In the Heart of a Fool Part 24

And then the pitiless fates turned the screws of the rack again and the father burst forth in his vain grief, with his high, soft, woman's voice. "I wonder--I wonder--I wonder, what G.o.d has in waiting for you to make up for this?"

Before she could answer, the telephone bell rang. The wife stepped to the instrument. "Well," she said when she came back. "The hour has struck; the expressman went to Tom for the express charges; he knows the package is here and," she added after a sigh, "he knows that I know all about it." She even smiled rather sadly, "So he's coming out--on his wheel."

CHAPTER XXII

IN WHICH TOM VAN DORN BECOMES A WAYFARING MAN ALSO

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

"I wonder, my dear," he spoke slowly, and with great gentleness, "if maybe I shouldn't talk with Tom--before you see him."

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

"But father," broke in the daughter, "Tom and I can--"

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

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

"It's all right, Tom--I understand things." The Doctor's eyes turned to the parcel on the floor between them.

The Doctor's voice was soft; his manner was gentle, and he lifted his blue, inquiring eyes into the young Judge's restless black ones. Dr.

Nesbit put a fatherly hand on the young man's arm, and said: "Shall we sit down, Tom, and take stock of things and see where we stand? Wouldn't that be a good idea?"

They sat down and the younger man eyed the package, turned it over, looked at the address nervously, pulled at his mustache as he sank back, while the elder man was saying: "I believe I understand you, Tom--better than any one else in the world understands you. I believe you have not a better friend on earth than I right at this minute."

The Judge turned around and said in a disturbed voice, "I am sure that's the G.o.d's truth, Doctor Jim." Then after a sigh he added, "And this is what I've done to you!"

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

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

"Over at her mother's," replied the father. "n.o.body will interrupt us--and so I thought we could get down to gra.s.s roots and talk this thing out."

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

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

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

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

"All right, Tom," piped the Doctor, "go ahead."

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

He broke off and looked up. "How could I get up before a jury and feel them out man by man as I talked if I wasn't sensitive to these things?

You've seen me make them cry when I was in the practice. How could I make them cry if I didn't feel like crying myself. You're a doctor--you know that. People forget what I am--what a thousand stringed instrument I am. Now, Doctor Jim, let me tell you something. This is the bottom hard pan of the truth: I never before really cared for these women--these other women--when I got them. But I do care for the chase, I do care for the risk of it--for the exhilaration of it--for the joy of it!"

The Doctor's mouth twitched and he took a breath as if about to speak.

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

He rose and began pacing the piazza as he continued speaking. "It's always been so with me--as early as my boyhood it was so. I often wake in the lonely nights and think of them all over again--the days and nights, the girls and women who have flashed bright and radiant into my life. Over and over again, I repeat to my soul their names, over and over I live the hours we have spent together, the dangers, the delights, the cruel misery of it all and then at the turn of the street, at the corner of a room, in the winking of an eye I see another face, it looks a challenge at me and I am out on the high road of another romance. I've got to go! It's part of my life; it's the pulse of my blood."

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

Van Dorn went on: "And then you and my friends ask me to quit. Laura, G.o.d help her--she naturally--" he exclaimed. "But is the moon to be blotted out for me? Are the night winds to be m.u.f.fled and mean no more than the sc.r.a.ping of a dead twig against a rusty wire? Are flowers to lose their scent, and gra.s.s and trees and birds to be blurred and turned drab in my eyes? How do you think I live, man? How do you think I can go before juries and audiences and make them thrill and clench their fists and cry like children and breathe with my emotions, if I am to be stone dead? Do you think a wooden man can do that? Try Joe Calvin with a jury--what does he accomplish with all his virtue? He hasn't had an emotion in twenty years. A pretty woman looking at Joe in a crowd wouldn't say anything to him with her eyes and dilating nostrils and the swish of her body. And when he gets before a jury he talks the law to them, and the facts to them, and the justice of the case to them. But when I used to stand up before them, they knew I was weak, human mud.

They had heard all the stories on me. They knew me, and some of them despised me, and all of them were watching out for me, but when I reached down in my heart and brought up the common clay of which we all are made and molded it into a man or an event before their eyes, then--by G.o.d they came to me. And yet you've been sitting there for years, Doctor Jim Nesbit and saying 'Tom--Tom, why don't you quit?'"

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

"Yes," he groaned, rising. "There are Laura and Lila."

He thrust his hands deeply into his pockets and looked down at the Doctor and sneered. "There's the trap that snapped and took a paw, and I'm supposed to lick it and love it and to cherish it."

He shuddered, and continued: "For once I'll speak and tell it all. I'll not be a hypocrite in this hour, though ever after I may lie and cringe.

There are Laura and Lila and here am I. And out beyond is the wind in the elms and the suns.h.i.+ne upon the gra.s.s and the moving odor of flowers--flowers that are blus.h.i.+ng with the joy of nature in her great perennial romance--and there's Laura and Lila and here am I."

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

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

"Why stop at thirty--or even forty? Why stop at all?"

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

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

"Tom," cried the Doctor in his treble, with excitement in his voice, "you can't take care of yourself. No man ever lived who could. You may get away with your love affairs, and no one be the wiser; you may make a crooked or dirty million on a stock deal and no one be the wiser; but you'll bear the marks to the grave."

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

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

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

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

Their eyes met and turned to the parcel on the floor. "You can't afford--well, that sort of thing," the Doctor punched the parcel contemptuously with his cane. "It's all bad enough, Tom, but that way lies h.e.l.l!"

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

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