Edgar, all at once, felt himself tangibly closer, closer than ever before, to the Unknown, the Great Secret. It was right next to him, still veiled and unriddled, but very near. It excited him, and it was this that lent him his sudden solemnity. Unconsciously he sensed that he was approaching the outer edges of childhood.
The baron and Edgar’s mother were both sensible of a dumb opposition in front of them without realizing that it emanated from the child. The presence of a third person in the carriage constrained them, and those two dark glowing orbs opposite acted as a check. They scarcely dared to speak or look up, and it was impossible for them to drop back into the light, easy conversational tone of the day before, so entangled were they already in ardent confidences and words suggestive of secret caresses. They would start a subject, promptly come to a halt, say a broken phrase or two, make another attempt, then lapse again into complete silence. Everything they said seemed always to stumble over the child’s obstinate silence and fall flat.
The mother was especially oppressed by her son’s sullen quiescence. Giving him a cautious glance out of the corners of her eyes, she was startled to observe, for the first time, in the manner Edgar compressed his lips, a resemblance to her husband when he was annoyed. At that particular moment, when she was playing “hide-and-seek” with an adventure, it was more than ordinarily discomfiting to be reminded of her husband. The boy, only a foot or two away, with his dark, restless eyes and that suggestion behind his pale forehead of lying in wait, seemed to her like a ghost, a guardian of her conscience, doubly intolerable there in the close quarters of the carriage. Suddenly, for one second, Edgar looked up and met his mother’s gaze. Instantly they dropped their eyes in the consciousness that they were spying on each other. Till then each had had implicit faith in the other. Now something had come between mother and child and made a difference. For the first time in their lives they set to observing each other, to separating their destinies, with secret hate already mounting in their hearts, though the feeling was too young for either to admit it to himself.
When the horses pulled up at the hotel entrance, all three were relieved. The excursion had been a failure, each of them felt, though thy did not say so. Edgar was the first to get out of the carriage. His mother excused herself for going straight up to her room, pleading a headache. She was tired and wanted to be by herself. Edgar and the baron were left alone together.
The baron paid the coachman, looked at his watch, and mounted the steps to the hall, paying no attention to Edgar and passed him with that easy sway of his slim back which had so enchanted the child that he had immediately begun to imitate the baron’s walk. The baron brushed past him, right past him. Evidently he had forgotten him and left him to stand there beside the driver and the horses as though he did not belong to him.
Something in Edgar broke in two as the man, whom in spite of everything he still idolized, slighted him like that. A bitter despair filled his heart when the baron left without so much as touching him with his cloak or saying a single word, when he, Edgar, was conscious of having done no wrong. His painfully enforced self-restraint gave way, the too heavy burden of dignity that he had imposed upon himself dropped from his narrow little shoulders, and he became the child again, small and humble, as he had been the day before. At the top of the steps he confronted the baron and said in a strained voice, thick with suppressed tears:
“What have I done to you that you don’t notice me any more? Why are you always like this with me now? And mamma, too? Why are you always sending me off? Am I a nuisance to you, or have I done anything to offend you?”
The baron was startled. There was something in the child’s voice that upset him at first, then stirred him to tenderness and sympathy for the unsuspecting boy.
“You’re a goose, Eddie. I’m merely out of sorts to-day. You’re a dear boy, and I really love you.” He tousled Edgar’s hair, yet with averted face so as not to be obliged to see those great moist, beseeching child’s eyes. The comedy he was playing was becoming painful. He was beginning to be ashamed of having trifled so insolently with the child’s love. That small voice, quivering with suppressed sobs, cut him to the quick. “Go upstairs now, Eddie. We’ll get along together this evening just as nicely as ever, you’ll see.”
“You won’t let mamma send me right off to bed, will you?”