THE MOVING FINGER CONTINUES TO WRITE
Having read and reread the boy’s
letter Doctor Holiday sat long with it in his hand
staring into the fire. Poor Teddy for whom life
had hitherto been one grand and glorious festival!
He was getting the other, the seamy side of things,
at last with a vengeance. Knowing with the sure
intuition of love how deeply the boy was suffering
and how sincerely he repented his blunders the doctor
felt far more compassion than condemnation for his
nephew. The fineness and the folly of the thing
were so inextricably confused that there was little
use trying to separate the two even if he had cared
to judge the lad which he did not, being content with
the boy’s own judgment of himself. Bad
as the gambling business was and deeply as he regretted
the expulsion from college the doctor could not help
seeing that there was some extenuation for Ted’s
conduct, that he had in the main kept faith with himself,
paid generously, far more than he owed, and traveling
through the fiery furnace had somehow managed to come
out unscathed, his soul intact. After all could
one ask much more?
It was considerably harder for Larry
to accept the situation philosophically than it was
for the senior doctor’s more tolerant and mature
mind. Larry loved Ted as he loved no one else
in the world not perhaps even excepting Ruth.
But he loved the Holiday name too with a fine, high
pride and it was a bitter dose to swallow to have his
younger brother “catapulted in disgrace,”
as Ted himself put it, out of the college which he
himself so loved and honored. He was inclined
to resent what looked in retrospect as entirely unnecessary
and uncalled for generosity on Ted’s part.
“Nobody but Ted would ever have
thought of doing such a fool thing,” he groaned.
“Why didn’t he pull out in the first place
as Hendricks wanted him to? He would have been
entirely justified.”
But the older man smiled and shook his head.
“Some people could have done
it, not Ted,” he said. “Ted isn’t
built that way. He never deserted anybody in
trouble in his life. I don’t believe he
ever will. We can’t expect him to have behaved
differently in this one affair just because we would
have liked it better so. I am not sure but we
would be wrong and he right in any case.”
“Maybe. But it is a horrible
mess. I can’t get over the injustice of
the poor kid’s paying so hard when he was just
trying to do the decent, hard, right thing.”
“You have it less straight than
Ted has, Larry. He knows he is paying not for
what he did and thought right but for what he did and
knew was wrong. You can’t feel worse than
I do about it. I would give anything I have to
save Ted from the torture he is going through, has
been going through alone for days. But I would
rather he learned his lesson thoroughly now, suffering
more than he deserves than have him suffer too little
and fall worse next time. No matter how badly
we feel for him I think it is up to us not to try
to dilute his penitence and to leave a generous share
of the blame where he puts it himself on
his own shoulders.”
“I suppose you are right, Uncle
Phil,” sighed Larry. “You usually
are. But it’s like having a piece taken
right out of me to have him go off like that.
And the Canadians are the very devil of fighters.
Always in the thick of things.”
“That is where Ted would want
to be, Larry. Let us not cross that bridge until
we have to. As he says himself there are worse
things than death anyway.”
“I know. Marrying the girl
would have been worse. She was rather magnificent,
wasn’t she, just as he says, not saving herself
when she might have at his expense?”
“I think she was. I am
almost glad the poor child is where she can suffer
no more at the hands of men.”
The next day came a wire from Ted
announcing his acceptance in the Canadian army and
giving his address in the training camp.
The doctor answered at once, writing
a long, cheerful letter full of home news especially
the interesting developments in Ruth’s romantic
story. It was only at the end that he referred
to the big thing that had to be faced between them.
“I am not going to say a word
that will add in any way to the burden you are already
carrying, Teddy, my lad. You know how sadly disappointed
we all are in your having to leave college this way
but I understand and sympathize fully with your reasons
for doing what you did. Even though I can’t
approve of the thing itself. I haven’t a
single reproach to offer. You have had a harsh
lesson. Learn it so well that you will never bring
yourself or the rest of us to such pain and shame again.
Keep your scar. I should be sorry to think you
were so callous that you could pass through an experience
like that without carrying off an indelible mark from
it. But it isn’t going to ruin your life.
On the contrary it is going to make a man of you,
is doing that already if I may judge from the spirit
of your letter which goes far to atone for the rest.
The forgiveness is yours always, son, seventy times
seven if need be. Never doubt it. We shall
miss you very much. I wonder if you know how dear
to us you are, Teddy lad. But we aren’t
going to borrow trouble of the future. We shall
say instead God speed. May he watch over you wherever
you are and bring you safe back to us in His good time!”
And Ted reading the letter later in
the Canadian training camp was not ashamed of the
tears that came stinging up in his eyes. He was
woefully homesick, wanted the home people, especially
Uncle Phil desperately. But the message from
the Hill brought strength and comfort as well as heart
ache.
“Dear Uncle Phil,” he
thought. “I will make it up to him somehow.
I will. He shan’t ever have to be ashamed
of me again.”
And so Ted Holiday girded on manhood
along with his khaki and his Sam Browne belt and started
bravely up out of the pit which his own willful folly
had dug for him.
Tony was not told the full story of
her brother’s fiasco. She only knew that
he had left college for some reason or other and had
taken French leave for the Canadian training camp.
She was relieved to discover that even in Larry’s
stern eyes the escapade, whatever it was, had not
apparently been a very damaging one and accepted thankfully
her uncle’s assurance that there was nothing
at all to worry about and that Ted was no doubt very
much better off where he was than if he had stayed
in college.
As for the going to war part small
blame had she for Ted in that. She knew well
it was precisely what she would have done herself in
his case and teemed with pride in her bonny, reckless,
beloved soldier brother.
She had small time to think much about
anybody’s affairs beside her own just now.
Any day now might come the word that little Cecilia
had gone and that Tony Holiday would take her place
on the Broadway stage as a real star if only for a
brief space of twinkling.
She saw very little even of Alan.
He was tremendously busy and seemed, oddly enough,
to be drawing a little away from her, to be less jealously
exacting of her time and attention. It was not
that he cared less, rather more, Tony thought.
His strange, tragic eyes rested hungrily upon her
whenever they were together and it seemed as if he
would drink deep of her youth and loveliness and joy,
a draught deep enough to last a long, long time, through
days of parching thirst to follow. He was very
gentle, very quiet, very loveable, very tender.
His stormy mood seemed to have passed over leaving
a great weariness in its wake.
A very passion of creation was upon
him. Seeing the canvases that flowered into beauty
beneath his hand Tony felt very small and humble,
knew that by comparison with her lover’s genius
her own facile gifts were but as a firefly’s
glow to the light of a flaming torch. He was of
the masters. She saw that and was proud and glad
and awed by the fact. But she saw also that the
artist was consuming himself by the very fire of his
own genius and the knowledge troubled her though she
saw no way to check or prevent the holocaust if such
it was.
Sometimes she was afraid. She
knew that she would never be happy in the every day
way with Alan. Happiness did not grow in his sunless
garden. Married to him she would enter dark forests
which were not her natural environment. But it
did not matter. She loved him. She came always
back to that. She was his, would always be his
no matter what happened. She was bound by the
past, caught in its meshes forever.
And then suddenly a new turn of the
wheel took place. Word came just before Christmas
that Dick Carson was very ill, dying perhaps down in
Mexico, stricken with a malarial fever.
A few moments after Tony received
this stunning news Alan Massey’s card was brought
to her. She went down to the reception room, gave
him a limp cold little hand in greeting and asked
if he minded going out with her. She had to talk
with him. She couldn’t talk here.
Alan did not mind. A little later
they were walking riverward toward a brilliant orange
sky, against which the Soldiers’ and Sailors’
Monument loomed gray and majestic. It was bitter
cold. A stinging wind lashed the girl’s
skirts around her and bit into her cheeks. But
somehow she welcomed the physical discomfort.
It matched her mood.
Then the story came out. Dick
was sick, very sick, going to die maybe and she, Tony
Holiday couldn’t stand it.
Alan listened in tense silence.
So Dick Carson might be going to be so unexpectedly
obliging as to die after all. If he had known
how to pray he would have done it, beseeched whatever
gods there were to let the thing come to an end at
last, offered any bribe within his power if they would
set him free from his bondage by disposing of his cousin.
But there beside him clinging to his
arm was Tony Holiday aquiver with grief for this same
cousin. He saw that there were tears on her cheeks,
tears that the icy wind turned instantly to frosted
silver. And suddenly a new power was invoked the
power of love.
“Tony, darling, don’t
cry,” he beseeched. “I can’t
stand it. He he won’t die.”
And then and there a miracle took
place. Alan Massey who had never prayed in his
life was praying to some God, somewhere to save John
Massey for Tony because she loved him and his dying
would hurt her. Tony must not be hurt. Any
God could see that. It must not be permitted.
Tony put up her hand and brushed away
the frosted silver drops.
“No, he isn’t going to
die. I’m not going to let him. I’m
going to Mexico to save him.”
Alan stopped short, pulling her to a halt beside him.
“Tony, you can’t,”
he gasped, too astonished for a moment even to be
angry.
“I can and I am going to,” she defied
him.
“But my dear, I tell you, you
can’t. It would be madness. Your uncle
wouldn’t let you. I won’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me.
Nobody can stop me. I’m going. Dick
shan’t die alone. He shan’t.”
“Tony, do you love him?”
“I don’t know. I
don’t want to talk about love your
kind. I do love him one way with all my heart.
I wish it were the way I love you. I’d go
down and marry him if I did. Maybe I’ll
marry him anyway. I would in a minute if it would
save him.”
“Tony!” Alan’s face
was dead white, his green eyes savage. “You
promised to stick to me through everything. Where
is your Holiday honor that you can talk like that
about marrying another man?” Maddened, he branished
his words like whips, caring little whether they hurt
or not.
“I can’t help it, Alan.
I am sorry if I am hurting you. But I can’t
think about anybody but Dick just now.”
“Forgive me, sweetheart.
I know you didn’t mean it, what you said about
marrying him and you didn’t mean it about going
to Mexico. You know you can’t. It
is no place for a woman like you.”
“If Dick is there dying, it
is the place for me. I love you, Alan.
But there are some things that go even deeper, things
that have their very roots in me, the things that
belong to the Hill. And Dick is a very big part
of them, sometimes I think he is the biggest part of
all. I have to go to him. Please don’t
try to stop me. It will only make us both unhappy
if you try.”
A bitter blast struck their faces
with the force of a blow. Tony shivered.
“Let’s go back. I’m
cold so dreadfully cold,” she moaned
clinging to his arm.
They turned in silence. There
was nothing to say. The sunset glory had faded
now. Only a pale, cold mauve tint was left where
the flame had blazed. A star or two had come
out. The river flowed sinister black, showing
white humps of foam here and there.
At the Hostelry Jean Lambert met them in the hall.
“Tony, where have you been?
We have been trying everywhere to locate you.
Cecilia died this afternoon. You have to take
Miss Clay’s place tonight.”
Tony’s face went white.
She leaned against the wall trembling.
“I forgot I forgot
about the play. I can’t go to Mexico.
Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”