In the Heart of a Fool. White William Allen
currents that we know are not of ourselves, and so have called divine.
In the morning, in the early gray of morning, when Grant Adams rose to make the fire for breakfast, he found his father, sitting by the kitchen table, half clad as he had risen from a restless bed. Scrawled sheets of white paper lay around him on the floor and the table. He said sadly:
“She can’t come, Grant–she can’t come. I dreamed of her last night; it was all so real–just as she was when we were young, and I thought–I was sure she was near.” He sighed as he leaned back in his chair. “But they’ve looked for her–all of them have looked for her. She knows I’m calling–but she can’t come.” The father fumbled the papers, rubbed his gray beard, and shut his fine eyes as he shook his head, and whispered: “What holds her–what keeps her? They all come but her.”
“What’s this, father?” asked Grant, as a page closely written in a fine hand fluttered to the floor.
“Oh, nothing–much–just Mr. Left bringing me some message from Victor Hugo. It isn’t much.”
But the Eminent Authority who put it into the Proceedings of the Psychological Society laid more store by it than he did by the scraps and incoherent bits of jargon which pictured the old man’s lonely grief. They are not preserved for us, but in the Proceedings, on page 1125, we have this from Mr. Left:
“The vice of the poor is crass and palpable. It carries a quick and deadly corrective poison. But the vices of the well-to-do are none the less deadly. To dine in comfort and know your brother is starving; to sleep in peace and know that he is wronged and oppressed by laws that we sanction, to gather one’s family in contentment around a hearth, while the poor dwell in a habitat of vice that kills their souls, to live without bleeding hearts for the wrong on this earth–that is the vice of the well-to-do. And so it shall come to pass that when the day of reckoning appears it shall be a day of wrath. For when God gives the poor the strength to rise (and they are waxing stronger every hour), they will meet not a brother’s hand but a glutton’s–the hard, dead hand of a hard, dead soul. Then will the vicious poor and the vicious well-to-do, each crippled by his own vices, the blind leading the blind, fall to in a merciless conflict, mad and meaningless, born of a sad, unnecessary hate that shall terrorize the earth, unless God sends us another miracle of love like Christ or some vast chastening scourge of war, to turn aside the fateful blow.”
CHAPTER XIII
IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE INTERIOR OF A DESERTED HOUSE
An empty, lonely house was that on Quality Hill in Elm Street after the daughter’s marriage. It was not that the Doctor and Mrs. Nesbit did not see their daughter often; but whether she came every day or twice a week or every week, always she came as a visitor. No one may have two homes. And the daughter of the house of Nesbit had her own home;–a home wherein she was striving to bind her husband to a domesticity which in itself did not interest him. But with her added charm to it, she believed that she could lure him into an acceptance of her ideal of marriage. So with all her powers she fell to her task. Consciously or unconsciously, directly or by indirection, but always with the joy of adventure in her heart, whether with books or with music or with comradeship, she was bending herself to the business of wifehood, so that her own home filled her life and the Nesbit home was lonely; so lonely was it that by way of solace and diversion, Mrs. Nesbit had all the woodwork downstairs “done over” in quarter-sawed oak with elaborate carvings. Ferocious gargoyles, highly excited dolphins, improper, pot-bellied little cupids, and mermaids without a shred of character, seemed about to pounce out from banister, alcove, bookcase, cozy corner and china closet.
George Brotherton pretended to find resemblances in the effigies to people about Harvey, and to the town’s echoing delight he began to name the figures after their friends, and always saluted the figures intimately, as Maggie, or Henry, or the Captain, or John Kollander, or Lady Herdicker. But through the wooden menagerie in the big house the Doctor whistled and hummed and smoked and chirruped more or less drearily. To him the Japanese screens, the huge blue vases, the ponderous high-backed chairs crawly with meaningless carvings, the mantels full of jars and pots and statuettes, brought no comfort. He was forever putting his cane over his arm and clicking down the street to the Van Dorn home; but he felt in spite of all his daughter’s efforts to welcome him–and perhaps because of them–that he was a stranger there. So slowly and rather imperceptibly to him, certainly without any conscious desire for it, a fondness for Kenyon Adams sprang up in the Doctor’s heart. For it was exceedingly soft in spots and those spots were near his home. He was domestic and he was fond of home joys. So when Mrs. Nesbit put aside the encyclopedia, from which she was getting the awful truth about Babylonian Art for her paper to be read before the Shakespeare Club, and going to the piano, brought from the bottom of a pile of yellow music a tattered sheet, played a Chopin nocturne in a rolling and rather grand style that young women affected before the Civil War, the Doctor’s joy was scarcely less keen than the child’s. Then came rare occasions when Laura, being there for the night while her husband was away on business, would play melodies that cut the child’s heart to the quick and brought tears of joy to his big eyes. It seemed to him at those times as if Heaven itself were opened for him, and for days the melodies she played would come ringing through his heart. Often he would sit absorbed at the piano when he should have been practicing his lesson, picking out those melodies and trying with a poignant yearning for perfection to find their proper harmonies. But at such times after he had frittered away a few minutes, Mrs. Nesbit would call down to him, “You, Kenyon,” and he would sigh and take up his scales and runs and arpeggios.
Kenyon was developing into a shy, lovely child of few noises; he seemed to love to listen to every continuous sound–a creaking gate, a waterdrip from the eaves, a whistling wind–a humming wire. Sometimes the Doctor would watch Kenyon long minutes, as the child listened to the fire’s low murmur in the grate, and would wonder what the little fellow made of it all. But above everything else about the child the Doctor was interested in watching his eyes develop into the great, liquid, soulful orbs that marked his mother. To the Doctor the resemblance was rather weird. But he could see no other point in the child’s body or mind or soul whereon Margaret Müller had left a token. The Doctor liked to discuss Kenyon with his wife from the standpoint of ancestry. He took a sort of fiendish delight–if one may imagine a fiend with a seraphic face and dancing blue eyes and a mouth that loved to pucker in a pensive whistle–in Mrs. Nesbit’s never failing stumble over the child’s eyes.
Any evening he would lay aside his Browning─even in a knotty passage wherein the Doctor was wont to take much pleasure, and revert to type thus:
“Yes, I guess there’s something in blood as you say! The child shows it! But where do you suppose he gets those eyes?” His wife would answer energetically, “They aren’t like Amos’s and they certainly are not much like Mary’s! Yet those eyes show that somewhere in the line there was fine blood and high breeding.”
And the Doctor, remembering the kraut-peddling Müller, who used to live back in Indiana, and who was Kenyon’s great-grandfather, would shake a wise head and answer:
“Them eyes is certainly a throw-back to the angel choir, my dear–a sure and certain throw-back!”
And while Mrs. Nesbit was climbing the Sands family tree, from Mary Adams back to certain Irish Sandses of the late eighteenth century, the Doctor would flit back to “Paracelsus,” to be awakened from its spell by: “Only the Irish have such eyes! They are the mark of the Celt all over the world! But it’s curious that neither Mary nor Daniel had those eyes!”
“It’s certainly curious like,” squeaked the Doctor amicably–“certainly curious like, as the treetoad said when he couldn’t holler up a rain. But it only proves that blood always tells! Bedelia, there’s really nothing so true in this world as blood!”
And Mrs. Nesbit would ask him a moment later what he could find so amusing in “Paracelsus”? She certainly never had found anything but headaches in it.
Yet there came a time when the pudgy little stomach of the Doctor did not shake in merriment. For he also had his problem of blood to solve. Tom Van Dorn was, after all, the famous Van Dorn baby!
One evening in the late winter as