Part 27 (1/2)
CHAPTER XXIV
IN WHICH THE DEVIL FORMALLY TAKES THE TWO HINDERMOST AND CLOSES AN ACCOUNT IN HIS LEDGER
Harvey tried sincerely to believe in Tom Van Dorn up to the very day when it happened. For the town had accepted him gladly and unanimously as its most distinguished citizen. But when the town read in the _Times_ one November day after he had come home from his political campaign through the east for sound money and the open mills--a campaign in which Harvey had seen him through the tinted gla.s.ses of the Harvey _Daily Times_ as one of the men who had saved the country--when the town read that cold paragraph beginning: ”A decree of divorce was issued to-day to Judge Thomas Van Dorn, from his wife, Mrs. Laura Nesbit Van Dorn, upon the ground of incompatibility of temperament by Judge protem Calvin in the district court,” and ending with these words: ”Mrs. Van Dorn declined through her attorney to partic.i.p.ate in a division of the property upon any terms and will live for the present with her daughter, aged five, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. James Nesbit on Elm Street”--when the town read that paragraph, Harvey closed its heart upon Thomas Van Dorn.
Only one other item was needed to steel the heart of Harvey against its idol, and that item they found upon another page. It read, ”Wanted, pupils for the piano--Mrs. Laura Van Dorn, Quality Hill, Elm Street.”
Those items told the whole story of the deed that Thomas Van Dorn had done. If he had felt bees sting before he got his decree, he should have felt vipers gnawing at his vitals afterward.
But he was free--the burden of matrimony was lifted. He felt that the whole world of women was his now for the choosing, and of all that world, he turned in wanton fancy to the beckoning arms of Margaret Fenn.
But the feeling of freedom, the knowledge that he could speak to any woman as he chose and no one could gainsay him legally, the consciousness that he had no ties which the law recognized--and with him law was the synonym of morality--the exuberant sense of relief from a bondage that was oppressive to him, overbore all the influence of the town's spirit of wrath in the air about him.
As for the morality of the town and what he regarded as its prudery--he scorned it. He believed he could live it down; he said in his heart that it was merely a matter of a few weeks, a few months, or a few years at most, before they would have some fresh ox to gore and forget all about him. He was sure that he could play upon the individual self-interest of the leaders of the community to make them respect him and ignore what he had done. But what he had done, did not bother him much. It was done.
He seemed to be free, yet was he free?
Now Thomas Van Dorn was thirty-eight years old that autumn. Whether he loved the woman he had abandoned or not, she was a part of his life.
Counting the courts.h.i.+p during which he and this woman had been a.s.sociated closely, nearly ten years of his life, half of the years of his manhood--and that half the most active and effective part, had been spent with her. A million threads of memory in his brain led to her; when he remembered any important event in his life during those ten years, always the chain of a.s.sociated thought led back to the image of her. There she was, fixed in his life; there she smiled at him through every hour of those ten years of their life, married or as lovers together.
For whom G.o.d had joined, not Joseph Calvin, not Joseph Calvin, sitting as Judge protem, not Joseph Calvin vested with all the authority of the great commonwealth in which he lived, could put asunder. That was curious. At times Thomas Van Dorn was conscious of this phenomenon, that he was free, yet bound, and that while there was no G.o.d, and the law was the final word, in all considerable things, some way the brain, or the mind that is fettered to the brain, or the soul that is built upon the aspect of the mind fettered to the brain, held him tethered to the past.
For our lives are not material, whatever our bodies may be. Our lives are the acc.u.mulations of consciousness, the a.s.sembling of our memories, our affections, our judgments, our aspirations, our weaknesses, our strength--the vast sum of all our impressions, good or bad, made upon a material plate called the brain. The brain is of the dust. The picture--which is a human life--is of the spirit. And the spirit is of G.o.d. And when by whatever laws of chance or greed, or high purpose or low desire two lives are joined until the cement of years has united the myriads of daily sensations that make up a segment of these lives, they are thus joined in the spirit forever.
Now Thomas Van Dorn went about his free life day by day, glorying in his liberty. But strands of his old life, floating idly and unnoticed through minutes of his hourly existence, kept tripping him and bothering him. His meals, his clothes, his fixed habits of work, the manifold creature comforts that he prized--all the a.s.sociations of his life with home--came to him a thousand, thousand times and cut little knife-edged rents in the fabric of his new freedom.
And he would have said a year before that it was physically impossible for one child--one small, fair-haired child of five, with pleading face and eager eyes--to meet a man so often in a given period of time, as Lila met him. At first he had avoided her; he would duck into stores; hurry up stairways, or hide himself in groups of men on the sidewalk when he saw her coming. Then there came a time when he knew that the little figure was slipping across the street to avoid him because his presence shamed her with her playmates.
He had never in his heart believed that the child meant much to him. She was merely part of the chain that held him, and yet now that she was not of him or his interests, it seemed to Thomas Van Dorn that she made a piteous figure upon the street, and that the sadness that flitted over her face when she saw him, in some way reproached him, and yet--what right had she in him--or why should he let her annoy him, or disturb his peace and the happiness that his freedom brought. Materially he noticed that she was well fed, well dressed, and he knew that she was well housed. What more could she have--but that was absurd. He couldn't wreck his life for the mere chance that a child should be petted a little.
There was no sense in such a proposition. And Thomas Van Dorn's life was regulated by sense--common sense--horse sense, he called it.
It is curious--and scores of Tom Van Dorn's friends wondered at it then and have marveled at it since, that in the six months which elapsed between his divorce and his remarriage, he did not fathom the shallowness and pretense of Margaret Fenn. But he did not fathom them.
Her glib talk taken mechanically from cheap philosophy about being what you think you are, about s.h.i.+fting moral responsibility onto good intentions, about living for the present and ignoring the past with the uncertain future, took him in completely. She used to read books to him, sitting in the glow of her red lamp-shade--a glow that brought out hidden hints of her splendid feline body, books which soothed his vanity and dulled his mind. In that day he fancied her his intellectual equal.
He thought her immensely strong-minded, and clear headed. He contrasted her in thought with the wife he had put away, told Margaret that Laura was always puling about duty and getting her conscience pinched and whining about it. They agreed sitting there under the lamp, that they had been mates in some far-off jungle, that they had been parted and had been seeking one another through eons, and that when their souls met one of the equations of the physical universe was solved, and that their happiness was the adjustment of ages of wrong. She thought him the most brilliant of men; he deemed her the most wonderful of women, and the devil checked off two drunken fools in his inventory.
It was in those halcyon days of his courts.h.i.+p of Margaret Fenn, when he felt the pride of conquest of another soul and body strongly upon him, that Judge Thomas Van Dorn began to acquire--or perhaps to exhibit noticeably--the turkey gobbler gait, that ever afterward went with him, and became famous as the Van Dorn Strut. It was more than mere knee action--though knee action did characterize it prominently. The strut properly speaking began at the tip of his hat--his soft, black hat that sat so c.o.c.kily upon his head. His head was thrown back as though he had been pulled by a check-rein. His shoulders swung jauntily--more than jauntily, call it insolently--as he walked, and his trunk swayed with some stateliness as his proud hands and legs performed their grand functions. But withal he bowed and smiled--with much condescension--and lifted his hat high from his handsome head, and when women pa.s.sed he doffed it like a flag in a formal salute, and while his body spelled complacence, his face never lost the charm and grace and courtesy that drew men to him, and held them in spite of his faults.
One bitter cold December day, when the wind was blowing sleet down Market Street, and hardly a pa.s.ser-by darkened the doors of the stores, the handsome Judge sailed easily into the Amen Corner, fumbled over the magazines, picked out a pocketful of cigars from the case, without calling Mr. Brotherton who was in the rear of the store working upon his accounts, lighted a cigar, and stood looking out of the frosted window at the deserted gray windy street, utterly ignoring the presence of Captain Morton who was pretending to be deeply buried in the _National Tribune_, but who was watching the Judge and trying to summon courage to speak. The Judge unb.u.t.toned his modish gray coat that nearly reached his heels and put his hands behind him for a moment, as he puffed and pondered--apparently debating something.
”Judge,” said the Captain suddenly and then the Captain's courage fell and he added, ”Bad morning.”
”Yes,” acquiesced the Judge from his abstraction. In a long pause that followed, Captain Morton swallowed at least a peck of Adam's apples that kept coming up to choke him, and then he cleared his throat and spoke:
”Tom--Tom Van Dorn--look around here.” He lowered his voice and went on, ”I want to talk to you.” The Captain edged over on the bench.
”Sit down here a minute--I've been wanting to see you for a month.”
Captain Morton spoke all but in a whisper. The Adam's apple kept strangling him. The Judge saw that the old man was wrestling with some heavy problem. He turned, and looking down at the little wizened man, asked: ”Well, Captain?”
The Captain moistened his lips, patted his toes on the floor, and twirled his fingers. He took a deep breath and said: ”Tom, I've known you since you were twenty-one years old. Do you remember how we took you in the first night you came to town--me and mother? before the hotel was done, eh?” A smile on the Judge's face emboldened the Captain. ”You've got brains, Tom--lots of brains--I often say Tom Van Dorn will sit in the big chair at the White House yet--what say? Well, Tom--” Now there was the place to say it. But the Captain's Adam's apple bobbed convulsively in a second silence. He decided to take a fresh start: ”Tom, you're a sensible man--? I says to myself I'm going to have a plain talk to that man. He's smart; he'll appreciate it. Just the other day--George back there, and John Kollander and d.i.c.k Bowman and old man Adams, and Joe Calvin, and Kyle Perry were in here talking and I says--Gentlemen, that boy's got brains--lots of brains--eh? and he's a prince; 'y gory a prince, that's what Tom Van Dorn is, and I can go to him--I can talk to him--what say?” The Captain was on the brink again.