The Eye of Dread

by Payne Erskine

When Peter Junior was able to leave his home and get about a little on his crutches, he loved to come there and rest and spend his idle hours, and Bertrand found pleasure in his companionship. They read together, and sang together, and laughed together, and no sound was more pleasant to Mary Ballard’s ears than this same happy laughter. Peter had sorely missed the companionship of his cousin, for, at the close of the war, no longer a boy and unwilling to be dependent and drifting, Richard had sought out a place for himself in the work of the world.

First he had gone to Scotland to visit his mother’s aunts. There he found the two dear old ladies, sweetly observant of him, willing to tell him much of his mother, who had been scarcely younger than the youngest of them, but discreetly reticent about his father. From this he gathered that for some reason his father was under a cloud. Yet he did not shrink from trying to learn from them all they knew about him, and for what reason they spoke as if to 70 even mention his name was an indiscretion. It was really little they knew, only that he had gravely displeased their nephew, Peter Craigmile, who had brought Richard up, and who was his mother’s twin brother.

“But why did Uncle Peter have to bring me up? You say he quarreled with my father?”

“Weel, ye see, ye’r mither was dead.” It was Aunt Ellen, the elder by twenty years, who told him most about it, she who spoke with the broadest Scotch.

“Was my father a bad man, that Uncle ‘Elder’ disliked him so?”

“Weel now, I’d no say that; he was far from that to be right fair to them both––for ye see––ye’r mither would never have loved him if he’d been that––but he––he was an Irishman, and ye’r Uncle Peter could never thole an Irishman, and he––he––fair stole ye’r mither from us a’––an––” she hesitated to continue, then blurted out the real horror. “Your Uncle Peter kenned he had ance been in the theayter, a sort o’ an actor body an’ he couldna thole that.”

But little was to be gained with all his questioning, and what he could learn seemed no more than that his father had done what any man might be expected to do if some one stood between him and the girl he loved; so Richard felt that there must be something unknown to any one but his uncle that had turned them all against his father. Why had his father never appeared to claim his son? Why had he left his boy to be reared by a man who hated the boy’s father? It was a strange thing to do, and it must be that his father was dead.

At this time Richard was filled with ambitions,––fired 71 by his early companionship with Bertrand Ballard,––and thought he would go to France and become an artist;––to France, the Mecca of Bertrand’s dreams––he desired of all things to go there for study. But of all this he said nothing to any one, for where was the money? He would never ask his uncle for it, and now that he had learned that he had been all his young life really a dependent on the bounty of his Uncle Peter, he could no longer accept his help. He would hereafter make his own way, asking no favors.

The old aunts guessed at his predicament, and offered to give him for his mother’s sake enough to carry him through the first year, but he would not allow them to take from their income to pay his bills. No, he would take his way back to America, and find a place for himself in the new world; seek some active, stirring work, and save money, and sometime––sometime he would do the things his heart loved. He often thought of Betty, the little Betty who used to run to meet him and say such quaint things; some day he would go to her and take her with him. He would work first and do something worthy of so choice a little mortal.

Thus dreaming, after the manner of youth, he went to Ireland, to his father’s boyhood home. He found only distant relatives there, and learned that his father had disposed of all he ever owned of Irish soil to an Englishman. A cousin much older than himself owned and still lived on the estate that had been his grandfather Kildene’s, and Richard was welcomed and treated with openhearted hospitality. But there, also, little was known of his father, only that the peasants on the estate remembered him lovingly as a free-hearted gentleman.