“You can’t tell me, my dear, that Tom isn’t paying–I know how that sort of thing gets under his skin–he’s too sensitive not to imagine all it means to the child.” Mrs. Nesbit’s face hardened and her husband saw her bitterness. “I know, my dear–I know how you feel–I feel all that, and yet in my very heart I’m sorry for poor Tom. He’s swapping substance for shadow so recklessly–not only in this, not merely with Laura–but with everything–everything.”
“Good Lord, Jim, I don’t see how you can agonize over a wool-dyed scoundrel like that–perhaps you have some tears for that Fenn hussy, too!”
“Well,” squeaked the Doctor soberly–“I knew her father–a lecherous old beast who brought her up without restraint or morals–with a greedy philosophy pounded into her by example every day of her life until she was seventeen years old. There’s something to be said–even for her, my dear–even for her.”
“Well, Jim Nesbit,” answered his wife, “I’ll go a long way with you in your tomfoolery, but so long as I’ve got to draw the line somewhere I draw it right there.”
The Doctor looked at the floor. “I suppose so–” he sighed, then lifted his head and said: “I was just trying to think of all the sorrows that come into the world, of all 249the tragedies I ever knew, and I have concluded that this tragedy of divorce when it comes like this–as it has come to our daughter–is the greatest tragedy in the world. To love as she loved and to find every anchor to which she tied the faith of her life rotten, to have her heart seared with faithlessness–to see her child–her flesh and blood scorned, to have her very soul spat upon–that’s the essence of sorrow, my dear.”
He looked up into her eyes, bent to kiss her hand, and after he had picked up his cane and his hat from the rack, toddled down the walk to the street, a sad, thoughtful, worried little man, white-clad and serene to outward view, who had not even a whistle nor a vagrant tune under his breath to console him.
That day, after her father’s insistence, Laura Van Dorn changed from the night watch to the day nurse, and from that day on for ten days, she ministered to Grant Adams’ wants. Mechanically she read to him from such books as the house afforded–Tolstoi–Ibsen, Hardy, Howells,–but she was shut away from the meaning of what she read and even from the comments of the man under her care, by the consideration of her own problems. For to Laura Van Dorn it was a time of anxious doubt, of sad retrogression, of inner anguish. In some of the books were passages she had marked and read to her husband; and such pages calling up his dull comprehension of their beauty, or bringing back his scoffing words, or touching to the quick a hurt place in her heart, taxed her nerves heavily. But during the time while she sat by the injured man’s bedside, she was glad in her heart of one thing–that she had an excuse for avoiding the people who called.
As Grant grew stronger–as it became evident that he must go soon, the woman’s heart shrank from meeting the town, and she clung to each duty of the man’s convalescence hungrily. She knew she must face life, that she must have some word for her friends about her tragedy. She felt that in going away, in suing for the divorce himself, her husband had made the break irrevocable. There was no resentment nor malice toward him in her heart. Yet the future seemed hopelessly black and terrible to her.
250The afternoon before Grant Adams was to leave the Nesbit home he was allowed to come down stairs, and he sat with her upon the side porch, all screened and protected by vines that led to her father’s office. Laura’s finger was in a book they had been reading–it was “The Pillars of Society.” The day was one of those exquisite days in mid-June, and after a cooling rain the air was clear and seemed to put joy into one’s veins.
“How modern he is–how American–how like Harvey,” said the young man. “Ibsen might have lived right here in this town, and written that,” he added. He started to raise his right arm, but a twinge of pain reminded him that the stump was bound, so he raised his left and cried: