“Here it is, sir. I placed that stone further out at the end of the chimney on purpose for it, and in this side I’ve left a hole for your tobacco. I thought I was very clever doing that.”
“And we’d be fine and cozy here in the winter––if it wer’n’t for the women––a––a––now I’m blundering. I’d never turn them out if they lived there the rest of their days. But to have a lad beside me as I might have had––if you’d said, ‘Here it is, father,’ but now, it would have have been music to me. You see, Harry, I forswore the women harder than I did the men, and it’s the longing for 222 the son I held in my arms an hour and then gave up, that has lived in me all these years. The mother––gone––The son I might have had.”
“I can’t say that––to you. I have a curse on me, and it will stay until I have paid for my crime. But I’ll be more to you than sons are to their fathers. I’ll be faithful to you as a dog to his master, and love you more. I’ll live for you even with the curse on me, and if need be, I’ll die for you.”
“It’s enough. I’ll ask you no more. Have you no curiosity to hear what I have to tell you?”
“I have, indeed I have. But it seems I can’t ask it––unless I’m able to return your confidence. To talk of my sorrow only deepens it. It drives me wild.”
“You’ll have it yet to learn, that nothing helps a sorrow that can’t be helped like bearing it. I don’t mean to lie down under it like a dumb beast––but just take it up and bear it. That’s what you’re doing now, and sometime you’ll be able to carry it, and still laugh now and again, when it’s right to laugh––and even jest, on occasion. It’s been done and done well. It’s good for a man to do it. The lass down there at the cabin is doing it––and the mother is not. She’s living in the past. Maybe she can’t help it.”
“When I first came on them out there in the desert, she seemed brave and strong. He was a poor, crippled man, with enormous vitality and a leonine head. The two women adored him and lived only for him, and he never knew it. He lived for an ideal and would have died for it. He did not speak English as well as they. I used to wish I could understand him, for he had a poet’s soul, and eyes like his 223 daughter’s. He seemed to carry some secret with him, and no doubt was followed about the world as he thought he was. Fleeing myself, I could not know, but from things the mother has dropped, they must have seen terrible times together, she and her husband.”
“A wonderful deal of poetry and romance always clung to the names of Poland and Hungary for me. When I was young, our part of the world thrilled at the name of Kosciuszko and Kossuth. I’d give a good deal to know what this man’s secret was. All those old tales of mystery, like ‘The Man with the Iron Mask,’ and stories of noblemen spirited away to Siberia, of men locked for many years in dungeons, like the ‘Prisoner of Chillon,’ which fired the fancy and genius of Byron and sent him to fight for the oppressed, used to fill my dreams.” Larry talked on as if to himself. It seemed as if it were a habit formed when he had only himself with whom to visit, and Harry was interested.
“Now, to almost come upon a man of real ideals and a secret,––and just miss it. I ought to have been out in the world doing some work worth while––with my miserable, broken life––Boy! I knew that man McBride! I knew him for sure. We were in college together. He left Oxford to go to Russia, wild with the spirit of adventure and something more. He was a dreamer––with a practical turn, too. There, no doubt, he met these people. I judge this Manovska must have been in the diplomatic service of Poland, from what Amalia told us. Have you any idea whether that woman sitting there all day long rapt in her own thoughts knows her husband’s secret? Is it a thing any one now living would care to know?”