28 In His Dreams He Shall See Thee And Ache
THE studio, the late afternoon lights filling gayly its high chill length. The sculptor stands busy, his fingers deep in molding wet clay, two swinging bronze lamps sparkling like fire-flies in the half light. The autumn day has been damp and dark, the sky out there, seen between the wet vines, is the color of drab paper, a fog that London could not surpass shrouds the Eternal City. Looking rather moodily out at it, sits George Valentine, ensconced in a great carved and gilded chair, and encircling himself with a second fog of his own making the smoke of his cigar. Both are silent, the younger absorbed in his clay cast, the elder in his thoughts. A week has passed since the funeral. Presently George Valentine leaves off staring at the yellow fog, and turns his attention to the artist, still busily absorbed in modeling his wet clay, and stares at him.
“What an odd fellow you are, Rene!” is what he says.
Rene looks up. It strikes Mr. Valentine, as it has not struck him hitherto, that his young friend is altogether too worn and hollow-eyed for the number of his years, and that he has grown more taciturn than he ever used to be. “What is it you say?” Rene asks.
“I say you are a queer fellow. Why, look here. For the past sixteen years or more you have known me as Paul Farrar. All in a moment, as it must seem to you, I start up, like the hero of a melodrama, not myself at all, but somebody else; not Paul Farrar, but the long lost son of a lady you very well know—a Tichborne Claimant No. 2. You are summoned suddenly to a death-bed; you meet me there, under another name and identity, and you accept the metamorphosis without question or comment. Over two weeks have gone since then, we have met daily, still not a word. It may be delicacy of feeling, it may be indifference, it may be good breeding—I don’t know what name you give it, but it is queer, to say the least.”
“It is good breeding,” says Rene, laughing. “I have always been taught that it is impolite to ask questions. Besides, mon ami, how could I intrude on your secrets—painful recollections, perhaps? You knew me; when you saw fit, you would tell me. Meantime——”
“Meantime, absorbed in secrets of your own, you don’t burn with curiosity to hear those of other men. You look hipped, my lad, as if fate had given you a facer of late. You work too hard, and you don’t eat enough. I’ve watched you. No wonder you grow as thin as a shadow. No touch of Roman fever, I trust, my boy?”
“Well—who knows? There are so many kinds of Roman fever. Yes,” Rene says, half jestingly, half seriously; “I suppose I may call it that. I certainly caught it here in Rome. Never mind me,” impatiently; “I will do well enough. I am a tough fellow, lean though I be. I’ll pull through all right. Tell me of yourself, tres cher. You give me credit for less interest in you than I possess, if you do not see I am full of curiosity—though that is not the word either—to hear your story. It should be a romantic one. As to being surprised—I don’t know. You always seemed a man a little out of the ordinary to me—a man with a history. No; I was not much surprised to find you were somebody besides my father’s friend, M. Paul Farrar.”
George Valentine has gone back to his scrutiny of the weather; he watches it through the blurred panes with dreamy, retrospective eyes. There is silence; he smokes, Rene plunges his fingers into the soft clay, and an angel’s face breaks through. The elder man’s thoughts are drifting backward to that other life, that seems now like a life lived in a dream.
“What a little forever it is to look back upon! ” he says, “and yet like yesterday, too. That old time at Toronto, when I led the luxurious, idle life of a youthful prince, as spoiled, as flattered, as headstrong, as self-indulgent as any prince—how it comes back as I sit here, and I am no longer the George Valentine of forty years—battered, world-worn, gray—but the lad George, who rode and danced, and dreamed, and thought life a perpetual boy’s holiday, and who fell in love at nineteen with a trapeziste, and ran away with her and married her.”
Half to himself, in the tone of one who muses aloud, half to Rene, who listens and works in sympathetic silence, he tells the story—the story of the one brief love idyl of his life. “I came back to my senses more quickly than I lost them,” he says, “as I suppose most people do who make unequal marriages. I had simply made utter wreck and ruin of my life. She is dead, poor soul, this many a day—she was Snowball’s mother. I will say nothing about her that I can leave unsaid. Only—when I left her, after ten months of marriage you may believe me when I say I was justified in doing it. She was not in love with me. I found that out soon enough; she was not of the women who fall in love. She was so utterly wrapped up in herself, she had no room in her poor little starved heart for any other human creature. Perhaps she may have been fond of her child, but I doubt it.”
“You left her after ten months,” Rene repeats. Something in the statement seems to fit badly with some other fact in his mind. He regards his friend with a puzzled look.
“Just ten months, my young friend—we parted thus for our mutual benefit. I never saw her again until I saw her fall from the slack-rope in Badger’s circus, one day some six years after.”
“Six years after,” again repeats Rene, the puzzled look deepening in his face. “And Snowball was but three years old then!”
“Precisely. It’s a deuce of a business. Rene——”
“Well?”
“Snowball is not my daughter.” A stunned pause. And yet—Rene could not tell you why—the shock of astonishment is not so great as it ought to be. “I thought you would say that,” he says, in a hushed tone. “And your mother—we all, she herself, her husband—have been deceived.”
“It’s a bad business, old fellow, I don’t deny, and all owing to the false report of my death. By the merest accident—a slip on the ice, a sprained ankle—I did not sail in the fatal Belle O’Brien. Another man took my place—a poorer devil even than myself—so poor that to keep him from freezing to death that bitter winter weather I shared my scanty wardrobe with him. He, George Valentine, as his clothes led all to think, perished that stormy night, and the Paul Farrar who lived, and had a hard fight with fortune for many a year, was a castaway about whom no one was likely to be concerned. I did not know I was forgiven. I only knew another heir had been found for the great Valentine fortune. I did not know Mimi, my wife, had married again, in good faith enough, Tom Randal. I was engaged in a hand-to hand fight for bread in those early days. When I did know, it was too late. I came to Clangville, honestly resolute to see my mother, and obtain her pardon. Time might have softened her, I thought, and condoned my offense. It was an extraordinary thing that Mimi, my wife—Tom Randal’s widow, if you like—should be there at the same time. There she was, with little Snowball, and I soon discovered, from Vane Valentine, that he knew all about her (except the fact of her second marriage; that very few people ever knew); that she had visited my mother, and threatened to make public her marriage with me, unless bought off. Vane Valentine only knew me as Paul Farrar, of course. I had met him at Fayal some time before. A new thought struck me. Without presenting myself in person I could judge of my mother’s feeling toward me by her conduct toward the child supposed to be mine. If, after Mimi’s tragical fate, she showed pity for the child, I would have come forward at once, and revealed myself. I longed for her forgiveness, Rene; I longed to be back in the world of living men, from which for years I had seemed to be thrust out; I longed to be once more my mother’s son. One kindly, womanly act toward the child—I would have asked no more—I would have come forward, pleaded for pardon, and striven in the future to repair the past. But that act never came. The child—unseen, uncared for, as though she were a dog or a pet bird of the dead woman’s—was banished, and given over to the hands of strangers. She thought her her grandchild, and still banishered her unseen. Perhaps it was the doing of Vane Valentine—Heaven knows! It sufficed to kill my last hope forever. The heart that could be so hard to the child was not likely to soften to the father.
“I accepted the decision in silence and went my way, taking the little one with me. Of course I fell in love with the child at sight—every one did that. She was the most bewitching baby in the world; but you remember her, no doubt. You know my life since then, the life of a wanderer always. But for the accident that night on which we met there never would have been either reconciliation or forgiveness. I had made up my mind, you see after the episode of Snowball, that there was no hope for me. But it has been decreed otherwise. My poor mother! hers was a lonely life. She wrapped herself in silence and pride, and shut out the world. Can a mother forget her child? On her death-bed she told me I had been forgiven always. It will comfort me when I am on mine to remember that.”
Rene stands silent. After a pause George Valentine goes on: “Perhaps there, just at the last, I should have told my mother the truth. I think I would, but that I knew the explanation would be too great a shock for her to bear. And she loved the girl so dearly, as I do, as you, as we all do. Dear little Snowball! what does it matter? If she were my daughter in reality I could never be fonder of her than I am.”
“It matters a great deal,” Rene answers, “and so Vane Valentine will think, and say, when he hears it. It robs him at a word of title and fortune. How do you think he will take that?”
“He had better take it quietly, or it may be worse for him. If he is harsh to that child he shall rue it. And you, too, my friend—you have become involved in this family tangle. It will devolve upon you, I suppose, as you have already promised, to go and tell Snowball. I wish—I wish my mother had not insisted upon that. The exposé, if it must come, will be the deuce and all to stand.”
“Right is right,” says Rene.
“To be sure; but if a man prefers the wrong? Supposing he is the only one to suffer? It is rather a nuisance, isn’t it, to be forced into a court of appeal, whether or no? Look here, Rene, Vane Valentine will not resign what he has waited for so long, gotten so hardly, without fighting it out to the bitter end. Do you know what that means for me? It means taking the whole world into my confidence— telling it what a confounded ass I have been, all my life, — seeing my name, and hers, and my mother’s in glaring capitals in every English and American newspaper I pick up. Do you know what it means for Snowball? The exposure of her birth, as the daughter of a lawless circus woman—an heiress under false pretenses— a wife whom Vane Valentine no more would have married, knowing the truth than—— Good Heaven! Rene, don’t you see the thing is impossible?”
Rene stands silent. Right is right— yes, but to hold fast to the right through all things, simply because it is right, sometimes requires a courage superhuman.
“It will break her heart, it will brand her with infamy, it will blight her life, it will compel her to face an exposure, for which a crown and a kingdom would not repay. No, no, Rene; go over and tell her, if you like, since the promise was extorted on a death-bed, but there we will stop. Sir Vane shall be Sir Vane to the end. It shall be no new Orton and Tichborne affair, this, with the same ultimate ending, no doubt. It is a thousand pities it must be told at all—it will make the child miserable all her life. Rene, need it be told?”
“Undoubtedly, since I have promised. Better be miserable, knowing the truth, than happy in a fool’s paradise of ignorance.”
“A fool’s paradise! Ah! poor little Snowball! I doubt the paradise, even a fool’s, with Vane Valentine. If he is unkind to her—then, Rene, I will face all things, and have it out with him. Let him look to it, if he is harsh with her. Come what may, I shall not spare him.”
Still Rene is silent. He stands with folded arms and knitted brows, staring moodily out at the pale flood of moon-rays silvering the stone court. George Valentine has risen, too, and is pacing up and down.
“You will see for yourself,” he says, “when you go there. There need be no haste; they do not return to England, I believe, until spring. Go over then, and see, and tell her. For myself, I shall remain in Rome this winter. One look at her will tell you more than a score of letters, whether or no she is happy. I seem to have a sort of presentiment about it, that she is not—that she never will be. I distrust that fellow—I always have. He has the soul of a miser, grasping, sordid, cruel; and he was in love with another woman, a cousin. Snowball never cared for him, I feel sure. How could she? —old, cold, self-centered, unfitted for her in every way. Dear little Snowball! so fresh, so bright, so joyous—how soon he will change all that! It is a pity, a thousand pities, mon ami, that you——”
“For Heaven’s sake, hush!” Rene Macdonald cries out, fiercely. “Do you think I am made of this?” striking passionately the marble against which he stands “that I can listen to you? Do you think there is ever an hour, sleeping or waking, in which she is absent from me? I try to forget sometimes—I force myself to forget, lest in much thinking of what might have been but for this fortune and that man, I should go mad.”
George Valentine lays his hand on his shoulder, and stands beside him—mute. Something of this he has suspected. How could it be otherwise? But he speaks no word. The voice that breaks the silence is the voice of a girl singing, to a piano, in the apartment above. An English family have that second floor. The voice of the girl, singing an English song, comes to them though the open windows, through the slumbering sweetness of the night.
” In the daytime thy voice shall go through him,
In his dreams he shall see thee, and ache,
Thou shalt kindle by night, and subdue him
Asleep or awake.”
“If you would rather not go,” George Valentine says, at last, “it may be too hard for you——”
“I will go,” Rene answers, between his teeth; “I must see for myself. If he makes her happy—well, I shall try and be thankful, and see her no more. If he is what you think him—what I think him—let him look to it! Say no more, tres cher, there are some hurts that simply will not bear handling; this is one of them.”
