BOOK ONE THE FAMILY (continued 2)

“Of course. He selects all my things for me,” said Rosamond proudly.

“Well, he does a good job. He knows what’s right for you.” St. Peter continued to look her up and down with satisfaction. “And Kathleen is getting new furs. You were advising her?”

“She didn’t mention it to me,” Rosamond replied in a guarded voice.

“No? And what do you call this, what beast?” he asked ingenuously, again stroking the fur with his bare hand.

“It’s taupe.”

“Oh, moleskin!” He drew back a little. “Couldn’t be better for your complexion. And is it warm?”

“Very warm—and so light.”

“I see, I see!” He took Rosamond’s arm and escorted her to her car. “Give Louie my compliments on his choice.” The motor glided away—he wished he could escape as quickly and noiselessly, for he was a coward. But he had a feeling that Kathleen was watching him from behind the sash curtains. He went up to the door and made a long and thorough use of the foot-scraper before he tapped on the glass. Kathleen let him in. She was very pale; even her lips, which were always pink, like the inside of a white shell, were without colour. Neither of them mentioned the just-departed guest.

“Have you been out in the park, Kitty? This is a pretty little storm. Perhaps you’ll walk over to the old house with me presently.” He talked soothingly while he took off his coat and rubbers. “And now for the furs!”

Kathleen went slowly into her bedroom. She was gone a great while—perhaps ten actual minutes. When she came back, the rims of her eyes were red. She carried four large pasteboard boxes, tied together with twine. St. Peter sprang up, took the parcel, and began untying the string. He opened the first and pulled out a brown stole. “What is it, mink?”

“No, it’s Hudson Bay sable.”

“Very pretty.” He put the collar round her neck and drew back to look at it. But after a sharp struggle Kathleen broke down. She threw off the fur and buried her face in a fresh handkerchief.

“I’m so sorry, Daddy, but it’s no use to-day. I don’t want any furs, really. She spoils everything for me.”

“Oh, my dear, my dear, you hurt me terribly!” St. Peter put his hands tenderly on her soft hazel-coloured hair. “Face it squarely, Kitty; you must not, you cannot, be envious. It’s self-destruction.”

“I can’t help it, Father. I envious. I don’t think I would be if she let me alone, but she comes here with her magnificence and takes the life out of all our poor little things. Everybody knows she’s rich, why does she have to keep rubbing it in?”

“But, Kitty dear, you wouldn’t have her go home and change her coat before coming to see you?”

“Oh, it’s not that, Father, it’s everything! You know we were never jealous of each other at home. I was always proud of her good looks and good taste. It’s not her clothes, it’s a feeling she has inside her. When she comes toward me, I feel hate coming toward me, like a snake’s hate!”

St. Peter wiped his moist forehead. He was suffering with her, as if she had been in physical anguish. “We can’t, dear, we can’t, in this world, let ourselves think of things—of comparisons—like that. We are all too susceptible to ugly suggestions. If Rosamond has a grievance, it’s because you’ve been untactful about Louie.”

“Even if I have, why should she be so revengeful? Does she think nobody else calls him a Jew? Does she think it’s a secret? I don’t mind being called a Gentile.”

“It’s all in the way it’s done, you know, Kitty. And you’ve shown that you were a little bored with all their new things, now haven’t you?”

“I’ve shown that I don’t like the way she overdresses, I suppose. I would never have believed that Rosie could do anything in such bad taste. While she is here among her old friends, she ought to dress like the rest of us.”

“But doesn’t she? It seems to me her things look about like yours.”

“Oh, Father, you’re so simple! And Mother is very careful not to enlighten you. We go to the Guild to sew for the Mission fund, and Rosie comes in a handmade French frock that cost more than all our dresses put together.”

“But if hers are no prettier, what does it matter how much they cost?” He was watching Kathleen fearfully. Her pale skin had taken on a greenish tinge—there was no doubt about it. He had never happened to see that change occur in a face before, and he had never realized to what an ugly, painful transformation the common phrase “green with envy” referred.

“Oh, foolish, they are prettier, though you may not see it. It’s not just the clothes”—she looked at him intently, and her eyes, in their reddened rims, expanded and cleared. “It’s everything. When we were at home, Rosamond was a kind of ideal to me. What she thought about anything, decided it for me. But she’s entirely changed. She’s become Louie. Indeed, she’s worse than Louie. He and all this money have ruined her. Oh, Daddy, why didn’t you and Professor Crane get to work and stop all this before it began? You were to blame. You knew that Tom had left something that was worth a lot, both of you. Why didn’t you do something? You let it lie there in Crane’s laboratory for this—this Marsellus to come along and exploit, until he almost thinks it’s his own idea.”

“Things might have turned out the same, anyway,” her father protested. “Whatever the process earned was Rosamond’s. I wasn’t in the mood to struggle with manufacturers, I know nothing of such things. And Crane needs every ounce of his strength for his own experiments. He doesn’t care about anything but the extent of space.”

“He’d better have taken a few days off and saved his friend’s reputation. Tom trusted him with everything. It’s too foolish; that poor man being cut to pieces by surgeons all the time, and picking up the little that’s left of himself and bothering about the limitations of space—much good they’ll do him!”

St. Peter rose, took both of his daughter’s hands, and stood laughing at her. “Come now! You have more brains than that, Kitty. It happens you do understand that whatever poor Crane can find out about space is more good to him than all the money the Marselluses will ever have. But are you implying that if Crane and I had developed Tom’s discovery, we might have kept Rosie and her money in the family, for ourselves?”

Kathleen threw up her head. “Oh, I don’t want her money!”

“Exactly; nor do I. And we mustn’t behave as if we did want it. If you permit yourself to be envious of Rosie, you’ll be very foolish, and very unhappy.”

The Professor walked away across the snowy park with a tired step. He was heavy-hearted. For Kathleen he had a special kind of affection. Perhaps it was because he had had to take care of her for one whole summer when she was little. Just as Mrs. St. Peter was ready to start for Colorado with the children, the younger one developed whooping-cough and had to be left at home with her father. He had opportunity to observe all her ways. She was only six, but he found her a square-dealing, dependable little creature. They worked out a satisfactory plan of life together. She was to play in the garden all morning, and was not on any account to disturb him in his study. After lunch he would take her to the lake or the woods, or he would read to her at home. She took pride in keeping her part of the contract. One day when he came out of his study at noon, he found her sitting on the third floor stairs, just outside his door, with the arnica bottle in one hand and the fingers of the other puffed up like wee pink sausages. A bee had stung her in the garden, and she had waited half the morning for sympathy. She was very independent, and would tug at her leggings or overshoes a great while before she asked for help.

When they were little girls, Kathleen adored her older sister and liked to wait on her, was always more excited about Rosie’s new dresses and winter coat than about her own. This attachment had lasted even after they were grown. St. Peter had never seen any change in it until Rosamond announced her engagement to Louie Marsellus. Then, all at once, Kathleen seemed to be done with her sister. Her father believed she couldn’t forgive Rosie’s forgetting Tom so quickly.

It was dark when the Professor got back to the old house and sat down at his writing-table. He would have an hour on his notes, he told himself, in spite of families and fortunes. And he had it. But when he looked up from his writing as the Angelus was ringing, two faces at once rose in the shadows outside the yellow circle of his lamp: the handsome face of his older daughter, surrounded by violet-dappled fur, with a cruel upper lip and scornful half-closed eyes, as she had approached her car that afternoon before she saw him; and Kathleen, her square little chin set so fiercely, her white cheeks actually becoming green under her swollen eyes. He couldn’t believe it. He rose quickly and went to his one window, opened it wider, and stood looking at the dark clump of pine-trees that told where the Physics building stood. A sharp pain clutched his heart. Was it for this the light in Outland’s laboratory used to burn so far into the night!

VIII

THE following week St. Peter went to Chicago to give his lectures. He had engaged rooms for himself and Lillian at a quiet hotel near the university. The Marselluses went down by the same train, and they all alighted at the station together, in a raging snow-storm. The St. Peters were to have tea with Louie at the Blackstone, before going to their own quarters.

Tea was served in Louie’s suite on the lake front, with a fine view of the falling snow from the windows. The Professor was in a genial mood; he was glad to be in a big city again, in a luxurious hotel, and especially pleased to be able to sit in comfort and watch the storm over the water.

“How snug you are here, Louie! This is really very nice,” he said, turning back from the window when Rosamond called him.

Louie came and put both hands on St. Peter’s shoulders, exclaiming delightedly: “And do you like these rooms, sir? Well, I’m glad, for they’re yours! Rosie and I are farther down the corridor. Not a word! It’s all arranged. You are our guests for this engagement. We won’t have our great scholar staying off in some grimy place on the South side. We want him where we can keep an eye on him.”

Louie was so warm with his plan that the Professor could only express satisfaction. “And our luggage?”

“It’s on the way. I cancelled your reservations and did everything in order. Now have your tea, but not too much. You dine early; you have an engagement for to-night. You and Dearest are going to the opera——Oh, not with us! We have other fish to fry. You are going off alone.”

“Very well, Louie! And what are they giving to-night?”

“Mignon. It will remind you of your student days in Paris.”

“It will. I always had abonnement at the Opéra Comique, and Mignon came round frequently. It’s one of my favourites.”

“I thought so!” Louie kissed both the ladies, to express his satisfaction. The Professor had forgotten his scruples about accepting lavish hospitalities. He was really very glad to have windows on the lake, and not to have to go away to another hotel. After the Marselluses went to their own apartment, he remarked to his wife, while he unpacked his bag, that it was much more convenient to be on the same floor with Louie and Rosamond. “Much better than cabbing across Chicago to meet them all the time, isn’t it?”

At eight o’clock he and his wife were in their places in the Auditorium. The overture brought a smile to his lips and a gracious mood to his heart. The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an expression of youth,—that, and no more; with the sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy stresses—the delicacy, too—belonging to that time. After the entrance of the hero, Lillian leaned toward him and whispered: “Am I over-credulous? He looks to me exactly like the pictures of Goethe in his youth.”

“So he does to me. He is certainly as tall as Goethe. I didn’t know tenors were ever so tall. The Mignon seems young, too.”

She was slender, at any rate, and very fragile beside the courtly Wilhelm. When she began her immortal song, one felt that she was right for the part, the pure lyric soprano that suits it best, and in her voice there was something fresh and delicate, like deep wood flowers. “Connais-tu—le-pays”—it stirred one like the odours of early spring, recalled the time of sweet, impersonal emotions.

When the curtain fell on the first act, St. Peter turned to his wife. “A fine cast, don’t you think? And the harps are very good. Except for the wood-winds, I should say it was as good as any performance I ever heard at the Comique.”

“How it does make one think of Paris, and of so many half-forgotten things!” his wife murmured. It had been long since he had seen her face so relaxed and reflective and undetermined.

Through the next act he often glanced at her. Curious, how a young mood could return and soften a face. More than once he saw a starry moisture shine in her eyes. If she only knew how much more lovely she was when she wasn’t doing her duty!

“My dear,” he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, “it’s been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young.”

“How often I’ve thought that!” she replied with a faint, melancholy smile.

“You? But you’re so occupied with the future, you adapt yourself so readily,” he murmured in astonishment.

“One must go on living, Godfrey. But it wasn’t the children who came between us.” There was something lonely and forgiving in her voice, something that spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless.

“You, you too?” he breathed in amazement. He took up one of her gloves and began drawing it out through his lingers. She said nothing, but he saw her lip quiver, and she turned away and began looking at the house through the glasses. He likewise began to examine the audience. He wished he knew just how it seemed to her. He had been mistaken, he felt. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own. Presently the melting music of the tenor’s last aria brought their eyes together in a smile not altogether sad.

That night, after he was in bed, among unaccustomed surroundings and a little wakeful, St. Peter still played with his idea of a picturesque shipwreck, and he cast about for the particular occasion he would have chosen for such a finale. Before he went to sleep he found the very day, but his wife was not in it. Indeed, nobody was in it but himself, and a weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes-Pyrénées, half a dozen spry seamen, and a line of gleaming snow peaks, agonizingly high and sharp, along the southern coast of Spain.

Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public dining-room of the hotel, and three of the Professor’s colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture, had met some of the faculty, and immediately invited them to dinner. They accepted—when was a professor known to refuse a good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward observed to his wife, practically all the guests in the dining-room were participants in the happy event. Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same, his fellow professors went away from the Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had marriageable daughters, they were certainly envying him his luck.

“That,” her husband replied, “is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up in the worst possible light. I’m not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to occupy an apartment I couldn’t afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow.”

They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging the town, and Scott had laryngitis and was writing prose poems about the pleasures of tending your own furnace when the thermometer is twenty below.

“Godfrey,” said Mrs. St. Peter when he set off for his class-room on the morning after their return, “surely you’re not going to the old house this afternoon. It will be like a refrigerating-plant. There’s no way of heating your study except by that miserable little stove.”

“There never was, my dear. I got along a good many years.”

“It was very different when the house below was heated. That stove isn’t safe when you keep the window open. A gust of wind might blow it out at any moment, and if you were at work you’d never notice until you were half poisoned by gas. You’ll get a fine headache one of these days.”

“I’ve got headaches that way before, and survived them,” he said stubbornly.

“How can you be so perverse? You know things are different now, and you ought to take more care of your health.”

“Why so? It’s not worth half so much as it was then.”

His wife disregarded this. “And don’t you think it’s a foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?”

The Professor’s dark skin reddened, and the ends of his formidable eyebrows ascended toward his black hair. “It’s almost my only extravagance,” he muttered fiercely.

“How irritable and unreasonable he is becoming!” his wife reflected, as she heard him putting on his overshoes in the hall.

IX

FOR Christmas day the weather turned mild again. There would be a family dinner in the evening, but St. Peter was going to have the whole day to himself, in the old house. He asked his wife to put him up some sandwiches, so that he needn’t come back for lunch. He kept a few bottles of sherry in his study, in the old chest under the forms. Fortunately he had brought back a great deal of it from his last trip to Spain. It wasn’t foresight—Prohibition was then unthinkable—but a lucky accident. He had gone with his innkeeper to an auction, and bought in a dozen dozens of a sherry that went very cheap. He came home by the City of Mexico and got the wine through without duty.

As he was crossing the park with his sandwiches, he met Augusta coming back from Mass.

“Are you still going to the old house, Professor?” she asked reproachfully, her face smiling at him between her stiff black fur collar and her stiff black hat.

“Oh, yes, Augusta, but it’s not the same. I miss you. There are never any new dresses on my ladies in the evening now. Won’t you come in sometime and deck them out, as a surprise for me? I like to see them looking smart.”

Augusta laughed. “You are a funny man, Doctor St. Peter. If anyone else said the things you do to your classes, I’d be scandalized. But I always tell people you don’t mean half you say.”

“And how do you know what I say to my classes, may I ask?”

“Why, of course, they go out and talk about it when you say slighting things about the Church,” she said gravely.

“But, really, Augusta, I don’t think I ever do.”

“Well, they take it that way. They are not as smart as you, and you ought to be careful.”

“It doesn’t matter. What they think to-day, they’ll forget to-morrow.” He was walking beside Augusta, with a slack, indifferent stride, very unlike the step he had when he was full of something. “That reminds me: I’ve been wanting to ask you a question. That passage in the service about the Mystical Rose, Lily of Zion, Tower of Ivory—is that the Magnificat?”

Augusta stopped and looked at him. “Why, Professor! Did you receive no religious instruction at all?”

“How could I, Augusta? My mother was a Methodist, there was no Catholic church in our town in Kansas, and I guess my father forgot his religion.”

“That happens, in mixed marriages.” Augusta spoke meaningly.

“Ah, yes, I suppose so. But tell me, what is the Magnificat, then?”

“The Magnificat begins, doth magnify My soul dot magnify the Lord; you must know that.”

“But I thought the Magnificat was about the Virgin?”

“Oh, no, Professor! The Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat.”

St. Peter became intensely interested. “Oh, she did?”

Augusta spoke gently, as if she were prompting him and did not wish to rebuke his ignorance too sharply. “Why, yes, just as soon as the angel had announced to her that she would be the mother of our Lord, the Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat. I always think of you as knowing everything, Doctor St. Peter!”

“And you’re always finding out how little I know. Well, you don’t give me away. You are very discreet.”

Their ways parted, and both went on more cheerful than when they met. The Professor climbed to his study feeling quite as though Augusta had been there and brightened it up for him. (Surely she had said that the Blessed Virgin sat down and composed the Magnificat!) Augusta had been with them often in the holiday season, back in the years when holidays were holidays indeed. He had grown to like the reminders of herself that she left in his work-room—especially the toilettes upon the figures. Sometimes she made those terrible women entirely plausible!

In the early years, no matter how hard he was working, he had always felt the sense of holiday, of a special warmth and fragrance in the air, steal up to his study from the house below. When he was writing his best, he was conscious of pretty little girls in fresh dresses—of flowers and greens in the comfortable, shabby sitting-room—of his wife’s good looks and good taste—even of a better dinner than usual under preparation downstairs. All the while he had been working so fiercely at his eight big volumes, he was not insensible to the domestic drama that went on beneath him. His mind had played delightedly with all those incidents. Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,—working her chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes,—alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories.

On this Christmas morning, with that sense of the past in his mind, the Professor went mechanically to work, and the morning disappeared. Before he knew it was passing, the bells from Augusta’s church across the park rang out and told him it was gone. He pushed back his papers and arranged his writing-table for lunch.

He had been working hard, he judged, because he was so hungry. He peered with interest into the basket his wife had given him—a wicker bag, it was, really, that he had once bought full of strawberries at Gibraltar. Chicken sandwiches with lettuce leaves, red California grapes, and two shapely, long-necked russet pears. That would do very well; and Lillian had thoughtfully put in one of her best dinner napkins, knowing he hated ugly linen. From the chest he took out a round cheese, and a bottle of his wine, and began to polish a sherry glass.

While he was enjoying his lunch, he was thinking of certain holidays he had spent alone in Paris, when he was living at Versailles, with the Thieraults, as tutor to their boys. There was one All Souls’ Day when he had gone into Paris by an early train and had a magnificent breakfast on the Rue de Vaugirard—not at Foyot’s, he hadn’t money enough in those days to put his nose inside the place. After breakfast he went out to walk in the soft rainfall. The sky was of such an intense silvery grey that all the grey stone buildings along the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue Sufflot came out in that silver shine stronger than in sunlight. The shop windows were shut; on the bleak ascent to the Pantheon there was not a spot of colour, nothing but wet, shiny, quick-silvery grey, accented by black crevices, and weatherworn bosses white as wood-ash. All at once, from somewhere behind the Pantheon itself, a man and woman, pushing a hand-cart, came into the empty street. The cart was full of pink dahlias, all exactly the same colour. The young man was fair and slight, with a pale face; the woman carried a baby. Both they and the wheels of their barrow were splashed with mud. They must have come from a good way in the country, and were a weary, anxious-looking pair. They stopped at a corner before the Pantheon and fearfully scanned the bleak, silvery, deserted streets. The man went into a bakery, and his wife began to spread out the flowers, which were done up in large bouquets with fresh green chestnut-leaves. Young St. Peter approached and asked the price.

“Deux francs cinquante, Monsieur,” she said with a kind of desperate courage.

He took a bunch and handed her a five-franc note. She had no change. Her husband, watching from the bakery, came running across with a loaf of bread under his arm.

“Deux francs cinquante,” she called to him as he came up. He put his hand into his pocket and fumbled.

“Deux francs cinquante,” she repeated with painful tension. The price agreed upon had probably been a franc or a franc fifty. The man counted out the change to the student and looked at his wife with admiration. St. Peter was so pleased with his flowers that it hadn’t occurred to him to get more; but all his life he had regretted that he didn’t buy two bunches, and push their fortunes a little further. He had never again found dahlias of such a beautiful colour, or so charmingly arranged with bright chestnut-leaves.

A moment later he was strolling down the hill, wondering to whom he could give his bouquet, when a pathetic procession filed past him through the rain. The girls of a charity school came walking two and two, in hideous dark uniforms and round felt hats without ribbon or bow, marshalled by four black-bonneted nuns. They were all looking down, all but one—the pretty one, naturally—and she was looking sidewise, directly at the student and his flowers. Their eyes met, she smiled, and just as he put out his hand with the bouquet, one of the sisters flapped up like a black crow and shut the girl’s pretty face from him. She would have to pay for that smile, he was afraid. Godfrey spent his day in the Luxembourg Gardens and walked back to the Gare St. Lazare at evening with nothing but his return ticket in his pocket, very glad to get home to Versailles in time for the family dinner.

When he first went to live with the Thieraults, he had found Madame Thierault severe and exacting, stingy about his laundry and grudging about the cheese and fruit he ate for dinner. But in the end she was very kind to him; she never pampered him, but he could depend upon her. Her three sons had always been his dearest friends. Gaston, the one he loved best, was dead—killed in the Boxer uprising in China. But Pierre still lived at Versailles, and Charles had a business in Marseilles. When he was in France their homes were his. They were much closer to him than his own brothers. It was one summer when he was in France, with Lillian and the two little girls, that the idea of writing a work upon the early Spanish explorers first occurred to him, and he had turned at once to the Thieraults. After giving his wife enough money to finish the summer and get home, he took the little that was left and went down to Marseilles to talk over his project with Charles Thierault fils, whose mercantile house did a business with Spain in cork. Clearly St. Peter would have to be in Spain as much as possible for the next few years, and he would have to live there very cheaply. The Thieraults were always glad of a chance to help him. Not with money,—they were too French and too logical for that. But they would go to any amount of trouble and no inconsiderable expense to save him a few thousand francs.

That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleander-buried house in the Prado, until his little brig, L’Espoir, sailed out of the new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his spare crew were all Provençals, seamen trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lyons. On the voyage everything seemed to feed the plan of the work that was forming in St. Peter’s mind; the skipper, the old Catalan second mate, the sea itself. One day stood out above the others. All day long they were skirting the south coast of Spain; from the rose of dawn to the gold of sunset the ranges of the Sierra Nevadas towered on their right, snow peak after snow peak, high beyond the flight of fancy, gleaming like crystal and topaz. St. Peter lay looking up at them from a little boat riding low in the purple water, and the design of his book unfolded in the air above him, just as definitely as the mountain ranges themselves. And the design was sound. He had accepted it as inevitable, had never meddled with it, and it had seen him through.

It was late on Christmas afternoon when the Professor got back to the new house, but he was in such a happy frame of mind that he feared nothing, not even a family dinner. He quite looked forward to it, on the contrary. His wife heard him humming his favorite air from Matrimonio Segreto while he was dressing.

That evening the two daughters of the house arrived almost at the same moment. When Rosamond threw off her cloak in the hall, her father noticed that she was wearing her new necklace. Kathleen stood looking at it, and was evidently trying to find courage to say something about it, when Louie helped her by breaking in.

“And, Kitty, you haven’t seen our jewels! What do you think? Just look at it.”

“I was looking. It’s too lovely!”

“It’s very old, you see, the gold. What a work I had finding it! She doesn’t like anything showy, you know, and she doesn’t care about intrinsic values. It must be beautiful, first of all.”

“Well, it is that, surely.”

Louie walked up and down, admiring his wife. “She carries off things like that, doesn’t she? And yet, you know, I like her in simple things, too.” He dropped into reflection, just as if he were alone and talking to himself. “I always remember a little bracelet she wore the night I first met her. A turquoise set in silver, wasn’t it? Yes, a turquoise set in dull silver. Have you it yet, Rosie?”

“I think so.” There was a shade of displeasure in Rosamond’s voice, and she turned back into the hall to look for something. “Where are the violets you brought for Mamma?”

Mrs. St. Peter came in, followed by the maid and the cocktails. Scott began the usual Prohibition lament.

“Why don’t you journalists tell the truth about it in print?” Louie asked him. “It’s a case where you could do something.”

“And lose my job? Not much! This country’s split in two, socially, and I don’t know if it’s ever coming together. It’s not so hard on me, I can drink hard liquor. But you and the Professor like wine and fancy stuff.”

“Oh, it’s nothing to us! We’re going to France for the summer,” Louie put his arm round his wife and rubbed his cheek against hers, saying caressingly, “and drink Burgundy, Burgundy, Burgundy!”

“Please take me with you, Louie,” Mrs. St. Peter pleaded, to distract him from his wife. Nothing made the McGregors so uncomfortable and so wrathful as the tender moments which sometimes overtook the Marselluses in public.

“We are going to take you, and Papa too. That’s our plan. I take him for safety. If I travelled on the Continent alone with two such handsome women, it wouldn’t be tolerated. There would be a trumped-up quarrel, and a stiletto, and then somebody would be a widow,” turning again to his wife.

“Come here, Louie.” Mrs. St. Peter beckoned him. “I have a confession to make. I’m afraid there’s no dinner for you to-night.”

“No dinner for me?”

“No. There’s nothing either you or Godfrey will like. It’s Scott’s dinner to-night. Your tastes are so different, I can’t compromise. And this is his, from the cream soup to the frozen pudding.”

“But who said I didn’t like cream soup and frozen pudding?” Louie held out his hands to show their guiltlessness. “And are there haricots verts in cream sauce? I thought so! And I like those, too. The truth is, Dearest,” he stood before her and tapped her chin with his finger, “the truth is that I like all Scott’s dinners, it’s he who doesn’t like mine! He’s the intolerant one.”

“True for you, Louie,” laughed the Professor.

“And it’s that way about lots of things,” said Louie a little plaintively.

“Kitty,” said Scott as they were driving home that night, Kathleen in the driver’s seat beside him, “that silver bracelet Louie spoke of was one of Tom’s trinkets, wasn’t it? Do you suppose she has some feeling for him still, under all this pompuosity?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very much!” she cried vehemently.

He pinched off his driving-glove between his knees and snuggled his hand over hers, inside her muff. “Sure?” he muttered.

“Yes, I do!” she said fiercely, squeezing his knuckles together with all her might.

“Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty. Most girls wouldn’t have thought it necessary. I’m the only one who knows, ain’t I?”

“The only one who ever has known.”

“And I’m just the one another girl wouldn’t have told. Why did you, Kit?”

“I don’t know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you were the real one.” Her head dropped on his shoulder. “You know you are the real one, don’t you?”

“I guess!”

X

THAT winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up his father-in-law.

“I’ll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of Louie’s party?”

“I had classes.”

“It was some lunch! Louie’s a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty of them,” Scott tapped his breast-pocket. “We had poor Tom served up again. It was all right, of course—the scientific men were interested, didn’t know much about him. Louie called on me for personal recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn’t express myself very well. I’m not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be talking uphill. You know, Tom isn’t very real to me any more. Sometimes I think he was just a—a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor.”

Scott’s remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house. With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.

He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope, came in at the green door that led from the street.

“Are you Professor St. Peter?” he inquired.

Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was his manly, mature voice—low, calm, experienced, very different from the thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young man’s sandy hair—the very fair forehead which had been protected by his hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was fine-looking, he saw—tall and presumably well built, though the shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.

“I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I’ve come to ask your advice. I don’t know anybody in the town.”

“You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you from?”

“I’ve never been to high school, sir. That’s the trouble.”

“Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you from?”

“New Mexico. I haven’t been to school, but I’ve studied. I read Latin with a priest down there.”

St. Peter smiled incredulously. “How much Latin?”

“I read Cæsar and Virgil, the Æneid.”

“How many books?”

“We went right through.” He met the Professor’s questions squarely, his eyes were resolute, like his voice.

“Oh, you did.” St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been digging around his red-fruited thorn-trees. “Can you repeat any of it?”

The boy began: “Infandum, jubes renovare dolorem,” and steadily continued for fifty lines or more, until St. Peter held up a checking hand.

“Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good pronunciation and good intonation. Was the Father by any chance a Frenchman?”

“Yes, sir. He was a missionary priest, from Belgium.”

“Did you learn any French from him?”

“No, sir. He wanted to practise his Spanish.”

“You speak Spanish?”

“Not very well, Mexican Spanish.”

The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew enough to get credit for a modern language. “And what are your deficiencies?”

“I’ve never had any mathematics or science, and I write a very bad hand.”

“That’s not unusual,” St. Peter told him. “But, by the way, how did you happen to come to me instead of to the registrar?”

“I just got in this morning, and your name was the only one here I knew. I read an article by you in a magazine, about Fray Marcos. Father Duchene said it was the only thing with any truth in it he’d read about our country down there.”

The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular periodicals it got him into trouble. “Well, what are your plans, young man? And, by the way, what is your name?”

“Tom Outland.”

The Professor repeated it. It seemed to suit the boy exactly.

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty.” He blushed, and St. Peter supposed he was dropping off a few years, but he found afterward that the boy didn’t know exactly how old he was. “I thought I might get a tutor and make up my mathematics this summer.”

“Yes, that could be managed. How are you fixed for money?”

Outland’s face grew grave. “I’m rather awkwardly fixed. If you were to write to Tarpin, New Mexico, to inquire about me, you’d find I have money in the bank there, and you’d think I had been deceiving you. But it’s money I can’t touch while I’m able-bodied. It’s in trust for someone else. But I’ve got three hundred dollars without any string on it, and I’m hoping to get work here. I’ve been bossing a section gang all winter, and I’m in good condition. I’ll do anything but wait table. I won’t do that.” On this point he seemed to feel strongly.

The Professor learned some of his story that morning. His parents, he said, were “mover people,” and both died when they were crossing southern Kansas in a prairie schooner. He was a baby and had been informally adopted by some kind people who took care of his mother in her last hours,—a locomotive engineer named O’Brien, and his wife. This engineer was transferred to New Mexico and took the foundling boy along with his own children. As soon as Tom was old enough to work, he got a job as call boy and did his share toward supporting the family.

“What’s a call boy, a messenger boy?”

“No, sir. It’s a more responsible position. Our town was an important freight division on the Santa Fé, and a lot of train men live there. The freight schedule is always changing, because it’s a single track road and the dispatcher has to get the freights through when he can. Suppose you’re a brakeman, and your train is due out at two A. M.; well, like as not, it will be changed to midnight, or to four in the morning. You go to bed as if you were going to sleep all night, with nothing on your mind. The call boy watches the schedule board, and half an hour before your train goes out, he comes and taps on your window and gets you up in time to make it. The call boy has to be on to things in the town. He must know when there’s a poker game on, and how to slip in easy. You can’t tell when there’s a spotter about, and if a man’s reported for gambling, he’s fired. Sometimes you have to get a man when he isn’t where he ought to be. I found there was usually a reason at home for that.” The boy spoke with gravity, as if he had reflected deeply upon irregular behaviour.

Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and asked her husband if he wouldn’t bring his young friend in to lunch. Outland started and looked with panic toward the door by which he had come in; but the Professor wouldn’t hear of his going, and picked up his telescope to prevent his escape. As he carried it into the house and put it down in the hall, he noticed that it was strangely light for its bulk. Mrs. St. Peter introduced the guest to her two little girls, and asked him if he didn’t want to go upstairs to wash his hands. He disappeared; as he came back something disconcerting happened. The front hall and the front staircase were the only hard wood in the house, but as Tom came down the waxed steps, his heavy new shoes shot out from under him, and he sat down on the end of his spine with a thump. Little Kathleen burst into a giggle, and her elder sister looked at her reprovingly; Mrs. St. Peter apologized for the stairs.

“I’m not much used to stairs, living mostly in ’dobe houses,” Tom explained, as he picked himself up.

At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls. The day had grown warm, and the Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen. His stiff white collar began to melt, and his handkerchief, as he kept wiping his face with it, became a rag. “I didn’t know it would be so warm up here, or I’d have picked a lighter suit,” he said, embarrassed by the activity of his skin.

“We would like to hear more about your life in the South-west,” said his host. “How long were you a call boy?”

“Two years. Then I had pneumonia, and the doctor said I ought to go on the range, so I went to work for a big cattle firm.”

Mrs. St. Peter began to question him about the Indian pueblos. He was reticent at first, but he presently warmed up in defence of Indian housewifery. He forgot his shyness so far, indeed, that having made a neat heap of mashed potato beside his chop, he conveyed it to his mouth on the blade of his knife, at which sight the little girls were not able to conceal their astonishment. Mrs. St. Peter went on quietly talking about Indian pottery and asking him where they made the best.

“I think the very best is the old,—the cliff-dweller pottery,” he said. “Do you take an interest in pottery, Ma’am? Maybe you’d like to see some I have brought along.” As they rose from the table he went to his telescope underneath the hat-rack, knelt beside it, and undid the straps. When he lifted the cover, it seemed full of bulky objects wrapped in newspapers. After feeling among them, he unwrapped one and displayed an earthen water jar, shaped like those common in Greek sculpture, and ornamented with a geometrical pattern in black and white.

“That’s one of the real old ones. I know, for I got it out myself. I don’t know just how old, but there’s piñon trees three hundred years old by their rings, growing up in the stone trail that leads to the ruins where I got it.”

“Stone trail ... piñons?” she asked.

“Yes, deep, narrow trails in white rock, worn by their moccasin feet coming and going for generations. And these old piñon trees have come up in the trails since the race died off. You can tell something about how long ago it was by them.” He showed her a coating of black on the under side of the jar.

“That’s not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off. It’s soot, from when it was on the cook-fire last—and that was before Columbus landed, I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old pots, with the fire-black on them.” As she gave it back to him, he shook his head. “That one’s for you, Ma’am, if you like it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t think of letting you give it to me! You must keep it for yourself, or put it in a museum.” But that seemed to touch a sore spot.

“Museums,” he said bitterly, “they don’t care about our things. They want something that came from Crete or Egypt. I’d break my jars sooner than they should get them. But I’d like this one to have a good home, among your nice things”—he looked about appreciatively. “I’ve no place to keep them. They’re in my way, especially that big one. My trunk is at the station, but I was afraid to leave the pottery. You don’t get them out whole like that very often.”

“But get them out of what, from where? I want to know all about it.”

“Maybe some day, Ma’am, I can tell you,” he said, wiping his sooty fingers on his handkerchief. His reply was courteous but final. He strapped his bag and picked up his hat, then hesitated and smiled. Taking a buckskin bag from his pocket, he walked over to the window-seat where the children were, and held out his hand to them, saying: “These I would like to give to the little girls.” In his palm lay two lumps of soft blue stone, the colour of robins’ eggs, or of the sea on halcyon days of summer.

The children marvelled. “Oh, what are they?”

“Turquoises, just the way they come out of the mine, before the jewellers have tampered with them and made them look green. The Indians like them this way.”

Again Mrs. St. Peter demurred. She told him very kindly that she couldn’t let him give his stones to the children. “They are worth a lot of money.”

“I’d never sell them. They were given to me by a friend. I have a lot, and they’re no use to me, but they’ll make pretty playthings for little girls.” His voice was so wistful and winning that there was nothing to do.

“Hold them still a moment,” said the Professor, looking down, not at the turquoises, but at the hand that held them: the muscular, many-lined palm, the long, strong fingers with soft ends, the straight little finger, the flexible, beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the rest of the hand as if it were its own master. What a hand! He could see it yet, with the blue stones lying in it.

In a moment the stranger was gone, and the St. Peter family sat down and looked at one another. He remembered just what his wife had said on that occasion.

“Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his pennies, and he departs leaving princely gifts.”

Yes, the Professor reflected, after all these years, that was still true. Fellows like Outland don’t carry much luggage, yet one of the things you know them by is their sumptuous generosity—and when they are gone, all you can say of them is that they departed leaving princely gifts.

With a good tutor, young Outland had no difficulty in making up three years’ mathematics in four months. Latin, he owned, had been hard for him. But in mathematics, he didn’t have to work, he had merely to give his attention. His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter held the boy at arm’s length. As a young teacher full of zeal, he had been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes commonplace by a natural law.

In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their protégé than her husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he had proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as “Ma’am.” He came often to the house that summer, to play with the little girls. He would spend hours with them in the garden, making Hopi villages with sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and the Rio Grande country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend Roddy.

“Mother,” Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, “what do you think! Tom hasn’t any birthday.”

“How is that?”

“When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot to tell the O’Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he was so big, but Mrs. O’Brien always said he didn’t have enough teeth for that.”

St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his mother died in a wagon.

“Well, you see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her health. And one day, when they were camped beside a river, Tom’s father went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom’s mother saw it, and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some people found her and drove her on to the next town to a doctor. But when they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her into the O’Briens’ yard, because that was nearest the doctor’s and Mrs. O’Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a few hours.”

“Does Tom know anything about his father?”

“Nothing except that he was a school-teacher in Missouri. His mother told the O’Briens that much. But the O’Briens were just lovely to him.”

St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there were no shadows. Kathleen and Rosamond regarded his free-lance childhood as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved to play at being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older than Tom, who knew everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and Indians. “And he gave up a fine job firing on the Santa Fé, and went off with Tom to ride after cattle for hardly any wages, just to be with Tom and take care of him after he’d had pneumonia,” Kathleen told them.

“That wasn’t the only reason,” Rosamond added dreamily. “Roddy was proud. He didn’t like taking orders and living on pay cheques. He liked to be free, and to sit in his saddle all day and use it for a pillow at night. You know Tom said that, Kitty.”

“Anyhow, he was noble. He was always noble, noble Roddy!” Kathleen finished it off.

After the first day, when he had walked into the garden and introduced himself, Tom never took up the story of his own life again, either with the Professor or Mrs. St. Peter, though he was often encouraged to do so. He would talk about the New Mexico country when questioned, about Father Duchene, the missionary priest who had been his teacher, about the Indians; but only with the two little girls did he ever speak freely and confidentially about himself. St. Peter used to wonder how the boy could afford to spend so much time with the children. All through that summer and fall he used to come in the afternoon and join them in the garden. In the winter he dropped in two or three evenings a week to play Five Hundred or to take a dancing-lesson.

There was evidently something enchanting about the atmosphere of the house to a boy who had always lived a rough life. He enjoyed the prettiness and freshness and gaiety of the little girls as if they were flowers. Probably, too, he liked being so attractive to them. A flush of pleasure would come over Tom’s face—so much fairer now than when he first arrived in Hamilton—if Kathleen caught his hand and tried to squeeze it hard enough to hurt, crying: “Oh, Tom, tell us about the time you and Roddy found the water hole dry, and then afterward tell us about when the rattlesnake bit Henry!” He would whisper: “Pretty soon,” and after a while, through the open windows, the Professor would hear them in the garden: the laughter and exclamations of the little girls, and that singularly individual voice of Tom’s—mature, confident, seldom varying in pitch, but full of slight, very moving modulations.

He couldn’t have wished for a better companion for his daughters, and they were teaching Tom things that he needed more than mathematics.

Sitting thus in his study, long afterward, St. Peter reflected that those first years, before Outland had done anything remarkable, were really the best of all. He liked to remember the charming groups of three he was always coming upon,—in the hammock swung between the linden-trees, in the window-seat, or before the dining-room fire. Oh, there had been fine times in this old house then: family festivals and hospitalities, little girls dancing in and out, Augusta coming and going, gay dresses hanging in his study at night, Christmas shopping and secrets and smothered laughter on the stairs. When a man had lovely children in his house, fragrant and happy, full of pretty fancies and generous impulses, why couldn’t he keep them? Was there no way but Medea’s, he wondered?

XI

ST. PETER had come in late from an afternoon lecture, and had just lighted his kerosene lamp to go to work, when he heard a light foot ascending the stairs. In a moment Kathleen’s voice called: “May I interrupt for a moment, Papa?”

He opened the door and drew her in.

“Kitty, do you remember the time you sat out there with your bee-sting and your bottle? Nobody ever showed me more consideration than that, not even your mother.”

Kathleen threw her hat and jacket into the sewing-chair and walked about, touching things to see how dusty they were. “I’ve been wondering if you didn’t need me to come in and clean house for you, but it’s not so bad as they report it. This is the first time I’ve called on you since you’ve been here alone. I’ve turned in from the walk more than once, but I’ve always run away again.” She paused to warm her hands at the little stove. “I’m silly, you know; such queer things make me blue. And you still have Augusta’s old forms. I don’t think anything ever happened to her that amused her so much. And now, you know, she’s quite sentimental about their being here. It’s about Augusta that I came, Papa. Did you know that she had lost some of her savings in the Kinkoo Copper Company?”

“Augusta? Are you sure? What a shame!”

“Yes. She was sewing for me last week. I noticed that she seemed depressed and hadn’t much appetite for lunch—which, you know, is unusual for Augusta. She was ashamed to tell any of us about it, because it seems she’d asked Louie’s advice, and he told her not to invest in that company. But a lot of the people in her church were putting money into it, and of course that made it seem all right to her. She lost five hundred dollars, a fortune for her, and Scott says she’ll never get a cent of it back.”

“Five hundred dollars,” murmured St. Peter. “Let me see, at three dollars a day that means one hundred and sixty-six days. Now what can we do about it?”

“Of course we must do something. I knew you’d feel that way, Father.”

“Certainly. Among us, we must cover it. I’ll speak to Rosamond to-night.”

“You needn’t, dear.” Kathleen tossed her head. “I have been to her. She refuses.”

“Refuses? She can’t refuse, my dear. I’ll have a word to say.” The firmness of his tone, and the quick rush of claret colour under his skin, were a gratification to his daughter.

“She says that Louie took the trouble to speak to his banker and to several copper men before he advised Augusta; and that if she doesn’t learn her lesson this time, she will do the same thing over again. Rosamond said they would do something for Augusta later, but she didn’t say what.”

“Leave Rosamond to me. I’ll convince her.”

“Even if you can do anything with her, she’s determined to make Augusta admit her folly, and it can’t be done that way. Augusta is terribly proud. When I told her customers ought to make it up to her, she was very haughty and said she wasn’t that kind of a sewing-woman; that she gave her ladies good measure for their money. Scott thought we could buy stock in some good company and tell her we had used our influence and got an exchange, but that she must keep quiet about it. We could manage some such little fib, she knows so little about business. I know I can get the Dudleys and the Browns to help. We needn’t go to the Marselluses.”

“Wait a few days. It’s a disgrace to us as a family not to make it up ourselves. On her own account, we oughtn’t to let Rosamond out. She’s altogether too blind to responsibilities of that kind. In a world full of blunderers, why should Augusta have to pay scrupulously for her mistakes? It’s very petty of Rosie, really!”

Kathleen started to speak, stopped and turned away. “Scott will give a hundred dollars,” she said a moment later.

“That’s very generous of him. I’ll give another, and Rosie shall make up the rest. If she doesn’t, I’ll speak to Louie. He’s an absolutely generous chap. I’ve never known him to refuse to give either time or money.”

Kathleen’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Why, Daddy, you have Tom’s Mexican blanket! I never knew he gave it to you. I’ve often wondered what became of it.” She picked up from the foot of the box-couch a purple blanket, faded in streaks to amethyst, with a pale yellow stripe at either end.

“Oh, yes, I often get chilly when I lie down, especially if I turn the stove out, which your mother says I ought always to do. Nothing could part me from that blanket.”

“He wouldn’t have given it to anybody but you. It was like his skin. Do you remember how horsey it smelled when he first brought it over and showed it to us?”

“Just like a livery stable! It had been strapped behind the saddle on so many sweating cow-ponies. In damp weather that smell is still perceptible.”

Kathleen stroked it thoughtfully. “Roddy brought it up from Old Mexico, you know. He gave it to Tom that winter he had pneumonia. Tom ought to have taken it to France with him. He used to say that Rodney Blake might turn up in the Foreign Legion. If he had taken this, it might have been like the wooden cups that were always revealing Amis and Amile to each other.”

St. Peter smiled and patted her hand on the blanket. “Do you know, Kitty, I sometimes think I ought to go out and look for Blake myself. He’s on my conscience. If that country down there weren’t so everlastingly big——”

“Oh, Father! That was my romantic dream when I was little, finding Roddy! I used to think about it for hours when I was supposed to be taking my nap. I used to swim rivers and climb mountains and wander about with Navajos, and rescue Roddy at the most critical moments, when he was being stabbed in the back, or drugged in a gambling-house, and bring him back to Tom. You know Tom told us about him long before he ever told you.”

“You children used to live in his stories. You cared more about them than about all your adventure books.”

“I still do,” said Kathleen, rising. “Now that Rosamond has Outland, I consider Tom’s mesa entirely my own.”

St. Peter put down the cigarette he had just lighted with anticipation. “Can’t you stay awhile, Kitty? I almost never see anyone who remembers that side of Tom. It was nice, all those years when he was in and out of the house like an older brother. Always very different from the other college boys, wasn’t he? Always had something in his voice, in his eyes ... One seemed to catch glimpses of an unusual background behind his shoulders when he came into the room.”

Kathleen smiled wanly. “Yes, and now he’s all turned out chemicals and dollars and cents, hasn’t he? But not for you and me! Our Tom is much nicer than theirs.” She put on her jacket and went out of the study and quickly down the stairs. Her father, on the landing, looked after her until she disappeared. When she was gone he still stood there, motionless, as if he were listening intently, or trying to fasten upon some fugitive idea.

XII

ST. PETER was breakfasting at six-thirty, alone, reading last night’s letters while he waited for the coffee to percolate. It had been long since he had had an eight o’clock class, but this year the schedule committee had slyly put him down for one. “He can afford to take a taxi over now,” the Dean remarked.

After breakfast he went upstairs and into his wife’s room. “I have a rendezvous with a lady,” he said, tossing an envelope upon her counterpane. She read a note from Mrs. Crane, the least attractive of the faculty ladies, requesting an interview with the Professor at his earliest convenience: as she wished to see him quite alone, might she come to his study in the old house, where she understood he still worked?

“Poor Godfrey!” murmured his wife.

“One ought not to joke about it——” St. Peter went into his own room to get a handkerchief and came back, taking up his suspended sentence. “I’m afraid it means poor Crane is coming up for another operation. Or, worse still, that the surgeons tell her another would be useless. It’s like The Pit and the Pendulum. I feel as if the poor fellow were strapped down on a revolving disk that comes around under the knife just so often.”

Mrs. St. Peter looked judicially at the letter, then at her husband’s back. She didn’t believe that surgery would be the subject of discussion when they met. Mrs. Crane had been behaving very strangely of late.

Doctor Crane had married a girl whom no other man ever thought of courting, a girl of whom people always said: “Oh, she’s so good!” chiefly because she was so homely. They had three very plain daughters, and only Crane’s salary to live upon. Doctors and surgeons kept them poor enough.

St. Peter kissed his wife and went forth quite unconscious of what was going on in her mind. During the morning he telephoned Mrs. Crane, and arranged a meeting with her at five o’clock. As the bell in the old house didn’t work now, he waited downstairs on the front porch, to receive his visitor and conduct her up to his study. It was raining drearily, and Mrs. Crane arrived in a rubber coat, and a knitted sport hat belonging to one of her daughters. St. Peter took her wet umbrella and led her up the two flights of stairs.

“I’m not very well appointed to receive ladies, Mrs. Crane. This was the sewing-room, you know. There’s Augusta’s chair, which she insisted was comfortable.”

“Thank you.” Mrs. Crane sat down, took off her gloves, and tucked wisps of damp hair up under her crocheted hat. Her bleak, plain face wore an expression of grievance.

“I’ve come without my husband’s knowledge, Doctor St. Peter, to ask you what you think can be done about our rights in the Outland patent. You know how my husband’s health has crippled us financially, and we never know when his trouble may come on worse again. Myself, I’ve never doubted that you would see it is only right to share with us.”

St. Peter looked at her in amazement. “But, my dear Mrs. Crane, how can I share with you what I haven’t got? Tom willed his estate and royalties in a perfectly regular way. The fact that he named my daughter as his sole beneficiary doesn’t affect me, any more than if he had named some relative of his own. I tell you frankly, I have never received one dollar from the Outland patent.”

“It’s all the same if it goes to your family, Doctor St. Peter. My husband must be considered in this matter. He spent days and nights working with Outland. Tom never could have worked his theory out without Robert’s help. He said so, more than once, in my presence and in the presence of others.”

“Oh, I believe that, Mrs. Crane. But the difficulty is that Tom didn’t make any recognition of that assistance in his will.”

Mrs. Crane had set her head and advanced her long chin with meek determination. “Well, this is how it was, Professor. Mr. Marsellus came here a stranger, to put in the Edison power plant, just at the time the city was stirred up about Outland’s being killed at the front. Everybody was wanting to do something in recognition of the young man. You brought Mr. Marsellus to our house and introduced him. After that he came alone, again and again, and he got round my husband. Robert thought he was disinterested, and was only taking a scientific interest, and he told him a great deal about what he and Outland had been working on. Then Rosamond’s lawyers came for the papers. Tom Outland had no laboratory of his own. He was allowed the use of a room in the physics building, at my husband’s request. He wanted to be there, because he constantly needed Robert’s help. The first thing we knew, your daughter’s engagement to Marsellus was announced, and then we heard that all Outland’s papers had been given over to him.”

Here St. Peter anticipated her. “But, Mrs. Crane, your husband couldn’t, and wouldn’t, have kept Tom’s papers. They had to be given over to his executor, who was my daughter’s attorney.”

“Well, I could have kept them, if he couldn’t!”—Mrs. Crane threw up her head as if to show that the worm had turned at last—“kept them until justice was done us, and some recognition had been made of my husband’s part in all that research work. If he had taken the papers to court then, with all the evidence we have, we could easily have got an equity. But Mr. Marsellus is very smooth. He flattered Robert and got everything there was.”

“But he didn’t get anything from your husband. Outland’s papers and apparatus were delivered to his executor, as was inevitable.”

“That was a poor subterfuge,” said Mrs. Crane, with deep meaning. “You know how unworldly Robert is, and as an old friend you might have warned us.”

“Of what, Mrs. Crane?”

“Why, that Marsellus saw there was a fortune in the gas my husband and his pupil had made, and we could have asked for our equity before we gave your son-in-law a free hand with everything.”

St. Peter felt very unhappy. He began walking up and down the little room. “Heaven knows I’d like to see Crane get something out of it, but how? How? I’ve thought a great deal about this matter, and I’ve blamed Tom for making that kind of will. I don’t think it occurred to the boy that the will would ever be probated. He expected to come back from the war and develop the thing himself. I doubt whether Robert, with all his superior knowledge, would have known the twists and turns by which the patent could be commercialized. It took a great deal of work and a special kind of ability to do that.”

“A salesman’s ability!” Mrs. Crane was becoming nasty.

“If you like; but certainly Robert would have been no man to convince manufacturers and machinists, any more than I would. A great deal of money was put into it, too, before any came back; every cent Marsellus had, and all he could borrow. He took heavy chances. Crane and I together could never have raised a hundredth part of the capital that was necessary to get the thing started. Without capital to make it go, Tom’s idea was merely a formula written out on paper. It had lain for two years in your husband’s laboratory, and would have lain there for years more before he or I would have done anything about it.”

Mrs. Crane’s dreary face took on more animation than he had supposed it capable of. “It had lain there because it belonged there, and was made there! My husband was done out of it by an adventurer, and his friendship for you tied his hands. I must say you’ve shown very little consideration for him. You might have warned us never to let those papers go. You see Robert getting weaker all the time and having those terrible operations, and our girls going shabby and teaching in the ward schools, and Rosamond riding about in a limousine and building country houses,—and you do nothing about it. You take your honours—you’ve deserved them, we never forget that—and move into your new house, and you don’t remember what it is to be in straitened circumstances.”

St. Peter drew his chair nearer to Mrs. Crane, and addressed her patiently. “Mrs. Crane, if you had any legal rights in the patent, I’d defend them against Rosamond as soon as against anyone else. I think she ought to recognize Dr. Crane’s long friendship and helpfulness to Tom in some way. I don’t see just how it can be done, but I feel it should be. And if you wish, I’ll tell Rosamond how I feel. Why don’t you put this matter before her?”

“I don’t care to ask anything of Mrs. Marsellus. I wrote her some time ago, and she replied to me through her lawyer, saying that all claims against the Outland patent would be considered in due order. It’s not worthy of a man in Robert’s position to accept hush money from the Marselluses. We want justice, and my brother is confident the court will give it to us.”

“Well, I suppose Bright knows more about what the courts will do than I. But if you’ve decided to go to law about it, why did you come to me?”

“There are some things the law don’t cover,” said Mrs. Crane mysteriously, as she rose and put on her gloves. “I wanted you to know how we feel about it.”

St. Peter followed her downstairs and put up her umbrella for her, and then went back to his study to think it over. His friendship with Crane had been a strange one. Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common cause. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to “show results” that was undermining and vulgarizing education. The State Legislature and the board of regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the university. Candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts were allowed credits for commercial studies; courses in book-keeping, experimental farming, domestic science, dress-making, and what not. Every year the regents tried to diminish the number of credits required in science and the humanities. The liberal appropriations, the promotions and increases in salary, all went to the professors who worked with the regents to abolish the purely cultural studies. Out of a faculty of sixty, there were perhaps twenty men who made any serious stand for scholarship, and Robert Crane was one of the staunchest. He had lost the Deanship of the College of Science because of his uncompromising opposition to the degrading influence of politicians in university affairs. The honour went, instead, to a much younger man, head of the department of chemistry, who was willing “to give the taxpayers what they wanted.”

The struggle to preserve the dignity of the university, and their own, had brought St. Peter and Dr. Crane much together. They were, moreover, the only two men on the faculty who were doing research work of an uncommercial nature, and they occasionally dropped in on one another to exchange ideas. But that was as far as it went. St. Peter couldn’t ask Crane to dinner; the presence of a bottle of claret on the table would have made him uncomfortable. Dr. Crane had all the prejudices of the Baptist community in which he grew up. He carried them with him when he went to study at a German university, and brought them back. But Crane knew that none of his colleagues followed his work so closely, and rejoiced at his little triumphs so heartily, as St. Peter.

St. Peter couldn’t help admiring the man’s courage; poor, ill, overworked, held by his conscience to a generous discharge of his duties as a teacher, he was all the while carrying on these tedious and delicate experiments that had to do with determining the extent of space. Fortunately, Crane seemed to have no social needs or impulses. He never went anywhere, except, once or twice a year, to a dinner at the President’s house. Music disturbed him too much, dancing shocked him—he couldn’t see why it was permitted among the students. Once, after Mrs. St. Peter had sat next him at the President’s dinner-table, she said to her husband: “The man is too dreary! All evening his heavy underwear kept coming down below his cuffs, and he kept poking it bade with his fore-finger. I believe he thinks it’s wicked to live with even so plain a woman as Mrs. Crane.”

After Tom Outland graduated from the university, he and Dr. Crane worked side by side in the Physics building for several years. The older man had been of great assistance to the younger, without doubt. Though that kind of help, the result of criticism and suggestion, is not easily reckoned in percentages, still St. Peter thought Crane ought to get something out of the patent. He resolved to see Louie about it. But first he had better talk with Crane himself, and try to dissuade him from going to law. His brother-in-law, Homer Bright, would be tempted by the publicity which an action involving the Outland patent would certainly bring him. But he would lose the case, and Crane would get nothing. Whereas Louie, if he were properly approached, would be generous.

St. Peter looked at his watch. He would go home now, and after dinner he would walk over to the Physics building, where his colleague worked every night. He never went to see Crane at his house if he could help it. He lived in the most depressing and unnecessary ugliness.

XIII

AT dinner Lillian asked him no questions about his interview with Mrs. Crane, and he volunteered no information. She was not surprised, however, when he said he would not stop for a cigar, as he was going over to the Physics laboratory.

He walked through the park, past the old house and across the north end of the campus, to a building that stood off by itself in a grove of pine-trees. It was constructed of red brick, after an English model. The architect had had a good idea, and he very nearly succeeded in making a good thing, something like the old Smithsonian building in Washington. But after it was begun, the State Legislature had defeated him by grinding down the contractor to cheap execution, and had spoiled everything, outside and in. Ever since it was finished, plumbers and masons and carpenters had been kept busy patching and repairing it. Crane and St. Peter, both young men then, had wasted weeks of time with the contractors, and had finally gone before the Legislative committee in person to plead for the integrity of that building. But nothing came of all their pains. It was one of many lost causes.

St. Peter entered the building and went upstairs to a small room at the end of a chain of laboratories. After knocking, he heard the familiar shuffle of Crane’s carpet slippers, and the door opened.

Crane was wearing a grey cotton coat, shrunk to a rag by washing, though he wasn’t working with fluids or batteries to-night, but at a roll-top desk littered with papers. The room was like any study behind a lecture room; dusty books, dusty files, but no apparatus—except a spirit-lamp and a little saucepan in which the physicist heated water for his cocoa at regular intervals. He was working by the glare of an unshaded electric bulb of high power—the man seemed to have no feeling for comfort of any kind. He asked his visitor to sit down, and to excuse him for a moment while he copied some entries into a note-book.

St. Peter watched him scribbling with his fountain pen. The hands that were so deft in delicate manipulations were white and soft-looking; the fingers long and loosely hung, stained with chemicals, and blunted at the tips like a violinist’s. His head was square, and the lower part of his face was covered by a reddish, matted beard. His pale eyes and fawn-coloured eyebrows were outbalanced by his mouth, his most conspicuous feature. One always remembered about Crane that unexpected, startling red mouth in a setting of kinky beard. The lips had no modelling, they were as thick at the corners as in the middle, and he spoke through them rather than with them. He seemed painfully conscious of them.

St. Peter saw no use in beating about the bush. As soon as Crane put down his pen, he remarked that Mrs. Crane had been to see him that afternoon. His colleague flushed, took up a large celluloid paper-knife, and began shutting and unshutting his hands about the blade.

“I want to know exactly how you feel about this, and what the facts are,” St. Peter began. “We’ve never discussed it before, and there may be things I know nothing about. Did Tom ever say that he meant you to have a share in his profits, if there were any?”

“No, not exactly. Not exactly that.” Dr. Crane moved his shoulders about in his tight coat and looked embarrassed and unhappy. “More than once he said, in a general way, that he hoped it would go, on my account as well as on his own, and that we would use the income for further experiments.”

“Did he talk much about the possible commercial value of the gas while he was trying to make it?”

“Not much. No, very seldom. Perhaps not more than half a dozen times in the three years he was working in my laboratory. But whenever he did, he spoke as if there would be something in it for both of us if our gas became remunerative.”

“Just how much was it ‘our gas,’ Crane?”

“Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn’t. The idea was Outland’s. He benefited by my criticism, and I often helped him with his experiments. He never acquired a nice laboratory technic. He would fail repeatedly in some perfectly sound experiment because of careless procedure.”

“Do you think he would have arrived at his results without your help?”

Dr. Crane was clenching the paper-knife with both hands. “That I cannot say. He was impatient. He might have got discouraged and turned to something else. He would have been much slower in getting his results, at any rate. His conception was right, but very delicate manipulation was necessary, and he was a careless experimentor.”

St. Peter felt that this was becoming nothing less than cross-examination. He tried to change the tone of it.

“I want to see you get recognition and compensation for whatever part you had in his experiments, if there’s any way to get it. But you’ve been neglectful, Crane. You haven’t taken the proper steps. Why in the world didn’t you have some understanding with Tom when he was getting his patent? You knew all about it.”

“It didn’t occur to me then. We’d finished the experiments, and I put them out of my mind. I was trying to concentrate on my own work. His results weren’t as interesting scientifically as I’d expected them to be.”

“While his manuscripts and formulae were lying here those two years, did you ever make the gas, or give any study to its behaviour?”

“No, of course not. It’s off my own line, and didn’t interest me.”

“Then it’s only since this patent has begun to make money that it does interest you?”

Dr. Crane twisted his shoulders. “Yes. It’s the money.”

“Heaven knows I’d like to see you get some of it. But why did you put it off so long? Why didn’t you make some claim when you delivered the papers to his executor, since you hadn’t done so before? Why didn’t you bring the matter up to me then, and let me make a claim against the estate for you?”

Dr. Crane could endure his chair no longer. He began to walk softly about in his slippers, looking at nothing, but, as he talked, picking up objects here and there,—drawing-tools, his cocoa-cup, a china cream-pitcher, turning them round and carefully putting them down again, just as he often absently handled pieces of apparatus when he was lecturing.

“I know,” he said, “appearances are against me. But you must understand my negligence. You know how little opportunity a man has to carry on his own line of investigation here. You know how much time I give to any of my students who are doing honest work. Outland was, of course, the most brilliant pupil I ever had, and I gave him time and thought without stint. Gladly, of course. If he were reaping the rewards of his discovery himself, I’d have nothing to say—though I’ve not the least doubt he would compensate me liberally. But it does not seem right that a stranger should profit, and not those who helped him. You, of course, do profit—indirectly, if not directly. You cannot shut your eyes to the fact that this money, coming into your family, has strengthened your credit and your general security. That’s as it should be. But your claim was less definite than mine. I spent time and strength I could ill afford to spare on the very series of experiments that led to this result. Marsellus gets the benefit of my work as well as of Outland’s. I have certainly been ill-used—and, as you say, it’s difficult to get recompense when I ask for it so late. It’s not to my discredit, certainly, that I didn’t take measures to protect my interests. I never thought of my student’s work in terms of money. There were others who did, and I was not considered,” he concluded bitterly.

“Why don’t you put in a claim to Marsellus, for your time and expert advice? I think he’d honour it. He is going to live here. He probably doesn’t wish to be more unpopular than a suddenly prosperous man is bound to be, and you have many friends. I believe I can convince him that it would be poor policy to disregard any reasonable demand.”

“I had thought of that. But my wife’s brother advises a different course.”

“Ah, yes. Mrs. Crane said something of that sort. Well, Crane, if you’re going to law about it, I hope you’ll consult a sound lawyer, and you know as well as I that Homer Bright is not one.”

Dr. Crane coloured and bridled. “I’m sure you are disinterested, St. Peter, but, frankly, I think your judgment has been warped by events. You don’t realize how clear the matter is to unprejudiced minds. Though I’m such an unpractical man, I have evidence to rest my claims upon.”

“The more the better, if you are going to depend on such a windbag as Bright. If you go to law, I’d like to see you win your case.”

St. Peter said good-night, went down the stairs, and out through the dark pine-trees. Evidence, Crane said; probably letters Tom had written him during the winter he was working at Johns Hopkins. Well, there was nothing to be done, unless he could get old Dr. Hutchins to persuade Crane to employ an intelligent lawyer. Homer Bright’s rhetoric might influence a jury in a rape or bigamy case, but it would antagonize a judge in an equity court.

The Professor took a turn in the park before going home. The interview had depressed him, and he was afraid he might be wakeful. He had never seen his colleague in such an unbecoming light before. Crane was narrow, but he was straight; a man you could count on in the shifty game of college politics. He had never been out to get anything for himself. St. Peter would have said that nothing about the vulgar success of Outland’s idea could possibly matter to Crane, beyond gratifying his pride as a teacher and friend.

The park was deserted. The arc-lights were turned off. The leafless trees stood quite motionless in the light of the clear stars. The world was sad to St. Peter as he looked about him; the lake-shore country flat and heavy, Hamilton small and tight and airless. The university, his new house, his old house, everything around him, seemed insupportable, as the boat on which he is imprisoned seems to a seasick man. Yes, it was possible that the little world, on its voyage among all the stars, might become like that; a boat on which one could travel no longer, from which one could no longer look up and confront those bright rings or revolution.

He brought himself back with a jerk. Ah, yes, Crane; that was the trouble. If Outland were here to-night, he might say with Mark Antony, My fortunes have corrupted honest men.

XIV

AT the end of the semester, St. Peter went to Chicago with Rosamond to help her buy things for her country house. He had very much wanted to stay at home and rest—the university work seemed to take it out of him that winter more than ever before; but Rosamond had set her mind on his going, and Mrs. St. Peter told him he couldn’t refuse. A Chicago merchant had brought over a lot of old Spanish furniture, and on this nobody’s judgment would be better than St. Peter’s. He was supposed to know a good deal about rugs, too. When his wife said a thing must be done, the Professor usually did it, from long-established habit. Her instincts about what one owed to other people were better than his.

Louie accompanied them to Chicago, where he was to join his brother, the one who was in the silk trade in China, and go on to New York with him for a family reunion. St. Peter was amused, and pleased, to see that Louie sincerely hated to leave them—with very little encouragement he would have sent his brother on alone and remained in Chicago with his wife and father-in-law. They all lunched together, after which the Professor and Rosamond took the Marsellus brothers to the LaSalle Street station. When Louie had again and again kissed his hand to them from the rear platform of the Twentieth Century observation car, and was rolled away in the very act of shouting something to his wife, St. Peter, who had so often complained that there was too much Louie in his life, now felt a sudden drop, a distinct sense of loss.

He took Rosamond’s arm, and they turned away from the shining rails. “We must be diligent, Rosie. He expects wonders of us.”

Scott McGregor got on the Blue Bird Express one afternoon, returning from a business trip for his paper. On entering the smoking-car, he came upon his father-in-law lying back in a leather chair, his clothes covered with dust, his eyes closed, a dead cigar hanging between the relaxed lingers of his dark, muscular hand. It gave Scott a start; he thought the Professor didn’t look well.

“Hello, Doctor! What are you doing here? Oh, yes! the shopping expedition. Where’s Rosamond?”

“In Chicago. At the Blackstone.”

“Outlasted you, did she?”

“That’s it.” The Professor smiled apologetically, as if he were ashamed to admit it.

Scott sat down beside him and tried to interest him in one subject after another, without success. It occurred to him that he had never before seen the Professor when he seemed absolutely flattened out and listless. That was a bad sign; he was glad they were only half an hour from Hamilton. “The old chap needs rest,” he reflected. “Rosamond’s run him to death in Chicago. He oughtn’t to be used as a courier, anyhow! I’m going to tell Kitty that we must look out for her father a little. The Marselluses have no mercy, and Lillian has always taken it for granted that he was as strong as three men.”

That evening Mrs. St. Peter was standing by the French windows in the drawing-room, watching somewhat anxiously for her husband. The Chicago train was usually punctual, and surely he would have taken a cab from the station, for it was a raw February night with a freezing wind blowing off the lake. St. Peter arrived on foot, however. As he came through the gate, she could see by his walk and the set of his shoulders that he was very tired. She hurried to open the front door, and asked him why he hadn’t come up in a taxi.

“Didn’t think of it, really. I’m a creature of habit, and that’s one of the things I never used to do.”

“And in your lightest overcoat! I thought you only wore this one because you were going to buy a new fur coat in Chicago.”

“Well, I didn’t,” he said rather shortly. “Let’s omit the verb ‘to buy’ in all forms for a time. Keep dinner back a little, will you, Lillian? I want to take a warm bath and dress. I did get rather chilled coming up.”

Mrs. St. Peter went to the kitchen, and, after a discreet interval, followed her husband upstairs and into his room.

“I know you’re tired, but tell me one thing: did you find the painted Spanish bedroom set?”

“Oh, dear, yes! Several of them.”

“And were they pretty?”

“Very. At least, I think I’d have found them so if I’d come upon them without so many other things. Too much is certainly worse than too little—of anything. It turned out to be rather an orgy of acquisition.”

“Rosamond lost her head?”

“Oh, no! Perfectly cool. I should say she had a faultless purchasing manner. Wonder where a girl who grew up in that old house of ours ever got it. She was like Napoleon looting the Italian palaces.”

“Don’t be harsh. You had a nice little vacation, at any rate.”

“A very expensive one, for a poor professor. And not much rest.”

A look of sharp anxiety came into Mrs. St. Peter’s face. “You mean,” she breathed in a hushed voice, “that she let you——”

He cut in sharply. “I mean that I paid my way, as I hope always to be able to do. Any suggestion to the contrary might have been very graceful, but it would have been rejected. I am quite ready to permit myself a little extravagance to be of service to the women of my family. Any other arrangement is humiliating.”

“Then that was why you didn’t get your fur coat.”

“That may have been one reason. I was not much in the humour for it.”