The Return of Peter Grimm Part 28

Ten little days!"

His hand shaking, he picked up the letter again, spread it wide, and began to read it, Peter Grimm standing behind him, looking over the reader's shoulder.

"Dear Mr. Grimm," the letter ran, "I have not written because I can't help Willem. And I am ashamed. Don't be too hard upon me, sir, in your thoughts. At first I often went hungry. And then the few pennies I had saved for him were spent. Now I see that I can never hope to get him back. Willem is far better off with you. I know he is. But, oh, how I wish I could just see him again! _Once._ Perhaps I could come there in the night time and no one would know----"

"Oh!" breathed Peter Grimm, between tight clenched teeth. "The pity of it! The _pity_ of it!"

"Who's that?" cried Frederik, looking up with a start of terror from his perusal of the letter.

The young man peered about the shadows beyond the radius of the lamp, a nervous dread at his heart.

"Who's in the room!" he demanded, glancing behind him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Who's in the room!" he demanded]

Then with a self-contemptuous shake of his head he muttered angrily:

"That's queer. I could have sworn somebody was looking over my shoulder.

Bah! My nerves are going bad!"

He returned to the reading of the letter.

"I met some one from home to-day," went on Anne Marie's epistle. "If there's any truth in the rumour that Kathrien is going to marry Frederik, _it mustn't be_, Mr. Grimm. It must _not_. She must not marry him. For Frederik is my little boy's fa----"

"There _is_ some one here!" muttered Frederik, laying down the letter.

Calming his disordered nerves once more, he glanced furtively up toward Willem's room in the bedroom gallery above his head. Then he picked up the photograph and looked at it long with eyes full of trouble and apprehension. It was the full-length cabinet likeness of a plainly dressed young woman with a pretty, slack face. And the face's weakness was half redeemed by a stamp of settled sadness that was not devoid of a certain dignity.

Frederik turned the photograph over. On the back he read:

"_For my little boy, from Anne Marie._"

His mouth twitched. Throngs of memories were crowding in upon him. And the eyes of the Dead Man were boring to his very soul. Something very like Conscience was stirring within him. He laid the photograph face downward on the table and he bent his head forward upon his hands.

The young man was not a melodrama villain. He was not even a scoundrel, in the broad sense of the term. Weak, lazy, pleasure loving, he was what Peter Grimm had all unconsciously made him. As a dilettante, a man of leisure, or even comfortably engaged in some easy, congenial life work and with pleasant home surroundings, he would probably have developed few undesirable traits.

From boyhood he had been under the influence and orders of Peter Grimm.

To be under Peter Grimm's supervision entailed one of three courses, according to the character of the person concerned: either to yield gracefully and gratefully to the old man's kindly but iron domination and find therein love and protection,--as had Kathrien; or to use the right of personal thought and individuality, and therefore to clash forever with Peter,--as had James Hartmann; or to seem for policy's sake to bend, while really living one's own life;--as had Frederik.

Peter Grimm was the slave and apostle of Order, Work, and Method.

Frederik loved ease, luxury, artistic surroundings. Yet he was too wise to antagonise his uncle, who had the power to leave him one day the master of all these pleasant things he craved. So he had adapted himself outwardly to a path he loathed. And, by the wayside, he had secretly sought such pleasures as his nature craved.

Anne Marie had chanced to be by the wayside.

What had followed was rendered tragic chiefly by Anne Marie's innate goodness and by Peter Grimm's fierce morality.

Frederik dared not risk the loss of a future fortune by admitting his fault or by marrying the woman for whom, at the time, he had really cared. In a s.h.i.+ftless way and with straitly limited income, he had done what he could do for her. The sacrifices these helps had entailed and the constant fear of exposure and of consequent disinheritance had in time made the thought of Anne Marie a horror to him.

When he had gone, at Peter Grimm's command, to Leyden and Heidelberg to study botany, Frederik had hoped to close the unsavoury incident for all time.

On his return he had found Willem installed at the Grimm home, a living, ever-present menace and reminder to him. And, despite a soft heart and a normally decent nature, Frederik had, little by little, been forced by his own past and his own hopes into a course that at times was hateful to him. Ten thousand men, far worse than he, walk the streets of every big city and sleep snug o' nights with no grinning Conscience-Skull to break their rest. A thousand well-meaning, harmless sons of dominating and domineering parents are forced, as was he, into by-roads as hateful to them. To be cast by Fate to enact the Villain, when one has not the temperament, the apt.i.tude, nor the desire for the unsavoury role, falls to more men's lot than the world realises.

It had fallen to Frederik Grimm's. Wherefore, sick at heart, he sat with his head in his hands. And Peter Grimm read his thoughts as from a printed page.

"Once more a spark of manhood is alight in your soul," whispered the Dead Man. "It is not too late. Nothing is ever too late. Turn back!"

Frederik looked up, half-listening. His hand crept out to the letter.

"Follow the impulse that is in your heart," begged the Dead Man. "Follow it! Take the little boy in your arms. Declare him to all the world as your own. Go down on your knees and ask his mother's forgiveness. Ah, do it, lad, so that I can go back still trusting you,--still believing in you,--blessing you! _Frederik!_"

"Yes," answered Frederik, starting up. "What is it?"

He glanced about the room unseeingly, then looked toward the outer door and called:

"Come in!"

"That's curious!" he mused, settling back in his chair. "I thought I heard some one at--_Who's at the door?_" he called again.

"_I_ am at the door," replied the Dead Man in solemn vehemence. "_I_, Peter Grimm. The uncle who loved you and whom you tricked. Anne Marie is at the door,--the little girl who is ashamed to come home. Willem is at the door--your own flesh and blood--_nameless_! Katje, sobbing her heart out,--James--all of us. _All!_ We are all at the door, Frederik! At the door of your conscience. Ah, don't keep us waiting!"

CHAPTER XV

A HALF-HEARD MESSAGE

Frederik rose slowly from his chair. His face was working. Instinctively his glance lifted to Kathrien's door. His eyes grew bright and his weak mouth strong with a wondrous resolve. He crossed the room to the stair-foot; that light of pure sacrifice deepening in his whole upraised face.

"Yes!" urged the Dead Man, keeping eager pace with him in body and in thought. "Yes! Call her. Give her back her promise."

The flabby muscles of a self-indulgent man may sometimes perform a single prodigious feat of strength. Wherein they have an infinite advantage over the far flabbier resolutions of a self-indulgent man. And Frederik Grimm's weak, atrophied better self was not equal to the strain thrown upon it.

At the stair-foot, his step faltered. He halted irresolutely, while the Dead Man watched him in an anguish of hope and fear.

Then came surrender to long habit; and with it a gush of weak rage. Not at himself. He had not the strength left for that. But at the cause of his distress. He brought down his fist upon the desk with a resounding thwack. His eye fell on the open page with its pathetic scrawl of appeal.

"d.a.m.n her!" he growled, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the letter and tearing it across and across. "I wish to G.o.d I'd never seen her!"

Peter Grimm gazed down upon him with eyes wherein lurked a slowly rising fire.

"Frederik Grimm!" commanded the Dead Man. "Get up! Stand up before me!

Stand up, I say!"

Frederik made as though to rise, then swore under his breath and sat down again.

"Stand up!" flashed the Dead Man.