Tom Beauling

Front matter

Copyright, 1901, by The Century Co. THE DE VINNE PRESS.

To Richard Harding Davis

Chapter 1

❦

ONE spring, before the peaches were done blossoming or the cherry blossoms come to their best, Judge Tyler, of Mitford, sat in the cool of his study and considered what the year might bring. Although a sturdy reputation, a number of excellent investments, and sixty years of bachelor life rendered Judge Tyler independent of droughts, floods, high winds, or other criminal manifestations of weather, still there was the blood of stout Connecticut farmers in his veins, and the open pamphlet on his knees was Whalen's "Agricultural Prophecies." As he sat taking in the prophecies for pretty nearly what they were worth (and grumbling over his own sagacity), he threw a glance out the window, and ob- served a lady and a child walking along the road-side of the fence which divided his private garden from the public street. His eyes were almost back at certain statements regarding July wheat, when the tail of them caught an arm, black-gloved to the elbow, in the act of pushing open his smart green gate. A large picture-hat of soft colors, capping a slim figure in white, drooped up the gravel walk between the neat little six-inch square hedges of box. One black-gloved hand crumpled a white muslin handkerchief; the other rested picturesquely, but by no means unlovingly, on the further shoulder of a sturdy little boy of five. One of the white-figured curtains of the window put an abrupt end to observation.

It was Sunday, and Judge Tyler's ancient Irish servant was at the afternoon service of her church, so that the knocking which presently fell upon the door obliged him (not suffering from cheerfulness especially) to go and open it himself.

The lady stood weakly on the thresh- old confronting him. Sunken cheeks and big eyes, feverishly bright, told a tale. She coughed.

"Consumption," said the judge to himself, methodically, as you would file a paper for reference.

"You don't know me?" said the lady.

"No," said the judge, stiffly; "I do not place you." For all his judicial certainty of speech, there was a something about the lady which Judge Tyler did recognize. It was as you recall a poem whose title, purpose, and moral you have forgotten, but of whose prosody one haunting line remains. The haunting line was a big, sweet mouth.

Judge Tyler glanced down at the child, and was slightly scandalized to perceive that so young a male wore trousers. The child had a big, sweet mouth also. His smiled without volition.

"You don't remember me, Judge Tyler," said the lady. She parted her big, sweet mouth into a deprecating smile, which instantly began to tremble at the corners. Then she interlaced her fingers, without closing them. The familiar gesture at once brought the lady to her proper niche in Judge Tyler's gallery of recollection.

"I remember you perfectly, Harmony," he said. There was neither surprise nor warmth in his tone, nor indeed coldness, rather a judicial tinct of noncommission. Whatever the tone, the lady's eyes drooped, almost tragically, before it, and she laid her hand with a charming free-arm gesture back on the rosy infant's shoulder. Judge Tyler, easily sure of himself, waited.

"This is my son—Tom," said the lady. Then she swayed, and Judge Tyler thrust out his right arm to prevent her falling.

"I won't fall," she said, as if that was the gist of her tragedy. "Really, I won't." It sounded like a daughter promising her mother to be good.

"Perhaps you would better step inside," said Judge Tyler.

"Yes, that's it," said she, "if I can just sit down a moment."

Her hand rested lightly into the judge's crooked arm. He could feel that it was shaking. Once it jerked nervously.

"I couldn't go to any one else," she said; "you see, I am not well."

Although his manner was too grave and collected to be reassuring, the judge conducted his visitor with courtesy to the study and placed her in a deep chair, having first softened its back with a small brown cushion. When she was seated, he stood before the mantel and looked at her interrogatively. The infant stood sturdily by the left arm of his mother's chair. The lady glanced deprecatingly from the infant to the judge, and smiled her big, sweet smile.

"Children have such absurd memories," she said.

The judge understood perfectly, but preferred to say: "Do I understand you to indicate, Harmony, that you wish to speak with me alone?"

"Oh, yes, if you please," said the lady. "Tom, go with Judge Tyler."

The infant advanced upon the judge, or rather from beneath him,—under- mined him, as it were,—and looked him in the face, as if to determine whether or not that black-clothed, gray-headed man was trustable. In the course of his life Judge Tyler had spoken to more felons than children. He was quite at a loss.

"Come," he said presently, in a gruff voice, and forced himself to hold out a finger. The child's hand closed on the finger as a grown man's hand closes on money that is owing to him. An ingratiating feeling started, with the brazen intention of getting into his heart, to run up the judge's arm. He managed, not too easily, to check it at the elbow.

"Be good, Tom!"

In the dining-room the blinds were drawn. A few blue-and-white plates, "Independence Hall;" "Old South;" "The Franklin Elm," New Haven; "Mount Vernon;" a steel-engraving, "Shakespere lisant son drame de Macbeth devant La Reine Elisabeth et sa cour;" a copperplate, "Delia Hid in Shades Eludes her Eager Swain," and a copy of a copy of Van Dyke's portrait of himself ornamented the walls. The head of a cow-faced moose looked out alarmingly over the top of an ugly black-walnut sideboard. His neck was lost in shadow, and you might have stretched your imagination to believe that a stall containing the animal's body and legs was situated immediately behind that offensive piece of furniture. Judge Tyler lifted the child into the arm-chair at the head of the solid mahogany.

"There," said the judge. He reached the door, stopped, turned, and went over to the sideboard with somewhat of the stealthy manner with which we may assume that a thief moves. Out of a Canton-ware bowl he took a fig, hesitated, and took another. These he thrust hastily into the child's hand.

"There," he said gruffly.

The child eyed first the judge and then the figs.

"Don't eat too fast," said the judge, still more gruffly. He hurried out of the room, closing the door behind him with something more than firmness and some- thing less than a bang. He could hear the lady in the study coughing.

The child, in imitation of the dusty mouse, began a procrastinating attack upon the figs.

Judge Tyler cleared his throat.

"He is a manly little fellow," he said.

"Thank you," said the lady.

The judge seated himself tentatively on the edge of a chair, and waited for her to explain.

"I hated to have to come to you," she began.

"Since you have come," said the judge, tartly, "it will hardly be necessary to go into that."

"But you are so just," she began again. The judge acknowledged the compliment with an impatient but momentary contraction of the eyebrows.

"I couldn't go to my own sister," she said, "could I?"

"I don't know why you couldn't," said Judge Tyler.

"I simply couldn't," she said plain- tively. "Dorothy was always so hard. Even when we were little, though I was older, she used to find fault with me on ethical grounds. I couldn't go to Dorothy—" The lady was stopped by a fit of coughing. Then she said, with her wide, trembling smile:

"You see? I had to come to somebody, and I chose you, because I know that even if you are g-g-gruff—"

"I hope," said the judge, hastily, "that this cough is nothing serious."

"Oh, but it is!" she said. "I have had it three years. We were barn-storming with 'Julius Cæsar'—doing one-night stands in the country towns—I was Cæsar's wife—"

Judge Tyler could not explain why it suddenly and quite inapplicably occurred to him that Cæsar's wife was above suspicion.

"And I caught cold—this cold—and so I have come to you to ask a great, great service—I am afraid an impossible service."

The Judge bowed.

"It's about Tom."

The judge looked troubled.

"Don't say you won't before you hear me out. Is he—is Tom out of harm's way?"

"I hope so," said Judge Tyler, his mind reverting with a twinge of agony to certain breakables in the dining-room.

"Then that's all right," said the lady. "Judge Tyler, what is to become of Tom if I die?"

That sort of sudden question is always difficult to answer, and painful.

"If you would care to put me in possession of the facts," said Judge Tyler, "we could then perhaps talk of your son with better mutual understanding."

"That would be better," said the lady. "But you will let me do it my own way, won't you? It makes it so much harder if you ask questions. It's hard enough, anyway."

The judge looked at his watch.

"I can give you just an hour," he said, and he added, almost kindly: "Will you take something before you begin—a glass of wine? You will forgive me remarking, Harmony, that you look very ill."

"I am," she said gravely, "but I won't take anything, please."

Chapter 2

YOU know what sort of a home life I had," said the lady. "I used to call my father and my mother the last of the Puritans. They were so good and strict, such church-goers, so upright, so God-fearing, so hard on children. I think my father and my mother were never children themselves. They were born grown up. They were never tempted by light things. Dorothy was like them. She used to sew little samplers, and ask God to punish her if she was wicked. But I wasn't like that. I was very joyous, and glad that I was pretty. I used to stick flowers in my hair and dance before a glass. You remember our house—all horse-hair and mahogany, a stuffed duck under glass in the parlor. Fancy! The rooms were always darkened when the sun was shining its brightest. Our house was cool on the hottest days. But the air in it was never fresh, always stuffy—old-fashioned air. I remember when my uncle died. I saw him in his coffin. Fancy letting a child—a little child—see a dead person in a coffin! It seemed to me that his coffin was like a small edition of our house—a stricter interpretation of the spirit of our house. I remember thinking, though I was only a little child, that my father and my mother and my sister and I had all been born buried, and that when we really and truly died we would simply be put into smaller coffins. Our house was a coffin that you could breathe in; a real coffin was smaller and you could not breathe in it—that was the only difference.

"My father and my mother loved me. I know that because one day they prayed for the heathen in foreign lands, and I asked them why they did that, and they said it was because they loved the heathen in foreign lands. And they used to pray for me, so they must have loved me too. But they didn't love me the way I wanted to be loved. They never kissed me when I had flowers in my hair and red cheeks from dancing, when I looked pretty and most like a child, but every morning, after morning prayers, and every evening before going to bed. They never kissed me on Sunday. When I had diphtheria—you remember how sick I was—and the danger was past, they did not cry over me and be fatherly and motherly, but called up the servants and read a lot of stiff prayers, and then they kissed me solemnly, and said they were glad their little girl had not been taken. And Dorothy, little Dorothy—what do you think she said? She said it was a great relief to her that I had not died then, for, in her judgment, I was not fit to die.

"I was never the kind that is 'fit to die,' Judge Tyler. I was only fit to live, to be gay, to laugh, to dance, to sing, to play, to make people laugh, and later to make some man happy. For I was a good girl, even if I was only fit to live. If I could only make you understand how terrible home was to me. I—"

The lady pressed the handkerchief to her lips lightly and coughed. Then she went on:

"Children can bear almost anything. They have to. But when I grew up, I could not bear it any longer. I was eighteen that spring. They did many things to poor New England in the old days, and in our days. They drove out love and gaiety and the pride of life, but they could not drive out spring. Every year spring came to New England, and begged people to live and be happy. But people only stopped their ears, and hid in their houses, and prayed to a stiff God, when the real God had sent them spring. That spring I had it out with my father and my mother. And when I had told them about life and sunlight and gladness, they sighed and said I was no child of theirs, but a penance for their sins. And they believed it. And they prayed for me and for strength to bear their burden. When they had done praying, I went away."

"It broke their hearts," said the judge, coldly. "They loved you very deeply, Harmony."

"Yes," said she, "I broke their hearts, for theirs was a gospel of forgiveness, and they could not find it in their hearts to forgive. They would not take me back. Did you know that? When I saw how I had hurt them, I offered to go back. Did you know that? I offered to go back and live in that house. And when I made that offer, I had done nothing in any way shameful. But they said I had made my bed and I must lie in it. And I was glad of that, for, though it was hard and narrow, I loved the bed I had made for myself. The sun waked me.

"That summer I sang at Peaks Island in Portland Harbor. And the people up there liked me and the songs I sang. And the other people in the company were friendly with me because I was good and only wanted to live and let live. One night a man who was going to put on a comic opera in New York heard me sing, and offered me a part in it. Think how happy I was! Think of getting to New York the very first year! I was so triumphant, so gay—and it was then that I offered to go back and live with my people. Think of what it must have cost to make the offer, for I was sure—oh, so sure!—they would want me, and I didn't—I couldn't want to go!

"So when summer was over I went to New York, full of the part I was to sing, and so happy and eager to have people like me and be a success. And then troubles began. It seemed that nobody had a clear title to the new opera, and there were disputes and litigations, and finally the manager washed his hands of the whole thing and put on a play instead. But there was no part in it for me, and by that time winter was half over, and I could not get any work. I went from manager to manager, and the high and mighty ones I could not even get to see, and the others had no place for me, and I could not get any other kind of work to do that I could do. And I had no money—no money, nothing to pawn, no one to turn to. Do you know I thought, then, of coming to you? But I was ashamed. I was ashamed to then—and—and—now I'm not."

"It would perhaps have been better if you had." said the judge.

"Yes, I wish I had," said she, "and—and I don't. Even when I thought that I might have to starve, I was happier than I had been in my father's house. That winter my father died. And I could not go to his funeral, because I could not buy a ticket to Mitford. It was so pitiful, his dying like that, because I thought that if it hadn't been for me he would have lived longer. At the very end of winter I got work to do. But it was too late."

A feverish color spread up from the lady's throat over her cheeks and forehead, and she had another fit of coughing.

"This is too much for you, Harmony," said the judge.

"No," she said; "it's all I'll have to do. I've got just enough strength to do it. Please get me some water."

The judge hurried out, and presently returned with a glass of water. The lady took a sip, and then, balancing the glass on the chair arm, continued:

"One day there was a wet snow falling, and nothing but hopelessness in the world. And a man came into my life. He only meant to be friendly; I know that. And we were just good friends. He helped me through the winter, and I took his help because I promised myself that I would pay him back—every penny. And we were just good friends for a long, long time. And when we stopped being that, it was all my fault. I got to care about him, you see. I got to care about him. Then I got a part in a melodrama that was going on the road—but it was too late.

"So you see I made life very terrible for myself. People don't realize how terrible a look can be. I got plenty of terrible looks, and from worse women than I was. And I made up my mind one night—we were on board the City of Cleveland, going to Detroit—that when the rest had gone to bed I would get out through my stateroom window, and over the rail, and have done with it. I hoped my body would sink and never be found. I don't know quite what happened, but suddenly I knew that it wasn't myself I loved any more, but some one else. And then I couldn't bear to die. Things got easier after that, because I was standing them for some one else—for my little son. And now—now that I have done my best and worked my hardest for him, and it wasn't good enough or hard enough—what is to become of him—what is to become of him? That's why I have come to you to help me. Won't you tell me what will become of him?"

"Do I understand that you are out of work now?" said the judge.

"Out of work!" she cried excitedly. "It isn't that—you don't understand. I'm dying!"

Judge Tyler could not find anything to say. He stuttered a word, and waited for her to finish.

"Don't you suppose," she said, "that people know when they are dying? I have known for three years that it had to come. I have known it ever since the night I was Caesar's wife, and it was so cold. I got this cough then, and it's done for me. Won't you tell me what to do about Tom? I have been a good mother to him, Judge Tyler. I have worked and slaved for him, and it's got to count for something. Won't you tell me what's to be done—won't you?"

This last very pitifully. Judge Tyler was not unmoved, but his keen sense of justice told him that the woman should not have come to him.

"Harmony," he said, "was there no one else to whom you could go?"

"What do you mean?" she said. "I thought you—"

"You don't understand, perhaps," said he. "I'm going to ask you a question—a painful question."

"Yes."

"Harmony, what was the man's name?"

She breathed in once, hard.

"I don't know," she said.

Chapter 3

YOU don't know?"

"I was very proud," she said. "He never told me his name; I never asked him."

"I don't understand that kind of pride," said Judge Tyler.

"You would if you were a woman," said she.

"Perhaps," a little dryly. "Perhaps I would. But as it is, I do not. You tell me that you do not know this man. Does he—did he ever know that you had a son?"

"How should he know? I went out of his life, he out of mine."

"He must be found," said Judge Tyler. "This is his affair, not mine."

"Yes," she said plaintively, "I suppose so, but—"

"Have you no means of tracing him?"

"I did—I did try to find him," she said. "Here." She took a small leather case containing a photograph out of her pocket and handed it to the judge. He looked at the photograph attentively.

"This is you and he?" he said.

"Yes."

The lady in the photograph was certainly Harmony. You could tell that by the eyes and the mouth. It was too big, as mouths go, but so very sweet and mobile as to make you forget that it was not the most perfectly sized and beautiful mouth extant. The eyes were too far apart, of an untroubled, starry kind; they sometimes made you look away from the mouth. But the present Harmony was only a pale, tired, thin copy of the Harmony in the photograph. It made Judge Tyler start to see her again as he remembered her.

"I've changed, haven't I?" said she.

Women say so many things that only women can answer.

"I might not know this man if I met him on the street," said Judge Tyler. "It is already faded, and was taken evidently at an age when the marks of a man's character, whatever it may be, are still held in abeyance by the youth of his face. Here are no lines of race, no marks of profession. Five years may have changed his face completely. He may have worked, he may have idled. He may wear a mustache, he may be dead. Have you no idea what his name was?"

"No."

"But he must have had a name that you called him by?"

"Would that matter?" she asked. "I—I gave him that name."

"Then it doesn't matter what it was," said Judge Tyler, hastily. He glanced at the photograph again. "He looks like a gentleman."

"He was," said the lady, in a tone implying that she expected contradiction.

Judge Tyler started to return the photograph, but his judicial habit of cross-questioning even inanimate objects caused him first to turn it over and examine the back. The cardboard was yel- low with age, and stained. In the center was an object in gilt purporting to be the ferocious head of a winged gryphon, the trade-mark of a once popular firm of photographers. Across the upper righthand corner a name and date were written, with violet ink, in a fine, slanting, feminine hand.

"There is a name written here," said Judge Tyler. "Did you know that?"

"Yes. I wrote it there—it's my son's name."

"Tomas Beauling," read the judge. "May I ask why you call him that?"

"I call him that," she said, "because it belonged to a brave and loyal gentleman who asked me to marry him, and wanted to take my sin on his own head. He is dead now, and I want my son to have his name. I know he wouldn't mind."

"I have never heard the name," said the judge. "I presume he was an actor?"

"I think he was," said the lady; "but the world wasn't good to him. You wouldn't have heard of him, though, even if he had been celebrated, for Beauling was only his real name—he only told it to me."

"I see," said the judge.

"And I want my son," she went on, "to grow up as good and loyal a gentleman as Tomas Beauling was; and I have come to you, Judge Tyler, for help. Won't you help me about it? I beg your pardon." She began to cough again.

"You place me in a very difficult position," said Judge Tyler; "pardon me, if I am blunt. If you were to die, the position would not be altered. I am willing to do anything you ask—in reason; but you cannot expect me to provide for your son's future, or to act as his guardian. I have no gift with children. The habits of my life are opposed to any change, and if I undertake to help you in this matter it can only be with advice. You did right in coming to me, perhaps. But if, as you say, you are seriously ill, you must go to your sister Dorothy. She is the proper person to appeal to. And I feel sure that if anything were to happen to you, she would feel it her duty to take your son into her own family and do by him as by her own."

"You advise me," she said excitedly, "to leave my son with a woman who would bring him up as I was brought up—in a cold, dark house, with a cold, dark God in the parlor and a red-hot hell in the basement! That's what you would advise me to do!"

"Don't talk so wildly, Harmony," said Judge Tyler.

"Do you know what I hoped you would say," she said, without heeding—"what I expected you to say? I expected you to say, 'Harmony, I will look after your son to the best of my ability; I will be good to him, and see that he is brought up in the sunlight.' I expected you to take all the cares and worries of dying off my hands. And instead of that you say, 'Harmony, before you die, it would be perhaps advisable if you buried your son alive!

With that she burst into tears.

"Harmony," said the judge, "I don't know why you should expect these things of me."

"Because," she sobbed, "I thought you had a heart as big as a church. I thought you would love poor little Tom the moment you saw him, and want him for your son. 'Who can help loving Tom?' I said. But instead of that, you have no heart at all. It has been dried out of you." She got up. "Get me my boy," she said. "I will take him away; we won't trouble you any more. Even I can't breathe in your uncharitable house. Get me my child before he smothers. I said, when I knew I had to die, 'I will just take Tom to Judge Tyler.' And that comforted me so! I said, 'I will just take Tom to Judge Tyler.' Oh, I thought I knew you! I thought your heart was as warm as an oven, but it's as cold as my father's God."

She made three quick steps for the door, staggered, and, before Judge Tyler could get to her, fell full length.

Blood came out of her mouth, and she died.

Chapter 4

DEATH is too difficult. Even the corpse of a house-fly must be disposed of by a good housekeeper. How pleasant if bodies vanished as utterly as entities!

The death of humans is no bursting of soap-bubbles; as surely the colors and the life go out, but the dirt remains. The crematory is far, the grave to be digged; the buzzard more horrible than the worm. Furthermore, between these ultimates and the clay bulks the cunctating law with inquiry and jury of Fabian coroners, crawls the undertaker's black delivery wagon, intrudes his office,—an infant's casket, white but shop-worn, in the window,—his smug indifference, his catalogue and lists of prices. Looms, beyond these unavoidables, the church, the great slow sentences, the delaying sweet- ness of Chopin and Mendelssohn, the lyric voices of little boys, flowers—so sweet that you close your eyes and believe yourself at a wedding; and last the grave, and the cynical "Dust to dust," or the furnace and the undoing heat.

O Lord, make of me a conjurer's coin! Now you see it—now you don't.

Something like this went through Judge Tyler's mind when he had lifted Harmony from the floor, and found that she was really dead. Had she been an unknown, he could hardly have felt the responsibility to be more heavy and unjust. Mingled with pity and the proper feelings that go with all hearts was a righteous resentment against her for dying. But his predominating, first, middle, and last thought was of the little boy waiting in the dining-room for his mother's call.

Judge Tyler was a brave man, but he paused for a moment and looked upward at his duty, as one wearied with climbing looks upward to the mountain-top. He was strongly armored, but the present crisis struck through a weak place in the harness and pierced him. He hated the thought of telling that child what he had to tell. And, worse, he hated the growing probability that the child would tire of the dining-room and come to find his mother. So, after a moment's reflection, he compromised with his duty and put it off. He stepped into the hall, locked the study door behind him, and put the key in his pocket. Then he went into the dining-room.