Peewee/Chapter 3

Peewee, his soaked shoes making no sound upon the polished stair-treads, ascended into a large, softly lighted hall above. Rooms, some dark, some softly lighted like the hall, opened on both sides. He listened; there was, so far as he could determine, no one in these rooms; the only sounds that came to him were the voices and laughter from below.

The phenomenon of rooms lighted but not occupied perplexed him and reassured him at the same time; he advanced to look in upon the room nearest on the left. The lamps shining through silk shades showed it, as he had felt sure it must be, unoccupied. He went in excitedly and moved about, touching and looking at the ornaments and trying and feeling of the furniture. He stopped and touched curiously the long nap of the silky rug. There was another lighted room ​upon the other side, and he started toward it across the hall, but halted suddenly to inspect the sweep of the handsome, wide stairs. He went up hesitatingly, step by step, and at the top he listened. The silence assured him that there was no one on this floor either. He crossed to the nearest lighted bedroom; and this room—done in white and gold, with connecting dressing room and bath—set him to dancing deliriously. He patted the lace counterpane upon the bed with his damp and dirty hands, and picked up and examined the white toilet articles, monogrammed in gold, upon the dresser. He went to look in on the white and gilt of the tiled bath. But he caught himself about, checked and startled and stiffened by the sound of a motor which had stopped outside the house.

He ran out to the head of the stairs in panic. Unquestionably someone was coming into the house, and someone was also ascending the stairway from the basement, up which he himself had come. He realized that he must not be discovered here in the house, among all these beautiful and costly things. To have come to the. ​house openly and inquired whether the man there was his father would have been a different thing, but suppose, under these present circumstances, the man should prove not to be his father. Then they would merely turn him over to the police, who, he knew, did not allow poorly dressed people to make any explanations.

The person he had heard ascending the stair—a servant—passed through the lower hall. An outer door closed somewhere. He heard a man's deep, good-natured voice say something unintelligible; then he heard a woman's voice.

"It's possible," the woman's voice said, "to get him out to dinner, but anything that keeps him out after eleven o'clock is taboo apparently. Did you notice how he acted to-night?"

The man's voice answered: "Only like a man thinking of business, it seemed to me."

Then another man's voice, not so deep or pleasant, spoke: "One of my rights as a married man, my dear."

The woman laughed and Peewee drew back from the stair-head in terror. She had laughed from the bottom of the stair; she was coming ​up! He stared about in his fright for a place of concealment, then darted noiselessly into the nearest dark bedroom. He could see her plainly as she came slowly up the stair and stopped for several moments in the hall, hesitating and looking back as though something which she had not understood but only had felt vaguely was troubling her. She was the woman whose picture he had seen in the newspaper office. His father's wife?

She was a slender woman. Her hair was almost black, with lights of brown in it, and looped itself prettily about her ears and temples; her eyes were deep dark blue, and kind and pleasant; her nose and chin were finely formed and full of character; her mouth was sweet and tender. Her look was girlish, but her face showed more understanding and sympathy than mere girls have.

That indeterminate, disturbing emotion which he had felt in looking at her picture he felt still more plainly now. She made him, in some not understandable way, seem small and lonely; she stirred in him something like a physical want, ​like pain. He wished his dead mother might have looked like her. He was glad—because there was the suggestion of tears in his feelings—when she went into the white bedroom and closed the door. Then he rushed out silently toward the stairs.

He was planning his escape as he cautiously descended them peering down and looking for the men. The servants on the lower floor, he realized, had been disturbed; it was not probable that he could get out of the house by the way he had come in without being seen and caught. The alternative that remained was to get out at the great front door.

He could see nothing of the men. The door of one of the rooms which had been open when he had ascended the stairs was now closed. The men unquestionably had gone in there. He passed this door on tip-toe and had nearly reached the comparative safety of the vestibule when the voice of the deeper toned of the two men, reaching him through the closed door, caught and halted him and whirled him suddenly about:

​"I'm not accusing you, Walter; I'm here to get an explanation from you."

It was not the sentence that had caught Peewee; it was the name. Was the other man in the room the one who might be his father? He hesitated. While he did so the room next to the one the men were in which had been dimly lighted became suddenly dark and he could no longer hear the men's voices. This phenomenon must have been produced by one of the men closing a door between the rooms. He crept into the dark room cautiously, and discovered that folding doors between the two rooms had been closed, but that by crouching close to the doors he could hear almost plainly. It was now again the deeper-voiced man who was speaking.

"Just this. Lampert, the old barn boss whom we discharged some years ago, came to me to-day. His daughter, he said, had died in some rooming house on the West Side. He rambled mysteriously and insultingly, about our family being the ones who ought to bury her. I didn't believe his story; I thought it was only a touch for money, but I couldn't let his insinuations pass. ​I went out there with him. He'd told this much truth at least; the woman lay there dead. It was easy to see what kind of woman she had been."

Peewee's pulse-beat had quickened. It must be the woman who had told him she was his mother that the man was talking about.

The other man said something not audible; then the first man spoke again.

"No, he'd come to me because I was the head of the family and the company, but his insinuations referred to you."

"You think they're true?"

"I'm asking you, brother."

"My God, Jeffrey! I'd be crazy to try to defend myself against you, when I need your help!"

Peewee caught eagerly at the name. That deeper-voiced man—he knew who he must be. That one whose death notice the truck driver had shown him had been Jeffrey Markyn, Second. This one, in the queer way this family called itself, must be Jeffrey Markyn, Third. He was at least, so he had just said—this Wal​ter's brother. In that case Walter's name would be also Markyn. Was the middle part of that name Wendell?

The first man said something now which Peewee could not hear.

The other answered: "Good heavens, Jeffrey! You don't suppose I risked my home for her?"

Again the first man said something inaudible.

"No, years ago. Before I married Marion. After they'd taken Marion abroad to marry her to someone over there."

Peewee stiffened. Marion? That was Mrs. Walter Wendell Markyn, the pretty lady who had just gone upstairs. This man was Walter Wendell Markyn, then.

"No, I'm not trying to excuse myself. If I were, I'd blame it on that damned old family enmity which, when Marion and I engaged ourselves to marry, made both families refuse to recognize our engagement."

What was an enmity? Peewee asked himself. Why did people use words one couldn't understand.

​"They drove us both three-quarters mad, I think, before they took Marion away to separate us. Then, afterward, I met this barn boss' daughter. I don't know now how I came to drift into such an affair. I thought they'd succeed in getting Marion married to someone over there. She wrote me how hard they were trying to do that. They'd kept her over there so long I thought my love for her had weakened."

Peewee could not hear Jeffrey Markyn's reply to that; the other's words were clear.

"Of course not! This Helen Lampert knew that I would never marry her; she'd understood that from the beginning, and that it must end whenever I decided. But I furnished an apartment for her."

Jeffrey Markyn spoke again; the inflection of his voice showed he had asked a question.

His brother answered. "About two years. Then Marion came back."

It appeared to Peewee that this conversation was not getting easier to understand but harder. What had been "about two years?"

"I admit that, Jeffrey. You don't yet know ​half! This is much worse than you can think for Marion. When they took Marion away, we'd renewed our engagement as solemnly as we could; we'd sworn to one another by every sacred thing—Marion, that as long as she might live would never have any other man but me, and I, that I would never have any other woman. She came back and I found I still was crazy over her."

Peewee could understand that; he too was somewhat crazy over Mrs. Walter Wendell Markyn.

"She'd done so much, Jeffrey—she'd fought them for me, and beaten them, and now she'd come back here to marry me. She asked me if I'd kept our promise. I couldn't tell her 'No.' I was wild about her. I told her 'Yes.' I told Helen we were through, and she was game and square and didn't question it. I never heard from her again till day before yesterday."

"Then what?"

"She sent a note."

The circumstance interested Peewee inconsequentially. The sick woman had been able to ​write, then; she had not been strong enough when he had seen her. Had she written it on one of the "men's cards" and with the pencil out of the dresser drawer?

"Yes; she wanted me to come over to that place on the West Side. I didn't dare not to go. Ten years of silence and then—that! I knew it must be important. I went over there. I found her ill; she knew she was dying. Jeffrey, I said you didn't yet know half of it! There is a boy."

"What?"

"There's a boy."

Peewee jerked excitedly. He had been growing certain that the sick woman had told the truth; she was his mother and this Walter Wendell Markyn was his father. But he had not been so assured that his father knew. Much of what had been said had not been understandable to him, but this was. He realized that his father was still speaking.

"She'd understood me, she said, Jeffrey, all through our association better than I had understood myself. She'd known that I had never ​stopped loving Marion. She'd foreseen, when she learned Marion was coming back, that she would have to give me up, and she hadn't been willing to give me up entirely. She wanted the boy for herself. She meant to go straight for his sake. She didn't succeed in doing that. The courts, she said, took the child away from her when he was a little over two years old. Afterward she lost trace of him. There was some confusion of the records and the boy's identity was lost. Ten days ago, at the beginning of her illness, she saw him on the street and recognized him."

"Recognized him? A child of eight whom she had not seen since he was two?"

"The child's likeness to me attracted her attention and she had investigations made by private police who established his identity. She was to have the boy there for me to see. I didn't know what to do. I went back there and found her dead. The nurse who had attended her was there with her. The boy had been there but had got away. He must have slipped out, the nurse said, while she was telephoning the doctor. ​He can be found again; he sells newspapers on the street, and the private police whom she employed knew him. Jeffrey, what am I to do?"

His own course, Peewee argued, had now become quite clear. Did he, in fact, so greatly resemble his father? He wished there was some way he could look into the room and see. But he could not doubt the fact, since his mother had recognized him by that likeness; and he realized that, in that case, he did not need to be afraid. He would wait, he thought, until they had finished talking; then he would go into the room. He dramatized, with the instinctive egotism of children, his own importance and their great surprise when he should make that entry.

"We must find the boy, brother." This was Jeffrey Markyn speaking.

"I mean, what am I to do about my wife? Marion's love for me is built upon her faith in me. She feels that ours has been a perfect love. To learn now that I came straight from another to her—"

"Walter, we can't leave a boy of our blood—of father's blood and mother's—to fight out his ​life alone upon the streets. Who knows of your connection with him?"

"No one, as yet. Helen played square with me until the end. I used a fictitious name when I went over there."

"We'll have the boy found and put him with someone who'll look after him and have him educated."

Peewee clenched his hands resentfully. He did not want to be put with someone; agents of justice and charity had been trying to do that to him all his life. What he wanted was to live here in this house; and now, more even than that, to live near and see the woman who had gone upstairs. He heard his father now:

"Put him with some one? Until when? My connection with him will finally be found out and Marion will feel that I have put deceit upon deceit. My own hope of pardon from her—if there is a hope—would be that, as soon as I knew there was a boy, I came to her; confessed; begged her to forgive me."

"Tell her, then."

"I can't hurt her like that, Jeffrey! I can't! ​Even if we leave myself out of consideration entirely, I can't inflict that agony upon her!"

Peewee had been backing away from the door. The emotions, if not all the words of what the men were saying, were quite plain to him. His feelings had been stirred by their talk about Mrs. Markyn. They should not, he was determined, hurt her. The exact nature of the hurt to be inflicted on her was not wholly clear, but he understood that it was through him that it was to come to her. Because his father had found him—or rather was about to find him—she was to suffer.

He resented the means of prevention which they proposed for this. They should not, he was resolved, put him with someone to be taken care of; that would be no better than the Boys' Home. He did not, he considered, have any need of a father. He had got on very well without one—better than he would with a parent who proposed to send Burke and Mundy private operatives to look for him. They did not know, of course, what expertness he had gained in avoiding such agents.

​He had crossed the darkened room and the hall and had reached the vestibule. He could hardly hear from there the voices of the men. He looked back over his shoulder at the big, luxurious rooms. There were limitations, he commenced to comprehend, upon people who lived in a fine house like this; there must be many things which a boy who lived here would not be allowed to do. He muffled with his hand the clicking of the lock as he sprung open the front door. He closed it behind him almost without a sound and descended the wide stone steps.

A light in what he thought must be the white bedroom blinked out as he turned after a few steps to look back at the house. He stood for some time gazing at the darkened window. How pretty she was and how sweet! His throat closed up in thinking of her. He decided that when he had grown up he would purchase a larger house than this and have her come to see him. There was a not quite understandable consolation in this thought. It was still raining, and he began to wonder where he was going to sleep.