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CHAPTER XIX
CLEO'S CRY

The decision once made was carried out without delay. He placed an editor permanently in charge of his paper, closed the tall green shutters of the stately old house, sold his horses, and bought tickets for himself and mammy for New York.

He paused at the gate and looked back at the white pillars of which he had once been so proud. He hadn't a single regret at leaving.

"A house doesn't make a home, after all!" he sighed with a lingering look.

He took the boy to the cemetery for a last hour beside the mother's grave before he should turn his back on the scenes of his old life forever.

The cemetery was the most beautiful spot in the county. At this period of the life of the South, it was the one spot where every home had its little plot. The war had killed the flower of Southern manhood. The bravest and the noblest boys never surrendered. They died with a shout and a smile on their lips and Southern women came daily now to keep their love watches on these solemn bivouacs of the dead. The girls got the habit of going there to plant flowers and to tend them and grew to love the shaded walks, the deep boxwood hedges, the quiet, sweetly perfumed air. Sweethearts were always strolling among the flowers and from every nook and corner peeped a rustic seat that could tell its story of the first stammering words from lovers' lips.

Norton saw them everywhere this beautiful spring afternoon, the girls in their white, clean dresses, the boys bashful and self-conscious. A throb of pain gripped his heart and he hurried through the wilderness of flowers to the spot beneath a great oak where he had laid the tired body of the first and only woman he had ever loved.

He placed the child on the grass and led him to the newly-made mound, put into his tiny hand the roses he had brought and guided him while he placed them on her grave.

"This is where little mother sleeps, my boy," he said softly. "Remember it now – it will be a long, long time before we shall see it again. You won't forget – "

"No – dad-ee," he lisped sweetly. "I'll not fordet, the big tree – "

The man rose and stood in silence seeing again the last beautiful day of their life together and forgot the swift moments. He stood as in a trance from which he was suddenly awakened by the child's voice calling him excitedly from another walkway into which he had wandered:

"Dad-ee!" he called again.

"Yes, baby," he answered.

"Oh, come quick! Dad-ee – here's C-l-e-o!"

Norton turned and with angry steps measured the distance between them.

He came upon them suddenly behind a boxwood hedge. The girl was kneeling with the child's arms around her neck, clinging to her with all the yearning of his hungry little heart, and she was muttering half articulate words of love and tenderness. She held him from her a moment, looked into his eyes and cried:

"And you missed me, darling?"

"Oh – C-l-e-o!" he cried, "I thought 'oo'd nev-er tum!"

The angry words died in the man's lips as he watched the scene in silence.

He stooped and drew the child away:

"Come, baby, we must go – "

"Tum on, C-l-e-o, we do now," he cried.

The girl shook her head and turned away.

"Tum on, C-l-e-o!" he cried tenderly.

She waved him a kiss, and the child said excitedly:

"Oh, dad-ee, wait! – wait for C-l-e-o!"

"No, my baby, she can't come with us – "

The little head sank to his shoulder, a sob rose from his heart and he burst into weeping. And through the storm of tears one word only came out clear and soft and plaintive:

"C-l-e-o! C-l-e-o!"

The girl watched them until they reached the gate and then, on a sudden impulse, ran swiftly up, caught the child's hand that hung limply down his father's back, covered it with kisses and cried in cheerful, half-laughing tones:

"Don't cry, darling! Cleo will come again!"

And in the long journey to the North the man brooded over the strange tones of joyous assurance with which the girl had spoken.

CHAPTER XX
THE BLOW FALLS

For a time Norton lost himself in the stunning immensity of the life of New York. He made no effort to adjust himself to it. He simply allowed its waves to roll over and engulf him.

He stopped with mammy and the boy at a brown-stone boarding house on Stuyvesant Square kept by a Southern woman to whom he had a letter of introduction.

Mrs. Beam was not an ideal landlady, but her good-natured helplessness appealed to him. She was a large woman of ample hips and bust, and though very tall seemed always in her own way. She moved slowly and laughed with a final sort of surrender to fate when anything went wrong. And it was generally going wrong. She was still comparatively young – perhaps thirty-two – but was built on so large and unwieldy a pattern that it was not easy to guess her age, especially as she had a silly tendency to harmless kittenish ways at times.

The poor thing was pitifully at sea in her new world and its work. She had been reared in a typically extravagant home of the old South where slaves had waited her call from childhood. She had not learned to sew, or cook or keep house – in fact, she had never learned to do anything useful or important. So naturally she took boarders. Her husband, on whose shoulders she had placed every burden of life the day of her marriage, lay somewhere in an unmarked trench on a Virginia battlefield.

She couldn't conceive of any human being enduring a servant that wasn't black and so had turned her house over to a lazy and worthless crew of Northern negro help. The house was never clean, the waste in her kitchen was appalling, but so long as she could find money to pay her rent and grocery bills, she was happy. Her only child, a daughter of sixteen, never dreamed of lifting her hand to work, and it hadn't yet occurred to the mother to insult her with such a suggestion.

Norton was not comfortable but he was lonely, and Mrs. Beam's easy ways, genial smile and Southern weaknesses somehow gave him a sense of being at home and he stayed. Mammy complained bitterly of the insolence and low manners of the kitchen. But he only laughed and told her she'd get used to it.

He was astonished to find that so many Southern people had drifted to New York – exiles of all sorts, with one universal trait, poverty and politeness.

And they quickly made friends. As he began to realize it, his heart went out to the great city with a throb of gratitude.

When the novelty of the new world had gradually worn off a feeling of loneliness set in. He couldn't get used to the crowds on every street, these roaring rivers of strange faces rushing by like the waters of a swollen stream after a freshet, hurrying and swirling out of its banks.

At first he had found himself trying to bow to every man he met and take off his hat to every woman. It took a long time to break himself of this Southern instinct. The thing that cured him completely was when he tipped his hat unconsciously to a lady on Fifth Avenue. She blushed furiously, hurried to the corner and had him arrested.

His apology was so abject, so evidently sincere, his grief so absurd over her mistake that when she caught his Southern drawl, it was her turn to blush and ask his pardon.

A feeling of utter depression and pitiful homesickness gradually crushed his spirit. His soul began to cry for the sunlit fields and the perfumed nights of the South. There didn't seem to be any moon or stars here, and the only birds he ever saw were the chattering drab little sparrows in the parks.

The first day of autumn, as he walked through Central Park, a magnificent Irish setter lifted his fine head and spied him. Some subtle instinct told the dog that the man was a hunter and a lover of his kind. The setter wagged his tail and introduced himself. Norton dropped to a seat, drew the shaggy face into his lap, and stroked his head.

He was back home again. Don, with his fine nose high in the air, was circling a field and Andy was shouting:

"He's got 'em! He's got 'em sho, Marse Dan!"

He could see Don's slim white and black figure stepping slowly through the high grass on velvet feet, glancing back to see if his master were coming – the muscles suddenly stiffened, his tail became rigid, and the whole covey of quail were under his nose!

He was a boy again and felt the elemental thrill of man's first work as hunter and fisherman. He looked about him at the bald coldness of the artificial park and a desperate longing surged through his heart to be among his own people again, to live their life and feel their joys and sorrows as his own.

And then the memory of the great tragedy slowly surged back, he pushed the dog aside, rose and hurried on in his search for a new world.

He tried the theatres – saw Booth in his own house on 23d Street play "Hamlet" and Lawrence Barrett "Othello," listened with rapture to the new Italian Grand Opera Company in the Academy of Music – saw a burlesque in the Tammany Theatre on 14th Street, Lester Wallack in "The School for Scandal" at Wallack's Theatre on Broadway at 13th Street, and Tony Pastor in his variety show at his Opera House on the Bowery, and yet returned each night with a dull ache in his heart.

Other men who loved home less perhaps could adjust themselves to new surroundings, but somehow in him this home instinct, this feeling of personal friendliness for neighbor and people, this passion for house and lawn, flowers and trees and shrubs, for fields and rivers and hills, seemed of the very fibre of his inmost life. This vast rushing, roaring, impersonal world, driven by invisible titanic forces, somehow didn't appeal to him. It merely stunned and appalled and confused his mind.

And then without warning the blow fell.

He told himself afterwards that he must have been waiting for it, that some mysterious power of mental telepathy had wired its message without words across the thousand miles that separated him from the old life, and yet the surprise was complete and overwhelming.

He had tried that morning to write. A story was shaping itself in his mind and he felt the impulse to express it. But he was too depressed. He threw his pencil down in disgust and walked to his window facing the little park.

It was a bleak, miserable day in November – the first freezing weather had come during the night and turned a drizzling rain into sleet. The streets were covered with a thin, hard, glistening coat of ice. A coal wagon had stalled in front of the house, a magnificent draught horse had fallen and a brutal driver began to beat him unmercifully.

Henry Berg's Society had not yet been organized.

Norton rushed from the door and faced the astonished driver:

"Don't you dare to strike that horse again!"

The workman turned his half-drunken face on the intruder with a vicious leer:

"Well, what t'ell – "

"I mean it!"

With an oath the driver lunged at him:

"Get out of my way!"

The big fist shot at Norton's head. He parried the attack and knocked the man down. The driver scrambled to his feet and plunged forward again. A second blow sent him flat on his back on the ice and his body slipped three feet and struck the curb.

"Have you got enough?" Norton asked, towering over the sprawling figure.

"Yes."

"Well, get up now, and I'll help you with the horse."

He helped the sullen fellow unhitch the fallen horse, lift him to his feet and readjust the harness. He put shoulder to the wheel and started the wagon again on its way.

He returned to his room feeling better. It was the first fight he had started for months and it stirred his blood to healthy reaction.

He watched the bare limbs swaying in the bitter wind in front of St. George's Church and his eye rested on the steeples the architects said were unsafe and might fall some day with a crash, and his depression slowly returned. He had waked that morning with a vague sense of dread.

"I guess it was that fight!" he muttered. "The scoundrel will be back in an hour with a warrant for my arrest and I'll spend a few days in jail – "

The postman's whistle blew at the basement window. He knew that fellow by the way he started the first notes of his call – always low, swelling into a peculiar shrill crescendo and dying away in a weird cry of pain.

The call this morning was one of startling effects. It was his high nerve tension, of course, that made the difference – perhaps, too, the bitter cold and swirling gusts of wind outside. But the shock was none the less vivid. The whistle began so low it seemed at first the moaning of the wind, the high note rang higher and higher, until it became the shout of a fiend, and died away with a wail of agony wrung from a lost soul.

He shivered at the sound. He would not have been surprised to receive a letter from the dead after that.

He heard some one coming slowly up stairs. It was mammy and the boy. The lazy maid had handed his mail to her, of course.

His door was pushed open and the child ran in holding a letter in his red, chubby hand:

"A letter, daddy!" he cried.

He took it mechanically, staring at the inscription. He knew now the meaning of his horrible depression! She was writing that letter when it began yesterday. He recognized Cleo's handwriting at a glance, though this was unusually blurred and crooked. The postmark was Baltimore, another striking fact.

He laid the letter down on his table unopened and turned to mammy:

"Take him to your room. I'm trying to do some writing."

The old woman took the child's hand grumbling:

"Come on, mammy's darlin', nobody wants us!"

He closed the door, locked it, glanced savagely at the unopened letter, drew his chair before the open fire and gazed into the glowing coals.

He feared to break the seal – feared with a dull, sickening dread. He glanced at it again as though he were looking at a toad that had suddenly intruded into his room.

Six months had passed without a sign, and he had ceased to wonder at the strange calm with which she received her dismissal and his flight from the scene after his wife's death. He had begun to believe that her shadow would never again fall across his life.

It had come at last. He picked the letter up, and tried to guess its meaning. She was going to make demands on him, of course. He had expected this months ago. But why should she be in Baltimore? He thought of a hundred foolish reasons without once the faintest suspicion of the truth entering his mind.

He broke the seal and read its contents. A look of vague incredulity overspread his face, followed by a sudden pallor. The one frightful thing he had dreaded and forgotten was true!

He crushed the letter in his powerful hand with a savage groan:

"God in Heaven!"

He spread it out again and read and re-read its message, until each word burned its way into his soul:

"Our baby was born here yesterday. I was on my way to New York to you, but was taken sick on the train at Baltimore and had to stop. I'm alone and have no money, but I'm proud and happy. I know that you will help me.

"Cleo."

For hours he sat in a stupor of pain, holding this crumpled letter in his hand, staring into the fire.

CHAPTER XXI
THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

It was all clear now, the mystery of Cleo's assurance, of her happiness, of her acceptance of his going without protest.

She had known the truth from the first and had reckoned on his strength and manliness to draw him to her in this hour.

"I'll show her!" he said in fierce rebellion. "I'll give her the money she needs – yes – but her shadow shall never again darken my life. I won't permit this shame to smirch the soul of my boy – I'll die first!"

He moved to the West side of town, permitted no one to learn his new address, sent her money from the general postoffice, and directed all his mail to a lock box he had secured.

He destroyed thus every trace by which she might discover his residence if she dared to venture into New York.

To his surprise it was more than three weeks before he received a reply from her. And the second letter made an appeal well-nigh resistless. The message was brief, but she had instinctively chosen the words that found him. How well she knew that side of his nature! He resented it with rage and tried to read all sorts of sinister guile into the lines. But as he scanned them a second time reason rejected all save the simplest and most obvious meaning the words implied.

The letter was evidently written in a cramped position. She had missed the lines many times and some words were so scrawled they were scarcely legible. But he read them all at last:

"I have been very sick since your letter came with the money. I tried to get up too soon. I have suffered awfully. You see, I didn't know how much I had gone through. Please don't be angry with me for what neither you nor I can help now. I want to see you just once, and then I won't trouble you any more. I am very weak to-day, but I'll soon be strong again.

"Cleo."

It made him furious, this subtle appeal to his keen sense of fatherhood. She knew how tenderly he loved his boy. She knew that while such obligations rest lightly on some men, the tie that bound him to his son was the biggest thing in his life. She had been near him long enough to learn the secret things of his inner life. She was using them now to break down the barriers of character and self-respect. He could see it plainly. He hated her for it and yet the appeal went straight to his heart.

Two things in this letter he couldn't get away from:

"You see, I didn't know how much I had gone through."

He kept reading this over. And the next line:

"Please don't be angry with me for what neither you nor I can help now."

The appeal was so human, so simple, so obviously sincere, no man with a soul could ignore it. How could she help it now? She too had been swept into the tragic situation by the blind forces of Nature. After all, had it not been inevitable? Did not such a position of daily intimate physical contact – morning, noon and night – mean just this? Could she have helped it? Were they not both the victims, in a sense, of the follies of centuries? Had he the right to be angry with her?

His reason answered, no. And again came the deeper question – can any man ever escape the consequences of his deeds? Deeds are of the infinite and eternal and the smallest one disturbs the universe. It slowly began to dawn on him that nothing he could ever do or say could change one elemental fact. She was a mother – a fact bigger than all the forms and ceremonies of the ages. It was just this thing in his history that made his sin against the wife so poignant, both to her and to his imagination. A child was a child, and he had no right to sneak and play a coward in such an hour.

Step by step the woman's simple cry forced its way into the soul and slowly but surely the rags were stripped from pride, until he began to see himself naked and without sham.

The one thing that finally cut deepest was the single sentence: "You see, I didn't know how much I had gone through – "

He read it again with a feeling of awe. No matter what the shade of her olive cheek or the length of her curly hair, she was a mother with all that big word means in the language of men. Say what he might – of her art in leading him on, of her final offering herself in a hundred subtle ways in their daily life in his home – he was still responsible. He had accepted the challenge at last.

And he knew what it meant to any woman under the best conditions, with a mother's face hovering near and the man she loved by her side. He saw again the scene of his boy's birth. And then another picture – a lonely girl in a strange city without a friend – a cot in the whitewashed ward of a city's hospital – a pair of startled eyes looking in vain for a loved, familiar face as her trembling feet stepped falteringly down into the valley that lies between Life and Death!

A pitiful thing, this hour of suffering and of waiting for the unknown.

His heart went out to her in sympathy, and he answered her letter with a promise to come. But on the day he was to start for Baltimore mammy was stricken with a cold which developed into pneumonia. Unaccustomed to the rigors of a Northern climate, she had been careless and the result from the first was doubtful. To leave her was, of course, impossible.

He sent for a doctor and two nurses and no care or expense was spared, but in spite of every effort she died. It was four weeks before he returned from the funeral in the South.

He reached Baltimore in a blinding snowstorm the week preceding Christmas. Cleo had left the hospital three weeks previous to his arrival, and for some unexplained reason had spent a week or ten days in Norfolk and returned in time to meet him.

He failed to find her at the address she had given him, but was directed to an obscure hotel in another quarter of the city.

He was surprised and puzzled at the attitude assumed at this meeting. She was nervous, irritable, insolent and apparently anxious for a fight.

"Well, why do you stare at me like that?" she asked angrily.

"Was I staring?" he said with an effort at self-control.

"After all I've been through the past weeks," she said bitterly, "I didn't care whether I lived or died."

"I meant to have come at once as I wrote you. But mammy's illness and death made it impossible to get here sooner."

"One excuse is as good as another," she retorted with a contemptuous toss of her head.

Norton looked at her in blank amazement. It was inconceivable that this was the same woman who wrote him the simple, sincere appeal a few weeks ago. It was possible, of course, that suffering had embittered her mind and reduced her temporarily to the nervous condition in which she appeared.

"Why do you keep staring at me?" she asked again, with insolent ill-temper.

He was so enraged at her evident attempt to bully him into an attitude of abject sympathy, he shot her a look of rage, seized his hat and without a word started for the door.

With a cry of despair she was by his side and grasped his arm:

"Please – please don't!"

"Change your tactics, then, if you have anything to say to me."

She flushed, stammered, looked at him queerly and then smiled:

"Yes, I will, major – please don't be mad at me! You see, I'm just a little crazy. I've been through so much since I came here I didn't know what I was saying to you. I'm awfully sorry – let me take your hat – "

She took his hat, laid it on the table and led him to a seat.

"Please sit down. I'm so glad you've come, and I thank you for coming. I'm just as humble and grateful as I can be. You must forget how foolish I've acted. I've been so miserable and scared and lonely, it's a wonder I haven't jumped into the bay. And I just thought at last that you were never coming."

Norton looked at her with new astonishment. Not because there was anything strange in what she said – he had expected some such words on his arrival, but because they didn't ring true. She seemed to be lying. There was an expression of furtive cunning in her greenish eyes that was uncanny. He couldn't make her out. In spite of the effort to be friendly she was repulsive.

"Well, I'm here," he said calmly. "You have something to say – what is it?"

"Of course," she answered smilingly. "I have a lot to say. I want you to tell me what to do."

"Anything you like," he answered bluntly.

"It's nothing to you?"

"I'll give you an allowance."

"Is that all?"

"What else do you expect?"

"You don't want to see her?"

"No."

"I thought you were coming for that?"

"I've changed my mind. And the less we see of each other the better. I'll go with you to-morrow and verify the records – "

Cleo laughed:

"You don't think I'm joking about her birth?"

"No. But I'm not going to take your word for it."

"All right, I'll go with you to-morrow."

He started again to the door. He felt that he must leave – that he was smothering. Something about the girl's manner got on his nerves. Not only was there no sort of sympathy or attraction between them but the longer he stayed in her presence the more he felt the desire to choke her. He began to look into her eyes with growing suspicion and hate, and behind their smiling plausibility he felt the power of a secret deadly hostility.

"You don't want me to go back home with the child, do you?" Cleo asked with a furtive glance.

"No, I do not," he replied, emphatically.

"I'm going back – but I'll give her up and let you educate her in a convent on one condition – "

"What?" he asked sharply.

"That you let me nurse the boy again and give me the protection and shelter of your home – "

"Never!" he cried.

"Please be reasonable. It will be best for you and best for me and best for her that her life shall never be blackened by the stain of my blood. I've thought it all out. It's the only way – "

"No," he replied sternly. "I'll educate her in my own way, if placed in my hands without condition. But you shall never enter my house again – "

"Is it fair," she pleaded, "to take everything from me and turn me out in the world alone? I'll give your boy all the love of a hungry heart. He loves me."

"He has forgotten your existence – "

"You know that he hasn't!"

"I know that he has," Norton persisted with rising wrath. "It's a waste of breath for you to talk to me about this thing" – he turned on her fiercely:

"Why do you wish to go back there? To grin and hint the truth to your friends?"

"You know that I'd cut my tongue out sooner than betray you. I'd like to scream it from every housetop – yes. But I won't. I won't, because you smile or frown means too much to me. I'm asking this that I may live and work for you and be your slave without money and without price – "

"I understand," he broke in bitterly, "because you think that thus you can again drag me down – well, you can't do it! The power you once had is gone – gone forever – never to return – "

"Then why be afraid? No one there knows except my mother. You hate me. All right. I can do you no harm. I'll never hate you. I'll just be happy to serve you, to love your boy and help you rear him to be a fine man. Let me go back with you and open the old house again – "

He lifted his hand with a gesture of angry impatience:

"Enough of this now – you go your way in life and I go mine."

"I'll not give her up except on my conditions – "

"Then you can keep her and go where you please. If you return home you'll not find me. I'll put the ocean between us if necessary – "

He stepped quickly to the door and she knew it was needless to argue further.

"Come to my hotel to-morrow morning at ten o'clock and I'll make you a settlement through a lawyer."

"I'll be there," she answered in a low tone, "but please, major, before you go let me ask you not to remember the foolish things I said and the way I acted when you came. I'm so sorry – forgive me. I made you terribly mad. I don't know what was the matter with me. Remember I'm just a foolish girl here without a friend – "

She stopped, her voice failing:

"Oh, my God, I'm so lonely, I don't want to live! You don't know what it means for me just to be near you – please let me go home with you!"

There was something genuine in this last cry. It reached his heart in spite of anger. He hesitated and spoke in kindly tones:

"Good night – I'll see you in the morning."

This plea of loneliness and homesickness found the weak spot in his armor. It was so clearly the echo of his own feelings. The old home, with its beautiful and sad memories, his people and his work had begun to pull resistlessly. Her suggestion was a subtle and dangerous one, doubly seductive because it was so safe a solution of difficulties. There was not the shadow of a doubt that her deeper purpose was to ultimately dominate his personal life. He was sure of his strength, yet he knew that the wise thing to do was to refuse to listen.

At ten o'clock next morning she came. He had called a lawyer and drawn up a settlement that only waited her signature.

She had not said she would sign – she had not positively refused. She was looking at him with dumb pleading eyes.

Without a moment's warning the boy pushed his way into the room. Norton sprang before Cleo and shouted angrily to the nurse:

"I told you not to let him come into this room – "

"But you see I des tum!" the boy answered with a laugh as he darted to the corner.

The thing he dreaded had happened. In a moment the child saw Cleo. There was just an instant's hesitation and the father smiled that he had forgotten her. But the hesitation was only the moment of dazed surprise. With a scream of joy he crossed the room and sprang into her arms:

"Oh, Cleo – Cleo – my Cleo! You've tum – you've tum! Look, Daddy! She's tum – my Cleo!"

He hugged her, he kissed her, he patted her flushed cheeks, he ran his little fingers through her tangled hair, drew himself up and kissed her again.

She snatched him to her heart and burst into uncontrollable sobs, raised her eyes streaming with tears to Norton and said softly:

"Let me go home with you!"

He looked at her, hesitated and then slowly tore the legal document to pieces, threw it in the fire and nodded his consent.

But this time his act was not surrender. He had heard the call of his people and his country. It was the first step toward the execution of a new life purpose that had suddenly flamed in the depths of his darkened soul as he watched the picture of the olive cheek of the woman against the clear white of his child's.