The Man Who Lived in a Shoe

by Henry James Forman

Who but a fool, my dear old Dibdin, could be so blind as you? Who but a fool could fail to see that I am consumed with passion for Alicia and had only been waiting, dreading, hoping until she might be old enough to know her own mind and heart—and waiting too long?

And now Alicia is engaged—and to my own nephew, Randolph—and life for me, life in the rich, vivid, colorful, romantic sense of the word, is at an end.

My nephew Randolph—a sophomore at Columbia—engaged to Alicia!

Flashes of savagery strike into my heart when I could find it possible to hate that youth—notably when I catch the Pendleton expression in his face, the Pendleton shiftiness in his eyes. At such moments I experience an intense, all but irresistible desire to grapple with him as on a certain occasion I grappled with his father, to knock his head against the wall and choke that brazen-faced, insolent temerity out of him with his last breath.

But I am only Uncle Ranny—and I don't suppose I shall do anything of the kind. Have I not brought him up? Have I not labored and toiled for him, watched over him? Is he not my child like the rest? There is something about the person, the very flesh of the child one has reared that disarms one's anger and turns the heart to water. His bad manners hurt more deeply, yet they are not like the bad manners of a stranger. His transgressions are not like others' transgressions. In God's name, your soul cries out, there must be redeeming features, extenuating conditions! Have I not had a hand in shaping him? And was he not ineffably endearing as a child? He may be somewhat wild now, but is not all youth like that on its path to manhood?

This is a parent's point of view, I see, not a rival's. Why, why did that boy, of all the males in the world, take Alicia from me?

It was only yesterday that it happened, but already it seems like an ancient calamity that stamps its victim with the slow grind of years of pain, blanches his flesh and presses him down into the limbo of those undergoing the slow drawn-out tortures of life.

Yet I was happy yesterday. I came home at one, as I do of Saturdays, and the early April sunshine, while still treacherous, was nevertheless full of dazzling promise of spring, of relief from the dread winter we have endured. My head had been buzzing with schemes like a hive. The lease of the châlet expires in May and I was full of vain notions of taking a larger, more attractive house that should be a suitable setting for Alicia. Only one year more of college is left for Alicia after this and then—and then—Alicia had talked of entering the shop, and I should have her with me all the time. How I longed and looked forward to that day! Alicia my constant companion, sharing every moment of the day, going and coming together, lunching together, discussing everything. Who shall blame me if I saw visions?

And then, perhaps an hour after lunch, they suddenly entered my study together—Randolph a half-pace or so behind her with something hangdog in his look—an expression I detest in him—and Alicia, head high, flushed with a look of desperate resolution about the somewhat haggard eyes that startled me.

I had been occupied in turning over the pages and collating a Caxton, a genuine Caxton that I meant later to show to Alicia—"The Royal Book," (1480, 2d year of the Regne of King Rychard the thyrd)—a beautiful incunabulum.