The Return of Peter Grimm Part 45

"'Uncle Rat has come to town, To buy----'"

McPherson came in.

"Here's the water, Willem," he announced, going over to the couch. "I got it at last, after barking my s.h.i.+ns over----"

He glanced at the sofa and its occupant. Then the gla.s.s fell from his nerveless hand. He knelt in horror beside the still, white little body that lay there.

"Dead!" gasped McPherson.

"No!" exulted Peter Grimm from the doorway. "Not _dead_, Andrew, old friend. There never was so fair a prospect for _life_!"

"Oh," sighed Willem blissfully, his arm about Peter Grimm's neck, "I'm _so_ happy! I didn't know any one could be so happy as this--or so _well_."

"If only the rest of them knew what they are missing! Hey, Willem?"

a.s.sented Peter Grimm.

"What is Dr. McPherson looking at there on the sofa?" demanded Willem.

"He seems scared--and--and--unhappy. _What_ is he looking at, Mynheer Grimm?"

"He is looking at--_nothing_. And he doesn't know it. Come!"

"It's--it's so wonderful to be _alive_!" cried Willem.

They pa.s.sed out, and the door of the house closed noiselessly behind them.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE DAWNING

Night had given place to red dawn, and red dawn to white day.

Dr. McPherson came out of the Grimm house and sat down on the edge of the vine-bordered stoop. He was very tired. He had had a hard and trying night. In his ears were still ringing the sobs of old Marta, hastily awakened to learn of her only grandson's death;--Kathrien's quiet grief;--Mrs. Batholommey's excited, high-pitched questionings that jangled on the death hush as horribly as breaks the Venus music through the Pilgrims' Chorus.

It had been a night of stark wakefulness, of a myriad details. And McPherson had borne the brunt of it all. Now, under an opiate, Marta was asleep. Mrs. Batholommey had trotted ponderously home to bear the black tidings of a prisoned child's Release to her husband. And Kathrien had gone to her own room under the doctor's gruff command to s.n.a.t.c.h an hour's rest. McPherson himself had come out into the cool and freshness of the new-born world for a breathing s.p.a.ce, and to think.

The June day was young. Very young. Under the early sun the gra.s.s was afire with dew diamonds. The flowers, dripping and fragrant, held up their cups to the light. The town still lay asleep. Over the suburb brooded the Hush of the primal Wilderness, creeping back furtively and momentarily to its long-lost domain.

And presently the quiet was broken by the swift recurring click of heels on the sidewalk. Some one was coming along the slumbrous Main street; and coming with nervous haste. The steps turned in at the Grimm gate.

McPherson raised his blood-shot, sleep-robbed eyes and stared crossly toward the newcomer.

It was Frederik Grimm. And, recognising him, McPherson's frown deepened into a scowl.

"Is it true?" asked Frederik as he stopped in front of the doctor. "I met Mrs. Batholommey. She was just pa.s.sing the hotel on her way home. I hadn't been able to sleep, so I was starting out for a walk. She told me----"

"That Willem's dead?" finished McPherson, with brutal frankness. "Yes, it's true. Did you suppose that it was a new vaudeville joke?"

Frederik stood blinking, blank-faced, apparently failing to grasp the sense of the doctor's words. The younger man's aspect dully irritated McPherson.

"Yes," he reiterated, "the boy's dead. The problem of supporting him needn't bother you now. Not that it ever did. He's dead. And it's the luckiest thing that ever happened to him."

Frederik raised one hand in instinctive protest. But he might as well have sought to stem Niagara with a straw.

The doctor's strained nerves, his genuine grief, his dislike for the dapper young man before him, combined to open wide the floodgates of honest Scottish wrath. And he saw no cause to exercise self-control.

"You're in luck!" he growled. "The law could have compelled you to pay some such munificent sum as four dollars a week for his maintenance.

You're safe from that now. And I congratulate you. It'll mean an extra weekly quart of champagne or a brace of musical comedy seats for you.

The law is stringent and I was going to invoke it in your case. You smashed a decent girl's life. You helped bring a nameless boy into a world that would have made his life a h.e.l.l as long as he lived. Just because his father happened to be a yellow cur. And, in penalty for that sin, the power and majesty of an outraged law would have a.s.sessed you about one per cent of your yearly income. You're lucky."

Frederik winced as though he had been lashed across the face.

"I sometimes wonder," continued McPherson, urged to fresh vehemence by sight of the effect he was scoring, "if h.e.l.l holds a worse criminal or a more mercilessly punished one than the man or woman who lets a little child suffer needlessly--who _makes_ it suffer. And of all the suffering that can be heaped upon a child, everything else is like a feather's weight compared to sending it out in life with a name such as Willem would have borne. Oh, but G.o.d's merciful when He finds little children crying in the dark and leads them Home! Batholommey and the rest of them sneer at me for sticking to the old h.e.l.l-fire Calvin doctrines in these days of pew-cus.h.i.+on religion. But I tell you, in all reverence, if there's no h.e.l.l for the people who torture children, then it's time the Almighty turned awhile from pardoning sinners and built one."

"Don't worry," said Frederik shortly. "There is one. I know. I am in it."

"'Mourner's bench talk,' eh? It's cheap. Penitence is always on the free list. And in your case, as in most, it comes too late to do any good, except to salve the penitent's feelings. Willem lived in the same house with you for three years. All around him was Love. Except from the one person whose sacred duty it was to give that Love. We pitied him. We knew what he'd be facing if he lived. We made his childhood as happy as we could, so that he'd have at least one bright thing to look back on afterward. He was nothing to any of us. Except that he was a child crippled and maimed and fore-d.a.m.ned for life in the worst way any Unfortunate could be. We pitied him and we loved him. Did he ever hear a harsh word or see a forbidding face? Yes; he did. From one person alone.

From _you_, his father. Even last night when he crept downstairs parched with thirst, and begged you for a drink of water----"

"Don't!" cried Frederik, in sharp agony. "Do you suppose you can tell _me_ anything about that? Do you suppose I haven't gone over it all--yes, and over all the three years--a hundred times since I heard he was dead? Do you think you can make me feel it any more d.a.m.nably than I do? If so, go ahead and try. You spoke of the need for a h.e.l.l. You can spare your advice to the Almighty. He has made one. And I can't even wait until I'm dead before I walk through it."

"Through it," a.s.sented McPherson sardonically. "_Through_ it with many a lamentable groan and a beating of the breast, and with squeaky little wails of remorse--and on _through_ it, out onto the pleasant slopes of forgetfulness and new mischief. Take my condolences on your fearful pa.s.sage through your purgatory. I fear me it will take you the best part of a week to pa.s.s entirely out of it. It's only a man-built h.e.l.l, that of yours. And, according to the modern theologians, G.o.d has no worse one for you later on."

With twitching, pallid face, and anguished eyes, Frederik Grimm looked dumbly at his tormentor. Even in his agony, he felt, subconsciously, far down in his atrophied soul, that the doctor's forecast as to the duration of his remorse's torture was little exaggerated.

Yet, for the moment, his "man-built h.e.l.l" was grilling and racking the stricken penitent to a point that the Spanish Inquisition's ingenuity could never have devised.

McPherson, with a sombre satisfaction, noted the younger man's misery.

Then a wistful look flitted across his gnarled, bearded face.

"I wonder," he mused, his angry voice sinking to a rumble, "I wonder if you can guess--and of course you can't--what a prize you spent eight years in throwing away. You had a son. And you disowned him and turned your back on him. I've had no son. I shall never have a son. And when I go out into the dark, there'll be no man-child to carry on my name. No lad to inherit this brute body of mine with all its strength and giant endurance; this brain of mine, that has tried so hard to perfect itself and to give its possible successor the faculty for thought and work and self-mastery. My father was a strong man, a great man. And much of the little power and goodness and worthiness that exist in me, I owe to him.

No man in future years can say that of _me_. It must be something that no childless man can understand or dream of, to feel the fingers of one's little son tugging at one. To,--Lord! What would Mother Batholommey say if she could hear me maundering and havering away like this! It means nothing to _you_, either. Except that you've had, and hated, and thrown away what many a better man would give half his life for."

There was a short silence. McPherson, ashamed of blurting his sacred heart secrets to a fellow he detested, sat gnawing angrily at his ragged grey moustache. Frederik, to whom the last part of the doctor's tirade had pa.s.sed unheard, stood gazing sightlessly at the ground before him.

And for a s.p.a.ce, neither of them spoke.

At length Frederik looked up, almost timidly.

"Could--might I see him?" he asked.

"H'm?" grunted McPherson, starting from the maze of his own unhappy thoughts.

"I say, may I go in and see----?"

"Had three years to see him in, didn't you?" demanded McPherson. "I can't recall now that I ever saw you glance at him when you could help it. Why should you go in and see him now? You can't frighten him any more."

He checked himself.