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Road to Understanding, The

<h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2> <h3>ACTOR AND AUDIENCE</h3> Helen did not go with her daughter to Denby House the second morning. Betty insisted that she was quite capable of taking the short trip by herself and Helen seemed nothing loath to remain at home. Helen never seemed, indeed, loath to remain at home these days—especially during daylight. In the evening, frequently, she went out for a little walk with Betty. Then was when she did her simple marketing. Then, too, was the only time she would go out without the heavy black veil. Betty, being away all day, and at home only after five o'clock, did not notice all these points at first. As time passed, however, she did wonder why her mother never would go out on Sunday. Still, Betty was too thoroughly absorbed in her own new experiences to pay much attention to anything else. Every morning at nine o'clock she left the house, eager for the day's work; and every afternoon, soon after five, she was back in the tiny home, answering her mother's hurried questions as to what had happened through the day. "And you're so lovely and interested in every little thing!" she exclaimed to her mother one day. "But I am interested, my dear, in every little thing," came the quick answer. And Betty, looking at her mother's flushed face and trembling lips felt suddenly again the tightening at her throat—that her success or failure should mean so much to mother—dear mother who was trying so hard not to show how poor they were! For perhaps a week Betty reported little change in the daily routine of her work. She wrote letters, read from books, magazines, or newspapers, worked on the card-index record of correspondence, and sorted papers, pamphlets, and circulars that had apparently been accumulating for weeks. "But I'm getting along beautifully," she declared one day. "I've got Mrs. Gowing thawed so she actually says as many as three sentences to a course now. And you should see the beaming smile Benton gives me every morning!" "And—Mr. Denby?" questioned her mother, with poorly concealed eagerness. Betty lifted her brows and tossed her young head. "Well, he's improving," she flashed mischievously. "He asked for the salt and the pepper, yesterday. And to-day he actually observed that he thought it looked like snow—at the table, I mean. Of course he speaks to me about my work through the day; but he doesn't say any more than is necessary. Truly, mother, dear, I'd never leave my happy home for him." "Oh, Betty, how can you say—such dreadful things!" Betty laughed again mischievously. "Don't worry, mumsey. He'll never ask me to do it! But, honestly, mother, I can't see any use in a man's being so stern and glum all the time." "Does he really act so unhappy, then?" At an unmistakable something in her mother's voice Betty looked up in surprise. "Why, mother, that sounded exactly as if you were glad he was unhappy!" she exclaimed. Helen, secretly dismayed and terrified, boldly flaunted the flag of courage. "Did I? Oh, no," she laughed easily. "Still, I'm not so sure but I am a little glad: if he's unhappy, all the more chance for you to make yourself indispensable by helping him and making him happy. See?" "Happy!" scoffed Betty with superb disdain; "why, the man doesn't know what the word means." "But perhaps he has seen—a great deal of trouble, dear." The mother's eyes were gravely tender. "Perhaps he has. But is that any reason for inflicting it on other people by reflection?" demanded Betty, with all of youth's intolerance for age and its incomprehensible attitudes. "Does it do any possible good, either to himself or to anybody else, to retire behind a frown and a grunt, and look out upon all those beautiful things around him through eyes that are like a piece of cold steel? Of course it doesn't!" "Oh, Betty, how can you!" protested the dismayed mother again. But Betty, with a laugh and a spasmodic hug that ended in a playful little shake, retorted with all her old gay sauciness:— "Don't you worry, mumsey. I'm a perfect angel to that man." Then, wickedly, she added as she whisked off: "You see, I haven't yet had a chance to poke even one finger inside of one of those cabinets!" It was three days later that Betty, having put on her hat and coat at Denby House, had occasion to go back into the library to speak to her employer. "Mr. Denby, shall I—" she began; then fell back in amazement. The man before her had leaped to his feet and started toward her, his face white like paper. "Good God!—you!" he exclaimed. The next instant he stopped short, the blood rushing back to his face. "Oh, Miss Darling! I—er—I thought, for a moment, you were— What a fool!" With the last low muttered words he turned and sat down heavily. Betty, to whom the whole amazing sentence was distinctly audible, lifted demure eyes to his face. "I beg your pardon, you said—" The sentence came to a suggestive pause. Into Betty's demure eyes flashed an unmistakable twinkle. The man stared, frowned, then flushed a deeper red as full comprehension came. He gave a grim laugh. "I beg your pardon, Miss Darling. That epithet was meant for me—not you." He hesitated, his eyes still searching her face. "Strange—strange!" he muttered then; "but I wonder what made you suddenly look so much like— Take off your hat, please," he directed abruptly. "There!" he exclaimed triumphantly, as Betty pulled out the pins and lifted the hat from her head, "that explains it—your hat! Before, when I first saw you, your eyes reminded me of—of some one, and with your hat on the likeness is much more striking. For a moment I was actually fool enough to think—and I forgot she must be twice your age now, too," he finished under his breath. Betty waited a silent minute at the door; then, apparently still unnoticed, she turned and left the room, pinning her hat on again in the hall. To her mother that afternoon she carried a jubilant countenance. "Well, mother, he's alive! I've found out that much," she announced merrily. "He? Who?" "Mr. Burke Denby, to be sure." "Alive! Why, Betty, what do you mean?" "He's alive—like folks," twinkled Betty. "He's got memory, a heart, and I think a sense of humor. I'm sure he did laugh a little over calling me a fool." "A fool! Child, what have you done now?" moaned Betty's mother. "Nothing, dear, nothing—but put on my hat," chuckled Betty irrepressibly. "Listen, and I'll tell you." And she drew a vivid picture of the scene in the library. "There, what did I tell you?" she demanded in conclusion. "Did I do anything but put on my hat?" "Oh, but Betty, you mustn't, you can't—that is, you must— I mean, please be careful!" On Helen's face joy and terror were fighting a battle royal. "Careful? Of course I'm careful," cried Betty. "Didn't I stand as still as a mouse while he was sitting there with his beetling brows bent in solemn thought? And then didn't I turn without a word and pussy-step out of the room when I saw that he had ceased to realize that there was such a being in the world as little I? Indeed, I did! And not till I got out of doors did I remember that I had gone into that library in the first place to ask a question. But I didn't go back. The question would keep—and that was more than I could promise of his temper, if I disturbed him then. So I came home. But I just can't wait now to get back. Only think how much more interesting things are going to be now!" "Why, y-yes, I suppose so," breathed Helen, a little doubtfully. "Oh, yes, I shall be watching always for him to come alive again. Besides, it's so romantic! It's a love-story, of course." "Why, Betty, what an idea!" The mother's face flamed instantly scarlet. "Why, of course it is, mother. If you could have seen his face you'd have known that no one but somebody he cared very much for could have brought that look to it. You see, he thought for a moment that I was she. Then he said, 'What a fool!' and sat down. Next he just looked at me; and, mother, in his eyes there were just years and years of sorrow all rolled into that one minute." "Were there—really?" The mother's face was turned quite away now. "Yes. And don't you see? I'm not going to mind now ever what he says and does, nor how glum he is; for I know down inside, he's got a heart. And only think, I look like her!" finished Betty, suddenly springing to her feet, and whirling about in ecstasy. "Oh, it's so exciting, isn't it?" But her mother did not answer. She did not seem to have heard, perhaps because her back was turned. She had crossed the room to the window. Betty, following her, put a loving arm about her shoulders. "Oh, and, mother, look!" she exclaimed eagerly. "I was going to tell you. I discovered it last Sunday. You can see the Denby House from here. Did you know it? It's so near dark now, it isn't very clear, but there's a light in the library windows, and others upstairs, too. See? Right through there at the left of that dark clump of trees, set in the middle of that open space. That's the lawn, and you can just make out the tall white pillars of the veranda. See?" "Oh, yes, I see. Yes, so you can, can't you?" Helen's voice was light and cheery, and carefully impersonal, carrying no hint of her inward tumult, for which she was devoutly thankful. In spite of her high expectations, Betty came from Denby House the next afternoon with pouting lips. "He's just exactly the same as ever, only more so, if anything," she complained to her mother. "He dictated his letters, then for an hour, I think, he just sat at his desk doing nothing, with his hand shielding his eyes. Twice, though, I caught him looking at me. But his eyes weren't kind and—and human, as they were yesterday. They were their usual little bits of cold steel. He went off then to his office at the Works (he said he was going there), and he never came home even to luncheon. I didn't have half work enough to do, and—and the cabinets were locked. I tried them. At four he came in, signed the letters, said good-afternoon and stalked upstairs. And that's the last I saw of him." Nightly, after this, for a time, Betty gave forth what she called the "latest bulletin concerning the patient":— "No change." "Sat up and took notice." "Slight rise in temper." "Dull and listless." Such were her reports. Then came the day when she impressively announced that the patient showed really marked improvement. He asked her to pass not only the salt and the pepper, but the olives. "And, indeed, when you come to think of it," she went on with mock gravity, "there's mighty little else he can ask me to pass, in the way of making voluntary conversation; for Benton and Sarah do everything almost, except lift the individual mouthfuls for our consumption." "Oh, Betty, Betty!" protested her mother. "Yes, yes, I know—that was dreadful, wasn't it, dearie?" laughed Betty contritely. "But you see I have to be so still and proper up there that home becomes a regular safety-valve; and you know safety-valves are necessary—absolutely necessary." Helen, gazing with fond, meditative eyes at the girl's bright face, drew a tremulous sigh. "Yes, I know, dear; but, you see, I'm so—afraid." "You shouldn't be—not with a safety-valve," retorted Betty. "But, really," she added, turning back laughingly, "there is one funny thing: he never stays around now when there's any chance of his seeing me with my hat on again. I've noticed it. Every single night since that time he did see me a week ago, he's bade me his stiff good-afternoon and gone upstairs before I'm ready to leave." "Betty, really?" cried Helen so eagerly that Betty wheeled and faced her with a mischievous laugh. "Who's interested now in Mr. Burke Denby's love-story?" she challenged. But her mother, her hands to her ears, had fled. It was the very next afternoon that Betty came home so wildly excited that not for a full five minutes could her startled mother obtain anything like a lucid story of the day. Then it came. "Yes, yes, I know, dear, of course you can't make anything out of what I say. But listen. I'll begin at the beginning. It was like this: This morning he had only a few letters for me. Then, in that tired voice he uses most of the time, he said: 'I think perhaps now, we might as well begin on the cataloguing. Everything else is pretty well caught up.' I jumped up and down and clapped my hands, and—" "You did what?" demanded her mother aghast. Betty's nose wrinkled in a saucy little grimace. "Oh, I mean inside of me. Outside I just said, 'Yes, sir,' or 'Very well, Mr. Denby,' or something prim and proper like that. "Well, then he showed me huge drawers full of notes and clippings in a perfectly hopeless mass of confusion, and he unlocked one of the cabinets and took out the dearest little squat Buddha with diamond eyes, and showed me a number on the base. 'There, Miss Darling,' he began again in that tired voice of his, 'some of these notes and clippings are numbered in pencil to correspond with numbers like these on the curios; but many of them are not numbered at all. Unfortunately, many of the curios, too, lack numbers. All you can do, of course, is to sort out the papers by number, separating into a single pile all those that bear no number. I shall have to help you about those. You won't, of course, know where they go. I may have trouble myself to identify some of them. Later, after the preliminary work is done, each object will be entered on a card, together with a condensed tabulation of when and where I obtained it, its age, history—anything, in short, that we can find pertaining to it. The thing to do first, however, is to go through these drawers and sort out their contents by number." "Having said this (still in that weary voice of his), he put back the little Buddha,—which my fingers were just tingling to get hold of,—waved his hand toward the drawers and papers, and marched out of the room. Then I set to work." "But what did you do? How did you do it? What were those papers?" "They were everything, mumsey: clippings from magazines and papers and sales catalogues of antiques, typewritten notes, and scrawls in long hand telling when and where and how Mr. Burke Denby or his father had found this or that thing. But what a mess they were in! And such a lot of them without the sign of a number! "First, of course, I took a drawer and sorted the numbers into little piles on the big flat library table. Some of them had ten or a dozen, all one number. That work was very easy—only I did so want to read every last one of those notes and clippings! But of course I couldn't stop for that then. But I did read some of the unnumbered ones, and pretty quick I found one that I just knew referred to the little diamond-eyed Buddha Mr. Denby had taken out of the cabinet. I couldn't resist then. I just had to go and get it and find out. And I did—and it was; so I put them together on the library table. "Then I noticed in the same cabinet a little old worn toby jug—a shepherd plaid—about the oldest and rarest there is, you know; and I knew I had three or four unnumbered notes on toby jugs—and, sure enough! three of them fitted this toby; and I put them together, with the jug on top, on the library table. Of course I was wild then to find some more. In the other cabinets that weren't unlocked, I could see, through the glass doors, a lot more things, and some of them, I was sure, fitted some of my unnumbered notes; but of course they didn't do me any good, as I couldn't get at them. One perfectly beautiful Oriental lacquered cabinet with diamond-paned doors was full of tablets, big and little, and I was crazy to get at those— I had a lot of notes about tablets. I did find in my cabinet, though, a little package of Chinese bank-notes, and I was sure I had something on those. And I had. I knew about them, anyway. I had seen some in London. These dated 'way back to the Tang dynasty—sixth century, you know—and were just as smooth! They're made of a kind of paper that crumples up like silk, but doesn't show creases. They had little rings printed on them of different sizes for different values, so that even the ignorant people couldn't be deceived, and—" "Yes, yes, dear, but go on—go on," interrupted the eager-eyed mother, with a smile. "I want to know what happened here—not back in the sixth century!" "Yes, yes, I know," breathed Betty; "but they were so interesting—those things were! Well, of course I put the bank-notes with their clippings on the table; then I began on another drawer. It got to be one o'clock very soon, and Mr. Denby came home to luncheon. I wish you could have seen his face when he entered the library and saw what I had done. His whole countenance lighted up. Why, he looked actually handsome!—and he's forty, if he's a day! And there wasn't a shred of tiredness in his voice. "Then when he found the bank-notes and the Buddha and the toby jug with the unnumbered clippings belonging to them, he got almost as excited as I was. And when he saw how interested I was, he unlocked the other cabinets—and how we did talk, both at once! Anyhow, whenever I stopped to get my breath he was always talking; and I never could wait for him to finish, there was so much I wanted to ask. "Poor old Benton! I don't know how many times he announced luncheon before it dawned over us that he was there at all; and he looked positively apoplectic when we did turn and see him. I don't dare to think how long we kept luncheon waiting. But everything had that flat, kept-hot-too-long taste, and Benton and Sarah served it with the air of injured saints. Mrs. Gowing showed meek disapproval, and didn't make even one remark to a course—but perhaps, after all, that was because she didn't have a chance. You see, Mr. Denby and I talked all the time ourselves." "But I thought he—he never talked." "He hasn't—before. But you see to-day he had such a lot to tell me about the things—how he came by them, and all that. And every single one of them has got a story. And he has such wonderful things! After luncheon he showed them to me—some of them: such marvelous bronzes and carved ivories and Babylonian tablets. He's got one with a real thumb-print on it—think of it, a thumb-print five thousand years old! And he's got a wonderful Buddha two thousand years old from a Chinese temple, and he knows the officer who got it—during the Boxer Rebellion, you know. And he's got another, not so old, of Himalayan Indian wood, exquisitely carved, and half covered with jewels. "Why, mother, he's traveled all over the world, and everywhere he's found something wonderful or beautiful to bring home. I couldn't begin to tell you, if I talked all night. And he seemed so pleased because I was interested, and because I could appreciate to some extent, their value." "I can—imagine it!" There was a little catch in Helen Denby's voice, but Betty did not notice it. "Yes, and that makes me think," she went on blithely. "He said such a funny thing once. It was when I held in my hand the Babylonian tablet with the thumb-mark. I had just been saying how I wished the little tablet had the power to transport the holder of it back to a vision of the man who had made that thumb-print, when he looked at me so queerly, and muttered: 'Humph! they are more than potatoes to you, aren't they?' Potatoes, indeed! What do you suppose made him say that? Oh, and that is when he asked me, too, how I came to know so much about jades and ivories and Egyptian antiques." "What did you tell him?" At the startled half terror in her mother's voice Betty's eyes widened. "Why, that I learned in London, of course, with you and Gladys and Miss Hughes, poking around old shops there—and everywhere else that we could find them, wherever we were. You know how we used to go 'digging,' as Gladys called it." "Yes, I know," subsided the mother, a little faintly. "Well, we worked all the afternoon—together!—Mr. Denby and I did. What do you think of that?" resumed Betty, after a moment's pause. "And not once since this morning have I heard any tiredness in Mr. Burke Denby's voice, if you please." "But how—how long is this going to take you?" "Oh, ages and ages! It can't help it. Why, mother, there are such a lot of them, and such a whole lot about some of them. Others, that he doesn't know so much about, we're going to look up. He has lots of books on such things, and he's buying more all the time. Then all this stuff has got to be condensed and tabulated and put on cards and filed away. But I love it—every bit of it; and I'm so excited to think I've really begun it. And he's every whit as excited as I am, mother. Listen! He actually forgot all about running away to-night before I put on my hat. And I never thought of it till just as I was pinning it on. He had followed me out into the hall to tell me something about the old armor in the corner; then, all of a sudden, he stopped—off—short, just like that, and said, 'Good-night, Miss Darling,' in his old stiff way. As he turned and went upstairs I caught sight of his face. I knew then. It was the hat. I had reminded him again of—her. But I shan't mind, now, if he is stern and glum sometimes—not with a Babylonian tablet or a Chinese Buddha for company. Oh, mother, if you could see those wonderful things. But maybe sometime you will. I shouldn't wonder." "Maybe sometime—I—will!" faltered the mother, growing a little white. "Why, Betty, what do you mean?" "Why, I mean, maybe I can take you sometime— I'll ask Mr. Denby by and by, after we get things straightened out, if he won't let me bring you some day to see them." "Oh, no, no, Betty, don't—please don't! I—I couldn't think of such a thing!" Betty laughed merrily. "Why, mumsey, you needn't look so frightened. They won't bite you. There aren't any of those things alive, dear!" "No, of course not. But I'm—I'm sure I—I wouldn't be able to appreciate them at all." "But in London you were trying to learn to be interested in such things," persisted Betty, still earnestly. "Don't you know? You said you wanted to learn to like them, and to appreciate them." "Yes, I know. But I'm sure I wouldn't like to—to trouble Mr. Denby—here," stammered the mother, her face still very white. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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