CHAPTER III
When Marion De Lorme first moved into the big, forbidding house facing the monument at Confederate Circle, he was no doubt the loneliest and most friendless boy in all of Louisville. He had no remembrance of his mother other than a little snapshot of a small and frightened looking woman with a bouncing baby in her arms. As for his father, silent, stooped and almost blind, he knew little of and seemed to care less for the stalwart, handsome lad whom he occasionally used as a staff but more frequently sent out of his presence. One thing Mr. De Lorme required of the boy, and that was regularity in his school attendance and good rating in his studies. Marion was the star student wherever he went, but with all his application he knew that he could not offer a report to his father that would wholly meet with his approval.
When Marion heard him railing over a percentage of ninety-eight and declaring that the boys of the present day were no good, and Marion the worst of the lot, his son was sometimes tempted to bring him a percentage of about sixty, just to see the result.
Mr. De Lorme was a chemist. He had long since explained his business or profession to his son. He was an analytical chemist, and his work was all done in his private laboratory, for big firms, corporations, and sometimes even for nations. It was a strange business. Marion had long ceased feeling any curiosity concerning the queer looking, whiskered persons who came to the house, usually during the evening, any more than he hoped to have any acquaintance with the suave, perfectly-dressed gentlemen who drove up in taxis during the day.
All these visitors, clients or customers called but rarely. All day long Mr. De Lorme, shut up in his laboratory, worked away with his strange and delicate instruments, leaving Marion to his own devices, with two ironclad rules: the first, that he should stand always at the head of his classes; the second, that no other boys should ever be permitted to enter the house.
Every morning, early, before school time, leaning heavily on his son’s arm, Mr. De Lorme made the round of the park three times. Every night after dark he repeated the journey. Marion dreaded these walks. His father, stumbling and nearly blind, attracted a good deal of sympathetic attention.
One thing puzzled Marion a great deal, and that was how his father, handicapped by his blindness, could put through laboratory tests that called for the most exquisite accuracy of sight as well as touch and judgment. He decided that the young assistant who worked always with his father must supply in himself the needed vision.
Marion hated the assistant, a greasy, dark-browed, long-haired fellow named Zipousky, but who answered cheerfully enough to Zip. Zip was a strange mixture of youth and age. Marion doubted if there was much of anything that he did not know, yet the fellow showed an almost pathetic eagerness to be with Marion.
When the De Lormes moved to Louisville from Chicago, Marion determined to make some friends. He spent many evenings walking up and down the block, his eyes seeking the uncurtained windows where he could catch glimpses of the family life he so longed for. But the silence of the De Lorme household seemed to throw a spell over the boy. Other boys felt it and made few advances. And Marion did not know how to come half way.