Did I expect too much? Was I one of those whom Aristotle wrote: “The angry denouncers of men are the true lovers of men?” I don’t know. I only know that whatever it was that I expected had no reality. Can one come to terms with truth and go on living? If others can, I am afraid I cannot. I am afraid I am as weak as my father. “Courage is the price.” I don’t have it.
He went back to his room and looked at the bags and suitcases, and a wave of exhaustion took him, and a feeling of the most awful loneliness and loss. He put Jenny from his mind forcibly. He undressed, bathed, shaved, and dressed again, in a haze of unreality which he welcomed, for it stopped him from thinking. But the sickness of loss remained. He went downstairs for breakfast and found a tremulous Mary who told him she had been afraid that the storm last night “was the end of the world.” Jonathan smiled at her kindly, and she thought how withered and blasted he appeared, and how very pale. “I am afraid, Mary,” he said, “that the world isn’t that lucky.” Mary retreated to the kitchen and informed the cook that “Doctor seems so strange,” and the cook replied, as she was always replying these days, “He has his worries.”
There was no mail, for the trains had been delayed, and the newspaper was only two pages today and was rilled with news of the storm and of reports that it had been extremely destructive over several states. President McKinley was reported to be recovering from his wound, though several Cabinet officers had gone to Buffalo under urgings from Vice-President Roosevelt.
What will I do with today? thought Jonathan. He went outside and was surprised to find that within an hour the air had turned sultry again and was still and pent. He was amazingly tired and sluggish. The gardener came and wailed at the wreck of his careful work and Marjorie’s. “Mrs. Ferrier isn’t going to like this,” said the old man, looking reproachfully at Jonathan. “It’s bad along here, Doctor, very bad. Lots of windows got blown in, and I hear there’s twenty people missing in town, and the news coming from the farms is bad, very bad. Water’s rising in the river, too. It’s going to flood. Farms is already flooded, they say, and stock drowned.” He looked at the blue sky, with its rack of hurrying clouds. “They say it’s all over, but it ain’t I can tell. I lived a long time, and I know weather.”
Jonathan walked about with him on the soaked earth, his hands in his trousers pockets. “Jim,” he said, “what do you think about living, anyway?”
Jim turned slowly and studied him, and his browned and wrinkled face was solemn. “Well sir, Doctor, I guess you just have to stand it don’t you?”
Jonathan was intrigued. “But why?”
Jim shrugged. “Why not?” he replied. “What else can a man do?”
What else can a man do? Was that a stupid answer or was it a very wise one?
Jonathan said, “Let me help you clean up. It’s all a mess and a ruin, but we can put it together again, I suppose. We can even plant new trees where the old ones fell. We can plant the gardens again and pick up the dead branches.”
The old man, who had bent to examine a precious and battered shrub, painfully straightened himself and he smiled at Jonathan. “Well, that’s what I’ve just been saying, Doctor.”
Robert Morgan, coming to the offices, paused on the steps and blinked, and could not believe it. Far across the long lawns he could see Jonathan Ferrier in his shirtsleeves,
filling
a wheelbarrow with debris and wielding a rake and tugging at dead branches, working near the old gardener. Then he was vigorously using a pitchfork for heavier debris. He stopped to light a cigarette and look at the sky. Well, well, thought Robert, and went into the offices smiling a little.
At noon the sky turned brazen again, and the heat was appalling, and puffs of heavy wind were beginning to swirl fallen twigs and leaves in the gutters. At two o’clock the sky was very dark and boiling, and lightning snaked and thunder muttered discontentedly in the mountains. At three the storm broke.
Just as the water began to fall in the semidarkness Marjorie Ferrier arrived home in a station hack, hurrying toward the house, the driver dashing behind her with her luggage.
Jonathan, after a very light lunch, had felt so weary and numb that he had gone to his room and had fallen across the bed in a state approaching stupefaction. So, he did not hear his mother return. He did not hear the preliminary cannonading of the thunder. He slept heavily until five o’clock, to find a shrieking twilight about him again, and an infernal roaring in the air, and a pressure in the atmosphere like pouring steam. Someone had closed his open window and pulled in the shutters. His face and all of his body was sweating and his mouth was dry and he felt weak and dazed. For a moment he did not know where he was, what was the time of the day, or how it had come about that he was here at all.
He sat up, stunned and blinking, wiping his face, staring about him, listening. Then, after a long time, he got to his feet, bathed in cold water, and sat down to smoke and think. Something had happened to him, but what it was he did not know. He only knew that a sort of quietus had come to him, an area of nonfeeling or -thinking.
The room steadily darkened as the storm increased, but Jonathan did not light his lamps for over an hour. He tried to read, but the storm distracted his very slight attention, and so he confined himself to listening. Abruptly, the rain stopped but the thunder and lightning and wind intensified. There was a knock on his door, then the door opened.
“Jon?” asked Marjorie.
She stood on the threshold, very pale and quiet, her dark hair fluffed about her cheeks as if she had been sleeping. Her mouth was without color, and her eyes were unusually large and bright in the lamplight, as if she were feverish. She had taken off her traveling suit and wore a calico wrapper printed in gray and blue, and bedroom slippers.
Jonathan sat in his chair and looked silently at his mother and did not move, but the hard muscles sprang out about his mouth and his hands tightened on the arms of his chair. Marjorie gazed at him and saw that his black brows had met above his eyes and that his eyes were sinning like black fire.
“Jon?” she said again, and moistened her lips. “I came home, but you were sleeping, and I did not want to disturb you.”
She advanced into the room and the feverish brightness in her eyes had widened, and she began to breathe a little faster, as if she were very frightened. She clasped her hands tightly together. She said in a very low voice, “I know, dear. I read the Philadelphia papers last night. It’s all over, Jon, it’s all over.”
“Yes,” he said, and stood up. “It’s all over.”
They stared at each other in a silence broken only by the boisterous uproar outside, and the lamps flickered and somewhere a loose shutter crashed against a wall.
“I must talk to you, Jon,” said Marjorie.
“And what will you tell me, Mama? More lies? More sweet evasions? You and old Martin were very clever about the whole thing, weren’t you?
A
giggling little conspiracy of silence.”
A look of deep alarm and suffering ran over Marjorie’s face. She sat down near the door as if her last strength had left her. “Jon,” she whispered. He could see her hps move but could not hear her. He moved closer so that she would hear everything he said, and his look was so formidable, and totally unknown to her, that she cowered away from him as from a terrible stranger. She could not endure the look on his face and in his eyes.
“Did you believe that swill in the papers?” he asked.
She tried to speak, then coughed and put her trembling hand to her throat. “I—I felt there was something eke,” she said.
“Oh, indeed, Mama, there was a great deal more! But you know a lot of it, don’t you? Sufficient to say now that before old Martin died, he made out a last affidavit and confession, and he finally told the truth he and you both knew. The truth, Mama.”
She swallowed, and even in her terror her expression questioned him.
“And a lot you didn’t know, if that is possible. I won’t tell you about that. Perhaps Howard Best will be glad to enlighten you.” His voice, normally harsh, had a sound in it she had never heard before, and her fright rose.
“Where is darling Harald now?” he asked, and loomed over her so urgently that she thought he was about to strike her, and in that abysmal fear she said quickly, “He returned yesterday morning, Jon!”
“Oh, yesterday morning.” He looked down at her and smiled. “So, he is there with Jenny. He has been alone there with Jenny for a long time, and you knew what he was from the very beginning, and you did not care in the least for Jenny—alone with him, a man like him—so long as you could continue to protect him.”
“Oh, Jon, he would never harm Jenny!”
“No more than he harmed Mavis. Is that it?”
“Jon,” she almost groaned, “if you know everything, as you say, then you must know what Mavis was!”
“She was my wife.”
Marjorie put her hand to her thin cheek as if he had hit her in reality, but she looked up at him and her lips moved soundlessly.
“My wife,” he said. “A fool, mindless, wanton. Yes, all that, and more. But she was still my wife when he took her, as if she had been a common whore. She was still my wife when she conceived a child by him. She was still my wife when she died of her abortion, and he would still have lived, in all those lies, if it hadn’t been for Howard Best.”
Marjorie was too stricken to speak. She could feel the painful lurching of her heart and could hear the thunderous explosions outside and could see, almost blinding her, the steady and fiery lightning.
“My wife,” said Jonathan. “It was nothing to you that he had done this thing to me, his brother. It was nothing to any of you. It meant even less when I was arrested for a crime that I had never committed, which I could never have brought myself to commit. If I had been hanged for that crime, you would still have kept your pretty lips well closed.”
“Oh, Jon!” she cried. “You cannot believe that! You don’t believe that! If there had been any danger to you at all, if you had been convicted, we should have spoken, Martin and I!”
“That is another lie,” said her son, and his hand lifted as if indeed he would strike her, but now she sat upright and
looked him fully in the face. “It was nothing to you, was it, Mama, that I spent those months in prison, that I spent those weeks in a courtroom before grinning crowds and reporters and had to listen in silence to the prosecuting attorney accuse me of every stinking thing under the sun, such as murdering my wife and my unborn child? No, it was nothing to you. You let it all happen to me. And when I came back here, you still did not speak, either of you, not even to me! You let a whole town malign me and despise me, and drive me out, and call me murderer to my face. Why, Mama?”
Marjorie dropped her head a little. “We thought you were strong enough to bear it, Jon. We watched and waited and prayed. If there had been any danger— You forget. Harald is also my son, weaker than you, we thought. We thought he— we tried to protect him from you, Jon, and you from knowing. Can’t you understand? Won’t you try to understand? It was really for you that
I
kept silent.” Her head bowed lower. “You are both my sons. By not speaking
I
thought—
I
thought I’d saved you both.”
He laughed abruptly. “And you never dreamed that the truth would come out, did you? It still would not have come out if a very nice little plot hadn’t been laid against me by Kent Campion and various others, including the man who aborted Mavis and killed her. In the event that plot would have succeeded—tell me, Mama, would you have spoken .then?”
She could only stare at him speechlessly, growing paler and paler. She put her hand tightly against her breast.
“A plot to send me to prison, probably for life, for alleged abortions,” said Jonathan. “That would have been comparatively easy, with my first trial still fresh in people’s minds, and the conviction that I was guilty of killing Mavis. Mavis has been the precipitant in this whole vicious mess, from the very beginning, but you helped very efficiently, Mama, very efficiently, and I congratulate you. While I was in prison, no doubt you were very pleased with yourself.”
She got to her feet, staggering a little. “Jon! You can’t believe that! You don’t believe it!
I
refuse to believe that you are taking yourself seriously.”
He said, “There is just one thing
I
want to know, and tell me the truth this time.” His rage was rising, and the terribleness in his face was more than Marjorie could stand. “Did you know that he had seduced Mavis before you heard them both arranging for Mavis to be aborted?”
“Yes,” she said. “I knew. But I couldn’t say anything to Harald or to Mavis. I was afraid that it would—it would cause something, and that you would know. Always I was trying to shield you, Jon, to protect you from knowing. I thought it would end, and it had ended, and it would all be over and no one would be hurt.”
He said very gently, “You were quite successful in a way. No one was hurt, except that Mavis died, and I was tried for murder, and my name blackened all over the country. Harald went his way, and everything was lovely, and he lived on Myrtle’s money and tried to get Jenny to marry him, and— by God, now I know that all the time he was laughing in my face!”
“Jon, won’t you try to believe that it was all done to protect you?”
“And to protect smiling, laughing Harald?”