last night. If I were in your shoes I should say just what you're saying now."

"It's something to win your approval," said Townsend, sarcastically, "and I'm sure I'm very much obliged to you for coming down town to give me your praise."

"Oh, don't talk like that," said Peter. "It doesn't do any good and it doesn't help to clear things up."

"You can't clear things up. Neither of us can. You began by lying to me when you said you had a business engagement, and you wound up by coming out drunk of the rottenest house in this city. And, see here! I don't like your tone. I'm not standing here to be reproved by you for my att.i.tude in this matter. I might be more inclined to give you a chance if you made a clean breast of it."

"I wish I could," said Peter, "but I can't. All I can tell you is that I had to go to that place last night for a very good reason. I'd never been there before and I shall never go there again. I hadn't even heard of the place until a few days ago. You've got to accept my word of honour that I went there with a friend of mine to get a man who means a very great deal to me out of bad trouble."

"It's taken you sometime to think that out," said Townsend, brutally.

Peter winced as if he had been struck. He had gone to the studio under the belief that everything would be quite easy. He was honest. His conscience was clear. He was not a liar. Surely his word would be accepted. Whatever happened he wasn't going to be disloyal to his brother. Apart from the fact that he had sworn not to give Graham away, he wasn't the kind that blabbed. He tried again, still keeping himself well under control, although he was unable to hide the fact that Ranken Townsend's utter disbelief in him hurt deeply.

"Mr. Townsend," he said, "I don't want to do anything to make you more angry than you are. It's perfectly simple for you to say that you won't have me marry Betty. But remember this: I've only got to go to Betty and ask her to marry me, with or without your consent, and she will. If you don't believe me, you don't know Betty."

"Ah! but that's exactly where you make your mistake," said Townsend. "I _do_ know Betty. And let me tell you this, Peter Guthrie: My girl has been brought up. She hasn't been dragged up or allowed to bring herself up. The consequence is that she's not among the army of present-day girls who look upon their fathers and mothers as any old trash to be swept aside and over-ridden whenever it suits them to do so. I'm the man to whom she owes all the happiness and comfort that she's known. I'm the man who's proud to be responsible for her, to whom she belongs and who knows a wide stretch more of life and its troubles than she does,--and, not being an empty-headed, individualistic, precocious little fool, she knows it too. She belongs to a past decade--to an old-fashioned family.

Therefore, what I say goes; and if I tell her that, for a very good reason, I don't want her to have anything to do with you, she will be desperately unhappy, but she'll not question my authority or my right to say so. These are facts, however absurd and strange they may appear to you. I think it would be a d.a.m.ned good thing if other fathers took the trouble to get on the same footing with their daughters. There'd be less unhappiness and fewer grave mistakes if they did." He was almost on the verge of adding, "Look at your sister Belle if you don't believe me."

Peter had nothing to say.

The two men stood facing one another, gravely, in silence. They were both moved and stirred. And then Peter nodded. "I'm glad you're Betty's father," he said at last. "She owes you more than she can ever pay back. I give you my word that I shan't attempt to dispute your authority. I respect you, Mr. Townsend, and when I marry Betty I want to have your consent and approval. I also give you my word that it was absolutely necessary for me to go to Papowsky's last night, without any explanation whatever. Are you going to take it?"

"No," said Townsend; "I'm not. Even if I'd known you for years what you ask is too much for me to swallow. Good Lord, man! can't you see that I'm protecting my daughter--the one person I love in this world--the one person whose happiness means more to me than anything on earth? Why should I believe that you're different from other young men,--the average young man whom I see every day, who no more cares about going clean to the woman he is going to marry than he does for running straight afterwards? I don't know you and hitherto I've accepted you on your face value. When it comes to the question of a man's trusting his daughter to the first person who comes and asks him for her, he's got to be pretty sure of what he's doing. In any case, I don't hold with the old saying that 'young men will be young men.' You may sow your wild oats if you like, but they're not going to blossom in the garden of a little girl who belongs to me. In that respect I'm as narrow-minded as a Quaker. And let me tell you this finally: I know the sort of place that Papowsky's is. I know what goes on there and the sort of people who frequent it. To my mind any man who's seen coming out of it does for himself as the future husband of any good girl. If you have, as you say, a good reason for going there, tell it to me. If not, get out."

The artist had said these things with intense feeling. Hard as they were, Peter had to acknowledge that they were right. Just for one instant he wavered. He was on the point of giving the whole story away.

Then his loyalty to his brother came back to him. He would rather be shot than go back on the man who had trusted him and with whom he had grown up with such deep affection. "Very well," he said, "that settles it. I've nothing more to say. But one of these days I'll prove that my word of honor was worth taking. In the meantime, you can't stop me from loving Betty and you'll never be able to stop Betty from loving me."

He turned on his heel, took up his hat and stick and went out.

III

Graham was sitting up in bed when Peter returned to his room. He was looking about him with an expression of queer surprise,--puzzled apparently to find himself in his room.

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, old man!" said Peter. "How d'you feel?"

Graham put his hand up to his head. "I don't know yet. Have I been asleep? I thought I'd been in a railway accident. I was looking about for the broken girders and the ghastly signs of a smash."

He got slowly out of bed, put on his slippers and walked up and down for a few minutes with a heavy frown on his face. The emotion of the night before had left its marks. He stopped in front of a chair on the back of which his evening clothes were hanging neatly. He remembered that he had thrown them off. He noticed--at first with irritation--that the things on his dressing-table had been re-arranged--tampered with. It didn't look as he liked it to look. Something had been taken away. It dawned on him that all his razors had been removed. "Removed,"--the word sent a sort of electric shock through his brain as it pa.s.sed through. He went over to the window and looked out into the street. The sun glorified everything with its wonderful touch. Good G.o.d! To think that he might be standing at that very moment on the other side of the great veil.

"I don't know--I don't know what to say to you for all this, Peter," he said.

Peter sat down, thrust his hands into his pockets and his long legs out in front of him. Reaction had set in. He felt depressed and wretched.

"One of these days," he said, "I may ask you to do the same thing for me."

Something in his tone made Graham turn round sharply. "What's wrong?"

"Everything's wrong," said Peter. "But I'll tell you some other time.

Your affair has got to be settled first."

"No; tell me now," said Graham. He dreaded to feel that he was the cause somehow or other of bringing trouble upon his brother. Never before in all his life had he seen Peter looking like that.

"Mr. Townsend happened to be pa.s.sing Papowsky's last night and saw me coming out. I'd had a sc.r.a.p up in the studio with a bunch of men who were half drunk. I must have looked like it. He told me that he wouldn't have me marry Betty, and he repeated it this morning. I've just come away from his place. That's what's the matter with me."

"Oh, curse me!" cried Graham. "Curse me for a fool!"

Peter sprang to his feet. "Don't start worrying about me. And look here; don't let's waste time in trying to sc.r.a.pe up spilt milk. I'm going to marry Betty, that's a dead certainty, and sooner or later Mr. Townsend will withdraw the brutal things he said to me. And you're going to wipe your slate clean, right away. So buck up and get busy, old man. Have your bath and get dressed as soon as you can. I'm going to help you to fix your affair as soon as you're ready."

"How?" asked Graham.

"I don't know quite. I think I'll ask Kenyon."

"No, don't. Let's do it together. I don't want Kenyon to see,--I mean I'd rather Kenyon was out of it. I'd rather that you were the only one to look on at the remainder of my humiliation,--that's the word. He knows quite enough as it is."

"All right!" said Peter. "Hurry up, then. We'll go round to the apartment and see Ita Strabosck. I cashed a cheque on the way back from Mr. Townsend's. We can't let her go out into the street with nothing in her pocket,--that's impossible."

Graham nodded. He couldn't find words to say what he felt about it all.

There was a look of acute pain on his pale face as he went into the bath-room.

And then Peter sat down at his brother's table and wrote a little note to Betty:

My own dearest Baby:

Something has happened and your father--who's a fine fellow and well worthy of you--believes that I'm such a rotter that he's told me to consider myself scratched. I'm going to play the game by him for your sake as well as his. Don't worry about it.

Leave everything to me. I won't ask you to go on loving me and believing in me, because that you must do, just as I shall go on loving you and believing in you. _It has to be._ I've got to think things over to see what can be done.

In the meantime, and as long as I live, Your PETER.

He addressed the letter and put the envelope in his pocket. Then he went to the bath-room and called out: "Old man, shall I have some breakfast sent up for you?" The answer was, "No; the sight of food would make me sick."

Graham dressed quickly and nothing more was said by either of the brothers until they went out into the street together.

"We'll get a cab," said Peter.

"No; I'm too broke. Let's walk."

And so they walked hard, arm in arm. It seemed rather an insult to Graham that the day was so fine, the sky so blue and equable and that all the pa.s.sers-by seemed to be going on their way untroubled. He'd have been better pleased if the day had been dark and ugly and if everybody had been hurrying through rain and sleet. His own mind was disturbed by a storm of the most unpleasant thoughts. The girl whom they were on their way to see had exercised a strong physical fascination over him.

He had believed in her absolutely. She had meant a great deal to him.

Her deceit and cunning selfishness brought pessimism into his soul. It was a bad feeling.

As they came up to the house with its shabby door, a man well-past middle age,--a flabby, vulgar person, with thick awkward legs,--left it rather quickly and walked in the opposite direction. The two boys went in and Peter led the way up the dark staircase. The door was open and Lily, the colored maid, was holding a shrill argument with a man with a basket full of empty siphons on his arm. Her face broke into an odd and knowing smile when she saw Graham. They pa.s.sed her without a word and went along the pa.s.sage into the sitting-room. It was empty, but in a hideous state of disorder. There was about it all that last night look which is so unpleasant and insalubrious. The windows had not been opened and the room reeked with stale tobacco smoke and beer. Cigar stumps lay like dead snails on the carpet. Empty bottles were everywhere and dirty gla.s.ses. Through the half-open door which led into the bed-room they heard a flutey, uncertain soprano voice singing a curious foreign song.