In the meantime things were happening at home that did not help the situation.

XIII

He had moved into the parlour at last. It was almost his own room. An old piece of furniture, half wardrobe and half dresser, standing in the vestibule outside the parlour, had been turned over to him for good. His library and his playthings were installed on the shelves in the upper part. His personal things occupied a whole drawer below. At night he slept on the big sofa, and the door to his parents' room was closed.

One night he lay awake unusually long. The old struggle was going on within him, and there was no peace in sight. His parents had gone to bed a good while ago, and as far as he was concerned just then, they had practically ceased to exist.

Then his attention was attracted by a slight noise from their room. The stillness of the night made it audible to him in spite of the closed door. At first he listened out of idle curiosity, and to get away from his own feverish thoughts. Finally he got up without any clear idea of what he was doing, or why he did it. He began to tremble even as he moved on tip-toe across the room. At the door he had to kneel down to steady himself.

He could not tell whether an hour or a minute had pa.s.sed when he crawled into bed again. His whole body was on fire. He could feel the pulses at his temples hammering. At that moment he knew what pa.s.sion was. The man in him had been let loose, and he wanted to cry aloud with the bitter-sweet agony of it.

There was no thought of father or mother in his mind. The people back of the door were just a man and a woman. The feelings that surged through his heart, shaking his body volcanically, would have been the same if those two had been perfect strangers.

No jealousy stirred him. No sense of shame shocked him. His dominant emotion was envy.

The visit of death had left him unmoved. Now he had been as close to life in its most intense form, and the effect of it was maddening--a call that seemed to make further waiting worse than death.

He fell asleep at last with a part of the pillow stuffed into his mouth to keep his sobs from being heard in the next room....

XIV

The thing had him by the throat. It was stronger than any power he could bring to bear against it. Fighting it was useless. Resistance meant merely prolonged torture. Surrender meant sleep--and torture of a different kind the next day.

Once more he managed to get hold of the book that had wrought such disastrous change in his entire existence. He read again the chapters bearing directly on his own case. They seemed more convincing than ever.

There could be no doubt of his degradation or his doom.

XV

He came running home from some errand one evening not long before Christmas. His mind was more at ease than it had been for a long time.

That season of the year rarely failed to bring him a little happiness.

The moment he flung open the kitchen door, he knew that something was wrong, and his heart sank within him.

The mother stood in the middle of the floor wringing her hands. Granny sat on the sofa, stolid-faced as usual, and rolled one of her endless bandages. On the chair by the window sat the father, his shoulder against the wall, his left elbow on the table, and his head resting in his left hand.

Keith could hardly believe what he saw.

His father's face was contorted with pain or grief. Big tears rolled down his cheeks and dropped on the table before him. Every little while he was shaken by a sob that almost choked him.

"Is he sick," the boy gasped.

"Something dreadful has happened," the mother stammered, unable to take her eyes off her husband.

"You had better go into the parlour, Keith," whispered Granny as she started on a new roll.

Keith turned his glance once more to the father. He had never seen a man cry before, and until that moment such a lack of control on the part of his father had seemed quite unimaginable. The strangeness of it frightened him.

"I fear it will kill him," he heard his mother mutter.

"I wish it would," the father broke out, raising his head for a moment.

"But it won't, Anna.... I'll be over it in a minute."

His words were forced out between sobs. Keith saw that he was struggling terribly to get himself in hand.

Then he caught sight of Keith, whose entrance he evidently had not noticed, and as usual the presence of the boy brought back the self-restraint for which he had been striving vainly until then.

"Keith," he said, speaking much more quietly, "your Uncle Wilhelm has been arrested for using money that didn't belong to him. I can't believe it, but I am sure they will send him to jail.... You must always remember what I have told you about money...."

His own words seemed to bring back to him the full horror of the situation, and he threw himself face downward over the table in another convulsive outburst of grief.

Granny on the sofa was signalling frantically to Keith to leave the room. Mechanically he obeyed her. Anything was better than to watch his father....

XVI

Little by little he learned the whole sad story. At the same time he realized that Christmas would probably be spoiled--the one thing he had banked on for momentary relief.

Once upon a time Uncle Wilhelm had been the most prosperous member of the family, owning a big, fine grocery store in the fashionable North End district. He made a lot of money, but his wife was vain and foolish and pleasure-loving. She always managed to spend more than he could ever earn, and he was idiotically in love with her. It ended in bankruptcy.

Uncle Wilhelm got a position as superintendent of a small factory in the South End. There he might have done very well in a more modest way, had not his wife proceeded to turn his life into a perfect h.e.l.l. This was her way of punishing him for his failure to support her in the style she demanded. He was weak in more ways than one, and soon he drank not merely for the sake of a good time, as everybody else did, but to find consolation and forgetfulness. His private affairs went from bad to worse. Gradually he lost the habit of distinguishing between his own meagre funds and those entrusted to him. It was a clear case, and his employer proved merciless when it was found out.

What Keith's father had feared came true. And that Christmas was more sad than any other part of any other year had ever been.

XVII

It would have been hard on Keith at any time. Coming as it did, the family disgrace, which he guessed rather than grasped, and the disappointment, which was a depressingly tangible thing, brought his natural sensitiveness to a morbid pitch.

There was one idea that haunted him day and night--the idea that he belonged to a race doomed in advance to decay and destruction.

Uncle Wilhelm's case was not an isolated one. There was Uncle Henrik, the youngest brother of Keith's father, who had gone to the dogs while still a youth, and in a more ignominious fashion, if possible. What was he now but a besotted tramp, begging shamelessly of friend or stranger for a few _ore_ with which to buy a brief moment of coa.r.s.e happiness?

There was Uncle Marcus, the husband of Keith's paternal aunt, who had hurt his leg in a storm and lost his splendid position as chief engineer of the swiftest steamer plying on the Northern route. Now he was disabled for ever, and proud Aunt Brita was at her wit's end to keep the home and the family together.

There were the two half-brothers of Uncle Wilhelm's silly wife--popular and dashing young fellows reading blithely the purple path to destruction. Even Keith's nave mind had discovered which way they were headed, although his thoughts of them were not free from admiration.

And there were still others. Wherever he turned within the narrowing family circle, he met similar instances of progress in the wrong direction. Some were sinners and some were victims of fate--or seemed so--but it came to the same thing in the end.

"The Wellanders are going," Keith's mother said one day to Aunt Brita when she was too depressed and worried to mind the boy's presence.

"Yes," replied Aunt Brita grimly, "and so is everybody else who ever had anything to do with them. Keith will have to start it all over again from the beginning."