JOHN was to find out what had happened to James when he had pulled himself together and joined the family breakfast. Dear Mother had the dearest letter from dear James. He had been invited to go yachting with the Montgomery Stairses and had refused, but during the night he had found himself wishing that he had not refused, and what had the dear, original, adventurous fellow done? He had packed his grip and set out on foot for City Island so as to join the Winona before daybreak, when she was to sail. The party had all spent the night on board, and wouldn't they be surprised and delighted when they found her darling at breakfast waiting for them?
Dear Mother then wandered off in speculation concerning rumors which she had heard hinting that between Miss Winona Stairs, who was a great heiress, and her James there was more than a passing interest.
"I only pray," said Mrs. Eaton, "that if it is true, she is good enough for him. He is so sensitive . . . He has never given me a moment's doubt or anxiety. It is a blessing to have at least one son who loves his home and his old mother."
John, who was usually hearty at meals, ate next to nothing. The praises of James sickened him, and a dozen times his outraged sense of justice almost caused him to leap to his feet and roar out the whole truth about the precious rascal to an accompaniment of breaking glass and china. But no good purpose would be served, and he managed to restrain himself.
There was about an hour before train time and this was punctuated with many awkward silences. Mr. Eaton kept thinking: "How long will it be before I see this fine boy of mine again? Perhaps I shall never see him again."
Mr. Eaton while reading in his study had recently suffered from a curious and painful attack. It had been as if a huge hand had suddenly seized his heart and squeezed it while it struggled and fluttered. He had not mentioned this to anybody. But the memory of it did not leave him often—the pain had been very great—and he lived in fear of a repetition.
Mrs. Eaton kept thinking that John's ways were not her ways and that people whose ways were not hers, and who did not smugly and with exaggerated cheerfulness fall in with hers, were better off at sea. To Sarah, John's visit had been anything but a pleasure. She felt that his occupation dragged the family down socially. Why hadn't he stayed in the United States Navy? That was bad enough. But surely it wasn't gentlemanly to be in the merchant marine. Edward was silent because of grief. He loved his big brother with all his heart, and believed that everything John did was exactly right, and that he was the wisest, kindest, and most accomplished gentleman in the world.
Edward and his father accompanied John to the station.
"Well, my boy," said Mr. Eaton, "good-bye and may God bless you."
"And may God bless you, father," said John. Then suddenly: "Father," he said, "if you hear about me doing anything and don't understand how I came to do it, please don't be in a hurry to condemn me. I try to live the way I think you would live if you were a sailor . . . Eddie, will you do me a favor? Will you please grow up to be as good a man as your father?"
Poor Mr. Eaton was embarrassed at this frank and open praise. His hand closed tightly on Edward's, and as the train pulled out from the station and John waved to them from the platform, tears gathered in his extraordinary black eyes and rolled out of them. He pulled himself together with a laugh and dashed the back of his hand across his eyes. Then he clapped Edward cheerfully on the back and exclaimed:
"And you've got to do me a favor too, young man—you've got to grow up to be as good a man as your brother John."
To run off to sea without doing something to square matters for the Jackson girl never entered John's head. So he got off the train at the old familiar Westchester station, left his valise with the ticket agent, who remembered him, and set out on the old familiar walk of his school days. He felt immensely older and very sad.
Here was the shop where the children used to buy "suckums" and licorice "shoe laces." Next the fork of the roads with the triangular blacksmith shop. And John still saw and admired through the open door in the murky light the skilled play of the old smith's vast brown muscles.
The harness shop came next, the littlest shop in the world, with the family quarters above it. There was a "For Sale" sign on the building, but in answer to John's knocking the Jackson girl herself came to the door. It was obvious that she had relied on John's promise. For she had put on her best dress and done all she could to make herself look neat and attractive. But her face fell when she saw that John was unaccompanied.
John stepped quickly into the little leather shop and shut the door behind him. "My brother," he said, "promised me that he would come. He gave me his word of honor. So I went to sleep with a clear conscience. This morning I found that he had run away . . . I think you are well rid of him."
During this recital her face had turned hard and scornful. "I may be rid of him," she said, "but he's not rid of me."
"I feel the same way about him," said John. "I want to see him punished."
"He will be," exclaimed the girl, and she clenched her fists.
"They usually are—in the end," said John; "at least I hope they are. Meanwhile what you need is money so that you can live and a name to protect you against gossip." He tried to show her a light-hearted smile. "Will you take mine?"
She did not understand at first and he had to explain.
"You're all dressed up and expecting to get married, and I don't choose to have you disappointed. James is out of the question. Will I do?"
Her face softened and her eyes began to fill. She came a step closer to him. "Say," she said, "you're a real man, you are."
"It's about the only thing we can do," said John, and he blushed because of the admiration in her eyes.
"It's a dirty trick of me to take you at your word," said the girl. "But I don't see what else I can do. Honest I don't." John put his arm around her shoulders and patted them in a fatherly way. She had begun to cry. "Do you mean it?" she asked after a while. "Truly?"
"Truly," said John.
"Will you wait here while I tell mother? Mother don't hardly speak to me."
"I want to meet your mother."
The girl seemed a little taken aback. Then she appeared to smile. "Your voice," she said, "is like James's—a little. Mother's blind. Will you let her think you're James? She thinks it's James that's coming to marry me. It would take forever to make her understand what has happened."
"All right," said John. "But before you talk with your mother I want you to know just what I can do and just what I can't. It isn't much . . . I'm a sailor, you know, so I won't be—I won't be home much. I have a hundred and sixty dollars that I can spare and I can send you thirty dollars a month out of my pay. It won't ever be less and when I get to be master it will be more. I'd want you to move away from Westchester. You'll be getting something for the shop, won't you, when it's sold? I don't know where you'd better go, but somewhere where we're not all so well known. A fresh start won't do any harm."
"Mother's from Flushing," said the girl. "She's always wanting to go back. We could go to Flushing."
"And," said John, "I wouldn't think of lying to my father; but if he heard that we'd been married he'd have to learn about James. I think we'd better get married in New York. Nobody knows us there. You could come back to your mother then, and move to Flushing when you were ready. My ship sails from Boston in the morning, and I have to be aboard by midnight."
"It's more than I deserve," said the girl. "I've been a fool and a disgrace. But if you was to stay around, I'd show you there was some good in me. I'd work my hands off to the bone for you."
"I believe that I am getting a good little wife," said John simply; "and now let's tell your mother that we are going to the city to be married. Pershaps she'd like to come too."
The girl shook her head. "She'd like to, but it's hard for her to get about. It's awful to be blind."
And so John joined his life to another which a member of his family had wrecked, and went to sea feeling very much as if he had tied a millstone around his neck.
The adventure with Dear Mother's paint-box had shaken Edward's ambition to be an explorer. And he read no more about dwarfs and gorillas and elephant guns. He had now an intense wish to be an artist. He wished that he had been more attentive at the clay-modeling class where Alice Ruggles had showed so much talent. He might have learned something. But he had missed that opportunity. And now he had no clay to work with, nor paints nor brushes.
There were stubs of pencils to be filched from father's study, and the groceries were usually delivered in wrappings of brown or white paper which could be dampened and flattened out with a warm iron, and upon which it was possible to draw.
Being now keen to learn, it was a pity that Edward could not have had a teacher, for having a fine pair of observing eyes in his head and a flexible hand he must have made quick progress. But in the long run it did not matter. For in a few years' time his own experience and experiments turned teacher, and he could draw anything in creation very swiftly, surely and beautifully.
Dear Mother was down on artists, except Raphæl and the old Italians who depicted religious subjects. Artists were low people who lived loosely. If Edward had said that he wished to be an artist, he would have been deprived of all pencils and grocery store paper. But Edward was a wise child. And he believed in being praised and encouraged instead of being scolded and opposed. Wherefore, although the two large library volumes filled with reproductions of masterpieces contained also pictures of battles and pagan odds and ends, he confined his copying to the religious subjects.
To this day Edward, with his eyes shut, can do a very forceful head of Christ, or having placed four or five curling and apparently meaningless lines on a sheet of paper can convert them with three or four touches of pure magic either into a classic Madonna and child or into the five little pigs who went to market.
The little hypocrite went to even greater lengths in order to win his mother's favor and praise. He confined himself to religious subjects, and when as sometimes happened the Old Master had omitted a fig leaf, Edward had tacked one on. When in later life he was painting the shadowed fig leaves on the gleaming white wall of the Corsican brigand's house in that fascinating little landscape which the Luxembourg bought, he smiled often to think under what circumstances and for what purpose he had first given his attention to the anatomy of that particular kind of leaf.
For a little boy who intended to be a minister to develop a passion for drawing Saints and Christs and Madonnas and bambini seemed normal enough to Mrs. Eaton and beyond censure. And if a little too much realistic blood sometimes flowed from the arrow wounds of his Saint Sebastians, she overlooked it. It wasn't quite nice; it would have been as well to have stuck the arrows in the Saint as one sticks pins in a cushion or cloves in a ham, but the main thing was that he had chosen to depict a Saint.
One day he tackled the three Marys and outdid himself. He made a drawing full of faults, no doubt, but filled also with grace and a certain flowing quality achieved by the sweetness and cleanness of the lines. And he knew at once that he had drawn better than he had ever drawn before.
He hid his masterpiece away until the next day, which was Dear Mother's birthday, and when she was alone after breakfast he presented it to her, with an assortment of well chosen and propitiating lies.
"I drew it especially for you, Dear Mother, for your birthday," he said, "and it's the nicest one I've ever done. It's the three blessed Marys, Dear Mother; and see, I didn't have to hide their feet with bunches of grass the way I used to do. And the hands do look like hands, Dear Mother, don't they?"
They certainly did, and Mrs. Eaton said so. She was in a good humor. And even in her lay, false-seeing eyes, the picture had a certain charm.
"There weren't any halos in the original," continued Edward. "I put them in out of my own head. I wouldn't want people to look at this picture and think I'd just gone and drawn three ordinary ladies." He looked now up into his mother's face and said: "Dear Mother, it will be my birthday in February, and if you'll only give me a little box of paints I'll color their lovely robes for you, and the trees in the distance. Mary Mother ought to have a sky-blue dress, and Mary Cleophas would look nice in pale yellow. Mary Magdalene is drawn after she stopped being bad and had repented and been forgiven. So we could make her dress pink instead of red, don't you think? . . . I do wish you'd think over about the paints."
Mrs. Eaton did. She thought over about the paints then and there and concluded that Edward should have them. But she did not tell him this. She believed in discipline. She did not believe in children having things just when they wanted them. It was far, far better for them to wait.
So she said that she didn't know about the paints. One would see. It depended perhaps not altogether upon whether it was good for a little boy to have a box of paints or not, but much on whether between now and his birthday, during all those intervening months, not some of the time, but all of the time, he was a good boy, a good, God-fearing, Christian little boy in whom his Dear Mother might repose a certain amount of confidence.
Now to obtain paints at this period in his career Edward would have committed any crime, would have stooped to any lie, duplicity or hypocrisy. He was even willing to be a good, well conducted little boy for every one of all the long days of a good many months. It seemed a small price to pay.
The school year had opened and he had not now so much time to draw. The boys teased him because he was going to be a clergyman, a career which seemed rather girlish to them. And his voice seesawed so violently between high and low that when he was called upon to recite the whole class tittered, and was reproved by a tittering teacher.
Toward Christmas, however, Edward's voice settled into a pleasant, engaging place—rather low down in the scale, with a husky quality. One day at recess he fought a battle in the hickory wood
back of halfway house with a boy slightly larger than himself, and came out about even—so even, indeed, that although each boy claimed a victory and asked only to be let at the other again to prove it, each had already determined in his heart that his next fight would be with somebody else.
This fight did Edward a lot of good. He had been considered something of a sissy. That phase was over. Asked by a stern mother to explain a purplish, greenish circle about his left eye, he had told a long rigmarole about a religious dispute with another boy who had made fun of the miracles in the Bible. Mrs. Eaton could not approve of fighting, but the cause in which her little boy had fought softened her judgment. He was forgiven, but he was not to fight any more. He could show his contempt for scoffers in more telling ways.
But the true inwardness of the battle was altogether different. Between the boys' playground and the girls' at Mr. Harrington's school there was a high fence of pine boards. Here and there a knot had fallen or been punched from its socket, and through these peep-holes the boys and girls sometimes communicated, if only for the reason that during school hours such communication, even between brothers and sisters, was strictly forbidden. Edward and Alice Ruggles were frequent offenders.
But their reason was different. There was really a sincere attachment between them. And each hankered after the society of the other. Sometimes they exchanged through a knothole choice tidbits from the school luncheons with which their respective mothers had provided them.
On the day of the battle, the Jepson boy had seen Edward receive at the fair and somewhat inkstained hands of Alice, a luscious sandwich of thin bread and apricot jam. In places the jam had soaked through the bread. It was a morsel for the gods.
As Edward raised this delectable sandwich to his ravenous schoolboy mouth, the Jepson boy stepped forward and with a harsh, sibilant, sneering sound knocked it from his hand. Edward recovered the sandwich and looked at it. It had fallen on an ant heap and was a ruin of sand and struggling red ants.
For a moment Edward looked puzzled. He looked puzzled because he was puzzled. He was puzzled at a series of passions the like of which he had never experienced before. One of these passions was for Alice. Through her gift she had been insulted and belittled. His heart swam with an aching tenderness. Another passion was of disappointment at seeing something of a peculiar deliciousness, which he had been about to eat, spoiled. There were other passions in the mixture. And the least of these was the wish to do murder then and there upon the person of young Jepson.
As a preliminary Edward stepped suddenly forward and violently scrubbed the Jepson boy's face with the bread and the butter and the jam and the sand and the ants.
Blows must then and there have been struck had not big boys intervened. A dozen of them, scenting a difference of opinion, had swiftly gathered like so many buzzards from different parts of the playground, and these now took charge of the affair. Two appointed themselves Edward's seconds and two took charge of Jepson. Then the principals were taken at a sharp run—for recess was short and there was no time to be lost—to the hickory wood back of half-way house, and had their jackets stripped off, and were then thrown at each other with a brutal and joyous violence.
Americans believe that the average American is born with a knowledge of how to use his fists, and that in this he differs from foreigners as clearly as any man whose thumb meets up with his fore finger differs from a monkey whose thumb doesn't. No national belief was ever more charged with error. It is no more natural for an American or a man of any other race to strike straight and true blows with his fists than it is for a cat to kick out backwards like a mule.
Edward and Jepson were average American boys and their zeal to strike each other terrible blows was for some minutes only exceeded by their failure to hit each other at all. They brandished their fists as beetles brandish their antennae, and they leaped about and embraced and swung their arms like windmills. Something or other at the last moment always turned their most terrible blows into pushes. Edward's most painful injury was to his left instep. And it was not the fist but the heavy boot heel of the Jepson boy which caused it. It was the Jepson boy's right elbow which blackened Edward's eye. And it was the top of Edward's head in collision with the Jepson boy's soft stomach which, just as the school bell rang and stopped the sport, sickened the Jepson boy and made him wish that he had allowed Edward to eat his old sandwich in peace.
Through the convenient knothole the fair Alice had observed the insult, the challenge, the disappearance of the combatants behind half-way house and their subsequent reappearance. It was not easy to tell which was the winner. Nevertheless her heart beat high and she could not but regard Edward as a hero. She believed in fighting. It was one of her father's beliefs. The Ruggles family were also brought up to believe in wars. Mr. Ruggles believed that occasional wars were beneficial to populations and that what became of individuals if only they didn't revert to monkeys, which, so he averred, they only too frequently did, was of no consequence.
But for this battle, Edward's daily conduct up to the day of his birthday was exemplary and so were his reports from school. Consequently Mrs. Eaton, who had not been allowed to forget that there was a question of paints concerned, made up her mind that she would give them to him.
It had always been unfortunate for Edward that his birthday came so soon after Christmas. Because Christmas with its gifts to all and sundry had the effect of throwing Mrs. Eaton into a miserly state of mind for the rest of the winter. And it was not until the shrubberies had to be worked over and the grounds put in order in the spring that she again spent small sums of money at all freely. Eatons whose birthdays fell during the summer months always fared best.
Furthermore, during this particular autumn, and especially at Christmas time, James had been a heavy drag on her pocketbook. For this particular ewe lamb her sacrifices were willing and cheerful. For James, as she frequently said, like Ruth, was "taking his place in the world," whatever that may have meant, and like most mid-Victorian Christians, Mrs. Eaton was a social snob of the most rampant nature. James frequented the society of the rich and the magnificent. He was said to be almost engaged to the beautiful and wealthy Miss Stairs. Wherefore money spent on James was well spent. He would do his family honor one of these days and make them proud. That James also frequented the society of the very low, if not humble, was not known to his mother. And sometimes when she imagined that he was spending the night with rich friends, he was not doing any such thing.
James would save up his money until he had enough to go on a tear, and then, when his eyes had cleared up, he would come home and tell the most magnificent and satisfactory lies, and begin once more the long and tedious process of wheedling and saving money.
Why the Jackson girl had left Westchester and no longer pestered him with her troubles, and whither she had gone, he did not know. And if only she remained absent and silent he did not care. But once in a while sudden misgivings woke him in the night. The mental picture of that young woman suddenly appearing at the rectory with a baby in her arms and telling Dear Mother all about everything was truly terrifying. But perhaps the fool of a girl had been mistaken about the baby!
Well, Dear Mother made a special trip to the great city to purchase some odds and ends which Edward, who was growing rapidly, really needed, and the paints which she felt he did not really need at all, but which she had made up her mind to give him. In those old days the English made the best and the most expensive water colors. And the Germans made the cheapest and worst. The German cakes were so hard and thin that only intensive rubbing with a brush loaded with water would extract any color from them whatever. Children, however, could eat them with safety, and for this reason they found a ready sale. The English colors had the reputation of murdering little children who ate them too freely.
So, although the honest young woman who waited on Mrs. Eaton assured her that for seri ous purposes of painting the German paints were of no use whatever, it was the German paints which Mrs. Eaton, feeling miserly from the Christmas spending, finally bought. Edward, she felt, would never know the difference.
But he did. And when he opened the paint-box and saw that for which he had so long waited, he suffered one of the most bitter and poignant disappointments of his life.
But he dared not let Dear Mother read the expression on his face, so he flung his arms about her and buried the expression against her rustling black silk dress.
Later he carried the paints to the little attic over the wood-house and tried them and gave up, and flung himself presently face down on the hard dusty floor and wept in an unmanly way. His father coming home from the church by the short cut through the woods heard the muffled sound of the weeping and climbed the attic stairs to ascertain the cause.
"Hurt?" he asked.
Edward was about ready to stop crying anyway and he got to his feet and quickly controlled himself, unless we may reckon an occasional sniffle a lack of self-control.
"Mother promised me some paints for my birthday if I'd be good," said Edward, "and I've been good for months and months, and she gave me these. You can't paint with these things."
Mr. Eaton took the japanned box in his hands and opened it. "I know you can't," he said cheerfully. "I've tried. You scrub 'em and scrub 'em, don't you, and the color won't come off on the brush. They aren't even good colors. I wonder why they make them. I think they are supposed to be harmless if taken internally. In other words, their virtues are all negative. Is this where you come to draw?"
"Yes, sir," said Edward, who was now perfectly composed.
"Will you show me some of your drawings? I haven't asked before. Sometimes, when you're working at something you don't like to show it to people, you like to put that off until you are sure that you've done the best you can."
Edward un-covered a whole sheaf of drawings in their secret hiding-place and brought them to his father. This one seated himself in the one broken chair which the place afforded and began to examine them one by one.
Father's judgments were Edward's gospel. And the little boy stood with an anxious beating heart.
When Mr. Eaton had looked at the last drawing, he smiled at Edward and said with a quiet sincerity: "Eddie, I think they are amazing. You have a strong and definite talent. And I don't blame you a bit for crying about the paints. The disappointment might have drawn tears from a stone. You never can tell. The next time I go to the city I'll get you the best box of water colors there is. You ought to have them. You need them. But let's keep it to ourselves. We don't want to hurt mother's feelings." Once more he looked at some of the drawings. "Do you like religious subjects best?" he asked.
"Not really and truly," said Edward. "But mother wouldn't like me to spend so much time drawing if I drew other things."
"I see," said the Reverend Mr. Eaton. "Well, some of the old Italian masters painted them for similar reasons, I imagine. And some of them didn't draw as well as you do."
"John," said Edward diffidently, "thought that I could be a real artist if I practised hard. He said that in a few years if I wanted to be an artist he would help me."
"I would help you too," said his father.
"But mother wouldn't like it," said Edward.
"No," said Mr. Eaton with a sigh, "your mother wouldn't like it." At that moment a ghastly look came over Mr. Eaton's face and he began to beat the air with his hands. Then his hands clenched, and with a sound half moan and half sob, he slipped from the chair to the floor and lay there writhing and groaning. The crisis of pain passed. "Don't be frightened, Eddie," he murmured. "I'll be all right. Oh, dear—dear—dear—that was bad! That was almost more than I could bear."
Sweat burst from his face at every pore. He lay still for a few long moments and then got slowly to his feet. He put a trembling arm around his little son and held him close to his side.
"That was a heart attack, Eddie, old man," he said. "I've had three of them. I didn't want anybody to know. But you know. And I don't want you to tell, Don't worry. I may never have another—and as you see—they are painful, but not fatal."
The minister smiled like a knight.
One important thing happened during Edward's sixteenth year. His friendship with Alice Ruggles, the atheist's daughter, had grown steadily and strongly. The children were never so happy as when they were together. They understood each other perfectly. Alice had turned into a perfect little beauty, and she was sweet-tempered, but Mrs. Eaton did not approve of her and awaited only a good opportunity to put an end to the friendship. During the autumn of Edward's sixteenth year this opportunity occurred.
Sarah at this time was twenty, and although she had been out for two years, Mrs. Eaton's efforts to get her married and settled had miscarried. Sarah had a sharp tongue and the young men were afraid of her. She could be very disagreeable on occasion, and the thought that time was passing and opportunities being missed did nothing to sweeten her temper. Sarah had something of James's temperament. Almost any man attracted her, but at the first sign of a budding romance becoming mildewed or blighted she would make the mistake of wooing her hero too ardently, and then turning bitter and tempersome when he shied off.
Mrs. Eaton had engineered a little supper dance for Sarah, and had also invited a few boys and girls of Edward's set to keep him company. People liked to go to the rectory dances. The food was always excellent, and the music, taken right out of the heart of an old square Steinway by Mr. Eaton's organist, was capital.
It was a warm night in Indian summer. The library had a good parquet floor which had been cleaned and waxed for the occasion. Most of the chairs had been carried out on the veranda, for when she had a daughter to marry, Mrs. Eaton believed in couples being privileged to sit out a dance. The windows of her own bedroom opened immediately above the veranda, and retiring now and then to this point of vantage she could often overhear what the young people were saying.
The first thing that Alice Ruggles did that night to offend Mrs. Eaton was to look so brilliant and pretty that all the other girls looked plain by comparison. Alice wore a high-necked black velvet dress with an Irish lace collar. Her eyes matched the dress, and her face was like a young rose. Women at that time wore what were called angel sleeves. These resembled half inflated balloons and destroyed the human shape almost as completely as the older fashion of bustles.
The fashion of Alice's dress was as old as the thirteenth century. It followed the lines of her slim body and gave her something of a boyish and princely look. This slap at fashion was an offense to Mrs. Eaton, but it was a minor offense. The real offense was deeper seated.
It happened that Sarah, having tried to stuff an enormous supper into a stomach laced out of all patience, had had a fainting spell and been retired from action. It was then that Alice was heard to remark in her clear boyish voice that people who wore corsets and laced themselves were always suffering the tortures of the damned, and deserved to. For her part she didn't wear corsets and never would.
Not only did Alice voice these outrages aloud, but she voiced them to a group of amused and admiring young men and boys. Among them Edward, still headed for Holy Orders.
It was too much. It was more than Mrs. Eaton could bear. She sailed into the midst of the group.
"You don't wear corsets," she cried, "and you let men put their arms around you and dance with you! If a daughter of mine were to speak as you have spoken I would whip her within an inch of her life. Not to wear corsets is immodest and indecent."
The attack was so wanton and unprovoked that Alice, taken wholly by surprise, found no words with which to answer, and turned slowly to the color of white paper. She did not, however, lower her eyes from Mrs. Eaton's face.
"It is precisely," said Mrs. Eaton, "what was to be expected of a child of your parentage and bringing up. How could a man who believes himself to be descended from a monkey have anything but a shameless daughter? You will have to sit out the rest of the dances, Alice; I cannot have an uncorseted female gamboling about the rectory."
Alice, hot with rage and shame, flung out of the room. She was for getting her hat and cloak and walking home, all the long miles, in her little high-heeled slippers. But Edward, who had followed her into the hall, begged and pleaded with her. And James, too, infatuated with the girl's beauty, came and added his pleadings to Edward's. She consented to stay then until her father came for her. But she would stay on the veranda—cloaked and hatted and ready to go.
"Even if she is your mother, Eddie," she exclaimed, "I don't ever want to see her again, and I won't ever speak to her."
The two children found two chairs in a dark corner of the veranda. Presently Edward had made her laugh.
Suddenly she laid her little hand on his and said: "You're sweet, Eddie. You're good as gold. Nobody could help loving you. I wish you weren't going to be a minister."
Edward smiled in the dark. He was not going to be a minister. But that was his secret. He was going to be a great artist. He was going to fill the world with paintings of a slim Alice in a black velvet dress with an Irish lace collar.
"When you are a minister, Eddie," said Alice, "are you going to hold with the Evangelist who states that Mary and the child spent the winter in Egypt or with the Evangelist who maintains that they remained in Bethlehem? Or are you going to be like your mother and believe them both?"
"Sssh!" said Edward, and he whispered a warning. But not in time. There came down to them from the window above where she had been listening the terrible voice of Mrs. Eaton.
"I heard what you said, you young Jezebel," said she. "Don't ever darken my door again. Don't you dare!"
Later she forbade Edward to have anything more to do with the atheist's daughter. He promised his mother that he wouldn't, and he continued to see Alice whenever he had a chance.
Lying and hypocrisy, pretending to be altogether different from what you really are—these were the arts which Edward zealously practised in his own home in order to keep the peace with his mother. And these arts were real perversions of his nature, for he had been born into the world an honest, straightforward baby. It was only for his mother's benefit, however, that it was necessary to practise them. With all the world outside the rectory and with his father inside of it he was frank and truthful.
He was especially so with the Ruggles family. It was a long way to their house, and he was forbidden to go there; but as it was always possible to say that he had been somewhere else and get himself believed, he went often. He went not only for the sake of being with Alice, but for the sake of hearing her father talk.
Ruggles was an extraordinary man. He had enough income to live on, and he shocked the community in which he lived by refusing to do even a day's work at anything remunerative. He spent about half of his time reading and remembering what he had read, and the rest of his time studying nature in all its phases—including the human ones.
His home stood in the midst of two acres of ground. But instead of planting these grounds so that his neighbors could see into them and even into the windows of his house, he had surrounded them, European fashion, with a high brick wall, massed his planting along the boundaries, and made himself as private as a mouse in its nest.
When you went to call upon the Ruggles family you did not ring the front door-bell. You rang the bell at the front gate. Then while you waited for the Chinaman to come and open the peep-hole in the gate and look to see who you were, you had a chance to look about you and were almost under compulsion to examine the gate itself. This was made of heavy oak planks studded with fancy-headed nails. Some of the nail-heads were shaped like Tudor roses and some like Pilgrim shells; but others were shaped like letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks. And the Chinaman never came until you had had time to read several times over and commit to memory the following:
They Say. What Say They? Let Them Say!
That was Ruggles' motto. People gossiped about him. They said that he was an atheist, and that he believed man to be decended from a monkey, and was an advocate of free love. And he didn't care what people said about him. And hence the motto.
Some people went so far as to say that Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles were not married. As a matter of fact they were, but as they really loved each other very much and had always been absolutely faithful to each other, it didn't seem to matter very much whether they were married or not. As Mr. Ruggles himself often said: "Marriage wasn't invented for people who love each other and want to live together. It was made for people who hate each other and want to live apart." But he would usually add, and sometimes for the special benefit of Alice and Edward, "And it was also invented for people who only think they love each other and think they want to live together!"
And when he said that, Alice would say in a disgusted way: "I suppose that means you and me, Eddie"; and then she would laugh and everybody else would laugh. Edward would also blush.
Edward's idea of happiness at this time would have been to live always with the Ruggles family. He would have liked to have his father also with him inside of the tall brick wall, and nobody else—not Dear Mother, or dear Sarah, or brother James.
Here, he would have liked to live out his life in happy, stimulating talk and laughter and in an infinite painting of pictures.
At this time it was obvious to almost everybody who knew the boy, with the exception of his own mother, that Edward had a splendid talent for drawing and painting, and a speed and facility which were almost Japanesque.
As a record of his visits to the Ruggles he left a long series of drawings, which Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles, very old and broken people now, treasure to this day. They are mostly drawings of Alice. "Trilby" had just stormed the hearts of the world. And the old song, "Oh, don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?" was on the lips of all who sang.
So Edward drew his sweet Alice in every conceivable pose and lighting and in every kind of costume. The oftener he drew her the more exquisite she seemed to him, and the more exquisite he managed to make her look.
And to this day he could draw her with his eyes shut, if he wanted to. But he hasn't the heart—poor fellow!
Edward had long since made up his mind that one of these days he would tell Dear Mother that he was not going into the church, and that instead he was going to draw and paint for a living, and that if there wasn't a living in it, he was going to paint and draw just the same.
It was all very well, he argued, to be a hypocrite day in and day out for the sake of keeping the peace. It was all very well, in small matters and beliefs, to pretend that you were of Dear Mother's persuasion, but when it came to great decisions, like the choice between a divinity school and an art school, it would be necessary to come out into the open, take his own side and maintain it.
He faced this ultimate day of reckoning the more easily because it seemed always such a long, indefinite way off. But days galloped by, and months trotted by, and years crawled past, and all of a sudden something definite had to be done and done quickly.
The school year being over, Dear Mother took Edward in her arms and said: "And in the autumn, my darling son, you will go to the divinity school and begin your life's work. Father has arranged everything."
It would have seemed as if this was Edward's opportunity. But he did not so see it. He wanted to see it, and to seize it, but he couldn't. He wanted to say:
"I've decided not to go into the church, Dear Mother. I believe that God made everything and that Christ was the best gentleman that ever lived, and that if we all did what He wanted us to the world would be a better place. But the God of the Old Testament isn't the God Who made everything, but a jealous, horrible, old monster, and the Gospels contradict each other dreadfully. I don't believe that God wrote the Bible, because lots of it is pure drivel, and I'm not going to despise the whole Jewish race the way you do, and worship a member of it. . . .
"If a man goes down on his hands and knees, all the hairs on his body are so arranged that if he had enough of them and it rained, they would shed the rain. A newborn baby can hang by its hands. The worst dreams I've ever had have all been about falling. I think that we were monkeys before we were men and pollywogs before we were monkeys, and oysters before that . . . And you think that everybody that isn't an Episcopalian will go to Hell, and I don't . . . So I'm not going to stand up and preach what I don't believe for a living—the way poor father does."
But Edward said nothing of the kind. Why spoil a whole summer? Why not wait till the very last minute, and then tell Dear Mother that he was going to duck out of being a minister? Besides, John would be home in August. If Dear Mother proved to be too awfully horrid and despotic, one could always go down to the sea with John, and John would help one to France and to the studio of a good master.
So he accepted Dear Mother's announcement about the divinity school with becoming gravity and until John's arrival in August continued to play the hypocrite.
July was a dull month for Edward. It was so hot that the pencil or the brush kept slipping sideways in his fingers, and so much water had fallen in June that mosquitoes made out-of-door sketching impossible. To make matters worse the Ruggles family had gone to the White Mountains for the summer, and both Sarah and Dear Mother were almost murderously ill with hay fever.
But this was really a blessing in disguise, for just when the two women seemed to be making life intolerable for the men of the family, dearest grandmother sent Dear Mother a check, and Dear Mother decided at once to take Sarah and herself to the White Mountains for a stay of three weeks. Edward begged very hard to be taken too. The White Mountains were vague to him, but he felt that somewhere among them he would be sure to stumble on the Ruggles family—Alice especially; and even if he didn't, the mountains and the trees and waterfalls would be fun to draw. But Dear Mother could not see how any good purpose could be served by Edward's going. He wasn't a daughter who might possibly land a husband, and the check was rather small.
So the two women, their noses red and angry, departed alone. And if they left much heat in the rectory and many mosquitoes outside, they left also an atmosphere of intense peace and quiet.
For a few days just before the return of Mrs. Eaton and Sarah, Edward and his father had the rectory to themselves. James had either gone to the city on one of his periodic sprees or else he had gone to Newport to visit some rich friends. He himself had said Newport.
Those few days with his father were perhaps the happiest days of Edward's life. Their meals together had all the gaiety of little picnics. They discussed every subject under the sun, and for the time being were absolutely free from female domination or nagging. Upon the last night of those few happy days, just when it was getting to be bedtime, Mr. Eaton suddenly asked his son a leading question.
"Eddie," he said, "you're not going to the divinity school, are you?"
"No, sir!" said Edward.
"That is final, is it, and not subject to sudden change owing to irresistible pressure?" Mr. Eaton smiled as he spoke, and Edward smiled back at him.
"I'll have to tell mother that I'm not going," said Edward, "and there'll be a row. I've tried to tell her a hundred times. But nothing comes of it; I get too panicky. I'm a perfect coward where mother's concerned. And I don't know why. I'm too big to be whipped. There isn't a blessed thing she can do to hurt me, and yet I'm scared to death of her."
"But she'll have to know."
"If I could tell her that I was going to the law school instead of the divinity school it wouldn't be so bad. But it's the telling her that I'm going to be an artist is what I can't face. You know how she is about people who paint and sculpture and write—I mean live people. Dead artists are all right with mother—Walter Scott and Raphæl and Milton and Praxiteles. But the live ones are beyond the pale. They are not only low and vulgar, but lost . . . What I'm afraid of is that mother will take sick or something like that, and that nothing will make her well except my going into the church."
"For a mere child," said Mr. Eaton, "you are hideously wise. That was what my mother did to me."
"And that is what Ruth is doing to Bruce with her back."
"In my experience," said Mr. Eaton, "there is nothing that the average woman won't stoop to in order to get her own way. She usually gets it, and usually it is of no especial benefit to herself or anybody concerned."
"I wish you would tell me what I'd better do."
"You mentioned once that John had promised to help you out if you wanted to study in Paris. Why not wait till John shows up and then we three will get together and thrash the thing out?"
Edward stroked his chin ruefully. "I know what that will lead to," he said, "and I suppose it's the only way. But I did hope that one of us Eaton boys would have the courage to stand up to mother and not run away."
"John ran," said Mr. Eaton, "and Mark ran. But they don't either of them seem to run from anything else. They are fine men, both of them. Even if they did run once, I find myself admiring them and being proud of them. . . ."
"If I became a first-rate artist," said Edward, "and earned lots and lots of money, mother would forgive me."
"If you don't," smiled his father, "you will never forgive yourself, and that would be a lot worse . . . Personally I feel very sure of you. I have always felt sure of all my boys except James. I never had his confidence. I don't know what he is up to half the time, and I am not sure that I want to know."
"He's unlucky," said Edward. "There is nothing really worth doing that he really wants to do. That isn't really his fault, is it? It's no credit to John that he was born wanting to be a sailor or to Mark that he was born wanting to be a farmer. It's their good luck; and it's my good luck that I've got something that seems worth working for and sacrificing for. I can't remember now when it hasn't been more fun to draw and paint than to get into mischief, but I might have been born with the same feeling about getting into mischief—that it was more fun than anything else."
Mr. Eaton rose reluctantly and said that it was time to go to bed. Edward and his father lighted their respective candles.
"Why do women want to have their own way so much?" asked Edward.
"Nobody knows surely," said Mr. Eaton, "but it is probably vanity." And he started to ascend the stairs. He moved slowly and as if his feet were a little too heavy for him. When he had reached the top of the stairs with Edward a step or two behind him, he turned and said: "Good night, Eddie, and sleep well . . . How peaceful the house seems."
"Doesn't it," said Edward.
"It's a curious thing," said Mr. Eaton, "that the worst wars aren't fought by armies in the field, but within the four walls of human habitations which we call homes. They are nearly always wars of self-aggrandizement and oppression. I once heard Mark Twain make a speech. He said that he loved the human race, but that he wished he had it back in the ark—with an auger. Good night, Eddie."
During the small hours of the next morning Edward was waked by a train whistling for Bartow Station. A long time afterward he heard his brother James hunting for the keyhole in the front door. A little later he heard sounds similar to those which one hears on a ship at sea during rough weather.
But at the breakfast table James seemed sober enough and ate with a good appetite.