The American Claimant - (14)

This was an aspect of the girl’s conduct which she had not clearly perceived before. Was it treachery? Had she abused a trust? The thought crimsoned her cheeks with shame and remorse.
    “Oh, forgive me,” she said, “I did not know what I was doing. I have been so tortured—you will forgive me, you must; I have suffered so much, and I am so sorry and so humble; you do forgive me, don’t you?—don’t turn away, don’t refuse me; it is only my love that is at fault, and you know I love you, love you with all my heart; I couldn’t bear to—oh, dear, dear, I am so miserable, and I never meant any harm, and I didn’t see where this insanity was carrying me, and how it was wronging and abusing the dearest heart in all the world to me—and—and—oh, take me in your arms again, I have no other refuge, no other home and hope!”
    There was reconciliation again—immediate, perfect, all-embracing—and with it utter happiness. This would have been a good time to adjourn. But no, now that the cloud-breeder was revealed at last; now that it was manifest that all the sour weather had come from this girl’s dread that Tracy was lured by her rank and not herself, he resolved to lay that ghost immediately and permanently by furnishing the best possible proof that he couldn’t have had back of him at any time the suspected motive. So he said:
    “Let me whisper a little secret in your ear—a secret which I have kept shut up in my breast all this time. Your rank couldn’t ever have been an enticement. I am son and heir to an English earl!”
    The girl stared at him—one, two, three moments, maybe a dozen—then her lips parted:
    “You?” she said, and moved away from him, still gazing at him in a kind of blank amazement.
    “Why—why, certainly I am. Why do you act like this? What have I done now?”
    “What have you done? You have certainly made a most strange statement. You must see that yourself.”
    “Well,” with a timid little laugh, “it may be a strange enough statement; but of what consequence is that, if it is true?”
    “If it is true. You are already retiring from it.”
    “Oh, not for a moment! You should not say that. I have not deserved it. I have spoken the truth; why do you doubt it?”
    Her reply was prompt.
    “Simply because you didn’t speak it earlier!”
    “Oh!” It wasn’t a groan, exactly, but it was an intelligible enough expression of the fact that he saw the point and recognized that there was reason in it.
    “You have seemed to conceal nothing from me that I ought to know concerning yourself, and you were not privileged to keep back such a thing as this from me a moment after—after—well, after you had determined to pay your court to me.”
    “Its true, it’s true, I know it! But there were circumstances—in—in the way—circumstances which—”
    She waved the circumstances aside.
    “Well, you see,” he said, pleadingly, “you seemed so bent on our traveling the proud path of honest labor and honorable poverty, that I was terrified—that is, I was afraid—of—of—well, you know how you talked.”
    “Yes, I know how I talked. And I also know that before the talk was finished you inquired how I stood as regards aristocracies, and my answer was calculated to relieve your fears.”
    He was silent a while. Then he said, in a discouraged way:
    “I don’t see any way out of it. It was a mistake. That is in truth all it was, just a mistake. No harm was meant, no harm in the world. I didn’t see how it might some time look. It is my way. I don’t seem to see far.”
    The girl was almost disarmed, for a moment. Then she flared up again.
    “An Earl’s son! Do earls’ sons go about working in lowly callings for their bread and butter?”
    “God knows they don’t! I have wished they did.”
    “Do earls’ sons sink their degree in a country like this, and come sober and decent to sue for the hand of a born child of poverty when they can go drunk, profane, and steeped in dishonorable debt and buy the pick and choice of the millionaires’ daughters of America? You an earl’s son! Show me the signs.”
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    “I thank God I am not able—if those are the signs. But yet I am an earl’s son and heir. It is all I can say. I wish you would believe me, but you will not. I know no way to persuade you.”
    She was about to soften again, but his closing remark made her bring her foot down with smart vexation, and she cried out:
    “Oh, you drive all patience out of me! Would you have one believe that you haven’t your proofs at hand, and yet are what you say you are? You do not put your hand in your pocket now—for you have nothing there. You make a claim like this, and then venture to travel without credentials. These are simply incredibilities. Don’t you see that, yourself?”
    He cast about in his mind for a defence of some kind or other—hesitated a little, and then said, with difficulty and diffidence:
    “I will tell you just the truth, foolish as it will seem to you—to anybody, I suppose—but it is the truth. I had an ideal—call it a dream, a folly, if you will—but I wanted to renounce the privileges and unfair advantages enjoyed by the nobility and wrung from the nation by force and fraud, and purge myself of my share of those crimes against right and reason, by thenceforth comrading with the poor and humble on equal terms, earning with my own hands the bread I ate, and rising by my own merit if I rose at all.”
    The young girl scanned his face narrowly while he spoke; and there was something about his simplicity of manner and statement which touched her —touched her almost to the danger point; but she set her grip on the yielding spirit and choked it to quiescence; it could not be wise to surrender to compassion or any kind of sentiment, yet; she must ask one or two more questions. Tracy was reading her face; and what he read there lifted his drooping hopes a little.
    “An earl’s son to do that! Why, he were a man! A man to love!—oh, more, a man to worship!”
    “Why, I—?”
    “But he never lived! He is not born, he will not be born. The self-abnegation that could do that—even in utter folly, and hopeless of conveying benefit to any, beyond the mere example—could be mistaken for greatness; why, it would be greatness in this cold age of sordid ideals! A moment—wait—let me finish; I have one question more. Your father is earl of what?”
    “Rossmore—and I am Viscount Berkeley!”
    The fat was in the fire again. The girl felt so outraged that it was difficult for her to speak.
    “How can you venture such a brazen thing! You know that he is dead, and you know that I know it. Oh, to rob the living of name and honors for a selfish and temporary advantage is crime enough, but to rob the defenceless dead—why it is more than crime, it degrades crime!”
    “Oh, listen to me—just a word—don’t turn away like that. Don’t go—don’t leave me, so—stay one moment. On my honor—”
    “Oh, on your honor!”
    “On my honor I am what I say! And I will prove it, and you will believe, I know you will. I will bring you a message—a cablegram—”
    “When?”
    “To-morrow—next day—”
    “Signed ‘Rossmore’?”
    “Yes—signed Rossmore.”
    “What will that prove?”
    “What will it prove? What should it prove?”
    “If you force me to say it—possibly the presence of a confederate somewhere.”
    This was a hard blow, and staggered him. He said, dejectedly:
    “It is true. I did not think of it. Oh, my God, I do not know any way to do; I do everything wrong. You are going?—and you won’t say even good-night—or good-bye? Ah, we have not parted like this before.”
    “Oh, I want to run and—no, go, now.” A pause—then she said, “You may bring the message when it comes.”
    “Oh, may I? God bless you.”
    He was gone; and none too soon; her lips were already quivering, and now she broke down. Through her sobbings her words broke from time to time.
    “Oh, he is gone. I have lost him, I shall never see him any more. And he didn’t kiss me good-bye; never even offered to force a kiss from me, and he knowing it was the very, very last, and I expecting he would, and never dreaming he would treat me so after all we have been to each other. Oh, oh, oh, oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! He is a dear, poor, miserable, good-hearted, transparent liar and humbug, but oh, I do love him so—!” After a little she broke into speech again. “How dear he is! and I shall miss him so, I shall miss him so! Why won’t he ever think to forge a message and fetch it?—but no, he never will, he never thinks of anything; he’s so honest and simple it wouldn’t ever occur to him. Oh, what did possess him to think he could succeed as a fraud—and he hasn’t the first requisite except duplicity that I can see. Oh, dear, I’ll go to bed and give it all up. Oh, I wish I had told him to come and tell me whenever he didn’t get any telegram—and now it’s all my own fault if I never see him again. How my eyes must look!”
    CHAPTER XXIV.
    Next day, sure enough, the cablegram didn’t come. This was an immense disaster; for Tracy couldn’t go into the presence without that ticket, although it wasn’t going to possess any value as evidence. But if the failure of the cablegram on that first day may be called an immense disaster, where is the dictionary that can turn out a phrase sizeable enough to describe the tenth day’s failure? Of course every day that the cablegram didn’t come made Tracy all of twenty-four hours’ more ashamed of himself than he was the day before, and made Sally fully twenty-four hours more certain than ever that he not only hadn’t any father anywhere, but hadn’t even a confederate—and so it followed that he was a double-dyed humbug and couldn’t be otherwise.
    These were hard days for Barrow and the art firm. All these had their hands full, trying to comfort Tracy. Barrow’s task was particularly hard, because he was made a confidant in full, and therefore had to humor Tracy’s delusion that he had a father, and that the father was an earl, and that he was going to send a cablegram. Barrow early gave up the idea of trying to convince Tracy that he hadn’t any father, because this had such a bad effect on the patient, and worked up his temper to such an alarming degree. He had tried, as an experiment, letting Tracy think he had a father; the result was so good that he went further, with proper caution, and tried letting him think his father was an earl; this wrought so well, that he grew bold, and tried letting him think he had two fathers, if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to, so Barrow withdrew one of them and substituted letting him think he was going to get a cablegram—which Barrow judged he wouldn’t, and was right; but Barrow worked the cablegram daily for all it was worth, and it was the one thing that kept Tracy alive; that was Barrow’s opinion.
    And these were bitter hard days for poor Sally, and mainly delivered up to private crying. She kept her furniture pretty damp, and so caught cold, and the dampness and the cold and the sorrow together undermined her appetite, and she was a pitiful enough object, poor thing. Her state was bad enough, as per statement of it above quoted; but all the forces of nature and circumstance seemed conspiring to make it worse—and succeeding. For instance, the morning after her dismissal of Tracy, Hawkins and Sellers read in the associated press dispatches that a toy puzzle called Pigs in the Clover, had come into sudden favor within the past few weeks, and that from the Atlantic to the Pacific all the populations of all the States had knocked off work to play with it, and that the business of the country had now come to a standstill by consequence; that judges, lawyers, burglars, parsons, thieves, merchants, mechanics, murderers, women, children, babies—everybody, indeed, could be seen from morning till midnight, absorbed in one deep project and purpose, and only one—to pen those pigs, work out that puzzle successfully; that all gayety, all cheerfulness had departed from the nation, and in its place care, preoccupation and anxiety sat upon every countenance, and all faces were drawn, distressed, and furrowed with the signs of age and trouble, and marked with the still sadder signs of mental decay and incipient madness; that factories were at work night and day in eight cities, and yet to supply the demand for the puzzle was thus far impossible. Hawkins was wild with joy, but Sellers was calm. Small matters could not disturb his serenity. He said—
    “That’s just the way things go. A man invents a thing which could revolutionize the arts, produce mountains of money, and bless the earth, and who will bother with it or show any interest in it?—and so you are just as poor as you were before. But you invent some worthless thing to amuse yourself with, and would throw it away if let alone, and all of a sudden the whole world makes a snatch for it and out crops a fortune. Hunt up that Yankee and collect, Hawkins—half is yours, you know. Leave me to potter at my lecture.”
    This was a temperance lecture. Sellers was head chief in the Temperance camp, and had lectured, now and then in that interest, but had been dissatisfied with his efforts; wherefore he was now about to try a new plan. After much thought he had concluded that a main reason why his lectures lacked fire or something, was that they were too transparently amateurish; that is to say, it was probably too plainly perceptible that the lecturer was trying to tell people about the horrid effects of liquor when he didn’t really know anything about those effects except from hearsay, since he had hardly ever tasted an intoxicant in his life. His scheme, now, was to prepare himself to speak from bitter experience. Hawkins was to stand by with the bottle, calculate the doses, watch the effects, make notes of results, and otherwise assist in the preparation. Time was short, for the ladies would be along about noon—that is to say, the temperance organization called the Daughters of Siloam—and Sellers must be ready to head the procession.
    The time kept slipping along—Hawkins did not return—Sellers could not venture to wait longer; so he attacked the bottle himself, and proceeded to note the effects. Hawkins got back at last; took one comprehensive glance at the lecturer, and went down and headed off the procession. The ladies were grieved to hear that the champion had been taken suddenly ill and violently so, but glad to hear that it was hoped he would be out again in a few days.
    As it turned out, the old gentleman didn’t turn over or show any signs of life worth speaking of for twenty-four hours. Then he asked after the procession, and learned what had happened about it. He was sorry; said he had been “fixed” for it. He remained abed several days, and his wife and daughter took turns in sitting with him and ministering to his wants. Often he patted Sally’s head and tried to comfort her.
    “Don’t cry, my child, don’t cry so; you know your old father did it by mistake and didn’t mean a bit of harm; you know he wouldn’t intentionally do anything to make you ashamed for the world; you know he was trying to do good and only made the mistake through ignorance, not knowing the right doses and Washington not there to help. Don’t cry so, dear, it breaks my old heart to see you, and think I’ve brought this humiliation on you and you so dear to me and so good. I won’t ever do it again, indeed I won’t; now be comforted, honey, that’s a good child.”
    But when she wasn’t on duty at the bedside the crying went on just the same; then the mother would try to comfort her, and say:
    “Don’t cry, dear, he never meant any harm; it was all one of those happens that you can’t guard against when you are trying experiments, that way. You see I don’t cry. It’s because I know him so well. I could never look anybody in the face again if he had got into such an amazing condition as that a-purpose; but bless you his intention was pure and high, and that makes the act pure, though it was higher than was necessary. We’re not humiliated, dear, he did it under a noble impulse and we don’t need to be ashamed. There, don’t cry any more, honey.”
    Thus, the old gentleman was useful to Sally, during several days, as an explanation of her tearfulness. She felt thankful to him for the shelter he was affording her, but often said to herself, “It’s a shame to let him see in my crying a reproach—as if he could ever do anything that could make me reproach him! But I can’t confess; I’ve got to go on using him for a pretext, he’s the only one I’ve got in the world, and I do need one so much.”
    As soon as Sellers was out again, and found that stacks of money had been placed in bank for him and Hawkins by the Yankee, he said, “Now we’ll soon see who’s the Claimant and who’s the Authentic. I’ll just go over there and warm up that House of Lords.” During the next few days he and his wife were so busy with preparations for the voyage that Sally had all the privacy she needed, and all the chance to cry that was good for her. Then the old pair left for New York—and England.
    Sally had also had a chance to do another thing. That was, to make up her mind that life was not worth living upon the present terms. If she must give up her impostor and die, doubtless she must submit; but might she not lay her whole case before some disinterested person, first, and see if there wasn’t perhaps some saving way out of the matter? She turned this idea over in her mind a good deal. In her first visit with Hawkins after her parents were gone, the talk fell upon Tracy, and she was impelled to set her case before the statesman and take his counsel. So she poured out her heart, and he listened with painful solicitude. She concluded, pleadingly, with—
    “Don’t tell me he is an impostor. I suppose he is, but doesn’t it look to you as if he isn’t? You are cool, you know, and outside; and so, maybe it can look to you as if he isn’t one, when it can’t to me. Doesn’t it look to you as if he isn’t? Couldn’t you—can’t it look to you that way—for—for my sake?”
    The poor man was troubled, but he felt obliged to keep in the neighborhood of the truth. He fought around the present detail a little while, then gave it up and said he couldn’t really see his way to clearing Tracy.
    “No,” he said, “the truth is, he’s an impostor.”
    “That is, you—you feel a little certain, but not entirely—oh, not entirely, Mr. Hawkins!”
    “It’s a pity to have to say it—I do hate to say it, but I don’t think anything about it, I know he’s an impostor.”
    “Oh, now, Mr. Hawkins, you can’t go that far. A body can’t really know it, you know. It isn’t proved that he’s not what he says he is.”
    Should he come out and make a clean breast of the whole wretched business? Yes—at least the most of it—it ought to be done. So he set his teeth and went at the matter with determination, but purposing to spare the girl one pain—that of knowing that Tracy was a criminal.
    “Now I am going to tell you a plain tale; one not pleasant for me to tell or for you to hear, but we’ve got to stand it. I know all about that fellow; and I know he is no earl’s son.”
    The girl’s eyes flashed, and she said:
    “I don’t care a snap for that—go on!”
    This was so wholly unexpected that it at once obstructed the narrative; Hawkins was not even sure that he had heard aright. He said:
    “I don’t know that I quite understand. Do you mean to say that if he was all right and proper otherwise you’d be indifferent about the earl part of the business?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “You’d be entirely satisfied with him and wouldn’t care for his not being an earl’s son,—that being an earl’s son wouldn’t add any value to him?”
    “Not the least value that I would care for. Why, Mr. Hawkins, I’ve gotten over all that day-dreaming about earldoms and aristocracies and all such nonsense and am become just a plain ordinary nobody and content with it; and it is to him I owe my cure. And as to anything being able to add a value to him, nothing can do that. He is the whole world to me, just as he is; he comprehends all the values there are—then how can you add one?”
    “She’s pretty far gone.” He said that to himself. He continued, still to himself, “I must change my plan again; I can’t seem to strike one that will stand the requirements of this most variegated emergency five minutes on a stretch. Without making this fellow a criminal, I believe I will invent a name and a character for him calculated to disenchant her. If it fails to do it, then I’ll know that the next rightest thing to do will be to help her to her fate, poor thing, not hinder her.” Then he said aloud:
    “Well, Gwendolen—”
    “I want to be called Sally.”
    “I’m glad of it; I like it better, myself. Well, then, I’ll tell you about this man Snodgrass.”
    “Snodgrass! Is that his name?”
    “Yes—Snodgrass. The other’s his nom de plume.”
    “It’s hideous!”
    “I know it is, but we can’t help our names.”
    “And that is truly his real name—and not Howard Tracy?”
    Hawkins answered, regretfully:
    “Yes, it seems a pity.”
    The girl sampled the name musingly, once or twice—
    “Snodgrass. Snodgrass. No, I could not endure that. I could not get used to it. No, I should call him by his first name. What is his first name?”
    “His—er—his initials are S. M.”
    “His initials? I don’t care anything about his initials. I can’t call him by his initials. What do they stand for?”
    “Well, you see, his father was a physician, and he—he—well he was an idolater of his profession, and he—well, he was a very eccentric man, and—”
    “What do they stand for! What are you shuffling about?”
    “They—well they stand for Spinal Meningitis. His father being a phy—”
    “I never heard such an infamous name! Nobody can ever call a person that—a person they love. I wouldn’t call an enemy by such a name. It sounds like an epithet.” After a moment, she added with a kind of consternation, “Why, it would be my name! Letters would come with it on.”
    “Yes—Mrs. Spinal Meningitis Snodgrass.”
    “Don’t repeat it—don’t; I can’t bear it. Was the father a lunatic?”
    “No, that is not charged.”
    “I am glad of that, because that is transmissible. What do you think was the matter with him, then?”
    “Well, I don’t really know. The family used to run a good deal to idiots, and so, maybe—”
    “Oh, there isn’t any maybe about it. This one was an idiot.”
    “Well, yes—he could have been. He was suspected.”
    “Suspected!” said Sally, with irritation. “Would one suspect there was going to be a dark time if he saw the constellations fall out of the sky? But that is enough about the idiot, I don’t take any interest in idiots; tell me about the son.”
    “Very well, then, this one was the eldest, but not the favorite. His brother, Zylobalsamum—”
    “Wait—give me a chance to realize that. It is perfectly stupefying. Zylo—what did you call it?”
    “Zylobalsamum.”
    “I never heard such a name: It sounds like a disease. Is it a disease?”
    “No, I don’t think it’s a disease. It’s either Scriptural or—”
    “Well, it’s not Scriptural.”
    “Then it’s anatomical. I knew it was one or the other. Yes, I remember, now, it is anatomical. It’s a ganglion—a nerve centre—it is what is called the zylobalsamum process.”
    “Well, go on; and if you come to any more of them, omit the names; they make one feel so uncomfortable.”
    “Very well, then. As I said, this one was not a favorite in the family, and so he was neglected in every way, never sent to school, always allowed to associate with the worst and coarsest characters, and so of course he has grown up a rude, vulgar, ignorant, dissipated ruffian, and—”
    “He? It’s no such thing! You ought to be more generous than to make such a statement as that about a poor young stranger who—who—why, he is the very opposite of that! He is considerate, courteous, obliging, modest, gentle, refined, cultivated—oh, for shame! how can you say such things about him?”
    “I don’t blame you, Sally—indeed I haven’t a word of blame for you for being blinded by—your affection—blinded to these minor defects which are so manifest to others who—”
    “Minor defects? Do you call these minor defects? What are murder and arson, pray?”
    “It is a difficult question to answer straight off—and of course estimates of such things vary with environment. With us, out our way, they would not necessarily attract as much attention as with you, yet they are often regarded with disapproval—”