Big Tom, sitting between them, saw it all. A man cannot live a score of years and more, utterly cut off from the life of the world, without having many a long hour for thought in which he will inevitably find himself turning over the problems which fill the life he has missed. Tom De Willoughby had had many of them. He had had no one to talk to whose mind could have worked with his own. On winter nights, when Sheba had been asleep, he had found himself gazing into the red embers of his wood fire and pondering on the existence he might have led if fate had been good to him.
“There must be happiness on the earth somewhere,” he would say. “Somewhere there ought to have been a woman I belonged to, and who belonged to me. It ought all to have been as much nature as the rain falling and the corn ripening in the sun. If we had met when we were young things—on the very brink of it all—and smiled into each other’s eyes and taken each other’s hands, and kissed each other’s lips, we might have ripened together like the corn. What is it that’s gone wrong?” All the warm normal affections of manhood, which might have remained undeveloped and been cast away, had been lavished on the child Sheba. She had represented his domestic circle.
“You mayn’t know it, Sheba,” he had said once to her, “but you’re a pretty numerous young person. You’re a man’s wife and family, and mother and sisters, and at least half a dozen boys and girls.”
All his thoughts had concentrated themselves upon her—all his psychological problems had held her as their centre, all his ethical reasonings had applied themselves to her.
“She’s got to be happy,” he said to himself, “and she’s got to be strong enough to stand up under unhappiness, if—if I should be taken away from her. When the great thing that’s—that’s the meaning of it all—and the reason of it—comes into her life, it ought to come as naturally as summer does. If her poor child of a mother—Good Lord! Good Lord!”
And here he sat in the moonlight, and Delia Vanuxem’s son was looking at her with ardent, awakened young eyes.
How she listened as Rupert told his story, and how sweetly she was moved by the pathos of it. Once or twice she made an involuntary movement forward, as if she was drawn towards him, and uttered a lovely low exclamation which was a little like the broken coo of a dove. Rupert did not know that there was pathos in his relation. He made only a simple picture of things, but as he went on Tom saw all the effect of the hot little town left ruined and apathetic after the struggle of war, the desolateness of the big house empty but for its three rooms, its bare floors echoing to the sound of the lonely pair of feet, the garden grown into a neglected jungle, the slatternly negro girl in the kitchen singing wild camp-meeting hymns as she went about her careless work.
“It sounds so lonely,” Sheba said, with tender mournfulness.
“That was what it was—lonely,” Rupert answered. “It’s been a different place since Matt came, but it has always been lonely. Uncle Tom,” putting his hand on the big knee near him, as impulsively as a child, “I love that old Matt—I love him!”
“Ah, so do I!” burst forth Sheba. “Don’t you, Uncle Tom?” And she put her hand on the other knee.