Changeling, and Other Stories
thought of Home Rule and were shocked when they heard it. He went
north to Scotland for golf, and the flat Scot accent made him homesick
for Belfast.
"I think I 'll just run over to see how the old town 's getting on."
The truth was, though he would n't acknowledge it to himself, he wanted
to get news of Jeanie Lindsay. How was she? And was she the same as
ever? And was she--the thought stabbed him strangely--laughing her
slow laugh and looking her calm look for some other than he?
News he got of her quickly and with a vengeance. Going across Donegal
Place he was tapped on the arm.
"I 'd like a wee word wi' you, Mr. Aleck Robertson."
He saw beside him a compact figure with a set jaw and savage eyes. He
was mostly cognizant of the eyes. They blazed at him with unconcealed
hatred.
"And who may you be?"
"You 'll know me fine afore I 'm through with you, Aleck Robertson. I
'm Tom Lindsay, Jeanie Lindsay's brother."
Robertson forgot the eyes in the question that jumped to his lips. He
held out his hand.
"I ha'e heard her speak o' you. You 're the one that went to
Newcastle, to the shipbuilding. And how 's Jean?"
Lindsay struck the proffered hand down.
"She 's the way you left her, wi' this difference: There 's a bastard
o' yours on her arm this four months. And do you know what I 'm going
to do to you for that, Aleck Robertson? I 'm going to kill you!"
"Wi' a baby!"
"Wi' a baby o' yours!"
"Wi' a baby o' mine!" Robertson was plainly dazed.
"You were no' expecting that, maybe?"
"No! I was no' expecting that." The big man tried to pull his
faculties together.
"And where is she now? She 's no' gone away, is she?"
"No! She 's no' gone away. And she 's not where she might be, for all
you did--in the poor-house! Nor tramping the streets, selling matches!
No! She 's at home. In her father's house--"
"At home, you say?"
"She 's at home." Tom Lindsay put himself in Robertson's way. "And,
now, listen to me--"
The red-bearded man shoved Tom aside as though he were a troublesome
bush in the path.
"Will you get to hell out o' my way," he roared, "afore I gi'e you a
clout on the lug?"
He started at breakneck speed down the street. The brother looked
after him silently, his jaw loose with wonder.
He pushed aside the little gate in front of the garden and though he
knocked at the door, he tried it, so impatient was he for entry, and
finding it on the latch, he opened it as a gust of wind might. In the
hall he met her coming to answer the knock, and suddenly as he saw her,
all the bluster and the heartiness went out of him, and his knees
turned to water and there was a great catch in his throat. He wanted
to see her only, but the baby she had on her arm was she also, both of
them one. It suddenly occurred to him that he too was a part of her,
all three of them one. And he felt suddenly as Saul must have felt
when, going toward Damascus, he was stricken to the earth.
She smiled at his perturbation. "I 'm glad to see you, Aleck." Calmly
she shifted the child to her left arm. She put out her hand to him and
he caught it and held on to it as a foundering sailor hangs on to a
thrown line. She led him to the parlor.
"Have you no word," she smiled, "for me and this wee fellow o' yours?"
He looked at the both of them, she more like Ceres, the autumn spirit,
than ever, buxom and wise and calmly happy, and the little thing of
down and fluttering life in her arms, soft as a newly hatched chick, he
sensed.
"When," he asked, and his voice in his own ears was hoarse as the
cawing of a rook, "when are you going to marry me?"
"I 'm no' so sure," she said calmly, "that I 'm going to marry you at
all."
"You 're going to marry me, Jeanie, and I 'll start the mill again, and
we 'll all be fine--"
"And you 'll gi'e the working people the raises they're entitled to?"
"I will not," he flashed out suddenly, as of old. "They 're entitled
to nothing."
"Then I'll ha' nothing to do wi' you." She looked at him calmly. "Nor
will this wee fellow. I 'm a working-woman, Aleck, and he 's a
working-woman's son. We 're no' your kind."
He saw the baby's face now, crumpled with sleep. Very like an old
man's face it seemed to him, and yet there was something indefinably
pulling about it.
"The wee workin'-fellow!" There was such a pathetic touch to the idea.
"By God!" he blurted suddenly. "I'll gi'e them the mill!"
She smiled again. "The wee thing then was missing in you, Aleck--I
think you got it now. And I 'll marry you, Aleck, just when you say.
It's no' too soon," she added simply.
For a minute he was sunk in abstraction while she patted his hand with
the old, familiar gesture. He raised his head and spoke with
conviction.
"You know, Jeanie, you know, it's queer to think that an hour ago I had
no idea of all this. You and thon wee fellow, and the mill's working
again and a' right between me and the men. I had made an end, and now
there 'll be no end. You know, it seems ordained in a manner of
speaking. Ay, as it were, ordained. It does," he said. "It does
that. Ay, indeed. It does so."
THE KEEPER OF THE BRIDGE
I
Every time he came back, after a brief visit in the South American
capital, to the gorge where he was building the great bridge, Lovat's
heart would throb and his throat swell with pride as he looked at the
great stone structure spanning the Andean chasm. First the little
train would come puffing and straining up the grade, on the iron path
between the lavish tropic greenery. Then there were the peaks of
mountains, daring the sky, their tops lightly muffled with snow.
_Nevada_, went the Spanish word, soft as the snow itself. Then,
imminent, one felt, was the drop of the gorge, a dramatic descent that
stopped the heart in its rhythmic beating. "Here is the end!" one
said. And then the bridge!
Soaring, splendid, slender, strong, its arches spanning the tumbling
river beneath, the great bridge ran like a rainbow from mountain to
mountain. Lovat thought of it, with its lightness, its perfection, its
spurning of the ground, as a spirit that crossed with winged unwetted
feet the challenging river beneath. It suggested, somehow, Artemis in
the dusk, with a tongue of fire above her proud brow.
The wonder and the miracle of it never failed to thrill him. All the
harsh practical details of his work, details of thrust and strain, of
fitting springer to pier, and voussoir to springer, of the curve of
intrados, of the strength of abutments, never took away from him the
sense that he had done, was doing, a great and practical thing. These
mountains, that composition of jungle, that smashing drop to the
turbulent river, the snarling waters themselves--all these were the
work of the Great Mason, the detail of his Divine Hand. So they were
when and so they had remained since the heavens and the earth were
finished and all the host of them, and He rested on the seventh day
from all the work which He had made.
But a day would come, the Master of the Masons knew and had ordained,
when the welter of passionate nature would subside, and the small race
of mankind He had fashioned would reach a place of progress in their
journey when this would have to be bridged. Then one of His prentice
men would do it. And Lovat experienced a sense of holiness that he had
been the chosen one.
Lovat looked at the bridge with wonder and with pride each time he
returned, but each time he returned he felt somehow that the bridge had
been jealous of his absence, resented it, became temperamental as a
woman. Whilst he was there everything was right. There were
accidents, of course, but they were the recognized risks of a great
venture, the ordinary failure of the human factor in a Titanic
equation. But when he was away strange things happened. Now an
unaccountable error in laying this or that, now a sudden collapse of
machinery, now a terrible accident to the native workmen. But when he
was there, all was well. It seemed as if the bridge demanded all his
time, all his talent, all his attention.
It occurred to him there was a sort of contest between him and the
bridge, a sort of quiet, deadly fight, as between a man and a spirited
horse he is riding in a steeplechase. He felt, too, that all the
strange things about him knew it--the surly river, the whispering
jungle, the majestic mountains, the cold observant stars. These could
tell him what it was, for they had observed all things, seeing history
begin and peoples fade and nations rise. They had seen great
prehistoric animals flap wings terrible and dark as a demon's. They
had seen these things die and be forgotten. They were of nature and
knew humanity, and they could tell him, if they wished.
But they told nothing. They observed the cruel law of silence, which
all nature knows and dead men learn. The business was his and the
bridge's. Let the twain fight it out.
"I 'm getting morbid, up here in the mountains," Lovat complained, and
he turned abruptly to think of a month from now, when Cecily would come
south from New York to marry him in Cartagena, and to be with him for
the last days before the bridge was opened. Her dark, serious eyes and
cloudy hair and serious smiling mouth were before him, but the shadow
of the bridge rose between him and the vision of her like a barred
door....
II
There were two mysteries in Simon Lovat's life. One was how he, a poor
Highland Scots-born boy, reared in abject poverty, had ever come to be
the great architect he was. And the other was how he had become
engaged to Cecily Stanford, Gamaliel Stanford's only daughter, and
Gamaliel Stanford was a millionaire.
He hated to think of his infancy in the little Argyle town where he was
born. He hated even to think of his boyhood in New York. People, he
felt, would n't understand it. They might talk of being hungry, but
did they know what hunger for years was, abject hunger, malnutrition?
Did these well-fed men who talked of hardship know, could they conceive
of a family to whom for years a nickel meant the difference between
butter on bread and dry bread? They talked of slums, and dirt, and
poverty, but he kept his mouth closed. Were he to tell them what he
knew of these--he himself--might they not draw back from him as they
would draw back with a shudder from a man who had been close to lepers?
Fine words mean so little in this world.
All his life until seven years ago, when he was twenty-five, had been a
succession of cold ill-fed days, relieved by the magic thrill of
bridges.
There had been a viaduct here, a railroad span there, an Egyptian arch
somewhere else in Argyle that would vibrate some chord within him. A
rainbow would flush him with sudden beauty. And in New York the wonder
of the bridges made up for heartburnings and disappointments. The
gossamer span to Brooklyn affected him like a long note on a
hunting-horn. At times human weaknesses would boil within him, as when
he thought with rage that other boys and men must be uplifted by the
prizes and scholarships they won, feeling the pride of combat and of
victory, but to him they meant only the wherewithal to live for himself
and his mother and sisters. Other boys were welcomed with feastings
when they had achieved success, but success meant to him only the
filling of famished hands--not that he grudged it, God knows! but one
hungers for a little praise, a little recognition, as one hungers for
food. And then had come the days of obscurity, working for others
until Gamaliel Stanford, the big, bluff builder, had recognized his
genius and given him his chance. He did fine work for Stanford.
Stanford, the self-made millionaire, wished after the fashion of his