The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

She had ached for inspiration and she had failed. She blamed herself. Adelaide was no tactician. When she forced activity on her desire, she was even less expressive than when it lay painfully quiescent within her heart.

Yet there was an issue to her inspiration, even if she was not to be the one who gained. With the fall came a new spurt of hope and confidence to Quincy. It was still Rhoda. The boy ignored, of course, that the fuel for this new hope had come from Adelaide; that his élan toward Rhoda was due to Adelaide’s encouragement. He had never looked on his younger sister in a warm light. The fire with which Rhoda touched him had never ceased to burn. And it was the season of lost passions—the season of burning leaves. Adelaide saw the event with conscious eyes—its irony, its hopelessness. It was she who had yearned and who had planned; it was Rhoda who ignored and who received.

And then, of course, came the same result. Quincy made ready for a still surer, harder state of disillusion.

The climax of sullen naughtiness was over.

After all, his condition had been chiefly due to his own sense of weakness, to his lack of pride. There had been so little impetus to pride! It was not that he was an unremarkable boy. He was. But most such feel distinction at least within their family. The illustriousness that the world will, of course, deny them, they receive at the hand of a parent, or a sister—a little world. And this little world they coax into sufficiency so that the basic need of holding up one’s head is answered; and, often to tragic consequence, the cold outer world comes to be ignored.

This was not Quincy’s case. He had succeeded poorly in judging his family’s view of him to be a blind one. Now, however, matters changed to a degree.

Quincy was at an age to sound the springs of manhood, and to glean childish joy therefrom. Above his poverty of gifts, there arose now a sense of power and of promise that thrilled him the more for its bare setting. Quincy was to be a man—a tall, strong master endowed with all the honors of his sex! This was something to one who had been an unpetted child in a large family. And the new feeling brought revolution to his ways and views. The new element that entered in was one of confidence—potential self-assertion. It was a sickly, scarce noticeable thing. It was not strong enough to appear in its own light. But it gave to Quincy a sense of a reserve, a flair of a future. And however vague, this was a vital thing in one whose soul had been so constantly flung back upon a fancy-builded past.

A laborious task is the nurturing of pride in one who has lived long without it. Its growth is an imperceptible evolving. No member of the household—not Marsden who saw through idleness, not Adelaide who saw through love—was well aware of it in Quincy. To them, he was merely “behaving better.” His moroseness was less militant. His silence had less of a sneer and a scowl. But silence it was still. Quincy scarce knew of it himself, until the climax that with one shock bared his transfiguration. But until that climax, it seemed none the less to Quincy that life’s pain had subsided; that his surroundings were more bearable. He still felt the selfish attitude of Rhoda; his father’s stretches of ignoring him and sudden spurts of tyranny still wracked him; his mother was no less inadequate; Marsden was still the mordant sphinx. But now, a new element within him told him to abide his time—bade him grow and hope.

It was not until the spring that he learned how pervasively this new and hidden sense had fretted all of his being; how strongly it had attuned the fibres of his soul to its own message.

It was April and late afternoon. All of the Burt children were in the sitting room, on the second floor. Jonas was in town for the Easter holidays. And Rhoda had just returned from a visit to Savannah where, incidentally, she had become engaged. So there was a general human glow about the place.