New Name (11 page)

The thought struck him suddenly from out of the cheerfulness of the evening, and he lifted a blanched face to Anita as she put before him his second helping of ice cream and another cup of coffee.

And he was a murderer! He had killed poor Bessie Chapparelle, a girl a good deal like this Anita girl, clean and fine, with high ideals. What would these people, these kind, good people, think of him if they knew? What would they do? Would they put handcuffs on him and send for the police? Or would they sit down and try to help him out of his trouble? He half wished that he dared puthimself upon their mercy. That minister now. He looked like a real father! But of course he would have to uphold the law. And of course there wasn’t anything to do but hang him when he had killed a girl like Bessie! Not that he cared about the hanging. His life was done. But for the sake of his mother, who had never taken much time out of her social duties to notice him, and the father who paid his bills and bailed him out, he was running away, he told himself, so that they would not have to suffer. Just how that was saving them from suffering he didn’t quite ever try to explain to himself. He was running away so there would not be any trial to drag his father and mother through. That was it.

He ate his ice cream slowly, trying to get ahold of himself once more, and across the room Anita and Jane happened to be standing together for an instant in a doorway.

“Isn’t he stunningly handsome, Anita? Aren’t you just crazy about him?” whispered Jane effusively.

“He’s good-looking enough,” admitted Anita, “but I’m afraid he knows it too well.”

“Well, how could he help it, looking like that?” responded the ardent Jane, and she flitted away to take him another plate of cake.

But the crowning act of his popularity came when Mr. Harper, president of the bank, senior elder in the church, and honored citizen, came around to speak with the young man and welcome him to the town. He had been detained and came in late, being rushed to his belated supper by the good women of the committee. He had only now found opportunity to find the new teller and speak to him.

Murray rose with a charming air of deference and respect and stood before the elder man with all the ease that his social breeding had given him. He listened with flattering attention while the bank president told him how glad he was to have a Christian young man in his employ, and how he hoped they would grow to be more than employer and employed.

Murray had dreaded this encounter if it should prove necessary, as he feared the president would have met his young teller before this occasion and would discover that he was not the right man. But Elliot Harper stood smiling and pleased, looking the young man over with apparently entire confidence, and Murray perceived that so far he was not discovered.

It was easy enough to assent and be deferential. The trouble would come when they began to ask him questions. He had settled it in his mind quite early in the evening that his strong point was to be as impersonal as possible, not to make any statements whatsoever about himself that could possibly not be in harmony with the character of the man he represented, as he thought they knew him, and to make a point of listening to others so well that they should think he had been talking. That was a little trick he learned long ago in college when he wanted to get on the right side of a professor. It came back quite naturally to him now.

So he stood with his handsome head slightly bowed in deference and his eyes fixed in eager attention, and the entire assembly fastened their eyes upon him and admired.

That might possibly be called the real moment when the town, at least those representatives of the town that were present, might be said to have opened their arms and taken him into their number. How he would meet Mr. Harper was the supreme test. With one accord they believed in Mr. Harper. He stood to them for integrity and success. They adored Mr. Harrison, their minister, and confided to him all their troubles; they had firm belief in his creed and his undoubted faith and spirituality; they knew him as a man of God and respected his wonderful mind and his consistent living. But they tremendously admired the keen mind, clear business ability, coupled with the staunch integrity, of their wealthy bank president, Elliot Harper. Therefore they awaited his leading before they entirely surrendered to the new young man who had come to live in their midst.

Murray Van Rensselaer felt it in the atmosphere as he sat down. He had not lived in an air of admiration all his life for nothing. This was his native breath, and it soothed his racked nerves and gave him that quiet satisfaction with himself that he had been accustomed to feeling ever since he was old enough to know that his father was Charles Van Rensselaer, the successful financier and heir of an ancient family.

He had stood the test, and the time was up. Now, anytime, in a moment or two, he could get away, melt into the darkness, and forget Marlborough. They would wonder and be indignant for a day or a week, but they would never find him nor know who he was. He would simply be gone. And then very likely in aday or two the other man whom he had been representing for the evening would either turn up or have a funeral or something, and they would discover his fraud. But there would in all probability be an interval in which he could get safely away and be no more. He had gained a dinner and a pleasant evening, a little respite in the nightmare that had pursued him since the accident, and he had a kindly feeling toward these people. They had been nice to him. They had showed him a genuineness that he could not help but admire. He liked every one of them, even the offish Anita, who had a delicate profile like Bessie’s, and the ridiculous Jane, who could not take her eyes from him. Now that he was an outcast, he must treasure even such friendliness, for there would be little of that sort of thing left for him in the world going forward. He could not hope to hoodwink people this way the rest of his life.

He felt a sudden pang at the thought of throwing this all away. It had been wonderfully pleasant, so different from anything he had ever experienced among his own crowd—an atmosphere of loving kindness like what he used to find at the Chapparelles’, which made the thought of stolen evenings spent in the company of Bessie seem wonderfully fresh and sweet and free from taint of any selfishness or sordidness. How different, for instance, these girls were from the girls at home. Even that Jane had an innocence about her that was refreshing. How he would enjoy lingering to play with these new people who treated him so charmingly, just as he had lingered sometimes in new summer resorts for a little while to study new types of girls and frolic awhile. It would bepleasant,
how
pleasant, to eat three good meals a day and have people speak kind words and try to forget that he was a murderer and an outlaw. If he were in a foreign land now, he might even dare it. But four hundred miles was a short distance where newspapers and telegraph and radio put everything within the same room, so to speak. No, he must get out, and get out quickly. There would likely be a late train, and perhaps his other self would arrive on it. If possible he would have to get away without going back to Mrs. Summers’, but at least if he went back he must not linger there. He could make some excuse, run out for medicine to the drugstore, perhaps, or if worse came to worst, pretend to go up to bed and then steal away after she was asleep. There would be a way!

His resilient nature allowed him to feel wonderfully cheerful as he arose from the table at last and prepared to make his adieus.

But it was not easy, after all, to get away. Mrs. Summers came to him and asked him if he would mind carrying a basket home for her—she wouldn’t be a minute—and then pressed him into service to gather up silver candlesticks and a few rare china dishes.

“You see, they’re borrowed,” she explained, “and I don’t like to risk leaving them here lest someone will be careless with them in the morning before I could get over, or mix them up and take them to the wrong person. I wouldn’t like them to get broken or lost under my care.”

They walked together across the lawn under a belated moon that had struggled through the clouds and was casting silver slants over the jeweled brown of the withered grass.

“It’s been so lovely having you here,” said Mrs. Summers gently, “almost like having my boy back again. I kept looking at you and thinking, ‘He’s my boy. He’s coming home every night, and I can take care of him just as I did with my own.’”

Murray’s heart gave a strange lurch. Nobody had ever spoken to him like that. Love, except in a tawdry form, had never come his way, unless his father’s gruffness and continual fault-finding might be called love. It certainly had been well disguised so that he had never thought of it in that light. It had rather seemed to him, when he thought about it at all, that he stood to his father more in the light of an obligation than anything else. His mother’s love had been too self-centered and too irritable to interest him. There had been teachers occasionally who had been fond of him, but their interest had passed when he used them to slide out of schoolwork. There had been a nurse in his babyhood that he barely remembered, who used to comfort him when he was hurt or sleepy, and sometimes when he was sick cuddle him in her arms as if she cared for him, but that was so very far away. He had sometimes watched the look between Bessie Chapparelle and her mother when he would be there playing games in the evenings with Bessie, a look that had made him think of the word
love
, but that also was far away and very painful now to think about. Strange how one’s thoughts will snatch a bit from every part of one’s life and blend them together in an idea that takes but an instant to grasp, just as a painter will take a snatch of this and adab of that color and blend them all into a tint, with no hint of the pink or the blue, or the black, or the yellow, or the white, that may have gone to form it, making just a plain gray cloud. Murray was doing more thinking these last few days than he had ever done in the whole of his life before. Life, as it were, was painting pictures on his mind; wonderful living truths that he had never seen before were flashing on the canvas of his brain, made up of the facts of his past life which at the time had passed over him unnoticed. He had gone from his cradle like one sliding downhill and taking no note of the landscape. But he found now that he had suddenly reached the bottom of the hill and had to climb up (if indeed he might ever attain to any heights again), that he knew every turn of the way he had come and wondered how he could have been oblivious before. It occurred to him that his experience might be called “growing up.” Trouble had come, and he had grown up. Life had turned back on him and slapped him in the face, and he began to see things in life, now that he had lost them, that he had not even recognized before.

As he slipped his arm through the big basket and stood waiting for Mrs. Summers to decide whose cake pan the big square aluminum one was, he looked wistfully about him on the disarray of tables, kind of hungering in his heart to come here again and feast and bask in the cheery comforting atmosphere. Good and sweet and wholesome it all was, a sort of haven for his weary soul that was condemned to plod on throughout his days without a place for his foot to remain, forevermore. He had a strange, tiredfeeling in his throat as if he would like to cry, like a child who has come to the end of the good time, and whose bubbles are broken and vanished. There would be no more bubbles for him anymore. The bowl of soapsuds was broken.

And so as they walked toward the little cottage with its gleaming light awaiting them from the dining room window, he felt strangely sad and lonely, and he wished with all his heart that he might walk in and be this woman’s boy. If only he could be born again into her home and claim her as his mother and take the place as her son and be a new man, with all his past forgotten! He thought—poor soul, he had not yet learned the subtlety of sin and the frailty of human nature—he thought if he could be in this environment, with such people about him, such a home to come to, and such a mother to love him, he could learn to fit it. If it hadn’t been for the possibility of the other man coming, he would have dared to try it and keep up his masquerade.

Chapter 11

H
e helped her unpack the basket and put her things away, and he gave a wistful look about the pretty, cozy room. He had never supposed there were homes like this anywhere. There was nothing formal about the place, and yet there were bits of fine old furniture, pictures, and bric-a-brac that spoke of travel and taste. It just seemed a place where one would like to linger and where
home
had been impressed upon everything around like a lovely monogram worked into the very fabric of it.

“Now,” said Mrs. Summers as she whirled about from the cake box, where she had been bestowing a dozen lovely frosted sponge cakes that had been left over and she had brought home, “you must get to bed! I know you are all worn out, and you’ve got to be on hand early tomorrow morning. What time did Mr. Harper say he wanted you at the bank? Was it nine o’clock? I thought so. So I won’t keep you up but a minute more. I thought it would be niceif we just had a bit of a prayer together the first night, and a verse. I always like a verse for a pillow to sleep on, don’t you? Even if it is late. Will you read, or shall I?” and she held out a little limp-covered book that looked, like everything else in the house, as if it had been used lovingly and often.

“Oh,
you
!” gasped Murray embarrassedly, looking at the book as if it had been a toad suddenly lifting its head in the way, and wondering what strange new ceremony now was being thrust at him. There seemed no end to the strange things they did in this pleasant, unusual place. Take that thing they called “blessing” and was a prayer! It was like that book his nurse used to read him in his childhood, called
Alice in Wonderland
. You never knew what you would be called upon to do next before you could eat or sleep. Did they do these things all the time, every day, or just once in a while, when they were initiating some new member? It must be a great deal of trouble to them to keep it up every day, and must take up a good deal of time.