The Return of Peter Grimm Part 47

This morning I'm sane enough to know that ghosts were invented by the first nervous man who was alone at night. This morning I am heart-broken because my little boy lies dead. To-morrow I shall be sane enough to know that it is as lucky for me as it is for him, that he died. And in a week I'll be congratulating myself over it all and revelling in a freedom and a fortune I've always craved. So you see I'm quite incurable."

"Why do you say such things?" she cried. "You know they aren't true."

"When I said you 'always understand,' Kitty, I was wrong. You don't understand. No woman understands--that a man doesn't reform. A good man may have taken a wrong twist. And when he finds his way back to the straight road, they say he has 'reformed.' He hasn't. He's only struck his own natural gait again. As he was bound to. And _my_ kind of man sometimes takes a momentary twist in the _right_ direction. Then people say _he_ has reformed. And they are just as much mistaken as they were in the other case. For, water won't run uphill after the first pressure is withdrawn."

"But in the fires of affliction----"

"The fires of affliction," he retorted sadly, "have burned away the dross from the pure gold of many a soul, I suppose. But no fires were ever heated that could burn dross fiercely enough to turn it into gold.

Yet----"

He hesitated, then said, without daring to look at her:

"There's one thing I do want you to know, Kitty. Whatever I was and am, and whatever shams went to make up my daily life here--you know my love for _you_ was true and absolute and that I loved and _love_ you more than the whole world besides?"

"Yes," she returned, unembarra.s.sed. "I believe that, Frederik. In part.

You loved me as much as you could love any one. But----"

"Why must there be a 'but'?" he entreated.

"But," she went on with the relentlessness of the Young, "not as much as you loved yourself."

"More! Ten thousand times more!" he declared vehemently.

"No," she contradicted. "For you didn't love me enough to give me up when you knew I cared for another man. The Perfect Love would have----"

"The 'perfect love'!" he scoffed. "I have read of it. But I have yet to see it."

"You cannot see it," she replied, "for the same reason I could not see Oom Peter when he was fighting my battle here last night. My eyes were blinded by the world I live in. Perfect love is everywhere. It is within and about us. But----"

"But I would be too ign.o.ble to recognise it if I chanced upon it?

Perhaps. But why strip me of my last illusion? In the torment of my self-abas.e.m.e.nt this morning, I have clung to that one comfort: That I love you with a love which a truly worthless man _could_ not feel. And now----"

"_Don't_ misunderstand me," she begged, half-tearfully. "I----"

"You have shown me the truth. And I ought to thank you for it. Perhaps some day I can. If I still remember it then. Good-bye, dear. I shan't be here again. I've--I've left you a little present. Dr. McPherson will give it to you."

"But I _can't_ take----"

"Oh, yes, you can. It isn't really from me. That's just another of my lies to make a good impression. I've gotten so in the habit of telling them that it is going to take me a long time to realise that one of the chief advantages of being a rich man is the immunity from the need to lie. The present isn't really from me. It's from Oom. Peter. You can't refuse it from _him_. If you doubt it's Oom Peter's own direct gift, ask Dr. McPherson. It was bad enough," he sighed, in mock despair, "for Oom Peter to squander so much of my money while he was alive, without keeping on doing it after he died. I hope he has stopped it at last. Or I'll soon be reduced to standing at the subway steps with a tin cup in my hand."

Through the forced lightness, whose effort wrung sweat from the man's forehead, Kathrien was woman enough to see the mortal agony that lay beneath. And again she held out her hand.

"Good-bye, Frederik," she said gently. "And may you be happy!"

He looked doubtfully at the shapely little hand. Then, with an awkwardness strangely foreign to his normal grace, he took the hand in both his own and stood a moment, looking down at it as though not knowing what to do with it.

Then, very simply, he fell on his knees, touched the warm, roseleaf palm to his lips, got up and, without looking back, hurried out of the house.

Kathrien watched his slender, carefully groomed figure until it was lost at a turn in the rose bushes. Then she came back into the room and stood beside Peter Grimm's old chair.

"Oom Peter!" she whispered. "This is my wedding day. You know it, don't you? And--oh, please let me think you are close--_close_--beside me all the time!"

THE END