Black is White

by George Barr McCutcheon

It was not courage, but cowardice, that put him in spots where the bullets were thickest; it was not valour that sent him among the bayonets and sabres of a fanatical enemy. It was the thing at the bottom of his soul that told him she would come to him once more when the strife was ended, and that she was waiting for him somewhere beyond the border to hear his plea for pardon! Of such flimsy shreds is man's purpose made!

Five years after his return to New York he brought her son back to the house in lower Fifth Avenue and tried, with bitterness in his soul, to endure the word “father” as it fell from lips to which the term was almost strange.

The old men, they who sat by the fire on this wind-swept night and waited for the youth of twenty-two to whom the blue missive was addressed, knew the story of James Brood and his wife Matilde, and they knew that the former had no love in his heart for the youth who bore his name. Their lips were sealed. Garrulous on all other subjects, they were as silent as the grave on this.

They, too, were constrained to hate the lad. He made not the slightest pretence of appreciating their position in the household. To him they were pensioners, no more, no less; to him their deeds of valour were offset by the deeds of his father; there was nothing left over for a balance on that score. He was politely considerate; he was even kindly disposed toward their vagaries and whims; he endured them because there was nothing else left for him to do. But, for all that, he despised them; justifiably, no doubt, if one bears in mind the fact that they signified more to James Brood than did his long-neglected son.

The cold reserve that extended to the young man did not carry beyond him in relation to any other member of the household so far as James Brood was concerned. The unhappy boy, early in their acquaintance, came to realise that there was little in common between him and the man he called father. After a while the eager light died out of his own eyes and he no longer strove to encourage the intimate relations he had counted upon as a part of the recompense for so many years of separation and loneliness.

It required but little effort on his part to meet his father's indifference with a coldness quite as pronounced. He had never known the meaning of filial love; he had been taught by word of mouth to love the man he had never seen, and he had learned as one learns astronomy—by calculation. He hated the two old men because his father loved them.

In a measure, this condition may serve to show how far apart they stood from each other, James Brood and Frederic. Wanderlust and a certain feeling of unrest that went even deeper than the old habits kept James Brood away from his home many months out of the year. He was not an old man; in fact, he was under fifty, and possessed of the qualities that make for strength and virility even unto the age of fourscore years. While his old comrades, far up in the seventies, were content to sit by the fire in winter and in the shade in summer, he, not yet so old as they when their long stretch of intimacy began, was not resigned to the soft things of life. He was built of steel, and the steel within him called for the clash with flint. He loved the spark of fire that flashed in the contact.

It was a harsh December night when the two old men sat guard over the message from the sea, and it was on a warm June day that they had said good-bye to him at the outset of his most recent flight.

The patient butler, Jones, had made no less than four visits to the library since ten o'clock to awaken them and pack them off to bed. Each time he had been ordered away, once with the joint admonition to “mind his own business.”

“But it is nearly midnight,” protested Jones irritably, with a glance at the almost empty decanter.