While Grant Adams and Margaret were talking, the two old men on the porch, who once would have grappled with the problems of the great first cause, dropped into cackling reminiscences of the old days of the sixties and seventies when they were young men in their twenties and Harvey was an unbleached yellow pine stain on the prairie gra.s.s. So they forgot the flight of time, and forgot that indoors the music had stopped, and that two young voices were cooing behind the curtains.

Upstairs, Laura Van Dorn and her mother, reading, tried with all their might and main to be oblivious to the fact that the music had stopped, and that certain suppressed laughs and gasps and long, silent gaps in the irregular conversation meant rather too obvious love-making for an affair which had not been formally recognized by the family. Yet the formality was all that was lacking. For if ever an affair of the heart was encouraged, was promoted, was greeted with everything but hurrahs and hosannas by the family of the lady thereunto appertaining, it was the love affair of Kenyon Adams and Lila Van Dorn.

The youth and the maiden below stairs were exceedingly happy. They went through the elaborate business of love-making, from the first touch of thrilling fingers to such pa.s.sionately rapturous embraces as they might steal half watched and half tolerated, and the mounting joy in their hearts left no room for fear of the future. As they sat toying and frivoling behind the curtains of the wide living room in the Nesbit home, they saw Grant Adams's big, awkward figure hurrying across the lawn. He walked with stooping shoulders and bowed head, and held his claw hand behind him in his flinty, red-haired hand.

"Where has he been?" asked Kenyon, as he peered through the open curtain, with his arm about the girl.

"I don't know. The Mortons aren't at home this afternoon; they all went out in the Captain's big car," answered the girl.

"Well,--I wonder--" mused the youth.

Lila s.n.a.t.c.hed the window curtain, and closing it, whispered: "Quick--quick--we don't care--quick--they may come in when he gets on the porch."

Through a thin slit in the closed curtains they watched the gaunt figure climb the veranda steps and they heard the elders ask:

"Well?" and the younger man replied, "Nothing--nothing--" he repeated, "but heartbreak."

Then he added as he walked to the half-open door, "Doctor--it seems to me that I should go to Laura now; to Laura and her mother."

"Yes," returned the Doctor, "I suppose that is the thing to do."

Grant's hand was on the door screen, and the Doctor's eyes grew bright with emotion, as he called:

"You're a trump, boy."

The two old men looked at each other mutely and watched the door closing after him. Inside, Grant said: "Lila--ask your mother and grandmother if they can come to the Doctor's little office--I want to speak to them."

After the girl had gone, Grant stood by Kenyon, with his arm about the young man, looking down at him tenderly. When he heard the women stirring above on the stairs, Grant patted Kenyon's shoulder, while the man's face twitched and the muscles of his hard jaw worked as though he were chewing a bitter cud.

The three, Grant and the mother and the mother's mother, left the lovers in such awe as love may hold in the midst of its rapture, and when the office door had closed, and the women were seated, Grant Adams, who stood holding to a chair back, spoke:

"It's about Kenyon. And I don't know, perhaps I should have spoken sooner. But I must speak now."

The two women gazed inquiringly at him with sympathetic faces. He was deeply embarra.s.sed, and his embarra.s.sment seemed to accentuate a kind of caste difference between them.

"Yes, Grant," said Mrs. Nesbit, "of course, we know about Lila and Kenyon. Nothing in the world could please us more than to see them happy together."

"I know, ma'am," returned Grant, twirling his chair nervously. "That's just the trouble. Maybe they can't be happy together."

"Why, Grant," exclaimed Laura, "what's to hinder?"

"Stuff!" sniffed Mrs. Nesbit.

He looked up then, and the two women could see that he flinched.

"Well,--I don't know how to say it, but you must know it." He stopped, and they saw anguish in his face. "But I--Laura," he turned to the younger woman and made a pitiful gesture with his whole hand, "do you remember back when you were a girl away at school and I stopped writing to you?"

"Yes, Grant," replied Laura, "so well--so well, and you never would say--"

"Because I had no right to," he cut in, "it was not my secret--to tell--then."

Mrs. Nesbit sat impatiently on her chair edge, as one waiting for a foolish formality to pa.s.s. She looked at the clumsy, bulky figure of a man in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes, and obviously was rather irritated at his ill-timed interjection of his own childhood affair into an entirely simple problem of true love running smoothly. But her daughter, seeing the anguish in the man's twisted face, was stricken with a terror in her heart. Laura knew that no light emotion had grappled him, and when her mother said, "Well?" sharply, the daughter rose and went to him, touching his hand gently that had been gripping the chair-back. She said, "Yes, Grant, but why do you have to tell it now?"

"Because," he answered pa.s.sionately, "you should know, and Lila should know and your mother should know. Your father and I and my father all think so."

Mrs. Nesbit sat back further in her chair. Her face showed anxiety. She looked at the two others and when Laura's eyes met her mother's, there was a warning in the daughter's glance which kept her mother silent.

"Grant," said Laura, as she stood beside the gaunt figure, on which a mantle of shame seemed to be falling, "there is nothing in the world that should be hard for you to tell me--or mother."

"It isn't you," he returned, and then lifting his face and trying to catch the elder woman's eyes, he said slowly:

"Mrs. Nesbit--I'm Kenyon's father."

He caught Laura's hand in his own, and held her from stepping back.

Laura did not speak. Mrs. Nesbit gazed blankly at the two and in the silence the little mantel clock ticked into their consciousnesses.

Finally the elder woman, who had grown white as some old suspicion or fatal recollection flashed through her mind, asked in an unsteady voice: "And his mother?"

"His mother was Margaret Muller, Mrs. Nesbit," answered the man.

Then anger glowed in the white face as Mrs. Nesbit rose and stepped toward the downcast man. "Do you mean to tell me you--" She did not finish, but began again, not noticing that the door behind her had let in her husband: "Do you mean to say that you have let me go on all these years nursing that--that, that--creature's child and--"

"Yes, my dear," said the Doctor, touching her arm, and taking her hand, "I have." She turned on her husband her startled, hurt face and exclaimed, "And you, Jim--you too--you too?"

"What else could I do in honor, my dear? And it has been for the best."

"No," she cried angrily; "no, see what you have brought to us, Jim--that hussy's--her, why, her very--"

The years had told upon Doctor Nesbit. He could not rise to the struggle as he could have risen a decade before. His hands were shaking and his voice broke as he replied: "Yes, my dear--I know--I know. But while she bore him, we have formed him." To her darkening face he repeated: "You have formed him--and made him--you and the Adamses--with your love. And love," his soft, high voice was tender as he concluded, "love purges everything--doesn't it, Bedelia?"

"Yes, father,--love is enough. Oh, Grant, Grant--it doesn't matter--not to me. Poor--poor Margaret, what she has lost--what she has lost!" said the younger woman, as she stood close to Grant and looked deeply into his anguished face. Mrs. Nesbit stood wet-eyed, and spent of her wrath, looking at the three before her.

"O G.o.d--my G.o.d, forgive me--but I can't--Oh, Laura--Jim--I can't, I can't, not that woman's--not her--her--" She stopped and cried miserably, "You all know what he is, and whose he is." Again she stopped and looked beseechingly around. "Oh, you won't let Lila--she wouldn't do that--not take that woman's--that woman who disgraced Lila's mother--Lila must not take her child--Oh, Jim, you won't let that--"

As she spoke Mrs. Nesbit sank to a sofa near the door, and turned her face to the pillow. The three who watched her turned blank, inquiring faces to one another.

"Perhaps," the Doctor began hesitatingly and impotently, "Lila should--"

"What does she know--what can a child of twenty know," answered the grandmother from her pillow, "of the taint of that blood, of the devil she will transmit? Why, Jim--Oh, Jim--Lila's not old enough to decide.

She mustn't--she mustn't--we mustn't let her." Mrs. Nesbit raised her body and asked as one who grasps a shadow, "Won't you ask her to wait--to wait until she can understand?"

A question pa.s.sed from face to face among those who stood beside the elder woman, and Dr. Nesbit answered it. Strength--the power that came from a habit of forty years of dominating situations--came to him and he stepped to his wife's side. The two stood together, facing the younger pair. The Doctor spoke, not as an arbiter, but as an advocate:

"Laura, your mother has her right to be considered here. All three of you; Kenyon himself, and you and Lila--she has reared. She has made you all what you are. Her wishes must be regarded now." Mrs. Nesbit rose while the Doctor was speaking. He took her hand as was his wont and turned to her, saying: "Mother, how will this do: Let's do nothing now, not to-day at any rate. You must all adjust yourselves to the facts that reveal this new relation before you can make an honest decision. When we have done that, let Laura and her mother tell Lila the truth, and let each tell the child exactly how she feels; and then, if you can bring yourself to it, leave it to her; if she will wait for a time until she understands her grandmother's point of view--very well. If not--"

"If not, mother, Lila's decision must stand." This came from Laura, who stepped over and kissed her mother's hand. The father looked tenderly at his daughter and shook his head as he answered softly: "If not--no, I shall stand with mother--she has her right--the realest right of all!"

And so it came to pa.s.s that the course of true love in the hearts of Lila Van Dorn and Kenyon Adams had its first sharp turning. And all the world was overclouded for two souls. But they were only two souls and the world is full of light. And the light falls upon men and women without much respect for cla.s.s or station, for good deeds or bad deeds, for the weak or for the strong, for saints or sinners. For know well, truly beloved, that chance and circ.u.mstance fall out of the great machine of life upon us, hodge podge and helter skelter; good is not rewarded by prizes from the wheel of fortune nor bad punished by its calamities. Only as our hearts react on life, do we get happiness or misery, not from the events that follow the procession of the days.

Now for a moment let us peep through the clouds that lowered over the young souls aforesaid. Clouds in youth are vastly black; but they are never thick. And peering through those clouds, one may see the lovers, groping in the umbrage. It does not matter much to us, and far less does it matter to them how they have made their farewell meeting. It is night and they are coming from Captain Morton's.