Tom Beauling/Chapter 1
❦
ONE spring, before the peaches were done blossoming or the cherry blossoms come to their best, Judge Tyler, of Mitford, sat in the cool of his study and considered what the year might bring. Although a sturdy reputation, a number of excellent investments, and sixty years of bachelor life rendered Judge Tyler independent of droughts, floods, high winds, or other criminal manifestations of weather, still there was the blood of stout Connecticut farmers in his veins, and the open pamphlet on his knees was Whalen's "Agricultural Prophecies." As he sat taking in the prophecies for pretty nearly what they were worth (and grumbling over his own sagacity), he threw a glance out the window, and observed a lady and a child walking along the road-side of the fence which divided his private garden from the public street. His eyes were almost back at certain statements regarding July wheat, when the tail of them caught an arm, black-gloved to the elbow, in the act of pushing open his smart green gate. A large picture-hat of soft colors, capping a slim figure in white, drooped up the gravel walk between the neat little six-inch square hedges of box. One black-gloved hand crumpled a white muslin handkerchief; the other rested picturesquely, but by no means unlovingly, on the further shoulder of a sturdy little boy of five. One of the white-figured curtains of the window put an abrupt end to observation.
It was Sunday, and Judge Tyler's ancient Irish servant was at the afternoon service of her church, so that the knocking which presently fell upon the door obliged him (not suffering from cheerfulness especially) to go and open it himself.
The lady stood weakly on the threshold confronting him. Sunken cheeks and big eyes, feverishly bright, told a tale. She coughed.
"Consumption," said the judge to himself, methodically, as you would file a paper for reference.
"You don't know me?" said the lady.
"No," said the judge, stiffly; "I do not place you." For all his judicial certainty of speech, there was a something about the lady which Judge Tyler did recognize. It was as you recall a poem whose title, purpose, and moral you have forgotten, but of whose prosody one haunting line remains. The haunting line was a big, sweet mouth.
Judge Tyler glanced down at the child, and was slightly scandalized to perceive that so young a male wore trousers. The child had a big, sweet mouth also. His smiled without volition.
"You don't remember me, Judge Tyler," said the lady. She parted her big, sweet mouth into a deprecating smile, which instantly began to tremble at the corners. Then she interlaced her fingers, without closing them. The familiar gesture at once brought the lady to her proper niche in Judge Tyler's gallery of recollection.
"I remember you perfectly, Harmony," he said. There was neither surprise nor warmth in his tone, nor indeed coldness, rather a judicial tinct of noncommission. Whatever the tone, the lady's eyes drooped, almost tragically, before it, and she laid her hand with a charming free-arm gesture back on the rosy infant's shoulder. Judge Tyler, easily sure of himself, waited.
"This is my son—Tom," said the lady. Then she swayed, and Judge Tyler thrust out his right arm to prevent her falling.
"I won't fall," she said, as if that was the gist of her tragedy. "Really, I won't." It sounded like a daughter promising her mother to be good.
"Perhaps you would better step inside," said Judge Tyler.
"Yes, that's it," said she, "if I can just sit down a moment."
Her hand rested lightly into the judge's crooked arm. He could feel that it was shaking. Once it jerked nervously.
"I couldn't go to any one else," she said; "you see, I am not well."
Although his manner was too grave and collected to be reassuring, the judge conducted his visitor with courtesy to the study and placed her in a deep chair, having first softened its back with a small brown cushion. When she was seated, he stood before the mantel and looked at her interrogatively. The infant stood sturdily by the left arm of his mother's chair. The lady glanced deprecatingly from the infant to the judge, and smiled her big, sweet smile.
"Children have such absurd memories," she said.
The judge understood perfectly, but preferred to say: "Do I understand you to indicate, Harmony, that you wish to speak with me alone?"
"Oh, yes, if you please," said the lady. "Tom, go with Judge Tyler."
The infant advanced upon the judge, or rather from beneath him,—undermined him, as it were,—and looked him in the face, as if to determine whether or not that black-clothed, gray-headed man was trustable. In the course of his life Judge Tyler had spoken to more felons than children. He was quite at a loss.
"Come," he said presently, in a gruff voice, and forced himself to hold out a finger. The child's hand closed on the finger as a grown man's hand closes on money that is owing to him. An ingratiating feeling started, with the brazen intention of getting into his heart, to run up the judge's arm. He managed, not too easily, to check it at the elbow.
"Be good, Tom!"
In the dining-room the blinds were drawn. A few blue-and-white plates, "Independence Hall;" "Old South;" "The Franklin Elm," New Haven; "Mount Vernon;" a steel-engraving, "Shakespere lisant son drame de Macbeth devant La Reine Elisabeth et sa cour;" a copperplate, "Delia Hid in Shades Eludes her Eager Swain," and a copy of a copy of Van Dyke's portrait of himself ornamented the walls. The head of a cow-faced moose looked out alarmingly over the top of an ugly black-walnut sideboard. His neck was lost in shadow, and you might have stretched your imagination to believe that a stall containing the animal's body and legs was situated immediately behind that offensive piece of furniture. Judge Tyler lifted the child into the arm-chair at the head of the solid mahogany.
"There," said the judge. He reached the door, stopped, turned, and went over to the sideboard with somewhat of the stealthy manner with which we may assume that a thief moves. Out of a Canton-ware bowl he took a fig, hesitated, and took another. These he thrust hastily into the child's hand.
"There," he said gruffly.
The child eyed first the judge and then the figs.
"Don't eat too fast," said the judge, still more gruffly. He hurried out of the room, closing the door behind him with something more than firmness and something less than a bang. He could hear the lady in the study coughing.
The child, in imitation of the dusty mouse, began a procrastinating attack upon the figs.
Judge Tyler cleared his throat.
"He is a manly little fellow," he said.
"Thank you," said the lady.
The judge seated himself tentatively on the edge of a chair, and waited for her to explain.
"I hated to have to come to you," she began.
"Since you have come," said the judge, tartly, "it will hardly be necessary to go into that."
"But you are so just," she began again. The judge acknowledged the compliment with an impatient but momentary contraction of the eyebrows.
"I couldn't go to my own sister," she said, "could I?"
"I don't know why you couldn't," said Judge Tyler.
"I simply couldn't," she said plaintively. "Dorothy was always so hard. Even when we were little, though I was older, she used to find fault with me on ethical grounds. I couldn't go to Dorothy—" The lady was stopped by a fit of coughing. Then she said, with her wide, trembling smile:
"You see? I had to come to somebody, and I chose you, because I know that even if you are g-g-gruff—"
"I hope," said the judge, hastily, "that this cough is nothing serious."
"Oh, but it is!" she said. "I have had it three years. We were barn-storming with 'Julius Cæsar'—doing one-night stands in the country towns—I was Cæsar's wife—"
Judge Tyler could not explain why it suddenly and quite inapplicably occurred to him that Cæsar's wife was above suspicion.
"And I caught cold—this cold—and so I have come to you to ask a great, great service—I am afraid an impossible service."
The Judge bowed.
"It's about Tom."
The judge looked troubled.
"Don't say you won't before you hear me out. Is he—is Tom out of harm's way?"
"I hope so," said Judge Tyler, his mind reverting with a twinge of agony to certain breakables in the dining-room.
"Then that's all right," said the lady. "Judge Tyler, what is to become of Tom if I die?"
That sort of sudden question is always difficult to answer, and painful.
"If you would care to put me in possession of the facts," said Judge Tyler, "we could then perhaps talk of your son with better mutual understanding."
"That would be better," said the lady. "But you will let me do it my own way, won't you? It makes it so much harder if you ask questions. It's hard enough, anyway."
The judge looked at his watch.
"I can give you just an hour," he said, and he added, almost kindly: "Will you take something before you begin—a glass of wine? You will forgive me remarking, Harmony, that you look very ill."
"I am," she said gravely, "but I won't take anything, please."