"Delia," Vickers said gently, "come and speak to my sister, Mrs. Lane."
As the child awkwardly held out a hand, Isabelle felt the tears come into her eyes. Here was her old Vickers,--the gentle, idealistic soul she had loved, the only being it seemed to her then that she had ever really loved.
"Delia and I have been tramping the Louvre," Vickers remarked. "That"s the way we are learning history."
Isabelle glanced about the forlorn little sitting-room of the third-cla.s.s hotel.
"Why did you come here?"
"It does well enough, and it"s near the Louvre and places.... It is very reasonable."
Then Isabelle remembered what Fosd.i.c.k had said about Vickers"s gift of half his fortune to Mrs. Conry. "You see the idiot hadn"t sense enough to run off with a man who had money. Some d.a.m.n fool, artist! That"s why you must pack Vick away as soon as you can get him to go."
With this in her mind she exclaimed impulsively:--
"You are coming back with us, Vick!"
"To live in America?" he queried with bitter humor. "So you came out as a rescue party!"
"You must get back into life," Isabelle urged vaguely.
"What life? You don"t mean the hardware business?"
"Don"t be silly! ... You can"t go on living over here alone by yourself with that child."
"Why not?"
"Oh, because--you must _do_ something, Vick! I want you to be famous."
"That doesn"t seem quite possible, now," he replied gently.
"You"ll come and live with me--oh, I need you, Vick!"
She threw her arms about him and hugged him tightly to her as she had as a girl. The intensity of her feeling moved him strangely, and her words also.
What was it she meant by "needing him"?
"You must--that"s the thing!"
Holding her head away she searched his face critically, and her heart was wrung again by the sense of waste in it all. "Poor brother," she murmured, tightening her clasp.
"I"m not going over as a helpless dependent!" he protested, and suddenly without warning he shot out his question,--"And what have _you_ made out of it? How have the years been?"
"Oh, we jog on, John and I,--just the usual thing, you know,--no heights and no depths!"
An expression of futility came momentarily into her eyes. It wasn"t what she had pictured to herself, her marriage and life. Somehow she had never quite caught hold of life. But that was a common fate. Why, after all, should she commiserate her brother, take the "poor Vick" tone that everybody did about him? Had she attained to a much more satisfactory level than he, or had the others who "poor Vickered" him? There was something in both their natures, perhaps, at jar with life, incapable of effectiveness.
Vickers finally consented to return to America with his mother and sister "for a visit." Delia, he said, ought to see her father, who was a broken man, living in some small place in the West. (Isabelle suspected that Vickers had sent him also money.) Conry had written him lately, asking for news of his daughter.
"Does Vick intend to tote that lump of a girl around with him for the next twenty years?" Mrs. Price demanded of Isabelle, when she heard that Delia was to be of their party.
"I suppose so, unless she totes herself off!"
"The woman dumped her child on him! Well, well, the Colonel had something of the fool in him where women were concerned,--only I looked after that!"
"Mother," Isabelle retorted mischievously, "I am afraid you"ll never be able to keep down the fool in us; Vick is pretty nearly all fool, the dear!"
Her brother"s return being settled, Isabelle plunged into her shopping, buying many things for both the houses, as well as her dresses. There were friends flitting back and forth, s.n.a.t.c.hes of sight-seeing, and theatres. By the time they took the steamer Isabelle confessed she was a "wreck." Yet she talked of taking an apartment in Paris the next spring and sending her child to a convent, as Mrs. Rogers had done. "It would be nice to have my own corner over here to run to," she explained. "Only Potts wants me to bury myself at Schwalbach."
Cairy joined them at Plymouth. He had been in London making arrangements for the production of a play there, and had hopes of enlarging his sphere.
"Coming home?" he asked Vickers. "That"s good!"
"Thank you," Vickers replied dryly.
Cairy had already the atmosphere of success about him. He still limped in a distinguished manner, and his clothes marked him even in the company of well-dressed American men. He had grown stouter,--was worried by the fear of flesh, as he confided to Vickers,--and generally took himself with serious consideration. It was a far call from the days when he had been Gossom"s ready pen. He now spoke of his "work" importantly, and was kind to Vickers, who "had made such a mess of things," "with all that money, too."
With his large egotism, his uniform success where women were concerned, Vickers"s career seemed peculiarly stupid. "No woman," he said to Isabelle, "should be able to break a man." And he thought thankfully of the square blow between the eyes that Conny had dealt him.
In the large gay party of returning Americans that surrounded Isabelle and Cairy on the ship Vickers was like a queer little ghost. He occupied himself with his small charge, reading and walking with her most of the days. Isabelle was conscious of the odd figure Vickers made, in his ill-fitting Italian clothes, with an old Tyrolean cloak of faded green hanging about him, his pale face half hidden by a scrubby beard, his unseeing eyes, wandering over the great steamer, a little girl"s hand in his, or reading in a corner of the deserted dining hall.
Vickers was not so dull of eye, however, that he did not observe Isabelle and Cairy, sitting side by side on the deck, talking and reading. They tried to "bring him in," but they had a little language of jokes and references personal to themselves. If Vickers wondered what his sister, as he knew her, found so engrossing in the Southerner, he was answered by a remark Isabelle made:--
"Tom is so charming! ... There are few men in America who understand how to talk to a woman, you know."
When Vickers had left his native land, the art of talking to a woman as distinguished from a man had not been developed....
Lane met the party at Quarantine. That was his domestic office,--"meeting"
and "seeing off." As he stood on the deck of the bobbing tug waving to his wife, he was a symbol of the American husband, Cairy jokingly pointed out.
"There"s John holding out the welcoming arms to roving wife." And there were hundreds of them, roving wives, on the deck, very smartly dressed for their return to domesticity, with laden trunks coming up out of the holds, and long customs bills to pay, the expectant husbands waiting at the pier with the necessary money. And there were others with their husbands beside them on the decks, having carried them through Europe, bill-payers and arrangers extraordinary for their majesties, the American wives. Cairy was writing a farce about it with the t.i.tle, "Coming Home."
Vickers, who scarcely remembered his brother-in-law, looked curiously at the self-possessed, rather heavy man on the tug. He was an effective person, "one who had done something," the kind his countrymen much admired.
"Had a pleasant voyage, I suppose, and all well?" Then he had turned to Vickers, and with slight hesitation, as if not sure of his ground, observed, "You will find considerable changes, I suppose."
"I suppose so," Vickers a.s.sented, feeling that conversation between them would be limited. In the confusion at the pier while the numerous trunks were being disgorged, Vickers stood apart with Delia Conry and had an opportunity to observe the quiet, efficient manner in which John Lane arranged everything. He had greeted Isabelle and his mother impartially, with a family kiss for both. Vickers caught his brother-in-law"s eye on him several times as they were waiting, and once Lane made as if to speak and was silent. Vickers was sensitively aware that this man of affairs could not pretend to understand him,--could at the best merely conceal under general tolerance and family good feeling his real contempt for one who had so completely "made a mess of things." He had foreseen the brother-in-law, and that had been one reason why he had hesitated to return, even for a visit. Lane soon made another effort, saying: "You will find it rather warm in the city. We have had a good deal of hot weather this summer."
"Yes," Vickers replied; "I remember New York in September. But I am used to long summers."
As the stranger"s eyes roved over the noisy pier, Lane looked at the little girl, who was rendered dumb by the confusion and clung to Vickers"s hand, and then he eyed his brother-in-law again, as if he were recollecting the old Colonel and thinking of the irony in the fact that his only surviving son should be this queer, half-foreign chap.
A large motor waited outside the pier to take the party to the hotel.
"Aren"t you coming, Tom?" Isabella asked, as Cairy made for a cab with his luggage.
"I will meet you at the station to-morrow," Cairy called back. "Business!"
"Well,--how is everything?" she asked her husband. "Glad to see me back?"
"Of course."
They darted swiftly up town to an immense hotel, where Lane had engaged rooms for the party. Having seen them into the elevator, he returned by the motor to his office.