Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 10

first meeting of Elijah Lockwood and Harriet Forrester took place in the stuffy little parlor of the boarding house on Broad Street, Charleston, under the very shadow of St. Michael's Church.

All the way South, Lockwood's nervous tension had been drawing more and more taut. He had hardly slept or eaten, but had been sustained by a fevered eagerness that was pitiable to behold. Each of the three nights spent on the road, Veazie had staged a ghastly farce in hotel rooms—a trance, with the skull of Burrum Gao as his “control.”

On the second night, at the Exchange Hotel in Oxford, North Carolina, this had taken place in a room on the ground floor, at the rear of the building. Andrew Todd, the chauffeur, peeping beneath a badly drawn shade, had witnessed part of the extraordinary performance. Terror had gripped his soul.

“No, sir, I ain't goin' no farther South!” he told the professor, next morning. “I'm goin' to quit this job right here. I'm through!”

“What's the idea?” the professor snarled.

“I'm scared, boss! I'm quittin'!”

“Nonsense, you damned fool! Here, take this, and forget it!” The professor shoved a greenback into Andrew's yellow paw. “There's another for you every day you stick, and a good bonus when you land us back in Boston; so I don't want to hear any more such rubbish. Mind, now!”

Thus had Andrew been held in line; but not by any means had the panic in his heart been lessened.

The next night, at Columbia, he had struck up acquaintance with some of “the race”—by which name the sons of Ham denote themselves. They had given him a few sniffs of “coke.” He had spent hours with them, talking of skulls and voodoos and various dark matters which, even from jungle days, lurk in many an African heart.

Brooding blackly on the monstrous portent of the skull, he had driven the limousine on the last lap of the journey. Now, even in the very hour of old Lockwood's joy, he was holding mumbled converse with three or four dusky folk lounging on a doorstep near the car. One of them, at that, was not so very dusky, being a saffron Jamaica personage. Fate, thereby, was weaving ebon threads in the already somber pattern meshing half a dozen lives.

Nothing somber, however, seemed to cloud the old man's spirit as he stood trembling in the shabby boarding house parlor, hearing a woman's step along the hallway. For was not this the felicitous hour and minute of his glory and his joy, crowning a lifetime's search?

“She's coming now!” the professor whispered, pale and anxious of mien—for even at the lip, cups have been known to waver and slip. “She's coming! Calm yourself, Mr. Lockwood!”

The old man's fingers twitched, his bushy gray brows contracted. His throat gulped with a spasm of terrible emotion.

“Oh, my God, my God!” he murmured, with a gust of breath.

Then, as Mrs. Forrester appeared in the doorway, all strength forsook him. The parlor with its dim lights, the doorway, the woman's figure, all blent to gray confusion, as if gossamers had drawn before them.

“Where is she, Veazie?” he gasped. “Where—where's my girl?”

“Why, here she is! Don't you see her?” The professor beckoned Mrs. Forrester. He caught her savagely by the arm, whispering: “Come on, now! Play up, or—” He urged her forward. “Call him father!”

“Father!” she tremulously articulated.

Old Lockwood began to sob with strange and unlovely noises, with the slow and scant tears of senility. How painful, how deplorable a scene! In it the delusions of a broken old man were blent with the shuddering aversion of a woman constrained to imposture by harsh duress, and with the chicanery and greed of a wolfish charlatan.

“Say something, can't you?” Veazie whispered again. His clutch tightened on her arm. “Play up!”

Mrs. Forrester sank on her knees beside the old Bostonian. Through all her loathing of this forced deception, through all her hate and fear of the professor, Lockwood's tragedy moved the woman's heart within her. Might she not, after all, bring a little happiness to this starved soul? With a gesture of sincere pity, she took one of Lockwood's thin, veined hands in both her own, and kissed it.

“Father!” she said again.

Blindly he drew her to him. His trembling arms encircled her. He tried to speak, but could find no words. His scant and senile tears fell on her hair, already gray.

Calmer, presently, the old man talked with her. She sat beside him in a low chair, still holding his hand. The parlor door, tight shut, excluded whatever curious ones might wander along the hall. The professor—fearing lest, if left alone with old Lockwood, she might break all bounds and confess the truth—sat by the open window. Springlike air wafted in; the night brooded warmly, overarched by a far sky bored through by sharp and twinkling stars. Veazie, an ugly blotch on the lovely night, remained there, listening to every word.

Now he watched the lamentable drama being played by marionettes whereof he held the strings. Now he looked out on Broad Street, where an occasional motor or trolley rolled along, while whites and negroes passed, unconscious of the poignant human tragedy being enacted so near at hand.

“I've put it over!” the professor was exulting. “It's a gold mine!” Swollen with evil joy, toadlike, he sat and gloated. “A gold mine, and by God I've put it over!”

Old Lockwood was asking:

“And have you no memories of me—none at all?”

“How could I have? I was such a little thing! But sometimes it seems as if I remembered dimly.”

“You remember—what?”

She paused, reviewing the lessons which Veazie had taught her so that she might make some colorable self-identification.

“There was a boat, wasn't there?” she finally queried, hesitantly. “A yacht, or something like that?”

“Yes, yes—the Nenuphar! Go on!”

“That's all I seem to remember, at first—just a boat. Later, though, it seems as if I could see a bit of a strange city.” She spoke with well simulated dubiety. “Square white houses, flat roofs, brown people—not like our negroes, though. They talked some queer kind of language.”

“Yes, yes—that was Arabic, my dear one! Do you remember any of it? Tet ka'lm Arabi?” 

She shook her head.

“No, I've forgotten all that. There was another city, too, wasn't there? Much bigger—a French city.”

“Marseilles—yes! This proves it! You're my daughter!”

Mrs. Forrester winced, but kept on:

“I half remember some kind of strange old Jew who took me there in a ship; and then there was another man who took me away. I remember the ocean, and New Orleans.”

“Yes, yes! He was a French Creole, and—”

“Yes, César Nadeau! He adopted me. Nadeau was my own name till I married Mr. Forrester.”

“César Nadeau! I must see him and reward him!”

“No, father—he's dead.”

“I bless his memory, for having saved you. And—you never knew your own real name?”

“I remembered 'Marian,' but until my marriage I was always Marian Nadeau. I spoke French, too, but I'm afraid I've rather forgotten it now. My husband was French, though—Charleston Huguenot stock, originally Forestier.”

She paused for a moment, while Veazie nodded approval. The story was succeeding well.

“Going across fine!” thought he. “We've got this old bird hooked for every cent he's got in the world!”

“Marian Lockwood,” said the woman presently. “So that's really my name—Marian Lockwood Forrester! How strange it seems!”

“You've always remembered the 'Marian', anyway.”

“Yes, but I never knew I had a real, live father till last night, when Professor Veazie telephoned me from Columbia that he had found you, and was bringing you to me.”

The old Bostonian murmured an endearment, and drew her closer.

“But you have a father! Life is going to be very different for you, now! All that I have is yours!”

“Great stuff!” thought the professor, rubbing his hairy hands together. “Now we're coming!”

“And,” asked old Lockwood, “you have children?”

“I have a girl, named Disney.”

“Daughter, eh? That's an odd name—Disney.”

“Yes, it's an old Huguenot family name, from long ago.”

“How old is she?”

“Nearly twenty.”

“A granddaughter nearly twenty years old!” mused the old man. “I'm a grandfather, and I never knew it till to-night!” Tears of happiness gleamed in his sunken eyes. “God has been very good to me, as my life fades!”

Silence fell in the dimly lit parlor with the marble-topped table and the Confederate flags. The bells of St. Michael's boomed out slowly, resonantly, blurring the soft Southern night air. Veazie turned from the window.

“You're getting tired, Mr. Lockwood,” he warned. His solicitude was real enough. What if the old man should collapse, or even die, under too great an emotional strain? Lockwood's voice gave evidence of exhaustion. “This is enough for the first interview. Hadn't we better be going back to the hotel? You've got all to-morrow, and every other day, to hear all the details.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” agreed Lockwood; “but just a few minutes more! There's so much I want to know. I don't want to leave my girl just yet. I want to know how she grew up and married, and how—how she came to this.” He gestured at the shabby room. “She shan't stay here long—not while my Boston home is yearning for her.”

“There isn't much to tell, really,” the woman put in. “My husband was a musician, a wonderful man—”

“But sadly improvident,” the professor added.

“He died about eight years ago.”

“Without property or insurance,” remarked Veazie. “And there was nothing from the foster father, either.”

“I see!” nodded Lockwood. “It's a common enough story. Ah, but it's all ended now, my darling! But where—where's my granddaughter? I want to see my granddaughter!”

“She's playing accompaniments at a concert of the Musical Clubs, up on Meeting Street. She's in great demand.”

“Splendid! But—”

“You'll see her to-morrow,” the professor promised. “This is enough for one evening.”

“But I want to see her to-night!” old Lockwood insisted with childish eagerness.

“No, father!” Mrs. Forrester patted his trembling hand. “She won't be home till half past ten or eleven o'clock, and you're tired. You ought to go now.”

“As if I could leave you, Marian, when I—when I've just found you!”

Mrs. Forrester rose, and with both hands drew him up from his chair.

“Yes, yes! You ought to get some rest, some sleep.”

“I don't feel as if I'd ever sleep again!” The old man quavered into an odd laugh, pressing a hand to his brow. “What an hour!”

“Come!” bade the professor.

Mrs. Forrester joined her insistence to his, and together they helped the old man, almost tottering now, to the door. There he took her in his arms and held her feebly tight, kissing her forehead, her eyes.

“My girl!” he murmured. “My own dear little girl!”

Veazie drew him away. He found a second to whisper to the woman:

“Fine, so far—but no double crossing! Go all the way through, or—you know what 'll happen!”

When they were gone, Mrs. Forrester stood there in the vaguely lighted hallway, savagely smearing off the kisses.

“Oh, God!” she groaned, as if in agony. And then again: “Oh, God!”