A DOMESTIC DISCORD

After a month in the South, I was well again younger in feeling, and in looks, than I had been for ten years. Carlotta and the children, except “Junior” who was in college, had gone to Washington when I went to Florida. I found her abed with a nervous attack from the double strain of the knowledge that Junior had eloped with an “impossible” woman he had met, I shall not say where, and of the effort of keeping the calamity from me until she was sure he had really entangled himself hopelessly.

She was now sitting among her pillows, telling the whole story. “If he only hadn’t married her!” she ended.

This struck me as ludicrous a good woman citing to her son’s discredit the fact that he had goodness’ own ideals of honor.

“What are you laughing at?” she demanded.

I was about to tell her I was hopeful of the boy chiefly because he had thus shown the splendid courage that more than redeems folly. But I refrained. I had never been able to make Carlotta understand me or my ideas, and I had long been weary of the resentful silences or angry tirades which mental and temperamental misunderstandings produce.

“Courage never gets into a man unless it’s born there,” said I. “Folly is born into us all and can be weeded out.”

“What can be expected?” she went on after trying in vain to connect my remark with our conversation. “A boy needs a father. You’ve been so busy with your infamous politics that you’ve given him scarcely a thought.”

Painfully true, throughout; but it was one of those criticisms we can hardly endure even when we make it upon ourselves. I was silent.

“I’ve no patience with men!” she went on. “They’re always meddling with things that would get along better without them, and letting their own patch run to weeds.”

Unanswerable. I held my peace.

“What are you going to do about it, Harvey? How can you be so calm? Isn’t there anything that would rouse you?”

“I’m too busy thinking what to do to waste any energy in blowing off steam,” was my answer in my conciliatory tone.

“But there’s nothing we can do,” she retorted, with increasing anger, which vented itself toward me because the true culprit, fate, was not within reach.

“Precisely,” I agreed. “Nothing.”

“That creature won’t let him come to see me.”

“And you musn’t see him when he sends for you,” said I. “He’ll come as soon as his money gives out. She’ll see that he does.”

“But you aren’t going to cut him off!”

“Just that,” said I.

A long silence, then I added in answer to her expression: “And you must not let him have a cent, either.”

In a gust of anger, probably at my having read her thoughts, she blurted out: “One would think it was your money.”

I had seen that thought in her eyes, had watched her hold it back behind her set teeth, many times in our married years. And I now thanked my stars I had had the prudence to get ready for the inevitable moment when she would speak it. But at the same time I could not restrain a flush of shame. “It is my money,” I forced myself to say. “Ask your brother. He’ll tell you what I’ve forbidden him to tell before that I have twice rescued you and him from bankruptcy.”

“With our own money,” she retorted, hating herself for saying it, but goaded on by a devil that lived in her temper and had got control many a time, though never before when I happened to be the one with whom she was at outs.

“No with my own,” I replied tranquilly.

“Your own!” she sneered. “Every dollar you have has come through what you got by marrying me through what you married me for. Where would you be if you hadn’t married me? You know very well. You’d still be fighting poverty as a small lawyer in Pulaski, married to Betty Crosby or whatever her name was.” And she burst into hysterical tears. At last she was showing me the secrets that had been tearing at her, was showing me her heart where they had torn it.

“Probably,” said I in my usual tone, when she was calm enough to hear me. “So, that’s what you brood over?”

“Yes,” she sobbed. “I’ve hated you and myself. Why don’t you tell me it isn’t so? I’ll believe it I don’t want to hear the truth. I know you don’t love me, Harvey. But just say you don’t love her.”

“What kind of middle-aged, maudlin moonshine is this, anyway?” said I. “Let’s go back to Junior. We’ve passed the time of life when people can talk sentimentality without being ridiculous.”

“That’s true of me, Harvey,” she said miserably, “but not of you. You don’t look a day over forty you’re still a young man, while I

She did not need to complete the sentence. I sat on the bed beside her and patted her vaguely. She took my hand and kissed it. And I said I tried to say it gently, tenderly, sincerely: “People who’ve been together, as you and I have, see each other always as at first, they say.”

She kissed my hand gratefully again. “Forgive me for what I said,” she murmured. “You know I didn’t think it, really. I’ve got such a nasty disposition and I felt so down, and that was the only thing I could find to throw at you.”

Please please!” I protested. “Forgive isn’t a word that I’d have the right to use to any one.”

“But I must

“Now, I’ve known for years,” I went on, “that you were in love with that other man when I asked you to marry me. I might have taunted you with it, might have told you how I’ve saved him from going to jail for passing worthless checks.”

This delighted her this jealousy so long and so carefully hidden. Under cover of her delight I escaped from the witness-stand. And the discovery that evening by Doc Woodruff that my son’s ensnarer had a husband living put her in high good humor. “If he’d only come home,” said she, adding: “Though, now I feel that he’s perfectly safe with her.”

“Yes let them alone,” I replied. “He has at least one kind of sense a sense of honor. And I suspect and hope that he has at bottom common sense too. Let him find her out for himself. Then, he’ll be done with her, and her kind, for good.”

“I must marry him off as soon as possible,” said Carlotta. “I’ll look about for some nice, quiet young girl with character and looks and domestic tastes.” She laughed a little bitterly. “You men can profit by experience and it ruins us women.”

“Unjust,” said I, “but injustice and stupidity are the ground plan of life.”

We had not long to wait. The lady, as soon as Junior reached the end of his cash, tried to open negotiations. Failing and becoming convinced that he had been cast off by his parents, she threw aside her mask. One straight look into her real countenance was enough for the boy. He fled shuddering but not to me as I had expected. Instead, he got a place as a clerk in Chicago.

“Why not let him shift for himself a while?” suggested Woodruff, who couldn’t have taken more trouble about the affair if the boy had been his own. “A man never knows whether his feet were made to stand on and walk with, unless he’s been down to his uppers.”

“I think the boy’s got his grandmother in him,” said I. “Let’s give him a chance.”

“He’ll make a career for himself yet like his father’s,” said Woodruff.

That, with the sincerest enthusiasm. But instinctively I looked at him for signs of sarcasm. And then I wondered how many “successful” men would, in the same circumstances, have had the same curiously significant instinct.