Read Ebook: The House of Baltazar by Locke William John

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Ebook has 2363 lines and 108294 words, and 48 pages

"His bolting. Did you know my father very well?"

"I've told you we were great friends."

"Did you know my mother?"

Her eyelids flickered for a moment; but she replied steadily:

"No. I was only a student and your father was my private tutor. But I heard--from other people--a great deal about your mother. I believe she died many years ago, didn't she?"

"Yes. When I was five. I barely remember her. I was brought up by my uncle and aunt--her people. They scarcely knew my father and haven't a good word to say about him. It was only when I grew up and developed a sort of taste for mathematics, that I realized what a swell he was. And I can't help being fascinated by the mystery of it. There he was, as far as I can gather, full of money, his own and of mother's, beginning to enjoy at thirty a world-wide reputation--and suddenly he disappears off the face of the earth. It wasn't a question of suicide. For the man who buys a ticket for the next world doesn't go to peculiar trouble to take all his worldly estate with him. It isn't reasonable, is it?"

"Your father was too much in love with life to go out of it voluntarily," said Sister Baring.

"Then what the blazes did he do, and why did he do it?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Is he alive or dead?"

"How should I know, Mr. Baltazar?"

"Why should he have written to me?" she interrupted.

The rebuke in her voice and eyes sent the young man into confused apologies.

"Naturally not. You must forgive me, Sister; but, as I've told you, I've never met a pal of that mysterious father of mine before. I want to get all the information I can."

She drew a chair and sat by him. The great hall was very still and, in contrast with the vivid sunshine perceived through the eastern windows, very dark. Through the open door came the scents of the summer gardens. The air was a little heavy. She felt her cap hot around her temples, and lassitude enfeebling her limbs. The strain of the war years began to tell. She had regarded this appointment as a rest from the intolerable toil of the General Hospital in a large town which she had just quitted. Before then she had served in France. And before that--for many years--she had followed the selfless career of the nurse. Now, suddenly, her splendid nerve showed signs of giving. If she had not sat down, her legs would have crumpled up beneath her. So she thought. . . .

She looked at the young man, so eager, so proven, so like his father in gesture and glance, yet in speech and outlook--she was yet to get to that--but she knew the revolutionary influences of the war, the real war, on those who have faced its terrors and become saturated with its abiding philosophies--so different from the fervid creature, John Baltazar, of the late nineties, who had never dreamed of the possibility of this world convulsion. He had much the same frank charm of manner, the direct simplicity of utterance; but the mouth was weaker; the eyes were blue, the eyes of a shrewish blonde--not the compelling, laughing, steel-grey eyes with a queer sparkle in the iris of John Baltazar. All in the young face that was not John Baltazar's was the mother's. She hated the mother dead, as she had loathed her living. Only once had she seen her, a blonde shrew-mouse of a woman. Just a passing by on the Newnham road, when a companion had pointed her out as Mrs. Baltazar. The little bitter mouth had bitten into her memory: the hard little blue eyes had haunted her for eighteen years. The mouth and eyes were there, before her, now. The rest, all that was noble in the boy, was John Baltazar.

"Who has told you the little you do know about him?" she asked.

Again she rebuked him: "I thought you said your uncle brought you up."

"On my mother's fortune--he was my guardian and trustee. But he never let me forget that I was the son of John Baltazar. There was no question of affection from either of them--himself or his wife. Anything I did wrong--it was my scoundrel of a father coming out in me. After passing through a childish phase of looking on him as a kind of devil who had blasted my young life, I began to have a sneaking regard for him. You see, don't you? If he was the antithesis of Uncle Richard, he must be somebody I could sympathize with, perhaps rather somebody who could sympathize with me. They drew me into the arms of his memory, so to speak. Odd, isn't it?"

"What specifically did they accuse him of?"

A sudden red spot flamed in the Sister's cheek and her tired eyes flashed. "That's a lie! And so is the other. How dare they?"

"That's not true either. At least, not in that sense. There was another woman. Yes. But only one. And God knows that there could be nothing purer and cleaner and sweeter on this earth than that which was between them."

"I'm more than ready to believe it," said John Baltazar's son. "But--how do you know?"

"It's the story of a dear friend of mine," she replied. "Nothing was hidden from me. The girl couldn't help worshipping him. He was a man to be worshipped. I don't want to speak evil of your mother--there may have been misunderstandings on both sides--but I knew--my friend and I knew--through acquaintances in Cambridge--never from himself--that his married life was very unhappy."

"Look here, Sister," said young Baltazar, putting up an arresting hand. "As we seem to be talking pretty intimately about my affairs, I'll tell you something I've never breathed to a human being. I've no childish memories of being tucked up in bed and kissed to sleep by an angel in woman's form, like children in picture books. Now I come to think of it, I used to envy them. The only vivid thing I remember is being nearly beaten to death with a belt--it was one of those patent leather things women used to wear round their waists--and then being stuffed away in the coal hole."

"Oh, you poor mite!" Marcelle straightened herself in her chair, and the tears sprang. "Before you were five! Oh, how damnable! What a childhood you must have had! How did you manage to come through?"

He laughed. "I suppose I'm tough. As soon as I went to school--they sent me at eight years old--I was all right. But never mind about me. Go on with your friend's story. It's getting interesting. I quite see now that my father may have had a hell of a time."

"If you quite see," she said, "there's little more to tell."

She leaned forward again on her elbow and, staring across the great hall, through the wide-open doorway to the lawns and trees drenched in the afternoon sunshine, forgot him and lost herself in the sunshine, the most wonderful that ever was, of the years ago. Godfrey Baltazar looked at her keenly yet kindly, and his stern young lips softened into a smile; and after a bit he stretched out a hand and touched her wrist very gently.

"Tell me," he said in a low voice. "It's good for me, and may be good for you."

She came back to the present with a little sigh.

"It's such a very old story, you see. He was unhappy. His wife's ungovernable temper drove him from the house. He had to lead his intellectual as well as his physical life. He lived most of his time in college. Went home for week-ends--vainly seeking reconciliation. Then the girl threw herself into his life. She worshipped him. She seemed to give him something sweet and beautiful which he had been looking for. And he fell in love with her. And when she knew it, she was taken up into the Seventh Heaven and she didn't care for God or woman--only for him. It lasted just a month--the end of the summer term. Oh, it was very innocent, as far as that goes--they only met alone in the open air--stolen hours in the afternoon. Only one kiss ever passed between them. And then he said: 'I am a brute and a fool. This can't go on.' She had given herself to him in spirit and was ready to go on and on whithersoever he chose, so long as she was with him; but she was too shy and tongue-bound to say so. And he stamped along the road, and she by his side, all her heart and soul a-flutter, and he cried: 'My God, I never thought it would have come to this! My child, forgive me. If ever I hurt a hair of your dear head, may God damn me to all eternity!' And they walked on in silence and she was frightened--till they came to the turn of the road--this way to Newnham, that to Cambridge. And he gripped her two hands and said: 'If I withered this flower that has blossomed in my path I should be a damnable villain.' He turned and walked to Cambridge. And the girl, not understanding anything save her love for him, wept bitterly all the way to Newnham. She neither saw him nor heard of him after that. And a week afterwards he disappeared, leaving no trace behind. And whether he's alive or dead she doesn't know till this day. And that is the real story of your father."

He had turned and put both elbows on the intervening table and, head in hand, listened to her words. When she ended, he said:

"Thank God. And thank you. So that is the word of the enigma."

"Yes. There is no other."

"I?" She started back from the table. "I? What do you mean?"

"Why the friend, Sister? Why the camouflage?" He reached out his hand and grasped hers. "Confess."

She returned his pressure, shrugged her shoulders, and said, without looking at him:

"I suppose it was rather thin. Yes. Of course I would have thrown everything to the winds for him. It was on my account that he went away--but, as God hears me, I never sent him."

A long silence stole on them. There was so much that struggled to be said, so little that could be said. At last the young man gripped his crutches and wriggled from his chair. She rose swiftly to aid him.

"Let us have a turn in the sun. It will be good for us."

So they went out and she helped him, against his will--for he loved his triumph over difficulties--down the majestic marble stairs, and they passed the happy tennis courts and the chairs of the cheery invalids looking on at the game, and on through the Japanese garden with its pond of great water-lilies and fairy bridge across, and out of the gate into the little beech wood that screened the house from the home farm. On a rough seat amid the sun-flecked greenery they sat down.

He said: "I may be a sentimental ass, but you seem to be nearer to me than anyone I've ever met in my life."

She made a little helpless gesture. He laughed his pleasant laugh, which robbed his lips of their hardness.

"You supply a long-felt want, you know."

"That sounds rather nice, but I don't quite understand, Mr. Baltazar."

"Oh, Mr. Baltazar be blowed!" he cried. "My name's Godfrey. For God's sake let me hear somebody call me by it! You of all people. Why, you knew me before I was born."

He said it unthinking--a boyish epigram. Her sudden flush brought consciousness of blunder in elemental truth and taste. He sat stiff, horrified; gasped out:

"Forgive me. I didn't realize what I was saying."

She glanced covertly at his young and consternation-stricken face, and her heart went out to him who, after all, on so small a point of delicacy found himself so grievously to blame.

"Perhaps, my dear boy," she said, "it is well that you have touched on this. You and I are grown up and can speak of things frankly--and certain things that people don't usually discuss are often of supreme importance in their own and other people's lives. I didn't know you before you were born, nor did your father. It's he that counts. If he had known, he would never have left your mother to. . . . No, no! He would have found some other way. He couldn't have left her. It's incredible. I know it. I know all the strength and the beauty and the wonder of him."

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