Peewee/Chapter 10
When Peewee got to the top of the stairs, he turned and looked down. All that he saw was the disappearing back of the servant. He waited. After he could no longer hear the servant's steps, he went part way down the stairs and listened. Not hearing anything, he went on all the way down. The library door had been closed. He put his ear against it and then could hear Beman's voice, high pitched and angry.
"She might have known something would happen if she trusted you!"
Peewee stiffened with surprise. Beman and his father were not then, in agreement. Beman was not merely turning Peewee over to his father. What was he doing? Someone, Peewee knew, would discover him if he stopped to listen outside the door of the library, but there was a room next to the library into which probably no one would come. Peewee darted into that room. Here, too, the door into the library was closed, and he went to it and lay down close to it on the floor.
"Go back further," he heard Beman saying. "Go clear back—back to the wedding."
"It goes still further back than that."
"Very well; but wasn't I right? The little fool was bound to marry you? Now the thing works out! I couldn't tell where Jeff Markyn's grandson would go wrong, but I knew he wouldn't go straight.
"No. You merely hated my family. It isn't the man who's injured that never forgives; it's the one who inflicts the injury."
Peewee grew tense with perplexity. What was the meaning of this talk? His father said something which Peewee could not hear.
"She came here,"—this was Beman speaking now—"several days in succession and sat by my front window where she could look out. She was watching, I discovered, for a boy she'd taken an interest in. She'd seen him on the beach here nearly every day. I got it out of her she meant to find a home for him—not in your house, not in any institution. The thing looked queer to me, and I said, 'Bring the boy here; I'm all alone in this big house and it'll be good for me.' She wouldn't consent at first; finally she agreed to it."
"Because you made her think that she could trust you. We all believed you'd buried that old family feud the way we had."
"Not with you, I hadn't. You married my granddaughter in spite of me; the boys on the Board could have told you to watch out."
Peewee's heart beat fast. He recollected the questions that Beman had asked him. Beman, it was beginning to appear, had already known the answer to those questions. Why then had he asked them? Was it to find out how much Peewee knew? Peewee had denied any knowledge of his father. So Beman had showed him to his father and at once sent him away. Why?
Beman's voice was again going on: "She brought the boy here and by hek! he looked as much like you as two peas. What lawyer would you go to, I wondered, if you were in trouble? You'd go, I had no doubt at all to Sallet. I put a man to dig in Sallet's office. Sallet, he found, was advertising for a boy. In twenty-four hours I had the whole blamed thing. I had the boy's record in the institutions; I had the mother's name. Like to hear it? I had her looked up too. I was almost sure what all this meant. I sent for you to come over here, and I watched you when you saw the boy. That made me certain. You're no fit husband for Matt Beman's granddaughter—coming to her straight from another woman, and with a child running the streets who doesn't know his father!"
"I never knew there was a boy."
"What does your knowing matter?"
Peewee heard his father's voice after a long interval. "What is it that you mean to do?"
"I'm going to take her back—away from you. This house is lonesome. I'm old, I ain't dead yet. I'd like a young woman—my granddaughter—around as well as anybody would."
Peewee thrilled delightedly. Beman was not going to give him over to his father; he was going to bring Mrs. Markyn here. It was not wholly plain how Beman was going to accomplish this, but the old man's power was certain. Peewee would see Mrs. Markyn daily; they might possibly eat their meals together; she would come perhaps to kiss him good-night.
"You've considered the effect of this, of course?" This was his father.
"You mean the scandal? It ain't necessary there should be any scandal. I don't mind gossip by people who don't know what they're talking about."
"No; I mean the effect of this on her."
"Of course I have. I'll get my effect. She wouldn't believe any story against you merely by itself, and you've made her trust you so that the boy, without the story, isn't enough to make her suspect you. But she'll have to believe the two together, and by the Lord! I've got 'em both, and she'll believe because you won't be able to deny."
Peewee chilled. The way Mrs. Markyn was to be brought here, then, was by telling her all about himself. He was no longer so sure what this implied. He had thought when he had been feeling certain that she suspected his relation to his father, that she was not made so unhappy by it as he had expected her to be. He had not been able to understand that. Now Beman said plainly that she did not yet suspect. If that was so, why had she brought him here? But he felt that Beman knew. Again therefore he himself was unable to comprehend.
"You don't understand," he heard his father say. "Marion still has perfect faith in me. We'd sworn that faith to one another; she asked me if I'd kept it, and I—God knows I couldn't tell her about this; I'd never loved anyone but her. I lied to her!"
"Of course, Jeff's grandson would."
"She built her happiness about that lie. If I—I beg you to reconsider this; I'm not thinking of myself. I'm thinking about her."
Peewee shivered at the pain in his father's voice; its tone more than the words themselves resolved his doubts. There was no doubt of Mrs. Markyn's unhappiness if she knew about him; she would grieve inexpressibly. Her desolation, her agony, were in his father's voice.
He drew swiftly back from the door. A servant had gone into the room opposite and switched on the light. Peewee had not noticed that it had grown dusk; the servant would come to this room next perhaps. He darted across the hall to Beman's den.
He sat there miserably. It was clear what was going on now in the library, although he could no longer hear even the voices. His father was begging Beman to change his intention. Would he succeed in doing that? Peewee had the feeling that his father was not the kind of person who could change any determination of that obstinate old man.
He had a sense of amazement of what was happening to his father. A man did something wrong; afterward apparently everything and everybody conspired to punish him. It was not perfectly clear to Peewee exactly what wrong his father had done with regard to Helen Lampert, but there was no doubt at all of the combination of forces which were taking vengeance for it. Lampert had learned of it, and had probably made his father give him money; Beman had heard of it and was going to take his wife away from him. Mrs. Markyn had said that a boy who was tempted to do anything wrong ought to think first how it would make his mother feel. It appeared clear that his father in the matter of Helen Lampert had not thought enough of how it would make his mother feel; if he had he would not have been in these difficulties.
The door of the library opened and his father passed through the hall. He stumbled a little, as though his gaze fixed itself upon objects without actually seeing them. Beman came from the library and crossed to his den. He saw Peewee and smiled with satisfaction.
"What a man must do, boy," he said triumphantly, "is wait. Sometime his time will come."
"Yes, sir," said Peewee unhappily.
The old man's victorious manner made plain what the result of the interview had been; his father had not been able to change Beman. Beman apparently had forgotten that he had told Peewee to stay upstairs; but he might remember it. Peewee moved out into the hall and went slowly up to his room.
He choked at the room's look of comfort. What was it Beman had said, "She'll believe because, by the Lord! I've got both the story and the boy." He perceived, as he stood in the room, the boy in the mirror standing in the reflected room in his new clothes.
They called the clothes his as they called the room, but both he realized, belonged to Beman. He went suddenly to the drawer into which the servant had tumbled his old clothes, and choked again as he saw that the clothes still were there. Then he began to take off his new clothes.
He folded his coat and shirt carefully and put them on a chair; then his knickerbockers. He unfastened his shoes; then he hesitated, and refastened them. He looked a long time at them, but finally he took off the shoes and stockings. He put on his old clothes which had been damp when they were tossed into the drawer and now smelled mouldy and dirty. His eyes filled with tears as he looked about the room, and he felt blindly for the door, and blinked the tears away and looked out. The hall was empty, and he went noiselessly down the stairs, but stopped half way. A servant passed below him without noticing him, and he heard Beman's voice speaking to the servant.
He stopped still and considered. There was something aggressively forceful in Beman's voice even when he spoke of ordinary things. He had been intending to run away from Beman, but the old man's tone made suddenly plain to him the futility of that. He had run away a dozen times from a dozen different institutions. They had always caught him, although they had had no more reason for searching for him than the mere routine transaction of their business. They would, he had learned fully, always catch him in the end. Beman, who had more reason for catching him than the authorities had, and who could use their agents besides others of his own, would catch him too if he was upon the streets; and he had, he realized, no place except the streets to go.
He went on down the stairs, anxiously contemplating these possibilities. He opened the great front door, went out, noiselessly reclosed it, and ran down the steps. He went north till he had counted four blocks, then, very slowly, west. The great, square house he was approaching was his father's. He had decided what to do. He would tell his father that he had overheard what had been said to him by Beman, and had run away in the hope that this would prevent Beman from telling Mrs. Markyn. That Peewee did not want Mrs. Markyn to be told might establish an understanding between them and soften his father.
On her account he did not dare to go to the house but sat down across the street from it, where eventually he might see his father going in or coming out. He perceived at the end of the street, where it merged into the park, a figure passing and repassing under a street lamp as though absorbed in troubled thought, but he did not at first recognize it as his father. When he did, he started up and went hesitatingly toward him. As he continued to tell himself fiercely that he was not afraid of his father, he did not know why each step as he approached was slower than the last, and why his flesh was cold. His father's look—hands clenched, eyes fixed on the ground, turning back automatically at each end of his short walk as though he did not know that he was doing it—increased these peculiar feelings. He did not doubt that his father was considering what he would like to do to him.
He had got close to him, but his father did not notice him. Twice, in his absorption, his father almost brushed him. Peewee tried to speak but could not. Desperately, he stepped in his father's way, but his father merely moved to go around this obstruction. Peewee perceived that in his old clothes and in the dark his father did not recognize him as the boy he had seen at Beman's.
"Well," his father demanded, "what is it that you want?"
Peewee could not reply. By repeating to himself from running away. His father started to push him out of his path.
"I'm the boy," Peewee croaked.
He saw his father stiffen and stare down at him, then swiftly bend. He felt him seize him and twist him about so that the street lamp lighted his face. Markyn raised his head and looked up and down the street to see who had come with him. Peewee waited, his eyes closed, his body weak with his not understandable feelings resting against his father's arm.
Dry sounds, whose meaning he could not determine, came from his father's throat.
"I ran away from him," Peewee started to explain.
He was not able however to say anything more, for Markyn in his excitement at getting possession of the boy, appeared to think of nothing else. He breathed deeply. Suddenly he clutched Peewee's hand and began to hurry him along the street.
Peewee had difficulty in making his legs obey instructions.