The Return of Peter Grimm by David Belasco (chrysanthemum read aloud txt) 📕

/> "I'll find you some," said he. "I suppose I'll never learn my way around the labyrinths of this old house. But if I can't get to the nearest faucet, I'll wake Marta and ask her to help me. Lie still. I'll be back in a minute."

He picked up the lighted candle again, and started off on his quest. As he left the room he passed close by Peter Grimm.

"Good-night, Andrew," said the Dead Man. "I'm afraid the world will have to wait a little longer for the Big Guesser. The secret you've delved for so long and so loudly was in your own hands this evening. And you didn't know what to do with it."

The doctor left the room without hearing him. But Willem heard. Starting up on the couch, the boy cried:

"Oh, Mynheer Grimm! _Where_ are you? I knew you were down here--That's why I wanted to come."

"Here I am," answered the Dead Man, moving forward into the range of the anxiously wandering blue eyes.

"Oh!" gleefully exclaimed the child. "I _see_ you now! I _see_ you now!"

"Yes? At last?"

"Oh, you've got your hat!" went on the boy excitedly. "It's off the peg. You're going!"

"Yes, Willem," replied the Dead Man. "I'm going."

"Need you go right away, Mynheer Grimm?" coaxed the child. "Can't you wait just a _little_ while?"

"I'll wait for _you_, dear lad," returned Peter Grimm.

"Oh, can I go with you?" asked the boy in glad surprise. "Thank you, Mynheer Grimm! I couldn't find the way without you."

"Oh, yes, you could, Willem. God's signal light is the surest thing in all the universe. But I'll wait for you, just the same."

The boy's drowsiness, overcome for the moment by his sight of the Dead Man's loved face, had crept in upon him once more. He lay back on the couch with a happy little sigh.

And at once he was off in the wonder-aisles of dreamland--a dreamland full of circuses, of impossibly funny and friendly clowns, of street parade glories, of marvellous animals and thrilling equestrian feats.

"Sleep well," said Peter Grimm. "I wish you the very pleasantest of dreams a boy could have in _this_ world."

The doctor's step sounded presently in the adjoining kitchen. As though awakened by it, Willem opened his eyes and sat up. The fever flush was gone from his cheeks, the fever glaze from his look. The lassitude that had weighted every joint in his sick little body had fled, to be replaced by a strange, glorious buoyancy.

With a glad shout, Willem sprang up and raced across the floor into Peter Grimm's outstretched arms.

"_Huge moroche_, Mynheer Grimm!" he cried. "Oh, I am _well_! I never was so well before. It's wonderful to be like this."

"You are happy, too?"

"Oh! _Happy?_ It's like school being over!"

"Good!" laughed Peter Grimm. "It will always be like that now. Come! Let's be off."

He lifted the exalted, eager boy lightly from the floor, and swung him to a perch on his shoulder.

"_Uncle Rat has come to town!_" sang Willem, too rapturously happy to keep still.

"Ha-_H'M_!" he and Peter Grimm chorused as they moved toward the door.


"'Uncle Rat has come to town,
To buy----'"


McPherson came in.

"Here's the water, Willem," he announced, going over to the couch. "I got it at last, after barking my shins over----"

He glanced at the sofa and its occupant. Then the glass fell from his nerveless hand. He knelt in horror beside the still, white little body that lay there.

"Dead!" gasped McPherson.

"No!" exulted Peter Grimm from the doorway. "Not _dead_, Andrew, old friend. There never was so fair a prospect for _life_!"

"Oh," sighed Willem blissfully, his arm about Peter Grimm's neck, "I'm _so_ happy! I didn't know any one could be so happy as this--or so _well_."

"If only the rest of them knew what they are missing! Hey, Willem?" assented Peter Grimm.

"What is Dr. McPherson looking at there on the sofa?" demanded Willem. "He seems scared--and--and--unhappy. _What_ is he looking at, Mynheer Grimm?"

"He is looking at--_nothing_. And he doesn't know it. Come!"

"It's--it's so wonderful to be _alive_!" cried Willem.

They passed out, and the door of the house closed noiselessly behind them.


CHAPTER XXIII


THE DAWNING

Night had given place to red dawn, and red dawn to white day.

Dr. McPherson came out of the Grimm house and sat down on the edge of the vine-bordered stoop. He was very tired. He had had a hard and trying night. In his ears were still ringing the sobs of old Marta, hastily awakened to learn of her only grandson's death;--Kathrien's quiet grief;--Mrs. Batholommey's excited, high-pitched questionings that jangled on the death hush as horribly as breaks the Venus music through the Pilgrims' Chorus.

It had been a night of stark wakefulness, of a myriad details. And McPherson had borne the brunt of it all. Now, under an opiate, Marta was asleep. Mrs. Batholommey had trotted ponderously home to bear the black tidings of a prisoned child's Release to her husband. And Kathrien had gone to her own room under the doctor's gruff command to snatch an hour's rest. McPherson himself had come out into the cool and freshness of the new-born world for a breathing space, and to think.

The June day was young. Very young. Under the early sun the grass was afire with dew diamonds. The flowers, dripping and fragrant, held up their cups to the light. The town still lay asleep. Over the suburb brooded the Hush of the primal Wilderness, creeping back furtively and momentarily to its long-lost domain.

And presently the quiet was broken by the swift recurring click of heels on the sidewalk. Some one was coming along the slumbrous Main street; and coming with nervous haste. The steps turned in at the Grimm gate. McPherson raised his blood-shot, sleep-robbed eyes and stared crossly toward the newcomer.

It was Frederik Grimm. And, recognising him, McPherson's frown deepened into a scowl.

"Is it true?" asked Frederik as he stopped in front of the doctor. "I met Mrs. Batholommey. She was just passing the hotel on her way home. I hadn't been able to sleep, so I was starting out for a walk. She told me----"

"That Willem's dead?" finished McPherson, with brutal frankness. "Yes, it's true. Did you suppose that it was a new vaudeville joke?"

Frederik stood blinking, blank-faced, apparently failing to grasp the sense of the doctor's words. The younger man's aspect dully irritated McPherson.

"Yes," he reiterated, "the boy's dead. The problem of supporting him needn't bother you now. Not that it ever did. He's dead. And it's the luckiest thing that ever happened to him."

Frederik raised one hand in instinctive protest. But he might as well have sought to stem Niagara with a straw.

The doctor's strained nerves, his genuine grief, his dislike for the dapper young man before him, combined to open wide the floodgates of honest Scottish wrath. And he saw no cause to exercise self-control.

"You're in luck!" he growled. "The law could have compelled you to pay some such munificent sum as four dollars a week for his maintenance. You're safe from that now. And I congratulate you. It'll mean an extra weekly quart of champagne or a brace of musical comedy seats for you. The law is stringent and I was going to invoke it in your case. You smashed a decent girl's life. You helped bring a nameless boy into a world that would have made his life a hell as long as he lived. Just because his father happened to be a yellow cur. And, in penalty for that sin, the power and majesty of an outraged law would have assessed you about one per cent of your yearly income. You're lucky."

Frederik winced as though he had been lashed across the face.

"I sometimes wonder," continued McPherson, urged to fresh vehemence by sight of the effect he was scoring, "if hell holds a worse criminal or a more mercilessly punished one than the man or woman who lets a little child suffer needlessly--who _makes_ it suffer. And of all the suffering that can be heaped upon a child, everything else is like a feather's weight compared to sending it out in life with a name such as Willem would have borne. Oh, but God's merciful when He finds little children crying in the dark and leads them Home! Batholommey and the rest of them sneer at me for sticking to the old hell-fire Calvin doctrines in these days of pew-cushion religion. But I tell you, in all reverence, if there's no hell for the people who torture children, then it's time the Almighty turned awhile from pardoning sinners and built one."

"Don't worry," said Frederik shortly. "There is one. I know. I am in it."

"'Mourner's bench talk,' eh? It's cheap. Penitence is always on the free list. And in your case, as in most, it comes too late to do any good, except to salve the penitent's feelings. Willem lived in the same house with you for three years. All around him was Love. Except from the one person whose sacred duty it was to give that Love. We pitied him. We knew what he'd be facing if he lived. We made his childhood as happy as we could, so that he'd have at least one bright thing to look back on afterward. He was nothing to any of us. Except that he was a child crippled and maimed and fore-damned for life in the worst way any Unfortunate could be. We pitied him and we loved him. Did he ever hear a harsh word or see a forbidding face? Yes; he did. From one person alone. From _you_, his father. Even last night when he crept downstairs parched with thirst, and begged you for a drink of water----"

"Don't!" cried Frederik, in sharp agony. "Do you suppose you can tell _me_ anything about that? Do you suppose I haven't gone over it all--yes, and over all the three years--a hundred times since I heard he was dead? Do you think you can make me feel it any more damnably than I do? If so, go ahead and try. You spoke of the need for a hell. You can spare your advice to the Almighty. He has made one. And I can't even wait until I'm dead before I walk through it."

"Through it," assented McPherson sardonically. "_Through_ it with many a lamentable groan and a beating of the breast, and with squeaky little wails of remorse--and on _through_ it, out onto the pleasant slopes of forgetfulness and new mischief. Take my condolences on your fearful passage through your purgatory. I fear me it will take you the best part of a week to pass entirely out of it. It's only a man-built hell, that of yours. And, according to the modern theologians, God has no worse one for you later on."

With twitching, pallid face, and anguished eyes, Frederik Grimm looked dumbly at his tormentor. Even in his agony, he felt, subconsciously, far down in his atrophied soul, that the doctor's forecast as to the duration of his remorse's torture was little exaggerated.

Yet, for the moment, his "man-built hell" was grilling and racking the stricken penitent to a point that the Spanish Inquisition's ingenuity could never have devised.

McPherson, with a sombre satisfaction, noted the younger man's misery. Then a wistful look flitted across his gnarled,