In the Heart of a Fool

The father rose. His head was cast down. He poked a vine curling about the porch floor with his cane.

“I wonder, my dear,” he spoke slowly, and with great gentleness, “if maybe I shouldn’t talk with Tom–before you see him.”

He continued to poke the vine, and looked up at the daughter sadly. “Of course there’s Lila; if it is best for her–why that’s the thing to do–I presume.”

“But father,” broke in the daughter, “Tom and I can–”

But he entreated, “Won’t you let me talk with Tom? In half an hour–I’ll go. You and Lila slip over to mother’s for half an hour–come back at half past twelve. I’ll tell him where you are.”

The mother and child had disappeared around the corner of the house when the click of Van Dorn’s bicycle on the curbing told the Doctor that the young man was upon the walk. The package from the capital still lay beside the porch column. The Doctor did not lift his eyes from it as the younger man came hurrying up the steps. He was flushed, bright-eyed, a little out of breath, and his black wing of hair was damp. On the top step, he looked up and saw the Doctor.

“It’s all right, Tom–I understand things.” The Doctor’s eyes turned to the parcel on the floor between them.

The Doctor’s voice was soft; his manner was gentle, and he lifted his blue, inquiring eyes into the young Judge’s restless black ones. Dr. Nesbit put a fatherly hand on the young man’s arm, and said: “Shall we sit down, Tom, and take stock of things and see where we stand? Wouldn’t that be a good idea?”

The Judge turned around and said in a disturbed voice, “I am sure that’s the God’s truth, Doctor Jim.” Then after a sigh he added, “And this is what I’ve done to you!”

“And will keep right on doing to me as long as you live,” piped the elder man, twitching his mouth and nose contemptuously.

“As long as I live, I fancy,” repeated the other. In the pause the young man put his hands to his hips and his chin on his breast as he slouched down in the chair and asked: “Where’s Laura?”

“Over at her mother’s,” replied the father. “Nobody will interrupt us–and so I thought we could get down to grass roots and talk this thing out.”

The Judge crossed his handsome ankles and sat looking at his trim toes.

“I suppose that idea is as good as any.” He put one long, lean, hairy hand on the short, fat knee beside him and said: “The whole trouble with our Protestant religion is that we have no confessor. So some of us talk to our lawyers, and some of us talk to our doctors, and in extreme unction we talk to our newspapers.”

He grinned miserably, and went on: “But we all talk to some one, and now I’m going to talk to you–talk for once, Doctor, right out of my soul–if I have one.”

He rose nervously, obeying some purely physical impulse, and then sat down again, with his hands in his thick, black hair, and his elbows on his bony knees.

“All right, Tom,” piped the Doctor, “go ahead.”

“Well, then,” he began as he looked at the floor before him, “do you suppose I don’t know that you know what I’m up to? Do you think I don’t know even what the town is buzzing about? Lord, man, I can feel it like a scorching fire. Why,” he exclaimed with emotion, “feeling the hearts of men is my job. I’ve been at it for fifteen years–”

The Doctor’s mouth twitched and he took a breath as if about to speak. Van Dorn stopped him: “Don’t cut in, Doc Jim–let me say it all out. I’m young. I love the moonlight and the stars and I never go through a wood that I do not see trysting places there–and I never see a great stretch of prairie under the sunshine that I do not put in a beautiful woman and go following her–not for her–Doctor Jim, but for the joy of pursuit, for the thrill of uncovering a bared, naked soul, and the overwhelming danger of it. God–man, I’ve stood afraid to breathe, flattened against a wall and heard the man-beast growl and sniff, hunting me. I love to love and be loved; but not less do I love to hunt and be hunted. I’ve hidden under trees, I’ve skulked in the shadows, I’ve walked boldly in the sunlight with my life in my hand to meet a woman’s eyes, to feel her guilty shudder in my arms. Oh, Doctor Jim, you don’t understand the riot in my blood that the moon makes shining through the trees upon the water, with great, shadowy glades, and the tinkle of cow bells far away, and a woman afraid of me–and I afraid of her–and nothing but the stars and the night between us.”

He stood excited with his deep, beady, black eyes burning and his proud, vain face flushed and his hands a-tremble. The Doctor saw that he was in the midst of a physical and mental turmoil that could not be checked.

Van Dorn went on: “And then you and my friends ask me to quit. Laura, God help her–she naturally–” he exclaimed. “But is the moon to be blotted out for me? Are the night winds to be muffled and mean no more than the scraping of a dead twig against a rusty wire? Are flowers to lose their scent, and grass and trees and birds to be blurred and turned drab in my eyes? How do you think I live, man? How do you think I can go before juries and audiences and make them thrill and clench their fists and cry like children and breathe with my emotions, if I am to be stone dead? Do you think a wooden man can do that? Try Joe Calvin with a jury–what does he accomplish with all his virtue? He hasn’t had an emotion in twenty years. A pretty woman looking at Joe in a crowd wouldn’t say anything to him with her eyes and dilating nostrils and the swish of her body. And when he gets before a jury he talks the law to them, and the facts to them, and the justice of the case to them. But when I used to stand up before them, they knew I was weak, human mud. They had heard all the stories on me. They knew me, and some of them despised me, and all of them were watching out for me, but when I reached down in my heart and brought up the common clay of which we all are made and molded it into a man or an event before their eyes, then–by God they came to me. And yet you’ve been sitting there for years, Doctor Jim Nesbit and saying ‘Tom–Tom, why don’t you quit?’”

He was seated now, talking in a low, tense voice, looking the Doctor deeply in the eyes, and as he paused, the perspiration stood out upon his scarred forehead, and pink splotches appeared there and the veins of his temples were big and blue. The Doctor turned away his eyes and said coldly: “There’s Laura–Tom–Laura and little Lila.”

“Yes,” he groaned, rising. “There are Laura and Lila.”

He shuddered, and continued: “For once I’ll speak and tell it all. I’ll not be a hypocrite in this hour, though ever after I may lie and cringe. There are Laura and Lila and here am I. And out beyond is the wind in the elms and the sunshine upon the grass and the moving odor of flowers–flowers that are blushing with the joy of nature in her great perennial romance–and there’s Laura and Lila and here am I.”

His passion was ebbing; his face was hardening into its wonted vain, artificial contour, his eyes were losing their dilation, and he was sitting rather limply in his chair, staring into space. The Doctor came at him.

“You’re a fool. You had your fling; you’re along in your thirties, nearly forty now and it’s time to stop.” The younger man could not regain the height, but he could hide under his crust. So he parried back suavely, with insolence in his voice:

“Why stop at thirty–or even forty? Why stop at all?”

“Let me tell you something, Tom,” returned the Doctor. “It’s all very fine to talk this way; but this thing has become a fixed habit, just like the whiskey habit; and in fifteen or twenty years more you’ll be a chronic, physical, degenerate man. You’ll lose your self-respect. You’ll lose your quick wits, and your whole mind and body will be burning up with a slow fire.”

“Oh, you dear old fossil,” replied Van Dorn in a hollow, dead voice, rising and patting his tie and adjusting his coat and collar, “I’m no fool. I know what I’m doing. I know how far to go, and when to stop. But this game is interesting; and I’m only a man,” he straightened up again, patted his mustache, and again tipped his hat into a cockey angle over his forehead, and went on, “not a monk.” He smiled, pivoted on his heel nervously and went on, “And what is more I can take care of myself.”

“So,” mocked the sneering voice of the young Judge, “I suppose you’ll carry the marks of all the men you’ve bought up in this town for twenty years.”

“Yes, Tom,” returned the Doctor pitifully, as he rose and stood beside the preening young man, “I’ll carry ’em to the grave with me, too; I’ve had a few stripes to-day.”

“Well, anyway,” retorted Van Dorn, pulling his hat over his eyes, restlessly, “you’re entitled to what you get in this life. And I’m going to get all I can, money and fun, and everything else. Morals are for sapheads. The preacher’s God says I can’t have certain things without His cracking down on me. Watch me beat Him at his own game.” It was all a make-believe and the Doctor saw that the real man was gone.

“Tom,” sighed the Doctor, “here’s the practical question–you realize what all this means to Laura? And Lila–why, Tom, can’t you see what it’s going to mean to her–to all of us as the years go by?”

Their eyes met and turned to the parcel on the floor. “You can’t afford–well, that sort of thing,” the Doctor punched the parcel contemptuously with his cane. “It’s all bad enough, Tom, but that way lies hell!”

Van Dorn turned upon the Doctor, and squared his jaw and said: “Well then–that’s the way I’m going–that way”–he nodded toward the package–“lies romance for me! There is the road to the only joy I shall ever know in this earth. There lies life and beauty and all that I live for, and I’m going that way.”

The Judge met the father’s beseeching face, with an angry glare–defiant and insolent.

The man and the woman looked at one another, but did not speak. The father put the child down and said:

“Now, Lila, run with grandpa and get a cooky from granny while your mother and I talk.”

She looked up at him with her blue eyes and her sadly puckered little face, swallowed her disappointed tears and trudged down the steps after the white-clad grandfather who was untying his horse.

When the child and the grandfather were gone the wife said in a dead, emotionless voice, looking at the parcel on the floor, “Well, Tom?”

“Well, Laura,” he repeated, “that’s about the size of it–there it is–and you know all about it. I shall not lie–this time. It’s not worth while–now.”

The woman sat in a porch chair. The man hesitated, and she said: “Sit down, Tom. I don’t know what to do or what to say,” she began. “If there were just you and me to consider, I suppose I’d say we’d have to quit. But there’s Lila. She is here and she does love you–and she has her right–the greatest right in the world to–well, to us–to a home, and a home means a father and a mother.” The man rose. He put his hands in his coat pockets and stood by the porch column, making no reply.

The wife continued, “I can’t even speak of what you have done to me, Tom. But it will hurt when I’m an old woman–I want to hide my face from every one–even from God–when I think of what you have used me for.”

He dropped into the chair beside her, looking at the floor. Her voice had stirred some chord in his thousand-stringed heart. He reached out a hand to her.

“No, Tom,” said the wife, “I don’t want your pity.”

“But, Tom,” asked the wife, “you aren’t going to this woman? You aren’t going to leave us? You surely won’t break up this home–not this home, Tom?”

The man hesitated before answering, then spoke directly: “I must follow my destiny–work it out as I see it. You have no right, no one has any right–even I have no right to compromise with my destiny. I live in this world just once!”

“But what is your destiny, Tom?” answered the wife. “Leave me out of it: but aren’t the roots you have put down in this home, this career you are building; our child’s normal girlhood with a father’s care–aren’t these the big things in your destiny? Lila’s life–growing up under the shame that follows a child of parents divorced for such base reasons as these? Lila’s life is surely a part of your destiny. Surely, surely you have no rights apart from her and hers!”

His quick mind was ready. “I have my own life to live, my own destiny to follow; my individual equation to solve, and for me nothing exists in the universe. As for my career–I’ll take care of that. That’s mine also!”

The wife threw out an appealing hand. “Tom, I can’t help wanting to pick you up and shield you. It will be awful–awful–that thing you are trying to go into. You’ve always chosen the material thing–the practical thing–and she–she’s a practical woman. Oh, Tom–I’m not jealous–not a bit. If I thought she would enrich your soul–if I thought she would give you what I’ve wanted to give you–what I’ve prayed God night after night to let me give you–I’d take even Lila and go away and give you your chance for a love such as I’ve had. Can you see, Tom, I’m not jealous? I’m not even angry.”

“No, Tom,” said the wife quietly, “she’ll not enrich you–not spiritually. No one can do that–for any one. It must come from within. I’ve poured my very heart over you, Tom, and you didn’t want it–you only wanted–oh, God–hide my shame–my shame–my shame.” Her voice rose for a moment and she muffled it with her face in her arms.

“Tom–” she faltered, “Tom–I am going to make one last plea–for Lila’s sake won’t you put it all away–won’t you?” she shuddered. “It is killing all my self-respect, Tom–but I must. Won’t you–won’t you please for Lila’s sake come back, break this off–and see if we can’t patch up life?”

“No,” he answered.

Their eyes met; his shifting, beady eyes were held forcibly with many a twitching, by her gray eyes. For two awful seconds they stood taking farewell of each other.

“No,” he repeated, dropping his glance.

Then he put out his hand with a gesture of finality, “I’m going now. I don’t know when–or–well, whether I’ll come–” He picked up the package. He was going down the steps with the package in his hands when he heard the patter of little feet and a little voice calling:

“Daddy–daddy–” and repeated, “daddy.”

He did not turn, but walked quickly to the sidewalk. As far as he could hear, that childish voice called to him.

And he heard the cry in his dreams.

Laura Van Dorn stood watching her husband pass down the street. She silenced the child by clasping her close in the tender motherly arms. No tears rose in the wife’s eyes, as she stood looking vacantly down the street at the corner where her husband had turned. Gradually it came to her consciousness that a crowd was gathering by her father’s house. She remembered then that she had seen a carriage drive up, and that three or four men followed it on bicycles, and then half a dozen men got out of a wagon. Even while she stared, she saw the little rattletrap of a buggy that Amos Adams drove come tearing up to the curb by her father’s house. Amos Adams, Jasper and little Kenyon got out. Even amidst the turmoil of her emotions, she moved mechanically to the street, to see better, then she clasped Lila to her breast and ran toward her father’s home.

“What is it?” she cried to the first man she met at the edge of the little group standing near the veranda steps.

“Grant Adams–we’re afraid he’s killed.” The man who spoke was Denny Hogan. Beside him was an Italian, who said, “He’s burned something most awful. He got it saving des feller here,” nodding and pointing to Hogan.

Laura put down her child and hurried through the house to her father’s little office. The strong smell of an anesthetic came to her. She saw Amos Adams standing a-tremble by the office door, holding Kenyon’s hand. Amos answered her question.

“They think he’s dying,–I knew he’d want to see Kenyon.”

“Come in, Laura–I need you. Now all of you go out but George and her.”

Then, as she came into the group, Laura saw Grant Adams, sitting with agony upon his wet face. Her father bent over him and worked on a puffy, pink, naked arm and shoulder, and body. The man was half conscious; his face was twitching, and when she looked again she saw where his right hand should be only a brown, charred stump.

Not looking up the Doctor spoke: “You know where things are and what I need–I can’t get him clear under,” Every motion he made counted; he took no false steps; he made no turn of his body or twist of his hand that was not full of conscious purpose. He only spoke to give orders, and when Brotherton whispered to Laura:

“White hot lead pig at the smelter–Grant saw it was going to kill Hogan and grabbed it.”

The Doctor shook his head at Brotherton and for two hours that was all Laura knew of the accident. Once when the Doctor stopped for a second to take a deep breath, Brotherton asked, “Do you want another doctor?” the little man shook his head again, and motioned with it at his daughter.

“She’s doing well enough.” She kept her father’s merciless pace, but always the sense of her stricken life seemed to be hovering in the back of her consciousness, and the hours seemed ages as she applied her bandages, and helped with the gruesome work of the knife on the charred stump of the arm. But finally it was over and she saw Brotherton and Hogan lift Grant to a cot, under her father’s direction, and carry him to the bedroom she had used as a girl at home. While the Doctor and Laura had been working in his office Mrs. Nesbit had been making the bedroom ready.

“But Laura,” the mother returned, “I believe your father is expecting your help here–to-night. I am sure he will need you.” The daughter looked steadily, but rather vacantly at her mother for a moment, then replied: “Well, Lila and I must go now. I’ll leave her there with the maid and I’ll try to come back.”

Her hand was on the door-knob. “Well,” hesitated her mother, “what about Tom–?”

The eyes of the two women met. “Did father tell you?” asked the daughter’s eyes. The mother’s eyes said “Yes.” Then rose the Spartan mother, and put a kind, firm hand upon the daughter’s arm and asked: “But Laura, my dear, my dear, you are not going back again, to all–all that, are you?”

“I am going home, mother,” the daughter replied.

“But your self-respect, child?” quoted the Spartan, and the daughter made answer simply: “I must go home, mother.”

When Laura Van Dorn entered her home she began the evening’s routine, somewhat from habit, and yet many things she did she grimly forced herself to do. She waited dinner for her husband. She called his office vainly upon the telephone. She and Lila ate alone; often they had eaten alone before. And as the evening grew from twilight to dark, she put the child to bed, left one of the maids in the child’s room, lighted an electric reading lamp in her husband’s room, turned on the hall lamp, instructed the maid to tell the Judge that his wife was with her father helping him with a wounded man, and then she went out through the open, hospitable door.

As the night wore on, she kept her nurse’s chart and did the things to be done for her patient. For the time her emotions were spent. Her heart was empty. Even for the shattered and suffering body before her, the tousled red head, the half-closed, pain-bleared eyes, the lips that shielded the clenched teeth–she felt none of that tenderness that comes from deep sympathy and moving pity. At dawn she went home with her body worn and weary, and after the sun was up she slept.

Scarcely had the morning stir begun in the Nesbit household, before Morty Sands appeared, clad in the festive raiment of the moment–white ducks and a shirtwaist and a tennis racket, to be exact. He asked for the Doctor and when the Doctor came, Morty cocked his sparrow like head and paused a moment after the greetings of the morning were spoken. After his inquiries for Grant had been satisfied, Morty still lingered and cocked his head.

“Of course, Doctor,” Morty began diffidently, “and naturally you know more of it than I–but–” he got no further for a second. Then he gathered courage from the Doctor’s bland face to continue: “Well, Doctor, last night at Brotherton’s, Tom came in and George and Nate Perry and Kyle and Captain Morton and I were there; and Tom–well, Doctor–Tom said something–”

“He did–did he?” cut in the Doctor. “The dirty dog! So he broke the news to the Amen Corner!”

The Doctor’s kindly face twitched with pain, and he cried: “Morty, you’re a boy in a thousand! But can’t you see that just at this time if I had half a dozen cases like Grant’s, they would be a God’s mercy for her!”

Morty could not control his voice. So he turned and tripped down the steps and flitted away. As Morty disappeared, George Brotherton came roaring up the hill, but no word of what Van Dorn had said in the Amen Corner did Mr. Brotherton drop. He asked about Grant, inquired about Laura, and released a crashing laugh at some story of stuttering Kyle Perry trying to tell deaf John Kollander about the Venezuelan dispute. “Kyle,” said George, “pronounces Venezuela like an atomizer!” Captain Morton rested from his loved employ, let the egg-beater of the hour languish, and permitted stock in his new Company to slump in a weary market while he camped on the Nesbit veranda during the day to greet and disperse such visitors as Mrs. Nesbit deemed of sufficiently small social consequence to receive the Captain’s ministrations. At twilight the Captain greeted Laura coming from her home for her night watch, and with a rather elaborate scenario of amenities, told her how his Household Horse company was prospering, how his egg beater was going, and asked after Lila’s health, omitting mention of the Judge with an easy nonchalance which struck terror to the woman’s heart–terror, lest the Captain and through him all men should know of her trouble.

The third night found Grant Adams restless, wakeful, anxious to talk. The opiates had left him. She saw that he was fully himself, even though conscious of his tortured body. “Laura,” he cried in a sick man’s feeble voice, “I want to tell you something.”

“Not now, Grant,” she returned quietly. “I’d rather hear it to-morrow.”

“No,” he returned stubbornly, “I want to tell you now.”

He paused as if to catch his breath. “For I want you to know I’m the happiest man in the world.” He set his teeth firmly. The muscles of his jaw worked, and he smiled up at her. He questioned her with his blue eyes, and after some assent had come into her face–or he thought it had, he went on:

“There’s a God in Israel, Laura–I know it way down in me and all through me.”

A crash of pain stopped him. He grinned at the groan, which the pain wrenched from him, and whispered, “There’s a God in Israel–for He gave me my chance. I saw the great white killing thing coming to do for Denny Hogan. How I’d waited for that chance. Then when it came, I wanted to run. But I didn’t run. There’s something in you bigger than fear. So when God gave me my chance He put the–the–the–” pain wrenched him again, and he said weakly, “the–I’ve got to say it, you’ll understand–He put the–the guts in me to take it.”

When she left him a few minutes later he seemed to be asleep. But when Doctor Nesbit came into the room an hour later Grant was wide-eyed and smiling, and seemed so much better that as a reward of merit the Doctor brought in the morning paper and told Grant he could look at the headings for five minutes. There it was that he first realized what a lot of business lay ahead of him, learning to live as a one-armed man. The Doctor saw his patient worrying with the paper, and started to help.

“Damages! damages!” cried Grant, “why, Doctor, I can’t get damages. I wasn’t working for the smelter when it happened. I was around organizing the men. And I don’t want damages. This arm,” he looked lovingly at the stump beside him, “is worth more in my business than a million dollars. For it proves to me that I am not afraid to go clear through for my faith, and it proves me to the men! Damages! damages?” he said grimly. “Why, Doctor, if Uncle Dan and the other owners up town here only know what this stump will cost them, they would sue me for damages! I tell you those men in the mine there saved my life. Ever since then I’ve been trying to repay them, and here comes this chance to turn in a little on account, to bind the bargain, and now the men know how seriously I hold the debt. Damages?” There was just a hint of fanaticism in his laugh; the Doctor looked at Grant quickly, then he sniffed, “Fine talk, Grant, fine talk for the next world, but it won’t buy shoes for the baby in this,” and he turned away impatiently and went into a world of reality, leaving Grant Adams to enjoy his Utopia.

That morning after breakfast, when Laura had gone home, the Doctor and his wife sitting alone went into the matter further. “Of course,” said the Doctor, “she’ll see that he has gone away. But when should we tell her what he has done?”

“Doctor,” said the mother, “you leave his letter here where I can get it. I’m going over there and pack everything that rightfully may be called hers–I mean her dresses and trinkets–and such things as have in them no particular memory of him. They shall come home. Then I’ll lock up the house.”

“Grant ought really to stay here another week–maybe we can stretch it to ten days–and let her have all the responsibility she’ll take. It’ll help her over the first bridge. Kenyon is taking care of Lila–I suppose?” The Doctor rose, stood by his wife and said as he found her hand:

“Poor Laura–poor Laura–and Lila! You know when I had her down town with me yesterday, in the hallway leading to Joe Calvin’s office, she met Tom–” The Doctor looked away for a moment. “It was pretty tough–her little heartbreak when he went by her without taking her up!” The wife did not reply. The husband with his arm about her walked toward the door.

“You can’t tell me, my dear, that Tom isn’t paying–I know how that sort of thing gets under his skin–he’s too sensitive not to imagine all it means to the child.” Mrs. Nesbit’s face hardened and her husband saw her bitterness. “I know, my dear–I know how you feel–I feel all that, and yet in my very heart I’m sorry for poor Tom. He’s swapping substance for shadow so recklessly–not only in this, not merely with Laura–but with everything–everything.”

“Good Lord, Jim, I don’t see how you can agonize over a wool-dyed scoundrel like that–perhaps you have some tears for that Fenn hussy, too!”

“Well,” squeaked the Doctor soberly–“I knew her father–a lecherous old beast who brought her up without restraint or morals–with a greedy philosophy pounded into her by example every day of her life until she was seventeen years old. There’s something to be said–even for her, my dear–even for her.”

“Well, Jim Nesbit,” answered his wife, “I’ll go a long way with you in your tomfoolery, but so long as I’ve got to draw the line somewhere I draw it right there.”

He looked up into her eyes, bent to kiss her hand, and after he had picked up his cane and his hat from the rack, toddled down the walk to the street, a sad, thoughtful, worried little man, white-clad and serene to outward view, who had not even a whistle nor a vagrant tune under his breath to console him.

That day, after her father’s insistence, Laura Van Dorn changed from the night watch to the day nurse, and from that day on for ten days, she ministered to Grant Adams’ wants. Mechanically she read to him from such books as the house afforded–Tolstoi–Ibsen, Hardy, Howells,–but she was shut away from the meaning of what she read and even from the comments of the man under her care, by the consideration of her own problems. For to Laura Van Dorn it was a time of anxious doubt, of sad retrogression, of inner anguish. In some of the books were passages she had marked and read to her husband; and such pages calling up his dull comprehension of their beauty, or bringing back his scoffing words, or touching to the quick a hurt place in her heart, taxed her nerves heavily. But during the time while she sat by the injured man’s bedside, she was glad in her heart of one thing–that she had an excuse for avoiding the people who called.

As Grant grew stronger–as it became evident that he must go soon, the woman’s heart shrank from meeting the town, and she clung to each duty of the man’s convalescence hungrily. She knew she must face life, that she must have some word for her friends about her tragedy. She felt that in going away, in suing for the divorce himself, her husband had made the break irrevocable. There was no resentment nor malice toward him in her heart. Yet the future seemed hopelessly black and terrible to her.

“How modern he is–how American–how like Harvey,” said the young man. “Ibsen might have lived right here in this town, and written that,” he added. He started to raise his right arm, but a twinge of pain reminded him that the stump was bound, so he raised his left and cried:

“And I tell you, Laura–that’s what I’m on earth to fight–the whole infernal system of pocket-picking and poor-robbing, and public gouging that we permit under the profit system.” The woman’s thoughts were upon her own sorrow, but she called herself back to smile and reply:

“All right, Grant–I’m with you. We may have to draft father and commandeer George Brotherton, and start out as a pirate crew–but I’m with you.”

“Let me tell you something,” said the man. “I’ve not been loafing for the past two years. I’ve got Harvey–the men in the mines and smelter, I mean, fairly well unionized, but the unions are nothing–nothing ultimate–they are only temporary.”

“Well,” returned the woman, soberly, “that’s something.”

The man made no answer. With his free hand he was ruffling his red hair, and she could see the muscles of his jaw working, and she felt his great mouth harden as he flashed his blue eyes upon her. “Laura,” he cried, “they may whip us this year. For a while they may scare the men into voting for prosperity, but as sure as we both live we shall see these times and these issues and these men who are promoting this devilish conspiracy eternally damned–all of them–the issues, the times and the men who are leading. And I don’t want to hurt you, Laura, but,” he added solemnly, “your husband must take his punishment with the rest.”

“I want my daddy–my dear daddy–I want him to come home–where is he?”

She sobbed in her mother’s arms and held up her little face to look earnestly into the beautiful face above her, as she cried, “Is he gone–Annie Sands’ new mamma says my papa’s never coming back–Oh, I want my daddy–I want to go home.”

She continued calling him and sobbing, and the mother rose to take the child away.

“Laura!” cried Grant, in a passionate question. He saw the weeping child and the grief-stricken face of the mother. In an instant he held out his bony left hand to her and said gently: “God help you–God help you.”

Harvey tried sincerely to believe in Tom Van Dorn up to the very day when it happened. For the town had accepted him gladly and unanimously as its most distinguished citizen. But when the town read in the Times one November day after he had come home from his political campaign through the east for sound money and the open mills–a campaign in which Harvey had seen him through the tinted glasses of the Harvey Daily Times as one of the men who had saved the country–when the town read that cold paragraph beginning: “A decree of divorce was issued to-day to Judge Thomas Van Dorn, from his wife, Mrs. Laura Nesbit Van Dorn, upon the ground of incompatibility of temperament by Judge protem Calvin in the district court,” and ending with these words: “Mrs. Van Dorn declined through her attorney to participate in a division of the property upon any terms and will live for the present with her daughter, aged five, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. James Nesbit on Elm Street”–when the town read that paragraph, Harvey closed its heart upon Thomas Van Dorn.

Only one other item was needed to steel the heart of Harvey against its idol, and that item they found upon another page. It read, “Wanted, pupils for the piano–Mrs. Laura Van Dorn, Quality Hill, Elm Street.”

Those items told the whole story of the deed that Thomas Van Dorn had done. If he had felt bees sting before he got his decree, he should have felt vipers gnawing at his vitals afterward.

As for the morality of the town and what he regarded as its prudery–he scorned it. He believed he could live it down; he said in his heart that it was merely a matter of a few weeks, a few months, or a few years at most, before they would have some fresh ox to gore and forget all about him. He was sure that he could play upon the individual self-interest of the leaders of the community to make them respect him and ignore what he had done. But what he had done, did not bother him much. It was done.

He seemed to be free, yet was he free?

Now Thomas Van Dorn was thirty-eight years old that autumn. Whether he loved the woman he had abandoned or not, she was a part of his life. Counting the courtship during which he and this woman had been associated closely, nearly ten years of his life, half of the years of his manhood–and that half the most active and effective part, had been spent with her. A million threads of memory in his brain led to her; when he remembered any important event in his life during those ten years, always the chain of associated thought led back to the image of her. There she was, fixed in his life; there she smiled at him through every hour of those ten years of their life, married or as lovers together.

For whom God had joined, not Joseph Calvin, not Joseph Calvin, sitting as Judge protem, not Joseph Calvin vested with all the authority of the great commonwealth in which he lived, could put asunder. That was curious. At times Thomas Van Dorn was conscious of this phenomenon, that he was free, yet bound, and that while there was no God, and the law was the final word, in all considerable things, some way the brain, or the mind that is fettered to the brain, or the soul that is built upon the aspect of the mind fettered to the brain, held him tethered to the past.

Now Thomas Van Dorn went about his free life day by day, glorying in his liberty. But strands of his old life, floating idly and unnoticed through minutes of his hourly existence, kept tripping him and bothering him. His meals, his clothes, his fixed habits of work, the manifold creature comforts that he prized–all the associations of his life with home–came to him a thousand, thousand times and cut little knife-edged rents in the fabric of his new freedom.

And he would have said a year before that it was physically impossible for one child–one small, fair-haired child of five, with pleading face and eager eyes–to meet a man so often in a given period of time, as Lila met him. At first he had avoided her; he would duck into stores; hurry up stairways, or hide himself in groups of men on the sidewalk when he saw her coming. Then there came a time when he knew that the little figure was slipping across the street to avoid him because his presence shamed her with her playmates.

It is curious–and scores of Tom Van Dorn’s friends wondered at it then and have marveled at it since, that in the six months which elapsed between his divorce and his remarriage, he did not fathom the shallowness and pretense of Margaret Fenn. But he did not fathom them. Her glib talk taken mechanically from cheap philosophy about being what you think you are, about shifting moral responsibility onto good intentions, about living for the present and ignoring the past with the uncertain future, took him in completely. She used to read books to him, sitting in the glow of her red lamp-shade–a glow that brought out hidden hints of her splendid feline body, books which soothed his vanity and dulled his mind. In that day he fancied her his intellectual equal. He thought her immensely strong-minded, and clear headed. He contrasted her in thought with the wife he had put away, told Margaret that Laura was always puling about duty and getting her conscience pinched and whining about it. They agreed sitting there under the lamp, that they had been mates in some far-off jungle, that they had been parted and had been seeking one another through eons, and that when their souls met one of the equations of the physical universe was solved, and that their happiness was the adjustment of ages of wrong. She thought him the most brilliant of men; he deemed her the most wonderful of women, and the devil checked off two drunken fools in his inventory.

One bitter cold December day, when the wind was blowing sleet down Market Street, and hardly a passer-by darkened the doors of the stores, the handsome Judge sailed easily into the Amen Corner, fumbled over the magazines, picked out a pocketful of cigars from the case, without calling Mr. Brotherton who was in the rear of the store working upon his accounts, lighted a cigar, and stood looking out of the frosted window at the deserted gray windy street, utterly ignoring the presence of Captain Morton who was pretending to be deeply buried in the National Tribune, but who was watching the Judge and trying to summon courage to speak. The Judge unbuttoned his modish gray coat that nearly reached his heels and put his hands behind him for a moment, as he puffed and pondered–apparently debating something.

“Judge,” said the Captain suddenly and then the Captain’s courage fell and he added, “Bad morning.”

“Yes,” acquiesced the Judge from his abstraction. In a long pause that followed, Captain Morton swallowed at least a peck of Adam’s apples that kept coming up to choke him, and then he cleared his throat and spoke:

“Tom–Tom Van Dorn–look around here.” He lowered his voice and went on, “I want to talk to you.” The Captain edged over on the bench.

“Sit down here a minute–I’ve been wanting to see you for a month.” Captain Morton spoke all but in a whisper. The Adam’s apple kept strangling him. The Judge saw that the old man was wrestling with some heavy problem. He turned, and looking down at the little wizened man, asked: “Well, Captain?”

“Well?” barked the Judge. The little man’s lips dried, he smiled weakly, and licked his lips and said: “It was about my sprocket–my Household Horse–I says, Tom Van Dorn understands it if you gentlemen don’t and some day him and me will talk it over and ’y gory–he’ll buy some stock–he’ll back me.”

The Captain’s nervous voice had lifted and he was talking so that the clerk and Mr. Brotherton both in the back part of the store might hear. The cement of the Judge’s countenance cracked in a smile, but the gray mantle of fear still fluttered across his eyes.

“All right, Captain,” he answered, “some other time–not now–I’m in a hurry,” and went strutting out into the storm.

Mr. Brotherton called half down the store, “Say, Doc–you should have been here a minute ago, and seen the Captain bristle up to Tom Van Dorn about his love affair and then get cold feet and try to sell him some Household Horse stock.” The Captain grinned sheepishly, the Doctor patted the Captain affectionately on the shoulder and chirped.

“So you went after him, did you, Ezry?” The loose skin of his face twitched, “Poor Tom–packing up his career in a petticoat and going forth to fuss with God–no sense–no sense,” piped the Doctor, glancing over the headlines in his Star. The Captain, still clinging to the subject that had been too much for him, remarked: “Doc–don’t you think some one ought to tell him?” The Doctor put down his paper, stroked his pompadour and looking over his glasses, answered:

“Ezry–if some one hasn’t told him–no one ever can. I tried to tell him once myself. I talked pretty middlin’ plain, Ezry.” He was speaking softly, then he piped out, “But what a man’s heart doesn’t tell him, his friends can’t. Still, Ezry, a strong friend is often a good tonic for a weak heart.” The Doctor looked at the Captain, then concluded: “That was a brave, kind act you tried to do–and I warrant you got it to him–some way. He’s a keen one–Ezry–a mighty keen one; and he understood.”

The Doctor waved his folded paper in an impatient gesture at the Captain.

“We are all products of our yesterdays, Ezry; we are what we were, and we will be what we were. Man is queer. Sometimes out of the depth of him a god rises–sometimes it’s a beast. I’ve sat by the bed and seen life gasp into being; I’ve stood in the ranks and fought with men as you have, and have seen them fight and then again have seen them turn tail like cowards. I have sat by the bed and seen life sigh into the dust. What is life–what is the God that quickens and directs us,–why and how and whence?–Ezry Morton, man–I don’t know. And as for Tom–into that roaring hell of lust and lying and cheap parching pride where he is plunging–why, Ezry, I could almost cry for the fool; the damned beforehand fool!”

Grant was getting something more than a local reputation in labor circles as an agitator, and was in demand as an organizer in different parts of the valley. He worked at his trade more or less, having rigged up a steel device on the stump of his right forearm that would hold a saw, a plane or a hammer. But he was no longer a boss carpenter at the mines. His devotion to the men and in the work they were doing seemed to the Nesbits to awaken in their daughter a new interest in life, and so they made many obvious excuses to have the Adamses about the Nesbit home.

Kenyon was growing into a pale, dreamy child with wonderful eyes, lustrous, deep, thoughtful and kind. He was music mad, and read all the poetry in the Nesbit library–and the Doctor loved poetry as many men love wine. Hero-tales and mythology, romances and legends Kenyon read day after day between his hours of practice, and for diversion the boy sat before the fire or in the sun of a chilly afternoon, retailing them in such language as little Lila could understand. So in the black night of sorrow that enveloped her, Laura Nesbit often spent an hour with Grant Adams, and talked of much that was near her heart.

He was strong, sometimes she thought him coarse and raw. He talked the jargon of the agitator with the enthusiasm of a dervish and the vernacular of the mine and the shop and the forge. But in him she could see the fire of a mad consuming passion for humanity.

As the Doctor went whistling into the storm that December night, he went over in his mind rather seriously the meaning and the direction and the final outcome of those small, unconscious buddings of interest in social problems that he saw putting forth in his daughter’s mind. Above everything else, he was not a reformer. He hated the reformer type. But he preferred to see her interested in the work of Grant Adams–even though he considered Grant mildly cracked and felt that his growing power in the valley was dangerous–rather than to see her under the black pall that enveloped her.

It was early in the evening as the Doctor went up the hill. He passed Judge Van Dorn, striding along and saw him turn into Congress Street to visit his lady love. The Judge carried a large roll of architect’s plans under his arm. The Doctor nodded to the Judge, and the Judge rather proud that he was free and did not have to slink to his lady’s bower, returned a gracious good evening, and his tall, straight figure went prancing down the street. When the Doctor entered his home, he found Laura and Lila sitting by the open fire. The child was in her night gown and they were discussing Santa Claus. Lila was saying:

“Kenyon told me Santa Claus was your father?”

Before the mother could reply the little voice went on:

“I wonder if my Santa Claus will come this year–will he, mother?–Why doesn’t father ever come to us, mother–why doesn’t he play with me when I see him?”