HUSBAND AND WIFE
The next morning found Frederick Graves
more nervous than ever. The weather had cleared.
The air, washed by yesterday’s downpour, came
through the open window sweet to his nostrils.
The countryside sparkled in the morning sun and the
greens of the woods and fields were deeper and richer;
but the beauty of the landscape touched him not.
He’d scarcely slept, and when weariness had
at last overcome him, his dreams had been filled with
visions of a red haired girl, and a sturdy, handsome
boy playing about upon the ragged rocks. When
he came down to breakfast, Ebenezer told him he’d
better see the doctor that day.
“You might go while Madelene
and I are out this morning,” suggested Helen.
“Ah,” hearing a child’s voice in
the hall, “here comes my baby!”
When the door opened, a little girl
of three bounded in. Ebenezer held out his arms
and Elsie sprang into them.
“Listen to Mrs. Waldstricker,”
he laughed. “She said, ‘my baby,’
and I say, she’s mine.... Aren’t
you my baby, pet?”
Helen smiled indulgently. This
wee bit of femininity was the one creature who could
keep her father amiable from one end of the day to
the other.
“My girlie wants to eat with
daddy?” Ebenezer went on, his face buried in
the flaxen hair. “Then she shall.”
“Elsie wants to eat with daddy,” parroted
the child.
“That’s why I say she’s
spoiled,” offered Helen, shrugging her shoulders.
“Now her place is in the nursery, but what can
I do?”
“Her place is right here on
her father’s knee,” replied Waldstricker,
“where I always want her, bless her.”
During the discussion about the child,
Frederick got up from the table and went out of doors.
As he left the dining room, he had
no definite plan; but no sooner had he walked across
the front lawn and taken a view of the long road the
way that led to Tessibel and his boy than
his feet, seemingly of their own volition, led him
along the grassy path up the hill. If he could
only see the two of them without his family knowing!
One kiss from his boy, one loving look from Tess,
and he felt he could start again to live!
To the sick man the distance was considerable,
but minute by minute he grew stronger, restored by
revivifying hope. An hour, only a short hour,
only a little distance further and he would be at the
lake; in sight of the willow trees around the shack.
He went down the hill to the top of the lane.
Here Tess had come to him that long ago night he’d
married her. Every familiar spot stung him with
bitter memories of the squatter girl.
He went slowly down and stopped under
a great tree opposite the house where he’d formerly
lived. Young had the place now, and Tess lived
there and his boy. Ebenezer’s insinuations
hurt him. His jealousy of Deforrest revived.
Remorse for his criminal selfishness burned him, an
unquenchable fire.
Shaken by conflicting emotions, he
went on by the deserted hut under the willows to the
lake shore. He’d go out to the ragged rocks
and rest, and then he’d try to see Tessibel
and the boy.
He came to the great gray slab where
he’d left Tess the night he told her of Madelene,
and sank down in the shade of the overhanging rocks.
Screened from the blazing sun, his hot skin rejoiced
in the coolness of the damp grotto. With unseeing
eyes, he glanced out over the glassy mirror of the
placid water. Unheeding, he heard none of the
bird-calls, and paid no attention to the intimate
little sounds of the lake side.
What should he do when at last he
saw Tess and the boy? Would he dare claim them?
Suddenly, something made him sit up
straight and listen. It was a child’s laugh.
He got up and stepped behind the hanging shoulder of
the rock and waited. He looked cautiously around
the jutting-rock, and there, racing toward him through
the brilliant sunshine, was a little boy, a handsome,
sturdy boy, and bounding along beside him, Kennedy’s
bulldog.
Then, instinctively, Frederick knew
this was his son. He would speak, he must speak!
He stepped from his hiding place and came face to face
with the little fellow and his companion. The
dog, uttering a great growl, crouched on his hind
quarters in rage. A stranger had ventured upon
ground belonging to his dear ones, and Pete was demanding,
in his doglike way, the reason thereof.
“Pete, Pete,” called Frederick,
soothingly, and Pete dropped his head and came forward,
as if to a friend. The boy stood, feet wide-spread,
staring fixedly at this man whom Pete knew and he had
never seen before.
Frederick patted the dog and smiled
ingratiatingly at the boy. He was looking down
into a pair of dark eyes, eyes like his own, into the
grave face of a child asking why he was there.
The dog nuzzled the man’s hand
and fawned upon him, making in his throat little noises
of welcome.
Frederick held out his other hand.
“Won’t you come, too, little boy?”
“I can’t!... Mummy wouldn’t
like it. I don’t know you.”
“She won’t mind, I’m
sure,” replied Frederick, his heart beating so
hard he could hear it. “Pete knows me,
and I know your mother. Her name is is
Tessibel.... Isn’t it?”
The man could scarcely get that beloved name from
between his lips.
“Yes, Tessibel is my mummy,”
said the boy. “You know my mummy, and my
Uncle Forrie?”
“Yes,” assented Frederick,
sitting down. “Come here and let me tell
you all about your mother’s beautiful curls.”
Boy hitched nearer the tall stranger.
He was drawn in some unknown way toward this man whose
arms were out-held to him. Then, suddenly, he
walked straight into them, his eyes still very grave,
still very questioning.
The moment Frederick touched the little
one he felt the world was his. He forgot Waldstricker,
forgot Madelene, forgot everything, but his elf-like
son within his cuddling grasp. He touched his
lips to the little face.
“Oh, I’ve wanted to see you so,”
he murmured.
“Why didn’t you come, then?” demanded
Boy.
“I was away,” said Frederick.
“My Uncle Forrie goes away,
too. When he came home yesterday, he brought
me a beautiful engine it goes on wheels.
I love my Uncle Forrie.”
“Could you love me, dear?” breathed Frederick.
“Yes, oh, yes. I love everybody.
God, too. So does Mummy. And Deacon, he’s
my owl, and An ”
Boy’s lips closed on the nearly
spoken word. He suddenly remembered the daily
lessons he’d had from his mother never to mention
Andy’s name to any one; that, if he did, a big
man would come and take his darling Andy away.
No, Boy couldn’t stand that. He wouldn’t
say anything about Andy, not even to this strangely
attractive man.
“What were you going to say, boy?” petitioned
Frederick.
“Nothin’. Just nothin’.”
And the father was satisfied, satisfied
not to talk, glad to have his son so heavenly close.
The long years of his exile were slipping away.
The nerve-racking yearning of tedious days and yet
more tedious, sleepless nights was partially quieted.
His son, so long, merely, the pulseless image of his
dreams, had become a breathing reality, and the child
was the living link between its mother and himself.
The longer he held the little one, the more intense
grew his desire for Tess. At length this demand
urged him to ask,
“Where’s your mother?”
“She’s home, just up there in that house.
She’s working.”
“You haven’t any father?”
the man queried at last. A lump rose in his throat
and choked him. What had the child been told about
him, he wondered.
“Oh, yes, I have somewhere’s,
but I got another up in the sky, away back in the
clouds, Mummy says. And he’s awful glad
when I’m good, and he cries like anything, when
I’m bad. So I try to be good, and sometimes
I’m gooder’n gold.”
To hear a name from the child’s
lips, the name he had dreamed of, was the one thought
filling his mind.
“Let me be your father?” he said, his
voice breaking.
“Sure I will,” he answered. “There’s
my mummy, now!”
Around the jutting rocks came Tess.
The red curls hung about her shoulders like a vivid
velvet mantle, just as Frederick always dreamed of
them. But her figure, in her simple morning dress,
was fuller and more womanly. Upon her face was
an expression of serenity and peace. Ah!
The woman was even more lovely than the girl he’d
married, and to the love-hungry man, on the great,
gray slab of rock, she was infinitely desirable.
“Mummy,” shouted the child,
joyfully, “I’ve found a daddy for us.
Petey and me found him.”
Tess stared at the man, undisguised
horror and dismay written in her eyes. She’d
not seen Frederick since that day he’d urged
her to marry Sandy Letts to escape Waldstricker, whose
hands, he’d described, as stronger’n God’s.
She’d hardly heard of him after he and Madelene
had gone West. She had long ago ceased to feel
any desire for him. Indeed, she scarcely thought
of him. During the full happy years since she
left the shanty, under the loving tuition of Deforrest
Young, the disgrace this man on the rocks had heaped
upon her had covered its claws and lacerated her no
more. But, at the sight of him, visions of the
past reared themselves in her imaginative mind.
Memory, suddenly, flung all the cruelties of his treatment
of her into a kaleidoscopic jumble, and meddlesome
fear presented numerous suggestions of calamity.
A moment she stood as if turned to stone.
“Come on, come,” Boy cried, tugging at
her dress.
Frederick struggled to his feet, and held out his
arms.
“Tessibel, oh, my Tess, be kind,” he supplicated.
But she’d taken the child’s
hand and without answering, was making her way swiftly
backward to the rock-path.