Part 49 (1/2)
Brotherton was mentally calculating that he would be in his middle fifties before a possible little girl of his might be putting on her first long dresses. It saddened him a little, and he turned, rather subdued, and called into the alcove to the Judge and said:
”Tom, this is our friend, Miss Van Dorn--I was just sending a message by her to a dear--a very dear friend I used to have, named Lila, who is gone. Miss Van Dorn knows Lila, and sees her sometimes. So now that you are here, I'm going to send this to Lila,” he raised the girl's hand to his lips and awkwardly kissed it, as he said clumsily, ”well, say, my dear--will you see that Lila gets that?”
Her father stepped toward the embarra.s.sed girl and spoke:
”Lila--Lila--can't you come here a moment, dear?”
He was standing by the smoldering fire, brus.h.i.+ng a rolled newspaper against his leg. Something within him--perhaps Mr. Brotherton's awkward kiss stirred it--was trying to soften the proud, hard face that was losing the mobility which once had been its charm. He held out a hand, and leaned toward the girl. She stepped toward him and asked, ”What is it?”
An awkward pause followed, which the man broke with, ”Well--nothing in particular, child; only I thought maybe you'd like--well, tell me how are you getting along in High School, little girl.”
”Oh, very well; I believe,” she answered, but did not lift her eyes to his. Mr. Brotherton moved back to his desk. Again there was silence. The girl did not move away, though the father feared through every painful second that she would. Finally he said: ”I hear your mother is getting on famously down in South Harvey. Our people down there say she is doing wonders with her cooking club for girls.”
Lila smiled and answered: ”She'll be glad to know it, I'm sure.” Again she paused, and waited.
”Lila,” he cried, ”won't you let me help you--do something for you?--I wish so much--so much to fill a father's place with you, my dear--so much.”
He stepped toward her, felt for her hand, but could not find it. She looked up at him, and in her eyes there rose the old cloud of sadness that came only once in a long time. It was a puzzled face that he saw looking steadily into his.
”I don't know what you could do,” she answered simply.
Something about the pathetic loneliness of his unfathered child, evidenced by the sadness that flitted across her face, touched a remote, unsullied part of his nature, and moved him to say:
”Oh, Lila--Lila--Lila--I need you--I need you--G.o.d knows, dear, how I do need you. Won't you come to me sometimes? Won't your mother ever relent--won't she? If she knew, she would be kind. Oh, Lila, Lila,” he called as the two stood together there in the twilight with the glow of the coals in the fireplace upon them, ”Lila, won't you let me take you home even--in my car? Surely your mother wouldn't care for that, would she?”
The girl looked into the fire and answered, ”No,” and shook her head.
”No--mother would be pleased, I think. She has always told me to be kind to you--to be respectful to you, sir. I've tried to be, sir?”
Her voice rose in a question. He answered by taking her arm and pleading, ”Oh, come--won't you let me take you home in my car, Lila--it's getting late--won't you, Lila?”
But the girl turned away; he let her arm drop. She answered, shaking her head:
”I think, sir, if you don't mind--I'd rather walk.”
In another second she was gone. Her father leaned against the mantel and the dying coals warmed tears in his hungry, furtive eyes, and his face twitched for a moment before he turned, and walked with some show of pride to his grand car. Half an hour later he was driving homeward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, when his ear caught the word, ”Lila,” in a girlish treble near him. He looked up to see a young miss--a Calvin young miss, in fact--running and waving her hands toward a group of boys and girls in their middle teens and late teens, trooping up the hill along the sidewalk. They were neighborhood children, and Lila seemed to be the center of the circle. He slowed down his car to watch them. Near Lila was Kenyon Adams, a tall, beautiful youth, fiddle box in hand, but still a boy even though he was twenty. Other boys played about the group and through it, but none was so striking as Kenyon, tall, lithe, with a beautifully poised head of crinkly chestnut hair, who strode gayly among the youths and maidens and yet was not quite of them. Even the Judge could see that Kenyon did not exactly belong--that he was rare and exotic. But as her father's car crept unnoticed past the group, he could see that Lila belonged. She was in no way exotic among the Calvins and Kollanders and the Wrights, and the children of the neighbors in Elm Street. Lila's clear, merry laugh--a laugh that rang like an old bell through Tom Van Dorn's heart--rose above the adolescent din of the group and to the father seemed to be the dominant note in the hilarious cadenza of young life. It struck him that they were like fireflies, glowing and darting and disappearing and weaving about.
And fireflies indeed they were. For in them the fires of life were just beginning to sparkle. Slowly the great bat of a car moved up past them, then darted around the block like the blind creature that it was, and whirling its awkward circle came swooping up again to the glowing, animated stars that held him in a deadly fascination. For those twinkling, human stars playing like fireflies in exquisite joy at the first faint kindling in their hearts of the fires that flame forever in the torch of life, might well have held in their spell a stronger man than Thomas Van Dorn. For the first evanescent fires of youth are the most sacred fires in the world. And well might the great, black bat of a car circle again and again and even again around and come always back to the beautiful light.
But Thomas Van Dorn came back not happily but in sad unrest. It was as though the black bat carried captive on its back a weary pilgrim from the Primrose Hunt, jaded and spent and dour, who saw in the sacred fires what he had cast away, what he had deemed worthless and of a sudden had seen in its true beauty and in its real value. Once again as the fireflies played their ceaseless game with the ever flickering glow of youth s.h.i.+ning through eyes and cheeks from their hearts, the great bat carrying its captive swooped around them--and then out into the darkness of his own charred world.
But the fireflies in the gay spring twilight kept darting and criss-crossing and frolicking up the walk. One by one, each swiftly or lazily disappeared from the maze, and at last only two, Kenyon and Lila, went weaving up the lawn toward the steps of the Nesbit house.
It had been one of those warm days when spring is just coming into the world. All day the boy had been roaming the wide prairies. The voices of the wind in the brown gra.s.s and in the bare trees by the creek had found their way into his soul. A curious soul it was--the soul of a poet, the soul of one who felt infinitely more than he knew--the soul of a man in the body of a callow youth.
As he and Lila walked up the hill, all the dreams that had swept across him out in the fields came to him. They sat on the south steps of the Nesbit house watching the spring that was trying to blossom in the pink and golden sunset. The girl was beginning to look at the world through new, strange eyes, and out on the hills that day the boy also had felt the thrill of a new heaven and a new earth.
Their talk was finite and far short of the vision of warm, radiant life-stuff flowing through the universe that had thrilled Kenyon in the hills. Out there, looking eastward over the prairies checked in brown earth, and green wheat, and old gra.s.s faded from russet to lavender, with the gray woods worming their way through the valleys, he had found voice and had crooned melodies that came out of the wind and sun, and satisfied his soul. Over and over he had repeated in various cadences the words:
”I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.”