CHAPTER XII
Calvin neither won nor lost the cause of the People vs. Gos Augarian; for the jury persisted in their disagreement which divided them at the hour when Calvin Clarke and Joan Daisy Royle utilized the empty court-room to discuss their differences.
After being out for forty hours, the jury reported that a verdict could not be reached; accordingly the judge discharged them and set the case for retrial several weeks later. Since Calvin had no other case on call, he took his vacation in this season which he best loved, late November, when occurred, always in the same week, the Stirring, tumultuous festival of the Harvard-Yale football game and Thanksgiving.
With confident anticipations, he reserved a lower on the Century for Boston and upon the next afternoon he was journeying across northern Indiana on his way home.
Homeland to him meant hills; flatness was the curse of the far country, and Calvin recalled, in comfortable reminiscence, how it had offended him on his first visit. There should be hills, shaded valleys, outcropping stones and rushing brooks, he had thought; and the expanse of the endless plain had seemed to him mere monotony.
He was impatient to see the slopes, the stone fences, the old, white homesteads of Massachusetts, yet the Indiana farms drew his gaze again and again until he let the "Atlantic Monthly" lapse to the seat beside him and sat idly watching the wigwam-like shocks of corn in the fields. They stood in long lines which appeared in diagonal, as the train approached; they shifted to straight right-angles, then rearranged their ranks into disappearing diagonals again as the train rushed away.
The sunlight laid purple shadows; the sun glinted on scarlet and yellow and umber boughs as woods flashed by undershot with the flame hues of the fiery sumach. Brown meadows intervened, bounded by gray rail fences; wire fences, now, and a rutted road. The train darted across a white streak of cement; a crimson copse of sycamore approached, half hiding a white house, and white wood smoke rose in the clear, sharp air.
Here was a pile of pumpkins; next a brush-heap burning! A work-team waited at a jangling crossing, and the breath of the horses fogged. On the left, now, a glimpse of blue water gleaming.
Calvin awaited a dune which he well remembered, and when it appeared, he felt the satisfaction of recognizing the familiar. When Lake Michigan was gone and he knew he would not see it again, he settled back to read, but soon he was watching the wonder of dusk drawn over the fields. He was aware of a mood of reluctance in this journey.
"I ought to have stayed in Chicago," he said to himself; but he knew that no obligation bound him. His cases on call were cleared and his vacation was due him. He meant, then, that he wished he had remained in Chicago. Why? Because of whom?
As the darkness deepened without, and the glow of lighted windows flickered between the trees, Calvin sent his mind upon an expedition of evasion of a fact which he would not accept. He thought of Arthur and Emily Todd and other friends in the suburbs and in the city, he thought of Ellison and associates in the office and he argued, "I've come to like them better this year. We're friends now." But he knew that none of them roused this reluctance at leaving.
He was wearing the coat, into the pocket of which the Royle girl had dropped her three dollars and a half with her list of books which she believed would make Ketlar a Mozart. Calvin put a hand into that pocket. Within it, was a smaller pocket to preserve articles such as slips of paper; and a bit of folded paper was in that small pocket, as Calvin Clarke very well knew.
He drew it out and, as the car lights were turned on, he unfolded the slip and examined again the Royle girl's writing; and the definiteness of it, the character of her spirit roused agreeable warmth within him.
He pulled a portfolio from the opposite seat and extracted a bundle of papers having to do with the Ketlar case; but he ignored the legal sheets and examined a newspaper picture of the Royle girl.
After he put it away, he sat deliberately reviewing his encounters with her from the first, when she had confronted him, head up, challenging him for his right to come for the State; when he had followed her upstairs, from Ketlar's room to hers, and her slim white heels rose from her slippers; when he had walked with her to the beach, where she showed him the stones which she called stars, and they returned and she attempted to awaken her mother or father and could not.
He revisited, in reverie, the hotel room where she had sat at the little table and offered him coffee with her pretty, white hands and he had refused, and she called him a ready-made—and he had torn the notes which Eller, the stenographer, had written.
He rehearsed their few words after he had freed her, their encounter in court with Elmen, their meeting again outside the grand jury room, when she had clasped his wrist till her nail cut his skin. He recollected, in its order, his glimpse of her as she left the jail; and he dwelt, in deliberate detail, on the meeting in the automat and on the street, when she asked him to buy the Barsoni book, with her three dollars and fifty cents. Thus he returned to their very recent day in court and their minutes alone, afterwards, in the empty court-room.
With eyes closed, he absorbed himself in this reverie and when he had come to the end, he would retraverse it all again; but he found that such a satisfying reverie, like a dream, was not to be commanded. It had come and gone; and he sat up to realization.
"I'm on this train because of her," he said to himself. "I left Chicago because of her. I'm going away from her."
He bent forward and abstracted from his portfolio the pages of evidence against her which reported her intimacy with Ketlar and cited the unescapable inferences to be drawn therefrom. Calvin Clarke deliberately reread these ugly pages for the purpose of exorcising from him his longing for that girl; but he succeeded only in arousing himself further, so he desisted.
In the morning, he was amid the green mountains of Massachusetts. The very air seemed sterner and the sight of the slopes stirred recollections of traditions of the Clarkes. He emerged from the train at Boston as self-contained as any one who faced the bleak wind blowing in from the bay with the smell of the sea.
He had some time between trains and he had considered dropping in on some of his classmates in their Boylston Street law offices or Federal Street banks, but at the last moment he decided to wander about alone, passing Old North Church, the old State House and King's Chapel.
He felt a hunger for the old, the really old, after his second year in Chicago; but when he had exhausted his hour, he was sorry he had not called on Boylston Street, for he had encountered no one whom he knew, and his solitary expedition reminded him of days with his father, and he passed the old building in which his father's office had been.
Faces of foreigners gazed at him. Foreigners seemed to have doubled their census in the last year; and the many-bloods, whom he had deemed characteristic of Chicago, crowded the ancient, narrow, twisted streets dear to his memories. But also there were men and women of his own kind, more of them, many more than in Chicago. He bought a Transcript, found it comfortingly the same and boarded his train for Haverhill.
From the little city, he was driven by motor over the old, old road to the gate which opened in the same direction and which swung over the exact arc as the stockade gate which Calvin Clarke had hinged two hundred and seventy years ago.
As he swung back the gate, his mother appeared in the doorway, under the old sun-dial, and he saw, with his first glance, that her cheeks were pink as ever, if her hair was a shade whiter; she was straight and strong and unchanged; the house and garden had not changed, the silence and peace of the place remained. The very sunlight over his shoulder and the shadows and fallen leaves on the pebbly path seemed to Calvin the same; and he went up the path, not hurrying, but with his heart swelling in his breast.
"My son, welcome home," his mother called, in her calm voice, half holding forth her arms, precisely as he had known she would; for she always did it so.
She extended her hands, at moments like this, but never quite toward him, rather before her and downward as she had held them out to him, undoubtedly, when he was a little child running to her. Judging from the height at which she held her hands, he had been about five years old when she last put out her arms, unrestrainedly, toward him.
Calvin had thought this many times before; but to-day the realization of her restraint filled him with unusual feeling. He almost dropped his bag and ran to her; but he remembered himself and carried the bag to the step where he laid it down; he caught his mother's hands and clasped them while he kissed her on her turned cheek. Then she kissed him on the cheek with her cool lips.
"I had your telegram," she said. "Your room is ready for you, Calvin."
He squeezed her hands with an impulse which surprised her. "I knew it would be," he replied, releasing her. "You're well, mother, aren't you?"
"Yes," she answered, but he knew she was not thinking of herself, but was studying him with her steady gray eyes. "I am always well, merely a year older. I see you are well. You had a good trip?"
"Very good," he replied and corrected, saying, "It was all right. The train, of course, was comfortable."
"What do you mean?" said his mother. "Did something happen?"
"Nothing happened," assured Calvin, wondering at himself for the correction he had made. Nothing had happened on the train—nothing which he could relate to his mother. "I'll go up to my room," he said, almost hastily, and picked up his bag and entered the house of 1722 and Queen Anne's war and John Adam's administration and Antietam.
It was not actually the house of Queen Anne's war; for that had been the original cabin which the Indians had burned. Calvin confused it thus, momentarily, because his mind was full of the phrase of the Royle girl and he was queerly sensitive to impressions to-day.
He felt, at this moment, the force of contrasts which never had affected him similarly, as his mind bore an image of the newly rented room with the bed-couch, which was the Royle girl's home; and he gazed about the old, changeless rooms and peopled them with the men and women familiar to him since childhood, though some of them had been dead two hundred years.
He made it vivid by imagining himself telling her of them. Gazing at old portraits, faded books and an ancient lamp, commonplaces to him, he found them endowed with poignant interest as he thought of showing them to that eager girl.
Shutting himself in his room, he placed his traveling bag on a table and methodically unpacked it. At a tap upon his door, he knew it was not his mother, who never would disturb him in his room, but was Debbie, the maid-servant, with his hot water.
A modern bathroom with running water, both hot and cold, was a few steps down the hall; but in Calvin's room was the washstand with the old blue and white washbowl and pitcher which had been used for at least seventy years, and no one knew certainly how much longer.
Calvin stepped to the door, thanked Debbie, told her he was very glad to be home, and he took in the tall hot-water pitcher with the pewter cover.
As he poured into the bowl, he imagined explaining to the Royle girl about it; he imagined her amused but interested. Then he thought of her as only interested. When she understood, she would like it, he thought.
But what a fancy for him here! He had left Chicago to leave her; he had come home to be away from her, and here he was showing her, in spirit, about his home.
"Tell me about Chicago and your new cases," his mother bid him, when he rejoined her in the library, where a maple fire snapped on the old stone hearth.
She drew him toward the fireplace and seated herself upon the hooded bench at the right, where he used to sit beside her for their talks when he was a little boy. In later years he resorted to the bench opposite, and he relapsed upon it now, gazing at the fire, at his mother and at the fire again, while he considered her, disquietedly.
He did not betray disquiet, he thought; and, in fact, he might have revealed it more plainly without his mother noticing it; for it was an hour of hardly constrained emotions in herself when her son returned from the crude, inchoate conglomeration of people in the west who, to her mind, composed the city which claimed him from her.
"Tell me about Chicago, Calvin," she repeated, her voice calm as ever, but her breast suffused with a feeling of antagonism against the distant people and with a pulse of her momentary triumph over them at regaining him.
"It's a place which becomes more incredible the longer one lives there," Calvin replied. "I think I do not yet credit even its physical proportions, mother," he explained, smiling.
He glanced about the room which was becoming dark away from the fire; for dusk was fallen, and at the other end of the library was an open window which looked out upon the garden, not upon city lights, but which put Calvin in mind of the open window at which the Royle girl stood in the court-room at this hour a few days ago.
He stirred, patting his pocket to locate his tobacco, stooped into the heat of the flames and picked up a blazing splinter, with which he lighted a cigarette.
His mother watched, with swelling breast, the play of the flame upon the clear-cut, powerful planes of her son's face, and she glanced down his spare, strong body to his feet. "He has character and health," she thought, repeating to herself with pride, "character—and he's mine."
She let herself enjoy the even line of his profile, the brown luster of his hair which still curled just a little and was very thick, as it had been when he was a boy; and she longed to touch his forehead. His was a fine, broad forehead with distinct, brown brows. She caught breath a bit quickly and watched his strong, well-shaped hands, which also were hers and she was conscious of so nearly giving way to emotionalism that she rebuked herself for weakening with age; and, recollecting what they had said, she remarked: "I understand the city is growing rapidly."
"It happened to have reason to go from the south edge of it to the north the other night," said Calvin, sitting back and smoking. "I was on an elevated train which went continuously for twenty miles past tenements and flats, tenements and flats crowded side by side, with only streets and shops and factories between, for every mile of the way. If I'd gone west from the lake or northwest or southwest, it would be the same. In that square of twenty miles, on the shore of that lake, mother, are more than three millions of people—the population of the thirteen colonies in the revolution."
"No," she objected.
"Yes," he insisted, a little quickly. "They're there. Not one, not a white face was there when that was hung." He touched with his boot-toe the crane which, as every Clarke knew, had been hung in the fireplace in 1790. "But now the population of the thirteen colonies is within a twenty mile square on the shore of that lake."
"An equal number of people may be there," corrected his mother, intently, "but not a like population."
"No," agreed Calvin. "Not like them."
"What can they be like, Calvin?" she inquired, leaning forward a little. "I read all the newspapers you send, I read of robbery and banditry, day and night, in banks and in hotels by broad daylight, and the constant taking of life."
"They're marking up a murder nearly every day," said Calvin.
"What can those people be like?" she demanded.
"They're like nobody," pronounced Calvin, shortly, "but themselves."
"Foreigners commit the crimes, do they not?"
"No; they're Americans."
"They can not be," she denied firmly.
"They're American born, the police records show," he maintained; "so if they aren't Americans, what are they?"
"An American to me," said his mother, with confident pride, "means a person of definite traditions and blood."
"I know," said Calvin, and realized that his mother Was repeating what he himself held, but now he opposed it. "On that basis, Chicago is certainly not an American city—nor will Boston be one, much longer," he added, with a puzzling impulse to offend her.
"The foreigners are visibly crowding in," she said, feeling it. "I hardly see how that can afford you satisfaction, Calvin."
"It doesn't," he denied, ashamed of himself. "I'm merely facing the fact. They're not crowding in now, mother. They completed that process before congress shut the doors. Now they are taking over."
"Taking over?" questioned his mother; but he knew she was merely combating the idea. She understood.
"Taking over the continent from us, mother."
"They can not."
"But they are."
"They can not," she repeated positively, with a ring of determination in her voice. "They can not because they have not the character. To take over a continent requires—character."
"Not if they're taking it from people who are dead," Calvin returned recklessly, forgetting his personal situation, until he realized that he had spoken as decisively as his mother could hope in favor of her frequent argument that he should end his exile in Chicago and return to his home and marry a girl of inheritance and tradition like his own.
His mind went to Melicent Webster because he knew that she, at that moment, was in his mother's mind. Melicent was a neighbor whom he had known since childhood, when she was a sturdy, straightforward, sober-minded little girl who swam and dived almost as well as a boy and who ice-skated skillfully and tirelessly.
Her family, or some member of it, had been a neighbor of the Clarkes' for nearly a hundred years, but except for the occasion when great-uncle Ethan wedded Susan Webster, in 1844, the families had not intermarried.
Since Melicent was two years younger than himself, she was twenty-eight this fall, Calvin reckoned; she was tall and strong and straightforward as ever, and Calvin liked and respected her. He had seen her several times, when last he was home, and he had danced with her on the evening before he returned to Chicago. She danced well, as she did all things, and she talked intelligently and with accurate information upon any matter she discussed; but when Calvin was alone upon the train, he had been surprised by no such reverie as followed his parting from the Royle girl.
Their characters could not be compared. Melicent was admirable, wholly so, whereas the Royle girl was despicable; yet now that Calvin was near Melicent Webster, he had no impatience to seek her. He would call sometime to-morrow or the next day. Her nearness stirred no sensation of the same order as that which overwhelmed him on the evening of his visit to the automat and when he sought the Royle girl in the empty court-room.
He thought, "Suppose she was a few hundred yards down this road." And the idea agitated him so that he stared into the fire, avoiding his mother's eyes. Suppose his mother could read what was in his mind! No danger; she could not conceive it.
"You are engaged in a case which greatly interests you," his mother said, refraining from pressing her advantage and avoiding the mistake of urging Melicent upon him.
"I've tried the arson case," Calvin replied. "But I'll have it again. The jury disagreed."
"Is there a new development in the case against that extraordinary musician?"
"Ketlar?" asked Calvin, glancing at her to see if he had betrayed himself to her. "His is my most important case," he admitted. "I consider it the most important case soon to be tried. Ketlar shot his wife because of a girl, of whom I have written you somewhat."
"Yes," said his mother.
"She is the daughter of a man calling himself some times James Morton Royle," Calvin continued. "He is a drunkard and a dead-beat, living by various frauds for which he has been arrested twenty times. The mother is chiefly remarkable as a veronal-drinker. These two and the daughter—Ketlar's recent companion—have been moving about from Chicago to Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, being ejected from hotels and apartment houses.
"Ketlar is the son of a hotel barber-shop manicurist and some unidentified traveling man, with corresponding morals. Ketlar married at nineteen, and since then has taken up with twenty or forty women and girls and had reached the Royle girl, who undoubtedly was like the rest, or worse, but she seems to have demanded that Ketlar marry her; so he quarreled with his wife, shot her and went back to the Royle girl, who had an alibi for him ready before the police arrived.
"She counts on freeing him and means to marry him, if she succeeds. She is clever—you've no idea how clever she is. For instance, she had books on musical composition sent to him in jail last week. She says, so he can study in jail and make himself a musician. Of course, he can't and won't. It's merely a spectacular play for cheap, popular sympathy and to furnish his music publishers with material for sensational press notices on his new jazz compositions, after he is freed. But she did it. That's how clever she is!"
He stopped and sat pressed straight against the hard back of his bench and felt his heart thumping under the excitement of his own condemnation of the Royle girl. It caught him, suddenly, aghast at that which he had said. Why had he so distorted the incident of the Barsoni book, and her three dollars and a half, wrapped in the list which was in his pocket now?
Was it because suddenly he had understood it after the manner in which now he had reported it to his mother? No; for all his body, trembling under his thumping heart, denied his interpretation. He had assailed her thus, distorting and misinterpreting that incident to force it to fit in with the rest for the purpose of making impossible to himself, and before his mother, his own emotions in regard to her.
"But he will not be freed!" Calvin heard his mother say.
"What?" he asked.
"The musician will not be freed, surely," his mother repeated.
"No," said Calvin. "No; I think not."
His finger was in his pocket, and he touched the little slip of paper upon which the Royle girl had written; and if he were at all consistent, he would fling it into the flame. But he did not.
He arose, with his heart thumping, and walked about the room during the few moments before Debbie appeared, announcing dinner.
As he approached the dining room where a steaming dish was on the table, he wondered at the vividness with which he imagined himself in the automat with the Royle girl. He sat down in his place at the table opposite his mother, and Debbie laid the brown-crusted and fragrantly flavored hot dish before him.
"Debbie made a beef pie for you, when she heard you were coming."
"Beef pie," said Calvin, halting the big spoon over the hot crust.
"Why, don't you want it?" asked his mother in surprise. "You usually ask for it."
"I don't think I'll eat," said Calvin. "Nothing's the matter, mother. I—I suppose I was upset a little on the train."
"Oh," said his mother. "I knew something happened on the train."
Repeatedly, during the following days, he found himself imagining what the Royle girl would think, if she looked in upon his home. He did not at first set himself deliberately to play with such fancies; he merely met them in his mind, although he probably induced them by rereading his reports upon her experience in the various and diverse domestic establishments which in succession had sheltered her parents and herself. This held before him contrasts that gave him glimpses of his own home from a new and extraordinary point of view.
It was the week in the year at Clarke's Ferry for setting out tulip bulbs, for laying away late apples and casks of cider, for raking mulch over the roots of larkspur, sweet William, Canterbury bells and the other perennials; it was the appointed time for a score of other tiny tasks, each unvarying year by year and each set and determined by customs immemorial as the oldest memory; and Calvin took up the old tasks, which he had performed as a boy, with such whole satisfaction that his mother lent to a neighbor the old gardener who regularly worked about the place.
He rejoiced in the feel of the familiar rake and the mattock in his hand, at the tug and tire of unused muscles; but, as he bent, his mind wantonly returned to the court-room in Chicago; he sank his heel, with proprietary pleasure, into the soft soil which his spade had upturned, and he thought of the flat on the floor above Ketlar's. He heaped up leaves and set fire to them at dusk, and while he stood leaning upon his rake and gazing into the flames, the reverie, which he had tried to command on the train and cause to return to him, came of itself.
One morning he visited the attic, haunted by heirlooms of seven generations. He came upon survivors of his own leaden soldiers packed away in a box beside that holding a model of an 1812 frigate which Calvin carefully had played with when a boy; and there, with his toys in the box before him, he suddenly set to wondering about the Royle girl, when she was a child, what playthings she had had and where she had laid them.
He called upon Melicent and she asked him to walk with her to the tea-room which she recently had opened on the Post Road. She had no need to earn money but she believed that she ought to occupy herself, and she was receiving much local admiration for her spirit and enterprise.
"Surely, after being two years in the west, you must approve of a girl working," she said to Calvin.
"Of course I do," he agreed, and praised the perfect order of the place and the excellence of the food which was served. For Melicent was competent and employed skilled help. "I look in unfailingly every morning and usually in the afternoon," she said, and since it was plain that she expected commendation for this, he gave it, while wondering what the Royle girl would expect for looking in twice a day upon others working. He gazed at Melicent's large, competent hands and thought of slender, white, strong ones. Glancing at Melicent's sturdy ankles, he thought of very slim ones and slim white heels.
Once during the afternoon he shared with Melicent an emotional experience.
They tramped from the tea-house by an old road which led by the Barlow place, which had been closed since Eben Barlow died last winter and now was being repaired and repainted.
"Who's come back?" asked Calvin, interestedly, as he saw the agreeable evidences of life about the old house.
"Nobody has come back, Calvin," said Melicent, soberly. "There was nobody to come back, you see."
"Somebody must be coming back," Calvin insisted. "There are carpenters and men painting."
"There is nobody to come back," Melicent repeated. "A Greek has purchased the place. He is having the repairing and painting done. His name is Polos; he made money in the fruit and confectionery business in Boston; he has seven children they say. The children speak good English."
"I suppose so," said Calvin, twinging with repugnance at the idea of Levantine immigrants in the Barlow home. Why, it was a hundred and fifty years old, and an Eben Barlow had been with Knox and Calvin Clarke in the Revolution. He drew a little closer to Melicent in their common resistance; he flushed and saw a flush warm her cheek, as her eyes met his.
"The Greek had a good deal of trouble buying the place," said Melicent slowly.
"He didn't have enough money?" asked Calvin.
"No; he had plenty of money. His trouble was to find any one to give him title; for all of Eben's heirs died before himself except old Mattie, who was his second cousin. She's insane in an asylum in Connecticut; but finally it was arranged so that she could give title," Melicent explained, with bosom rising and falling at the quick catch of her breath; and Calvin drew up in repulse of this decay and disappearance of his people. As instinct to combat it caught him, he felt full affinity with the girl beside him; he felt his helplessness alone, as she was feeling her helplessness alone to oppose this death of themselves; he felt hotly, as she also hotly was feeling, their power together to perpetuate their own.
But as he gazed at her, another image imposed itself—eager blue eyes and a white, beautiful brow with lovely shaping behind it, a posture of spirit and will, the Royle girl, as first he saw her, with her head up to fight.
Calvin looked away and after a few seconds, Melicent proceeded with him past the Polos place, talking of other matters.
On Saturday he journeyed to New Haven for the Harvard-Yale game, and when he was finding his seat in the huge bowl, surrounded by men of his own class, he started almost noticeably at sight of alert, slender, feminine shoulders and the back of a prettily poised head wearing a small, blue toque.
Although he had been speaking to a friend, he became mute for the moment in which he imagined that this was the Royle girl; and even after she turned her face, and he saw that she was a disappointing person, he kept glancing at her; and when the teams came on the field and commenced the spectacle of the game, with seventy thousand cheering, Calvin watched the blue toque and thought how much more eager, how much more partizan and excited would be the Royle girl, how her cheeks would pale and flush, her eyes glow and her hand grip him, if she were beside him.
For Thanksgiving at home there were three at the table, since cousin Harriet always came from Haverhill for the day.
She was a maiden of fifty-two, was cousin Harriet Clarke, and she believed in and employed plain, blunt speech, dealing directly with what she had in mind. Naturally, the ominous fate of the Barlow place had impressed her and, after Calvin had carved the turkey, she asked him:
"Have you seen the improvements in the Polos place?"
"Polos?" asked Calvin.
"The name is abbreviated from Batouopopolos, I believe—the buyer of the Barlow place."
"Yes, I've seen it," replied Calvin shortly.
"He walked by last week with Melicent," added his mother.
"I wonder how our Greek candyman will change this house," ventured cousin Harriet cheerily.
"Ours?" said Calvin.
"Our Greek successor, I mean, when we are gone," explained cousin Harriet, imperturbably. "The sundial over the door will come down, I fancy."
"What?" asked Calvin.
"Harriet!" exclaimed his mother.
"Undoubtedly. I never heard of a Greek having a sundial, especially over a door, did you? And he certainly will change the location of the gate. It might have done well enough for a stockade, but it's most impractical now; and this old wing will certainly come down. And did the furniture go with Eb Barlow's house, Calvin?"
"I don't know," murmured Calvin, constrained and furious.
"It did," whispered his mother.
"Our Greek will never believe what we have in the attic until he starts to clear it out. I know we have boxes which have not been moved for a hundred years, Abigail," pursued cousin Harriet. "He'll surely clear out our bedsteads, too, and our ridiculous washstands and this table we're eating on."
"Cousin Harriet!" cried Calvin, feeling physically almost sick. He gazed at his mother, to whom this last had been addressed by cousin Harriet, and saw that, though she kept her face calm, she was ghastly pale; and cousin Harriet, herself, was pale at the horror to which her own words had driven her when she had set out to stir him and sting him from his singleness.
Having halted, she became unable to resume; and Calvin seized the opportunity to mention another matter, but his mind could not consider it and he elicited no reply from his mother or his cousin. It was minutes, indeed, before either of them was able to continue dinner with any show of appetite; and though they talked impersonally and cheerfully of other things, he was glad when dinner was over and he could go out and tramp through the woods, leaving his mother and cousin together.
He felt restless and offended. Cousin Harriet had upset his mother, he knew; but he knew, too, that cousin Harriet had not offended his mother; she had spoken at a time which his mother never would have chosen and in a manner which she never could have employed, yet she had said what his mother would say. He must marry. If not for himself, then for them, for their blood and heritage which were his, for their duties and traditions, for the sake of the home and all the people of the past who had made him and them, he must take a wife and have children.
He strode away from the old house, conscious of no choice of direction except that he was avoiding the road toward Melicent's and the Barlow, now the Polos, place; he found himself upon the path which traced the traditional retreat of Timothy Clarke and Esther, his wife, and their children when they fled from the Indians two and a half centuries ago.
Calvin came to the lonely copse, upon unused land still in the possession of the family, where Timothy had fallen and Esther had taken the gun from his hand, loaded it and shot an Indian and then hurried her children on into Haverhill. And standing there alone in the silence, with the afternoon sunlight golden through the trees, Calvin thought what a people had been they who were his fathers, who had crossed the empty sea and settled this savage land, what men had begot and what women had borne children who in their time became like their fathers, begetting children like them again—Calvins, Timothies and Jeremies of Queen Anne's war, of 1776, of John Adams' administration and of Antietam, and whose wives, Esther, Susan and Abigail had been of soul and body like them.
He was their seed; and he was like them; or he might be. If he married a wife, like their wives, he could beget children of their soul and body. Melicent was like them. But only once before, and that when he had looked upon the scene of Polos, the Greek, taking over the Barlow place, had thought of her stirred him. He summoned idea of her now, to make it stir him again as he drooped before his duty to his forefathers, to his home and family, to the blood of them all within him.
As he stood there, trying to imagine himself marrying Melicent, his mind went wildly aberrant and it was the Royle girl whom he married. It was the Royle girl—companion of Ketlar, the wife-slayer, daughter of Dads, the dizzy, and of mamma, the doped, in the flat in Chicago—it was she whom he would take to wife.
At the idea, which he could not deny, with his desire of it thrilling and trembling in him, he thought of his mother learning that he would bring such a one to his home, make her his wife and the mother of the children to succeed him; and he swung toward the old house, clenching his hands and swearing within himself against such defilement of his blood and the blood of the others—of his mother and father, of the man of his own name who had died with Knox, and of Timothy, who, two hundred and fifty years ago, had fallen here.
Then, dully and slowly, Calvin Clarke returned to his home.