In the Heart of a Fool

“Veil nothing–shame on you, Martha Morton. Why, George hasn’t asked–”

“Now ain’t it the truth!” roared Brotherton. “Why veil! Veil?” he exclaimed. “She’s going to wear seven veils and forty flower girls–forty–count ’em–forty! And Morty Sands best man–”

“Keep still, George,” interrupted Ruth. “Now, Emma, when–when, I say, are you going to resign your school?”

Mr. Brotherton gave the youngest and most practical Miss Morton a look of quick intelligence. “Don’t you fret; Ruthie, I’m hog tied by the silken skein of love. She’s going to resign her school to-morrow.”

“Indeed I am not, George Brotherton–and if you people don’t hush–”

But Mr. Brotherton interrupted the bride-to-be, incidentally kissing her by way of punctuation, and boomed on in his poster tone, “Morty Sands best man with his gym class from South Harvey doing ground and lofty tumbling up and down the aisles in pink tights. Doc Jim in linen pants whistling the Wedding March to Kenyon Adams’s violin obligato, with the General hitting the bones at the organ! The greatest show on earth and the baby elephant in evening clothes prancing down the aisle like the behemoth of holy writ! Well, say–say, I tell you!”

The Captain touched the big man on the shoulder apologetically. “George, of course, if you could wait a year till the Household Horse gets going good, I could stake you for a trip to the Grand Canyon myself, but just now, ’y gory, man!”

“Grand Canyon!” laughed Brotherton. “Why, Cap, we’re going to go seven times around the world and twice to the moon before we turn up in Harvey. Grand Canyon–”

“Well, at least, father,” cried Martha, “we’ll get her that tan traveling dress and hat she’s always wanted.”

“But I tell you girls to keep still,” protested the bride-to-be, still in the prospective groom’s arms and proud as Punch of her position. “Why, George hasn’t even asked me and–”

“Neither have you asked me, Emma, ’’eathen idol made of mud what she called the Great God Buhd.’” He stooped over tenderly and when his face rose, he said softly, “And a plucky lot she cared for tan traveling dresses when I kissed her where she stud!” And then and there before the Morton family assembled, he kissed his sweetheart again, a middle-aged man unashamed in his joy.

It was a tremendous event in the Morton family and the Captain felt his responsibility heavily. The excited girls, half-shocked and half-amused and wholly delighted, tried to lead the Captain away and leave the lovers alone after George had hugged them all around and kissed them again for luck. But the Captain refused to be led. He had many things to say. He had to impress upon Mr. Brotherton, now that he was about to enter the family, the great fact that the Mortons were about to come into riches. Hence a dissertation on the Household Horse and its growing popularity among makers of automobiles; Nate Perry’s plans in blue print for the new factory were brought in, and a wilderness of detail spread before an ardent lover, keen for his first hour alone with the woman who had touched his bachelor heart. A hundred speeches came to his lips and dissolved–first formal and ardent love vows–while the Captain rattled on recounting familiar details of his dream.

Then Ruth and Martha rose in their might and literally dragged their father from the room and upstairs. Half an hour later the two lovers in the doorway heard a stir in the house behind them. They heard the Captain cry:

“The hash–George, she’s the best girl–’Y gory, the best girl in the world. But she will forget to chop the hash over night!”

As George Brotherton, bumping his head upon the eternal stars, turned into the street, he saw the great black hulk of the Van Dorn house among the trees. He smiled as he wondered how the ceremonies were proceeding in the Temple of Love that night.

It was not a ceremony fit for smiles, but rather for the tears of gods and men, that the priest and priestess had performed. Margaret Van Dorn had taken Kenyon home, then dropped Lila at the Nesbit door as she returned from South Harvey. When she found that her husband had not reached home, she ran to her room to fortify herself for the meeting with him. And she found her fortifications in the farthest corner of the bottom drawer of her dresser. From its hiding place she brought forth a little black box and from the box a brown pellet. This fortification had been her refuge for over a year when the stress of life in the Temple of Love was about to overcome her. It gave her courage, quickened her wits and loosened her tongue. Always she retired to her fortress when the combat in the Temple threatened to strain her nerves. So she had worn a beaten path of habit to her refuge.

Then she made herself presentable; took care of her hair, smoothed her face at the mirror and behind the shield of the drug she waited. She heard the old car rattling up the street, and braced herself for the struggle. She knew–she had learned by bitter experience that the first blow in a rough and tumble was half the battle. As he came raging through the door, slamming it behind him, she faced him, and before he could speak, she sneered:

“Ah, you coward–you sneaking, cur coward–who would murder a child to win–Ach!” she cried. “You are loathsome–get away from me!”

The furious man rushed toward her with his hands clinched. She stood with her arms akimbo and said slowly:

“You try that–just try that.”

He stopped. She came over and rubbed her body against his, purring, with a pause after each word:

“You are a coward–aren’t you?”

She put her fingers under his jaw, and sneered, “If ever you lay hands on me–just one finger on me, Tom Van Dorn–” She did not finish her sentence.

The man uttered a shrill, insane cry of fury and whirled and would have run, but she caught him, and with a gross physical power, that he knew and dreaded, she swung him by force into a chair.

“Now,” she panted, “sit down like a man and tell me what you are going to do about it? Look up–dawling!” she cried, as Van Dorn slumped in the chair.

The man gave her a look of hate. His eyes, that showed his soul, burned with rage and from his face, so mobile and expressive, a devil of malice gaped impotently at his wife, as he sat, a heap of weak vanity, before her. He pulled himself up and exclaimed:

“Well, there’s one thing damn sure, I’ll not live with you any more–no man would respect me if I did after to-night.”

“And no man,” she smiled and said in her mocking voice, “will respect you if you leave me. How Laura’s friends will laugh when you go, and say that Tom Van Dorn simply can’t live with any one. How the Nesbit crowd will titter when you leave me, and say Tom Van Dorn got just what he had coming! Why–go on–leave me–if you dare! You know you don’t dare to. It’s for better or worse, Tom, until death do us part–dawling!”

She laughed and winked indecently at him.

“I will leave you, I tell you, I will leave you,” he burst forth, half rising. “All the devils of hell can’t keep me here.”

“Except just this one,” she mocked. “Oh, you might leave me and go with your present mistress! By the way, who is our latest conquest–dawling? I’m sure that would be fine. Wouldn’t they cackle–the dear old hens whose claws scratch your heart so every day?” She leaned over, caressing him devilishly, and cried, “For you know when you get loose from me, you’ll pretty nearly have to marry the other lady–wouldn’t that be nice? ‘Through sickness and health, for good or for ill,’–isn’t it nice?” she scoffed. Then she turned on him savagely, “So you will try to hide behind a child, and use him for a shield–Oh, you cur–you despicable dog,” she scorned. Then she drew herself up and spoke in a passion that all but hissed at him. “I tell you, Tom Van Dorn, if you ever, in this row that’s coming, harm a hair of that boy’s head–you’ll carry the scar of that hair to your grave. I mean it.”

Van Dorn sprang up. He cried: “What business is it of yours? You she devil, what’s the boy to you? Can’t I run my own business? Why do you care so much for the Adams brat? Answer me, I tell you–answer me,” he cried, his wrath filling his voice.

“Oh, nothing, dawling,” she made a wicked, obscene eye at him, and simpered: “Oh, nothing, Tom–only you see I might be his mother!”

She played with the vulgar diamonds that hid her fingers and looked down coyly as she smiled into his gray face.

“Great God,” he whispered, “were you born a–” he stopped, ashamed of the word in his mouth.

The woman kept twinkling her indecent eyes at him and put her head on one side as she replied: “Whatever I am, I’m the wife of Judge Van Dorn; so I’m quite respectable now–whatever I was once. Isn’t that lawvly, dawling!” She began talking in her baby manner.

Her husband was staring at her with doubt and fear and weak, footless wrath playing like scurrying clouds across his proud, shamed face.

“Oh, Margaret, tell me the truth,” he moaned, as the fear of the truth baffled him–a thousand little incidents that had attracted his notice and passed to be stirred up by a puzzled consciousness came rushing into his memory–and the doubt and dread overcame even his hate for a moment and he begged. But she laughed, and scouted the idea and then called out in anguish:

“Why–why have you a child to love–to love and live for even if you cannot be with her–why can I have none?”

Her voice had broken and she felt she was losing her grip on herself, and she knew that her time was limited, that her fortifications were about to crumble. She sat down before her husband.

“Tom,” she said coldly, “no matter why I’m fond of Kenyon Adams–that’s my business; Lila is your business, and I don’t interfere, do I? Well,” she said, looking the man in the eyes with a hard, mean, significant stare, “you let the boy alone–do you understand? Do what you please with Grant or Jasper or the old man; but Kenyon–hands off!”

She rose, slipped quickly to the stairway, and as she ran up she called, “Good night, dawling.” Before he was on his feet he heard the lock click in her door, and with a horrible doubt, an impotent rage, and a mantling shame stifling him, he went upstairs and from her distant room she heard the bolt click in the door of his room. And behind the bolted doors stood two ghosts–the ghosts of rejected children, calling across the years, while the smudge of the extinguished torch of life choked two angry hearts.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

GRANT ADAMS VISITS THE SONS OF ESAU

“My dear,” quoth the Doctor to his daughter as he sat poking his feet with his cane in her little office at the Kindergarten, after they had discussed Lila’s adventure of the night before, “I saw Tom up town this morning and he didn’t seem to be exactly happy. I says, ‘Tom, I hear you beat God at his own game last night!’ and,” the Doctor chuckled, “Laura, do you know, he wouldn’t speak to me!” As he laughed, the daughter interrupted:

“Why, father–that was mean–”

“Of course it was mean. Why–considering everything, I’d lick a man if he’d talk that mean to me. But my Eenjiany devil kind of got control of my forbearing Christian spirit and I cut loose.”

The daughter smiled, then she sighed, and asked: “Father–tell me, why did that woman object to Tom’s use of Kenyon in the riot last night?”

Doctor Nesbit opened his mouth as if to answer her. Then he smiled and said, “Don’t ask me, child. She’s a bad egg!”

“Lila says,” continued the daughter, “that Margaret appears at every public place where Kenyon plays. She seems eager to talk to him about his accomplishments, and has a sort of fascinated interest in whatever he does, as nearly as I can understand it? Why, father? What do you suppose it is? I asked Grant, who was here this morning with a Croatian baby whose mother is in the glass works, and Grant only shook his head.” The father looked at his daughter over his glasses and asked: