The Sins of the Father Part 32

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 n.o.blest 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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.surance 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 grat.i.tude.

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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.a.ggy face into his lap, and stroked his head.