CHAPTER IX
Mysterious things are happening in Kennedy Square. Only the very wisest men know what it is all about—black Moses for one, who tramps the brick walks and makes short cuts through the dirt paths, carrying his tin buckets and shouting: “Po' ole Moses—po' ole fellah! O-Y-S-T-E-R-S! O-Y-STERS!” And Bobbins, the gardener, who raked up last year's autumn leaves and either burned them in piles or spread them on the flower-beds as winter blankets. And, of course, Mockburn, the night watchman: nothing ever happens in and around Kennedy Square that Mockburn doesn't know of. Many a time has he helped various unsteady gentlemen up the steps of their houses and stowed them carefully and noiselessly away inside, only to begin his rounds again, stopping at every corner to drone out his “All's we-l-l!” a welcome cry, no doubt, to the stowaways, but a totally unnecessary piece of information to the inhabitants, nothing worse than a tippler's tumble having happened in the forty years of the old watchman's service.
I, of course, am in the secret of the mysterious happenings and have been for more years than I care to admit, but then I go ten better than Mockburn. And so would you be in the secret had you watched the process as closely as I have done.
It is always the same!
First the crocuses peep out—dozens of crocuses. Then a spread of tulips makes a crazy-quilt of a flowerbed; next the baby buds, their delicate green toes tickled by the south wind, break into laughter. Then the stately magnolias step free of their pods, their satin leaves falling from their alabaster shoulders—grandes dames these magnolias! And then there is no stopping it: everything is let loose; blossoms of peach, cherry, and pear; flowers of syringa—bloom of jasmine, honeysuckle, and Virginia creeper; bridal wreath in flowers of white and wistaria in festoons of purple.
Then come the roses—millions of roses; on single stalks; in clusters, in mobs; rushing over summer-houses, scaling fences, swarming up trellises—a riotous, unruly, irresistible, and altogether lovable lot these roses when they break loose!
And the birds! What a time they are having—thrush, bobolinks, blackbirds, nightingales, woodpeckers, little pee-wees, all fluttering, skimming, chirping; bursting their tiny throats for the very joy of living. And they are all welcome—and it wouldn't make any difference to them if they hadn't been; they would have risked it anyway, so tempting are the shady paths and tangled arbors and wide-spreading elms and butternuts of Kennedy Square.
Soon the skies get over weeping for the lost winter and dry their eyes, and the big, warm, happy sun sails over the tree-tops or drops to sleep, tired out, behind the old Seymour house, and the girls come out in their white dresses and silk sashes and the gallants in their nankeens and pumps and the old life of out-of-doors begins once more.
And these are not the only changes that the coming of spring has wrought. What has been going on deep down in the tender, expectant hearts of root and bulb, eager for expression, had been at work in Harry's own temperament. The sunshine of St. George's companionship has already had its effect; the boy is thawing out; his shrinking shyness, born of his recent trouble, is disappearing like a morning frost. He is again seen at the club, going first under St. George's lee and then on his own personal footing.
The Chesapeake, so St. George had urged upon him, was the centre of news—the headquarters, really, of the town, where not only the current happenings and gossip of Kennedy Square were discussed, but that of the country at large. While the bald-heads, of course, would be canvassing the news from Mexico, which was just beginning to have an ugly look, or having it out, hammer and tongs, over the defeat of Henry Clay, to which some rabid politicians had never become reconciled, the younger gentry—men of Harry's own tastes—would be deploring the poor showing the ducks were making, owing to the up-river freshets which had spoiled the wild celery; or recounting the doings at Mrs. Cheston's last ball; or the terrapin supper at Mr. Kennedy's, the famous writer; or perhaps bemoaning the calamity which had befallen some fellow member who had just found seven bottles out of ten of his most precious port corked and worthless. But whatever the topics, or whoever took sides in their discussion, none of it, so St. George argued, could fail to interest a young fellow just entering upon the wider life of a man of the world, and one, of all others, who needed constant companionship. Then again, by showing himself frequently within its walls, Harry would become better known and better liked.
That he was ineligible for membership, being years too young, and that his continued presence, even as a guest, was against the rules, did not count in his case, or if it did count, no member, in view of what the lad had suffered, was willing to raise the question. Indeed, St. George, in first introducing him, had referred to “my friend, Mr. Rutter,” as an “out of town guest,” laughing as he did so, everybody laughing in return, and so it had gone at that.
At first Harry had dreaded meeting his father's and his uncle's friends, most of whom, he fancied, might be disposed to judge him too harshly. But St. George had shut his ears to every objection, insisting that the club was a place where a man could be as independent as he pleased, and that as his guest he would be entitled to every consideration.
The boy need not have been worried. Almost every member, young and old, showed by his manner or some little act of attention that their sympathies were with the exile. While a few strait-laced old Quakers maintained that it was criminal to blaze away at your fellow-man with the firm intention of blowing the top of his head off, and that Harry should have been hung had Willits died, there were others more discerning—and they were largely in the majority—who stood up for the lad however much they deplored the cause of his banishment. Harry, they argued, had in his brief career been an unbroken colt, and more or less dissipated, but he at least had not shown the white feather. Boy as he was, he had faced his antagonist with the coolness of a duellist of a score of encounters, letting Willits fire straight at him without so much as the wink of an eyelid; and, when it was all over, had been man enough to nurse his victim back to consciousness. Moreover—and this counted much in his favor—he had refused to quarrel with his irate father, or even answer him. “Behaved himself like a thoroughbred, as he is,” Dorsey Sullivan, a famous duellist, had remarked in recounting the occurrence to a non-witness. “And I must say, sir, that Talbot served him a scurvy trick, and I don't care who hears me say it.” Furthermore—and this made a great impression—that rather than humiliate himself, the boy had abandoned the comforts of his palatial home at Moorlands and was at the moment occupying a small, second-story back room (all, it is true, Gentleman George could give him), where he was to be found any hour of the day or night that his uncle needed him in attendance upon that prince of good fellows.
One other thing that counted in his favor, and this was conclusive with the Quakers—and the club held not a few—was that no drop of liquor of any kind had passed the boy's lips since the eventful night when St. George prepared the way for their first reconciliation.
Summed up, then, whatever Harry had been in the past, the verdict at the present speaking was that he was a brave, tender-hearted, truthful fellow who, in the face of every temptation, had kept his word. Moreover, it was never forgotten that he was Colonel Talbot Rutter's only son and heir, so that no matter what the boy did, or how angry the old autocrat might be, it could only be a question of time before his father must send for him and everything at Moorlands go on as before.
It was on one of these glorious never-to-be-forgotten spring days, then, a week or more after St. George had given up the fight with Kate—a day which Harry remembered all the rest of his life—that he and his uncle left the house to spend the afternoon, as was now their custom, at the Chesapeake. The two had passed the early hours of the day at the Relay House fishing for gudgeons, the dogs scampering the hills, and having changed their clothes for something cooler, had entered the park by the gate opposite the Temple Mansion, as being nearest to the club; a path Harry loved, for he and Kate had often stepped it together—and then again, it was the shortest cut to her house.
As the beauty and quiet of the place with its mottling of light and shade took possession of him he slackened his pace, lagging a little behind his uncle, and began to look about him, drinking in the loveliness of the season. The very air breathed tenderness, peace, and comfort. Certainly his father's heart must be softening toward him; surely his bitterness could not last. No word, it is true, had yet come to him from Moorlands, though only the week before his mother had been in to see him, bringing him news of his father and what her son's absence had meant to every one, old Alec especially. She had not, she said, revived the subject of the boy's apology; she had thought it better to wait for the proper opportunity, which might come any day, but certain it was that his father was most unhappy, for he would shut himself up hours at a time in his library, locking the door and refusing to open it, no matter who knocked, except to old John Gorsuch, his man of business. She had also heard him tossing on his bed at night, or walking about his room muttering to himself.
Did these things, he wondered on this bright spring morning, mean a final reconciliation, or was he, after all, to be doomed to further disappointment? Days had passed since his mother had assured him of this change in his father, and still no word had come from him. Had he at last altered his mind, or, worse still, had his old obstinacy again taken possession of him, hardening his heart so that he would never relent? And so, with his mind as checkered as the shadow-flecked path on which they stepped, he pursued his way beneath the wide-spreading trees.
When the two had crossed the street St. George's eye rested upon a group on the sidewalk of the club. The summer weather generally emptied the coffee-room of most of its habitues, sending many of them to the easy-chairs on the sprinkled pavement, one or two tipped back against the trees, or to the balconies and front steps. With his arm in Harry's he passed from one coterie to another in the hope that he might catch some word which would be interesting enough to induce him to fill one of the chairs, even for a brief half-hour, but nothing reached his ears except politics and crops, and he cared for neither. Harding—the pessimist of the club—a man who always had a grievance (and this time with reason, for the money stringency was becoming more acute every day), tried to beguile him into a seat beside him, but he shook his head. He knew all about Harding, and wanted none of his kind of talk—certainly not to-day.
“Think of it!” he had heard the growler say to Judge Pancoast as he was about to pass his chair—“the Patapsco won't give me a cent to move my crops, and I hear all the others are in the same fix. You can't get a dollar on a house and lot except at a frightful rate of interest. I tell you everything is going to ruin. How the devil do you get on without money, Temple?” He was spread out in his seat, his legs apart, his fat face turned up, his small fox eyes fixed on St. George.
“I don't get on,” remarked St. George with a dry smile. He was still standing. “Why do you ask?” Money rarely troubled St. George; such small sums as he possessed were hived in this same Patapsco Bank, but the cashier had never refused to honor one of his checks as long as he had any money in their vaults, and he didn't think they would begin now. “Queer question for you to ask, Harding” (and a trifle underbred, he thought, one's private affairs not being generally discussed at a club). “Why does it interest you?”
“Well, you always say you despise money and yet you seem happy and contented, well dressed, well groomed”—here he wheeled St. George around to look at his back—“yes, got on one of your London coats—Hello, Harry!—glad to see you,” and he held out his hand to the boy. “But really, St. George, aren't you a little worried over the financial outlook? John Gorsuch says we are going to have trouble, and John knows.”
“No”—drawled St. George—“I'm not worried.”
“And you don't think we're going to have another smash-up?” puffed Harding.
“No,” said St. George, edging his way toward the steps of the club as he spoke. He was now entirely through with Harding; his financial forebodings were as distasteful to him as his comments on his clothes and bank account.
“But you'll have a julep, won't you? I've just sent John for them. Don't go—sit down. Here, John, take Mr. Temple's order for—”
“No, Harding, thank you.” The crushed ice in the glass was no cooler nor crisper than St. George's tone. “Harry and I have been broiling in the sun all the morning and we are going to go where it is cool.”
“But it's cool here,” Harding called after him, struggling to his feet in the effort to detain him. There was really no one in the club he liked better than St. George.
“No—we'll try it inside,” and with a courteous wave of his hand and a feeling of relief in his heart, he and Harry kept on their way.
He turned to mount the steps when the sudden pushing back of all the chairs on the sidewalk attracted his attention. Two ladies were picking their way across the street in the direction of the club. These, on closer inspection, proved to be Miss Lavinia Clendenning and her niece, Sue Dorsey, who had been descried in the offing a few minutes before by the gallants on the curbstone, and who at first had been supposed to be heading for Mrs. Pancoast's front steps some distance away, until the pair, turning sharply, had borne down upon the outside chairs with all sails set—(Miss Clendenning's skirts were of the widest)—a shift of canvas which sent every man to his feet with a spring.
Before St. George could reach the group, which he did in advance of Harry, who held back—both ladies being intimate friends of Kate's—old Captain Warfield, the first man to gain his feet—very round and fat was the captain and very red in the face (1812 Port)—was saying with his most courteous bow:
“But, my dear Miss Lavinia, you have not as yet told us to what we are indebted for this mark of your graciousness; and Sue, my dear, you grow more like your dear mother every day. Why are you two angels abroad at this hour, and what can we do for you?”
“To the simple fact, my dear captain,” retorted the irresistible spinster, spreading her skirts the wider, both arms akimbo—her thin fingers acting as clothespins, “that Sue is to take her dancing lesson next door, and as I can't fly in the second-story window, having mislaid my wings, I must use my feet and disturb everybody. No, gentlemen—don't move—I can pass.”
The captain made so profound a salaam in reply that his hat grazed the bricks of the sidewalk.
“Let me hunt for them, Miss Lavinia. I know where they are!” he exclaimed, with his hand on his heart.
“Where?” she asked roguishly, twisting her head on one side with the movement of a listening bird.
“In heaven, my lady, where they are waiting your arrival,” he answered, with another profound sweep of his hand and dip of his back, his bald head glistening in the sunlight as he stooped before her.
“Then you will never get near them,” she returned with an equally low curtsy and a laugh that nearly shook her side curls loose.
St. George was about to step the closer to take a hand in the badinage—he and the little old maid were forever crossing swords—when her eyes fell upon him. Instantly her expression changed. She was one of the women who had blamed him for not stopping the duel, and had been on the lookout for him for days to air her views in person.
“So you are still in town, are you?” she remarked frigidly in lowered tones. “I thought you had taken that young firebrand down to the Eastern Shore to cool off.”
St. George frowned meaningly in the effort to apprise her ladyship that Harry was within hearing distance, but Miss Lavinia either did not, or would not, understand.
“Two young boobies, that's what they are, breaking their hearts over each other,” she rattled on, gathering the ends of her cape the closer. “Both of them ought to be spanked and put to bed. Get them into each other's arms just as quick as you can. As for Talbot Rutter, he's the biggest fool of the three, or was until Annie Rutter got hold of him. Now I hear he is willing to let Harry come back, as if that would do any good. It's Kate who must be looked after; that Scotch blood in her veins makes her as pig-headed as her father. No—I don't want your arm, sir—get out of my way.”
If the courtiers heard—and half of them did—they neither by word or expression conveyed that fact to Harry or St. George. It was not intended for their ears, and, therefore, was not their property. With still more profound salutations from everybody, the three bareheaded men escorted them to the next stoop, the fourth going ahead to see that the door was properly opened, and so the ladies passed on, up and inside the house. This over, the group resumed its normal condition on the sidewalk, the men regaining their seats and relighting their cigars (no gentleman ever held one in evidence when ladies were present)—fresh orders being given to the servants for the several interrupted mixtures with which the coterie were wont to regale themselves.
Harry, who had stood with shoulders braced against a great tree on the sidewalk, had heard every word of the old maid's outburst, and an unrestrained burst of joy had surged up in his heart. His father was coming round! Yes—the tide was turning—it would not be long before Kate would be in his arms!
CHAPTER X
St. George held no such sanguine view, although he made no comment. In fact the outbreak had rather depressed him. He knew something of Talbot's stubbornness and did not hope for much in that direction, nor, if the truth be told, did he hope much in Kate's. Time alone could heal her wounds, and time in the case of a young girl, mistress of herself, beautiful, independent, and rich, might contain many surprises.
It was with a certain sense of relief, therefore, that he again sought the inside of the club. Its restful quiet would at least take his mind from the one subject which seemed to pursue him and which Miss Clendenning's positive and, as he thought, inconsiderate remarks had so suddenly revived.
Before he had reached the top step his face broke out into a broad smile. Instantly his spirits rose. Standing in the open front door, with outstretched hand, was the man of all others he would rather have seen—Richard Horn, the inventor.
“Ah, St. George, but I'm glad to see you!”, cried Richard. “I have been looking for you all the afternoon and only just a moment ago got sight of you on the sidewalk. I should certainly have stepped over to your house and looked you up if you hadn't come. I've got the most extraordinary thing to read to you that you have ever listened to in the whole course of your life. How well you look, and what a fine color you have, and you too, Harry. You are in luck, my boy. I'd like to stay a month with Temple myself.”
“Make it a year, Richard,” cried St. George, resting his hand affectionately on the inventor's shoulder. “There isn't a chair in my house that isn't happier when you sit in it. What have you discovered?—some new whirligig?”
“No, a poem. Eighteen to twenty stanzas of glorious melody imprisoned in type.”
“One of your own?” laughed St. George—one of his merry vibrating laughs that made everybody happier about him. The sight of Richard had swept all the cobwebs out of his brain.
“No, you trifler!—one of Edgar Allan Poe's. None of your scoffing, sir! You may go home in tears before I am through with you. This way, both of you.”
The three had entered the coffee-room now, Richard's arm through St. George's, Harry following close. The inventor drew out the chairs one after another, and when they were all three seated took a missive from his pocket and spread it out on his knee, St. George and Harry keeping their eyes on his every movement.
“Here's a letter, St. George”—Richard's voice now fell to a serious key—“which I have just received from your friend and mine, Mr. N. P. Willis. In it he sends me this most wonderful poem cut from his paper—the Mirror—and published, I discover to my astonishment, some months back. I am going to read it to you if you will permit me. It certainly is a most remarkable production. The wonder to me is that I haven't seen it before. It is by that Mr. Poe you met at my house some years ago—you remember him?—a rather sad-looking man with big head and deep eyes?” Temple nodded in answer, and Harry's eyes glistened: Poe was one of his university's gods. “Just let me read to you what Willis says”—here he glanced down the letter sheet: “'Nothing, I assure you, my dear Horn, has made so great a stir in literary circles as this “Raven” of Poe's. I am sending it to you knowing that you are interested in the man. If I do not mistake I first met Poe one night at your house.' And a very extraordinary night it was, St. George,” said Richard, lifting his eyes from the sheet. “Poe, if you remember, read one of his stories for us, and both Latrobe and Kennedy were so charmed that they talked of nothing else for days.”
St. George remembered so clearly that he could still recall the tones of Poe's voice, and the peculiar lambent light that flashed from out the poet's dark eyes—the light of a black opal. He settled himself back in his chair to enjoy the treat the better. This was the kind of talk he wanted to-day, and Richard Horn, of all others, was the man to conduct it.
The inventor's earnestness and the absorbed look on St. George's and Harry's faces, and the fact that Horn was about to read aloud, had attracted the attention of several near-by members, who were already straining their ears, for no one had Richard's gift for reading.
In low, clear tones, his voice rising in intensity as the weird pathos of the several stanzas gripped his heart, he unfolded the marvellous drama until the very room seemed filled with the spirit of both the man and the demon. Every stanza in his clear enunciation seemed a separate string of sombre pearls, each syllable aglow with its own inherent beauty. When he ceased it was as if the soul of some great 'cello had stopped vibrating, leaving only the memory of its melody. For a few seconds no one moved nor spoke. No one had ever heard Richard in finer voice nor had they ever listened to more perfect rhythmic beauty. So great was the effect on the audience that one old habitue, in speaking of it afterward, insisted that Richard must have seen the bird roosting over the door, so realistic was his rendering.
Harry had listened with bated breath, absorbing every tone and inflection of Richard's voice. He and Poe had been members of the same university, and the poet had always been one of his idols—the man of all others he wanted most to know. Poe's former room opening into the corridor had invariably attracted him. He had frequently looked about its bare walls wondering how so great an inspiration could have started from such meagre surroundings. He had, too, with the romantic imagination of a boy, pictured to himself the kind of man he was, his looks, voice, and manner, and though he had never seen the poet in the flesh, somehow the tones of Richard's voice recalled to him the very picture he had conjured up in his mind in his boyhood days.
St. George had also listened intently, but the impression was quite different from the one made on the younger man. Temple thought only of Poe's despondency, of his striving for a better and happier life; of his poverty—more than once had he gone down into his own pockets to relieve the poor fellow's urgent necessities, and he was still ready to do it again—a readiness in which he was almost alone, for many of the writer's earlier friends had of late avoided meeting him whenever he passed through Kennedy Square. Even Kennedy, his life-long friend, had begun to look upon him as a hopeless case.
This antipathy was also to be found in the club. Even with the memory of Richard's voice in their ears one of the listeners had shrugged his shoulders, remarking with a bitter laugh that musical as was the poem, especially as rendered by Richard, it was, after all, like most of Poe's other manuscripts, found in a bottle, or more likely “a bottle found in a manuscript,” as that crazy lunatic couldn't write anything worth reading unless he was half drunk. At which St. George had blazed out:
“Hush, Bowdoin! You ought to be willing to be blind drunk half your time if you could write one stanza of it! Please let me have it, Richard,” and he took the sheet from his friend's hand, that he and Harry might read it at their leisure when they reached home.
Harry's blood had also boiled at the rude thrust. While under the spell of Richard's voice a cord in his own soul had vibrated as does a glass globe when it responds in perfect harmony to a note from a violin. He too had a Lenore whose loss had wellnigh broken his heart. This in itself was an indissoluble bond between them. Besides, he could understand the poet as Alec and his mother and his Uncle George understood himself. He had begun now to love the man in his heart.
With his mind filled with these thoughts, his hunger for Kate aroused tenfold by the pathos and weird beauty of what he had just heard, he left the group of men who were still discussing the man and his verses, and joined his uncle outside on the top step of the club's high stoop, from which could be seen the full length of the sun-flecked street on which the clubhouse stood, as well as the park in all its spring loveliness.
Unconsciously his eyes wandered across the path where Kate's house stood. He could see the tall chimneys and the slope of the quaint roof, and but that the foliage hid the lower part, could have seen Kate's own windows. She was still at home, he had heard, although she was expected to leave for the Red Sulphur any day.
Suddenly, from away up the street, past the corner of the park, there reached his ears a low winding note, which grew louder as it turned the corner, followed by the rattle of wheels and the clatter of horses' feet. He leaned forward and craned his head in the direction of the sound, his heart in his throat, the blood mounting to his cheeks. If that was not his father's horn it was wonderfully like it. At the same moment a coach-and-four swept in sight, driven by a man in a whitey-brown coat and stiff furry hat, with two grooms behind and a coachman next to him on the box. It was heading straight for the club.
Every man was on his feet.
“By Jove!—it's Rutter. Bowdoin!—Clayton!—here comes the colonel!”
Again the horn gave out a long withering, wiry note ringing through the leaves and along the brick pavement, and the next instant the leaders were gathered up, the wheel-horses hauled taut, the hub of the front wheel of the coach halting within an inch of the horse-block of the club.
“Bravo, Rutter! Best whip in the county! Not a man in England could have done it better. Let me help you down!”
The colonel shook his head good-humoredly, rose in his seat, shifted a bunch of violets to his inner lapel, slipped off his driving-coat, threw it across the rail, dropped his whip in the socket, handed his heavy gloves to his groom, and slid gracefully to the sidewalk. There he shook hands cordially with the men nearest him, excused himself for a moment until he had inspected his off leader's forefoot—she had picked up a stone on the way in from Moorlands—patted the nigh wheel-horse, stamped his own feet lustily as if to be sure he was all there, and, with a lordly bow to those about him, slowly mounted the steps of the club.
Harry had already risen to his feet and stood trembling, one hand clutching the iron railing that guarded the marble steps. A great throb of joy welled up in his throat. His mother was right—the loneliness had overpowered his father; he still loved him, and Miss Clendenning's prediction was coming true! Not only was he willing to forgive him, but he had come himself to take him home. He could hardly wait until his father reached his side, so eager was he to open his arms and hands and his lips in apology—and Kate!—what joy would be hers!
St. George had also gained his feet. What had brought the colonel into town, he said to himself, and in such state—and at this hour of the day, too? Could it be that Harry was the cause?
“How were the roads, Talbot?” he called out in his customary cheery tones. He would start fair, anyway.
The colonel, who, head down, had been mounting the marble steps one at a time, inspecting each slab as he climbed, after the manner of men thoroughly satisfied with themselves, and who at the same time are conscious of the effect of their presence on those about them, raised his head and gazed in astonishment at the speaker. Then his body straightened up and he came to a stand-still. He looked first into St. George's face, then into Harry's, with a cold, rigid stare; his lips shut tight, his head thrown back, his whole frame stiff as an iron bar—and without a word of recognition of any kind, passed through the open door and into the wide hall. He had cut both of them dead.
Harry gave a half-smothered cry of anguish and turned to follow his father into the club.
St. George, purple with rage, laid his hand on the boy's arm, so tight that the fingers sank into the flesh: there were steel clamps inside these delicate palms when occasion required.
“Keep still,” he hissed—“not a word, no outburst. Stay here until I come for you. Stop, Rutter: stand where you are!” The two were abreast of each other now. “You dare treat your son in that way? Horn—Murdoch—Warfield—all of you come out here! What I've got to say to Talbot Rutter I want you to hear, and I intend that not only you but every decent man and woman in Kennedy Square shall hear!”
The colonel's lips quivered and his face paled, but he did not flinch, nor did his eyes drop.
“You are not a father, Talbot—you are a brute! There is not a dog in your kennels that would not treat his litter better than you have treated Harry! You turned him out in the night without a penny to his name; you break his mother's heart; you refuse to hear a word he has to say, and then you have the audacity to pass him on the steps of this club where he is my guest—my guest, remember—look him squarely in the face and ignore him. That, gentlemen, is what Talbot Rutter did one minute ago. You have disgraced your blood and your name and you have laid up for your old age untold misery and suffering. Never, as long as I live, will I speak to you again, nor shall Harry, whom you have humiliated! Hereafter I am his father! Do you hear?”
During the whole outburst the colonel had not moved a muscle of his face nor had he shifted his body a quarter of an inch. He stood with his back to the door through which could be seen the amazed faces of his fellow-members—one hand tight shut behind his back, the other loose by his side, his eyes fixed on his antagonist. Then slowly, one word at a time, as if he had purposely measured the intervals of speech, he said, in a voice hardly heard beyond the door, so low was it:
“Are—you—through—St. George?”
“Yes, by God!—I am, and forever!”
“Then, gentlemen”—and he waved his hand courteously to the astounded listeners—“may I ask you all to join me? John, bring the juleps!”
CHAPTER XI
All the way back to his house St. George's wrath kept him silent. He had rarely been so stirred. He was not a brawler—his whole life had been one of peace; his whole ambition to be the healer of differences, and yet there were some things he could not stand. One of these was cruelty to a human being, and Rutter's public disowning of Harry was cruelty of the most contemptible kind. But one explanation of such an outrage was possible—the man's intolerable egoism, added to his insufferable conceit. Only once did Temple address Harry, walking silently by his side under the magnolias, and then only to remark, more to himself than to his companion—“It's his damned, dirty pride, Harry—that's what it is!”
Harry also held his peace. He had no theories regarding his father's conduct: only facts confronted him, one being that he had purposely humiliated him before the men who had known him from a boy, and with whom his future life must be cast. The end had come now. He was adrift without a home. Even Kate was lost. This last attack of his father's would widen the breach between them, for she would never overlook this last stigma when she heard of it, as she certainly must. Nobody would then be left on his side except his dear mother, the old house servants, and St. George, and of these St. George alone could be of any service to him.
It had all been so horrible too, and so undeserved—worse than anything he had ever dreamed of; infinitely worse than the night he had been driven from Moorlands. Never in all his life had he shown his father anything but obedience and respect; furthermore, he had loved and admired him; loved his dash and vigor; his superb physique for a man of his years—some fifty odd—loved too his sportsmanlike qualities—not a man in the county was his equal in the saddle, and not a man in his own or any other county could handle the ribbons so well. If his father had not agreed with him as to when and where he should teach a vulgarian manners, that had been a question about which gentlemen might differ, but to have treated him with contempt, to insult him in public, leaving him no chance to defend himself—force him, really, into a position which made it impossible for him to strike back—was altogether a different thing, and for that he would never, never forgive him.
Then a strange thing happened in the boy's mind. It may have been the shifting of a grain of gray matter never called into use before; or it may have been due to some stranded red corpuscle which, dislodged by the pressure he had lately been called upon to endure, had rushed headlong through his veins scouring out everything in its way until it reached his thinking apparatus. Whatever the cause, certain it was that the change in the boy's view of life was as instantaneous as it was radical.
And this was quite possible when his blood is considered. There had been, it is true, dominating tyrants way back in his ancestry, as well as spend-thrifts, drunkards, roysterers, and gamesters, but so far as the records showed there had never been a coward. That old fellow De Ruyter, whose portrait hung at Moorlands and who might have been his father, so great was the resemblance, had, so to speak, held a shovel in one hand and a sword in the other in the days when he helped drown out his own and his neighbors' estates to keep the haughty don from gobbling up his country. One had but to look into Harry's face to be convinced that he too would have followed in his footsteps had he lived in that ancestor's time.
It was when the boy, smarting under his father's insult, was passing under the blossoms of a wide-spreading magnolia, trying to get a glimpse of Kate's face, if by any chance she should be at her window, that this grain of gray matter, or lively red corpuscle—or whatever it might have been—forced itself through. The breaking away was slow—little by little—as an underground tunnel seeks an opening—but the light increased with every thought-stroke, its blinding intensity becoming so fierce at last that he came to a halt, his eyes on the ground, his whole body tense, his mind in a whirl.
Suddenly his brain acted.
To sit down and snivel would do no good; to curse his father would be useless and wicked; to force himself on Kate sheer madness. But—BUT—BUT—he was twenty-two!—in perfect health and not ashamed to look any man in the face. St. George loved him—so did his precious mother, and Alec, and a host of others. Should he continue to sit in ashes, swaddled in sackcloth—or should he meet the situation like a man? Then as his mental vision became accustomed to the glare, two things stood out clear in his mind—to win Kate back, no matter at what cost—and to compel his father's respect.
His mother was the first to hear the music of this new note of resolve, and she had not long to wait. She had come to town with the colonel—indeed it was at her request that he had ordered the coach instead of coming in on horseback, as was his custom—and was at the moment quietly resting on St. George's big sofa.
“It is all over, mother,” Harry cried in a voice so firm and determined that his mother knew at once something unusual had happened—“and you might as well make up your mind to it—I have. Father walked into the club five minutes ago, looked me square in the face, and cut me dead; and he insulted Uncle George too, who gave him the greatest dressing down you ever heard in your life.” He had learned another side of his uncle's character—one he should never cease to be grateful for—his outspoken defence of him before his equals.
Mrs. Rutter half rose from her seat in blank astonishment. She was a frail little woman with pale-blue eyes and a figure like a curl of smoke.
“Your—father—did not—speak—to—you!” she exclaimed excitedly. “You say—your father—But how dare he!”
“But he did!” replied Harry in a voice that showed the incident still rankled in his mind—“and right in the club, before everybody.”
“And the other gentlemen saw it?” She stood erect, her delicate body tightening up. There was a strain of some old-time warrior in her blood that would brook no insult to her son.
“Yes, half a dozen gentlemen saw it. He did it purposely—so they COULD see. I'll never forgive him for it as long as I live. He had no business to treat me so!” His voice choked as he spoke, but there was no note of surrender or of fear.
She looked at him in a helpless sort of way. “But you didn't answer back, did you, my son?” This came in a tone as if she feared to hear the details, knowing the boy's temperament, and his father's.
“I didn't say a word; Uncle George wouldn't let me. I'm glad now he stopped me, for I was pretty mad, and I might have said something I would have been sorry for.” The mother gave a sigh of relief, but she did not interrupt, nor did she relax the tautness of her body. “You ought to have heard Uncle George, though!” Harry rushed on. “He told him there was not a dog at Moorlands who would not have treated his puppy better than he had me—and another thing he told him—and that was that after to-day I was HIS son forever!”
St. George had been standing at the front window with his back to them, looking out upon the blossoms. At this last outburst he turned, and said over his shoulder:
“Yes—that's true, Annie—that's what I said and what I mean. There is no use wasting any more time over Talbot, and I don't intend to.”
“But Mr. Rutter will get over his temper.” (She never called him by any other name.)
“Then he will have to come here and say so. I shall never step foot in his house until he does, nor will Harry. As to his forgiving Harry—the boot is on the other leg; it is Talbot, not the boy he outraged, who must straighten out to-day's work. There was not a man who heard him who was not ashamed of him. Oh!—I have no patience with this sort of thing! The only son he's got—his only child! Abominable—unforgivable! And it will haunt him to his dying day! Poor as I am, alone in the world and without a member of my family above ground, I would not change places with him. No—Annie—I know how you feel, and God knows I have felt for you all these years, but I tell you the end has come! It's finished—over—I told him so to his face, and I mean it!”
The slight body sank back into her chair and her eyes filled with tears. Harry knelt beside her and put his arms about her. This mother, frail as she was, had always been his refuge and comfort: now he must do the comforting! (Keep moving, old red corpuscle, there is a lot of work ahead of you!)
“Don't worry, you dear little mother,” he said tenderly. “I don't know how it's coming out, but it will come out somehow. Let father go: Kate is the only thing that counts now. I don't blame her for anything she has done, and I don't blame myself either. All I know is that everything has gone wrong. But, wrong or right, I'm going to stay here just as long as Uncle George will let me. He's been more of a father to me than my own. It's you I can't get along without, you precious little mother,” and he patted her pale cheeks. “Won't you come in every day—and bring Alec too?” then, as if he had not yet asked her consent—“You don't mind my being here, do you?”
She drew his head close to her lips and kissed his cheek. “No, my son, I don't mind—I'm glad. Every night of my life I thank my Maker that you are here.” She raised her eyes to St. George, who stood looking down upon them both, and in a voice barely audible, an unbidden sob choking her utterance, faltered—“It's only one more proof of your goodness, St. George.”
He raised his hand in protest and a faint smile crossed his face. “Don't talk that way. Annie.”
“I will—it's true. It is a proof of your goodness. I have never deserved it. I don't now—but you never fail me.” Her voice was clearer now—her cheeks, too, had regained some of their color. Harry listened wonderingly, his arm still around her.
“I couldn't do anything else, Annie—nobody could under the circumstances.” His voice had dropped almost to a whisper.
“But it was for me you did it, St. George. I would rather think of it that way; it makes it easier. Say you did it for me.”
St. George stooped down, raised her thin white hand to his lips, kissed it reverently, and without a word of any kind walked to the door of his bedroom and shut it behind him.
Mrs. Rutter's hand dropped to her lap and a smile of intense relief passed over her face. She neither looked after St. George, nor did she offer any explanation to Harry; she merely bent forward and continued her caresses, stroking the boy's glossy hair, patting the white temples with her delicate fingers, smoothing the small, well-set ears and the full brown throat, kissing his forehead, her eyes reading his face, wondering if she had spoken too freely and yet regretting nothing: what she had said had come straight from her heart and she was not ashamed of it.
The boy lay still, his head against her breast. That his mother had been stirred even in a greater degree over what St. George had said to her than she had been by his father's treatment of him was evident in the trembling movement of the soft hands caressing his hair and in the way her breath came and went. Under her soothing touch his thoughts went back to the events of the morning:—his uncle's defiant tones as he denounced his father; his soft answer to his mother; her pleading words in reply, and then the reverent kiss.
Suddenly, clear as the tones of a far-off convent bell sifting down from some cloud-swept crag, there stole into his mind a memory of his childhood—a legend of long ago, vague and intangible—one he could not put into words—one Alec had once hinted at. He held his breath trying to gather up the loose ends—to make a connected whole; to fit the parts together. Then, as one blows out a candle, leaving total darkness, he banished it all from his mind.
“Mother dear!—mother dear!” he cried tenderly, and wound his arms the closer about her neck.
She gathered him up as she had done in the old days when he was a child at her breast; all the intervening years seemed blotted out. He was her baby boy once more—her constant companion and unending comfort: the one and only thing in her whole life that understood her.
Soon the warmth and strength of the full man began to reach her heart. She drew him still closer, this strong son who loved her, and in the embrace there grew a new and strange tenderness—one born of confidence. It was this arm which must defend her now; this head and heart which must guide her. She was no longer adrift.
The two had not moved when St. George re-entered the room some moments later. Harry's head still lay on her breast, the thin, transparent hands tight about his neck.