Читать книгу: «An Old Chester Secret», страница 3

CHAPTER III

THE gambler went on her trembling legs back to her cluttered parlor and sat down, panting and pallid. The throw of the dice had been in her favor!

It was curious that she had no misgiving as to what she was doing in thus closing the door of opportunity to Johnny – for of course, the new Mr. Smith's protection would mean every sort of material opportunity for him! If it had been his "grandfather's" protection which had been offered, perhaps she might have hesitated, for that would have meant material opportunity plus a love great enough to tell the truth; and Miss Lydia's own love – which was but a spiritual opportunity – could not compete with that! As it was, she tested opportunities by saying, "His grandfather can have him."

Of course it was just her old method of choosing the better part… All her life this gallant, timid woman had weighed values. She had weighed the reputation of being a jilt as against marriage to a man she did not respect – and she found the temporary notoriety of the first lighter than the lifelong burden of the second. She weighed values again, when she put her hundred dollars' worth of generosity on one side of the scales, and William's meanness on the other – and when generosity kicked the beam she was glad to be jilted. She had even weighed the painful unrealities of concealed poverty as against open shabbiness, and she saw that a dress she couldn't afford was a greater load to carry than the consciousness of the spot on her old skirt – especially as the spot was glorified by the memory of a friend's hospitality!

So now, when the new Mr. Smith considered adopting her boy, this simple soul weighed values for Johnny: Mr. Smith – or Johnny's grandfather? Pride – or love? And pride outweighed love. Miss Lydia put her hands over her face and prayed aloud: "God, keep him proud, so I can keep Johnny!"

Apparently God did, for it was only "Mr. Smith" who made further efforts to get her child. They were very determined efforts. Miss Lydia's landlord saw her again, and urged. She met what he had to say with a speechless obstinacy which made him extremely angry. When he saw her a third time he offered her an extraordinary increase in the honorarium – for which he had the grace five minutes later to apologize. He saw her once more, and threatened he would "take" Johnny, anyhow!

"How?" said poor, shaking Miss Lydia. Then, as a last resort, he sent his lawyer to her, which scared her almost to death. But the interview produced, for Mr. Smith, nothing except legal assurance that he could doubtless secure the person of his grandson by appealing to the courts in the character of a grandfather– for Miss Lydia had never taken out papers for adoption.

"The lady has nine-tenths of the law," said Mr. Smith's legal adviser, who had been consulted, first, as to a hypothetical case, and then told the facts. "The other one-tenth won't secure a child whom you don't claim as a relative. And the law means publicity."

"The hussy!" said Mr. Smith. "She's put a spoke in my wheel."

"She has," said the lawyer, and grinned behind his hand.

Mr. Smith glared at him. "That little wet hen!"

Well! after one or two more efforts, he swallowed his defeat, and, though for nearly a year he would not recognize Miss Lydia when he met her in the street, he made fast friends with the freckled, very pugnacious boy at his gates. He used to stop and speak to him and tell him to say his multiplication table, and then give him a quarter and walk off, greatly diverted. Sometimes when he saw his daughter in Philadelphia, he would tell her, sardonically, that "that child" had more brains than his father and mother put together!

"Not than his father," poor, cowering Mary would protest. And her father, looking at her with unforgiving eyes, would say, "I wish I owned him." ("I like to scare 'em!" he added to himself.) He certainly scared Mary. Scared her, and made her feel a strange anger, because he had something which did not belong to him; "after all, the boy is ours," she told her husband. She always went to bed with a headache after one of Mr. Smith's visits. As for Carl, his face would grow crimson with helpless mortification under the gibes of his father-in-law as Mary repeated them to him.

Once, when she told him that her father had "taken the boy home to supper with him," he swore under his breath, and she agreed, hurriedly:

"Father was simply mad to notice him! People will guess – "

But Carl broke in: "Oh, I didn't mean that. No one would ever suspect anything. I meant, what right has he to get fond of – the boy?"

"Not the slightest!" Mary said. And they neither of them knew that they were beginning to be jealous.

The occasion of Mr. Smith's "madness" was one winter afternoon when, meeting Johnny in the road, he took him into his carriage, then sent word to Miss Lydia that he was keeping the child to supper. He put him in a big chair at the other end of the table and baited him with questions, and roared with laughter and pride at his replies. Also, he gave him good advice, as a grandfather should:

"I hear you are a bad boy and get into fights. Never fight, sir, never fight! But if you do fight, lick your man."

"Yes, sir," said Johnny.

"And don't be afraid to tackle a bigger man than yourself. Only cowards are afraid to do that!"

"Yes, sir," said Johnny.

"But of course I don't approve of fighting. Only bad boys fight. Remember that!"

"Yes, sir," said Johnny, and scraped his plate loudly to attract the attention of old Alfred, his grandfather's man, who, familiar and friendly from thirty years' service, said, as he brought the desired flannel cakes, "The little man holds his fork just as you do, sir!" At which Mr. Smith stopped laughing, and said:

"Miss Sampson ought to teach him better manners."

He did not invite Johnny to supper again, which would have been a relief to Mary if she had known it; and was just as well, anyhow, for Miss Lydia, quaking at her own supper table (while Johnny was "holding his fork" in his grandfather's fashion!) had said to herself, "I'll tell him to say, 'No, thank you, sir,' if Mr. Smith ever asks him again."

It was about this time that Miss Lydia's landlord softened toward her sufficiently to bow to her as he passed her house. Once he even stopped her in the street to ask the particulars of one of Johnny's escapades: It appeared that a boy – one of the Mack boys, as it happened, who was always in hot water in Old Chester – got the credit of a smashed sash in Mr. Steele's greenhouse, which was really Johnny's doing; and in spite of sniffling denials, the (for once) innocent Mack boy was just about to get what the irate owner of the sash called a walloping, when Johnny Smith, breathless, and mad as a hatter, rushed into the greenhouse to say, "It was me done it!" – upon which the richly deserved walloping was handed over to the real culprit. Later, for some private grudge, Johnny paid it all back to young Mack, but for the moment – "I take my medicine," said Johnny, showing his teeth. "I don't hide behind another feller. But you bet I'll smash Andy Steele's hotbed sashes every chance I get!" Poor little Miss Lydia was frightened to death at such a wicked remark, and prayed that God would please forgive Johnny; and she was very bewildered to have Mr. Smith, listening to this dreadful story, chuckle with delight: "He'll come to a bad end, the scoundrel! Tell him I say I expect he'll be hanged. I'll give him a quarter for every pane he broke." After this interview Mr. Smith used to call on Miss Lydia occasionally just to inquire what was Johnny's latest crime, and once he invited his tenant to supper, "with your young scamp," his invitation ran. She went, and wore her blue silk, and sat on the edge of her chair, watching the grandfather and grandson, while the vein on her thin temple throbbed with fright. But it took another year of longing for his own flesh and blood before the new Mr. Smith reached an amazing, though temporary, decision.

"I'll have him," he said to himself; "I will have him! I'll swallow the wet hen, if I can't get him any other way. I'll – I'll marry the woman.".. But he hesitated for still another month or two, for, though he wanted his grandson, he did not hanker to make a fool of himself; and a rich man in the late seventies who marries an impecunious spinster in the fifties looks rather like a fool.

But when he finally reached the point of swallowing Miss Lydia he lost no time in walking out from his iron gates one fine afternoon and banging on her front door with his stick. When she opened it he announced that he had something he wanted to say. In his own mind, the words he proposed to speak were to this effect: "I'm going to marry you – to get the boy." To be sure, he would not express it just that way – one has to go round Robin Hood's barn in talking to females! So he began:

"I have been planning more comfortable quarters for you, ma'am, than this house. More suitable quarters for my – for the boy; and I – " Then he stopped. Somehow or other, looking at Miss Lydia, sitting there so small and frightened and brave, he was suddenly ashamed. He could not offer this gallant soul the indignity of a bribe! "If I can't get the boy by fair means, I won't by foul," he told himself; so instead of offering himself, he talked about the weather; "and – and I want you to know that Johnny shall be put down for something handsome in my will. It won't be suspicious. Everybody in Old Chester knows that I like him – living here at my gates; though he has the devil of a temper! Bad thing. Very bad thing. He should control it. I've always controlled mine."

Miss Lydia felt a sudden wave of pity; he was so helpless, and she was so powerful – and so lucky! All she said, in her breathless voice, was that he "was very kind – about the will."

Johnny's grandfather, looking into her sweet, blue eyes, suddenly said – and with no thought whatever of Johnny – "I wish I was twenty years younger!" The wistful genuineness of that was the nearest he came to asking her to marry him. He went home feeling, as he walked up to his great, empty house, very old and forlorn, and yet relieved that he had not offered an affront to Miss Lydia nor, incidentally, made a fool of himself. Then he thought with the old, hot anger, of Carl Robertson, and with a dreary impatience of his daughter; it was their doing that he couldn't own his own grandson! "Well, the boy shall have his grandfather's money," he said to himself, stumbling a little as he went up the flight of granite steps to his front door. "Every bit of it! I don't care whether people think things or not. Damn 'em, let them think! What difference does it make? Robertson can go to hell." He was so dulled that, for the moment, he forgot that if Robertson went to hell Mary would have to go, too. Later that night his tired mind cleared, and he knew it wouldn't do to let Johnny have his "grandfather's" money, and that even Mr. Smith's money must be bestowed with caution.

"I'll leave a bequest that won't compromise Mary, but she and Robertson must somehow do the rest. I'll send for her next week and tell her what to do; and then I'll fix up a codicil."

But next week he said next week; and after that he thought, listlessly, that he wasn't equal to seeing her. "She's fond of Robertson – I can't stand that! I never forgive."

So he didn't send for his daughter. But a week later William King did..

"I suppose I've got to go?" Mary told her husband, looking up from the doctor's telegram with scared eyes.

"It wouldn't be decent not to," he said.

"But he is right there, by the gate! I might see him. Oh – I don't dare!"

"Women are queer," Johnny's father ruminated. "I should think you'd like to see him. I guess all this mother-love talk is a fairy tale"; then, before she could retort, he put his arms around her. "I didn't mean it, dear! Forgive me. Only, Mary, I get to thinking about him, and I feel as if I'd like to see the little beggar!"

"But how can I 'love' him?" she defended herself, in a smothered voice; "I don't know him."

"Stop and speak to him while you're at your father's," he urged; "and then you will know him."

"Oh, I couldn't – I couldn't! I'd be afraid to."

"But why? Nobody could possibly suppose – "

"Because," she said, "if I saw him once I might want to see him again."

Carl frowned with bewilderment, but Johnny's mother began to pace up and down, back and forth – then suddenly flew out of the room and upstairs, to fall, crying, upon her bed.

However, she obeyed Doctor King's summons. The day the stage went jogging and creaking past Miss Lydia's door the lady inside looked straight ahead of her, and some one who saw her said she was very pale – "anxious about her father," Old Chester said, sympathetically. Then Old Chester wondered whether Carl was so unchristian as to refuse to come and see his father-in-law – "on his deathbed!" – or whether old Mr. Smith "on his death bed" was so unchristian as to refuse to see his son-in-law. "What did they quarrel about!" Old Chester said. "Certainly Mr. Smith seemed friendly enough to the young man before Mary married him."

When Mary – she was in the early thirties now, and Johnny was thirteen – came into her father's room and sat down beside him, the old man opened his eyes and looked at her.

"Pleasant journey?" he said, thickly.

"Yes, father. I hope you are feeling better?"

His eyes closed and he seemed to forget her. Later, looking up at her from the pillows of his great carved rosewood bed – the headboard looked like the Gothic doors of a cathedral – he said, "Tell your husband" – he lifted his upper lip and showed his teeth – "to educate him."

Mary said, "Who?" – then could have bitten her tongue out, for of course there was only one "him" for these three people! She gave a frightened glance about the room, but there was no one to hear that betraying pronoun. She said, faintly: "Yes, father. Now try to rest and don't talk. You'll feel better in the morning."

"He hates a coward as much as I do," Mr. Smith mumbled. "And he has brains; doesn't get 'em from you two. Guess he gets 'em from me."

"Father! Please —please!" she said, in a terrified whisper. "Somebody might hear."

"They're welcome. Mary.. he handed me back my own quarter for my own apples. No fool." He gave a grunt of laughter. "He said, 'Twelve times twelve' like lightning – when he was only ten!.. Last year he took his own licking, though the Mack boy was in for it… I'm going to give him a pony."

After that he seemed to forget her and slept for a while. A day or two later he forgot everything, even Johnny. The last person he remembered, curiously enough, was Miss Lydia Sampson.

It was when he was dying that he said, suddenly opening those marvelous eyes and smiling faintly: "Little wet hen! Damned game little party. Stood right up to me… Wish I'd married her thirteen years ago. Then there'd have been no fuss about my grandson."

"Grandson?" said Doctor King, in a whisper to Mrs. Robertson. And she whispered back, "He is wandering."

When Mary's husband arrived for the funeral and for the reading of the will (in which there was nothing "handsome" for Johnny!) the doctor told him of the new Mr. Smith's last words; and Mr. Robertson said, hurriedly, "Delirious, of course."

"I suppose so," said Doctor King.

But when he walked home with Doctor Lavendar, after the funeral, he said, "Have you any idea who Johnny Smith belongs to, Doctor Lavendar?"

"Miss Lydia," said Doctor Lavendar, promptly.

To which William King replied, admiringly, "I have never understood how anybody could look as innocent as you, and yet be so chock-full of other people's sins! Wonder if his mother will ever claim him?"

"Wonder if Miss Lydia would give him up if she did?" Doctor Lavendar said.

"She'd have to," William said.

"On the principle that a 'mother is a mother still, the holiest thing alive'?" Doctor Lavendar quoted.

"On the principle of ownership," said William King. "As to a mother being a 'holy thing,' I have never noticed that the mere process of child-bearing produces sanctity."

"William," said Doctor Lavendar, "Mrs. Drayton would say you were indelicate. Also, I believe you know that two and two make four?"

"I have a pretty good head for arithmetic," said William King, "but I only added things up a day or two ago."