In the Heart of a Fool Part 26

"But your self-respect, child?" quoted the Spartan, and the daughter made answer simply: "I must go home, mother."

When Laura Van Dorn entered her home she began the evening's routine, somewhat from habit, and yet many things she did she grimly forced herself to do. She waited dinner for her husband. She called his office vainly upon the telephone. She and Lila ate alone; often they had eaten alone before. And as the evening grew from twilight to dark, she put the child to bed, left one of the maids in the child's room, lighted an electric reading lamp in her husband's room, turned on the hall lamp, instructed the maid to tell the Judge that his wife was with her father helping him with a wounded man, and then she went out through the open, hospitable door.

But all that night, as she sat beside the restless man, who writhed in his pain even under the drug, she went over and over her problem. She recognized that a kind of finality had come into her relations with her husband. In the rush of events that had followed his departure, a period, definite and conclusive seemed to have been put after the whole of her life's adventures with Tom Van Dorn. She did not cry, nor feel the want of tears, yet there were moments when she instinctively put her hands before her face as in a shame. She saw the man in perspective for the first time clearly. She had not let herself take a candid inventory of him before. But that night all her subconscious impressions rose and framed themselves into conscious reflections. And then she knew that his relation with her from the beginning had been a reflex of his view of life--of his material idea of the scheme of things.

As the night wore on, she kept her nurse's chart and did the things to be done for her patient. For the time her emotions were spent. Her heart was empty. Even for the shattered and suffering body before her, the tousled red head, the half-closed, pain-bleared eyes, the lips that s.h.i.+elded the clenched teeth--she felt none of that tenderness that comes from deep sympathy and moving pity. At dawn she went home with her body worn and weary, and after the sun was up she slept.

Scarcely had the morning stir begun in the Nesbit household, before Morty Sands appeared, clad in the festive raiment of the moment--white ducks and a s.h.i.+rtwaist and a tennis racket, to be exact. He asked for the Doctor and when the Doctor came, Morty c.o.c.ked his sparrow like head and paused a moment after the greetings of the morning were spoken.

After his inquiries for Grant had been satisfied, Morty still lingered and c.o.c.ked his head.

"Of course, Doctor," Morty began diffidently, "and naturally you know more of it than I--but--" he got no further for a second. Then he gathered courage from the Doctor's bland face to continue: "Well, Doctor, last night at Brotherton's, Tom came in and George and Nate Perry and Kyle and Captain Morton and I were there; and Tom--well, Doctor--Tom said something--"

"He did--did he?" cut in the Doctor. "The dirty dog! So he broke the news to the Amen Corner!"

"Now, Doctor, we all know Tom," Morty explained. "We know Tom: but George said Laura was helping with Grant, and I just thought, certainly I have no wish to intrude, but I just thought maybe I could relieve her myself by sitting up with Grant, if--"

The Doctor's kindly face twitched with pain, and he cried: "Morty, you're a boy in a thousand! But can't you see that just at this time if I had half a dozen cases like Grant's, they would be a G.o.d's mercy for her!"

Morty could not control his voice. So he turned and tripped down the steps and flitted away. As Morty disappeared, George Brotherton came roaring up the hill, but no word of what Van Dorn had said in the Amen Corner did Mr. Brotherton drop. He asked about Grant, inquired about Laura, and released a cras.h.i.+ng laugh at some story of stuttering Kyle Perry trying to tell deaf John Kollander about the Venezuelan dispute.

"Kyle," said George, "p.r.o.nounces Venezuela like an atomizer!" Captain Morton rested from his loved employ, let the egg-beater of the hour languish, and permitted stock in his new Company to slump in a weary market while he camped on the Nesbit veranda during the day to greet and disperse such visitors as Mrs. Nesbit deemed of sufficiently small social consequence to receive the Captain's ministrations. At twilight the Captain greeted Laura coming from her home for her night watch, and with a rather elaborate scenario of amenities, told her how his Household Horse company was prospering, how his egg beater was going, and asked after Lila's health, omitting mention of the Judge with an easy nonchalance which struck terror to the woman's heart--terror, lest the Captain and through him all men should know of her trouble.

But deeper than the terror in her heart at what the Captain might know and tell was the pain at the thing she knew herself--that the home which she loved was dead. However proudly it might stand before the world, for the pa.s.sing hour or day or year, she knew, and the knowledge sickened her to her soul's death, that the home was doomed. She kept thinking of it as a tree, whose roots were cut; a tree whose leaves were still green, whose comeliness still pleased the eye but whose ugly, withered branches soon must stand out to affront the world. And sorrowing for the beauty that was doomed she went to her work. All night with her father she ministered to the tortured man, but in the morning she slipped away to her home again hoping her numb vain hope, through another weary journey of the sun.

The third night found Grant Adams restless, wakeful, anxious to talk.

The opiates had left him. She saw that he was fully himself, even though conscious of his tortured body. "Laura," he cried in a sick man's feeble voice, "I want to tell you something."

"Not now, Grant," she returned quietly. "I'd rather hear it to-morrow."

"No," he returned stubbornly, "I want to tell you now."

He paused as if to catch his breath. "For I want you to know I'm the happiest man in the world." He set his teeth firmly. The muscles of his jaw worked, and he smiled up at her. He questioned her with his blue eyes, and after some a.s.sent had come into her face--or he thought it had, he went on:

"There's a G.o.d in Israel, Laura--I know it way down in me and all through me."

A crash of pain stopped him. He grinned at the groan, which the pain wrenched from him, and whispered, "There's a G.o.d in Israel--for He gave me my chance. I saw the great white killing thing coming to do for Denny Hogan. How I'd waited for that chance. Then when it came, I wanted to run. But I didn't run. There's something in you bigger than fear. So when G.o.d gave me my chance He put the--the--the--" pain wrenched him again, and he said weakly, "the--I've got to say it, you'll understand--He put the--the guts in me to take it."

When she left him a few minutes later he seemed to be asleep. But when Doctor Nesbit came into the room an hour later Grant was wide-eyed and smiling, and seemed so much better that as a reward of merit the Doctor brought in the morning paper and told Grant he could look at the headings for five minutes. There it was that he first realized what a lot of business lay ahead of him, learning to live as a one-armed man.

The Doctor saw his patient worrying with the paper, and started to help.

"No, Doctor," said the young man, "I must begin sometime, and now's as good a time as any." So he struggled with the unwieldy sheets of paper, and finally managed to get his morning's reading done. When the time was up, he handed back his paper saying, "I see Tom Van Dorn is going on his vacation--does that mean Laura, too?" The Doctor shook his head; and by way of taking the subject away from Laura he said: "Now about your damages, Grant--you know I'll stand by you with the Company, don't you--I'm no Van Dorn, if I am Company doctor. You ought to have good damages--for--"

"Damages! damages!" cried Grant, "why, Doctor, I can't get damages. I wasn't working for the smelter when it happened. I was around organizing the men. And I don't want damages. This arm," he looked lovingly at the stump beside him, "is worth more in my business than a million dollars.

For it proves to me that I am not afraid to go clear through for my faith, and it proves me to the men! Damages! damages?" he said grimly.

"Why, Doctor, if Uncle Dan and the other owners up town here only know what this stump will cost them, they would sue me for damages! I tell you those men in the mine there saved my life. Ever since then I've been trying to repay them, and here comes this chance to turn in a little on account, to bind the bargain, and now the men know how seriously I hold the debt. Damages?" There was just a hint of fanaticism in his laugh; the Doctor looked at Grant quickly, then he sniffed, "Fine talk, Grant, fine talk for the next world, but it won't buy shoes for the baby in this," and he turned away impatiently and went into a world of reality, leaving Grant Adams to enjoy his Utopia.

That morning after breakfast, when Laura had gone home, the Doctor and his wife sitting alone went into the matter further. "Of course," said the Doctor, "she'll see that he has gone away. But when should we tell her what he has done?"

"Doctor," said the mother, "you leave his letter here where I can get it. I'm going over there and pack everything that rightfully may be called hers--I mean her dresses and trinkets--and such things as have in them no particular memory of him. They shall come home. Then I'll lock up the house."

The Doctor squinted up his eyes thoughtfully and said slowly, "Well, that seems kind. I don't suppose you need read her the whole letter.

Just tell her he is going to ask for a divorce--tell her it's incompatibility. But his letter isn't important." The Doctor sighed.

"Grant ought really to stay here another week--maybe we can stretch it to ten days--and let her have all the responsibility she'll take. It'll help her over the first bridge. Kenyon is taking care of Lila--I suppose?" The Doctor rose, stood by his wife and said as he found her hand:

"Poor Laura--poor Laura--and Lila! You know when I had her down town with me yesterday, in the hallway leading to Joe Calvin's office, she met Tom--" The Doctor looked away for a moment. "It was pretty tough--her little heartbreak when he went by her without taking her up!"

The wife did not reply. The husband with his arm about her walked toward the door.

"You can't tell me, my dear, that Tom isn't paying--I know how that sort of thing gets under his skin--he's too sensitive not to imagine all it means to the child." Mrs. Nesbit's face hardened and her husband saw her bitterness. "I know, my dear--I know how you feel--I feel all that, and yet in my very heart I'm sorry for poor Tom. He's swapping substance for shadow so recklessly--not only in this, not merely with Laura--but with everything--everything."

"Good Lord, Jim, I don't see how you can agonize over a wool-dyed scoundrel like that--perhaps you have some tears for that Fenn hussy, too!"

"Well," squeaked the Doctor soberly--"I knew her father--a lecherous old beast who brought her up without restraint or morals--with a greedy philosophy pounded into her by example every day of her life until she was seventeen years old. There's something to be said--even for her, my dear--even for her."

"Well, Jim Nesbit," answered his wife, "I'll go a long way with you in your tomfoolery, but so long as I've got to draw the line somewhere I draw it right there."

The Doctor looked at the floor. "I suppose so--" he sighed, then lifted his head and said: "I was just trying to think of all the sorrows that come into the world, of all the tragedies I ever knew, and I have concluded that this tragedy of divorce when it comes like this--as it has come to our daughter--is the greatest tragedy in the world. To love as she loved and to find every anchor to which she tied the faith of her life rotten, to have her heart seared with faithlessness--to see her child--her flesh and blood scorned, to have her very soul spat upon--that's the essence of sorrow, my dear."

He looked up into her eyes, bent to kiss her hand, and after he had picked up his cane and his hat from the rack, toddled down the walk to the street, a sad, thoughtful, worried little man, white-clad and serene to outward view, who had not even a whistle nor a vagrant tune under his breath to console him.

That day, after her father's insistence, Laura Van Dorn changed from the night watch to the day nurse, and from that day on for ten days, she ministered to Grant Adams' wants. Mechanically she read to him from such books as the house afforded--Tolstoi--Ibsen, Hardy, Howells,--but she was shut away from the meaning of what she read and even from the comments of the man under her care, by the consideration of her own problems. For to Laura Van Dorn it was a time of anxious doubt, of sad retrogression, of inner anguish. In some of the books were pa.s.sages she had marked and read to her husband; and such pages calling up his dull comprehension of their beauty, or bringing back his scoffing words, or touching to the quick a hurt place in her heart, taxed her nerves heavily. But during the time while she sat by the injured man's bedside, she was glad in her heart of one thing--that she had an excuse for avoiding the people who called.

As Grant grew stronger--as it became evident that he must go soon, the woman's heart shrank from meeting the town, and she clung to each duty of the man's convalescence hungrily. She knew she must face life, that she must have some word for her friends about her tragedy. She felt that in going away, in suing for the divorce himself, her husband had made the break irrevocable. There was no resentment nor malice toward him in her heart. Yet the future seemed hopelessly black and terrible to her.

The afternoon before Grant Adams was to leave the Nesbit home he was allowed to come down stairs, and he sat with her upon the side porch, all screened and protected by vines that led to her father's office.

Laura's finger was in a book they had been reading--it was "The Pillars of Society." The day was one of those exquisite days in mid-June, and after a cooling rain the air was clear and seemed to put joy into one's veins.

"How modern he is--how American--how like Harvey," said the young man.

"Ibsen might have lived right here in this town, and written that," he added. He started to raise his right arm, but a twinge of pain reminded him that the stump was bound, so he raised his left and cried:

"And I tell you, Laura--that's what I'm on earth to fight--the whole infernal system of pocket-picking and poor-robbing, and public gouging that we permit under the profit system." The woman's thoughts were upon her own sorrow, but she called herself back to smile and reply:

"All right, Grant--I'm with you. We may have to draft father and commandeer George Brotherton, and start out as a pirate crew--but I'm with you."

"Let me tell you something," said the man. "I've not been loafing for the past two years. I've got Harvey--the men in the mines and smelter, I mean, fairly well unionized, but the unions are nothing--nothing ultimate--they are only temporary."

"Well," returned the woman, soberly, "that's something."

The man made no answer. With his free hand he was ruffling his red hair, and she could see the muscles of his jaw working, and she felt his great mouth harden as he flashed his blue eyes upon her. "Laura," he cried, "they may whip us this year. For a while they may scare the men into voting for prosperity, but as sure as we both live we shall see these times and these issues and these men who are promoting this devilish conspiracy eternally d.a.m.ned--all of them--the issues, the times and the men who are leading. And I don't want to hurt you, Laura, but," he added solemnly, "your husband must take his punishment with the rest."

They sat mute, then each heard the plaintive cry of a child running through the house. "She is looking for me," said Laura. In a moment a little wet-eyed girl was in her mother's arms, crying:

"I want my daddy--my dear daddy--I want him to come home--where is he?"

She sobbed in her mother's arms and held up her little face to look earnestly into the beautiful face above her, as she cried, "Is he gone--Annie Sands' new mamma says my papa's never coming back--Oh, I want my daddy--I want to go home."

She continued calling him and sobbing, and the mother rose to take the child away.

"Laura!" cried Grant, in a pa.s.sionate question. He saw the weeping child and the grief-stricken face of the mother. In an instant he held out his bony left hand to her and said gently: "G.o.d help you--G.o.d help you."