Have I been spoiling him, I wonder? Would I have condoned and tolerated as much if he were my own son? He is over a year younger than Alicia and though a handsome enough lad in his way, I fancy I see too much of Pendleton in his face for comfort. His father also was markedly good-looking when he married poor Laura. Have I, I wonder, been rearing another Pendleton?
But Alicia, the bright, the fair, the radiant, almost a woman now, with more wisdom than I ever before found in women—how came she to do such a thing as to engage herself to him? I can understand his possible infatuation. But a girl, I had always believed, learns her woman's arts by instinct. How can she be so blind to the boy's character and defects? Can it be that she really loves him? Love, love, love! That blind force that is said to move the stars—why can it be so haggard, gaunt and painful a thing in the ordinary light of day? Woe is me that I am too dull to comprehend it! Like the blooded horse in Werther that bites his own vein to ease his overstrained heart, I must bleed inwardly—I must suffer and endure.
CHAPTER XXIII
Since it is for you, Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that this vagrom journal has been written, I should deem myself derelict and insincere if I did not convey to you in every detail the sort of creature you were in middle life. If you fail to approve of your progenitor, I shall know that I have been exact, for I fail to approve of him myself.
We are at war. Every fiber in me should thrill to the President's declaration of war against Germany, but here I have been calmly turning the pages of "The Description of a Maske", by Thomas Campion (S. Dunstone's Churchyard in Fleetstreet 1607). It is a beautiful volume in excellent preservation, one of five brought in by a young man who is going to enlist. He inherited them from a grandfather, possibly an old fellow like you, who held them precious. I bought them eagerly, for I know where I can dispose of them, though I should dearly like to place them in my own shelves. We shall make a profit on them, and a handsome one. That is the sort of thought that runs through my head, Randolph Byrd, aet. 70, and that is the sort of man you were thirty odd years ago. You never were young in your youth, my fine friend. Perhaps you will grow younger as you grow older.
But that is not all. Above the sensuous pleasure in the books and overriding the thought of lucre, is the strange romance of Alicia and your namesake, Randolph Pendleton. It blasts all my previous conceptions of romance. Where is the color and the warmth and the glory of it? I had expected after their announcement of a few days ago that I should be bitterly engaged in watching a glorious April dawn that would blind me with its strange flames because it was not for me. Instead I seem to see only a somber murky twilight whenever I surprise those two in private colloquy. The mere thought of the possibility of Alicia loving me (fantastic arrogance!) was wont to irradiate my heart and to make me positively light-headed, so that I could scarcely withhold my lips from smiling publicly. But my young cub of a nephew seems haggard and obsessed by care, and upon Alicia's eyes I have more than once observed traces of tears.
What can be the meaning of that?
Were I in reality a parent instead of masquerading as one, I should no doubt endeavor to fathom this mystery. But you see, I am still, as always, inadequate. The truth is, I dare not yet talk to Alicia about her love. A little later, Randolph Byrd, a little later—when the pain is more decently domesticated in my bosom and will not fly out like a newly unchained hound. Meanwhile is it not best that I fasten my attention upon Thomas Campion his Maske?
I may fill a little of the interim perhaps by telling you what I had passed over in the busy silence of the last two or three years, that Fred Salmon has attempted to make amende honorable. Fred Salmon, who was the means of my losing all of the meager capital you should have lived upon in your old age, has reappeared with a commendable attempt at restitution.
Begoggled and be-linen-dustered, he drove up to the châlet some ten months ago in a magnificently shining car of bizarre design and he entered my door booming like not too distant thunder.