Black is White

by George Barr McCutcheon

“God bless her!” shouted Mr Riggs.

“God bless her!” echoed Frederic, and they drained their glasses to Lydia Brood.

“Jones, open another bottle,” commanded Mr Dawes loftily.

Frederic shook his head, and two faces fell. Right bravely, however, the old men maintained a joyous interest in the occasion. They expounded loudly upon the virtues and graces of John Desmond's daughter; they plied the young man with questions and harangued him with advice; they threatened him with hell-fire if he ever gave the girl a minute of unhappiness; they were very firm in their contention that he “oughtn't to let the grass grow under his feet,” not for an instant! In the end they waxed tearful. It was quite too much joy to be borne with equanimity.

The young man turned moody, thoughtful; the unwonted exhilaration died as suddenly as it had come into existence. A shadow crossed his vision and he followed it with his thoughts. The gabbling of the old men irritated him as the makeshift feast of celebration grew old, and he made no pretence of keeping up his end of the conversation.

The gloomy, uneasy look deepened in his face. It was a farce, after all, this attempt to glorify an impulse conceived in desperation. A sense of utter loneliness came over him with a swiftness that sickened, nauseated him. The food was flat to his taste; he could not eat. Self-commiseration stifled him. He suddenly realised that he had never been so lonely, so unhappy, in all his life as he was at this moment.

His thoughts were of his father. A vast, inexplicable longing possessed his soul—a longing for the affection of this man who was never tender, who stood afar off and was lonely, too. He could not understand this astounding change of feeling. He had never felt just this way before. There had been times—and many—when his heart was sore with longing, but they were of other days, childhood days. To-night he could not crush out the thought of how ineffably happy, how peaceful life would be if his father were to lay his hands upon his shoulders and say: “My son, I love you—I love you dearly.” There would be no more lonely days; all that was bitter in his life would be swept away in the twinkling of an eye; the world would be full of joy for him and for Lydia.

If anyone had told him an hour earlier that he would have been possessed of such emotions as these he could have sneered in the face of him. When he entered the house that evening he was full of resentment toward his father and sullen with the remains of an ugly rage. And now to be actually craving the affection of the man who humbled him, even in the presence of servants. It was unbelievable. He could not understand himself. A wonderful, compelling tenderness filled his heart. He longed to throw himself at his father's feet and crave his pardon for the harsh, vengeful thoughts he had spent upon him in those black hours. He hungered for a word of kindness or of understanding on which he could feed his starving soul. He wanted his father's love. He wanted, more than anything else in the world, to love his father.

Lydia slipped out of his mind, Yvonne was set aside in that immortal moment. He had not thought of them except in their relation to a completed state of happiness for his father. Indistinctly he recognised them as essentials.

In the library, later on, he smoked with the old men, moodily staring up through the blue clouds into a space that seemed limitless. The expression of pain, and the self-pity that attended it, increased in his eyes. The old men rambled on, but he scarcely heard them. They wrangled, and he was not impatient with them. He was lonely. He felt deserted, forsaken. The sweet companionship of the day just closing stood for naught in this hour of a deeper longing. He wanted to hear his father say, from his heart: “Frederic, my son, here is my hand. It is no longer against you.”