Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 16
XVI
Mr. Lockwood and Disney's mother were in the library, on the second floor of the house, at the back, when the girl entered. Hearing her, Mr. Lockwood came to the head of the broad, curving stairway and called to her:
“Come up, my dear! You must hear this, too!”
“Hear what, grandfather?” she questioned, laying off hat and coat.
As she mounted the stairs, she sensed with quick perception that Miss Lavinia Grush was going up the flight to the third story. Disney knew this by a sound of furtive steps, and by a fugitive glimpse of a gnarled hand on the upper balustrade. The idea of eavesdropping hardly grew conscious in the girl's mind, but a vague wonder filled her.
“What,” she half thought, “is the meaning of all this?”
The library, spacious and well lighted, was cheerful with an open fire—for even on this warm spring day, without a fire, a certain chill might lurk in that high-posted room tiered up with bookcases. The place looked almost like a museum. There the old man had gathered spoils from a score of his voyages and explorations of earlier adventurous days.
On one wall hung Japanese swords and Polynesian clubs, an alpenstock, and long-barreled dueling pistols from Spain. Another showed tapa mats, a quaintly carven coconut, a silver-mounted Bedouin rifle. The center of the room was held by a time-scarred refectory table from the ancient monastery of Benghazi, in Cyrenaica. On top of a bookcase, close by a rear window, stood a wooden box containing the skull of Burrum Gao. Everywhere the eye met curios, strange weapons, Babylonian clay cylinders, parchments—a very olla podrida of costly, rare, and unique treasures.
Disney found her mother looking happier than she had looked for many days. Mrs. Forrester was sitting in a Chinese wicker chair beside the refectory table, a little pale, but smiling. Old Lockwood came to the girl, passed an arm about her, and kissed her.
“What has my little girl of the bonny cheek and wind-swept eyes been up to this afternoon?” he queried, peering at her from under his bushy white brows. “Late again, eh?”
“Maybe a few minutes late,” she laughed, smoothing her glossy black hair. “I've been walking on the Esplanade.”
“Ah? Springtime! My faith—of course, of course! Why didn't you bring the young man in for tea?”
“He wouldn't come.” Her cheeks' color heightened. “He's rather odd, isn't he?”
“It is just as well, my dear,” judged Lockwood, putting on his glasses. “We are discussing a little matter of business. I'm glad you're here. I want you to know all about it, too.”
“About what, grandfather?”
The girl's exquisite features took an anxious look. Business, to her, had always meant trouble.
Lockwood gestured at the long table; and now she saw on it an open, japanned metal box, some papers neatly tied, and a few heavy manila filing envelopes.
“It's about—that,” the old man replied. “I've been confessing a few things to your mother, my dear child. As you know, confession is good for the soul.”
Mrs. Forrester's breath caught. Her hands clenched, but she spoke no word.
“I—I don't understand,” the girl said hesitantly. “What has happened?”
“Good for the soul,” repeated Lockwood. “I know this has been good for mine. I feel much better, now that your mother knows the truth. I'll feel better still, when you do!”
“Know what?” asked Disney, wondering at his enigmatic smile.
“My dear girl—my dearest girl!” He laid a heavily veined hand on her shoulder. “Would you feel terribly cast down and grieved—would you feel that I've led you into false hopes and inexcusably deceived you, if—if—”
“Why, whatever is it, grandfather?” Disney's black eyes widened with anxiety. “Has something bad happened to you?”
“Some people might call it so,” he answered very gently; “but it's the effect on your mother and yourself that I'm thinking of now.”
“Oh, you needn't think of us, grandfather! We're both so happy—I am, anyhow, and I know mother is, too!”
“Yes, but would you be so happy if you knew that I'm really not a very rich man?”
“As if that, or anything to do with money, could make any difference in the world, you dearest of grandfathers!” The girl laughed, drew his face down to hers, and kissed him. “As if money—”
“God love you for that!” His eyes grew moist. “But money's important, child; and I really haven't half the money I'm supposed to have—no, nor a quarter of it. Some unfortunate investments, and—”
“We don't want to hear a word about all that, grandfather!” interrupted Disney. “Do we, mother?”
“Not a word!” Mrs. Forrester echoed. “What your—grandfather has just told me has made me happier than I reckon I've been in a long time. I don't want him to be rich!”
“And they say women are mercenary!” smiled the old man, quite beatified. “They're all wrong, the maligners of women!” He paused, stroking back his thin white hair. “Not that I'm a pauper, by any means,” he added. “I still own this house. There's a little money in bank, and a considerable life insurance policy.”
“Why, grandfather! You don't need to tell us this!”
“Oh, yes—yes! There must be no misapprehensions.” Standing there on the Shiraz rug, the old man nodded, and smiled with thin, close-shaven lips. “In a few days, as soon as Mr. Tolbert, my lawyer, gets back from New Bedford, I shall make a new will. Everything shall be left to your mother and you; but—how I regret to say it, dear girl!—I fear there won't be very much. When the estate is settled and all obligations met, perhaps there may be almost nothing.”
“There, there!” Disney laughed, pressing a cool, slender hand to his lips. “If you didn't have a dollar in the world, grandfather, we'd love you just the same. More—because then we could both go to work and help you. Couldn't we, mother?”
“Gladly!” Mrs. Forrester answered. “Thank God for this!” she was thinking. “Thank God there's not much for Veazie to get his hands on!”
Then, as she looked at the deceived old man, smiling as the aged smile, as he drew Disney to him and circled the girl with his thin arm, a love and loyalty such as she had never known gushed up in her. The luminous truth dawned in her that she had come to love him for his goodness, for his steadfast affection, even for the very simplicity that had led him so far astray.
Dimly, as through mists and vapors, she perceived that her sin of deception might perhaps be atoned by the happiness that she and Disney could after all bring into his long life of search, now—though so mistakenly—satisfied. The sense of dread and guilt and shame, so long oppressing her, fell away like a garment outworn. She breathed more freely, she smiled, she thought once more:
“Thank God for this!”
“Money!” Disney was saying. “What do we want money for, if only we have each other? I can give up my music, and—”
“My faith, no! No, child, there's enough for that—enough for all we really need. It's only that when I'm gone—and that may not be very long now—”
“Hush, grandfather! Please don't—please!”
The old man's eyes filled with tears that he could not restrain. His arm about her quivered.
“God is very good to me!” he whispered, as he kissed her black and glossy hair.
Listening with frigid wrath, at the stairhead above, Miss Lavinia Grush felt that God was anything but good to her. She growled an objurgation, retreated to her own room, shut the door, and sat down to smoke and glower.
“I'm done!” she brooded with venom. “So, then, he hasn't got hardly anything, after all—and what little there is, I won't get! I knew I wouldn't—not with those fly-by-nights coming in here! After all my years of slavery to that old fool! Something's got to be done, it has—that's grammatical! If he lives long enough to make another will, I'm out. Something's got to be done, quick, to get the boot on t'other leg. If that old fool lives—”
Her cogitations were broken by a tapping at the door.
“Come in! Well, Irene, what do you want?”
“I—I“m givin' notice, ma'am.” The colored girl's eyes blinked nervously, and she twisted her apron in unsteady, yellow fingers. “I'm leavin'.”
“Are, eh? What for?”
“I can't stand this house no more, ma'am.”
“What's the reason?” demanded Miss Grush, laying down her half smoked cigar. Her gesture was unsteady, her left hand contracted—an effect of the “strokes” she had suffered years before. “It's the new mistress, or what?”
“Oh, no, ma'am—I don't mind Mrs. Forrester none. She's all right, even if she is Southerner an' don't know proper respect for colored people. It—it ain't that.”
“Want a raise, do you?”
“No, ma'am—I wouldn't stay here now, not if you was to pay me twenty-five a week. I'm goin'!”
“Well, what for? Can't you give a reason?”
“It—it's that there skull, ma'am.” Irene's glance wandered, as if in fear the skull might suddenly pop out from Miss Grush's clothes closet and bite her. “I ain't sup'stitious, nor nothin', but—but since what happened—”
“You ramble-scamble, silly young idiot!” the old woman snapped, her nostrils wrath-widened. “As if you didn't know that was all a fraud! As if a skull could hurt you!”
“It might be a fraud, ma'am, an' it mightn't hurt me, but I just don't like it, nohow—up there in that box on the lib'ary shelf, an' me havin' to dust all round it. Andrew, he says—”
“That chauffeur!” snapped the old harridan. “You're a sweet pair of ignoramuses, you are—I hope to tell you!”
“Andrew, he's my financé, an' I ain't goin' to hear nothin' against him,” the girl sullenly affirmed. “He knows things, too, Andrew does!”
“What kind of things?”
“Never mind, ma'am; but—he's leavin', too.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish!” snapped the old woman, with a sudden flare of temper. “There's plenty other maids and chauffeurs. I'll give you your fortnight's money to-day, I will, and let you go right off!”
“No—no, ma'am,” the girl temporized. “We'll stay our time out, but after that—”
“All right—that's settled!” Miss Grush waved a tremulous and bony hand of dismissal. “That's enough—get out!”
After the door was closed and Irene had vanished, the old vixen sat for a long time in her rocker, smoking cigar after cigar, grunting to herself, brooding things not good to ponder—bitter things and evil.