Kennedy Square Part 14

"Two young b.o.o.bies, that's what they are, breaking their hearts over each other," she rattled on, gathering the ends of her cape the closer.

"Both of them ought to be spanked and put to bed. Get them into each other's arms just as quick as you can. As for Talbot Rutter, he's the biggest fool of the three, or was until Annie Rutter got hold of him.

Now I hear he is willing to let Harry come back, as if that would do any good. It's Kate who must be looked after; that Scotch blood in her veins makes her as pig-headed as her father. No--I don't want your arm, sir--get out of my way."

If the courtiers heard--and half of them did--they neither by word or expression conveyed that fact to Harry or St. George. It was not intended for their ears, and, therefore, was not their property. With still more profound salutations from everybody, the three bareheaded men escorted them to the next stoop, the fourth going ahead to see that the door was properly opened, and so the ladies pa.s.sed on, up and inside the house. This over, the group resumed its normal condition on the sidewalk, the men regaining their seats and relighting their cigars (no gentleman ever held one in evidence when ladies were present)--fresh orders being given to the servants for the several interrupted mixtures with which the coterie were wont to regale themselves.

Harry, who had stood with shoulders braced against a great tree on the sidewalk, had heard every word of the old maid's outburst, and an unrestrained burst of joy had surged up in his heart. His father was coming round! Yes--the tide was turning--it would not be long before Kate would be in his arms!

CHAPTER X

St. George held no such sanguine view, although he made no comment.

In fact the outbreak had rather depressed him. He knew something of Talbot's stubbornness and did not hope for much in that direction, nor, if the truth be told, did he hope much in Kate's. Time alone could heal her wounds, and time in the case of a young girl, mistress of herself, beautiful, independent, and rich, might contain many surprises.

It was with a certain sense of relief, therefore, that he again sought the inside of the club. Its restful quiet would at least take his mind from the one subject which seemed to pursue him and which Miss Clendenning's positive and, as he thought, inconsiderate remarks had so suddenly revived.

Before he had reached the top step his face broke out into a broad smile. Instantly his spirits rose. Standing in the open front door, with outstretched hand, was the man of all others he would rather have seen--Richard Horn, the inventor.

"Ah, St. George, but I'm glad to see you!", cried Richard. "I have been looking for you all the afternoon and only just a moment ago got sight of you on the sidewalk. I should certainly have stepped over to your house and looked you up if you hadn't come. I've got the most extraordinary thing to read to you that you have ever listened to in the whole course of your life. How well you look, and what a fine color you have, and you too, Harry. You are in luck, my boy. I'd like to stay a month with Temple myself."

"Make it a year, Richard," cried St. George, resting his hand affectionately on the inventor's shoulder. "There isn't a chair in my house that isn't happier when you sit in it. What have you discovered?--some new whirligig?"

"No, a poem. Eighteen to twenty stanzas of glorious melody imprisoned in type."

"One of your own?" laughed St. George--one of his merry vibrating laughs that made everybody happier about him. The sight of Richard had swept all the cobwebs out of his brain.

"No, you trifler!--one of Edgar Allan Poe's. None of your scoffing, sir!

You may go home in tears before I am through with you. This way, both of you."

The three had entered the coffee-room now, Richard's arm through St.

George's, Harry following close. The inventor drew out the chairs one after another, and when they were all three seated took a missive from his pocket and spread it out on his knee, St. George and Harry keeping their eyes on his every movement.

"Here's a letter, St. George"--Richard's voice now fell to a serious key--"which I have just received from your friend and mine, Mr. N.

P. Willis. In it he sends me this most wonderful poem cut from his paper--the Mirror--and published, I discover to my astonishment, some months back. I am going to read it to you if you will permit me. It certainly is a most remarkable production. The wonder to me is that I haven't seen it before. It is by that Mr. Poe you met at my house some years ago--you remember him?--a rather sad-looking man with big head and deep eyes?" Temple nodded in answer, and Harry's eyes glistened: Poe was one of his university's G.o.ds. "Just let me read to you what Willis says"--here he glanced down the letter sheet: "'Nothing, I a.s.sure you, my dear Horn, has made so great a stir in literary circles as this "Raven" of Poe's. I am sending it to you knowing that you are interested in the man. If I do not mistake I first met Poe one night at your house.' And a very extraordinary night it was, St. George," said Richard, lifting his eyes from the sheet. "Poe, if you remember, read one of his stories for us, and both Latrobe and Kennedy were so charmed that they talked of nothing else for days."

St. George remembered so clearly that he could still recall the tones of Poe's voice, and the peculiar lambent light that flashed from out the poet's dark eyes--the light of a black opal. He settled himself back in his chair to enjoy the treat the better. This was the kind of talk he wanted to-day, and Richard Horn, of all others, was the man to conduct it.

The inventor's earnestness and the absorbed look on St. George's and Harry's faces, and the fact that Horn was about to read aloud, had attracted the attention of several near-by members, who were already straining their ears, for no one had Richard's gift for reading.

In low, clear tones, his voice rising in intensity as the weird pathos of the several stanzas gripped his heart, he unfolded the marvellous drama until the very room seemed filled with the spirit of both the man and the demon. Every stanza in his clear enunciation seemed a separate string of sombre pearls, each syllable aglow with its own inherent beauty. When he ceased it was as if the soul of some great 'cello had stopped vibrating, leaving only the memory of its melody. For a few seconds no one moved nor spoke. No one had ever heard Richard in finer voice nor had they ever listened to more perfect rhythmic beauty. So great was the effect on the audience that one old habitue, in speaking of it afterward, insisted that Richard must have seen the bird roosting over the door, so realistic was his rendering.

Harry had listened with bated breath, absorbing every tone and inflection of Richard's voice. He and Poe had been members of the same university, and the poet had always been one of his idols--the man of all others he wanted most to know. Poe's former room opening into the corridor had invariably attracted him. He had frequently looked about its bare walls wondering how so great an inspiration could have started from such meagre surroundings. He had, too, with the romantic imagination of a boy, pictured to himself the kind of man he was, his looks, voice, and manner, and though he had never seen the poet in the flesh, somehow the tones of Richard's voice recalled to him the very picture he had conjured up in his mind in his boyhood days.

St. George had also listened intently, but the impression was quite different from the one made on the younger man. Temple thought only of Poe's despondency, of his striving for a better and happier life; of his poverty--more than once had he gone down into his own pockets to relieve the poor fellow's urgent necessities, and he was still ready to do it again--a readiness in which he was almost alone, for many of the writer's earlier friends had of late avoided meeting him whenever he pa.s.sed through Kennedy Square. Even Kennedy, his life-long friend, had begun to look upon him as a hopeless case.

This antipathy was also to be found in the club. Even with the memory of Richard's voice in their ears one of the listeners had shrugged his shoulders, remarking with a bitter laugh that musical as was the poem, especially as rendered by Richard, it was, after all, like most of Poe's other ma.n.u.scripts, found in a bottle, or more likely "a bottle found in a ma.n.u.script," as that crazy lunatic couldn't write anything worth reading unless he was half drunk. At which St. George had blazed out:

"Hush, Bowdoin! You ought to be willing to be blind drunk half your time if you could write one stanza of it! Please let me have it, Richard,"

and he took the sheet from his friend's hand, that he and Harry might read it at their leisure when they reached home.

Harry's blood had also boiled at the rude thrust. While under the spell of Richard's voice a cord in his own soul had vibrated as does a gla.s.s globe when it responds in perfect harmony to a note from a violin.

He too had a Lenore whose loss had wellnigh broken his heart. This in itself was an indissoluble bond between them. Besides, he could understand the poet as Alec and his mother and his Uncle George understood himself. He had begun now to love the man in his heart.

With his mind filled with these thoughts, his hunger for Kate aroused tenfold by the pathos and weird beauty of what he had just heard, he left the group of men who were still discussing the man and his verses, and joined his uncle outside on the top step of the club's high stoop, from which could be seen the full length of the sun-flecked street on which the clubhouse stood, as well as the park in all its spring loveliness.

Unconsciously his eyes wandered across the path where Kate's house stood. He could see the tall chimneys and the slope of the quaint roof, and but that the foliage hid the lower part, could have seen Kate's own windows. She was still at home, he had heard, although she was expected to leave for the Red Sulphur any day.

Suddenly, from away up the street, past the corner of the park, there reached his ears a low winding note, which grew louder as it turned the corner, followed by the rattle of wheels and the clatter of horses'

feet. He leaned forward and craned his head in the direction of the sound, his heart in his throat, the blood mounting to his cheeks. If that was not his father's horn it was wonderfully like it. At the same moment a coach-and-four swept in sight, driven by a man in a whitey-brown coat and stiff furry hat, with two grooms behind and a coachman next to him on the box. It was heading straight for the club.

Every man was on his feet.

"By Jove!--it's Rutter. Bowdoin!--Clayton!--here comes the colonel!"

Again the horn gave out a long withering, wiry note ringing through the leaves and along the brick pavement, and the next instant the leaders were gathered up, the wheel-horses hauled taut, the hub of the front wheel of the coach halting within an inch of the horse-block of the club.

"Bravo, Rutter! Best whip in the county! Not a man in England could have done it better. Let me help you down!"

The colonel shook his head good-humoredly, rose in his seat, s.h.i.+fted a bunch of violets to his inner lapel, slipped off his driving-coat, threw it across the rail, dropped his whip in the socket, handed his heavy gloves to his groom, and slid gracefully to the sidewalk. There he shook hands cordially with the men nearest him, excused himself for a moment until he had inspected his off leader's forefoot--she had picked up a stone on the way in from Moorlands--patted the nigh wheel-horse, stamped his own feet l.u.s.tily as if to be sure he was all there, and, with a lordly bow to those about him, slowly mounted the steps of the club.

Harry had already risen to his feet and stood trembling, one hand clutching the iron railing that guarded the marble steps. A great throb of joy welled up in his throat. His mother was right--the loneliness had overpowered his father; he still loved him, and Miss Clendenning's prediction was coming true! Not only was he willing to forgive him, but he had come himself to take him home. He could hardly wait until his father reached his side, so eager was he to open his arms and hands and his lips in apology--and Kate!--what joy would be hers!

St. George had also gained his feet. What had brought the colonel into town, he said to himself, and in such state--and at this hour of the day, too? Could it be that Harry was the cause?

"How were the roads, Talbot?" he called out in his customary cheery tones. He would start fair, anyway.

The colonel, who, head down, had been mounting the marble steps one at a time, inspecting each slab as he climbed, after the manner of men thoroughly satisfied with themselves, and who at the same time are conscious of the effect of their presence on those about them, raised his head and gazed in astonishment at the speaker. Then his body straightened up and he came to a stand-still. He looked first into St.

George's face, then into Harry's, with a cold, rigid stare; his lips shut tight, his head thrown back, his whole frame stiff as an iron bar--and without a word of recognition of any kind, pa.s.sed through the open door and into the wide hall. He had cut both of them dead.

Harry gave a half-smothered cry of anguish and turned to follow his father into the club.

St. George, purple with rage, laid his hand on the boy's arm, so tight that the fingers sank into the flesh: there were steel clamps inside these delicate palms when occasion required.

"Keep still," he hissed--"not a word, no outburst. Stay here until I come for you. Stop, Rutter: stand where you are!" The two were abreast of each other now. "You dare treat your son in that way?

Horn--Murdoch--Warfield--all of you come out here! What I've got to say to Talbot Rutter I want you to hear, and I intend that not only you but every decent man and woman in Kennedy Square shall hear!"

The colonel's lips quivered and his face paled, but he did not flinch, nor did his eyes drop.

"You are not a father, Talbot--you are a brute! There is not a dog in your kennels that would not treat his litter better than you have treated Harry! You turned him out in the night without a penny to his name; you break his mother's heart; you refuse to hear a word he has to say, and then you have the audacity to pa.s.s him on the steps of this club where he is my guest--my guest, remember--look him squarely in the face and ignore him. That, gentlemen, is what Talbot Rutter did one minute ago. You have disgraced your blood and your name and you have laid up for your old age untold misery and suffering. Never, as long as I live, will I speak to you again, nor shall Harry, whom you have humiliated! Hereafter _I_ am his father! Do you hear?"

During the whole outburst the colonel had not moved a muscle of his face nor had he s.h.i.+fted his body a quarter of an inch. He stood with his back to the door through which could be seen the amazed faces of his fellow-members--one hand tight shut behind his back, the other loose by his side, his eyes fixed on his antagonist. Then slowly, one word at a time, as if he had purposely measured the intervals of speech, he said, in a voice hardly heard beyond the door, so low was it:

"Are--you--through--St. George?"

"Yes, by G.o.d!--I am, and forever!"