Front matter (continued 3)

There was escape after all, though—if not in reading, then in writing. I can quite understand now the persistence of diarists in the world. I had no sooner written down the words above than a tremor of resolution shook me and I went into the baking city in quest of livelihood. I found nothing save exhaustion, but it is certain that in Crestlands I shall find even less.

I looked upon the teeming streets wide-eyed like a gawk, surprised anew that so many should find a foothold and sustenance where I had failed. The mystery of that will always baffle me. The deepening gloom gave way, however, when I entered Andrews' bookshop. His welcome was warm.

"Stranger," he greeted me cordially, "come into your own."

"I don't deny I have felt it calling," I admitted.

"'Course you did—there is nothing else in the world."

"Ah, how much else, Andrews!" I told him sadly.

Whether he has heard of my failure or not I cannot tell. If he has, he was tact itself.

"Here are some beautiful things for you to see," he announced, bustling as he led me to a table in the rear of the shop. I looked at his beautiful things and was able to give him some useful points about one or two of them. He has actually come upon a Caxton, the lucky devil! This was indeed "my own", as Andrews was shrewd enough to divine. Ça me connait. And his courtesy and his deference were strangely consoling in the light of my recent experiences. Courtesy and deference cost others so little, but what refreshing manna they are to one's self-respect!

I go on tramping the pavements of New York and I wish there were more point in my trampings.

Every morning I go forth with a faint glow of hope, and the dim basis of my hope, when I come to think it out, is something like this: In the haunts of men I may meet somebody, an old acquaintance who may know or hear of something whereby a broken reed like myself, a pronounced failure, may get the chance of earning a livelihood. A desperate enough situation when reduced to the glaring light of plain speech—but that is the best that I am able to do. If only Dibdin were here! Despairingly I am in need of a friend. But my past life has separated and insulated me, so that when I think of friends and my thought convulsively darts out this way and that, it encounters nothing but vacancy, empty air. Fred Salmon is avoiding the Club. He is the only one who had reached to me from the past, and the result I have already recorded. I am not eager to meet him, though I have worn out any hostility I may have felt toward him. C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire. I find my inward man the better for thinking of Fred neutrally, when I think of him at all.

Illness was the one thing lacking to my ineffable Pilgrim's Progress, so infallibly illness has appeared.

Jimmie came down with measles on Saturday and yesterday Alicia followed his example. The crumpling of Alicia under illness has proved like the shattering of a column in the edifice of my household. The whole insecure structure is tottering. And though she is burning with fever, the unhappy girl is murmuring with anxiety that stockings go unmended and buttons unsewn.

"Don't you worry about that, little girl," I keep telling her. "Griselda will do those things."

"Griselda has too much to do as it is," she gulps and the tears start to her hot eyes. I have isolated her and Jimmie in my room, and Randolph and Laura are cautioned to keep as far as possible away from them. I remember the time when I would have flown from the fear of infection as from the plague, but now my anxieties are of a wholly different nature. Jimmie is mending now, but Alicia is far more ill than she knows.

Griselda has undertaken the stockings and at night, when I sit watching and waiting for sounds from either of my invalids, I operate upon the buttons. It is curious how much art enters into the sewing of a button. A dog of a bachelor though I have ever been, I have never been compelled to learn that handicraft before. But I have learned from Griselda, who smiled crookedly when she imparted the law, that if you twist the thread around several times after you have sewn it, the whole thing acquires, relatively, the strength of a cable. To your punctured fingers you attend afterwards.

Alicia, awakening at midnight, sat up in bed and caught me at my task; she moaned most dolefully. I hastily put Jimmie's little "undies" behind me, but too late.

"You'll never want me—or need me again—what's the use of getting well?" she wailed weakly.

"Oh, yes, I shall, Alicia—more than ever," I hastened to assure her.

"You do everything now that I ought to do," she pressed with febrile insistence. "I shall be no use any more."

"But don't you see, Alicia," I argued, touching her hot forehead, "that I shall have to be earning money while you are doing the buttons? I ought to be earning it now, so get well as quickly as you can. Jimmie sees it; he's much better already." That logic seemed to soothe her more than I had expected. She caught my hand impulsively and pressed it to her cheek. The tremendous part played by affection in the lives of children is a never-ceasing wonder to me.

Alicia is convalescent again, laus Domini, and Jimmie is now running about the little house filling it with noise—which is music to my ears. Laura and Randolph have fortunately thus far escaped infection. Jimmie is wanting to resume "wolling up and down" the slope again, but this is still verboten.

I can now take up my journeys into town again and I note with a pang that I am growing shabby. The yearly purchases of clothes had been as regular with me as my meals, but I have ordered no clothes for the spring or summer. Odd, what a deleterious effect the shabbiness of clothes has upon one's consciousness! The tinge of inferiority it brings touches some very tender places in one's spirit, almost like a shabby conscience. But the doctor of the neighborhood, a contemplative fellow who obviously knows his business, though he talks of his laboratory and his experiments like an alchemist, has earned the clothes that I must do without. And of the two I needed them more.

My search is ended. There is jubilation in my heart again. I have fallen into a livelihood; like the bricklayer who used to fare forth, dinner pail in hand, I have found work.

And the way of it was an odd little stroke of Fate, a whimsicality that would have pleased the ironic soul of Thomas Hardy.

An old college friend of mine, Minot Blackden, whom I used to call Leonardo da Vinci because he was so full of ideas and inventions, had rediscovered, he said, the art of glass-staining. After a five years' residence in Italy, on a modest patrimony, most of which had gone into glass or into stain, he had returned to his native land and set up a shop à la William Morris somewhere in the region of Bleecker Street, and proceeded to stain glass. He had had some newspaper publicity recently, and there were cuts of his work.

While passing a church in my hot and dusty peregrinations, it occurred to me that here might be a chance of serving him and also myself. By writing an interesting booklet about his craft, illustrating it profusely and sending it with personal letters to all the vestries in the country, I might bring a flood of custom to his shop. It is with this forlorn proposal that I was blundering about to discover Minot Blackden. I failed to find his shop, but I came face to face with my old Salmon and Byrd acquaintance, Signor Visconti.

In his palm beach suit and Panama hat, Visconti made a splendent and impressive figure in the purlieus of Bleecker Street.

"Ah-h, Signor Byrd," he cried with Latin cordiality, seizing my hand in both his own, "you are what you call a sight for sick eyes. I have often wonder about you—you must come into my banca—we must have leetla refreshment!"

Refreshment appealed to me at the moment and gladly I accompanied him to his private office in the bank, that stands between a junk warehouse and a delicatessen emporium. With a charming tact he touched upon the hard luck of Salmon and Byrd and dismissed the subject for good.

Briefly—for him—that is, with a wealth of gesture and illustration, he informed me that he was looking for a man for his enlarging bank, and asked me to recommend one.

"I want a fina man—" he explained. "American gentleman—who speeks a leetla da Italian—who put up what you call a fina fronta—understand me?"

"A fine front," I mused aloud, "and speaks Italian—no, Signor Visconti, we had no such young man in our office. I can think of no one I could recommend."

He was obviously nonplused.

"I thinka," he said, with, a gesture of final resolution, "if I could finda some gentleman lika you, Mr. Byrd, he would be precisamente what I look for. I know," he added hastily with an apologetic laugh, "man lika you, Signor, be hard to find!" And again he laughed heartily, though watching me between narrowed eyelids. His drift was now obvious. I was silent for a moment.

"Well, if it comes to that, Signor Visconti," I answered slowly, "I am doing nothing in particular just now. I may be utterly no good for you, but—but if—"

"Ah, you would try old Visconti, Signor!" And up flew his arms like windmills. "You no ashamed to work in vot you Americans call da Guinea colony!—no, no!" He noted the deprecating shadow on my face. "Ah, you understanda—you know the granda history of the Italiana people. You—but, Mr. Byrd—" and with an admirable histrionic transition he suddenly turned grave and sad—"Mr. Byrd, you are the very man I looka for," and he gripped both my hands. "But, Meester Byrd—I fear I cannot afford to pay what you would expect. Ah, sacra—if I could! You, the very man—Dio—" and he clapped a hand dramatically to his forehead—"the very man, but!—" and his full smile of sad and wistful regret seemed genuine for all its histrionic value.

"What do you propose to pay, Signor Visconti?" I inquired.

"I can only pay to start," he whispered hoarsely, with the round eyes of a man facing the inevitable, "thirty-fiva, maybe forty dollars week. Too leetla, I know," he added slowly, letting his hands fall on his knees with resignation.

"Very well, Signor Visconti," I said. "If you will try me, I shall be glad to come at forty dollars."

Visconti fairly leaped at my hand and the bargain was struck.

I am to begin earning a livelihood on Monday.

Who said that adversity is the best teacher? Possibly it is, but gladness is the ablest cocktail. There is no stimulant like a little success.

I am an august personage.

I shall choke with pride, so august am I become in the Banca e Casa Commerciale Visconti.

I call up the National City Bank concerning the price of bonds, or the rate of exchange, in English so presumably impeccable that Signor Visconti visibly puffs out his magnificent chest as he listens. There is a divinity that shapes our "frontas", rough-hew them how we will.

"Visconti's speaking," I say with firmness and the head of Visconti's curls his fine dyed mustache and turns away, glowing with ill-concealed pleasure. This is seemingly what the head of Visconti's has been waiting for. Mentally I offer a fervent prayer that he may never be disillusioned as to my capacity.

I toil as I have never toiled before. I come early and go late and frequently have my lunch sent in from the adjoining delicatessen, powdered no doubt by the contiguous junk house, and the "boss", as the others call him, smiles with a rare unction that spells approval.

With difficulty we are actually living on my income. If I had the half of my capital back that I had no business to put into Salmon and Byrd—but ifs inaugurate depressing trains of thoughts. My library alone stands between me and disaster, so like a prudent man of business I have begun a catalogue of it and I am training Alicia to help me. I must not again be caught by so desperate a prospect as recently faced me.

How my little household had been affected by my late slough of despond I realize only now that I have passed it. Laughter and high spirits seem to have been uncorked again. We play and we rollic and chatter, more than in the early days of our vie de famille—how long ago is it?—something less than a year, no longer!

It is now the end of September and the schools have reopened. We are all sanely and industriously busy, like a normal American family, and as though its so-called head were an adequately competent being, and not the bungling masquerading amateur that he is. "Who never ate in tears his bread"—well, we have made intimate acquaintance of poverty and we fear it less than of yore—though we hate it more. It may be an impostor, but who maintains that all impostors are harmless? I certainly would deny that premise, so—we are cataloguing the library.

"Here is 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Burton," announces Alicia, taking down a volume.

"Small quarto, printed at Oxford, 1621," I finish for her.

"Yes," she breathes, marveling wide-eyed. "How can you remember such things, Uncle Ranny?" for so I have asked her to call me.

"How can I remember?" I ask in surprise. "How can I remember that you are Alicia Palmer, close to the towering age of fifteen, or that Jimmie Pendleton is five?"

"But we—are people," avers Alicia, "and we are—yours." I own to a slight thrill at this sweet investiture, implicit in her words, but I seem obtuse to it.

"But so is a great book a person," I sententiously inform her, "and 'Oxford, 1621', means a first edition, Alicia—not merely a person but a personage. That book is as proud an aristocrat as though it were plastered with coronets and simply throbbing with Norman blood. There is a whole heraldry about it—it is a prince among books. And all, Alicia, because it aroused men's interest and has given them delight from about the time the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth. It's a book that could take Doctor Johnson out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. Also, if the worst came to the worst, it could feed us for a time, and that is very important, isn't it, Alicia?"

"Yes," she breathes in awe which for some reason delights me. "What a wonderful thing it must be to write a great book." And she fingers the next volume with even greater reverence.

"The 'Life of Edward Malone', by Sir James Prior," reads Alicia. "Is that a prince among books, too?"

"No," I answer. "That is just a friend. Malone, you see, was crossed in love in the days of Doctor Johnson, and by way of consolation became a book-collector and a Shakesperian commentator. They say the Irish are fickle. But here is one who could never love again. So whenever I read his life, I think I see through a sort of mist the lovely lady whom he lost and all about him is curiously dear to me. He wouldn't feed us for very long, Alicia, but he has given me many hours of pleasure."

"Are book-collectors people—crossed in love?" she inquires with gentle subtlety, and I am surprised that one of her youthfulness should be arrested by that particular point.

"If you mean me," I answer quietly, "then I can tell you that I wasn't. No one ever loved me enough to cross me. I am a collector by a sort of—spontaneous degeneration."

Alicia throws her fine young head back and peals with delicious laughter. Afterwards I catch her smiling to herself as she copies down the titles.

I am amazed to note how lovely that child has become since she has been here. Her thin, frightened expression has given way to one of happy confidence. All too soon she will be enriching some young man's life with happiness. Her interest in my musty old books has given her a value of companionship in my eyes that I trust I shall not exaggerate at the expense of my niece and nephews—though Alicia is hardly one to take advantage of such a situation. Nevertheless, I must be on my guard.

After all, though she is the chartered, custodian of the others, and quis custodiet ipsos—who shall watch over Alicia? Obviously, it is my task to improve her mind in order to make her the better guardian for them.

And Alicia's mind is improving apace.

"Uncle Ranny," she inquired the other day, "may I ask what that first edition of Boswell's 'Johnson', cost you?"

"It costs me nothing but a sleepless hour now and then," I told her. "It is not paid for. But I owe Andrews four hundred dollars for it. God knows when I shall pay it. But why do you ask, Alicia?"

"I have just read in Book Prices Current that a copy was sold by Sotheby's in London for one hundred pounds."

"Already!" I murmured and I was lost in admiration not of the accretion in value—I am used to that—but of the girl's facility in acquiring the interest and the jargon of my hobby.

"Oh, Mr. Andrews must have a wonderful place!" she exclaimed. "That must be a splendid business. Where is he? How I'd love to see it!"

"You shall some day, Alicia," I told her. "He is in Twenty-ninth Street, and an excellent fellow he is."

I then explained to her how Andrews had insisted upon planting the book on my shelves.

Alicia gazed at me in silence for a moment, then suddenly tears glittered in her eyes.

"It's because of us," she said, with a quivering lip, "because we came that you couldn't buy it!"

"Don't talk rubbish, Alicia," I flared at her. "A collector gets almost as much pleasure in thinking of books he can't get as in those he buys. Don't you think you alone are worth more to me than an old Boswell?"

"No," she murmured gloomily, "but I'm going to try to be."

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER XII

Many months have passed since I last made an entry in this, which I mean to be a record of my life for later years, when I am grown old and white and memory gives back vividly only the days of childhood.

It must be that the stoking of the furnace below all winter, or else my absorption in Visconti's, has banished reflection upon events from out of my mind. It is not reflection that was banished, however, but only the energy to record it. The folk who work the treadmill leave few records behind them. And I am of the treadmill, occupant of an office chair, one of the gray mass of dwellers in the suburbs of life.

The office of Visconti's, that was at first like a queer old wharf in some foreign city to a ship from distant parts, has grown familiar and almost homelike, so that I feel the barnacles gathering about my hulk at the mooring place.

It is ever the same. I come and I labor and I go. The chair and the desk await me of a morning and by ten o'clock it is as though I had never left them. I go forth of an afternoon into freedom and feel a momentary desire to wander about as of old. The bland frontages of New York still have a lure for me. But the nestlings for whom I am laboring are at Crestlands and to them I automatically hasten my steps.

But is all that about to end?

To-day, for the first time since his disappearance, I heard of poor Laura's husband,—Pendleton.

For to-day I have received an astonishing letter from Dibdin, and it is that, I suppose, which has stirred me to writing again.

"Be prepared," Dibdin's letter begins, after his usual abrupt manner, "be prepared for a sort of shock."

"A week ago I arrived in Yokohama with half a schooner-load of stocks and stones, carvings, idols, etc., homeward bound.

"If you have ever been in Yokohama you will remember the Grand Hotel on the Bund." Yes, I do remember. It was the one bright spot for me in Japan on my brief and disappointing journey six years ago. Heaven knows why I went there. Once I had viewed the Temples at Nikko, the sacred deer on the Island of Miyajima and the volcanic cone of Fujiyama, there was nothing else to do. I am not an ethnologist and there were no bookshops. While awaiting my steamer, the only refuge was that self-same Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where you can still sit in a chair facing a window, as commercial travelers in provincial hotels in America sit, and look out across the water towards Tokio, and smoke and idle and gossip. Of an afternoon there is tea with excellent little cakes—served by Japanese girls in kimonos so gorgeous that even a geisha would be too modest to wear them in the street. The color, however, is meant for western eyes. The ladies, American and English from Tokio and thereabout, wives of commission merchants, agents, naval officers, diplomats, tourists, gather around and do what they can to annihilate reputations,—as is the way the world over.

There is also a bar—the longest in Asia. Incidentally, every bar in the East is the longest and men from Hongkong, Shanghai, Peking, Kobe and Yokohama carry the measurements of their respective bars in their heads for purposes of competitive argument. We all need something to brag about, and there's little else in those parts. When the ladies have finished their tea and have gone to their rooms or their 'rickshaws, the bar at the Grand is the next halting stage for the men. I have not thought of it for years, though it is vivid enough to me now. It is one of the five points on the globe where, if you loiter long enough, you are certain to encounter every one you ever knew. But—Pendleton!

"If you remember this setting," runs Dibdin's letter, "you will realize how easy it was even for a bear like me to pick up quickly the gossip of the place and, incidentally, the legend of Patterson. Patterson I learned was a drifter, an idler, a gambler, and a staunch support of the Grand bar. He is adroit, suave, pleasant, shifty—an American. Some trader found him on the beach in the Marquesas, took him along for company among the islands and ultimately landed him here. He has traded in skins, in silk, in insurance; is said to have all but killed a man in a card brawl and has cleaned out many a tourist at poker. Now, he is no longer allowed to play cards at the Grand.

"I had a curiosity to see this bird of plumage and two days ago, Mainwaring, the excellent manager of this hotel, pointed him out to me.

"Judge of my amazement, as novelists say, when I recognized in Patterson none other than the author of all your troubles, your vanished brother-in-law—Pendleton!

"Will it surprise you to learn that my first emotion was a desire to rush upon him as he leaned across the bar and drive a knife into his back?

"Instead, however, I got Mainwaring to introduce me and if Pendleton was surprised, he concealed it successfully. Presently he was drinking my liquor and chattering about the islands from which I am a recent arrival. If I disguised the cold rage I felt against the man you must give me credit for more diplomacy than you ordinarily do.

"'You talk like a New Yorker,' I presently let fall in a casual manner.

"'Ah, there you have me!' he threw out in a blandly mysterious sort of way. 'Truth is, I don't know where I come from!'

"In short, he tried on the lapsed memory sort of thing. Woke up one day to find himself at Manila. Didn't know his own name or who he was or whence. Initials on his linen were J.P. so he took the name of Patterson—as good as any other, and so forth. Very sad. But then one must take life as one finds it. Some of us are elected to martyrdom in this world. That, you understand, was his drift.

"'Well,' I told him calmly, 'if you really want to know who you are, I can tell you.'

"He turned, I thought, a shade paler, but he played his part smoothly.

"'You don't mean it!' he exclaimed with a quite seraphic ecstasy. 'You know me! My God, man, you are my deliverer come at last!'

"'You are Jim Pendleton,' I told him quietly and then I told him a few other things. My reasoning was like this: If he is the thorough hound I thought he was, he would have an excellent chance of bolting—and good riddance. If there was a shred of decency left in the man, now was the time for it to show.

"Well, he surprised me. I saw real tears in his eyes. He begged for every detail I could give him. His voice broke when he tried to ask questions about Laura and the kids. He has not bolted. He is quite pathetically attached to me. I am dashed if I can tell whether it's real or not. I don't believe for a minute in the lapsed memory dodge, but I am flabbergasted. He seems so pitifully keen for every scrap I can tell him. Maybe the poor brute is really ashamed of his past and is trying only to save his face under this rigmarole of lost identity? He clings to me and I have him, so to speak, under observation. If it should even seem remotely possible to make a man of him again, don't you think the risk of bringing him home might be worth taking? I don't know, I don't know. I shall use the best judgment I've got about me, but don't for a moment think I'll let you down. It's your interest I'm thinking of and the interest of the kids.

"I can't leave here for several weeks yet. That ought to give me time to take his measure. I know what he has been. Question is, can a leopard change his spots, or a beachcomber his character? We'll see, Randolph, my boy, we'll see what we see. Hard luck is hard luck, but this man—well, I needn't tell you. There is such a thing, to be sure, as trying back. I'd like to have a second chance myself, if I behaved like a villain. But of this fellow I am far from sure. I will say, though, that he's drinking less and trying to keep decent not only in my own sight, but to the surprise of all the white colony here.

"You will hear from me again before long."

As I read, I felt gradually overshadowed by the immense somber fact conveyed in this letter. It was like a black cloud bank that comes up swiftly, blotting out the sun from over the landscape. It was not a thing to blink, to wave aside or to dismiss with a shrug of the shoulders. It was instant and tyrannous, demanding anew urgent thought and decision. Fortunately I am no longer the same creature that was bodily hurled from tranquillity and leisure, like a monk from his cell, into the cold wind-swept ways of life. I seem a little less like chaff in the breeze. My backbone seemed actually to stiffen and settle as I posed the problem.

The problem is the fate of the children. To receive and re-create Pendleton means to give them up.

Well—and did I not assume their care only because there was none else? Now there would be—there might be—some one else. Pendleton has a legal right to his own children and, if he could establish it satisfactorily, no doubt a moral right as well.

The advent of Pendleton might prove to have incalculable advantages for myself. Here, on the one side, is the treadmill. On the other there is, or there was, ease and leisure and dreams. My small competency is gone in the wake of that man's destructive progress. But for myself, I might manage an easier and more agreeable way of subsisting than the way of Visconti's. Those are the cold facts, clearly enough—but somehow they will not let me rest. My world has been violently jarred, for all my painful calmness, and I seem unable to fit the parts again into exactly the old solidity of groove and joint. There are lurking interstices which I cannot fill. "Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?" the hero of an unforgettable tale was wont to ask himself. And he felt his soul floating off and dipping into the infinite. Likewise, I ask myself now, Who is Randolph Byrd? And the startling truth returns that the children in my house and I are inseparable, that I and they are one!

With this and the fact that Pendleton is in all likelihood coming back to claim them, I am, pending further news from Dibdin, left to grapple. At any rate, Dibdin also is returning.

It is now the spring and the year is beginning to smile again. I have been prospering at Visconti's and my income is now again the same as it was before ever the children came to me—before I became a business man. But there is not a soul to whom I can confide my new dilemma.

There is Minot Blackden, the glass stainer, whom I have finally discovered to be a near neighbor of Visconti's. To be exact, his studio and living quarters are in King Street, and we sometimes have our lunch together. But Blackden is so much in the grip of his medieval art that it gets into his food, stains his tapering hands and even spatters upon his finely pointed blue-black beard. All he can see in me is the Philistine who has cast all else aside for the sizzling fleshpots. When I chanced to mention having four children in my house, he looked upon me as a bird-of-Paradise might look upon a polar bear; I was to him a visible but incredible symbol of something strange and gross. There is nothing placid or resigned about Blackden. He is intense, incandescent.

"Do you realize," he said to me, "that I am restoring a lost art to the world?"

"But does it give you food?" I asked him.

"What does food matter?" he expostulated. "What does anything else in the world matter?"

Nevertheless, he was eager to take up my suggestion concerning the writing of a booklet upon his new craft and he has been sending it out broadcast. But so intensely devotional is his attitude to the whole business that I have not the face to suggest payment for the work, nor has he referred to it again. I know little of his art, but I know that his returns are increasing. It is obvious that I cannot burden a soul, burning with that gemlike flame of Blackden's, with any such confidence as the impending return of Pendleton. At times I think that Minot Blackden and Gertrude Bayard ought to marry each other. They are both so single-minded and so absolutely sure of themselves. But in the meantime there is no one I can talk to.

No—absolutely no one.

Walking to Grand Central station these brilliant afternoons is a thing I cannot resist. It is the only exercise I get. Crossing Washington Square, I strike into Fifth Avenue and by the time I reach Fourteenth Street I have a delicious sense of losing myself, of merging into the crowd, that is very soothing after a day in the office. There is nothing so stimulating as the energetic crowd in Fifth Avenue. At Brentano's bookstore I usually pause and scrutinize the window. I am very sound in the latest novels and the newest developments in stationery.

To-day, as my eyes were feasting on the cover jacket of Mr. Arnold Bennett's latest, a lady coming down the avenue likewise paused before the window and as we glanced at each other I found I was facing Gertrude. Of course she had a perfect right to cut me. She smiled uncertainly instead and put out her hand.

"Hello, Ranny," she murmured casually. "No reason why we can't meet as friends, is there?"

"Not the least in the world," I returned hastily. "Why should there be?"

"I didn't know—but of course you always were a sensible person."

I grinned in my guilty fashion.

"How is everything?" she continued brightly. "I heard—about your firm. You in business now?"

I mentioned my connection with Visconti's Banca e Casa Commerciale.

"You're a sort of hero of romance," she smiled speculatively over my head. "And the kiddies," she added, "they all right?"

"Going strong." She made no reference to Alicia but I thought it only decent not to leave her in doubt. "Everything in my household is about the same," I said. She nodded.

The years of our friendship flashed through my mind, with a sense of regret at the passing and crumbling of human relations. Gertrude would quite naturally have been the one I could have talked to concerning the probable return of Pendleton. Then, on a sudden occurred one of those coincidences which invariably surprise me. For what Gertrude uttered quite carelessly as though merely to fill the conversational pause, was this:

"No news of their father, I suppose?"

I have never yet lied to Gertrude. I detest lies in general. I was silent. My face must have betrayed me. Gertrude glanced into my eyes and in a startled voice she queried:

"Have you?"

Briefly, without going into detail, I told her.

"Why, Ranny," she exclaimed with a new manner, in a new voice, "that's the most wonderful thing I ever heard. Wonderful! That's the greatest luck for you. Your troubles will be over!"

"Ah, will they?" I speculated ruefully, rubbing my cheek. "That's the problem. Shall I be able to trust the children to him again?"

"Don't be a—foolish!" she retorted in almost her old manner. "The responsibility will make a man of him again. Besides—you'll have to. They are his. I should think you'd jump for joy at the relief. Dear me, what a story!"

"Oh—er—I must beg you not—not to mention a word of this to any one," I stammered. "You understand—it's a ticklish business—for the children's sake."

"Don't be absurd," she retorted impatiently. "I don't blab. Will you promise to let me hear how—how things come out?" I promised.

At this moment Minot Blackden, his eyes blinded by visions of rose windows, no doubt, bore down and all but collided with us. I introduced them mechanically to mitigate his apologies and left them both bound in the same direction southward. Gertrude waved a hand gayly.

"I'll expect good news!" were her parting words.

So I have told some one, I reflected, as I made my way toward Grand Central, and Gertrude expressed what all the world would say: "I ought to jump for joy at the relief. Besides, I shall have to turn them over to Pendleton." The wheels of the train I somberly boarded kept insistently repeating the same self-evident opinion. In addition there was the sickness of death in my soul for the folly of having given the thing away to Gertrude, of all people.

I wish I were not obliged to parry social invitations just at present. The excellent Visconti who had asked me to dinner two or three times during the winter, has suddenly taken a notion to ask me at least once every week. I hope I am not grown so churlish but that I appreciate his well-meant courtesy. But the fag is too great.

He has a house in Thirteenth Street neighboring on St. Vincent's Hospital, and he also has a motherless daughter, Gina, abounding in vitality, who must be amused. The proximity to the hospital, he intimates, the smell of carbolate and iodoform, depress young blood, and Gina, being super-American, must not be allowed to remember that there is anything unpleasant in life. I trust I am not the only vessel chosen to bring more lively spirits to that girl.

The effort for me is immense. I go to Crestlands after office hours, dress, return to town, and then make a late train for Crestlands again. The food is excellent and Gina sings prettily in a soprano as rich as her coloring. But the next morning Visconti's does not enjoy the fruit of my undimmed energies.

More recently, Visconti has urged me not to dress and in that I see the fine hand of Gina at work. As an American-born girl, Gina is quick and eager to read the signs and weather indications. And though I am becoming dexterous in excuses, I dined at the Visconti's last night nevertheless. Gina sang the Sole mio and Una voce poco fa and even told my fortune in cards, predicting that I should "be married a second time."

"But never a first time?" I queried simply.

"Oh, then you've never been married at all!" Gina exulted, and she energetically read the cards for me afresh. Her sortilege evidently is not a perfect science. But it occurs to me that by means of it the clever Gina found out more about my personal life than ever I had vouchsafed to her in all our acquaintance.

When I returned home I found Alicia in my study sitting late over the catalogue, a copy of which she is now completing. She jumped from her chair.

"Oh, I am so glad you've come, Uncle Ranny," she clapped her hands joyously. "I have found something we have overlooked."

"What is it, Alicia?" And my gaze was, I admit, fascinated by her flushed cheeks and starlike eyes sparkling with excitement. She seemed the Muse incarnating those books, the very spirit of beauty they enshrine. And yet she is not quite sixteen.

"It's Shelley's 'Alastor'!" she cried. "And it's so thin that it had slipped in between the covers of another book. It's a first edition—1816, isn't it?"

"Yes, Alicia. And a very beautiful poem besides."

"Oh, isn't it!" she cried in exultation. "I have read it all, Uncle Ranny, and do you know what I found out?"—and her voice became more solemn—"it is your life Shelley was writing!"

I laughed uproariously.

"Yes, he did!" flashed Alicia. "Only your life is so much better. He was so absorbed in himself, Alastor, that he died in his loneliness. And you—you are simply surrounded by people who love you. You—!"

And then, I regret to record, self-consciousness overtook Alicia. She became aware of her own vehemence and blushing furiously made as if to run out of the room.

My position of vantage near the door enabled me to stop her.

"Wait, my dear," I endeavored to lift her lowered chin. "Enthusiasm is nothing to be ashamed of. It's one of the finest things in life. And I'll tell you more—we are always applying to ourselves everything we read in books."

"Isn't that," murmured Alicia shamefacedly, "why people love books?" Foolish girl—to wake the sleeping pedant in me!

"Not altogether, Alicia. When we get older we become less personal. I love books because they hold the truth and the wisdom of men's minds. And aside from life and love, Alicia, wisdom and truth are the greatest realities in the world. There is death, of course, but who cares to dwell upon death?"

"I always did think that life and—and—love were greater than books," stammered Alicia earnestly. "And now that you yourself say so, I am sure of it!"

Astonishing child! When has she had the time to speculate upon the magnitude of life and love? Always that young thing keeps revealing herself to me afresh. I looked at her in silence for a moment. Here was a better counselor than any one, Dibdin excepted, with whom I might discuss the impending return of Pendleton.

"Alicia," I began in another tone, "there is something I should like to talk to you about. It's criminally late, I know, and you ought to be in bed, but since you will dissipate on the catalogue, I'll keep you up a little longer." I led her back to a chair and she gazed at me wide-eyed.

"Is it anything about—the—children?" she whispered, somewhat frightened.

"Yes—in a way—it is about the children. But more particularly it is about their father. Have you ever heard of him?"

"Their father!—I thought he was dead!" she murmured, awe-struck.

"There were times when we all thought so. He disappeared some years ago. But he's alive, Alicia. I've just heard from Dibdin, who found him in Japan." Her eyes grew wider.

"How terrible!" she breathed. "Does he know all—that has happened?"

"He does now—of course he didn't until Mr. Dibdin told him." And then this occurred to me. Ought I to shield Pendleton to the extent of telling her positively that he had lost his memory or identity? No. A confidant deserves scrupulous honesty, even if that confidant be as young as Alicia. "He told Dibdin," I went on, "that he lost his memory of the past and found himself one day stranded in Manila. Led rather a wild and worthless life afterwards—people who lose their memories seem to do that."

"Do you think that's true?" she queried.

"I don't know, Alicia, but when he comes back I suppose we'll have to accept that version. Dibdin will have some advice on that point, I feel sure."

Alicia remained silent for a time lost in reflection. Her child's face in her perturbation was the face of a grown woman.

"Do you think he'll want to take back the children, Uncle Ranny?"

"That's the crux of the whole matter, Alicia. I don't know. But if he does, he'll have a right to do so, of course; they are his."

"Oh, oh!" and her hands flew up to her face in a gesture of poignant despair. "Turn them over to such a man! Is that the way the world's arranged?"

I smiled gloomily. I saw that there was no need of comment upon the arrangement of the world. This girl young in her teens understood it as well as any one.

"Then I'd have to go, too," she uttered hoarsely with a dry sob of bitterness in her throat.

"Not necessarily," I interposed.

"Oh, yes, I should," she insisted doggedly, as though driving something painful into her flesh. "But it doesn't matter about me. But, Uncle Ranny, you won't—you can't give them up! They're all so happy here. Little Jimmie and Laura and Randolph! What chance would they have of growing up fine—away from you—-with a man like that? You won't let them go—you won't, you won't! Oh, it would be horrible, horrible!" she ended passionately.

"Listen, my dear," I tried to calm her. "I had no wish to harrow your feelings. I told you because you love the children—and we must face all this together. I shall want your help, your support." She flashed a sweet look mingled of pride and gratitude.

"After all you—have been through," she murmured incoherently. "But why don't you do this, Uncle Ranny!" and with the quick transition possible to youth, she was again alive, eager, excited, this little fellow conspirator of mine. "Why don't you let him come here and live right in this house for a while? We'll be awfully crowded," she ran on with flushed energy, "but we'll find room for him. And let's be awfully nice to him—and believe everything he says. Then we could watch him, and I just know we'll find out whether he's all right or not!"

I laughed at her enthusiasm.

"You forget, Alicia," I informed her, "that even if he shouldn't prove all right, he is still the father of those children."

"I don't care," she returned stoutly. "If he's bad and sees that we see he's bad, he wouldn't have the face to take them away from here. Even a bad father wants his children to be all right!"

"And how in the world do you know that, you astounding infant?"

"Oh, I know!" with a triumphant laugh, "At the Home—some fathers brought their children and cried—one of them did—because he was so bad he didn't think he was fit to have a child near him. I had tiptoed into the matron's office, and I heard him!"

"Perhaps he didn't want to support the brat," I scoffed to cover up my wonder.

"Well, and do you think he will?" Alicia snatched at my words. "A man who ran away from them, loafing round for years? Oh, it will be easy, Uncle Ranny!" she chuckled. "He couldn't fool us!"

"And why, my little Portia, couldn't he?"

"Because," said Alicia thoughtfully, "he will always be thinking of himself and we—won't."

"You mean," I pressed, delightedly, "he'll be self-conscious and give himself away, the while we are clothed in our rectitude?"

"Yes!" she cried, with a laugh. "We'll be thinking of Jimmie and Laura and Randolph—and it's always easier to think what to do when you're thinking of somebody else—not of yourself."

"And did you discover that also in the matron's office at the Home?" I leaned toward her in amazement.

"No," she bent her gaze downward, "I learned that right here."

I kissed Alicia upon the cheek. It lies heavy at my door that I have shown her too little affection in the past merely because she is not related to me. It startled me to realize that dear to me as Laura's children are, Alicia is the dearest of them all.

As with a gentle good night she slipped away, a profound sigh of relief escaped me. That child succeeded in almost wholly blotting out my feeling of bitter perplexity after talking with Gertrude. Do Alicias upon growing older turn into Gertrudes, I wonder? No, I think not. Surely not.

I now look to the return of Pendleton almost with equanimity.

CHAPTER XIII

I am agitated like a hen with a newly hatched brood.

It has suddenly been revealed to me that the complacency with which I have been regarding my care and rearing of the children is abysmally false and wholly unjustified.

They are not properly clothed for New York and even here in Crestlands they seem on a sudden pitifully shabby. The competition in that sort of thing in a suburb is keen. Everybody's children seem better dressed than my own and yet, do what I will, I cannot afford to spend more. Randolph's high-school dignity is positively impaired by clothes which he is constantly outgrowing. And the rate at which Jimmie wears out trousers and soils white suits is simply unbelievable. Laura alone seems to have the gift of always keeping her things fresh and wearing them as though they were new.

As for Alicia, that girl ought to be clothed in purple, at least figuratively, if only I could afford it. It seems to me I cannot live another day unless I procure for Alicia a large collection of frocks and blouses and shoes and whatever else would set off that faunlike creature, compact of energy and grace. For almost daily that child grows more beautiful in a way that pulls at my heartstrings.

I trust I am no idiotic parent, or foster parent, to rave about her eyes and complexion and the like. I am as dispassionate as any one can well be. But truly there is something starlike in her eyes and at times, when she is sewing or reading or working on my eternal catalogue, I surprise her pensive, absorbed in some long thoughts of her own that not for worlds would I disturb. At such moments I am absolutely fascinated by those soft pools of light that irradiate her face.

Are other girls like that at her age, I wonder? It seems scarcely conceivable. At any rate, I have never seen any others like her. But then, I have seen so few.

The truth remains, however, that I positively must dress her better. Even my dull fancy joyously leaps at the vision of Alicia beautifully dressed and diffusing sweetness and fragrance through the house. Of course, I cannot single her out. There is Laura, too. And it might seem invidious, although as the eldest of them all, Alicia is entitled to especial consideration. I cannot moreover allow Pendleton to observe that I have kept his children shabby. Few are the claims that Pendleton can legitimately array against me, but the shabbiness of the children would too flagrantly proclaim my failure. Nor does Dibdin know as yet my rake's progress since Fred Salmon made a business man of me.

But where am I to get the money for clothes when the mere routine of subsistence absorbs it all? There is still Dibdin's yellowing cheque intact, but I cannot use that—no.

Ah—I have it! I shall sell "Alastor!"

Since I had overlooked it, I shall merely assume I never had it. In its Rivière binding "Alastor" should bring at least two hundred dollars and may bring more. Heaven knows it cost me more. It holds some marginal memoranda by Leigh Hunt, which should not detract from its value. Since Alicia opines that my life is more laudable than Alastor's because there are those who love me, she shall profit by her judgment. "Alastor" shall be sacrificed for her soft and lovely frocks.

Sooner or later I had to come to it. What is a volume more or less compared to the happiness of a household? I am glad I have decided this. So farewell, "Alastor, Spirit of Solitude!"

I seem to be possessed by the mad feverish spirit of carnival.

Having sold my "Alastor" by means of an advertisement in the Sunday Times for two hundred and twenty-five dollars, I experienced a sensation of richer blood in my veins by that accession of wealth. "Alastor" has clothed all my family. I am sorry for the old woman who lived in a shoe. She possessed no library. The moral is obvious. What though I parted with a little bit of myself when I parted with that book, I have engrafted something else in its place. For the children also are myself.

I do not delegate Griselda any more to do the buying for them.

First I took Jimmie and Randolph to a men's outfitting shop where the atmosphere is august. Alicia offered to come along, but though Jimmie is hotly attached to her, he was vocal with objections.

"This is men's business," he cried, "and us men must go alone."

"We men," corrected Laura, laughing and kissing him.

"Us men know how to talk!" he retorted, violently rubbing the kiss from his cheek. Kisses, he implied, were all very well in their place, but not at important crises in masculine lives, not when the toga virilis was hanging grandly from their shoulders.

"Come on, old man," Randolph interposed with a wink in my direction, and Jimmie's wrath was appeased. The "old man" soothed and uplifted him to the proper pitch of virile dignity.

The seventy-five dollars laid out upon those two boys have given me more satisfaction than anything else recently—until I spent the balance upon the girls. Men's shops are prosaic and dull compared with those Greek temples that line Fifth Avenue with feminine apparel. As the paymaster for the boys I was unnoticed. As the "uncle" of the two girls opening the door to heart's desire, I was an object of almost affectionate solicitude to the saleswoman. They were alert to help and advise. What a freemasonry, an empire within an empire, is the domain of women's clothes! In the latest slang and in words from Shakespeare the jaded saleswomen were eager to interpret my wishes.

"I want some frocks and things for these girls," I announced boldly in one of the great shops. "Not too expensive but things nice girls ought to wear."

"I know," nasally asserted an efficient blonde, ceasing her mastication and mysteriously secreting what she was chewing somewhere in her capacious mouth. "Somethin' nice and classy—and quiet, but—you know!"

"Er—precisely—"

"Neat but not gaudy?" put in her more pallid, more "cultured" companion, with a faded smile to complete the specification.

"Ah—exactly so," I murmured and Laura seemed to experience a difficulty in restraining herself from giggling.

Alicia, however, with the simple directness that is hers, proceeded quietly to mention voiles and organdies and soon the discussion became technical and I helpless. I thought it wise to whisper to Alicia the amount of money at her disposal. She gasped her astonishment with a blush and then a beautiful light of gratitude and pleasure leaped into her eyes and I believe the child was going to cry. I turned away quickly, and steadily she proceeded with the business in hand.

To the lady who quoted Polonius, the neat but not gaudy one, I intrusted the selection of those things that I was not to see; she was sincerely gratified at my confidence and, I believe, conscientious.

There was just about enough change left for refreshments at Huyler's for the girls and paterfamilias. Gay were the spirits in which we three traveled homeward. How ridiculous Gertrude would make me, if she knew it!

I felt excitement and happiness bounding in my veins, a new quality of those emotions, the like of which I had never experienced before. And my heart positively missed a beat when the crushing thought struck me: Must I now lose these young creatures and pass again into the emptiness of life?

We Americans are like the French in that we think our climate the best in the world. Or, if not the best, at least so far superior to many others that, like the French, we are steeped in vanity about it.

Of Saturdays I reach home early after midday, yet it has been persistently and infallibly raining every Saturday afternoon the entire blessed spring. If perchance I want to take a walk and breathe some air, I cannot stir out of the house.

Yet a nervous restlessness possesses me: I must have some diversion. It suddenly occurred to me to ask the girls to put on their various new frocks that came last evening. For a moment I was a little ashamed at the thought. But at bottom, I suppose, every male is a Persian Ahasuerus, desirous of displaying and gloating over the beauty of his women folk. I have no doubt but that the king secretly admired Vashti even though he was wroth at her disobedience.

Laura, it appeared, was in the next street at the house of a school friend, but Alicia complied eagerly, displaying anything but the suffragette indignation of Vashti. She was, in fact, eager to parade her frocks with quite feminine excitement.

In her clinging voile, in soft-tinted organdie, in white slippers and silk stockings, Alicia appeared,—a vision surprising, disturbingly radiant with youthful charm. There was something with a blue sash that made her simply exquisite, the very incarnation of grace. Her hair gathered tightly at the nape of her neck and then spreading out into a great brush, a cloud of shimmering fine gold on her shoulders, seemed the only mark of childhood left that prevented me from being like another St. Anthony, miserably afraid of her.

I know not what devil possessed me to ask her to go and put up her hair before she took off that frock. How different must have been the character of Persia's queen. For Alicia ran out of the room and almost in a twinkling she was back with her hair up.

I sat for a moment staring at her speechless, dry-lipped and open-mouthed. For before me, flushed and sparkling, stood the most adorable young creature I had ever seen. Why should there be so much mystery in feminine hair?

"You—you—child!" I blurted out finally in a sort of choleric tenderness. "How dare you look so beauti—so grown up in my house!"

A peal of excited laughter was her answer and she made as if she would rush toward me with open arms, as might an affectionate child eager to caress an indulgent parent—and then on a sadden she checked herself, a blush suffusing her cheeks and her very ears.

"Go call Griselda," I commanded, to cover her confusion, "and show her the young woman we've been harboring in the guise of a child."

Alicia ran out of the room to comply and for a moment I remained sitting in my chair as under a spell. Then I rose hastily to dispel such nonsensical emotions and left my room, only to come face to face with Alicia and Griselda in the dining room.

"Oh, ay—yes!" muttered my aging Griselda, her swarthy countenance hot from the kitchen stove, looking more forbiddingly sybilline than ever, "It's all over!" she added mysteriously.

"What do you mean—all over?" I demanded a little stupidly, though dimly I suppose I understood her.

"The young besoms grow up sae fast, it's a meeracle they dinna wed in their cradles!"

"Wed!" I cried in disgust at the word. "You women are always thinking of only one thing—even you, Griselda. Go," I turned to Alicia, "let down your hair again this minute, so you won't put such wild notions into Griselda's frivolous mind."

Alicia laughed deliciously and even Griselda with a sort of dark twisted smile reiterated:

"Oh, ay—the young besoms!" Whereupon my young woman impulsively threw her arms about Griselda and kissed the brown cheek with gusto. Griselda returned by pinching Alicia's cheek fiercely.

My nephew Randolph and a companion, a tall gawky boy coming into the house at that moment, stood in their raincoats at the dining-room door and gaped, blocking Alicia's path.

"I say! Look who's here!" my young hopeful exclaimed with a low whistle, wagging his head from side to side. The other boy merely stared in dumb awe, twisting his wet cap in his fingers. That gawk and Alicia are the same age, yet—the difference!

"Let her go through and unmask," I waved them aside and Alicia, with her head down, ran laughing out of the room.

I returned to my chair and sat down as one dazed. My policy henceforth will be to frown on suchlike tricks—though I myself had instigated this one. What an occupation for a man of books and tranquillity—one who desired to write of Brunetto Latini—to add to the body of scholarship upon Dante!

And suddenly I put my head down on my arms and laughed long and I am sure quite meaninglessly.

For if I were a woman, I might just as easily have sobbed in a way to tear out the heart. Decidedly the suspense of awaiting news from Dibdin regarding Pendleton must be undermining my nerves.

I am gey ill to live with.

I seem to myself like the irascible old gentlemen in the comedies with the prithees and monstrous fine epigrams, forever taking snuff—save that there is no comedy about me.

I take down books and I cannot read them. What pleasure I used to experience in leaving some of the leaves uncut in fine editions so as to cut them on further readings! I have tried to extract that joy by cutting some recently, but there is no joy in it.

Why am I so certain that Pendleton will take away all these that I love and leave me desolate? All his past seems to argue against the probability. Yet constantly I see before me the picture of their going in a body with that man while I stand speechless, attempting to smile benignantly. How we dramatize ourselves, even the least imaginative amongst us! And all the time I feel as though great gouts of blood were dripping, dripping from my heart in nameless anguish.

Alicia, that divine child, is watching me unobtrusively though closely, whenever she can. She surrounds me with comforts and attentions. But like some sick owl, I prefer to brood alone.

The somewhat isolated position of my châlet on the rock and the lack of a wife in the household has saved me from making intimate acquaintances among my Crestlands neighbors. But there is one young man, Judkins, an architect in the stucco house opposite, who strides over to my porch and insists upon talking of his performances at golf.

"Ought to join the Club," he keeps reiterating. "Nothing like eighteen holes to take the kinks outa your brain after the hullabaloo in the city."

"Er—do I seem to have many kinks?" I ask, whereat he laughs in his harsh voice.

"All got 'em!" he cries. "Can't get away from 'em. Books!" he adds explosively, "books are no good! They give you the willies!"

And that man claims to have studied at the Beaux Arts! Edmond de Goncourt, that neurasthenic philosopher, prayed that he might make a hundred thousand francs from his play "Germinie Lacerteux," so that he might buy the house opposite and put this notice on it: "To be let to people who have no children, who do not play any musical instrument, and who will be permitted to keep only goldfish as pets." As for me, I should waive the children, the pets and the musical instruments; I would merely say, "No proselyting golfers need apply."

Alicia, to mitigate my mood, I suppose, devised a picnic in the woods. No one was to come save the children and I and that gawky companion of Randolph's, the boy John Purington, lest Randolph should be bored. Randolph, it appears, is easily bored. The consciousness of my recent hypochondriac behavior led me to accept the suggestion with alacrity.

The luncheon Griselda prepared was packed in paper boxes by Alicia and together, en masse, our little procession set forth and made its way to a grove less than two miles distant bordering on the great Croton aqueduct.

Randolph and the gawky boy fell at once to tossing a baseball, Jimmie rolled delightedly about the lush grass, still grappling with his insoluble problem of rolling up a slope and still perplexed as to why it should be easier to roll down. Laura ran to his aid and Alicia sat beside me and laughed.

"That is the whole problem of life that Jimmie is facing," I observed gloomily.

"No, it isn't, Uncle Ranny," she put her hand on my arm as she contradicted. "That is only the law of gravitation. There is a lot more to life than that!"

"Yes, Alicia," I lowered my voice, "but when that man comes, how it will hurt to think of little Jimmie, of all those children of my sister's in the care of that man who's really her—her murderer!"

"Please, please, don't think of that!" she begged, with imploring eyes. "That hasn't happened yet. And we'll—we'll manage it somehow. Maybe he's a good man, after all—and, oh; we'll watch him—we'll watch him! Besides, he mayn't come. If he is what you think, then I am sure he won't come!"

That proved a very cheering thought.

Before I knew it, I was myself tossing a ball with Alicia and romping with the rest of them.

It was only after the lunch had been eaten under the trees and the egg shells and papers were gathered and stowed away, and the gawky boy proceeded clumsily to monopolize Alicia, who has not the heart to snub anybody, that my depression returned.

Whereupon Alicia gayly proposed that it was time to think of going home, because Jimmie was drowsy and must not forego his nap.

Was it adroitness or spontaneity? I cannot tell, but it is marvelous how that girl anticipates and understands.

It was a happy, tired, air-steeped company that returned home.

A telegram has just arrived. Dibdin and Pendleton have landed in San Francisco!...

CHAPTER XIV

Pendleton is here. He has been here a week. Like one in the dazed excitement of some dream, the sort of farrago that leaves you limp and weakly smiling when you wake up and see the sun, I have been going about with numb limbs, strangely galvanized, not so much into activity as the expectation of activity.

What is it I have been expecting to happen? I hardly know. But perhaps I have been expecting melodrama. And I am overcome by the obvious truism that genuine melodrama is anything but melodramatic. That is why melodrama on the stage, with its ranting and strutting and flourishes, disgusts one by its bathos.

The presence of Pendleton in my house, occupying my bedroom while I have withdrawn into my little study, is the essence of melodrama.

Yet every one and everything is in a tacit conspiracy to make it seem natural. There is a tension in the atmosphere, without doubt, but we are all of us madly, energetically ignoring it, hiding it.

The man's conduct has been astounding, unimpeachable, unexceptionable.

He out-Enochs Enoch Arden. Yet—why should I disguise the fact to myself—I hate him. That, too, I suppose, is melodrama. But do what I will, he remains detestable to me. I cannot trust him. I try, however, not to show it. Dibdin has acquired a deep furrow between the eyes, due doubtless to his sense of responsibility in having resuscitated Pendleton. He carries the air of some magician or sorcerer who has evoked a demon and is overwhelmed with terror by the problem of what to do with him.

But I must in decency acknowledge that Pendleton's behavior has been without blemish.

Dibdin had sent me a long night letter from San Francisco saying he would remain there a few days, "to give the fellow chance to bolt if he wants to." There had been other telegrams. I was not to meet them at the train but to give explicit directions. It was as well. I could not have met Pendleton at the train even if he were coming from the dead. A week ago, when Dibdin telephoned from the city, I went so far as to order a cab to meet them.

There again the histrionics of the situation were at a hopeless disadvantage. For what I remember most vividly of that Saturday evening was the sickness of my soul as I sat awaiting their arrival. Again and again I had steeled myself to tell the children of their father's coming. I framed words and sentences in my mind until the cold perspiration moistened my forehead, but I could not face the ordeal. I had thought I knew myself—that I was steeled to the tests of life. But I saw I was still a reed. It came to within a couple of hours before their arrival and still I had not told them. I found myself on my two-inch terrace and a stream of profanity was breaking from my lips. On a sudden I saw Jimmie standing beside me. Shame and chagrin overtook me and I bent down to him and begged him to forgive me.

"Don't you mind me, Uncle Ranny," he put his hand in mine. "I'm a man, and I know a man has got to swear sometimes."

"No, Jimmie—not if the man has brains enough with which to think."

That contact with the child, however, seemed to release something in my clamped and aching skull.

"Run, Jimmie," I said, "and send Alicia out to me. I wish to speak to her."

Jimmie, to whom commissions are delight, was off like an arrow.

Some moments elapsed before Alicia could come to me and during that time I had a mad impulse to fly from it all, to, seize my hat and steal away, to take a train to the city and not to return, until it was all over. But I waited nevertheless and Alicia, who had been helping Griselda, came running out flushed, with concern in her eyes.

"Alicia," I began miserably, "I have tried to screw up my courage to tell the children about the coming of—of their father. But I simply can't do it, Alicia; it's—it's beyond me. I—I want you to tell them," I faltered like a guilty schoolboy. The girl winced perceptibly but—

"All right," she answered; "do you mean now?"

"About half-past six—the train gets here at six thirty-five. You take them into the garden—and keep them there until after the men come, and—I call you."

"Yes—Uncle Ranny," she whispered—"but, oh, please don't worry about it so much!"

"No, my dear," I murmured and at that moment I felt closer to her than to any other living being. To take the children out of the house upon the coming of their father—it sounded like a funeral. And it was at that moment—my funeral. And the rest of the afternoon was a blur and the encompassing world was a shadow. It was broken; no, it was too insubstantial for breaking. It kept thinning and receding away from me and I was left a dully throbbing entity in the primal chaos before Creation.

I was startled at last by hearing the wheezy groan of an aged taxi outside and like the galvanized corpse I was, I felt my members heavily stirring and propelling me to the door.

On the path in the curiously sickly light of a premature dusk under a clouded, lifeless sky I saw Dibdin and Pendleton, slightly stooping forward to the slope, walking toward me. That moment of poignant joy at seeing Dibdin, of exquisite pain on beholding Pendleton—I shall never forget it!

"Dibdin!" I cried, rushing at his hand and clinging to it to defer as long as possible touching the other's. Then, after ages it seemed, my eyes slowly turned to the tall figure of Pendleton and rested on the fleshy face, somewhat loose and pendulous, smooth-shaven and purplish, with eyes that fell before my own. Finally I disengaged my hand and held it out to him. I could not do otherwise.

"Jim," I murmured and my voice had labored over a universe of barriers to achieve that. But I could utter no more.

He peered at me from his protruding eyes as though he also were struggling, struggling with memory and with memories, with a teeming past, with all that he had been and committed, and for an instant I felt sorry for him.

"Come in," I breathed deeply, and we made our way into the house and into my study.

"Randolph," Pendleton finally uttered with a profound sigh, and then I recalled that he was playing a part. To me the appalling reality of the whole episode had been so excruciating that momentarily I forgot that he was in all likelihood playing a part. But was he? How could he? In the face of these children, in the face of all he is guilty of, how could he play a part, when the truth would raise him almost to a kind of manhood? I cannot give him the benefit of the doubt and yet I cannot wholly doubt him. Some idiotic simplicity or imbecility inside me makes it impossible for me to envisage any creature in human form as so consummate a villain. Perhaps—perhaps there is something—

"Randolph," he murmured in a deep guttural—"I know you—I remember you—yes, you are—you are—" and he paused. We hung for a moment like things dangling by threads, like marionettes motionless. Then, with a prickling sensation of sweat over all my body, I broke the spell by fumbling with a box of cigarettes and with a hand spasmodically quivering like the needle of a seismograph, I held them out.

"Have a good voyage?" I heard myself saying, as we all smoked and covertly stole glances at one another. I was not flying at his throat. Dibdin puffed heavily with the crease deepening between his eyes and Pendleton's gaze roved questing and unsteady about the room. Melodrama! There never was any except on the stage! In life there is only drama—and pain.

"How are the kids?" Dibdin asked abruptly.

"Fine!" I exclaimed automatically, in an unnatural voice, like a pistol shot. "They are out in the garden there," and Dibdin nodded. I felt certain that his mind also was seeing the analogy to a funeral. And now my brain seemed to be shaking off its dull lethargy. From somewhere in Maeterlinck the haunting memory of a phrase came glimmering through my consciousness, like a dim light through a fog, to the effect that if Socrates and Christ had been in the palace of Agamemnon, the tragedies of the house of Atreus could not have happened. I longed for a little wisdom to deal with the situation.

"Would you like," I turned to Pendleton, "to see the children?"

"The children," he repeated dazedly. "Yes—yes—I'd like to see them. But—just a moment. The children," he repeated piteously, "but no Laura!"

Sharp, sharp was the stab at my heart when he spoke her name. But either he is a supreme master in deceit or I am the dullest of simpletons. For the struggle through clouds of memory that his features expressed seemed real to me.

"I told you she was dead!" snapped Dibdin gruffly, without turning to him.

"You told me? Ah, yes." And he sighed heavily. "Of course you told me." And his chin sank weightily to his breast. We remained thus silent for a space. Then—

"Come," I said, standing up. "I'll take you to the children."

He rose ponderously, his great frame limp and leaden, and followed me somberly. He seemed sincere enough in his grief, I must own that. Dibdin did not move.

I led him into the garden toward the spot where the children were huddled about Alicia. She was talking to them in low tones and they were listening in dead silence. Never again, I hope, shall I experience that sense of going to my own execution that I experienced at that instant. Execution—no! I could have walked to a gibbet or a guillotine smiling, I am quite sure. What is my life to me? I was walking rather to the execution of those four young souls under the gnarled old apple tree.

Alicia, too! By Heaven! Like a lightning stroke that fact crashed into my soul. He would take Alicia also. No—no! He had no claim upon her, thank God!

"Not Alicia!" my voice broke out from the turmoil of my thoughts like the voice in a dream breaking the barriers of sleep.

"Eh?" said Pendleton faintly.

"Did you call, Uncle Ranny?" Alicia turned and asked in a clear, steady voice.

"Yes, Alicia," I struggled for control. "Here is Mr. Pendleton—come to see the children." I meant to say "his children," but I could not.

The whole sickly-colored evening seemed to shudder at my words. The children seemed like wraiths under the tree to shudder away from the intruding material world.

In a moment—what a tragic moment—Pendleton was bending toward them, peering, peering into their white, frightened faces. Then his gaze settled on Alicia and hung there for a space.

"This must be Randolph," he finally turned to the eldest boy, "grown—grown up—isn't it?" and his arms stirred forward.

"Yes, sir," the boy answered hoarsely and put out his hand.

"And this—can this be baby Laura?" Laura hung her head then raised it bravely and with shy resolution held out her hand. Pendleton took it and kissed her clumsily on the cheek.

Jimmie, hanging back, clung to Alicia's skirt and watched the proceedings with troubled stealth from behind her.

"And this is Jimmie," I said, taking the child by the shoulder—"the youngest of them."

As Pendleton was stooping toward him, Jimmie uttered a wild scream of heartbreaking terror, wrenched himself from my hold and fled like some little wounded animal toward the house. Pendleton gave a short, mirthless laugh.

My throat was parched, my heart Was thumping like a rabbit's, but how I loved Jimmie at that moment!

"He is only a baby," put in Alicia softly.

Again Pendleton looked at her—obliquely.

"And this is—" he murmured.

"Alicia Palmer," I supplied hastily, "who has been looking after them."

"Ah, Alicia—a little deputy mother—" and he held out his hand with shamefaced suavity.

The scene was over—the incredible episode—commonplace enough as I write it down. But I lived a dozen melodramas in that eternity that a clock would tick off in three or four minutes of time.

CHAPTER XV

Walking about as I do under sentence, I am like a man of my acquaintance, a stodgy, a terrible Philistine, who cherished for years a fancy that he could write Gilbert and Sullivan operas. In all his life he had probably never rhymed anything more subtle than love, above and dove. Since any fool, in his opinion, could supply the music, he aspired only to the Gilbertian librettos. Incessantly and hopelessly out of key he went about humming the Sullivan tunes to the lyrics he alleged to have in his mind.

Similarly, I go about with a sense of mendacious buoyancy,—like a shipwrecked passenger bobbing helplessly in a troubled sea, but still alive; a flickering glimmer of hope, like a desperate man facing a tiger, but still undevoured.

Brazenly I still expect happiness to emerge, somehow, out of hopelessness.

It is easy, of course, to lapse into moods of despondency, into wishing I were dead, since I cannot live in happiness,

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars

From this world-wearied flesh.

But such moments pass. There is a sort of tonic in the rough of life when the smooth is absent, and the wits, my poor dull wits, brace themselves for the shock of action. I feel certain now that in all my years of tranquillity it is the salt of suffering that was lacking. Yet who would seek suffering for its own sake? I know, however, that I feel younger and more energetic to-day than ever I felt five years ago.

Even Pendleton has his uses. He is the thorn in the side, the fox gnawing at my vitals under the cloak, but here he is in my house as its guest.

He goes with me to the city of a morning on his quest for work, "a connection" as he calls it, and often I find him at home before me when I arrive, in my room, smoking, or out in the garden with the children. I wince inwardly, but I hope I do not show it.

I spoke of hating him, but that is untrue. You cannot persistently hate any man, notably a guest in your house. You can only suspect him. Yet, when I see the children still shy of him, why does it give me a throbbing sense of triumph? I do not know, but so it is. Randolph alone seems to approach him nearer as the days go by. They go on walks together and Randolph confides to Alicia that he is fascinated by the tales of his father's experiences in the tropics, of ships and islands and pearl-fishing and native customs. I fancy Pendleton must be selectively on the alert in his narratives with his young son as the listener. His past must contain many things that none of us in this quiet haven will ever hear recounted.

But I am indifferent to his past. I could listen and even tolerate him as my guest, if only the children were not passing to his care. He talks of "relieving" me of the burden.

"Don't hurry, old man," I answer casually, "they are no burden to me."

He gazes at me and lowers his eyes.

"I tell you, Randolph, you're a revelation to me. I never knew a man like you before. They don't make them like that these days."

"Praise from Sir Hubert," occurs to me, but I don't say it. I am in reality at his mercy, I suppose, but I often feel as though he were at mine. The glossing over of his atrocious conduct, the taking him at his word on the subject of his lapsed memory, which we either slur or don't refer to at all, seem to give me a tremendous advantage over him,—the commonplace advantage of simple honesty over mendacity. Not for a moment do I now believe in his lapsed memory story. I cannot deny, however, that his air is one of repentance and, as Dibdin has said, who in this world is so hard but he wouldn't give a fellow man a second chance?

Jim Pendleton, now that he has been to a New York tailor's, appears as impressive and debonair as ever. He must be in the middle forties and he is not ill-looking. It is chiefly his eyes that seem changed to me. Do what I will, I cannot look at them. There is a certain disturbing obliqueness about his gaze that makes me turn mine away in a sort of vicarious shame.

But, again, C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire. And conscious of that truth, I mean to speak or think no more ill of Jim Pendleton. After all, his large contact with the world has given him something that I lack.

Last evening at dinner he was regaling us with an experience of his of spearing fish in the Marquesas.

"I was in the back of the boat," he was saying, "with a torch in my hand, and my islander, who was an expert at it, held his spear ready for the first fish that leaped. Several of them leaped and fell again into the water round us churning it up, so that we were wet with spray. Suddenly I saw a huge mass glistening in the torchlight, falling, it seemed, right on top of us.

"The native buried his spear upward in the thing as it fell. I tell you that man was quick! But it was too late. The huge fish flopped into the boat with its great head on my knees and the full weight of his body on the man, sending him overboard and splintering the side of the boat. In just about a second we were in total darkness, floundering in the water, with an overturned boat. I was badly bruised and the native had both legs broken.

"In spite of his broken legs, however, he offered to swim ashore, to the nearest projecting rock. But I was sure he couldn't make it and very certain I couldn't. It was a job, I can tell you, righting that boat, helping that man into it and scrambling in myself; and then with a piece of splintered oar rowing ourselves in. The fellow with his broken legs, worked just as hard as I did and never uttered so much as a groan. It did me up for some time. But that fellow was spearing fish again in ten days or so."

Jimmie, who is sometimes allowed to take his supper with us, sat gazing at his father, fascinated by the narrative until the last word. Then seemingly jealous that any one, even this strange father, should exceed me in prowess, his little face clouded and he demanded:

"Uncle Ranny, didn't you ever spear a big fish?"

"No, Jimmie," I laughed, "but maybe you and I will go there one day and spear some together."

"Well, anyway," he retorted stoutly, "you took us on a picnic."

Whereat we all laughed, albeit my own laugh was rueful. The thought flashed through my mind that Pendleton was certain to win them to himself the moment he decided to do so. The very memory of me would become ridiculous to them.

"Uncle Ranny," spoke up Laura, "has been too busy feeding us and buying us clothes to go traveling."

Alicia smiled radiantly at Laura across the table, and Griselda, who had just come in with the dessert, nodded her head with somber emphasis as she placed the bowl before me.

I could have hugged them all three in gratitude, but nevertheless I pressed Pendleton to narrate more of his experiences.

"No," he shook his head, evidently taking the children's comment to heart. "That's yarn enough for one evening."

That seemed to me very decent of Pendleton.

I could not help laughing at Dibdin to-day. I called him up on the telephone and demanded what he meant by coming from devil knows where after more than two years' absence and virtually cutting me.

"Come to lunch at the Salmagundi Club," he growled.

"Does it pain you as much as that to ask me?"

"Don't be a damn fool," he retorted.

"Don't be so wickedly witty," I replied.

"At twelve-thirty," he muttered and hung up the receiver. From which I gathered that he was out of sorts.

In the hall of the Club where he was waiting, I greeted him with,

"'Is it weakness of intellect, birdie,' I cried,

'Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?'"

He stared at me.

"How you can be so light and idiotic in the face of circumstances," he began, "passes my comprehension."

"Circumstances, my dear fellow, are all there is to life."

"Want to wash your paws?"

"No—I am as clean as I shall ever be."

I put my arm through his and allowed him to lead me to a quiet table in the rear of the billiard room, softly illumined by a shaded lamp at midday.

"What a delightful place!" I exclaimed. "Residence of Q.T. tranquillity."

"Tranquillity be blowed," he grunted, as he sat down facing me. "What are you going to do about that Old Man of the Sea of yours?"

"You mean Pendleton?"

"Whom the devil else can I mean?"

"Why, nothing of course, but give him a leg up if we can. What else is there to do? I just received a letter this morning from an insurance company asking for confidential information about him. He's given me as a reference and they're evidently considering him."

"The Danbury and Phoenix?" he asked.

"Yes. How did you know?"

"I got one, too."

"I suppose we are really his only two possible sponsors at present."

"I'd as soon recommend a convict from Sing Sing," he muttered.

"Oh, no!" I protested. "Not as bad as that. Besides, sometimes you have to recommend even a convict."

"I'd much rather recommend a convict. I hate to lie about this man. I've been asked whether I would trust him and I have to say yes. But you know dashed well I wouldn't. Give me a cigarette," he ended savagely.

"I think he'll go straight now," I murmured dully, passing my case to Dibdin and looking away. "The children will no doubt have an influence on him."

"You judge everybody by yourself."

"How d'ye mean—myself?"

"The long and the short of it is," he declared, putting both elbows on the table, "I had no idea what the children would do to you."

"What did they do to me?" I queried, mystified.

"Made you over—that's all."

"Explain," I said, gazing at him stupidly.

"What is there to explain?" growled Dibdin, when the waiter was out of earshot. "You were always a decent sort of idiot—bookworm, muddler, dilettante, whatever it was—afraid of real life, fit only to collect pretty little books or old musty volumes that nobody really cares to read in—a drifter, with about as much knowledge of the problems of existence as a stuffed owl in a glass.

"What happened? Your sister's orphans come to you. You plunge into life, go into business which you detest, lose your money, go to work as a clerk, by George! You of all people!—Keep a roof over them, bring them up and hang me if I don't think you were idiotically happy in it all until I brought this Old Man of the Sea!—What right had I to pick him up and bring him and bungle it all? And why the hell didn't you warn me not to fetch him? I thought I was helping you out. I'd sooner have chucked the brute overboard—I would, by Heaven!"

For a moment I could reply nothing at all to Dibdin. His estimate and account of my actions were natural enough to him who, despite his burly manner, exaggerates everybody's qualities. It seemed the more remarkable that he who so firmly believed in the second chance should now find no word to say in Pendleton's favor. But I could see clearly enough that what troubled him was the pain he instinctively realized the departure of the children from me to Pendleton was certain to bring me.

"Why didn't you cable me, 'Lose the brute?'" he took up his argument.

"Because, my dear fellow," I put my hand on his arm across the table, "it was too late; once you had found him and told him of what had occurred in his absence, it was too late. Would you like to live with the menacing uncertainty of him overhanging in space? Rather have him here and face him. Besides, the children are his"—I knew I must state my view squarely on that head—"If he is fit to take them, then have them he must, regardless."

"Regardless of you, you mean?" He put it darkly.

"Yes—regardless of me, certainly. I don't count."

"By the Lord!" and his fine head shot upwards in a gesture that was in itself invigorating. "D'you know you are twenty times the man you were?" he cried. "I couldn't have believed it. You—you're stupendous!"

I laughed and waved him away with a "Retro, Satanas."

"You're going it blind like that," he ran on, disregarding me,—"Salmon and Byrd," with a laugh—"losing all your money and then—Visconti's—slaving for the kids—meeting it all—by gad, you are living life!—heroic, I call it—I take off my hat to you!"

"Put it on again," I murmured, moved by his vehemence. It was certainly agreeable to hear such words from Dibdin, who never lied. Praise is a savory dish, not a thing that my misspent life has been surfeited with, and it was exquisitely soothing to one's vanity. But it was clear enough that Dibdin was wrong. His usually lucid view was obscured by the tangle of circumstances that weighed upon him. Naturally, I could not leave him in his error.

"If you knew," I managed to stammer, "the malignant fear that is eating my liver white, you—"

"Fear of what?" he broke in.

"Of turning those kids over to him;" I lowered my voice—"just that and—nothing else."

"Just that," he repeated gloomily, nodding his head. "Who would have supposed it? By the Lord! If ever there was a bull in a China shop, I am that bull. Why the devil did I ever pick the brute up? Look here!" he flashed with sudden inspiration, "why not deport him as we imported him, eh? I might manage it—I might!"

"No—no, Dibdin—neither you nor I would do such a thing."

"Why not?" he growled.

"That would make us—worse than he is, or was," I explained sadly. For I must own that for an instant my heart leaped at his suggestion. "Besides," I went on prosily, "it's not so easy to lay a ghost when once you've raised it. We've got to believe him, Dibdin, my boy—if only for the young ones' sake. He will probably get his job, and the thing to do now is not to arouse his suspicion of how we feel about him. Believe everything he says—believe in him. Thousands every year, according to the newspapers, turn up willfully missing! He was tired of the humdrum life and lit out; that is all there was to it. Now he wants to try back. You yourself thought he ought to have another chance."

There was genuine pathos in old Dibdin's voice when he spoke out with a humid somber look:

"By George, that chap's the Nemesis of us all! By his one willful act of destructive irresponsibility he has affected all our lives destructively. It's maddening that one worthless brute should be able to do all that. He killed Laura, damn him; he orphaned these kids; he's upset your life—he makes wretched conspirators of you and me—g-r-r-r! I'd like to pound him to a jelly!"

I laughed joylessly.

"What would that undo?"

"Nothing, I dare say," snapped Dibdin. "Besides, you really have no complaint, boy. You tower, Randolph, my lad; yes, by George! you tower head and shoulders above any one I know! His very villainy has made you over—blown the breath of life into you."

I believe I answered something flippant.

"Look here!" he cried, with a sudden movement upsetting a glass of water and disregarding it. "If those kids go over to him, we can keep an eye on him—just the same—as though we were with them!"

"How d'you mean?" I queried, puzzled.

"That girl—what's her name—Alicia! She'll keep an eye on him—and them. She's sharp, I tell you, with her innocent blue eyes. Give you a daily report like—like—"

"No!" I emphatically interrupted him. "That, never! She is not going from my house—certainly not to him!"

I was the more abashed by my own vehemence when I saw Dibdin staring at me with lifted eyebrows.

"Why—you are not—" he began blankly—but I interrupted him hotly.

"I am nothing!—She is to me just as Jimmie and Laura and Randolph are, but they are unfortunately his. Don't you know the meaning of responsibility for young lives, Dibdin? I want to give her her chance, educate her, make a fine woman of her. They have a father; she has no one but me. I can't turn her out—and I wish," I added lamely, "I had as much right to keep them all."

"Whew!" he whistled in renewed astonishment.

"I can only say I don't know you any more. I used to know you, but I'm proud to make the acquaintance of the new Mr. Randolph Byrd."

"Don't be a damn fool, Dibdin," I mumbled in exasperation. "You know you are talking rot. Why the devil are you so interested in the kids? There is that cheque you sent—!"

"You haven't cashed it," he interposed, moving his shoulders as one shaking off something. "Why the deuce haven't you?"

"I will some day," I grinned at him feebly, "when I need it more. But you haven't answered my question."

I felt I was goading him brutally but for once I seemed to have the dear old tramp upon the hip. For all his gruffness he was as full of emotions as anybody. It seemed to me absurd for a man to hide his implanted instinct, one of the noblest of all the little hidden root-cellars of our instincts, under a false shame or indifference. Women are wiser—they don't hide theirs; and I had become shameless about mine.

"Why," I repeated, "are you so much interested in those kids?"

"Don't be an ass!" he grunted, looking down upon the wet tablecloth, and a spasm as of pain crossed his countenance.