MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
MY 
 BROTHER S KEEPER 
 
 By 
 
 CHARLES TENNEY JACKSON 
 
 Author of 
 THE DAY OF SOULS 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
 
 ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS 
 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
COPYRIGHT 1910 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 
 c5^ 
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 BRAUNWORTH & CO. 
 
 BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS 
 
 BROOKLYN, N. Y. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE hunted man's left arm rose slowly until 
 his hand rested on the iron post supporting the 
 elevated railway spanning the Chicago street, his 
 face sank to the crook of his elbow, and, above this 
 shield, and under his gray hat, his eyes were leveled 
 at his enemy a block away on the farther curb. 
 
 The sun was very bright. To his right, another 
 square from the Alley L, the passing people were 
 clear in color, distinct in array, against the mighty 
 bulk of the church across the way; up the broad 
 steps between the crosses of stone on the balustrades, 
 these distinctive, beautifully gowned women, singly, 
 or in twos and threes, or in groups entered the 
 shadow below the intricate gates of bronze a pa- 
 geant like the pictures of a biograph, a processional 
 of moderns linking back to some festival of the 
 barbaric ages of faith. The hunted man saw, past 
 the church, its Gothic tower in the sunlight, a patch 
 of lake, blue, rippling under overarching elms 
 
2 ;MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 which showed a film of green on the Easter morning. 
 From this his alert glance shot back the other way 
 at the plain-clothes man who stood in brief baffled 
 inquiry on the corner, and then came on. 
 
 A train shot along the overhanging structure ; the 
 shock on the cool metal stung the hunted man's fin- 
 gers, the vibrant snarl tensed his brain, already acute 
 with caution and the need of fear. His right hand 
 stole back to the rubber grip of the automatic pistol 
 in his pocket, but his figure did not stir from its 
 mimicry protection of the iron frame casting its 
 shadow about him ; his eyes did not lose their watch- 
 ing of the plain-clothes man. 
 
 A group of people were coming from across the 
 street and along to the Alley L. The fugitive's 
 glance searched them incessantly, and when they had 
 neared him in his shelter, the women's rich skirts 
 touching him, with another flit of his eyQS, his hawk's 
 profile sharp in the sun, at the pursuer a block be- 
 hind, he stepped out in pace with them and went 
 along toward the church. They saw a big man of 
 rather unwieldy figure curiously at odds with the 
 lightness of his tread, an inexplicable grace such as the 
 life of the open gives; when he looked once at them 
 they saw a full, round face, unstirred, stealthily 
 complacent, the gray eyes bold in their wary, brief 
 intent a face which, on the side view, took again 
 its verisimilitude of a hawk's under the gray slouch 
 hat. He trailed the fashionable women, the silk- 
 hatted Easter men, his glance now ahead, for on the 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 3 
 
 corner opposite the church a uniformed patrolman 
 stood, his lazy baton flashing as did the spokes of the 
 carriage wheels, the flirting harness of the horses, 
 full-lifed in the morning, stretching their necks, 
 twisting their red tongues about the bits, with nerv- 
 ous starts checked by the immobile coachmen. 
 
 At sight of the bluecoat the hunted man fell bade 
 a step. He looked at the enemy behind with incred- 
 ible swiftness, and then came on with the group. 
 And slowly these turned in to a small side door of 
 the church, its shadows deep over the young sward. 
 For a moment the man stood alone, halted, clear in 
 the marvelous brightness alien, hostile, poised in a 
 complete cat-like patience, his eyes narrowing, con- 
 scious that before and behind his enemies could see 
 him unobstructed. 
 
 And a strange humor lit his priest's face, the 
 pleasure of peril, the thrill of the hunted; the butt 
 of the gun in his pocket bulked big as the hand of 
 a friend in the dark. Again his glance shot from 
 one officer to the other, the patrolman yawning by 
 the line of carriages, the detective now under the 
 Alley L looking alertly up its sodden way. With a 
 laugh, that was more a grimace, the hunted man 
 walked after the Easter worshipers, up the steps and 
 into the dim and cool recess. The usher, pallid, 
 poker-like, the lump of his throat working over the 
 edge of his high collar, stared at the man, who, for 
 a moment, did not remove his hat, nor turn down 
 his collar from his miner's blue shirt. The pale 
 
4 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 youth, his Adam's apple throbbing like a bad con- 
 science, was about to address the stranger when the 
 latter suddenly looked about at the bit of grass inlaid 
 as a jewel in the stone walk, the street beyond ; and 
 then turning, taking off his hat, he walked down the 
 cross aisle. The detective came past the door to the 
 corner and conferred with the policeman, who wiped 
 his red neck with a cotton glove and shook his head. 
 Before them the thickening array of beautifully 
 dressed women and clean men was mounting, a flow- 
 ered tide inundating the broad steps to the sanctuary. 
 From the bronzed doors came a murmur of the or- 
 gan, dreamy, sensuous, far as the whisper of the 
 sea's power on soft beaches, so was the Easter pre- 
 lude. From under the filigree of elms, young, green, 
 the April sun showered the lake ; the world seemed a 
 magician's crystal held to the light. 
 Within, far down the body of the cathedral, a 
 slender gentleman, frock-coated, his gray under- 
 chops stuck with hair in the senile folds, had paused 
 before his pew which the usher was making a topic 
 of apologetic whispers. Behind them a pursy ma- 
 tron, an array of black and lavender, holding a 
 gold Book of Prayer, bobbed about obstructing the 
 rivulet of worshipers pouring down the nave. And 
 they whispered, the gentleman, the usher like a 
 caricature of black and white, the puffing woman; 
 and then, with some final and proper snort, the pew- 
 holder led the way past the obstruction. 
 
 The hunted man filled the corner. He sank back, 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 5 
 
 lifting his muddy boots from the foot-rest and 
 turned his full face with its inimitable grimace on 
 the two. The respectables swept him with a ponder- 
 able hate; his gray upper lip lifted back at them, his 
 eyes grew slit-wise, he appeared an animal, a thing 
 of the outdoors, earning hate and requiting fear. 
 
 And from their stare the worshipers cringed; 
 the little gentleman in the baggy- fronted white 
 waistcoat and his rotund wife now looked straight 
 ahead at the altar with its enrobing lilies, ravishing 
 with their purity the dim recess beyond the chancel. 
 She slid to the cushioned rest with her knees and 
 muttered, her left hand before her head gleaming 
 with diamonds, the gold Book of Prayer set to this 
 jewel flashing. 
 
 The hunted man seemed seized with humor; a 
 great slow smile was on his face, turned now back 
 to the doors, reading each comer down the main 
 aisle with the alert judging of the open-bred. He 
 saw a confusing crush of Easter people blocking the 
 vestibule and spreading within under the loft where 
 the organ overlaid its throbbing sweetness. Beyond 
 this a vast window, a glowing picture of women 
 about a well with Christ haloed above, poured the 
 sun's diffused magic, so that, from the garments of 
 the Lord and from the simple women of Palestine, 
 millions of jewels filtered down upon the beautiful 
 moderns of the far-spreading auditorium from the 
 whiteness of the God's robe to the inordinate splen- 
 dor of the women, the plumes, furs, satins, gems, 
 
6 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 e.ach costing more than would have ransomed Him 
 from Calvary. 
 
 The fugitive was stilled in this sweet light, the 
 music's purring, the overarching shadows, the in- 
 effable spirit of peace. He seemed to have no curi- 
 osity, and no fear; after a moment, when the or- 
 gan's prelude swelled to a mighty inrushing, the 
 air vibrant, appealing with an ecstatic pathos to the 
 souls of the throng, he sank lower, his head leaning 
 to the crook of his folded arms, his eyes closed. 
 Then they might have seen his weariness. 
 
 Before the lilied cloth and behind the rich woods 
 of the chancel a cloud of white-robed youths arose, 
 their voices breaking to praise of the Creator for the 
 day; slowly, and with the set and practice of the 
 theatric subtly underplaying to the senses, they came 
 on by twos down the middle of the church, the first 
 of the procession bearing above him a curious piece 
 of white metal, inwrought and mysterious. Slowly 
 the processional chanting passed; their white gar- 
 ments touched the man's arm on the pew end, their 
 voices rose, the clear-eyed boys singing, and it was 
 as if, triumphantly, a god had passed. 
 
 The tired man's eyelids fluttered, his nostrils drew 
 from out the sensuous richness of the worship, a 
 perfume; he drew it again and again from his 
 dirty sleeve, the brackish sweetness of the buffalo 
 pea-vines on the North Platte where he had lain 
 for nine nights in the open after he killed Marty, 
 the guard. And mingled with this was the stubborn 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 7 
 
 sulphuric tang of the chlorination mill where he had 
 been a prisoner while the Miners' Union fought out 
 the Bull Hill war. His tired eyes closed; the long 
 escape, the police, the hurrying figures of the Chi- 
 cago streets, where he had twisted to evade the trail ; 
 the plunging traffic and the pitiless hunt even now 
 the dazzling voluptuousness of the Easter, its decked 
 women, its mighty chant, the robed procession all 
 this climacteric to the astonishing drama of his days, 
 fused to a blur, keyed low, until, in a droning inter- 
 change, it was the chittering of the San Miguel in its 
 rocky bed behind his cabin. The walls of the great 
 church lengthened and shot up until they were canon- 
 high he was a thousand miles to westward, stand- 
 ing by his shack door looking up the Colorado ridges, 
 with their sparse winter-bitten pines against the flare 
 of white peaks above the foot-hills. 
 
 For a time they did not notice him, the choristers 
 passing, the song in air. The music lulled, was still ; 
 the clergy before the cloth of lilies went through 
 some reverential motions, and then, in an ornate box 
 hung to the left of the altar from the wall, a man 
 with a bald head began to talk. The others answered, 
 and this went on the bald man in the white robe 
 over black speaking, and the mumble coming from 
 the thousands of women in the seats. The air grew 
 warm, the earth mellowing under the delight of the 
 spring, and within the temple it was now orientalized 
 with odors incense, perfumes concealing human 
 sweat, flowers crushed, dying, the smell of birds' 
 
8 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 feathers and the skins of animals, milliners' stuffs, 
 and trappings but an hour out of arsenical wrappers 
 from all the worshipers, mute, hot, heavy, rus- 
 tling, this complex and determined tribute for which 
 they had busied themselves for days, rose to God ; in 
 templed phalanx, with their hats correct, the women 
 hurled themselves before the Almighty. 
 
 Above, in his preaching box, the bald man, over- 
 come by this offering, music, flowers, odors, color, 
 warmth, this inordinate sensuousness, thrust now 
 and then a finger between his collar and the flesh of 
 his neck and went on talking, as he was expected to 
 do, saying the things he was expected to say, while 
 they listened in the proper attitudes, and thought 
 gently after the manner of the best people, the wom- 
 en now and then giving an approving nod of their 
 heads heaped high by dead birds' wings, by the hair 
 haggled and bargained from their meager sisters of 
 Europe, and false flowers fashioned by weary baby 
 fingers in the reek of the cities all of which, offered 
 virtuously by the best people everywhere, is, there- 
 fore, considered proper before the Lord, and is so re- 
 ceived by His minister. 
 
 But at last, in a pause of his droning, there came 
 a snore. At first it was not recognized, and then a 
 higher note caused silks to rustle, a hat or two 
 creaked in their wires under the dead birds' plumage. 
 The preacher hesitated; when it came again, he 
 stirred. Women's heads, under the dried and disin- 
 tegrated skins of the birds, turned. In the little pen 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 9 
 
 where the sleeping man had sunk, the pew-owners 
 looked composedly ahead. But a quicker note they 
 could not dissemble their panic, they opened wide 
 their eyes, the lady fanning herself hurriedly that 
 none might think she slept in the house of God on 
 Easter when there was so much to see and hear. 
 But the nasal sound came again ; near ones saw him 
 now, a lone, tired man in a blue miner's shirt, gro- 
 tesque, unlovely, his face burned by sun and un- 
 clean from the earth. 
 
 And now that deceit was useless, the couple with 
 him glowered; the lady in black and lavender, in- 
 deed, quivered with it. But the priest went pon- 
 derously on. At the next snore the littlest boy of 
 the white-robed crew tittered. And at the next, two 
 more tittered; one could look across the sea of silks 
 and tails of animals and dead birds' wings and tell 
 by the expression of the devout that God, indeed, 
 must be disturbed. The little gentleman by the 
 sleeping man was purple even without the splendid 
 light from a memorial window across his face, the 
 great artistry in the wall showing to all the thou- 
 sands of the temple that the dead man whose name 
 was written thereon must have had much money. 
 
 An usher was approaching. He bent, and the ro- 
 tund woman spoke to him, the golden Book of 
 Prayer trembling with wrath in her hand. The 
 usher bent again and touched the sleeper's arm. The 
 preacher in his ornate box went on unwinkingly, 
 superior to the trouble down in the cauldron of 
 
io MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 milliners' stuffs below him. He was preaching of 
 the Arisen, the greatness of God's love that could 
 look benignly down, undoubtedly, and forgive a 
 tired and hunted man . . . besides it was get- 
 ting late and he must hurry through to dine. 
 
 "Here here " the usher whispered, shaking the 
 snorer, who would not have awakened through 
 twenty hours of such puling remonstrance. A choir 
 boy laughed; the preacher hoisted his warm collar. 
 The usher whispered again, appealingly: "Here 
 mustn't sleep in church wake up!" 
 
 He did not, and the little man beyond reached 
 from his side and gave the tired man such a punch 
 that his hat fell from his lap. And at that he did 
 awake, whirling to his feet and about with such 
 precise and deadly action that the usher dashed 
 against the other pew. The man stood, his hand back 
 to his pocket. He stared dazedly. 
 
 "Here, you!" pleaded the usher, recovering. 
 "Come out of here !" 
 
 He held out the hat. The gray burned face before 
 him swept him and the others, the hostile faces all 
 about, and then, taking the hat, he followed the 
 usher up the aisle. They stared at him, forgetting 
 God, and even their new clothes, in fright at his 
 bloodshot eyes, his heavy face. But when he had 
 gone quite out in a pathetic, stilled obedience for so 
 big a man, they smiled in amused triumph, all those 
 of the perfumes concealing the smell of beasts' 
 skins and birds' wings at Sunday dinner they 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER n 
 
 would laugh over it, the tired man taken from the 
 house of God; they would dine; and then, cropful, 
 benign, the wings and tails of the dead birds laid 
 carefully away, with loosened waistbands and cor- 
 sets, they could sleep the afternoon, or drive or talk, 
 going about the pleasurable matter of just living. 
 
 The man stood blinded in the smite of the sun on 
 the temple steps. Then slowly he went, his drowsed 
 brain crackling into its need of fear. Down the 
 street's end with its splash and glitter of blue lake, 
 near the end of the carriage line and lolling coach- 
 men, he saw a policeman. He was sauntering slowly 
 toward the church. And on him with the old, fierce 
 thrill of the hunted the lone man looked. Slowly 
 from the base of the Greek cross he backed, watch- 
 ing the other, then with his curious agile tread, went 
 the other way along the line of carriages. He kept 
 very close to the curb; he was passing one of the 
 smartest of the equipages, when he stopped abruptly. 
 His eyes were fixed within to the cool semi-gloom of 
 the cushions. A woman was watching him with eyes 
 in terror. He himself exclaimed. The drowsy 
 driver did not notice; the fugitive looked again at 
 her, her eyes wide, her hand raised, her stifled cry 
 he glanced down the clean curb at the nearing patrol- 
 man, then, with his hand over the carriage window, 
 he sprang the trap and slid within. 
 
 "Yes," he said intently, to her complete recog- 
 nition, "have him drive on, will you ?" 
 
 "Rand !" Her voice came low, with a choke. He 
 
12 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 felt her limbs draw from his own on the cushions. 
 "Rand!" she whispered. 
 
 He nodded. In the pause they heard the coach- 
 man stir. Staring at the intruder the woman said, 
 clearly: "Terance home the Park Drive." Then 
 she turned, whispering, her hand up, to clear, as it 
 were, his image from her eyes : "Herford you've 
 come !" 
 
 His burned face had now a complacent cunning 
 like a man who had just won a game by some as- 
 tounding trick incredible to the onlookers. 
 
 "Eh? you? Demetra," he went on "and after 
 fourteen years you knew me!" He laughed and 
 looked out the vehicle had turned, and he saw the 
 patrolman loitering by the shadow of the Gothic 
 tower athwart the street. "I went to sleep and 
 they chucked me out. I had a notion to arise and 
 preach them truth to juggle the jewel and toss 
 it before their eyes, to make them gape and yelp with 
 wonder and I fell asleep and must have snored." 
 
 "You " she whispered still, in her shock "that's 
 like you, Rand you've not changed. Nothing!" 
 
 "A trifle fat," he retorted. "Eh the pity! I de- 
 test fat and here my bands have hounded me these 
 three years." And then he sat forward, his sleepy 
 grimace at her : "But you here in Chicago ? And 
 in this rig? Eh? It is astonishing. I come skulking 
 along like a hunted dog and God knows if there 
 was ever a man who hated to walk on tiptoes and go 
 hushed, it is I I slip along, dodging the police, and I 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 13 
 
 come on you. At once I open the door of your car- 
 nage I step in I take off my hat, so. I inquire as 
 to your health I am whirled off' Eh? Where? To 
 what? It is something of a marvel." 
 
 "It's like you," she breathed "like you." She sat 
 back, her dark eyes relaxing, her full lips less in 
 quiver. She was a woman of at least thirty. She 
 had an admirable grooming befitting her dominant 
 personality. Her accent was a trifle incisive you 
 would have called her foreign, yet with a doubt as to 
 placing her. She had about her light hair, brown 
 eyes, her face of resolution and calm acceptance, 
 something of the array of September, a luxurious 
 and golden fruition. That was about her the rich- 
 ness and the color of a September valley. 
 
 His big priest's face watched her; she noted now 
 its years marks, a cruelly hard stamp of wind and 
 sun. He was forty ; he looked it despite his outdoor 
 agility, his use of limb and alert eye. His voice had 
 a marvel in it an inimitable wealth of modulation, 
 mockery, appeal, power, humor, cruelty there was a 
 beautiful and irresistible quality in it belying his un- 
 stirred face, his settled form. Not seeing him, it 
 would have evoked in you romance, the lure of ad- 
 venture, youth, its tone, interpretative as a violin, 
 had the reserve of a cello. 
 
 "I see you remember?" he went on "but I did 
 not expect you to forget." 
 
 "Forget ?" Her eyes dreamed ; she was watching 
 the flash of the lake beyond the Lincoln Park shores. 
 
14 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Here now " she muttered "you're back, here, 
 where I've found peace." 
 
 "I should think you had found more," he retorted. 
 "A little Polish girl whom I first saw on the streets 
 with some peasant dancers. Eh ? you were starved 
 and whipped an old thief of a Lithuanian had you. 
 And I bought you I gave old Jurak fifty dollars for 
 you, and led you home and gave you a bath. And 
 how you scratched me !" In some good-humored rev- 
 erie he did not see her paling face. "I put you to 
 school in London. Eight years of it I gave you a 
 name Demetra! And in the end you ruined me; 
 and here you are, rigged like an empress. It's a mar- 
 vel!" 
 
 "Rand," she answered slowly, "I did not know 
 I never knew the truth for years that here in Amer- 
 ica they charged you, a minister, with supporting a 
 girl abroad, hidden. And you did not explain did 
 nothing except defy them, and renounce your faith. 
 Yes, you bought me I know. For what, God, per- 
 haps, can tell bought me, just as a dog." 
 
 "Eh, well," he returned lightly. "I am given to 
 experiments. I've knocked over most of the world 
 I know what it is to shiver all night in the rain and 
 be hungry. Three weeks ago I killed a man in Colo- 
 rado a guard at the bull pen. I was ahead and had 
 our only gun. He lay crumpled in the grass, and I 
 went and sat down beside him and it was a ticklish 
 moment, too. But I'd killed him, and there was a 
 quality to the thing. I thought he'd have something 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 15 
 
 to say out of the ordinary a man dying, to the man 
 who'd killed him. You know I'm ever attuned to the 
 unusual that I'm for ever seeking the complete and 
 distinctive. But I was disappointed this fellow 
 merely lay and gurgled- and did not recognize me. 
 He missed a marvelous opportunity. When I 
 come to the end you'll hear me sum up the thing 
 aright. Death is an infamous device at best, and 
 most of us contrive to make it commonplace. To 
 hang a man when the bright earth is here for him 
 to eat and drink and go about, to stand upright 
 and smell the good air! I will never be put out of 
 this without a quarrel I would wrangle it through 
 six Heavens, but what they'd hear me protest." 
 
 She listened calmly, but with a pretense of weari- 
 ness, as if she had heard much of this before he, 
 leaning, his poseur's assumption, his unstirred face 
 with merely a suggestion of a grin, his cool eyes, and 
 the fascination of his voice's range. "You killed a 
 man," she said, "and in the labor wars in Colorado? 
 That's strange, a striker, a union man a laborer for 
 their cause you, of all men on earth mad with 
 your individualism the prince of egoists !" 
 
 She was idly thinking what she had read of the 
 Cripple Creek strikes, the anarchy of a state, the con- 
 stitution overturned, the rule of the bullet, the bull 
 pen and the dollar. She grasped dimly that in this 
 brawl of the West the inordinate and defying spirit 
 of America was apotheosized; to the Bull Hill war 
 had come the thousands of adventurers of all the 
 
T6 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 lands, joining with the Miners' Federation or with 
 the Owners' League hardy men, all, masterful, 
 alert, taking nothing for granted, not used to defeat. 
 In this seething cauldron bubbled the most modern 
 and coherent socialistic cult along with the untram- 
 meled individualism of the New T World. She knew 
 vaguely of working-men shot, driven from their 
 homes, exiled from their state under threat of death ; 
 and in turn of rich men assassinated, troops dyna- 
 mited. She saw now the man by her side, as if he 
 limned out forjier, the foreign woman, vast battling 
 forms, universal and eternal spirits struggling, the 
 ancient law and the new, ever the same, the fighting 
 uplift of the race here in this wonderful, infinite 
 America. 
 
 "That's like you, too the son of a rich man a 
 justice of the Supreme Court a striker, hunted 
 down. Like you to throw yourself into some quarrel 
 for which you cared nothing. I remember once 
 abroad, when you were spending your mother's 
 money, they called you the Mad American. One 
 wonders now what's in you?" 
 
 "To whip the beast," he answered, "this brute 
 America they boast about to watch it turn and 
 snarl to prick the dull soul in it until it shakes with 
 rage. I even enjoy the sensation of being hunted by 
 their police it gives one a moment worth living. I 
 tell you I could be a prophet for the land if they'd 
 let me the poet of its epic." 
 
 She looked a moment in wonder, then relaxed. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 17 
 
 "That's like you, again one of your old impossible 
 speeches. I remember when a child, being terrified, 
 but even then I began to understand that you loved to 
 say something extravagant, to find distinctive 
 phrases/' She went on slowly "Those days when 
 you were interested brought life to me. I've won- 
 dered if you were changed." 
 
 "Changed ? The world has put a stomach on me 
 the pity of it. And I am forty. That, too, is an 
 outrage, that a man should grow old." He leaned 
 nearer, his inimitable grimace upon her. "A trifle 
 tired and fat there are no adventures for a fat 
 man. And here I am in Chicago after years ! Eh, 
 but I've lived. I've been bucko mate on a trader 
 to the Marquesas, and had her rotten timbers sink 
 beneath me ; I've mined in Queensland and down the 
 Peruvian coast; I've smuggled opium into the 
 French islands and done time marooned on a reef 
 for it ; I've slept and ate and fought with every race 
 that fronts the Pacific, and here I am, hotfooting 
 through Chicago's streets after the Bull Hill war 
 tired, getting fat there's no bloom on the peach for 
 a fat man. I think I'll go present myself at the 
 judge's door, hat in hand, and ask lodging for the 
 night. He turned me away, but he's rich and I want 
 it I want money, power, comfort I want all 
 this barbaric essence. I've starved and been hunted ; 
 I've sung my songs and, well now I want this brute 
 thing, wealth money, it's power." 
 
 "Ah, you," she cried, in a sort of terror; "will 
 
i8 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 nothing ever change you?" She stared out the 
 window at the gray flit of shadows from the blocks 
 of closely built houses. They had turned from the 
 park ways, crossing North State Street with its air 
 of decorous largeness, North Clark with its inter- 
 mittent shops and lodgings, to a clean and nonde- 
 script street, the horses traveling noiselessly on the 
 asphalt, the trees flitting by. From her study of the 
 Sunday's clean morning aspect, she presently shifted 
 her gaze to him : "You, the actor the poseur, al- 
 ways !" 
 
 "Let me be it then," he retorted; "you there 
 was always a thing in you for me to play on. I 
 believe, in fact, you loved me." 
 
 "Loved you?" she echoed slowly; "I, a child a 
 little Polish girl whom you picked up in the street. 
 You gave me a chance at life you broke the 
 shell from me yes. But could a woman have 
 loved you ?" 
 
 Rand's taunt came to the clearness of her thought. 
 "Eh, I made you, then and robbed you of nothing. 
 I thought there was some wonderful thing in you a 
 personality, a voice. Eh, I must have been a fool a 
 cub of a preacher a raw boy sluiced into a divinity 
 school to please some Scotch atavism in my father, 
 pulled through Princeton and sent abroad to come 
 back and be chucked into a sleepy church. Good God 
 // A rich and puling youth mauled over by doctors 
 of divinity, sent out to Europe at twenty-two he 
 finds a pretty child and he sends her to school to sing. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 19 
 
 Then, when I had already begun to balk at the col- 
 lar, three years later, they discover that I am paying 
 your bills. All the old hens go to cackling and they 
 ask me to explain. I don't choose to explain I am 
 already sick of the game I tell them frankly to 
 go to hell. I remember that day a committee of 
 deacons interrogating a divine, and he suddenly tell- 
 ing them to go to hell, and putting on his hat to 
 walk out." 
 
 "Your father," she retorted "you were his only 
 son." 
 
 "I remember that, too. He cursed me off the 
 place, and with the money my mother left I went. 
 Eh, you recall ? I flung it rather wide while it 
 lasted." His chuckle came. "But it was worth it 
 to tell three Presbyterian deacons sitting in a row 
 on the edge of their chairs to have a callow 
 preacher babe tell them to go to hell, and walk off. 
 There is a nice completion about it the episode, 
 rounded a perfect jewel. And we live such frag- 
 mentariness eh ? Few things ever are rounded out 
 we fulfill nothing, express nothing completely 
 and my leaving the church see the gem I made of 
 it? No boards of investigation, or charges preferred 
 merely three old dodderers sitting in a row, twirl- 
 ing their hats and digesting the matter in two sec- 
 onds that I told them to go to hell.'.' 
 
 She listened to the voice, its trick of unbelief, its 
 phrasing music he was ever uneasy unless he was 
 talking the egotism that stopped at nothing: 
 
20 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Well, now the Almighty and I get on admirably. 
 I whistle back to Him from any corner He flings me 
 to unafraid, undefeated." He turned to her with 
 a changed note, a patient curiosity. "But you, 
 Demetra, the little scared animal that I warmed 
 to life how you're changed ! What did it ? I recall 
 they said you had a voice. Did it make you what 
 you are?" 
 
 "It failed," she answered in composure. "I had 
 my chance I was taken up by Moskowczki in 
 Berlin sang once, indeed, in Milan. But I failed." 
 
 He noted the hardening of her face. She went on 
 evenly: "Well, it is not given to all. I changed 
 everything. You had disappeared three years be- 
 fore. I was on my own resources. I came to Amer- 
 ica nine years ago was an agent of the Austrian 
 government investigating some emigration matters 
 in a bureau of your Washington government 
 merely a clerk when I met the man I married." 
 
 He started, bent to her with his slow smile, an 
 almost imperceptible creeping of sardonic humor 
 over his broad face: "Married? I was thinking 
 you must be and well? Who is he?" 
 
 "I imagine you've heard of him. Doctor Ennisley 
 of Northlake University the chair of sociology. 
 That was the way I met him. He came to Washing- 
 ton a member of the first child labor commission. 
 We met when I was detailed to look up statistics of 
 emigration for him from southern Europe." 
 
 He watched her, actually marveling at last. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 21 
 
 "You," he began, "Demetra, a thing of moods and 
 passions married a professor!" 
 
 "Enough," she went on coldly. "I am married, 
 you see." 
 
 He grinned with an odd implication of common 
 thought, an unguessed reserve of power, cynically 
 hazarded if he wished, to play upon the deeps within 
 her, to find potentialities of rebellion, to outrage her 
 with ruthless analysis. She went on composedly, 
 measuring herself against his searching. "And I'll 
 tell you a strange thing. I came West with my hus- 
 band and found here, in Chicago, that his patron, 
 the man through whom he hopes to do wonderful 
 things for the reform of child labor conditions in 
 the mills South, the one whose fortune and influence 
 has made my husband's work possible, is Justice 
 Stephen Rand of the state supreme court your 
 father." 
 
 The renegade stirred. 
 
 "We are living there it is at the justice's request 
 your old home on La Salle Avenue." 
 
 He laughed. "This my dear lady is extra- 
 ordinary ! And you pick me up hounded through 
 Chicago's streets! Eh, I always insisted that noth- 
 ing more interesting than to live and feel and go 
 about could come to a man. I am always impatient 
 to crack open to-morrow to see what's in it." 
 
 "Your father," she paid no heed to his garrulous 
 shift and play, "has been aging the last year. He 
 has been a recluse for many years, save on his busi- 
 
22 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 ness to the capital. It is a strange house it seems 
 haunted at times. I " she hesitated, and went 
 firmly on "have felt it. I wanted to move, but the 
 judge wished us to reside in the north wing I think 
 he is lonely. He rather fancies me." 
 
 The son fixed her with his shrewd gray eyes. 
 "And you the woman who figured in the story that 
 made him damn me he does not dream? Look 
 here " he broke in suddenly "your husband? 
 Did you ever tell him all?" 
 
 "Yes. But not the man. He knows the circum- 
 stance. He is something of a dreamer an idealist 
 in some things a tolerance as broad as all this 
 land. He knows some man lifted me a child of 
 Polish peasants that through him I grasped at life 
 lifted myself from the brute." She shivered 
 curiously in a large luxuriance. "I went South 
 with him once to the cotton mills your father owns 
 and which Doctor Ennisley is trying to use as an ex- 
 periment of his reforms. I saw the immigrants 
 pouring in there alien, ignorant, degraded to be 
 crushed by the mills, by this America which they 
 thought meant life, hope all that the old world had 
 denied them, the beaten people. And, Herford, I 
 thought of you. I shuddered. I closed my eyes and 
 turned away. It was you who saved me from some- 
 thing of that kind the sweat-shops, mills, the peas- 
 ant women in the fields yes, you it was you gave 
 me my life!" 
 
 He was mute at the feeling in her voice ; then he 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 23 
 
 said : "And you a foreign woman, what has the 
 New World meant to you ?" 
 
 "I have told you. Peace rest after the fight 
 The love of a good man a place in life." 
 
 "Have you children ?' r 
 
 "No. We've been married three years. He has 
 a child by his first wife who, it seems, was a country 
 girl from Iowa a scared little thing. My husband 
 is a fanatic about some things the coming of the 
 races to America is one. He dreams of a great new 
 type the fusing of the blood of all the peoples 
 you should hear him talk of it." 
 
 "He married you," the man went on, "to mate 
 that clear. He saw you a beautiful animal a 
 woman of the people he saw in you a mother for 
 his new America." 
 
 She looked attentively at him. He went on, throw- 
 ing back his head to watch her calm face : "I have 
 a magician's crystal." He raised his upper lip in 
 that sardonic suggestion of a smile. "I hold bits 
 of the world to the light and look at them through 
 it. It is astonishing I call it truth. And here you 
 are clean as a cat by a fire. Large-bodied, com- 
 fortable, much pleased with the beauty you have 
 carried past thirty. You are a trifle stout, your neck 
 a bit full no matter it lends to the peculiar pan- 
 ther luxuriance you carry. Clean as a cat, luxuri- 
 antly content, voluptuously healthy, able, easy, 
 rounded, unstirred and once, a child, I thought I 
 saw in you " 
 
24 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 He broke off; he was staring without. 
 
 "Yes?'' she went on with a smile "Indeed?" 
 
 "No matter. There are some things my crystal 
 seems riot to make clear. I rub the glass and 
 wonder it is the things denied that interest one. 
 Well, I can't blame you to seize the good about you 
 and lie back cropful, content. Life cuts you women 
 cruelly sometimes. You have, indeed, to be cats, to 
 fight back wildly, piteously ineffective. No, I can't 
 blame you you women to be full and by a fire is 
 better than lean, shawled, ugly before your time. 
 I know. I have been a tramp on the road I know 
 the long way. I've seen the under side. I've been 
 worked in a chain-gang along with a nigger in 
 Brazil and had the blood drop off my fingers into the 
 stuff they gave us to eat at night. In this country 
 I once tramped through the South and I worked at 
 Rand's mills." 
 
 She turned on him in horror: "You your 
 father's mills!" 
 
 "Rolled cotton bales in the mill yard. I was there 
 ten days. I can remember the red clay road to the 
 shanties, the dust whirling along the gaunt brick 
 walls when nigger carts went by, and the little beasts 
 pouring out from the weave rooms. Eh, and I've 
 seen their rat faces dumb, thin, turned at me " 
 
 "Good God!" she cried, "be still!" 
 
 "Eh ? I remember once, His Honor, the Justice, 
 wished me to come to take charge of his interests in 
 the South, for an absentee landlord is never quite 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 25 
 
 sure. Yes, he would have forgiven me once if I'd 
 have come back to help break little animals in his cot- 
 ton mills." He turned to her with an outthrust 
 of his unshaven chin : "I recall now that once I read 
 a magazine article written by Corbett Ennisley on 
 Rand's mills the child workers, the mill-town 
 shanties. It was touchingly pictured and had a 
 fervent peroration about the brotherhood of men. 
 Here, this man you married what road has he come 
 to learn his wisdom?" 
 
 "He has given his life work to it he is known as 
 an authority." 
 
 "A line of ghosts from the loom rooms to the 
 shanties from the shanties to the looms. Eight 
 hundred, always, night and day and the great 
 wheels whirring always whirring the black 
 smoke drifting across the sky. The red dust of 
 the roadside and the stink along the unshaded lanes 
 eh, this college preacher of a brotherhood has 
 this ever bitten his soul ?" 
 
 She studied him in silence, his deep voice ceasing. 
 She tried to go back the years, to remember him, a 
 fresh-eyed, buoyant clergyman, too full, too ardent, 
 too eager for life's filling of the cup. She saw now 
 the unwieldy figure, the heavy face, the mocker's lips 
 his rough blue shirt unbuttoned at the throat, a 
 stain of earth across the bronzed flesh. She remem- 
 bered his trick of phrasing, the poetizing with which 
 he ever used to clothe his speech. She was trying to 
 visualize again a child's dream. 
 
26 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 In the pause the carriage stopped by a gate along 
 which was a high iron fence grotesque and old on 
 a coping. From it ran a walk of blue and yellow 
 ancient tiles on either side of which was a sward 
 severely plain. Rand's house set in this with the 
 bulk of a dock, a look of waiting, crouched, bulldog 
 stubborn, the windows staring, unwinking, sinister. 
 Banked by the respectable boarding-houses of small 
 managers, higher clerks, students and the like, each 
 with its flight of steps to the tesselated vestibule 
 floor and colored glass door, the judge's home 
 lingered on from a pretentious era of the seventies, 
 the only detached house along the decent stretch of 
 asphalt; its lawn and walk, the stone dog in the 
 front, its roofs and porticoes lending the air of a 
 dirty gem, but real, to a cheap ring. And 
 west from La Salle Avenue the sloven town shuffled 
 off to the sodden manner of the poor. The avenue 
 had none of Chicago's glut and battle; with its 
 young elms and marginal green, and three decent 
 church spires against the dun-streaked sky it was 
 tamely enough arrayed. 
 
 But Rand's house, beyond its black and rusty 
 fence, in its forlorn distinction, heeded nothing 
 you would have picked it as, in fact it was, the refuge 
 of a recluse, a broken spirit. When the carriage 
 stopped, the wife turned in intent study of the son. 
 
 "Rand," she whispered, "I had forgotten. I have 
 brought you here did you wish it do you want 
 to go in?" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 27 
 
 "Wish it? Who has a better right? It's mine." 
 
 "Your father " she looked at him incredulously, 
 "do you dare ?" 
 
 He had opened the door and was out before the 
 coachman could descend. The man looked at him 
 amazed, the rough blue shirt collar upturned above 
 his miner's coat. Demetra Ennisley followed; she 
 looked about at the vacant street, the silent house, 
 the level, ancient sward, young green in April, all 
 under the astonishing brilliance of the sun. "Drive 
 back to the church," she said to Terance. "Bring 
 Mrs. Ennisley I could not wait for her. The serv- 
 ice should be out by twelve at most." 
 
 The old man nodded, gathering his lines, still 
 looking amazedly at his hitherto unseen passenger. 
 He turned the vehicle and was off on the smooth 
 way. 
 
 The woman said : "You've killed a man, and your 
 father is justice of the supreme court. You see this, 
 don't you? Hadn't you better devise some other 
 meeting a reconciliation " 
 
 He checked her patiently: "Did you think I'd 
 come home to whine and beg? I'm a better man 
 than he or his kind. I am more just, kind, true. 
 I have, my dear lady, held myself up to the magic- 
 ian's globe and looked through." And then his com- 
 posure dropped to the opening note: "And I'm 
 home, tired of the road, the station houses, the dirty 
 blankets they give you, and the grub. I'm not afraid 
 to face him. Money, I want it it's power. I want 
 
28 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 to fight as my class can fight. I've seen the other 
 side I know the beaten people." 
 
 Her calm belied her, she seemed considering some 
 other matter with patient and simple sincerity. 
 
 "If you're here, my life is in your hands, I sup- 
 pose. You can wreck it everything. And you gave 
 me my chance at everything you kept me like a 
 brother would. I couldn't understand ; I was a child, 
 dreaming. Now, one wonders what you'll do." 
 
 He looked down at her from the step in an ascetic 
 humor. "One wonders what's in you worth saving. 
 See here " the big form on its agile legs came 
 nearer, he stooped in a sudden cunning to watch her 
 face "once you loved me whatever that is." 
 He stepped nearer : "See here answer me." 
 "Yes," she answered simply. "A child." 
 He reflected upon it with the air of a schoolmas- 
 ter. "Undoubtedly I could bring it back if I desired. 
 Eh? It might be an experiment of some interest if 
 time hung heavy here." Then he turned with his 
 inconsequential humor: "Come on in the house. 
 Let's hunt up that old turkey, the justice, and ruffle 
 him by a sight of the prodigal returned. Watch him 
 gabble when he sees me!" 
 
 "Rand," the wife retorted, "are you mad?" 
 "I," he said airily, "am the one person in the 
 world who acts on pure reason. I am the lone fol- 
 lower of truth." 
 
 With a strange patience she followed to the 
 house. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE woman paused again at the vestibule. The 
 April sky had a threat of cloud. 
 
 'There's much you don't know/' she began with 
 a show of indifference. "It's a poor time at best for 
 your return. There's a strike in the Alabama mills. 
 Mr. Ennisley has just returned from a conference 
 with the mill owners trying to win some concession 
 for the operatives. And your father is greatly wor- 
 ried he's been much harrassed there's a fear of 
 violence. And you?" She went on seriously as 
 one giving disinterested and grave counsel, "Your 
 swagger bitterness your inconceivable way of 
 stirring hatred." 
 
 "Let the fools fight it out it's none of my affair. 
 Here I am home hungry run down by the police. 
 When a man's hungry what does he care for some 
 claptrap of profit in a cotton mill? If a man's 
 hungry, feed him if he's cold, warm him if these 
 little rats in the mills are crying out for something, 
 give it them. Who are we to say another shall go 
 hungry or wear rags and crawl about any sort of 
 master?" 
 
 She evaded him; she went on indifferently: 
 29 
 
30 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 " You've hated the mills ; my husband has fought to 
 raise them given his life to them. He's endan- 
 gered his position at the university to plead for the 
 child labor laws his radical speeches and attacks 
 on the industrial system." 
 
 "A good man mewling about among the poli- 
 ticians and the money-makers for the right to live. 
 Has he ever slept in a station house with a rag of 
 a quilt over him and his brother man and gone out 
 the next day tramping the road ?" 
 
 She checked some revolt and went on: "Doctor 
 Ennisley has fought big odds the mill owners, the 
 newspapers, the courts. He was about to get a 
 hundred thousand dollars from Judge Rand to build 
 a training school for the child operatives a great 
 experiment when this strike came on. This very 
 week is the crisis of all he's hoped for!" 
 
 The son laughed; he had opened the door and 
 pushed through unwelcomed to the dark hall. "The 
 old man giving money to his beggars? Good God, 
 what's happened? I think it has been you you 
 know men well. You used to have a way of 
 getting things from them." 
 
 With no word she followed. / She wondered at 
 herself, subdued before him, she with her seeming 
 dominance, irradiating to others her completeness. 
 She had told herself years ago that she had forgot- 
 ten that now it was nothing that once, a child of 
 sixteen in a London private school, she had cried 
 night long because this man had left her with a 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 31 
 
 mere shake of the hand, uncaring that her cheeks 
 burned, that she could not still her heart-beats in his 
 presence. He had given much and asked nothing; 
 she had indeed, when the world disclosed its ways 
 in her later life, marveled what manner of man he 
 was. Now he was back, the enigma still. 
 
 Within the gloom of the hall an old serving-man 
 was staring at the new-comer ; a cry quavered from 
 him. 
 
 "Bullock, you're still alive. I recall that you 
 closed this door on me when I left the same gar- 
 goyle's head on you as now. I suppose if I should 
 come a hundred years from now they'd have it 
 stuffed and mounted in the hall to scare me off. You 
 hated me." 
 
 He turned and went down the high long hall with 
 its two oil portraits dim on a cheerless wall. At the 
 library door he looked back to see the old servant 
 with shaking hands on the inlaid brass monsters 
 of the door-knob. In the closing the grotesque 
 sleeping shapes flashed ; he remembered how, in his 
 boyish loneliness in this house, he had always asso- 
 ciated their judging evil with the door man's skinny, 
 blotched fingers they had jeered at youth He 
 looked about the dark library ; in these same reflect- 
 ing oaken and glass panels he had seen his boy's face 
 give back the dread of the silent room. Now a 
 man's face was staring here, his youth done, flung 
 away as found, idle treasure. The place rebuked 
 him. From a gilt, ancient frame the portrait of his 
 
32 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 dead brother, Donald, watched him as of old; his 
 mother's, farther away across the long table, peered 
 at him, the canvas presentment with the pallor of 
 the coffined. The cases with their heavy volumes, 
 the cold prisms of the chandeliers of pendant crys- 
 tals now as always, the house judged him and 
 despised. 
 
 He turned from his mute study to stir the low 
 fire ; to find the wife looking at him from the door. 
 
 "And you," he said, "live here? I'd as lief be in 
 a tomb" 
 
 "Be still," she answered; "your father is here." 
 
 Rand awaited the footfall on the berugged floor 
 of the hall. His father came from the shadow. He 
 must have seen the other from above; he had no 
 word, no gesture an old man, frail of form, a grim, 
 smooth-shaven pallor, a judicial strength, a sort of 
 nobleness that made the expectant disdain of his face 
 a cruel thing to see. They looked across the room 
 at each other, father and son, the blood in each 
 seemed dead. They had corrupted each the other 
 from an apex of hate long passed; the renegade 
 preacher of the Word had destroyed the elder's 
 faith in it through the years he had hardened to 
 the world. The justice had come to be an au- 
 tomaton of the law's expression; he symbolized 
 the impassive majesty, the terror of its spiritual 
 hereditament. To expect from his lips other than 
 the pitiless exactness, the penetration of justice, as 
 the soul of man could find it, was to expect that 
 
' On whose welcome have you come ? " 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 33 
 
 the stars would shower violets upon the moon to 
 hide its nakedness. He stood, The Law. 
 
 He spoke at last, a quavering that was of age, and 
 not surprise: "You have come. I might ask on 
 whose welcome to this "house ?" 
 
 There was the slightest trace of a bow in the son's 
 move, a smile on his lips. "I did not expect wel- 
 come. Only, perhaps a place for the night such as 
 your stablemen would offer a tramp. And I'm 
 hungry and a tramp would be fed." 
 
 The justice turned to Mrs. Ennisley. A pitying 
 terror was on her that they could be so calm, that 
 they could be so simple. Between them lay the brute 
 truth and they did not flinch. In silence she heard 
 the windy whip off the April lake stir the ancient 
 outer shutters. The clouds had spread treacherously 
 far and swift with a menace of rain within the hour. 
 
 "You'll see that he is fed? You are the mistress 
 of this house in such matters." 
 
 "John Bride will dine with you, I suppose," she 
 said quietly. "He always comes Sunday afternoons 
 and Thursday nights. Do you wish " she hesi- 
 tated "the table set for more than two ?" 
 
 "The coming of this man," the justice said evenly, 
 "has made no difference in the slightest matter. 
 John Bride and I dine alone at the usual hour." 
 
 The outcast had listened to the name. Stephen 
 Rand had turned to go when he followed, speaking 
 lightly, even in some grave good humor. "A moment 
 and only this : A place to sleep to-night because it's 
 
34 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 coming to storm and something to eat, because 
 I'm hungry. My belly calls, and so would yours 
 if you'd knocked about for fifteen hundred miles on 
 freight sidings and train yards, looking this way and 
 that, like a hunted wolf." 
 
 "As you wish," the old man's voice was court- 
 eously uncurious, "I am not concerned with your 
 comings or goings. There is food for you." 
 
 Rand watched him go. After the pause he fol- 
 lowed Mrs. Ennisley to the dining-room, where she 
 touched a button, summoning a maid. The stranger 
 looked about at the servant with his detached smile. 
 "A decent-looking girl. That's strange in this house 
 there was always a staff of mummies here there 
 was something that grew them old and yellowed." 
 He sat down and drew the slouch hat from his broad 
 forehead: "Eh well! Let's eat and drink and be 
 done with it. I thought he'd at least take me in. 
 The wind's up it'll be a damned rough night, and 
 I don't care who feeds me one man or the other." 
 He made an impatient gesture to the maid who 
 stood staring it his blue shirt, the collar upturned : 
 "Now bring rr*at and bread bring stuff that gives 
 a man action it's a damned cold night I'll go back 
 to." 
 
 Demetra watched him presently as he drank 
 hungrily, with no note of her. Gross, absorbed, 
 with animal intent, he ate. But after a while he 
 looked up, the first keen hurt satisfied, and seeing 
 her eyes on him across the table, laughed : "This is 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 35 
 
 an adventure for you. I kill a man in Colorado 
 because they'd bull-penned me I beat a way to Chi- 
 cago and a man who used to know me in Sonora, 
 now a watchman in the yards, tips me off to the 
 police. I dodge them forty hours and am driven 
 into a carriage to meet Demetra and home, to sit 
 here at the old man's board at his meat and wine. 
 O, the devil ! Never tell me that the game's not 
 worth while! Who's lived as I've lived?" 
 
 He rose and went to the long windows looking at 
 the naked ivy clinging to the wall of the house 
 across the sward, a sheer, windowless wall of this 
 decadent street, where Rand's house sat sullen in 
 a world of clerklings' rooming-places. He looked 
 back then, at her ; his restless eyes lit. 
 
 "His Honor he whom they proclaim the just 
 and great tell me something of him." 
 
 "I think, beneath it all, there are times when he 
 wishes to forgive you." 
 
 "Forgive me? Eh, for what? For being the 
 happier man? This one they set up in a silk 
 robe to judge his betters he forgive me? Who's 
 the man of us two I with never a moment in 
 twelve years when I could not swing everything I 
 owned on my back and set off on the road with it, or 
 this old man squatted here croaking law for others 
 and coining flesh into money at his mills? What's 
 his tribe to me? I have been beyond all that." 
 
 "That is like you your old wild talk." She 
 watched him with slow absorption that her show 
 
36 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 of indifference could not hide. "Here you have 
 come back where I've found peace." 
 
 "Peace? A cat's peace by the fire." He came to 
 her as she sat by the white cloth, leaned to her, his 
 marvel of a voice low : "See here they'll ask you 
 where you picked me up you will have to say I 
 stopped you at the gate, or something like that. 
 Naturally, you dare not admit you ever knew me." 
 
 "No." 
 
 "I thought as much. Well, lie then, as suits you. 
 I hate a lie, but now and then the fashion of your 
 tribe is to be followed. To eat when one's hungry, 
 and drink, and draw out of the storm when it wets 
 one to stand upright and feel strong in the sun, 
 fearing nothing to love and hate but simply, as 
 truth is Good Lord, it's simple, but how hard to 
 live among you with it !" 
 
 "That's like you," she repeated, "I heard all this 
 before bewildered by it then now " 
 
 "What, then?" 
 
 "Who could understand? Truth? I think you 
 are an empty bottle with the wind whistling through 
 it. I think " she muttered, staring at him, her 
 voice now swift, smiting, "you yourself are the 
 most incredible falsehood !" 
 
 He bent lower, his complacent cunning on her, 
 his sure voice about her as a net : "And this De- 
 metra! When I saw you a child, I thought there 
 was a wonderful thing in you, the thing that might 
 have made me a poet I wrote verses then do you 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 37 
 
 remember? God knows I do it yet sometimes in 
 the back rooms of working-men's saloons or along 
 the open road! Yes, sometimes I've loved a thing 
 and carried it until it was worn out and then threw 
 the bit of paper in the air, to the ground, and let it 
 rot. The best things are not printed nor painted nor 
 sung." 
 
 "Ah, you " she cried, "I remember!" 
 "Well, here we are. You have come to be com- 
 mon enough and I thought I saw in you the won- 
 derful comrade light and joy and soul. I could 
 stand in delight and watch a miracle. Eh, well 
 here we are. Can you see a sort of boy's face lit 
 with all that in this, now a gambler's bullet under 
 my jaw, a dirty shirt, fat, well on the way? You 
 have come to be common enough yourself, a trifle 
 fat and more than thirty. Eh, let me tell you some- 
 thing keep your good looks as long as you can. A 
 pretty woman is infinitely more interesting than a 
 plain one. The ugly sister falls back, she accepts, 
 deprecatingly she tries to please with a dilettante 
 false offering to life, to defy a cruelty of nature. 
 She can not come to us with a challenge ; the mission 
 of beauty is its sex appeal. Nature, the old devil, 
 knew what she was about, but you'd better assist 
 her all you can. Can't you contrive to keep from 
 being fat?" 
 
 "I am content." She had listened to his garrulity ; 
 always he had loved to talk, silence a thing not to be 
 endured. He was ever pricking the bubble and blow- 
 
38 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 ing the next but she wondered now at her accept- 
 ance. "I've married a good man I'm helping him. 
 I'm contented." 
 
 "Yes, as women are. A round of getting up, rub- 
 bing the sleep from your eyes, at breakfast in a 
 wrapper while the good man reads his paper. Then 
 a call or shopping or about the house, and to bed 
 at night snug, warm, cared for like a cow, clean 
 as a cat by a fire. Content as women are." 
 
 "What have you done with life? A tramp here 
 at your father's table? Home after the wreck of it 
 all? Your mother's fortune thrown to the wind? 
 Hating law, society incomprehensible? I think I 
 understand much that used to bewilder me the old 
 days when I think you loved me." 
 
 "The old days when I said I did." 
 
 She stirred; she laughed slightly; she drew, before 
 his watching, her sensuousness : "Tell me," she said, 
 "what was I to you?" 
 
 "A harp I thought some day I'd carry you about 
 to play on. But I tired of you I was right. Now, 
 you're common enough." 
 
 "Yes?" Her stealth taunted him. 
 
 "You women, all of you, are eaten with an itch 
 money, place, to have the eyes of men follow you, to 
 love." 
 
 "Is that a crime, then?" 
 
 "That's all you live for that is the secret of all 
 your heroisms. A woman will grind her fingers off 
 for love, but the greater thing that is beyond her." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 39 
 
 "The greater thing?" she leaned to him, her show 
 of complacence stirred: "What's that?" 
 
 "A thing men know. To go out in the daric to- 
 gether a hand to a comrade asking nothing. To 
 love without gift, without profit, without passion." 
 
 She was stilled, then asked curiously: "And no 
 woman does this?" 
 
 "For love you will give all. That is your temple 
 that is where you stop and dwell. But to give 
 all and ask nothing the greater thing is beyond 
 you." 
 
 , The wife rose and went to look from the window 
 at the gray spring clouds massing above the lake. 
 She came back presently, changed, a smiling, eager 
 mood, as one ready to play an intimate, friendly 
 game. 
 
 "Tell me, Herford, am I changed? Am I tHe 
 little ignorant Polish girl whom you picked up to 
 send to school, to learn gentle ways, to prove herself, 
 to live and be all all?" 
 
 He looked over the September ripeness of Her 
 body, her indolent smile conscious, full, daring with 
 power in the game. 
 
 "Changed much! You were then a thing of 
 dreams a suggestion of driving power in you a 
 dramatic dominance to come." 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 "I remember so little. I have tried to forget, but 
 I owe you much. A girl in a Galician village I 
 remember the hideous wooden shoes the women 
 
40 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 wore to the fields the toad-like figures of the 
 women " she checked herself, drawing a sharp 
 breath. "The other day, on Wabash Avenue, I 
 saw a picture of Millet's. I went into the shop and 
 asked to see the print and I took it to the front 
 again and tore it up, threw it in the street. And I 
 went out without paying for it I hated to remem- 
 ber. Ah, well !" He had listened with acute atten- 
 tion. "I suppose I would be that or worse if 
 you'd not given me a chance at life. Sometimes I 
 think of Poland my little brothers and sisters 
 Joseph, Stanislaus, little Marta Ludovic. I have 
 almost forgotten the tongue! And then, after you 
 came and went, I got on, some way I had a driv- 
 ing power as you say. And no matter, now this 
 is the new world and a woman must find her life 
 live, love. I'm happy." 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "No." He leaned to her, and laughed, a satiric 
 melody. 
 
 "Yes," she repeated steadily. "I accept. I think 
 of nothing, regret nothing. A woman can go to the 
 devil in spite of all the good in her; and a man can 
 save himself in spite of all his evil that's our 
 piteous disadvantage. You said we had to fight back 
 as cats fight we do. But I've found my place. 
 A woman can make wonderful compromises with 
 life she has to do it." 
 
 "A mollusk clinging to a rock. Common 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 41 
 
 enough bought with a ring and some women's 
 stuff contented. That's a woman's compromise, 
 yes." 
 
 "Well, I'm the wife, now the American wife 
 contented. And you, Rand, always the poseur, filled 
 with magnificent vanities. What have you given? 
 YouVe loved nothing, helped nothing. There's not 
 a soul that cares whether you live or die." 
 
 Across the table in the stillness he watched her. 
 Then, abruptly, he rose. "Where's my hat?" 
 
 "On the floor where you laid it. You're going?" 
 
 He looked down from under the range-beaten 
 brim, the shadow of a grimace on his priest's mouth. 
 "Yes." 
 
 She glanced to the window : "It's raining now 
 it's beginning to storm." 
 
 "I want the storm. It's honest." 
 
 The wife watched him upturning the collar of his 
 rough coat. He slipped the blue automatic pistol 
 from one pocket to the other to ease its pressure on 
 his leg. 
 
 She came nearer and said clearly : "You've killed 
 a man. If you go on the street you may be caught. 
 That would be a bad thing you, son of Stephen 
 Rand, of the supreme court." 
 
 He laughed now loudly: "And is that of what 
 you were thinking? And your fat berth by the fire 
 your husband your tabby content you'd not 
 like it endangered by me, eh? That's your solici- 
 tude?" 
 
42 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 She looked steadily at him ; she felt in command : 
 "I've come through much. I've made my place. 
 I'm the wife now the American wife." 
 
 He noted curiously the incisive foreign accent of 
 her perfect English; she had indeed nothing to recall 
 another life than this and her odd oriency, her 
 Byzantine maturity, rich, complete, a cosmopolite. 
 
 "Eh ?" He gave a grudging banter of admiration : 
 "And I worked the miracle of you? You'd be a 
 peasant in the fields, or, if you'd come to America, 
 a slattern immigrant woman in some sweat-shop, or 
 a miner's wife in some Slav coal town in Pennsyl- 
 vania, or an ill-smelling girl of the weave rooms in 
 Rand's mills in northern Alabama. Good God and 
 you overbear me with the imperious will of a line 
 of emperors! I was the juggler of fate, eh? I was 
 a wonder-worker who held you up to his crystal, 
 shook the ball till it dazzled and at once see the 
 American wife, rich, a Sybarite, the air of an em- 
 press !" 
 
 His young-old face dropped its mask ; he had the 
 pleasure, one would have guessed, of a maker of 
 intricate and beautiful toys, or a collector of curios, 
 in finding for his pains an exquisite and unexpected 
 virtu. 
 
 "Eh, well!" he went on, "it is a good role the 
 juggler. It is simple, too. When I'm happy, I 
 sing; when I'm sad, I weep; when the rain wets me, 
 I shiver; and when men wrong me, I curse. And 
 when I find a flower by me, I look into its heart. I 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 43 
 
 would write the poem greater than the Iliad, only it 
 would be fool's work to put it on paper. It would be 
 common enough to put the blaze and marvel of life 
 between cardboards." 
 
 She listened in odd patience. He went on, disre- 
 garding her, through the dim hall and out into the 
 windy afternoon. Once she cried to him, but he did 
 not seem to hear. She saw him go down the old 
 walk between the plain grass spaces, open the heavy 
 black gate and step to the pavement. 
 
 Without the coping Rand came upon a little old 
 man trying to force a huge umbrella into the wind 
 which was flicking the first drops of rain out of the 
 east The old man looked up; he broke to glad sur- 
 prise. 
 
 "Herford man! They said ye'd come! Home 
 lad!" 
 
 "And going again. Brother John you old 
 croaker not a line changed!" 
 
 John Bride laughed; he cleared his long white 
 underbeard from his red chops; his cheek smooth, 
 clear as a girl's. His fair eyes twinkled. 
 
 "Hearty, lad, as when I dandled ye in the old east 
 room of a Sunday visit. D'ye mind? More than 
 thirty years four and thirty six and thirty 
 Hoo! It's good to see ye!" 
 
 "You dine here to-day, I take it." 
 
 "Every Sunday and every Thursday night for 
 biUiards wi' Stephen. We have no missed it a week 
 since sixty-two unless he was wi'oot the city." 
 
44 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "You have queer taste, John Bride to dine here. 
 But you had a soul in you you stood between me 
 and many a bad break when I was a cub when they 
 were trying to hammer divinity into me. And I 
 was fool enough to let them." 
 
 Brother John laughed softly, fighting on with his 
 cotton umbrella. 
 
 "Boy, where awa'? Ye must have jist come." 
 
 "I don't know. It's a little matter." 
 
 " Ye'r leaving this dour day ? See here wouldn't 
 Stephie see ye ?" 
 
 "Stephie and I can see more than we desire in 
 less time than this." 
 
 John laughed again, his soft ringing chuckle. 
 
 "There was never much need of speech atween ye. 
 Come on, man. Walk a bit it'll start the blood 
 and then we'll have a bit of Scotch when we get 
 home. Ye can smell the smoke o' the peat in it." 
 
 But at the corner the younger man stopped: 
 "There are reasons why you'd better not." 
 
 "Hoo, man! Ye'r Stephen's first-born and ye'r 
 blood o' mine. I canna see a cousin's youngster put 
 off so." 
 
 Rand watched him narrowly. "You what's in 
 you? I'm not the lad I was nor the man either." 
 
 "I never was scared off by ye'r daft talk. No 
 honest man's afeard o' ye." 
 
 They went on from the precise bareness of La 
 Salle Avenue, westward across the hushed Sun- 
 day traffic of meaner streets, leading on to the tene- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 43 
 
 ments and dreary walls of warehouses under the 
 somber clouds. 
 
 "Look here " Rand had grown alert, his eyes 
 keen on each passer-by, and warily intent on a police- 
 man on a passing car 'Svhere are we going?" 
 
 "A bit on. By the railroad a block from the big 
 new school/' 
 
 "You live in this sort of place?" 
 
 "On a bit. They're most foreigners. Ye see the 
 block beyond ? I built it a grand property, housin' 
 forty families. Man, they're all sorts there Jews, 
 Irish, Swedish women, Italians and south of Europe 
 folk. It's a babel on rent day. And wi' the toddlers 
 pourin' out o' the big new school twice each day 
 it's a fearsome crossin' wi' sixty trains a day. I'm 
 flagman there." 
 
 Rand stopped him : "Brother John, have you lost 
 your money?" 
 
 "Lord love ye, I was never richer. That grand 
 property housin' forty families I built it. It's 
 my idea for the men in the gas houses and the yards 
 beyond. I rooted out the worst rookery in the city 
 this side the river to put it up." 
 
 They had come across from the red brick, three- 
 story apartment building stretching the entire block 
 from a dingy saloon corner to where the railroad 
 blocked the other end. There were six entrances up 
 flights of bare, well-kept stairs and above bulging 
 bays caught the sunshine from the dirty air. Across 
 from it a gaunt warehouse wall rose. The big new 
 
46 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 school-house was beyond the railroad crossing, 
 where it stood sharply against the wilderness of 
 tenements, of blackened small factories and the gas 
 tanks red, slurred in the failing afternoon. 
 
 "See here;" Rand asked again, "you said you 
 were flagman? I remember that you helped build 
 that road. When I was at Lake Park Academy you 
 were, I think, on the board of directors, John Bride." 
 
 "No doubt. There're divideends waitin' me this 
 quarter. I stretched legs under the vice-president's 
 round table last week, smoking his good cigar. Eh, 
 what are ye starin' at ?" 
 
 "That you're some sort of fool yet. You flag 
 the crossing?" 
 
 "Four years ago the St. Paul Limited ran down 
 six youngsters on this crossin' on their way from the 
 big school. They're a poor folk about and the wailin' 
 of the foreign mothers ... it was hard, man. I 
 investigated it personally I put this bit o' road 
 through before I had the Scotch burr out o' my 
 tongue a braw chick of an engineer. Well, the 
 foreign women wailin' and the men mutterin' it 
 was a bad crossin' and the grades are not yet where 
 they should be. I was out o' harness, lad old an' 
 alone and that's a bad thing. Eh, can ye under- 
 stand ? I was the first constructing engineer o' the 
 road, the first superinteendent, .man. I put it oot 
 fra all the West all the thousands of miles before 
 they merged us. Can ye see? I couldn't give it up. 
 I wanted to go in harness. And after the Limited 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 47 
 
 plowed through the bairns on their way from school 
 I asked the board to make me flagman, as I was to 
 live in the apartments I'd built just there. The board 
 laughed me down. Weel, I jist went on the super- 
 intendent of division had to appoint me. The board 
 called me daft, but I get my forty dollars a month 
 a flagman. 5 ' 
 
 "You sit in this box and warn people off the road 
 the road you hold stock in? Is that it, Brother 
 John?" 
 
 "There's more than a man's profit I get divi- 
 deends, but there's that beyond a man's profit. It 
 was na for that we put it oot to a' the Northwest." 
 
 "Eh?" 
 
 "There's service. The road made me, man this 
 mighty America made me. I came from Edinboro 
 an immigrant in steerage, penniless as any that walks 
 the street, comin' to find my cousin, Stephen. Ye'r 
 line had been from Linlithgow for two hundred 
 years, but blood is strong i' the North we'd kept the 
 connection. And ye'r father put me, a raw cub of a 
 student surveyor, to railroading. That's how I came 
 to mother this bit o' track and beyond west, man, 
 west! That was auld John Bride's service 
 drivin' it oot through snow and desert, and through 
 forty years watchin' it grow the road, and on it the 
 people came pourin' all the peoples. Lord love ye, 
 man, I've stood by the track mony a day, the red 
 flag in my hand with the same auld thrill a train 
 comes up frae the heart o' the town and roarin' off 
 
48 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 to the West bearin' the mony peoples. I'll stand 
 here 'til I drop, lad in harness. I'm na useless 
 yet wi' the flag in my hands, servin' as the road 
 serves. There's that beyond a man's profit." 
 
 The son's eyes were on John Bride as he stood 
 that day, a blink of the sun breaking the April 
 clouds and lighting his reddened face, his old eyes 
 on the right of way. There, between the dun and 
 mighty walls of the city's commerce, under the over- 
 hanging cloud above Chicago, this gorged meeting- 
 place, the glut of races, the crucible, ran the 
 road, the shining rails curving to the Northwest. 
 Spanning the land to sea, spreading to right, to left, 
 it came, pouring the exhaustless treasure of blood, 
 the long-pent myriads, the beaten people of the 
 defeated races, on to the mighty making, the illimit- 
 able ages of their destiny. 
 
 In the murk above the wet cinders a far switch- 
 man had hung a red lamp. The stranger watched it 
 as the old man cleaned his feet at the stair nearest 
 the road's crossing. 
 
 "Come up come up " said John Bride. 
 
 "See here," Rand answered, "it's best you know 
 I've killed a man." 
 
 "Come up," John Bride repeated. "It's wet, 
 wi'oot." 
 
 "You fool," the hunted man retorted, "I killed 
 Marty, the guard. You'd best not shelter me." 
 
 "I heard ye. ... Come on." 
 
 At the top of the stairs the old man opened the 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 49 
 
 door to the narrow hall of a flat. They went along 
 this passage past dark little rooms to the one that 
 seemed a dining-room. It had a round table, chairs, 
 a littered sideboard, all seeming cheaply pretentious, 
 middle-classy, an attempt at woodcarvers' ornate- 
 ness, suggesting the department store displays. The 
 host lit the gas, and bustled about with his coat and 
 rubbers. The guest sat down in silence, staring at 
 the crude, bright tinting of the walls, a calendar the 
 sole decoration. The single window looked on a 
 very clean white airshaft and across this, at an ob- 
 tuse angle was another facing. This window, in 
 the blur of the rainy evening, was a patch of uncer- 
 tain light, across which a shadow moved. 
 
 "You've a neighbor," said Rand "a woman. I 
 don't like them about. Who is she?" 
 
 "A bit of a quiet girl. A Jew girl who does type- 
 writing for the professor at the big house." 
 
 "Ennisley ?" Rand started, turning to him. 
 
 "Yes, the cracked socialist professor the papers 
 are caterwauling about. This Louise goes there 
 each day. She got his attention by teaching some 
 of the children hereabout that work days. I gave 
 her the basement and put in fifty chairs to start. It's > 
 a fine night school now, but she's gone wi' the pro- 
 fessor to bigger work. She's a great-eyed quiet 
 girl I think a bit daft on reforming matters." 
 
 "It's a queer place for a woman to live alone." 
 
 "I give her the flat cheap. She can keep an eye 
 on the class of Slavs she started, and she'd rather 
 
50 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 be here. She comes and goes, a still pleasant body- 
 lonely, I doubt not, except for her work. A foreign 
 born girl there's none aboot me but new peoples, 
 pushin' in, eager, quarrelin' God listen to the mony 
 tongues of them ! Hoo, this Chicago ! The marvel 
 of it. ... Ye'r of an auld line of America, man 
 if there is such. Two hundred years of it and be- 
 yond that, Scotch blood till the time of Bruce and 
 on. Ye'r line has fought every war the land saw. 
 It built on west and west wi' the frontier. But ye'r 
 day's done here's the new people pourin' along the 
 road." 
 
 The other man listened indifferently, watching 
 the shadow on the window light across, the spatter 
 of the rain making it a field of gold, a translucent 
 crystal, hung now in darkness. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ENNISLEY dropped his traveling-case by the 
 door of the rooms given to their indefinite 
 stay in Stephen Rand's house ; he turned, still in his 
 wet light overcoat, to his wife; he kissed her and 
 then held her off, his eyes shining with their grate- 
 ful, hungry pleasure. 
 
 "Demetra! You waited for me! It's very late. 
 The train was delayed at Grand Crossing hours. I 
 put in every minute, though, over the notes. How's 
 my little Tad? how's mother?" 
 
 She smiled back at his eager eyes going now 
 around the warm-lit room. There was ever this 
 pathos about the man reaching to her in his ardent 
 fashion to her, and to his home-spot for surcease, 
 shelter, sympathy. His sturdy youngish figure, his 
 fine brown-bearded face, its earnest eyes a trifle sad 
 with the detached self-centering of the dreamer, 
 the brow high, white, the stubborn hair a clean 
 boy's way of greeting one, of meeting issues openly, 
 simply ; this had been the spell he cast, this had been 
 his success. The dreaming had bred action, he had, 
 indeed, "come up fighting," his face had compact 
 purpose; he was an idealist capable of fanatical 
 
 51 
 
52 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 tenacity and with faiths at odd variance with the 
 scientific quality of his mind; it was this union that 
 made his class-room lectures of such absorbing inter- 
 est to the attentive young thought of the university. 
 He was not patient nor politic ; he could be Jesuitical 
 in his radical utterances, he could clothe them in a 
 waspish brilliance. It was this that had pushed him 
 to the forefront of every problem engaging him; he 
 was superbly alive to the importance of modernity, 
 its acute receptivity, its inspiring freedom. It 
 seemed the day for doing, and his mind was ever 
 pushing to extremes of sociological thought, prick- 
 ing lagging conditions he was little given to realiz- 
 ing his responsibilities, nor the long processes of 
 advancement. He was, therefore, a man distrusted 
 by representative social thinkers, and savagely as- 
 sailed by the obtuse commercial hegemony of the 
 American idea. He had truth with him and he used 
 it to sting; it was this inability to answer on com- 
 mon ground that made his opponents writhe, actu- 
 ally to hate him, denouncing him "visionary," "un- 
 sound," "fanatical." 
 
 And his lovable personality and thought, the 
 splendid crusading spirit of youth, cloaked his icon- 
 oclasm with a large valor ; he loved his work amaz- 
 ingly, he delighted in its doubtful fighting issues as 
 will the gentle soul to whom is clear the noble need 
 of war. For seven years he had fought for the child 
 labor reform laws with pen and tongue, importuning 
 in lobby and committee rooms in not only half a 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 53 
 
 dozen state capitals, but at Washington. He stood, 
 in fact, a national figure in this, because of his bitter 
 moral visualization of that aspect of it, which ap- 
 pealed to every mind sharing the modern restlessness 
 against the mere American idea, the squat, brutish 
 commercial aggrandizement, that, in the building 
 of the land, justified itself as business, the proper 
 purpose of the republic. 
 
 With his coat off he turned again to clasp his wife, 
 who yielded with a soft engaging condescension to 
 the pleasure. Always to him, it seemed, he should 
 cast away care with her, and in this room. "How's 
 my boy?" he repeated. "When you wrote, Demetra, 
 to Washington, he wasn't well. I suppose that har- 
 ness chafes him and he'll have to wear it ten 
 months, the doctor said. Poor little Tad !" 
 
 "He has a slight cold. Ellen tucked him away 
 early. Your mother wanted to sleep within hearing, 
 in the nursery to-night, but I persuaded her it was 
 not needful." 
 
 The young father's eager eyes softened. He 
 loved the voice of this woman, who had come to 
 take the place of Bertie's dead mother, the simple 
 little mid- West mother as unlike this second wife, 
 this splendid full-breasted creature with her foreign 
 air, as the wild rose of her Iowa prairies was un- 
 like the flare of a chrysanthemum. Ennisley's 
 mind went back to the days with Jessie and her 
 baby's birth the pitiful little twisted figure which 
 had been in braces from its second year the days 
 
54 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 when, with his country-bred wife, he had been a 
 sorry, ill-fledged instructor in an inland sectarian 
 college choking his ardent life. It seemed that he 
 had come up wonderfully in the short years, since 
 Jessie's death, to mate with this other woman, whose 
 gowning stamped her indubitably as of another 
 world. 
 
 When she came near him now, the fragrance 
 of her hair, neck, breath, bodice struck him with its 
 sense of her completeness. He thought of her at 
 times, a trifle awed, giving him the feeling that he 
 had come upon the reincarnation, as it were, of a 
 Roman matron though glossed with superficial 
 modernity, she stood near the primal mothers, their 
 latent power, their terrible nobleness. He loved 
 her passionately, but he seemed to grasp behind this 
 a strange duality for each of them. He looked on 
 himself, his common and thorough American blood 
 and breeding, as able to typify the coming man for 
 the mightier race; a parent stock needing for its 
 recrudescence out of the money-getting traditions 
 encrusting the later republic, the best the simpler 
 peoples offered, the flux of their untainted life 
 stream flowing immemorially through peasant veins 
 to obscure destinies. And in this foreign wife he 
 had found the symbol for the union, she, with her 
 origin of a common stock, risen to the highest that 
 was to be the glory of this new land, the mating of 
 the races, the flowering of the best of each to all. 
 To this conception, this eugenic law, he gave him- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 55 
 
 self with a seer's passion. Even now he dreamed she 
 was to have a child by him within the year. It 
 should be a son to be reared greatly, to be great, to 
 exemplify the New American, past the gross era, the 
 barbaric conquest and travail of the land. 
 
 He released his wife's warm hands. "Mother - 
 it's like her she couldn't trust the nurse or any 
 hired service, any more than she can reconcile her- 
 self to seeing us have soup at dinner. In Iowa, none 
 but a sick person is ever given soup !" 
 
 He laughed fondly, calling up his little mid- West 
 mother. 
 
 The wife smiled : "She's gone to bed, worrying 
 as usual, when you are out after nine-thirty. I drove 
 her to the Easter service at Trinity she was quite 
 overcome by it all in fact, appalled !" 
 
 He brooded a moment on his wife's unchanged 
 placidity. Then he went on: "No, don't bother 
 about anything to eat, dear. I had a bit on the train, 
 and I'm too fagged to bother about more. We had 
 a tough time at the last conference the situation is 
 pretty strained down there. I couldn't get much 
 concession from the mill owners; I'll make another 
 appeal to Judge Rand. If he'll abolish night work 
 for the children and shorten the hours, we'll have a 
 big point gained. If this strike hadn't come on now 
 just when we had him the biggest operator in the 
 Randsville district almost won over!" 
 
 "Louise called up," the wife said irrelevantly. 
 "She said a lot of mail had accumulated and she 
 
56 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 would bring it from your office if I thought you'd 
 be home to-night. I couldn't assure her." 
 
 His face lightened : "It's like the girl how she 
 watches things for me ! She's worked nights down 
 in that little flat in John Bride's block compiling 
 data so that when I write that report to the commis- 
 sion we can breeze through it in no time !" 
 
 His wife smiled ; she was used to this enthusiasm 
 when Louise Hergov, the secretary, was mentioned ; 
 a world of work and dreams, vital, glowing hazards 
 and victories in which she had no comradeship, 
 but she grudged nothing. There was a trifle of con- 
 descension in this tolerance; she had, in fact, a 
 secret feeling that Corbett was rather swayed by 
 this quiet secretary, a Jewish girl, whom he had 
 found, a colorless school teacher in a tenement dis- 
 trict, who had been a Hull House resident, and 
 much interested in a settlement on Larrabee Street 
 which Ennisley had founded in the days of his 
 lesser life. It was there he met her. The foreign 
 wife seemed to discover in him, in his enthusiasms, 
 his impulsive mannerisms, nothing of the brilliant 
 leadership which his name meant to the world. She 
 had wondered at times if the last, rough attribute of 
 the fighting man was not lacking in him. She had the 
 cosmopolite's disdain of the proselyting spirit, of the 
 crusading need she looked on the man's soul with 
 a complacent curiosity; it was a many- faceted jewel 
 of whose splendor there was no doubt, whatever its 
 intrinsic worth. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 57 
 
 "And the papers the Manufacturers' Record, 
 which Louise brought here it attacked you very 
 bitterly, didn't it?" 
 
 He smiled indulgently at her obvious intent of 
 sympathy, wondering if she would ever really un- 
 derstand. In the better light by her table where he 
 sat, she saw a new worn and haggard look on his 
 face. "I don't believe you've slept at all. Corbett, 
 you're aging under all this strife you stir up con- 
 stantly." 
 
 He laughed again, pulling his brown beard; his 
 tired eyes grew merry. 
 
 "O, if a man had three heads and enough brains 
 to fill 'em ! And six pairs of stout hands why then 
 I'd still want more ! There's so much to do !" 
 
 "I don't suppose you ever rested in your life," 
 she went on. "Your mother says she never saw 
 you still for a moment." 
 
 His eyes closed, he lay back in a reverie for once : 
 "Little mother who couldn't find her God in a big 
 city church on Easter ! No, I suppose she was simply 
 overwhelmed !" 
 
 He remembered the church life of his boyhood in 
 the mid-West. The First Methodist Church stand- 
 ing square, white clapboarded among the young 
 elms, the hitching rail before it in the village dust; 
 the Wednesday evening prayer meetings, the Ep- 
 worth League socials, the Sewing Circle where the 
 ladies each year filled four boxes with cast-off but 
 neatly repaired clothes to be sent to the families of 
 
58 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 needy preachers off somewhere or other his boy's 
 imagination always pictured that and winced at it. 
 He seemed to have begun his long knight-errantry 
 of thought from that, a visualization of the unknown 
 preachers' children, in pitiful, clean, proud beggary, 
 about the annual box sent from the First M. E. 
 Church of Iowa Center, and containing his own re- 
 juvenated short pants and frayed blouses. He had 
 been acute with the shame of it there seemed need 
 in the world of fighting men, and not a box of old 
 clothes sent by good women, to redress the wrongs 
 of meager children. That thought had sent him on, 
 had been with him through his hard-won college 
 course, his ill-paid years as an instructor at his alma 
 mater, with his country wife and crippled child, de- 
 pendent on his ability to keep his mouth shut to his 
 growing doubts, his heresies of creed and social doc- 
 trine, the bitterness of his repression; on and on to 
 the splendid years of freedom, of achievement; to 
 lead the fighting line, to be the daring raider far in 
 advance of one of the great causes. 
 
 And the little mother had come frightened along 
 this way; from filling the mission boxes and enter- 
 taining the minister with the best of the "put-up 
 fruit," and occasionally being invited out to drive in 
 his rattling old surrey with his wife and babies 
 from this to the startling Now, when she went to 
 a gorgeous Easter rite, dim, mysterious, inordinate, 
 sent and called for in Justice Rand's carriage, at her 
 side on the cushions this luxurious, foreign wife of 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 59 
 
 her successful son it was, indeed, a miracle ! And 
 she was frightened miracles belong properly in the 
 Old Testament 
 
 A step had come. Ennisley looked about. He 
 rose with his warm boy's grasp of a little woman's 
 hands; his mother was before him. He smothered 
 her invariable depreciating quaver, the reticence of 
 the mid-West pioneering woman to demonstrations 
 of affection he laughed delightedly, held her off to 
 look at her. 
 
 She had got from bed to meet him, hearing his 
 coming; hastily bundling into her "church dress," 
 the things left at hand. The lace collarette was un- 
 hooked, hanging unkempt, her sallow neck was bare, 
 her flatness of breast, her hardness of speech and 
 awkwardness never had she come beyond the 
 backwoods rearing of the Pennsylvania mountains, 
 everywhere she lacked relief and resonance, she was 
 a dried leaf flapping against a wall in November, 
 accenting the bleak day. 
 
 "I expected it!" the son cried, "I tried to tiptoe 
 past your room I knew you'd get up to assure 
 yourself that I had not been run over or drowned 
 on the way home. Mother, you'll have to be dis- 
 ciplined !" 
 
 "My Corbetty," she quavered. She had named 
 him after some unknown martyr she had read of 
 decades ago in the Christian Herald who had gone 
 to Uganda and been speared by the natives after 
 Communion ; only to be scandalized years later when 
 
60 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 a popular pugilist of the name uprose to be ever 
 after associated, somehow, in her mind, and sinfully, 
 with the missionary winging his way to Heaven, 
 and what was worse, with her son's career. Many 
 a prayer she had uttered for the trinity : her second- 
 born ; the martyr, speared and, likely as not, baked 
 thereafter; and the prize-fighter, that he be led from 
 the way of Sodom. 
 
 "My boy!" she went on, and then they were si- 
 lent in the primal trust, mother and son, overarching 
 all her occasional fears and doubts. He had gone far 
 from her faith, her ways of life; she could not com- 
 prehend his work and position, the dim realization 
 she had of him as an object of invective and attack, 
 of fighting deeds and splendid purposes she could 
 understand nothing at all; but she could flutter to 
 his breast, and know, by his fond un fear ing eyes, 
 that he was her boy and unchanged God did not 
 make such men for doubt nor dishonor. 
 
 The old lady saw his wife's eyes on them in this 
 embrace, her composed smile. This second woman 
 he had married? . . . Well, she was unlike any- 
 thing Mrs. Ennisley had dreamed of foreign peo- 
 ple to her had always been the bewhiskered Russian 
 who had bought a forty of the farm, guttural, un- 
 couth, his wife wearing a flaming headcloth of some 
 sort and huge shoes. But this foreign wife of Cor- 
 bett's a superb creature, suggesting art calendars 
 the Iowa mother concealed what of her awe and dis- 
 trust she could. It seemed the wife took too easily, 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 61 
 
 this furtive half- fear, half-veneration, the shy, moth- 
 ering desire to love and be understood that she 
 was too idly tolerant, condescending, letting things 
 go as they fell. 
 
 Corbett had concealed his hurts at her occasional 
 enigmatic smile upon this homely, confiding mother 
 love. They were as far apart as the poles, the wife 
 with her astonishing verisimilitude of old-world 
 caste and place, the mother with that lean-necked, 
 insecure mentality of the pioneering woman a tribe 
 of the era of graham bread and Epsom salts after 
 the generation of cornbread and sidemeat a race of 
 women who gave their stomachs to found an empire 
 and acquired a querulant dyspepsia to suckle giants 
 for the land. 
 
 "My boy," she said again, in that Puritanic dis- 
 sembling of sentiment of which the West has in- 
 herited overmuch, " 'pears like I never can git to 
 see you any more -traipsin' off to Alabama and then 
 Washington and land knows where next! Tears 
 like we never git a chance to say howdy to each other 
 any more." 
 
 Corbett laughed: "Little mother, some day I'll 
 lay off harness a whole week, and we'll run out to 
 Iowa Center when strawberries are ripe, and Archie 
 and I will loaf in our shirtsleeves and cut the old 
 lawn and fish the same old creeks." 
 
 "I see you," she returned, with playful disdain, 
 "when yore dead and buried, you'll rest. I come 
 clown here a week Thursday, and you only been 
 
62 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 home three nights seems to me. 'Tain't natural for 
 a body to go traipsin' so." 
 
 "I had to go on to Washington," he smiled. 
 "Hungerford wanted to see me about the draft of 
 the Ford bill. I rushed back soon as I could just 
 to be with you, mother you and Demetra, and my 
 little Tad." 
 
 She knew of Hungerford a brilliant congress- 
 man of one of the audacious states beyond the Mis- 
 souri. Only the other week she had read in the 
 Green County Republican, on the "patent inside" 
 that he was a leader of the "insurgents," and Rural 
 Life had denounced his attitude as to the duty on 
 hides. She was not sure of Hungerford, and of the 
 enticings of the great world for her boy Rural Life 
 had called the Kansan a "traitor." 
 
 "Land, what big men you do meet East," she went 
 on, "going to New York and them places like they 
 were Oskaloosa or Des Moines. New York must be 
 a pretty place," she added plaintively, "a body reads 
 so much about it." 
 
 He repressed his smile, seeing on his wife's face 
 one that he wished was averted. "Mother," he cried 
 gaily, "some day we'll make a trip and I'll introduce 
 you to the president. And by the way, I'm to lunch 
 with him before the session's over." 
 
 "Eatin' with the president!" she now went on. 
 "Corbetty, what next is a-goin' to happen to you ?" 
 
 He laughed in his proud exultance it had thrilled 
 him as did his joy of work that flush of happiness 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 63 
 
 which only the success of young days gives when 
 there is no sequent-wisdom to lessen the greatness 
 of achievement. "The president? Why, mother, I 
 talked with him last week. He's a bully fellow 
 you'd like him. He'd make you think of Archie 
 sure he would ! Same way of tearing into things as 
 that country editor brother of mine in a fall elec- 
 tion!" He went across to take her hands again, 
 laughing still: "Mother, it's fine to mix with big 
 men, even if you have to fight 'em ! It clears your 
 brain it makes you climb out of bed in the morning 
 and sting yourself with a cold bath and jump into 
 your fighting clothes and get back to the game to 
 put heart and mind and hand against the biggest 
 and know that they're feeling you ! Why, it's simply 
 great !" 
 
 She looked her fond dismay: "Corbetty, some 
 day you'll break down with all this jumpin' round. 
 It ain't natural to be carryin' on so. Ain't so, De- 
 metry?" 
 
 She forced her brief little diffident laugh as always- 
 she did when addressing this foreign wife, this 
 daughter that she couldn't understand. "Ain't so?" 
 
 Demetra smiled indolently: "These American 
 men are such tremendous dynamos they're like 
 eager children with their loves and hates and ambi- 
 tions running and screaming in the sun." 
 
 The professor laid back, putting his hands to- 
 gether, looking upward. 
 
 "I suppose I have all their faults," he began. "I 
 
64 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 suppose we nationally lack repose, a consciousness 
 of continuity, of tradition or philosophical perspec- 
 tive. We don't know enough to be tired world- 
 tired with all our questions answered and demands 
 refuted as they've been refuted in older civilizations. 
 But that's the grand thing this sense of newness, 
 this lack of tradition we're going far to hack out 
 big things for our own. We're only hammering 
 away roughly, but there'll be no moral or spiritual 
 uplift until the rough things are hammered smooth." 
 And with the loosening of his thoughts he went on 
 in his swift pedantry of the class-room, fired with his 
 charm of discourse, his fighting way "But it's the 
 world-consciousness, now a world-faith, now that 
 God's a mere naturalistic motive a law behind the 
 chemistry and mechanics. It seems that has to be 
 our only religion, our only light truth." He looked 
 a bit self-conscious, glancing at his mother. She 
 did not understand the least of it ; she watched him 
 in admiration. "To make a rough way for the 
 better type to come and have its turn at the problem. 
 And here this wonderful America! There never 
 was such a chance for the higher evolution the 
 new, splendid man. Dear " he addressed the wife, 
 idling at the piano now, listening to him with the 
 detached interest which she had always for his ar- 
 dors "it comes right down to that. It's why we're 
 fighting to prevent the little Polack emigrant girls 
 and the hill cracker children from standing on their 
 feet eleven hours a night at Rand's mills they must 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 65 
 
 be the mothers for the great process. If only we all 
 could see the worth of the human animal the mere 
 struggling type of nature seeking to rise ! That's my 
 philosophy that's why I'm fighting." 
 
 The little collarless woman, her scrawny neck and 
 flat bosom of the patient, tired, untutored western 
 mother of pioneering adventures, listened, awed it 
 reminded her, some way or other, of his high school 
 valedictory ! She remembered her beating heart that 
 June morning, with the big main room hushed and 
 the humming-birds in the window's jessamine she 
 rose with her droll and pathetic negation : " Tears 
 like a body just could sit here all night and listen to 
 you. But it's eleven and after, and decent folks are 
 all abed. My boy, you're tired, and Demetry, that 
 light ain't fit for a body's eyes on that piano." 
 
 The wife glanced easily at her. When the mother 
 had gone, after her good nights, they were quiet. 
 Corbett's mind went back to his hard youth, the 
 grind of his career college debater, star thesis 
 man, his struggling tutorship always behind him 
 in his mother and first wife the simple faith and 
 pioneering strength of home-keeping women. And 
 Demetra could never see it all ; she had seemed con- 
 tent to settle back, sheltered, bringing nothing to 
 his eager life, his buoyant dreams a reverie of 
 living and he loved her so ! 
 
 From this hungry thought his mind went to his 
 work for solace. "I went to a meeting of the strikers 
 Thursday. Demetra, it was pathetic the men and 
 
66 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 children- they want so to learn, to find a way. 
 There's a curious mixture there the native hill 
 crackers and the south of Europe emigrants enticed 
 over here by agents and dumped into the mills what 
 an awakening! Dirty, ignorant foreign. Most of 
 Rand's are Polacks." 
 
 "Poles?" the wife smiled. "Corbett, I'm one!" 
 
 He laughed deprecatingly, caught her again in his 
 boy's way: "Dear heart you're Demetra my 
 wife . . . always kind and true !" 
 
 She drew his brown head down she was so sure 
 of him, her power over him yet she felt his hurt. 
 Marriage had not been to her what he had dreamed 
 his idealizing enwrapped it as it did his outer life 
 he wanted it full, complete in each ineffable rela- 
 tion of soul, mind, body. Love, its delicious stealth, 
 its long embraces, the inordinate worship of the 
 senses he was a man to feel, exult here as splen- 
 didly as in his mighty quests for the race . . . 
 and it seemed she could not understand. He would 
 have blent his blood and soul with hers for this race- 
 dream, to bring the ennobling type through parent- 
 hood, and she could not see. 
 
 But always he was seeking; he murmured now: 
 "A man's big work, a fight, and from it all to have 
 a home to come to and you, dear, you !" 
 
 It appeared to-night she was curiously shaken, 
 creeping nearer him. She whispered: "Yes and 
 O, my husband, love me!" 
 
 And in one of those rare, unifying silences which 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 67 
 
 come before the complacent disillusionment of the 
 five-year's married is complete, cattle-like, they sat. 
 Indeed, he could not remember when she had seemed 
 so near, so dear, so under his hand. He had given 
 her peace. From his sore battles and great errantries 
 he had found time for patience, faith, love he had 
 given and she had accepted. But to-night she 
 seemed moved beyond her content; he spoke of 
 something that had been on him long : 
 
 "Demetra, I've wondered at times if everything 
 went against me if I was discredited at the uni- 
 versity because of the complaints against my rad- 
 icalism if it would hurt you?" 
 
 "Hurt me ?" She stirred, looked at him wonder- 
 ingly. 
 
 "Dear, there are bigger things than a class-room. 
 Sometimes I want to swing from it, get in the fight- 
 ing line of the socialistic movement to turn my 
 whole life to that miserable cotton mill town and its 
 problems. There's so much for a man to fight for !" 
 
 "That's like you, Corbett," she smiled, "always 
 giving something. Last year half your salary went 
 to that social settlement in the mill shanties. That's 
 why I didn't get the furs you promised me !" 
 
 He laughed with her playfulness his heedless- 
 ness was a seasonal joke. "Well," she went on, "I 
 remember the mills were unpleasant enough. And 
 how the children howled at our machine when the 
 judge and I went through mill-town on that trip 
 there. And the girls you should have seen their 
 
68 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 clothes they were positively picturesque. One little 
 thing had a meal sack on with holes cut for her 
 arms. She didn't look more than six, but I suppose 
 they do get dwarfed." 
 
 "Yes. In a strike they actually starve." 
 
 Her fingers idly played with the silken cord of the 
 pillow on which she leaned : "It's bad but if Jus- 
 tice Rand stands by you, they can't hurt you, Cor- 
 bett. He helped found the university." 
 
 "Yes, with money twisted out of the children's 
 lives. Eight hundred babies, almost, who crawl out 
 of the stinking shanties, night and day shifts, to give 
 themselves to what ? To what we call civilization 
 to build some other lives into sweetness, into light." 
 She had shivered she drew up the dominant figure 
 that had made men turn to look at her on the street. 
 He saw her face, touched as he had never known 
 it : "Men call me an agitator," he went on gently, 
 "but there's got to be a fighting line somewhere the 
 fighting men ahead of the constructing army. 
 Say what you please, it's war, class war, and there's 
 no compromise nothing except a complete read- 
 justment of human relations the substitution of 
 service and not profit as the end of living and 
 working. Yes, there's got to be a fighting line ahead 
 somewhere !" 
 
 "They say some bitter things of you," she an- 
 swered "they call you dangerous a revolutionist." 
 
 He laughed: "So were Garrison Luther 
 Christ very dangerous ! I know all the threats and 
 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 69 
 
 intrigues brought to oust me. It's Judge Rand 
 who's made my career possible not only at the uni- 
 versity, but in the bigger work Washington and 
 South. He's conservative^ powerful, even yet, when 
 he's almost out of harness." 
 
 "And yet," she went on, "he, the justice, owns the 
 mills!" 
 
 The dreamer sighed : "I know. That's the curious 
 thing in human nature. It's the business idea the 
 American idea. First, profit by any means any- 
 how it's your business alone. Get your money, 
 anyhow, at any cost, then build your hospitals, 
 schools, libraries be honest, kindly, broad-souled 
 but first take your profit. And the cotton mills ? 
 what chance have eight hundred children against the 
 big companies? What earthly chance have they if 
 there are not men fighting for them?" 
 
 The foreign wife had stirred : "The men " she 
 muttered "the strong men for the children. O, 
 that's the way the barbarians would have fought 
 the strong men for the little children !" 
 
 He looked in wonder at her she had risen to 
 pace the floor. 
 
 "Corbett, I remember once, I saw a little one not 
 eight years old with the tired, hopeless face of a 
 woman of fifty. It was one of the immigrants a 
 Polish baby one of my own race the beaten peo- 
 ple." She came near him, she leaned dominant, a 
 splendid barbarian holding within her hates, loves 
 a mother animal wild with the wrongs of the 
 
70 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 hunted. "Corbett, for a moment I hated you Am- 
 erica rich, proud, free ! I was a peasant girl back 
 a thousand years with the whip of some lord across 
 my shoulders !" 
 
 He started up, seizing her hand, his eyes afire with 
 fighting: "Demetra! This is like the woman I 
 dreamed of! I used to think of you a mother a 
 leader you, a foreign woman for whom America 
 has done so much finding a way for the beaten 
 people pouring in I dreamed of you in some great 
 part. The great, new, un fear ing women! I believe 
 in them so. I want them aroused, enfranchised 
 what a splendid race they could bring!" 
 
 "Ah, well!" She smiled now, quite recovered, it 
 appeared: "I want you to go on I want to be 
 proud proud !" 
 
 He had her hand in his happiness: "Dear girl, 
 you hearten a man you can send him out big and 
 brave. And sometimes I thought you didn't care- 
 that I was only a dreamer." His old wistfulness 
 crept back : "And suppose I had to leave the uni- 
 versity? If I get Rand's endowment for the mill 
 school we might have to go live there." 
 
 "Go? Live at Rand's mills?" He felt her draw- 
 ing slowly from him: "You mean at your social 
 settlement?" 
 
 He did not understand. "There'd be big work. 
 We'd need women earnest, helpful women. Dear, 
 you'd be so much you, a Polish woman, among 
 your own people, the eager, ignorant emigrants. Do 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 71 
 
 you know you're such a compound? you with an 
 ancestry of the common lot, have such a sort of 
 luxuriousness ?" He looked on her animal beauty, 
 autumnal, golden he laughed with his man's joy of 
 it. "Your life so strange abroad, singing, learn- 
 ing, provided for when a child by some man, you 
 never knew exactly for what. Then Washington 
 meeting so many men in all sorts of curious experi- 
 ences. It seems as if -you should know all, all that 
 life could mean for a woman the lowest to the 
 highest you've really had a wonderful life. You've 
 sprung like a great chrysanthemum from the soil. 
 That was my hope in you. It showed what might be 
 done what you, yourself, might help along the 
 rising of the race, the making of its mothers." 
 
 Her smile was a reverie so baffling that he paused. 
 
 "A little Polish girl?" she mused "so long ago 
 that I've almost forgotten even the tongue. And 
 the man who aided me a child?" 
 
 He stirred he had been patient long: "Dear, 
 have I ever asked of you more than you wished to 
 tell, me?" 
 
 "Corbett, did I ever deceive you ? I told you when 
 you married me I was tired, tired. I hoped for 
 peace, rest, after the fight of it all. Perhaps I've 
 disappointed you, you and your dear little country 
 mother, your college circles. . . . The women 
 have never quite received me, Corbett." 
 
 "Ah, well, what's the matter with these women?" 
 
 She laughed with some luxurious disdain. "I 
 
72 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 am Demetra. I smile, perhaps, at their inconsequen- 
 tial readings and tabby teas. They're rather dreary 
 to me. I've been used to men I seem to get 
 things done with them. And I live my own life 
 here." She moved with a sinuous accenting of the 
 yellow light enrobing her, and took his hands: 
 "Please, please, Corbett, don't be hurt. I'm trying to 
 adjust myself to be the wife. After a woman's 
 thirty, it takes adjustment." 
 
 H^r ease had come again, the thing that always 
 brought his wistful turning: "Dear heart, I know. 
 Our lives have been different, haven't they? Mine 
 such a battle always, working my way through col- 
 lege by doing janitor work anything until I won 
 the Frost scholarship. And then on, always the big 
 fight ahead of me now, ever the big fight !" 
 
 "I've honored every battle," she replied slowly, 
 and as always, when she gave him opening, all the 
 inner pathos of the man flashed out. He tried to 
 put an arm about her as she bent to him : 
 
 "If you could know," he muttered. "Always it's 
 as if I stood before a temple in you and could not 
 enter, a shrine in you that none had found your 
 soul!" 
 
 She checked a little laugh : "How you've misread 
 me, Corbett! All the great beautiful dreams you 
 have of me ! And I'm none of them. Only a woman 
 who was tired a woman who'd like to imagine she 
 was little and cared for, instead of being big and 
 disenchantingly self-reliant. And I don't want to do 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 73 
 
 big things, or lead movements merely to slip away 
 and rest/' 
 
 "No no " he murmured, shielding his illusion, 
 "Ah, well, dear, we're all hammering away. It's 
 the real problem to find ourselves, to be our best 
 and give our best, even if only a little!" 
 
 For a time he was still and then laughed again, 
 shortly, as a man will, coming from a musing : "And 
 I asked you to go South to mill-town to help 
 teach a lot of dirty emigrant girls to sew, bake, read, 
 write, or at least be clean. To be Americans 
 mothers for the new America ! It seems I thought 
 you had a power that could send a man on to any 
 greatness." 
 
 "You dreamer, you!" she smiled. And they 
 were still, he staring at the little fire, and she from 
 the window, when the maid entered. 
 
 "Miss Hergov's in the study," she announced. 
 
 At once he started up, greeting the girl with 
 protests, helping her with her wet veil. The wife 
 looked amusedly on. Corbett was at his boy's pranks 
 and slang as he could turn from one mood to an- 
 other : "Louise, you shouldn't have come a night 
 like this. Let the correspondence go hang! Your 
 loyalty is simply a disaster and your feet are wet, I 
 know!" 
 
 Miss Hergov spread her slim hands to the fire 
 while Ennisley brought a chair. The wife studied 
 them with her usual tolerant and amused detach- 
 ment, her sureness over him, in it the greed which 
 
74 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 women love to show another. She saw his eyes 
 watching with frank, fond interest the rain drip 
 from the trim gaiters under Miss Hergov's blue 
 skirt. "You're another one of these dynamos in the 
 flesh," she murmured. Ennisley laughed ; it seemed 
 that his cheery simplicity had come back with his 
 secretary's entrance his dreams and work were viv- 
 ified and real. 
 
 "Louise is a whole power plant!" he retorted. 
 "Roderman of the commission asked me the other 
 day how I got so much done four lectures a week 
 at the university, grinding away on my reports, and 
 looking after the work at Rand's mills, to say noth- 
 ing of bothering the legislatures in season and out, 
 and running off a magazine article now and then. 
 Well, it's Louise all Louise. I'm afraid some fel- 
 low will offer her more than I can afford to pay her 
 one of these days or marry her !" 
 
 The pale Jew girl smiled deprecatingly. Mrs. 
 Ennisley's lips parted; she was used to these ex- 
 travagances. "I suppose you two will want to 
 work," she said. "And, Louise, you can't go home 
 again. There are five unused bedrooms in this barn 
 of a house." 
 
 "Of course she'll stay!" announced Ennisley 
 buoyantly. "Why, just to think of her coming!" 
 
 Louise tried to protest, but the wife went to see to 
 the heating of a room, and the other turned back to 
 the genial host. 
 
 "Anything happened?" he began, in the frank un- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 75 
 
 derstanding of their labors. "I've let everything go 
 except the strike at Rand's mills. Been trying to get 
 an eight-hour agreement. I offered to let up on the 
 fight in the legislature if the operators would meet us 
 there. But the matter's ugly, Louise." 
 
 "There's danger of violence?" 
 
 "I'm afraid of it. Some wild-eyed agitators have 
 been among the yard men. They've won away some 
 of the boys whom we'd been helping at the mill set- 
 tlement. It makes me nervous at times." , 
 
 "The money you hope from Judge Rand for your 
 school down there?" she queried. "Violence would 
 make him bitter yes." 
 
 He nodded intimately at her quick grasp of the 
 heart of the problem. "And at the university it 
 would hurt me. And the cause, too. They're begin- 
 ning to identify me with the political propaganda of 
 socialism, I see by the newspapers," he laughed 
 blithely. It was good to be with her again, to have 
 speech and understanding untrammeled and confi- 
 dentially colloquial of the big things of his life. 
 
 "I know," she answered. "Altmayer was in to see 
 you, and some of the county candidates were with 
 him. They spoke so feelingly of you they do 
 openly claim you. And the president of the garment 
 workers, some young chap, showed me the circular 
 in which the National Manufacturers' Association 
 attack you and claim your reports are unfair on child 
 labor." 
 
 Ennisley .laughed again, with the light of battle 
 
76 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 in his eye. He took the girl's hands in comforting- 
 comradeship. "Louise, anyway, you understand 
 you always understand. And sometimes it seems 
 that you're the only one." 
 
 She watched him long ; always it had been so. In 
 the brief years of his early marriage a laughing, 
 blue-eyed young father, and later in his larger hor- 
 izon, as he grew mentally and learned the fighting 
 ways of the world always, it seemed, she had been 
 with him, the comrade, the inner agent. To her he 
 had carried his sore hurts, and she had understood. 
 
 At times he found himself, with his ever-idealiz- 
 ing imagination, grasping at a formless faith that 
 he owed much to her that her sanity, intuition, her 
 perspicacity in delicate issues to which he would 
 have flung himself headlong, and repented had 
 been a clear light guiding his path. 
 
 They went to his little study, choked with familiar 
 papers, books and heapings. His pipe, never smoked 
 in Demetra's rooms, was on the torn and ink-stained 
 blotter of the desk near the little silver frame en- 
 circling the picture of his dead wife with the lame 
 child in her arms. By his chair was drawn up 
 Louise's own, before it her type-writer. It was 
 a common shrine; from it went his faiths, his 
 dreams. To it and to her he came back from his 
 defeats or with the joy of achievement. 
 
 The girl at the machine wheeled her little chair to 
 look at him as he reached for the first of the letters 
 she had brought. She was slender, her face had a 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 77 
 
 pallor which one forgot in the singularly direct and 
 fixing beauty of her round blue eyes beneath straight 
 black lashes. Her hair, heavy, coarse, purpled, was 
 piled about her ears, completing her vivid contrasts, 
 her white face, the blue eyes, the hair with its firm 
 contour behind these was a personality, compact, 
 resolute. She was the daughter of an English 
 woman and a Nihilist long rotted beyond Baikal; 
 apostate, denationalized, a girl of mean streets but 
 a hereditament of thought, she had come to be, 
 through her dreary teaching days and as Doctor 
 Ennisley's secretary, a student of futile philosophies, 
 she burned with inner primal vengeances in her 
 secret idealizing of self. 
 
 She had no relations, nothing. And cloaking her 
 loneliness, her sex-hunger, her splendid dreams with 
 steadfast work, she lived on with but one outlook 
 for her life and that was the career of the man by 
 her side. She wondered if, ever to him, she was but 
 the shy, practical secretary ; she wondered if he knew 
 that she was passionate with the thought of heroic 
 immolations, that at times the blood surged to her 
 temples at the world wrongs of the proletaire from 
 which she drew breed that she played charming 
 enactments for her soul. At one time she visualized 
 her figure stepping before a black velvet curtain 
 facing some vast auditorium, from her throat a 
 song, amazing, unwritten, voicing the sadness of 
 her race, of all the patient and the failed, a rapture 
 from her wished-for glorification of life; and then 
 
78 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 again she had a sweeter drama she was to be a 
 mother to bring a man-child to the world, the child 
 of a strong man, with the prestige of deed. At 
 times, by Corbett's side, her hands trembled, she 
 felt herself one of his new race-mothers, the enfran- 
 chised and mighty women; and alone in the prim, 
 hateful walls of her tiny flat, she found herself in 
 tears before the pathos of all that life withheld 
 she loved him. 
 
 But she was, after all, merely Louise Hergov, 
 secretary-stenographer to a busy man a pale girl, 
 unpretty save for her blue eyes, and with a shy con- 
 sciousness of self that made her "practical." And 
 before Demetra, the wife, she stood writhing, at 
 times, with the smart of the other's easy dominance, 
 tolerant, complacent, ungiving she, who was afire 
 with the need of expression, of freedom, of love, 
 could only watch the man's soul starve for what she 
 must deny, and starve herself. 
 
 Corbett, at times, felt the constraint his wife's 
 presence put on Louise. From his chair now he 
 looked from one woman to the other, the wife, 
 idling, sensuous, autumn full ; the girl, pale April. 
 
 Louise broke on his serious intent with the inti- 
 macy in which they labored. "I suppose you know 
 Judge Rand's son is back?" 
 
 Ennisley started. "Herf ord Rand ? Mrs. Ennis- 
 ley did not mention it?" 
 
 "He was at the house yesterday. He is staying 
 at John Bride's. I saw him there." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 79 
 
 The professor sat forward; his frown stilled her, 
 then she went on: "I wondered if it would make 
 any difference his being here with your plans 
 the endowment for the rnill school and everything 
 you're trying to get through his father ?" 
 
 'Til tell you something." Ennisley spoke briefly 
 in his business tone. "The judge's will still leaves 
 him the mills everything. I had hoped to change 
 it, to turn the property over to the university and 
 to the technical schools to be started at the mills 
 in fact, to put under way the biggest experiment in 
 industrial sociology ever attempted. I'll tell you the 
 big scheme some day. Louise, it's why this strike 
 has upset me so a single act of violence now would 
 drive Judge Rand back from all I've led him to! 
 I wanted him to leave his fortune for the greater 
 and common good." 
 
 "And Rand, the son he'd get nothing?" 
 
 "Why should he? What's one man's life to the 
 lives of his thousand brothers? And twenty million 
 dollars to Herford Rand, whose very memory 
 haunts this house! I've never seen him, but he's 
 haunted me I've dreamed what manner of man he 
 was the master of the mills !" 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 JOHN BRIDE'S block, the "grand property 
 housin' forty families," was a hive of poor folk 
 but not savage urban misery ; artisans, meager clerk- 
 lings, drivers, watchmen, teamsters and the like, 
 people of family and living wage for the most part, 
 and from them Old John got an indifferent rental 
 which he yearly turned back for improvements. 
 John got his tithe from them, it appeared, in his 
 cheery pertinancy of interest in their lives and for- 
 tunes. To them, as to the board of directors of the 
 road and the coterie of pioneers about the town, he 
 was Brother John, eccentric, but loved the more. 
 The poor folk pointed him out as the "millionaire 
 flagman," and told with gusto of his day's work 
 there. But John's fortune was not anywhere near 
 this the panic of '93 had done for his larger activ- 
 ities. He was, in fact, a figure forgotten in the bald 
 huge uprise of the city's glut of wealth, he belonged 
 to a day dim in its annals, the era before the fire. 
 
 The old Scot seemed well content to stand in the 
 shelter of his wall and let the hurricane blow by- 
 one could enrich and intensify one's human relations 
 if one could no longer enlarge them. The time was 
 
 80 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 81 
 
 gone when Old Scotch John knew each station, 
 siding, bridge and feeder, but still he held the road 
 with a father's pride. It was more than an eccentric 
 whim of human love that led him to be watchman 
 for the thousand youngsters passing a dangerous 
 morning way across the tracks to the big new school. 
 There, by the rails, he could watch and dream of the 
 pathway of empire to the wide lands. He had seen 
 the mighty traverse, he felt his glory of service. 
 And yardmen, division masters, engineers all knew 
 him, smiled with him. 
 
 John Bride, with all his idiosyncrasies, had a 
 canny eye. His fine flats in a quarter where there 
 were poor men, but men of wage, were always full 
 ancj rentals paid to this hale and merry landlord. 
 
 "Stephen, man," he told his cousin at the Thurs- 
 day dinner at Rand's house, "what'd ye have more ? 
 The land pays, the house pays, and I have all I 
 wish and naught to leave it to that's the whole 
 philosophy. We all live, man, and well." 
 
 The justice bared his yellow teeth over his cigar. 
 "I remember when you came from Edinboro you 
 were no such fool, John. No, nor for forty years 
 after. When you put through the La Crosse divi- 
 sion and built the bridge you were no such fool as to 
 dream of standing in your old age at a crossing to 
 flag the trains. There's rheumatism in the air, these 
 days, and pneumonia." 
 
 Brother John laughed : "Whose leg's the stiffest ? 
 And whose lung's stoutest yours or mine? Stephie, 
 
82 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 I tak my toll o' life. John Bride's services are no 
 so cheap !" 
 
 The judge's mask-like face fixed to a trace of 
 smiling. "You're as perverse in this matter as this 
 college professor here is with his meddling with my 
 mills. Shorter hours, more ventilation, inspection 
 of the shanties by the state God knows, since I 
 let him go South with his schemes the mills have not 
 paid four per cent. The superintendent says the 
 operators openly charge the strike to him, and are 
 hounding me for indulging his experiments." 
 
 "Let him be. Man, do ye need the money? If 
 there's children in the mills standing eleven hours a 
 day, why take 'em out. If there's wind whistlin' 
 through the cracks of ye'r mill-town shanties of 
 nights, why, stop the cracks. Man, it's simple." 
 
 The justice grunted, closing one eye against 
 Brother John's smoke. He had had a deal of patience 
 with all this but there was no law for its interpreta- 
 tion. 
 
 "John, you're full, too, of this modern day splut- 
 ter. What are we coming to the laws, society, or 
 America if men listen to your subversion ? There's 
 overmuch of this about. We must go back to the 
 older republic and the standards when a. man was a 
 man on his own bottom and free to work with his 
 own hands and brain. My line's fought in every 
 war since Braddock, but it seems the day's come 
 when America is not for Americans nor for such 
 as you whom the land's enriched in your half cen- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 83 
 
 tury this side the water. It's that later breed of 
 Europe that's subverting us and our old basic idea 
 that men came to what they were worth." 
 
 "Their worth is more than profit. I say the land 
 means more than divideends. Stephen, it's made you 
 and it's made me who but America with its push- 
 in' and crowdin' in of the new folk? What enriched 
 ye but that? Ye sold them cotton and hauled 'em 
 on ye'r roads. We owe more to the land than to 
 sit on it and make a profit of it. There'll come a 
 generation to see it, Stephie service and not profit, 
 for the men who build and lead. This land's the 
 highway for all the peoples to travel. I stand and 
 see the red lights o' the trains vanish off in the murk, 
 and I think o' what they're buildin' out there 
 Huns and Italians, Poles and Jews pressin' on to 
 what grand journey's end! Eh, tell me God's 
 hand is on it it's for that I stand by the crossin' 
 wi' the flag, to go in service when I'm called." 
 
 The judge's grim smile tightened over his thin 
 lips. "You are a good deal of a fool, Brother John. 
 I once heard you spouting so to a board meeting of 
 the Lake Northern." 
 
 "There's one thing that's never talked of at direc- 
 tors' meetin's that I yet heard, and that's whether or 
 no there's right in a thing. I am fair tired of the 
 profit idea altogether." 
 
 "John, you talk like the introduction of the pro- 
 fessor's last book. I still call you a fool." The older 
 man rubbed his smooth chin. "But I can't talk. 
 
84 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 I've let the man go preach rank revolution to his 
 pimply- faced young teachers at the university and 
 send them out over the land I, mind, who founded 
 it. I let him go South and denounce my properties 
 and wheedle me for a hundred thousand for his ex- 
 periments. It's strange I've been a hard man, 
 John Bride." 
 
 John looked at him; a man of stubborn strength 
 and of odd, hidden, human weaknesses. The Scot 
 let his eyes wander about the somber dining-room, 
 its blackened and austere furniture, its ancient plate 
 and lighting; the brooding spirit of the master was 
 on it all. 
 
 "A hard man, Stephen," he answered slowly. 
 "Ye've eaten in on ye'rself. Ye've closed heart to 
 human kindliness what's all the clack o' the law 
 beside it? Law and money they canna loosen a 
 man's soul. I'm minded, when I see ye, of Staley, 
 the union engineer who's one of my tenants him 
 with his stump of an arm, who's just out of jail 
 because he sneered when the court decided against 
 him in his suit for damages against the road ye and 
 he are at the far eends of the brotherhood." 
 
 "And I will safely maintain," retorted the justice, 
 "that the man sits in your house, rent-free because 
 of it." 
 
 "He has bairns a wife " 
 
 "I thought so." The justice leaned closer over the 
 cloth. "John, you fool you do us honor. But have 
 I been unjust ?" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 85 
 
 "Have ye been more than just? This week ye'r 
 own boy came to me he had been sent from this 
 door, I take it." 
 
 The father settled back. He looked across his 
 glasses at the other, his face again the unstirred 
 mask, the eyes fixing coldly. 
 
 "We'd best not talk of him. John, I would not 
 quarrel with you." 
 
 "A rough, adventuring de'il," John Bride mut- 
 tered, "but his voice has a trick at times. I'm 
 minded o' his mother." 
 
 The two old men's eyes were raised across the 
 silver and the candlesticks to the portrait of a 
 woman, dim, all but indistinguishable, at the 
 room's end. For thirty-eight years Stephen Rand 
 had dined in silence here, but each time, before the 
 beginning of his lonely meal, his eyes had wandered 
 once to his dead wife's picture. They had been 
 years which had given bite to his common speech 
 with men, and made the world stand from him. 
 
 "Ah, man," John Bride said softly. "It's long!" 
 
 The father's unmoved speech came back. "It'll 
 be longer before I welcome him. There was his 
 mother dying the word she laid upon me that I 
 train him for the ministry. I did, against blood and 
 flesh and desire, I did, and it made me lose my own 
 faith in God at the end. What do you recall, John 
 Bride, of him his mother's fortune, a church, as 
 fair a start as anything could make and you know 
 the end. A girl he kept in London a drab of his 
 
86 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 student days, I take it and then, in five years to 
 the devil, a quarter million flung to thieves and beg- 
 gars, and he disappears, to come back a tramp at 
 best/' 
 
 Brother John was still. He looked across at the 
 picture of his cousin's wife. He wondered at this 
 heritage of hate left by this gentle soul to son and 
 father. He sighed ; he had watched Stephen harden 
 year by year over his memories ; cut each human tie, 
 to come to stand in that terrible twilight of the 
 aged, the embittered and the alone. 
 
 "A tramp then. Many's the father's hand reached 
 out to such." Brother John sighed as he rose. "The 
 prodigal found welcome, do ye mind?" 
 
 Stephen laughed with sudden real humor. "I was 
 waiting for the Scotch in you to bring Scripture! 
 When you can train Rand to parrot every text in 
 them he can come eat at my table. 'Til then he can 
 be damned." 
 
 Brother John laughed cheerily. "I'll find text 
 for ye both. Let be let be come, I can beat ye 
 at the billiards !" 
 
 "John Bride," the justice retorted, "I have 
 guessed something. The fellow is with you? You 
 took him in?" 
 
 "There's blood o' mine in him he's Jennie's son." 
 
 They stood under the play of the light through 
 the chandeliers, two old men, one priestly shaven, 
 one smoothing his white underbeard. "I remember, 
 Stephie, when I carried him through these halls 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 87 
 
 a bonny lad that could no more than toddle. And 
 his little mother skipped before us. And there was 
 Donald the auld house was over-cheery then 
 when I ate my first Thursday dinner wi' ye in this 
 darksome room." 
 
 The justice did not answer; John Bride came 
 nearer. "A bit o' his mother's eyes and laugh in him 
 the big man now. He's stayin' wi' me, Stephen, 
 no so far away.*' John went slowly on : "Did ye 
 turn him off again with no chance for word ?" 
 
 "I did not turn him off. He can come sleep here 
 and eat of my providing but not near me or with 
 me. If he wants word with me let him come civilly 
 let him show himself a man at last and not a clown 
 and waster." 
 
 "I'll thank ye for this. I'll have him come at the 
 last and civil. I think Jennie'd meet me easier 
 there's service in it." 
 
 "John Bride," the judge retorted dryly, "be still 
 of this. Come to the billiards." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 RAND came to his father's house the next day 
 unbidden and alone. He found his way to the 
 little breakfast-room of the Ennisleys' apartments, 
 bright with the April sun on the new verdure with- 
 out, where the mistress of the home discovered him, 
 imperturbable, and with peremptory demands upon 
 the ill-humor of the old serving-maid, who was 
 stupefied at this intrusion. She, indeed, was hasten- 
 ing to protest to Mrs. Ennisley when the latter 
 entered. 
 
 The wife paused at the door, watching silently, 
 her arms filled with the white spring bloom of daisies 
 from the tumble-down old conservatory in the rear 
 of the yard, which she had intended for the break- 
 fast table. The room was one set apart for their 
 exclusive use as guests of the recluse owner. After 
 a while, dwelling on Rand's unbidden presence, she 
 remarked : 
 
 "I have an impression that you're always eating. 
 I hope you are well?" 
 
 "Admirably. The woman's coffee is exceptional 
 much better than her temper." 
 
 "She is a patient soul." 
 88 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 89 
 
 "So is a dog. I remember the old dame twenty 
 years ago she had the same virtue. Eh, what's it 
 ever done for her? Patience it shrunk and with- 
 ered on her bones, it ate out her heart this patience. 
 It's a dog's servile trick." 
 
 The old maid had left the room. Rand looked 
 up to the wife, to find her frank study on him. Her 
 luxurious morning ease pricked him: his life had 
 been without the discipline of tradition, he had the 
 appeal of a child's license to women in his younger 
 days. They were for ever seeking the final chivalry 
 in him, as women will in those who deny their chal- 
 lenge. 
 
 "Well," the wife went on composedly, "it's the 
 woman who pays with patience even if it means her 
 bones and soul. Your father must have had a faculty 
 for holding his people the servants are gray in his 
 service." 
 
 "Everything here is rotted with age. I remember 
 as a boy they were old then. I had the same impres- 
 sion the other day when the butler hesitated about 
 letting me in. I remembered the same fishy eye on 
 me the same suspicion they all hate me. I be- 
 lieve they have an eye on a share in my birthright." 
 
 "I supposed you'd sold it long ago for a mess of 
 cocktails." 
 
 He laughed with a reckless pleasure as she ar- 
 ranged the flowers, a great gold and white bloom in 
 the sunlight on the table. Into the clear serenity of 
 the home had come a breath of careless ways. 
 
90 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Aren't they dear?" she said, and held the vase 
 for his inspection. The hard lines of his face re- 
 laxed, his eyes for a moment less somber ; he looked 
 about the home spot you would have said there was 
 in him a wistfulness. A moment, and his old flippant 
 looseness came back; but he watched her fingers 
 among the soil-sweet stems and leaves. 
 
 "Somehow, you have made this end of the house 
 less a tomb/' His mood sharpened: "You've 
 changed amazingly. I see it now older. There's 
 a line between your eyes. This Ennisley how did 
 you come to marry him ? You were growing older ? 
 That is a disaster to the cleverest. An interesting 
 woman only marries to secure a refuge from which 
 to make other forays if she wishes." 
 
 She turned away in cold reserve: "Enough 
 I'm married, you see." 
 
 "And going to Rand's mills, Ennisley said the 
 other night. By the Lord, you in a mill-town ! You, 
 who would give nothing to any man except for ease, 
 position, a refuge when you were tired. Eh, yon 
 at Randsville !" 
 
 "It's not true we're going there. This strike is 
 uglier than ever. But I I'm hopeless in such mat- 
 ters." 
 
 "And at your feet Ennisley crouches, watching 
 you like a fond dog. Eh men are fools !" 
 
 The wife in silence looked across the flit of spring 
 green to the sparrows in the bare ivy of the next 
 house wall. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 91 
 
 "Your position here is absurd," she said at last, 
 and her voice had impersonalized her interest in 
 him. "Your father refuses to receive you you are 
 a fugitive, you say. You dare come here day by 
 day, unasked a challenge to every good and loyal 
 thought that can arise in this house. Have you 
 nothing beyond it all ?" 
 
 His small eyes: twinkled malice : "Sufficient unto 
 the day. I need not think Brother John does that 
 for me. I eat, sleep, drink, quarrel with him, read 
 his dreary Scotch books. But he's got a soul. I'll 
 tell you something. I'm tired of being hunted. I 
 was known by another name in the Telluride camps. 
 Here, as Stephen Rand's son, I've nothing to fear 
 from the Colorado military anyhow, their guard 
 is rotted and forgotten now, or ought to be. And 
 I'm back I want my place. Here the cotton mills 
 have grown monstrous with profit. They've made 
 the old man hog-fat with money, and money's 
 power. I want it I'm going to stay. That col- 
 lege husband of yours is trying to wheedle half 
 Rand's fortune to his preaching, and I want to stay 
 and make my place. I think, in fact, I will go, hat in 
 hand, and a hangdog face, and ask that old clacker 
 of laws to forgive me. He's got money, and it ought 
 to be mine. Money's power I could sting the soul 
 of the world to madness if I had enough money." 
 
 She watched his Jesuit's mouth. "Be still," she 
 said quietly. "His mother's here." 
 
 Mrs. Ennisley looked timidly in the room. She 
 
92 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 saw her daughter-in-law and came on with her husky 
 note of equivocating apology, her hand up to her 
 skinny neck to see if her collar was properly pinned 
 which it was not, an inch of yellow flesh between 
 it and the band. "Demetry," she quavered, "is my 
 boy up yit ?" 
 
 "In the study and waiting to be called. He's 
 working, as usual, before breakfast." 
 
 The little old lady from Iowa peered uncertainly 
 at the man across the table. His rough coat, the blue 
 shirt collar upturned the garb seemed friendly 
 to her in the stealthy foreign atmosphere of this 
 great house which always appalled her. Rand 
 looked gravely back at her, the ungainly figure, the 
 ill-made dress. He nodded slowly, and she made a 
 vague curtesy. 
 
 "This is Judge Rand's son, mother," the wife 
 said indifferently. 
 
 The country woman was startled: "So? I 
 heard " she went on, after a nervous pause "that 
 you'd once been a preacher o' the Word." 
 
 He smiled; the wife's face hardened. "I am 
 more, madam; I am the text." 
 
 Her poor wits wandered ; she fluttered about the 
 room, a hapless mother bird, bedraggled before the 
 full-plumed nurture of the other woman; she tried 
 to smile at his evident pleasantry. "It's noble work, 
 sir, for them that's called. I wanted my son to pre- 
 pare for the ministry and he thought well of it 
 once " she broke off, fatuously laughing to put 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 93 
 
 herself at ease. Her son had entered. He was 
 distinctive in his silk morning jacket, but his eyes 
 had a wild look you would have believed him 
 trapped. And behind him was Miss Hergov. The 
 secretary held a yellow telegraph form which now 
 the professor took mechanically, with no heed to 
 his mother's turning. 
 
 "A riot at the mills/' he said studiedly, "a bomb 
 thrown among the police at the gate of Rand's 
 stockade. Five were killed." 
 
 In the peace of the day, the windows open to 
 the north air, the swallows twittering across the 
 grass, morning wet and cobwebbed, they were still. 
 The telegram fluttered from Corbett's fingers to the 
 carpet. And without moving from her steps the 
 wife's white hand reached to it, picked it up. They 
 could each hear the crinkle of the paper as she 
 smoothed it to read. 
 
 "Yes," she answered slowly, "just as you thought 
 everything was settled." 
 
 The mother looked on them in bewildered fear 
 and silence. 
 
 "It's bad " Corbett spoke as a man briefly 
 stunned "the thing has come what I was trying 
 to prevent a bomb, and thrown from the steps of 
 the university settlement my boys, the mill-hands 
 I'd worked for!" 
 
 Behind him Louise Hergov had moved up. She 
 touched his arm, a motion so soft that they seemed 
 not to see. But Rand's alert eyes were on her and 
 
94 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 on the other man's start and then his quick relief, as 
 if the girl had whispered some noble solace. 
 
 The wife came swiftly to him. "Corbett it's 
 ruin!" 
 
 "An outrage " he went gravely on, "planned by 
 some of the anarchistic element that came down 
 from New Jersey when the strike began. I knew 
 there were agitators imported secret meetings of 
 hotheads the foreign element." 
 
 "The mill-hands you were teaching English?" 
 cried the wife. "You taught them. Corbett, they'll 
 lay it to you the mill owners, the papers, the 
 courts !" 
 
 "I suppose so." He looked at Louise by his side. 
 "It's a sad ending of all I tried down there." 
 
 "No," retorted the secretary, "you never taught 
 violence! You tried to help splendidly!" She 
 caught his hand and held it with her cry "You gave 
 yourself, and they shall understand the whole 
 world shall!" 
 
 The color rose to her pale face ; she held his hand 
 in a caress. The wife's eyes were on them. "Good 
 somehow " the girl pleaded "O, good must come 
 of it all!" 
 
 "But the endowment from Judge Rand," the wife 
 persisted, "and your place at the university every- 
 thing ! You've been so foolishly bitter denouncing 
 the absentee proprietors, the legislature, the indus- 
 trial system and they've said ,you were making 
 class war class hatred " 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 95 
 
 She saw Rand's cunning eyes on her, then shift 
 to the girl and to her husband his somber, enig- 
 matic smile, then his unmoved gravity. 
 
 The professor stood back, his arms folded, he 
 sighed with an air of resignation : "I taught what I 
 saw the larger truth, the bigger hope. I went far, 
 but there must be strong words and hard knocks. 
 I know the operators want to break me that there 
 are millions of dollars ready to discredit me before 
 all America but it's my work a man's work. I'll 
 not go back an inch." 
 
 The wife faltered. He broke from Louise's side 
 and came to her. "I know," she went on, "but, 
 Corbett, your career your home place I your 
 wife" 
 
 The secretary turned away to the window. The 
 old mother watched them ; then she came lamely to 
 Corbett's other side, her hand went up to his shoul- 
 der. 
 
 "My children," she quavered, "a man who's done 
 no wrong can't be afraid. And my boy's done noth- 
 in' wrong, and he can't be afraid, no never. I 
 never brung my boy up to be afraid o' truth to fear 
 to face it." 
 
 The son started ; he put his other arm around her 
 in his old boyish simplicity, his need of homely 
 words, and women's praise. "Little mother, don't 
 worry. And, Demetra, whatever comes we'll fight it 
 out together. It's a set-back, that's all. It can't harm 
 me stop me." 
 
96 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "That's my boy," the mother whispered, her fond, 
 foolish chuckle coming, her yellow hand patting his 
 cheek. "He can't go far off the track, for I set him 
 on it right he allus knew the right and did the 
 right allus. His pore pa and I decided that for 
 our young ones before ever they was born before 
 the war when we come West from Pennsylvanny, 
 month after month in the wagon train. And when 
 we all got West and across the Missouri, the men 
 fightin' off the Indians clean to Cheyenne, where we 
 settled first, and Jared trapped and traded long afore 
 railroads come, allus we thought that ; and when the 
 war came we packed up and came fightin' back to 
 civilization so's Jared could git in the army, we 
 thought that allus that some day we'd have sons 
 to make men of big enough for all creation and its 
 problems whatever they was to be. And so we raised 
 'em when they come. Them's my boys them's what 
 I gave." 
 
 She finished and looked about in her odd little 
 confusion, but bright in her pride she lent again 
 to the son her embrace, and the group was still. The 
 stenographer looked from the window; Rand, by 
 the table, was in one of his rare reserves; then he 
 rose and came near the old woman, bowing gravely. 
 
 "Mother," he said, his full voice like a bell, "when 
 the epic's written you'll have a place. Here, you 
 soft-skinned woman listen!" 
 
 But the wife spoke to him with a bitter incre- 
 dulity: "Ah, you! Is it anything to you? Here's 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 97 
 
 something you can't play at these police dyna- 
 mited." 
 
 "The fools/' he murmured "they were paid for 
 it what of it?" 
 
 Corbett Ennisley stirred. "Rand, it's pure an- 
 archy you talk and you'll come to be the master of 
 the mills, I suppose. The police five killed in a 
 riot there !" 
 
 "Eh the fools. And these strikers these fel- 
 lows who are eternally hammering one another. Five 
 dead eh? For my profit." 
 
 "Rand, the police died in defense of your prop- 
 erty, in their duty." 
 
 "Exactly the dull fools. What do I, or my 
 property, care for them or their duty? What does 
 my money care about them now ?" 
 
 Corbett turned away. Miss Hergov from the win- 
 dow caught his despair. The Jew girl's eyes went 
 to the man at the table with a fascination she could 
 not resist. This, then, was to be the owner of the 
 grim house, the director of its fortunes, the master 
 of the south mills. In this pagan was to be power 
 over the lives of men and women he had never seen, 
 of whom he would never hear; of destinies to go 
 down obscure, forgotten out of these, their flesh 
 and souls and dreams, he would build the castle of 
 his desires. The girl looked at him with a long, slow- 
 gathering hate. The professor spoke in the silence; 
 his voice was husky. 
 
 "I heard last night, your father would forgive 
 
9S MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 you. Ah, you who have defied all human bonds! 
 There's no such thing with you as duty." 
 
 "It's all very admirable this duty. The other fel- 
 low's duty. It's what keeps the collar about his neck 
 and his head bowed it is, in fact, why the race 
 crawls about us. Duty is the last virtue of the weak, 
 as patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrel. And it 
 comes cheap enough. When I own Rand's mills I 
 can get children to spool cotton, and foremen to 
 drive, and police to shoot and lawyers to cackle one 
 way or other each for the precious jewel his duty. 
 It is an admirable thing, this duty small wonder 
 we are pleased with it." 
 
 The other man did not face him. It seemed that 
 the bright ardors of his soul had died. The outcast 
 sat among them and it was as if they were obsessed, 
 as if on them and the fair day a shade had fallen. 
 The little country woman clucked, she seemed strug- 
 gling to get past something that had been thrust 
 down her weak throat. At last Rand went on, easily, 
 untouched, his eyelids merely lifting to the other: 
 
 "Doctor Ennisley, I believe they call you a so- 
 cialist?" 
 
 "Men have." Ennisley's mood had hardened. 
 
 "Well, get money. You can't be a prophet of the 
 brotherhood without money. Get money, or it will 
 get you. It will sear over your fine dreams; it will 
 sicken your soul with failure. I swear to you, get 
 money it's power; it's the whip-hand over Fate; 
 it's the magician that can dazzle the eyes of men; 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 99 
 
 that can ward the avenging angels from you here, 
 and buy prayers for you hereafter yes, you can 
 build your own god and fill his temple with priests 
 to praise him with money. Eh ? I know !" 
 
 'I've thought of you at times/' Corbett muttered, 
 "years, when you were to me nothing but a name 
 that was whispered, a legend of this house. . . . 
 It seems I wondered if you would come back, and 
 what manner of man you'd be! I dreamed of some 
 great thing in you you might do so much so 
 much! The mills and three thousand souls de- 
 pendent on them! Twenty million dollars, I think 
 they say you'll have." His flash of eagerness had 
 died "Yes, I wondered what manner of man you'd 
 be you, the rich man's son ?" 
 
 "And now you see, eh? I'm here I consent to 
 stay to be the tame dog for money. Rand's 
 money it's power, life it can gild the dreams of 
 a human soul it can make life exquisite- a poem. 
 And it can make men go about you in whispers and 
 bend their backs and fetch and carry ; yes, and whim- 
 per and beg mere poor brutes who have to eat, 
 they say! Eh? do you believe me? I know I've 
 been on the road, a beggar. I've crawled along the 
 highway, crippled, dragging legs that seemed they'd 
 never walk again." He drew slowly from his pock- 
 ets a gold coin and held it where it dazzled in the 
 sunshine. "See; it's the magician's crystal. You 
 can, in fact, see the world, hell and Heaven through 
 it with it you can change the prayers of men to 
 
ioo MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 their God. I say, then get money; it alone can 
 work your miracles for you/' 
 
 Corbett rose; he laughed aimlessly. "And you're 
 the man I dreamed of! That I thought a soul was 
 in you, the master of the mills! O, I dreamed you 
 might feel some breath of the brotherhood arousing 
 the world the great unrest, social, spiritual the 
 wonderful new world of thought, of human feeling, 
 for the race to come !" 
 
 With a smile the rich man's son watched him. 
 They stood across the room, the antithesis each of 
 all the other meant for himself, his relation to his 
 world the man who had come fighting up for the 
 regeneration, the outpost taking the brunt of savage 
 wars before the era of the builders ; and the other, 
 the defying materialist, the predatory lord, the indi- 
 vidualist. Between them as they stood the age of 
 the North sea kings and an unborn era lay. 
 
 Rand's smile took an ironic pity. 
 
 "Doctor, what is the greatest thing in the world 
 to you ?" 
 
 "The brotherhood to come." 
 
 "You've never known it." 
 
 "I've given my life to it." 
 
 The other's supercilious smile deepened. "You 
 are an old woman gabbling over a possible change 
 in the weather." 
 
 The wife put in impatiently. "Enough of this. 
 Here's this riot. They'll lay it to you, Corbett." 
 
 The doctor shook his head. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER IGI 
 
 "What shall you do?" she persisted. 
 
 He was silent. Rand's voice came. ^ 
 
 "Do?" 
 
 "Yes yes ! Here's this trouble on us !" 
 
 "Trouble is the most important thing in the world. 
 It might make you really of some worth in the end." 
 
 They stared at him. The wife angrily repeated : 
 "Now what shall we do ?" 
 
 "Do? Why find the truth, and tell it." 
 
 "What nonsense. It may ruin him !" 
 
 "Well?" he smiled airily. "What then, if it does?" 
 
 The doctor stirred before this banter. "Demetra, 
 I shall not fear we shall not fear!" 
 
 "Fear?" Rand's wonder mocked him. "Why 
 fear? What's it good for?" 
 
 Ennisley looked from him to his mother, and then 
 with his arm about her, went from the room. The 
 two other women stood staring at Rand, sunk now 
 in a chair, replete with some satisfaction. 
 
 "You women," he said patiently, "are always fly- 
 ing for refuge to some cant or other, and fear is 
 the chief. I have studied you long, seeking for 
 something to glorify. I would like to fling you all 
 in the cauldron of great decisions and have you come 
 through erect, proud, free. I doubt if you ever do 
 the fear of the cave man and the mystery-mongering 
 of priests is too much for you. Eh ? The pity of it !" 
 
 They still stared at him ; then the wife with an im- 
 patient gesture left the room. Louise Hergov did 
 not stir; when he leisurely lifted his gaze he met her 
 
102 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 eyes of astonishing blue fixed on him, widening, 
 un fearing. 
 
 He laughed in some ascetic humor. But she did 
 not, fighting to steel herself against the power of his 
 ruthless measuring. She, who, in the secret drama 
 of her soul, dreamed of herself as this which he 
 sought to glorify. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LOUISE looked at him quietly. 
 "Well," he murmured, and returned her 
 gaze with that trace of menace in the outthrust of 
 his chin, "are you, too, going to bark at me ?" And 
 after the condemnation of her study, he inquired, 
 with some patience, "What's your name? It seems 
 to have slipped my mind." 
 
 "I am Miss Hergov," she answered, in a dignity 
 which'but lightened his eye the more. She knew of 
 him evilly well; his tradition was a part of the 
 stealth of the house, the gibing silences, the gro- 
 tesque shapes he had robbed its honor, its peace 
 he was indifferent to its hate. To Louise he had 
 come to personify, in her day-long residence here at 
 work, the overreaching spirit of America ; the over- 
 lording power of the holders of things she, with 
 her vague dreams, her memories of class oppression 
 and old world hopelessness, now that he was before 
 her, tried to despise him, to detest his dominance 
 as an apotheosis of all she hated. 
 
 "You are a foreign woman," he went on, un- 
 moved, "I can guess your history. Back of you some- 
 where is a skinny old dullard in a skull cap of velvet 
 
 103 
 
io 4 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 he sells and buys. You, yourself, would have been 
 packed into the shops or factories for some man's 
 profit but for some trick of fortune. A girl of the 
 sweat-shops and tenements and you escaped. You 
 ought to be devilishly glad for any picking we throw 
 you now. I, indeed, am sorry for you." 
 
 "Sorry ?" she echoed, out of her surprise. 
 
 "Here this " he extended to her a golden- 
 hearted marguerite from the table "put this in your 
 hair." 
 
 "My hair ?" 
 
 "Yes." She had taken the thing in some wonder; 
 he went on : "In your hair make yourself over to 
 please me. I am the rich man's son. You are Louise, 
 a girl of the factories I think there are some 
 hundreds like you in the mills South." 
 
 She drew calmly from him. "The flower," he 
 went on "in your hair. Make yourself to please 
 me I assure you it is worth while. I do not often 
 ask anything of a woman. There is a touch of the 
 Orient in your features lend it this bit of the 
 daisy's heart. Your eyes an astonishing blue. They 
 call you a good woman, doubtless?" 
 
 She stirred his dulcet tones went on in their gar- 
 rulous shift and play; "I know it's irritating to a 
 woman to be told she's good. But they are . . . 
 so is a cow." And against her rising sense of out- 
 rage, he continued : "See here ; let's look upon each 
 other as we are. I am the rich man's son you, a 
 girl of that stupid and amoristic beast, the people. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 105 
 
 Eh? you and your kind? There are many of you 
 in the south mills. I could open to you the gates of 
 life such as you'll never see in all your cramped half- 
 lived days. You are a magnificent dreamer. I could 
 make life for you, with your exquisite senses, an in- 
 comparable thing you can not even imagine it. 
 Eh ? you're pretty rather and you're poor. You 
 want to live, feel, be to cry out with passion, to 
 love and be loved to have the rapture of life within 
 you. And you have nothing except a sour duty that 
 will cackle over the wrinkles to come in your face, 
 the dimming of your eyes ! Eh ? well " he turned 
 away, as if dismissing her with serious authority. 
 "The marguerite in your hair close down your 
 neck in back. It is a spot on women where God hes- 
 itated with His fingers in the clay wondering if He 
 should go on with the job. But put it there to re- 
 member that I am T, and you are you and I offered 
 you a flower and truth, and not pretense and dis- 
 honor." 
 
 She had laid the blossom on the table. Seeing it 
 he came back, took it, held it to her. She stood 
 watching his inexplicable humor, the shift of his 
 sardonic theatricism ; then, slowly, she took the daisy 
 and went with it toward the door. He seemed look- 
 ing at her in surprise ; then his deep voice came. 
 
 "Wait." She turned. "The professor who gab- 
 bles about his brother man and all that. I see that 
 you love him ?" 
 
 She started, her wide eyes grew stony. She said 
 
io6 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 calmly: " Who are you, to question me ?" And then 
 sharply: "Why do you question me?" 
 
 "To amuse myself, merely. Truth? it is a capi- 
 tal pastime ! I wonder that none of the philosophers 
 hit upon it." 
 
 "You to say that! You of all men!" she cried 
 out. 
 
 "I, my dear young person, have never told a lie 
 since I was able to reason since I made myself the 
 exquisite instrument that I am." 
 
 "Good God !" she cried, in a sort of terror. "Who 
 are you?" 
 
 And staring at his grave face an instant she turned 
 and went out. 
 
 He lingered some moments. From the other room 
 came the muffled voices of the wife and husband. 
 Rand went from the apartments along the bare 
 passage connecting the wing with the main house. 
 The atmosphere of made things, of ancient woods, 
 paper, carpetings and brasses, time-dulled and per- 
 meated with bleak associations all the interflexed 
 dreariness of the fixed and useless assailed him. 
 The house had the precise and ordered method 
 of a case of butterflies under glass. The son remem- 
 bered the smell of the great hall differing from that 
 of the rear passage, and this from the staircase, and 
 that from the library. 
 
 He went across the hall to the sunny room that 
 opened on the decaying conservatory, its glass roof 
 patched with tin sheet plates, the moldings loose, 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 107 
 
 the muslin shades half-drawn and torn. The sun 
 from the spring sky fell through, flicking the massed 
 and formal green of young narcissus, gladioli, car- 
 nations and beds of new-mixed earth. Beyond, the 
 bent back of an old caretaker bobbed rhythmically 
 up as he dug behind some benches. 
 
 But nearer him, by the door, he came upon Louise, 
 crouched by a bed of moist fresh-smelling soil, her 
 fingers in it, treasuring the tender spires of the baby 
 narcissus. His shadow fell upon her, she looked up, 
 and then quickly back ; she spoke without again let- 
 ting her eyes raise. 
 
 "I came here to get away to put my hands in 
 this down here in the mother earth to sweeten 
 them to be myself again," her hot voice swept on. 
 "Your touch contaminated me !" 
 
 He watched her digging. She seemed fitted 
 to this nurturing; as the promise of this young green 
 so was she out of earth and air and water fashioned 
 to turn her face upward to the light, to gladden a 
 moment in the life of the sun, and pass back to her 
 elemental diffusing. 
 
 "Something fresh and friendly, like dirt," she 
 went on, checking the tremor in her throat. "I 
 would like to lay my face in it to be back with the 
 great mother." 
 
 And then, because she was conscious of his intent 
 on her as she worked, her eyes glancing along the 
 vistas of greenery under the light, with no other 
 noise than the old gardener dragging a hose some- 
 
io8 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 where beyond them, she had to look up at him : "I 
 would rather you did not speak to me/' 
 
 "Look at me again," he answered, "again ! Your 
 eyes they are unfearing. It is unusual the tribe 
 has tamed the most." 
 
 And her steadfast gaze did not waver from his 
 own. "You're strange," she muttered, after the 
 pause. "I try to guess. It seems you might do great 
 things . . . and I hate you !" 
 
 "I," he answered, unmoved, "am capable of all 
 the heroisms. And, perhaps, no more. Large men 
 for the heroisms, small men for the achievements." 
 
 "I think," she started up and stared at him, "that 
 you are the very soul of vanity." 
 
 "YouVe hit upon a weakness," he retorted, "that 
 appears to be truth. I do, indeed, lie awake nights 
 cudgeling my brains as to how finely I may say a- 
 thing the next morning to make them gape at me. 
 Truth ? you have hit upon its very button." 
 
 And while she watched him clearly, lashing her 
 mind to make way against him, they heard the old 
 gardener's voice raised in answer. Another spoke, 
 and along the damp decayed brick walk Mrs. Ennis- 
 ky came, her skirts flicking the overhanging grasses 
 and sprawling shoots of the fern beds. She did not 
 pause at sight of them, but, shading her eyes across 
 the raised beds, spoke. 
 
 "Mr. Ennisley was looking for you, Louise. I 
 sent Ellen, but she did not find you. There's some 
 message dictation I believe." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 109 
 
 The secretary nodded silently ; they heard her step 
 along the walk, and across the graveled space and 
 wooden step to the house. 
 
 "Her eyes," Rand said -at last, "there is a marvel 
 in them. Have you noticed it ?" 
 
 "This is like you amuse yourself with your con- 
 ceits. You're curiously like a child, who will absorb 
 itself pulling a flower to pieces." 
 
 "A delight to look into, to find the soul in it, to 
 lift the thing up and gaze at it with a child's wonder. 
 That is the very stuff of life. Yes to gaze with 
 a child's wonder a pagan's marveling at the mys- 
 teries." 
 
 The wife evaded him with a stinging impatience : 
 "O, will you be still!" 
 
 "Have you ever known me silent when I wished 
 to talk? I must consider myself fortunate. I have 
 stumbled upon one of those intensely interesting af- 
 fairs a complete little human drama, acute, throb- 
 bing, with a variety of chances, holding within it 
 all the potentialities of the soul." 
 
 "What are you saying?" she retorted sharply. 
 
 "Here is its completeness; old, very old, and 
 yet new new as the sunlight now upon you. Here 
 is a man and two women. . . . You, naturally, 
 are one. You, with your comforting love of ease 
 and cat-like pleasure, to lie back complacent, ac- 
 cepting, purring filled with the satisfaction of 
 sense. And here is the other secretly aflame with the 
 sacrificial idea. I swear to you she thinks herself 
 
I io MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 capable of all the immolations that a woman will 
 suffer for love. She can imagine herself crucifying 
 her heart to feed her soul on this hero-worship. It 
 is, indeed, a sublimation past tears, or the possi- 
 bility of gross act or speech. Therefore your cat's 
 place by his fire is quite safe. She'd never consent 
 to lose an atom of this martyring sweetness. She's 
 quite mad with its quality and I can't blame her. 
 The sacrificial idea for love even what they can't 
 have while episodic, common enough, with women 
 has a distinct dramatic appeal. I, myself, have often 
 been tempted to experiment with it." 
 
 She had stared at him, puzzled in suspicion. 
 
 "What's this, now?" she cried. 
 
 He put the tips of his index fingers together and 
 went on with an airy disinterestedness, as a good- 
 humored schoolmaster would explain: "Why, it's 
 plain enough. Here you are the three. This girl 
 at the man's feet her life, all her life, in this wor- 
 ship of what she imagines is in him and his rushing 
 about at his perplexities of saving the beast. Then, 
 there are you, idle, amused, watching, sure of your 
 power over him from his passion for you. And here 
 is he, hurt, confused, half-turning from you at times 
 to her, seeking the splendor he dimly feels is in her 
 eh? Am I not right is not this the diagnosis? 
 Or, we'll say, the prologue ? And here I sit to see. 
 I congratulate myself I understand clearly I hold 
 up my crystal and watch with the singleness of ad- 
 miration of the connoisseur. Here are three souls. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER in 
 
 Here are jealousy, ambition, hate, pure dreams, in- 
 finite loyalty, and through and under all the easy 
 flit back to the barbaric passions in us all. Even I 
 can not quite complete my evolvement from them. 
 Eh? The thing in this house charms me. It is as 
 though one, in brushing aside the dust and rubbish 
 of a curio-shop, had come upon a jewel, marvelously 
 cut, which the dealer had no idea he possessed. You 
 he the other woman! I shall be interested in 
 watching it work out." 
 
 She drew up her strong shoulders in disdain. 
 "Well, then?" she retorted, "what then?" 
 
 "Truth?" he ventured easily, "I am right?" 
 
 "As you please. I am indifferent." 
 
 "She loves him and you watch, amused." 
 
 "Frankly, yes." 
 
 "So," he went on, with the satisfaction of a dem- 
 onstrator of physics. "Thank you. Here he is 
 between you two blinded by passion for you, 
 stumbling back to the hero-worship she gives him. 
 He stands on the edge of the abyss." 
 
 She lost her studied calm. "You mean the riots 
 his career, reputation in the balance ?" 
 
 "When he falls who shall be by his side, eh ? You, 
 the warm cat by his fire, or she, the priestess of his 
 soul ? Ah, what a study ! It will show you all up 
 excellently!" 
 
 Her face paled as the cello of his voice flowed 
 on. But she said calmly : "Go on it's like you 
 play the fool. I do not fear you." 
 
U2 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "The prologue," he continued leisurely, "is done. 
 I shall now watch with uncommon interest. She 
 loves him, and you? With the exception of myself, 
 you have never loved anything. Well, do not it is 
 bad for the figure and the complexion." 
 
 Staring at him in a sort of hate she went back to 
 the professor's mother, who was knitting a pink 
 necktie for the reformer. 
 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 BYRON HAYES, manager of, and junior part- 
 ner in Rand's mills, came from the northern 
 Alabama town two days after the riots to consult 
 with the chief owner. He was a fair, rotund man 
 of the American type, obsessed by class-conscious- 
 ness, but unwittingly, as the self-made man invari- 
 ably is. He had, therefore, the comfortable theory of 
 the self-made, that the land and its development were 
 held in fee from God for the cunning and the strong 
 who could rise above the lesser; from which came 
 inevitably the deduction that perpetuation of privi- 
 lege inhered in him and his kind, whom God, the con- 
 stitution and the courts had created and would 
 maintain for this admirable duty before the eyes of 
 other men. No one, therefore, was more ardent in 
 his denunciation of "class feeling" and "class con- 
 sciousness," than Mr. Hayes; his patriotism, too, 
 had the ring of solid worth, the resonance of the re- 
 spectable; he would for God, the constitution and 
 the courts have sacrificed a million of his fellow- 
 countrymen in the field ; and would, moreover, have 
 stayed at home busily to manufacture clothes to 
 cover them, food to feed them, arms for them to 
 
H4 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 slay others; and would, as a final attestation of his 
 devotion, have accepted the bonds of their indebted- 
 ness to him and his thence on while the Republic 
 should endure, if need be. 
 
 Mr. Hayes had a minute and acrimonious report 
 to make to the chief proprietor at Randsville; after 
 this, he dined with the judge. By the latter's direc- 
 tion Doctor Ennisley was present, and, it being his 
 usual night, John Bride appeared. Naturally, Ennis- 
 ley was constrained in the presence of the man 
 whose persistent opposition had been the obstacle 
 to his schemes for Rand's mills looking to their evo- 
 lution as a model industrial establishment. The con- 
 versation, despite Stephen Rand's considerateness, 
 soon transcended the amicable relations of fellow 
 guests, for Mr. Hayes' patience was small. He had 
 the smallness of the middle-class mind against the 
 modernistic spirit of the universities; Doctor Ennis- 
 ley was the embodiment of this traitorous unrest, 
 social, economic, spiritual, which had seized "the 
 masses," a favorite phrase of this one-time clerk in 
 a Buffalo dry-goods house who had married a dress- 
 maker's assistant of New Jersey before the war 
 came to give the self-made an exceptional oppor- 
 tunity. 
 
 "And now the thing's done," he concluded a 
 lengthy and fervid setting- forth of the situation at 
 Rand's mills "now the bomb's thrown, it's the cue 
 for all the college socialists and preachers with their 
 maudlin sympathy for the shiftless and incapables 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 115 
 
 to run to cover. These men who, in the magazines 
 and in their lectures, have made a trade and reputa- 
 tion by questioning the solid interests of America, 
 who have overturned the confidence of investors and 
 aroused the suspicions of the masses now, that all 
 their yawp has borne fruit in anarchy, they run to 
 cover!" 
 
 The old justice was silent Beneath his grim 
 quality lay a fineness of courtesy, a many-sided ca- 
 pacity ; he had, moreover, felt a weakness in his po- 
 sition as an interpreter of organic law and as a 
 partisan in the social cleavage which his industrial 
 interests forced to his attention. It had been this 
 consciousness of issues and his personal nearness 
 to them that had led him to harbor Doctor Ennisley's 
 heresies, which now rebuked him, as they had tried 
 his patience the past year. He looked across the 
 board at Ennisley, silent and constrained, before the 
 indictment. 
 
 "And if this is what the colleges teach," went on 
 the self-made, "then down with the colleges if this 
 is what the paid professors advocate, bridle them. 
 Yes, make them directly responsible for the outlawry 
 they bring about !" 
 
 Ennisley spoke in the junior partner's pause: 
 "Hayes, have you thought out clearly what you're 
 saying?" 
 
 "I know this," retorted the other, glad at the 
 
 - chance to fasten his generalities home, "that before 
 
 you were allowed to come to Randsville and meddle 
 
n6 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 with your settlement among the hands, and to agi- 
 tate shorter hours, state inspection, weave-room ven- 
 tilation, model cottages, and so on, there never had 
 been a strike in that district. And I know that ever 
 since there has been friction, discontent, and now 
 riots anarchy murder." 
 
 "Yes; discontent with ignorance, with wrong to 
 the children a hideous and intolerable race wrong. 
 Judge Rand knows what I've done in his mill-town. 
 Ignorant, dirty, despised the cracker whites from 
 the hills, and the Polish emigrants the agents sent 
 there by shiploads yes, you are quite right, I 
 preached discontent!" 
 
 "Class hate revolution treason to America 
 nothing less!" 
 
 Ennisley turned, his patience hardening, danger- 
 ously calm. "Better homes a school a chance at 
 life. Yes,, I've told them of other things that Amer- 
 ica might mean the dawn of the new day, the 
 higher man." 
 
 Hayes snorted: "And here unde.r this roof 
 that is the incredible thing about it under the roof 
 of a justice of the supreme court, you have found 
 a listener to your gospel of revolt !" 
 
 "Tut, man" the old justice had listened with a 
 grim irony "this will not do not do. I think, 
 Doctor, we have been overzealous, we have gone far 
 afield, and routed up strange game. The country 
 to-day is looking at your radicalism with suspicious 
 eyes. This affair down there has centered men's 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 117 
 
 eyes on you and your new school of thought. It is 
 against the basic idea of America, you will admit." 
 
 "It is what he's taught in the college settlement 
 down there to the scum of Europe ; it is what he's 
 preached at his assemblies and in his class-room; 
 it is what he's been after in the legislatures, and 
 through Congress. He has made this college, 
 founded by you, Judge Rand, to stand out as the 
 hotbed of rabid thought. He's only one of a nest 
 of professors there who's stood forth to the country 
 in this light. All this in the school that owes its very 
 existence to you, Judge Rand here, under your 
 very roof was bred this attack on law, society." 
 
 "Hayes, my friend, will you be calm ? This is no 
 way to approach the matter. The laws stand they 
 will protect and punish." 
 
 "Yes, now the thing's done anarchy in the 
 mills." 
 
 The old judge sighed ; he had been sore beset of 
 late ; he had borne the secret brunt of Corbett Ennis- 
 ley's brilliant forays many times from his associates 
 on bench and in his associations with men; he had 
 felt himself more than patient. 
 
 "It's well enough to have the country understand 
 the matter," went on the superintendent; "to have 
 it clear that the bomb that killed five policemen was 
 thrown from the steps of the settlement in shanty- 
 town where this revolutionary teaching had gone on 
 among the foreigners by a group of college men 
 Americans, whom they knew as men of note. You 
 
n8 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 can't get away from it that the police charged this 
 building to break up a riotous demonstration and 
 from the inside a bomb was hurled from among the 
 sort of scum who had been gathered there to be up- 
 lifted" he threw all of his ponderous contempt into 
 the phrasing "enlightened bah !" 
 
 The college settlement's founder was silent for a 
 time. "I would like to have been there," he said. 
 "It is hard to believe that my boys that such a 
 thing is possible." 
 
 "Possible? The police know of secret meetings 
 there of a fellow from Newark an out-and-out 
 anarchist who harangued the mill-hands night after 
 night in the basement of your building, in the very 
 room you used to talk in. I wish to God the country 
 knew all this that it had come to light !" 
 
 "I taught nothing of that knew nothing. I urged 
 the unionizing of the hands, yes. I told the yard- 
 men to help the girl workers organize. I put the 
 night school on its feet to give them an outlet a 
 hope" 
 
 "You openly preached socialism," retorted Hayes, 
 "the chief has statements from a dozen boys of the 
 sort of things you said." 
 
 The justice stirred ; he turned to his protege qui- 
 etly, but with a serious and ominous tolerance: 
 "Doctor, is this true? Socialism? You preached 
 this to them these ignorant mill-hands?" 
 
 "I told them of a better day, a social dawn to 
 come. Yes." Corbett rose the dinner had been 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 119 
 
 finished. "I held forth to them a hope a dream of 
 what America would mean to their children " 
 
 "And then you ran. off back to Chicago, while 
 your dupes threw a bomb for this hope this 
 dream. 3 ' 
 
 "Hayes, I decline to listen." The social worker 
 was pale, resolute ; he went from them with dignity. 
 The judge's voice detained him at the door; he 
 turned, his fine young-bearded profile against the 
 shade. The frail old man at the head of the table 
 raised his hand. 
 
 "A moment, Doctor. You did not lend your set- 
 tlement house to these meetings knowingly? You 
 knew of no violent measures the attack on the mill 
 gates, Doctor?" 
 
 The doctor threw back his shoulders with a sort 
 of despair. "Judge Rand, can you ask that? Do I 
 need answer that ?" 
 
 The old man watched him curiously; he nodded, 
 his ghost of a hard smile came back. "I trust in 
 you, sir. I believe you." 
 
 The younger man went from them. It seemed to 
 John Bride, sitting mute, expectant, intent to the 
 matter, that there was a haunted pathos in his face. 
 The old Scot nodded cannily. 
 
 "He is over-impatient, but right, Stephen. He be- 
 lieves greatly, and those are seldom patient. He 
 would like to prick us on over-fast wi' his mil- 
 lenniums, when every mon will have the worth o' his 
 wage and a tight roof o' his bairns' heads/' 
 
122 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 There's been much to trouble me of late years; and 
 it seems we belong to a passing order. This is not 
 the America you came to in the fifties, John Bride, 
 or that my line has fought for since Ticonderoga." 
 
 "Ye may well say. It is mightier, more wonder- 
 fu', man. And it is comin' to more marvels yet 
 than we can see!" 
 
 But the old judge shook his head. "Strong men 
 are needed," he answered, "and there seems none. 
 The old stock of the Saxon is dying. My line itself, 
 John what is it ? It was the best, the elder blood 
 and what has it come to ? You know you have the 
 answer down at your place, to-night." 
 
 Brother John was sighting along the green cloth 
 under the lamp. "I will spot ye ten and beat ye, 
 Stephen. . . . And Her ford I think he's tamed 
 a bit that in the heart of the fool, he's sorry. . . . 
 I can give ye fifteen points and wallop ye. ... 
 There might be much to say for the waster, Stephen, 
 him wi' his mother's trick o' eye . . . and if 
 ye insist, I'll mark twenty on ye'r string, for ye have 
 no chance wi' me. . . . An' only son, Stephie, 
 and ye'r own; I'd give him a bit o' chance. . . . 
 I'll spot up half the string for ye, and ye may as 
 well sit down and let me play it. ... Stephie, 
 it's not a fine thing for a mon to sleep wi' his own 
 blood barred from his door for deeferances fifteen 
 years past. . . . Watch me make this three- 
 cushion, man! I'm not interferin', Stephen, but why 
 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 123 
 
 don't ye face him man to man and see what good 
 the garrulous fool has left in him?" 
 
 "There are two fools of you down there, though 
 one's not a scoundrel like the other," retorted the 
 justice; and then his unpitying tolerance spoke its 
 brief authority. "Send Rand here, then. He can 
 have his rooms, he can eat at my table and be 
 damned with him. I will not speak to him, or com- 
 municate with him except when I choose. And he'll 
 not overbear me with his insanities. But bring him 
 to dine with you the next time. It will test him, and 
 show what I can endure . . . And you missed 
 your shot, John never tell me this wigwagging 
 foolishness has not stiffened your joints !" 
 
 "Go on, man, the game's anybody's! I was just 
 a bit startled." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 FROM the dining-room Doctor Ennisley went up 
 the stairs to the hall leading to his apartments. 
 At the turn by the great windows, there was one 
 brief glimpse of the lake, black beneath the over- 
 cast sky, the wide, clean avenue stretching south and 
 north with its double lines of lights. The wind was 
 rising with a lonely stealth. It stirred the naked trees 
 touching the gables, and the syringa and lilac bushes 
 beyond in the streak of light which fell out on the 
 lawn from the billiard-room. The upper portion of 
 the house lay in its usual noiseless melancholy, and 
 to the soul of the watcher from the window this 
 presently crept, adding to his doubts. He was a sort 
 on whom the weight of the hours rested heavily 
 wherr the flame of his ardors burned low; their 
 splendors were touched with the oblique shadows, 
 the sadness of reality. There was so much to do, 
 so much misunderstanding, bitterness, hate! One 
 needed the crusader's immolating fervor and a 
 giant's strength ; Corbett wondered, at his moments 
 of depression, how he had the audacity to stand in 
 the fore of the new fighting line, what mystic spirit 
 held him on? He had denied it to be ambition, the 
 
 124 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 125 
 
 solace the great years were bringing for his early 
 eager and starving life. He knew now that he was 
 the national figure in the child labor reform move- 
 ment; there were others doing more substantial 
 work, but he was the brilliant figure, caustic, dar- 
 ing, whipping up the lagging conscience of the land. 
 He could afford to be hated, reviled while he was 
 winning exultantly. But it came to him oddly that 
 he really was a far different man, a student with an 
 indrawing reserve, a soul that clung to the sim- 
 plicity of home-making ways. He had morbid fore- 
 bodings of himself in the great crises of men's lives; 
 already he felt the mighty current carrying him on 
 to the deeps; he knew he was drifting to ever wider 
 circles already he was the iconoclast of creeds that 
 had nurtured him ; he was claimed by the ebullient 
 humors of every school of thought : more he was 
 beloved. 
 
 "Yes, that man Ennisley," Altmayer, the tireless 
 propagandist of the active socialists, the father of 
 the national party, had said when reference had 
 been made to the cotton mill agitator's spectacular 
 lobbyings and his invective writings, "let him be. 
 We don't need him in our party and he's doing 
 bigger work for us outside, reaching people who'd 
 be scared off if he came to them as an active social- 
 ist. He's doing our work he's making 'em squirm 
 Ennisley's all right as he is." 
 
 Ennisley had heard with some confusion; he had 
 realized then, his acute position ; he was on the crest 
 
126 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 of a wave he had created, taking him he knew not 
 where, only, to-day, he was tasting the sweetness 
 of power, the exultance of victorious youth 
 his life full, potential. It was an honest vanity, 
 surely, that would let a man take measure of 
 himself as the forefront figure of his cause. Now, 
 after the hour of his trial, facing Stephen Rand's 
 questions, the man to whom he owed all, whose suf- 
 ferance had made him what he was and was giving 
 him his chance beyond, the peace and power of his 
 imaginings came back. He looked out to the heart 
 of the town to the south, and it seemed as if the 
 spirit of its labor and achievement, its undershift 
 of hopes, obscure destinies, beckoned; its army of 
 toilers with a mighty onward shouting beheld him 
 and were heartened. Yes, he was the man to do, the 
 figure for a consecration, Christ's brotherhood to 
 men. Some day he would preach that, too ; for he 
 was, at heart, essentially religious. He would find 
 the human Christ as a symbol for the great war of 
 the beaten and the oppressed. 
 
 So it was presently, in a renewal of his faiths that 
 he went on to the rooms. It was a man's work, the 
 only thing worth while the lifting of the race type 
 he knew the largeness of his vision. He told him- 
 self that he would go South at once and resolutely 
 face this affair at Rand's mills. After all, it was 
 only incidental ; he would refute it, clear his name 
 and press on. Stephen Rand, the chief owner, whom 
 he had led curiously on this way, had not lost faith 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 127 
 
 in him, and he would go prove himself blameless, 
 his lofty cause innocent of this bloody affair. 
 
 In the cheery living-room across from his wife's 
 reading-table where she sat, he came upon Rand, 
 the younger, sprawled along the divan huge, un- 
 stirred, his round face with its odd mingling of 
 grossness and asceticism, watching her. He did not 
 even look up at the husband's coming. 
 
 And then x at Corbett's surprised greeting, he 
 turned with a ghost of ironic courtesy. 
 
 "You must have come by the side entrance?" 
 queried the doctor, with a show of hospitable inter-, 
 est, "there was no announcement." 
 
 "I did. I can stand only so much of John Bride's 
 certitudes and moralities and I can endure silence 
 not at all. And so I chose to come here, and sit by 
 your fire. It's to be a rough night, man." 
 
 His eyes were on them both and about the room 
 in the inutile hunger of the homeless and then, to 
 them came his loquacious malice : "A fire to sit by 
 from the wet ; to eat and drink, and then lie by to 
 debate the matter." 
 
 The wife had looked up with a trifle of conscious- 
 ness in her composure when Corbett came in; she 
 felt now sure of herself: "And you surely are an 
 appetizer after so much of the doctor's frantic 
 goodness!" 
 
 The husband laughed with her briefly. To-night he 
 would have had his work heartened by an intimate 
 appreciation. Demetra's careless mood stilled him. 
 
128 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "How's little mother?" he went on, "and Tad? 
 It's after nine, and mother's in bed, of course." 
 
 "An hour ago. And the nurse is with the boy 
 he's better to-night." 
 
 The young father had thought that always it was 
 the nurse who was with his motherless boy, ill or 
 well ; that always, in the quiet room beyond, Jessie's 
 child was tucked away with the nurse girl reading; 
 while without, in that irradiation of her softness, 
 sat his wife. She was always amused, friendly, in- 
 teresting complete. He turned aside. He had 
 thought of calling up Louise to ask of the last lec- 
 ture she was transcribing as he had shot it off last 
 week; he would have liked her voice over the tele- 
 phone ; he fancied her understanding him with only 
 a word of eager inquiry to her. She had that about 
 her, to know his moods, his failures and his resolves. 
 
 The wife sought him curiously as he looked 
 through the rooms to the study light beyond. 
 
 "She's coming at a quarter past " she said, 
 and looking quickly up, he caught her idle smile. 
 It stung him with complex significances; he stam- 
 mered confusedly, he knew not at what. The other 
 man's eyes were on him. 
 
 "Yes, perhaps," the doctor answered. "There's 
 some work to do that address before the Social 
 Equality Club Monday night I've been so hurried, 
 and Miss Hergov has been helping on the thing." 
 He did not usually so address her. She had been 
 "Louise" always with a frank fine camaraderie to 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 129 
 
 his wife, his associates and all the world, never his 
 tribute to her worth withheld. 
 
 The wife went on with good-humored interest: 
 "You've seen Mr. Hayes at dinner? He had some 
 news of this those dynamiters?" She had quite re- 
 covered from her first dismay the thing seemed 
 passing. 
 
 "Yes. It seems that the police have all the men in 
 the plot except one. A fellow from Newark a pro- 
 claimed anarchist started all the trouble. He got 
 my boys into it. Yes, they arrested some of them. 
 Old Sonska, the gate-man, and that Peter, and two 
 others from Number Two mill that curly-headed 
 little chap you remember? Peter? They were all 
 Poles all ignorant, alien they fell easily before 
 that blatant cur. I'm starting South to-morrow 
 night. I'll see into this." 
 
 She murmured indifferently ; she had a vague 
 memory of the two weeks she had been at the mills 
 with him last fall. They had repelled her with 
 their roaring, the sordid clatter, the gray walls over 
 the thin soil of northern Alabama. A dank sun ris- 
 ing over the pine lands always on this squalid pic- 
 ture, the mills, the gaunt red earth, the naked village 
 pouring each morning its dirty stream up the 
 dusty road to the mills and swallowing it again. She 
 had spent the time motoring along the river with 
 the wife of the resident superintendent, while Cor- 
 bett and his secretary had been busied at starting 
 the settlement in the new wooden hall Judge Rand 
 
1 30 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 had built for this experiment, grimly cynical but not 
 denying. 
 
 "You saw what the Chronicle said?" the wife 
 went on. "It denounced your meddling it called 
 you an unsafe agitator " 
 
 He laughed briefly ; before he had not minded at- 
 tack. "O, well, my dear, nothing can stop because 
 of that! We know who owns the Chronicle! I won- 
 der if Louise is coming? It's late and a bad night." 
 He went to the window and then stopped to slip 
 open the door to his child's chamber. The two that 
 sat without heard him murmur, he went in the 
 room and was kneeling at the bed he lifted the 
 tiny shrunken form they heard the boy's sleepy 
 mutter. 
 
 Rand watched. His garrulity was sunk in a study 
 the wife, the quiet room, the chamber beyond, the 
 lamp-glow, the young father kneeling. His gray 
 eyes noted curiously what was the texture of this 
 life, its cloaking of naked wounds? What was the 
 other man finding here, and to which he stood alien? 
 Corbett came back to them. It was as if with 
 his child's warm breath he had drunk strength 
 for a man's facing of his fight; there was more 
 here, indeed, than the easy virtue of the mar- 
 ried who have bought their flesh and look askance 
 at the unattached. He had come back with shining 
 eyes; it seemed that whatever had held its shadow 
 between him and the spirit of his work had now 
 been precipitated, and he could go on seeing in his 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 131 
 
 old faiths. He was never given long to despond, the 
 merest trick of sentiment would raise him. 
 
 "O, it's good to get back here," he cried, and 
 looked even on Rand with his ardent laugh, "it 
 heartens a man for the tough old fight ! And a man 
 must go on nothing can stand still. When you 
 come to think of it, it's wonderful, this era we're 
 in making the way clear. There'll be a race to 
 evolve its own philosophies and moralities " it 
 was like him to dismiss airily what other minds 
 would stumble at lifelong "we are the rough 
 workers far before the better man." 
 
 The other's humor rose. "The man to come the 
 devil take him ! We owe him nothing. I do not need 
 philosophies, nor hopes, nor fears, merely some- 
 thing to fill my mechanism of a stomach and breed 
 a mind to look about with." 
 
 "I think you've been at Stirner and some of those 
 doleful madmen of Germans," retorted the other. 
 But his flow was checked his working ideality, 
 youthful, simple, ennobling his world, holding to the 
 need of new interpretations for the spiritual as well 
 as the common conserving of mankind, had no note 
 of the acrid spirit of another departure from au- 
 thority ; his was the iconoclasm of the crusader, and 
 not the super-man. He had been troubled at a touch 
 of this in Louise he had gone grudgingly from 
 the faiths of his home-keeping youth, he had not 
 given the full measure to reason or enlargement. 
 His eyes were now upon his wife, placid over her 
 
1 32 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 stitching. It seemed that she had been the last mile- 
 stone of his slow renouncement of his mother's sim- 
 ple orthodoxy. It was a huge, hard, brilliant world 
 to which he had come, and it accepted nothing but 
 the proved. "I think," he went on slowly, "a God's 
 behind it all that after the final evolution the race 
 will come to sit with decent manners and faces clean 
 at the Father's table. And now the thing is to clear 
 the way, to make the human mood receptive. Hu- 
 man love will show the light as we need." 
 
 The wife listened inconsequentially; she had her 
 old composure to each of them. Rand's retort came : 
 "Love is a physiological device to keep the scheme 
 running. A trick of nature to keep men interested 
 in it. I think, however, that the curiosity of woman 
 would have her tampering with it always, instinct 
 or no instinct." 
 
 And the wife laughed with her indolent uncaring. 
 Rand turned to her: "Eh? is it not so?" 
 
 "Really," she answered, "I heard little of what 
 you were saying you both bore me so !" 
 
 He looked at her and gravely broke the lie in her 
 brief glance. The husband turned from the window, 
 he sighed: 
 
 "You're strange. One wonders what you'll come 
 to. Sometimes it seems as if all the possibilities 
 were in you you, an anarchist of the soul!" He 
 paused; the idealizing sympathy of his own nature 
 flashed out, he was in a noble pity for the other. 
 

 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 133 
 
 'There's something I will tell you. I think there's a 
 chance that your father will forgive you." 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 "He's aging fast. He called me to his room the 
 other night. He thinks he's not long to live. Rand, 
 he spoke of you he called you 'son.' I had never 
 heard that on his lips before." 
 
 The renegade's unstirred face did not move from 
 its contemplation of the wife's white hands. 
 
 "I've wondered at you," the doctor went on. "It 
 seems so much depends on you. O, there's much a 
 man might do! Money could do marvels yes, 
 you're right a magician! I think sometimes that 
 on mere wealth men will found their brotherhood, 
 their gentleness, their human love will come to be the 
 very essence of materialism of reason." 
 
 "Eh? the brotherhood Doctor, that is your 
 greatest thing in the world !" 
 
 "I told you I'd given my life to it." 
 
 "Eh, you have not lived. You have stood all the 
 time without, like a boy staring over a wall he can 
 not climb, to the fruit beyond." 
 
 The doctor turned away to watch from the dark 
 window. Between him and the others the gulf lay 
 impassable; his mind dimly groped along it the 
 huge man sunken in the chair, gross, uncaring, the 
 wife across the table. The need of work, of mighty 
 faiths, ardors crying to the skies was in him that 
 was life its worth, its ecstasy. 
 
 But they they stood far off, beholding curiously. 
 
MY BROTHERS KEEPER 
 
 m 'the stillness the bell at the side entrance 
 rang. 'He Jieard it in his dream, and did not move 
 at first Then he muttered, and they heard him : 
 "It's, .Louise. Almost ten, and Louise did not for- 
 
 !He~went in a sort of joy; swiftly, as if with the 
 opening of the door to her, he would find his life. 
 It would come glad, clean, unwearied. He opened 
 the door from the hall, her name on his lips. 
 
 Louise was there. Beyond her in the gloom, a 
 form, a shadow flitting to skulk by her side, a face 
 staring at him, white, uncertain. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 ( 
 
 HE greeted her ; he asked her in, and yet through 
 its casualness there was fear on him that he 
 could not explain. The oncoming spring rain pat- 
 tered the boards; beyond the open door the swath- 
 ing night seemed pressing in on him, and this 
 crouching shape by Louise's side centered the men- 
 ace of the dark to his mind. 
 
 "Louise/ 5 he began, striving against his falter, 
 
 "Be still/' she said, "this man wants to speak to 
 you. He came to me at the office. He had a card 
 you'd given him your name and address." 
 
 "Yes?" Corbett answered curiously. He could 
 make nothing of the shape, beyond its white face and 
 staring eyes. And as he stepped closer, and as the 
 girl was lifting her veil to speak again, like the dash 
 of an animal the man was past her and in the hall. 
 The doctor turned. Rand and the wife could see 
 them, her husband's profile inquiringly lifted, and 
 the black hulk of the intruder. The blur of the dim 
 lights was on them, and then on the girl as she 
 stepped within, closing her umbrella. 
 
 "He said he must come to you/' Louise went on 
 - "he could not wait he must be taken to you." 
 
 135 
 
136 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 The figure straightened with a sound like a yelp ; 
 it seemed that of a shrunken boy, dressed in clothes 
 grotesquely large, raising a hand to part the long 
 straight black hair from his brow to watch the doc- 
 tor a thin face, grimed but with a pallor that noth- 
 ing could hide, the color of a wall of whitewashed 
 deadness in the shade. "Doctor, my friend I 
 come!" 
 
 The other man stared back at the brilliant eyes 
 fixing him. They made one think of a rat, cornered, 
 half -drowned in a trap. The fugitive went on, his 
 lips trembling with their eagerness, their need you 
 would have said their joy, their trust and hope : 
 
 "Doctor I come my friend. Za blow iss 
 struck !" 
 
 He had an inimitable accent, which, with his agi- 
 tation, made his speech a thing not to be understood 
 on first hearing. Louise, indeed, did not compre- 
 hend. The boy fled nearer the man, his thin hand 
 again parting his hair, his shrill voice faster, faster. 
 
 "Novak, Frietmann all tose boys say I must 
 come North tey gave me money . . . tey sait 
 you you would save me Doctor, my friend!" 
 
 With a gesture, humbling, eager, enticing, like a 
 woman coming to a man after she has been beaten, 
 he reached for the other's hand, coat, anything to 
 touch. 
 
 And Ennisley now whirled back from him with 
 his long-pent cry : 
 
 "Karasac! You here " his voice went to a 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 137 
 
 whisper "you mean? " it sank lower, a mere 
 tremor of articulation "you were one of them! 
 You threw the bomb?" 
 
 The air of the little hall had died for him. He 
 had no need to breathe a man poised on an abyss 
 into which a touch would cast him. 
 
 The stranger sped under his upraised hand; he 
 flung back the coat, showing beneath an arm rough- 
 bandaged, the blood dried, streaked, smeared. 
 
 "Engel wass wit me the comrade from New 
 York. He told us liberty a blow for the brother- 
 hood for all tose for vat a man could die ! Yess 
 s I the blow iss struck !" 
 
 The mill-hand raised himself in a sort of pride 
 his thin rat face lit. His acrid whisper came: 
 "I wass not afraid. I remember all you told me." 
 
 The professor turned away. His tense eyes fell 
 upon Louise standing quietly by the door. Now, 
 with a resolute authority, as if to close out the 
 world from his tragedy, she closed it. In the still- 
 ness they heard the rain new falling; the street 
 lamps afar off struck through the little diamond 
 panes of dark red and Prussian blue in the old lead- 
 ings about the entrance and made livid patches on 
 their faces. The girl locked the door; she turned 
 to them. She had, by one of those instant and inex- 
 plicable assumptions of the clear mind in crises, taken 
 the mastery. She acted ; she drew the curtains, she 
 looked up with a keen aggression at the two beyond 
 in the living-room. The wife had risen; she was 
 
138 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 listening curiously. Rand had come on, he was at 
 the door, his hand to the frame. Without speech, 
 without movement, the affair in the hall in panto- 
 mime had surcharged them with its significance. 
 And all this Louise at once divined that each of 
 the five within voice knew as if a prologue had been 
 played in the fifty seconds since the dynamiter had 
 entered the dim light, the figures without motion. 
 
 "It's this," she said, as though to sum up at once 
 a problem long debated, as if finality had put it past 
 discussion. "This man has come from Rand's mills 
 to Doctor Ennisley a bomb-thrower seeking pro- 
 tection." 
 
 It seemed as if, with the words, Ennisley came 
 from his stupor. He turned to Rand, touching his 
 sleeve. "You see,. don't you?" His voice shook. 
 "He's a mill-boy whom I taught in the settlement. 
 I tried to raise him help him . . . and now " 
 His voice broke "Good God, he comes to me I" 
 
 "He comes to you." Rand's voice had no inquiry; 
 it but stamped the logic of what had gone. 
 
 The Pole lifted his coat, eagerly he turned from 
 one man to the other, as if surely they could not 
 doubt: "I am hurt, Doctor. The bomb went too 
 soon. But I got away. Tey put me in a freight 
 car dat night. Novak, he say, Chicago . . . the 
 doctor, he shall help you he tell us all so much. 
 And all last night I went about and my arm hurt. 
 And at last a Pole boy he tell me I show the card 
 you gif me." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 139 
 
 The thing was in Louise's fingers; she tore it 
 slowly up. The Pole was going on with his curiously 
 mechanical, yet eager recital, an even staccato, as 
 one on whom the power r of impress could stamp no 
 further, as one beggared by plunging events, awhirl 
 and past the consciousness of surprise. "I could 
 think of only you. To come to you, Doctor, my 
 friend brother." 
 
 Ennisley had turned again to Rand. "A boy of 
 the mills an ignorant Polish boy, brought up in 
 the weave rooms a night worker. Rand, you see, 
 don't you? You see I had nothing to do with this 
 anarchy nothing . . . and that it's ruin to have 
 him here even to have it known that I taught him. 
 Ruin the wreck of everything!" 
 
 "My brother that's what Engel sait. Liberty 
 we wass to fight for in America. You told us, 
 Doctor, it wass to struggle. We wass all brothers !" 
 
 The scholar fell back from his brother's groping : 
 "You see this?" he repeated "a mill-boy a stu- 
 dent at the settlement. And this, now he must 
 not know me be seen with me. All I'd hoped to do 
 everything " His whispered appeal sank lower 
 to the other, "You see, don't you?" 
 
 Rand's voice had the music of a bell : "He's come 
 to you a friend." 
 
 "Yes, I know." He turned away wearily, and 
 then started as if from the shadowy hall mock- 
 ing faces listened he had heard the slur of a silk 
 gown; his wife had come and was in the door, the 
 
140 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 light subduing her September richness, the burnish 
 of her light hair merely showing. 
 
 "Corbett," she said, "is this all true?" 
 
 And before he answered, while he was nodding 
 his assent, Louise spoke quietly. Before the wife 
 who had dominated her always with her complete 
 assumption of place and tribute, she had still her 
 calm. 
 
 "You'd better go." She laid her hand on Ennis- 
 ley's sleeve, the touch urging him toward the door 
 of his study. "You can do nothing you can not 
 even be seen with him. The servants may come 
 the nurse or Bullock and this is Rand's house 
 a justice of the supreme court. This anarchist came 
 here to see you. You dare not be seen with him !" 
 
 And as he stood, blankly staring at her, she pulled 
 at his coat: "Come." 
 
 He went on slowly. Once he turned and cried 
 back: "Demetra! You see I knew nothing did 
 nothing! The whisper of it would be ruin for us!" 
 
 "Come," the secretary repeated. "He shall be 
 taken care of, but you must not be seen." 
 
 Rand's narrowing eyes were on them as she led 
 him off you would have said a broken man. As 
 he went through the study door, she closed it and 
 stood, facing out, as if a guard to him, hi dreams, 
 his life, their common shrine. 
 
 They had waited, the bomb-thrower in the snug 
 window-corner by the turn of the stairs, hidden by 
 shade, his bright eyes seeking to comprehend ; Rand 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 141 
 
 in the middle of the hall, his arms folded ; the wife 
 by the door from the living-room, watching, startled. 
 
 "A mill-boy?" she said clearly, "to my husband?" 
 She came on nearer, and in the light bent curiously 
 to see him. And in the shadow rose a gasp, then a 
 yell ; he had leaped out in a frenzy, and was before 
 her. 
 
 "Wife? hees!" He stared up at her, his coat 
 half off, his broken arm swaying in its bandages. "I 
 know you he sait Demetra! I remember! Look 
 at me Karasac!" 
 
 She stood unbelieving; she whispered the name 
 and stood still. 
 
 "Ludovic Karasac I" the Pole went on. "Brother 
 and you tey named you Demetra !" 
 
 The wife stood stunned. She did not even notice 
 Rand's approach. And after a while, her eyes shift- 
 ing from Karasac to him, she said faintly : "Ludo- 
 vic. I remember." And then she whispered, as if 
 greedy with her thoughts, as if sucking them dry, 
 trying to moisten her lips the while in her obses- 
 sion: 
 
 "Ludovic . . . yes, I remember!" 
 
 They looked on each other, the wife in her superb 
 strength fed, clothed, against the backing of the 
 room's faded richness; the brother, lean, white, 
 harassed with broken speech, dirty, alien the beast- 
 man. Suddenly she cried out in Polish, a single 
 word. 
 
 He answered. She went on rapidly, the tongue 
 
142 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 harsh under her hot delivery, fretting now and then 
 under a forgotten phrase, and then lashing on, while 
 he at times tried to retort to her outpouring. He 
 lifted his hand, he protested, he snarled back, his 
 voice raising, until Rand stepped to them. 
 
 "Speak English, I tell you," he said, and Louise 
 added quietly: "Do not raise your voices. Be still 
 and speak English." 
 
 The wife turned on her; her anger blazed. Then 
 she went on to Rand : "Yes, my brother. I know 
 now, it is so !" 
 
 The Pole retorted bitterly, and then broke into 
 his baffling English: "Eight years we been from 
 Galicia in the mills, a contractor brought us." 
 
 "The mills?" The wife shrank before him. 
 "Here, tell me, my little brothers and sisters . . . 
 Joseph^" 
 
 "Five years ago he died." 
 
 "Stanislaus?" 
 
 "He was killed in the machinery." 
 
 She spoke more faintly : "Little Marta ?" 
 
 The brother came nearer ; he had a cunning grin : 
 "She was like you too pretty. She wass in the 
 mills and then she wass fourteen and the foreman, 
 he she went away like you to wear clothes and dia- 
 monds rich, I suppose." 
 
 She reached to touch his arm; she lifted the bloody 
 front of his coat, the rags of his shirt beneath, 
 blackened, burned with powder, soiled with wear- 
 ing and the bandages. "Joseph," she muttered, 
 
" I know you Look at me ! " 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 143 
 
 "Stanislaus; little Marta!" And then she turned 
 to Rand, but as if unseeing: "In the mills your 
 mills! The mills Corbett fought for. . . . And 
 I lived here! O, God!" ^ 
 
 The anarchist stared from her to the man ; then, 
 exultantly, he leaped before him. "Rand? Thees 
 Rand? The man we work for? And you I see! 
 He tek you from us, Demetra; he mek a lady to 
 sing, wear fine clothes you!" 
 
 "Be still," Rand said. 
 
 But the other woman was watching them, her 
 eyes widening. The wife went on with her blind 
 cry : "Yes, you took me, Rand. You sent me from 
 them, children babies, almost, then. And in the 
 mills they broke them your mills !" She writhed in 
 a sort of hate, her glance from him to the other 
 woman, who was still with the bigness of the revela- 
 tion. 
 
 "Rand," the mill-hand cried, "go hang me! 
 Karasac the anarchist he kill yass hang him!" 
 
 Rand turned his heavy face unmoved from one to 
 the other: "This is all true?" he muttered, his 
 voice in no surprise; "Demetra, this is true?" 
 
 She nodded. "I can remember his face my 
 brother's face a boy of eleven, but this is he, 
 Ludovic!" And then she went on apathetically, 
 now: "In this house my brother, an anarchist 
 the police over all this land hunting him down. 
 You see, don't you? I Corbett " And then 
 her eyes followed Rand's own in a brief glance at 
 
144 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 Louise Hergov. The secretary had come forward; 
 pale, resolute, before the other impassioned woman. 
 "You know, and you see, don't you? My husband 
 his work his career all everything is on this. 
 He must not know Corbett must not know!" 
 
 "No," the other woman retorted seriously, as one 
 deciding and as one against whom there was no ap- 
 peal: "We shall save him without that! He must 
 not know!" 
 
 Rand's eyes took a grim smile: "Ze lady," he 
 mocked, "rich, beautiful sister of Karasac, ze an- 
 archist!" And then he went on gravely: "It is 
 very good. But you dare not tell truth, eh ? Well, 
 then what to do with him the beast-brother?" 
 
 "He can not leave this house," the secretary said. 
 "Free, he'd be found somewhere he'd talk." 
 
 "Yes," the wife flashed out to Rand, "he must 
 be hidden. It's ruin you see, don't you ?" 
 
 The mill-hand had stood from them, his rat eyes 
 moving here, there, his mind gathering bit by bit 
 from his understanding of their speeches. 
 
 "Hang me!" he broke out defiantly. "Karasac, 
 brother to the rich woman. I know what they all 
 zay yass, hang me !" 
 
 "Be still," Rand threatened with arm upraised. 
 
 They saw that from the sick-room of the child 
 Ennisley's mother had come. She was in her ill-kept 
 old wrapper of gray calico; faded with smeared 
 flowers ; she had a glass and was looking along the 
 mantel for something among the stuff there. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 145 
 
 The wife pointed to the mother. "You see what 
 it means, don't you?" 
 
 Louise turned to Rand's watching of the old 
 woman. "See here can't you hide him in the rooms 
 you once had? They are never visited." She came 
 to him in swift appeal. "Yes ! Hide him !" 
 
 He considered her gravely. She had fought with 
 her soul to hate him as a contamination. But now 
 she laid a finger on his coat, and at his brief smile, 
 the wife started. 
 
 "Now, here," Louise pleaded, "Doctor Ennisley 
 his good name, his work you can save him you 
 must. You can hide this man you must !" 
 
 And the wife repeated faintly, standing before 
 them, beggared, shaken, watching the beast-brother : 
 "Yes, he must not be seen hide him !" 
 
 The brother stepped to her, he thrust a grimed, 
 white face before her, leering, imbruted: "Deme- 
 tra," he began and went on in their common tongue 
 until she flashed out angrily, and he snarled back in 
 his guttural speech. She seemed dazed, and Rand 
 touched the brother's arm. 
 
 "Little one," he said, with some good nature, 
 "you're not wanted, that's plain. By God, whoever 
 fashioned you, they're anxious enough to tuck you 
 out of sight !" 
 
 "Be still!" the wife retorted. "You know well 
 enough he can't be seen." 
 
 Louise fixed him with her unflinching blue eyes. 
 And from one to the other the beast-brother looked, 
 
146 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 staring, uncertain. Rand's face took its sardonic 
 grimace; he seemed enjoying the theatric cruelty 
 of the situation. "Truth?" he said, "who dares face 
 it ? What a simple thing ! To be kind, to be honest, 
 to be unf earing why, what is more reasonable? To 
 give children what brings their laughter, and men 
 what cleans their souls? What is greater? Is 
 money? Or your damned reputations, or filled 
 stomachs, or easy beds?" He turned to the mill-boy : 
 "Beast-brother," he said in a rare friendliness, 
 "within a week they shall perform miracles for you! 
 Come with me." 
 
 The women saw them go up the stairs, their foot- 
 falls on the rugs and then sharply on the wood, and 
 then die on the corridor. Then they faced each 
 other, and after the moment, began to consider the 
 thing in more reason. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE wife said after a brief study of the other 
 woman, as one debating whether to brave the 
 thing imperiously, or steal back stealthily, covering 
 the defenseless places of her trail : "Louise, it seems 
 that I must depend on you. You know, now; and 
 it would be useless to do anything but be frank with 
 you." And she went on, wondering if she appeared 
 shaken to the other's eyes: "It's like a blow had 
 fallen on us from the hand of God!" 
 
 "I don't think it is so bad," the secretary an- 
 swered. She spoke clearly, with the gravity of the 
 sure. "We can keep the matter still somehow. We 
 can save him for his work nothing else is import- 
 ant." 
 
 "I did not mean Corbett my husband " she 
 was confused before this directness. "I told you 
 much that man, Rand, here. Surely you will 
 understand. You've doubted me. I suppose all 
 women doubt me. Well " she went on, gathering 
 her old command against the accusation of the 
 other's silence "it's of no importance, perhaps, 
 but we are two foreign women here we have come 
 up different ways to what we've got in this America. 
 
 147 
 
148 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 We ought to know each other what we were to 
 begin with and what we've fought to. And then 
 you'd understand what it could mean to me . . . 
 my brother coming on me, a mill-hand his dirt, 
 his ignorance a criminal a beast. And Rand 
 Herford Rand I'd have to go back a long way to 
 tell you all." 
 
 "I was thinking," said the girl, "of quite another 
 thing. Doctor Ennisley his place before the 
 world his good name, his work for others far 
 beyond any such problem." She hesitated, feel- 
 ing again her old want of personality before the 
 wife : "That is the only thing/' she went on reso- 
 lutely. "I am not concerned with anything else what- 
 ever." 
 
 "It's good of you," the wife hurried on, "I might 
 have known, Louise. It's like you to think only of 
 that his work his position. Yes, there's much 
 depends on you." 
 
 But there lay still between them unspoken, the dis- 
 sembling fear of women, the piteous loneliness in 
 which they must go unappeased, watching each what 
 the other possesses, or what they may despoil and 
 flaunt to the beaten. 
 
 While they stood thus, returning a sort of com- 
 monplace murmur of reassurance to each other, 
 Rand came with that peculiar swing and shift 
 of his uncouth body that linked him back to the 
 brutes which never grow gross enough to lose their 
 dangerous primal quickness. He had been gone so 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 149 
 
 short a time that the wife exclaimed in apprehen- 
 sion: 
 
 "Why, you? what have you done with him?" 
 
 "My rooms. They were locked. I went to Bul- 
 lock and demanded the keys. Eh ? it was a strange 
 sight three apartments, locked, the blinds drawn, 
 the very bed unstirred, papers scattered about the 
 tables the dust heaped over everything. It was a 
 strange hate that made the man do that, to forbid 
 a hand to touch them after he drove his cub of a 
 preacher away." 
 
 The girl had looked at him with her usual intent. 
 "We'd better think of something else. Here, under 
 Judge Rand's roof, is this boy hunted " 
 
 "I think," retorted Rand, "he came for shelter 
 hungry, wounded, beaten." He turned to Demetra 
 with his outthrust chin : "A brother. Yours and 
 Ennisley's." 
 
 "He's not," she cried, in a sort of freshly aroused 
 savagery. "What have we to do with him a mill- 
 boy, ignorant an animal a fanatic a criminal 
 a hunted beast?" 
 
 "A hunted beast your brother." 
 
 She was stung, it seemed, by a brooding tender- 
 ness in his voice an actor's trick to madden and 
 outrage. "Will you be sane for once?" she cried. "I 
 have waited, fought, longed for peace rest. To win 
 something hold something! I came here, married, 
 to sink down in the quiet of a home, forgetting ev- 
 erything, asking nothing and now now this " 
 
ISO MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "There comes to you, a brother. A hunted boy 
 back to his friend, the prophet of the dawning 
 brotherhood of man. Eh? I think Ennisley called 
 it that?" 
 
 He turned with his leer to Louise Hergov, pale, 
 wide-eyed, watchful beyond the wife. "The brother- 
 hood, I think he teaches?" 
 
 "Why will you torture her?" The secretary did 
 not flinch from him. "You know well enough it is 
 the end of things if it's known he's married to the 
 sister of Karasac, who threw the bomb. You know 
 the thing has shocked the country that all the 
 nation's w r atching him. Your father a word from 
 him alone would ruin the work of his life." 
 
 "Truth?" he grimaced. "Can that ruin? What's 
 greater ?" 
 
 "Will you be a man for once?" the wife whipped 
 out. "Our brother ? Then he's yours. Your mills 
 made him. My little brothers and sisters, aliens, 
 brought here by a contractor flung into your mills, 
 crushed, degraded Ludovic an anarchist! Well, 
 who made him one?" 
 
 Rand leaned on one foot with a hand upraised, 
 two fingers crossed, on his face the air of a connois- 
 seur to whom had been propounded a delicate prob- 
 lem of virtuosity: "Let us think. Here are the 
 mills ; here your husband's teachings ; here the law ; 
 here society. It is a pretty study we will hold the 
 beast-brother up and look clearly at him. I could 
 dilate on it for hours who made the beast?" 
 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 151 
 
 She stared at him in horror. And while he stood 
 in his pose before them, the study door opened and 
 Corbett came out. He had a paper in his hand, and 
 nearer, he ran his fingers through his thick and 
 curly hair with a nervous, decided manner. 
 
 "You put him away?" he began; "well, I have 
 thought the matter out. There'll be a chance, if 
 we can keep him hid a day or two, to dress him 
 differently, disguise him somehow, and then give 
 him enough money to keep still and get him off 
 somewhere West." He finished and looked about 
 on their silence. "Just to keep the boy hidden a day 
 or so and then let him get away." 
 
 "I believe," answered Rand gravely, "he came to 
 you for shelter that he claimed you for a friend 
 that on you rests a life let us say, a soul." 
 
 Ennisley threw up his hands : "Rand, be serious. 
 If he's proved to be a pupil of mine, it's the end. I'm 
 in a delicate position, man. If your father turned on 
 me I'd have to leave the university, the child labor 
 commission a word from that crazed mill-boy 
 breaks down everything." He turned to Rand 
 in that ever-springing hope that nothing could daunt 
 in him : "I may have been radical hasty in speech 
 but I saw the newer social justice, the dawn of 
 to-morrow. I never encouraged anarchy violence 
 nothing!" 
 
 "Then, why fear ? Fear is a thing to cackle at 
 it is a whip over the backs of fools. Why need a 
 man crawl about under it?" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 They looked at him again; the wife's lips moved 
 presently. She went to Corbett's side. "That's like 
 him always the actor the poseur! Corbett, you're 
 ghastly ! This thing is killing you." 
 
 He turned on her with swift gratefulness, his arm 
 went about her in his eager pathos at each human 
 note he could ever strike in this woman whom he 
 never understood. "Dear heart," he said, "it's for 
 you you and my little Tad. A man has to 
 come back to those things after all his wife and 
 child and home. Rand what could he know ? When 
 a man's cornered he has to go back to the deeps of 
 life the very simple things. . . . My boy how 
 is he, Demetra ? I want to see him my boy." 
 
 "He's restless, I think. Your mother was up half 
 an hour ago with him. Ellen's asleep." 
 
 "I wish you'd get him," the father muttered. "I 
 suppose I'm confused by all this. I I'd like to sit 
 down quietly with you, Demetra, and my boy, and 
 think it out and find my way." He caught at her in 
 fervor. "Yes, I'm that kind I have to go back to 
 the simple things, dear heart." And he held her 
 close, staring after Rand, who was departing with 
 his usual abruptness. 
 
 When the man had gone, the girl, her pale face 
 averted, seemed not to notice their caresses. "Dear 
 heart," Corbett went on, "it touches me so your 
 suffering for me! Nothing could matter if you 
 cared, as I've hoped you'd care !" 
 
 For never had she seemed moved before by his 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 153 
 
 endearments. Yes, he had gone back to where the 
 common strength of men comes, loving this woman 
 with a persistent ideality. He was living a great 
 moment and he knew it as only the sensitive soul 
 may realize its crises. She seemed touched by his 
 caress, and the world of his fighting hopes and fail- 
 ures fell from him in this splendor. 
 
 Then suddenly the wife flung herself from him 
 and left the room for the lame child's chamber. He 
 stood staring after, reaching his hands out in un- 
 thinking joy, and then his eyes fell on Louise by the 
 study door. He was confused by his rapture ; then 
 it seemed the secretary was looking at him with a 
 repression, a measuring second thought, a new light. 
 The widening of her eyes seemed to chill him, as if, 
 for the first time, he had failed in something; he 
 stumbled in some pit of disloyalty. He would have 
 spoken as he went after his wife, but the girl pointed 
 and said merely : "Go !" and he went as if dismissed. 
 
 But through the night he could not forget Louise's 
 look ; as though he had lived a lie, or was now fooled 
 by a lie, or perhaps both. And from some height 
 she looked down upon him clearly. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE day that came was hatmted for the wife. 
 She went at nightfall from her secluded apart- 
 ments in the wing of the house to the front of the 
 great hall with its severe windows set about with 
 little leaded panes, waiting, waiting, she knew not 
 for what. About the day there was the ceaseless 
 expectance, the disdain of death to the destinies of 
 the living it sheltered its tragedies with an evil 
 decorum. 
 
 The place had ever oppressed her ; she rarely came 
 this far, and she seldom met Stephen Rand, for his 
 eccentric seclusion did not invite approach. His 
 dislike of lights, of change, the conforming of the 
 aged servants, the memories of the closed rooms, 
 lent each to the sinister aspect of the house, and 
 Demetra, with her hatred of discomfort, avoided it. 
 But here, to-night, she came upon the master, his 
 hard face, like a Roman coin, age-stained, turned 
 to her. She murmured of some errand to the house- 
 keeper and of the lights. 
 
 "There are none beyond this hall," he said curtly, 
 "none live beyond." 
 
 154 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 155 
 
 "Yes," she said steadily, "one could not live here 
 and not feel that." 
 
 "Ghosts ?" He smiled, the hard lips tightening 
 "We all see them at times." 
 
 The wife stirred with an unwonted pity for him: 
 "You've suffered one can feel that, too." 
 
 "I have put away the capacity. Mrs. Ennisley, I 
 have been a hard man. Your husband, the mill 
 superintendents, my associates in business and on 
 the bench can not say they have seen much more. 
 Life has been a truce with me no more." 
 
 She was still in her surprise before this word from 
 the Sphinx ; in the three years of their acquaintance, 
 since Corbett had brought her to his benefactor, 
 , Stephen had not spoken so far. She went on again 
 in her feeling of compassion: "Judge Rand, you 
 have been kindness itself tolerance patience to 
 us my husband's affairs. We've been grateful." 
 
 "Of Doctor Ennisley's schemes? I was not think- 
 ing of them. They have been unfortunate enough, 
 but I was not thinking of them. There has come 
 here a man whose history you know something of, 
 doubtless. I am a hard man, I may have been amiss 
 we both have a Scotch streak of Calvinistic stub- 
 bornness in us, but a fallen preacher is not to be 
 endured. Madam, he made me lose my faith in 
 God. I have had but one hate in my life and that 
 was to my son." 
 
 She was stilled ; ever since Rand's coming she had 
 dissembled her insecurity ; what the father knew of 
 
156 MY BROTHER'S ^KEEPER 
 
 his early life was to her a doubt. Now he went on : 
 "He picked a woman from the streets of Vienna or 
 London I do not know who or where. I know 
 only what the papers damned him with, and how he 
 outraged the cloth when he was questioned. But " 
 the old man went on pithily: "he may have loved 
 her." 
 
 "Loved her?" the wife whispered. "No he 
 loved nothing!" 
 
 "Eh?" Stephen peered at her. "He was of hot 
 blood it was for his dying mother's request I 
 forced him to the ministry. I say, I may have been 
 amiss there. But, however that, here he is to-day, a 
 drifter, boasting that he's been sailor, tramp the 
 braggart, unredeeming claiming a right of me. Eh, 
 well it seems to take me long to get at my point. 
 I'm an old man and breaking fast. There'll be need 
 of strong hands for my affairs and I have wanted to 
 say: 'Lad, there's a place for you here there's 
 work for you . . . I will take you back.' And" I 
 see nothing but the swaggering impostor in him. I 
 am feeling through the dark if he would come a 
 man a man to me "she caught the trouble in his 
 voice at last "I believe, madam, you can help me." 
 
 He had held a hand to her ; she saw him suddenly 
 anew a piteous figure, small, shrunk, bent in appeal 
 she knew how the thing had crushed him now. 
 In an impulse she reached to his cold thin fingers ; 
 she heard the break of a voice a father's voice and 
 none of the justice. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 157 
 
 "We can draw a human soul back from the pit/' 
 he went on, "I think we can, my dear. I'd rather 
 die forgetting that I had cursed my own. I could 
 pray to God again. Eh? I think you are one of 
 these painfully scientific moderns as to faith it 
 seems there is an end to authority, but you can 
 understand that in me that I could pray once more, 
 if I could undo this?" 
 
 "What can I do?" she murmured, confused the 
 more as to his purpose. 
 
 "I've asked him back. John Bride will bring him 
 Thursday to dine. And God help me, I do not know 
 how to face him. I want you there you and the 
 doctor. I do not want any sick sentiment of a 
 reconciliation. I had thought that in a company he 
 might be received without outrage, or scene Eh? 
 Can you see I wish to study the man to accept 
 him without surrender. Can you understand that?" 
 
 "Yes, and I shall come. And if I can help the 
 least thing the most trifling thing one can do " 
 
 He broke in on her with his smile that recalled the 
 son's own : 
 
 "You are the first woman that I have appealed 
 to for anything in quite forty years." 
 
 And then, with his curt and yet considerate man- 
 ner of dismissal, he left her with that strange sense 
 still on her that she had seen the hard man's soul 
 opened to its depths. For the moment she had 
 forgotten the coming of Karasac; that in Stephen's 
 fingers lay all that she had won to. She saw nothing 
 
158 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 but an old man, decrepit, clinging wretchedly to 
 some impossible hope, hurrying from her to cover 
 his beggared life. 
 
 In her rooms she came upon two men watching 
 each other across the table, the glow of the light 
 between her husband and Rand, the younger. The 
 wife's sense of danger, vague, yet acute, rose at 
 Rand's enigmatic face, at Corbett's studied quiet. 
 He rose to receive her. Rand, sunk as usual, his 
 huge form filling the chair, nodded with slow indif- 
 ference. 
 
 And the question that for twenty hours had 
 burned in her brain came unconsciously to her lips : 
 "He still here?" 
 
 "I have the beast locked in the rooms. He has 
 eaten and drunk he is washed and his arm attended 
 to." 
 
 "The servants?" she whispered, for the thing 
 brought the leap of panic to her. "Food you did 
 not ask them for it?" 
 
 "I brought it from John Bride's. God help me 
 for the second time in twenty years I lied . . . 
 or did I lie? I said it was to feed a dog. Eh 
 brother? The beast-brother a mad dog cornered." 
 
 She shivered. He went on to her and to Corbett's 
 staring silence : "You should have seen him eat a 
 dog, starved in the highway. He gulped it in a cor- 
 ner, watching me with his eyes that can hate as a 
 hunted beast ought to hate. Eh? I stayed an 
 hour with him watching. I fed him and at the end, 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 159 
 
 when I went to take the plate away, with some sort 
 of a snarl he struck me." 
 
 "Struck you ! Why that, Rand ?" Corbett's voice 
 was wondering. 
 
 "I hardly know. I merely put my hand on his 
 shoulder. I called him brother little beast-brother 
 ... he whirled and struck. See here?" 
 
 They saw now his temple bruised. 
 
 "Struck you?" the wife breathed hard: "You, 
 a man three times his size. You he struck- and 
 you?" 
 
 "I went to fetch him water. He was starved for 
 it. It seems it is turned off in that part of the 
 house." 
 
 "Struck you?" she whispered. "He must have 
 feared!" 
 
 "Fear? Yes what else is left him except fear 
 and hate?" 
 
 She could not sit before him; she rose to walk 
 the room. 
 
 And after a while, because Corbett did not speak, 
 and to live before Rand's silence was more intoler- 
 able than his talking, she went on hurriedly : "I can 
 see that. That was like you a play, a little drama 
 you could act out to have him strike you, and you 
 go fetch water for him patiently. That was like you 
 to stand before him with a smile with your con- 
 ceit that you were beyond it all !" 
 
 "It was, in fact, admirable. It was complete 
 and wholly done. The beast was dumb after that 
 
160 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 in horror at me. He has not soul enough to see 
 there was an approach to greatness in it. He strikes 
 me; I smile I bring him water I say, kindlier 
 than before : Tittle brother!' " 
 
 The wife flashed out: "You call it great! You 
 say it's fine you!" 
 
 "There may be finer things than to put your hand 
 out to a brother in the dark, hated, trapped, to bring 
 him water and to bind his wounds, but I do not know 
 of them. Think of it now: He curses me I smile. 
 He strikes me, and I say, more gently: 'Little 
 brother !' I put a hand out to caress his wound. Eh ? 
 you should have seen him then, sit back, his great 
 round eyes staring !" 
 
 The doctor muttered, rose and walked the room's 
 length to look from the window. His wife turned 
 burning eyes upon the outcast. 
 
 "Rand, my husband's been at a man's work, too. 
 He's given himself to the children in your mills." 
 
 "I understand he's done that arch-crime in Amer- 
 ica he's hurt dividends." 
 
 She turned away. "Enough of this. Here's this 
 boy he must be got away." 
 
 "Away? he's just come! Running with his little 
 patter of liberty, fraternity brotherhood back to 
 the hand that lifted him !" He came nearer, his deep 
 voice to her ear alone, his smile upon her: "A 
 brother!" 
 
 "Be still," she whispered, her eyes on Corbett up 
 the room, "you shall not tell him that !" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 161 
 
 He went on, ignoring her, his eyes, too, on the 
 doctor. "Do you call him brother?" 
 
 "I tell you stop !" the wife cried, and the husband 
 turned in amazement. $ 
 
 "Dear heart," he said, "what's this how does it 
 move you so?" 
 
 "Ah, well !" she breathed, "Rand scourges one so ! 
 And Rand's mills made the boy what he is, as God 
 lives, they did! Yes, you and all America!" 
 
 They faced her wonderingly, she who had been 
 the clean cat by the fire. And from this miracle, 
 Corbett turned to Rand. "I see," he muttered, "you 
 mean for me to admit the boy accept him protect 
 him." He sighed : "That's like you, mere madness." 
 
 "You've taught, I think," Rand answered, "a 
 brotherhood to come your socialism. Well, then, 
 where is its soul to be? Are we machines to grind 
 and grind, and have our lives drop off behind us, 
 tied and labeled? Eh socialism? Where are its 
 sacrifices ? You can't expect men to die for a sack 
 of potatoes !" 
 
 The teacher of the revolution turned away. From 
 the window he saw the black lake, the streak of 
 light over the city. Beyond, the broad land ran to 
 the seas ; it seemed that as a light above its majestic 
 capitol, its destiny the hope of the beaten and the 
 failed, his own life hung; the hope of it the hope of 
 myriads to be. He turned at last from his vision ; 
 he came back to his power of reserve, the bigness 
 of his imagined and indispensable place. "You are 
 
1 62 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 the man who makes things hopeless," he said. "You 
 are the spirit of the individualist, the outlaw, the 
 survival you belong back in another age. Yes, you 
 are the man who makes for despair, who sits ruthless 
 and unmoving yes, a beast across the human road. 
 Thank God that you can not hinder in the end that 
 the procession will crush you, throw you aside in the 
 end!" 
 
 "But now I live. It is brief and sweet, but I live." 
 He rose and appeared about to go, seeking for his 
 gray and battered hat, turning his rough shirt collar 
 about his neck. And, as in his way, without cere- 
 mony or dismissal, he was about to leave the door, 
 the wife came swiftly to him. 
 
 "This Karasac?" she said. "You leave him 
 there alone? He is it quite safe?" 
 
 "For him?" 
 
 "For him? I meant if he should be captured 
 betrayed he'd tell!" 
 
 "I think he would," Rand said gravely. "It 
 would be most human." 
 
 She tried to still her fear, to steady her voice. 
 
 "Yes, be the actor the preacher the fool ! Rand, 
 it's like you. You know we're cornered trapped !" 
 
 He bent to look in her eyes : "Let me see. Can 
 a woman be great enough for this ? Sometimes I've 
 wondered at you, Demetra !" 
 
 The husband started sharply ; the other man was 
 near the door. 
 
 "Demetra!" Ennisley cried. "What's this?" 
 
 

 
" Can a woman be great enough for this ? " 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 163 
 
 In the doorway Rand turned. They saw his gray 
 priest's face twitch with humor or disdain: "I 
 think," he muttered, "the temple is still empty." 
 
 Corbett watched him go, bewildered. "What does 
 he mean? He used your name, Demetra? Is he 
 crazy ?" 
 
 "O, well ! It's his actor's way his love of posing. 
 He's always been like that." 
 
 " Ahvays ? Demetra, how could you know ?" 
 
 "I've heard of the man." She went on, com- 
 posedly now : "Can't you understand ?" 
 
 The doctor sat down, discouraged. "I can't make 
 the man out." 
 
 "Ah, well " she came to him impetuously now, 
 with a resolute endeavor to change their thought. 
 "Come, Corbett, how are things at the university 
 or the mills anything?" she went on irrele- 
 vantly. 
 
 "Dear, it's bad. Hayes is still here trying to 
 poison the judge's mind against me to destroy my 
 influence for the mill reforms. And this boy here 
 this pupil of mine." He broke off; he was again 
 a man haunted. He looked at her and cried out: 
 "Demetra, are you in a trance? Good God, look 
 at me!" he went to shake her arm; she came from 
 her stupor : "Dear," he went on, laughing strangely, 
 "what was the matter? Don't be so still." 
 
 "Still?" She started. "Was I?" And she tried to 
 smile, but it seemed more a twist of some pity for 
 them both. "I was thinking !" 
 
164 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Well, you'd better not, dear. There'll be a way. 
 I know you feel the thing. I myself have gone about 
 all day in a dream. That boy hidden here and my 
 whole life hung by a straw. You you haven't 
 seen him, Demetra?" 
 
 She was on him quickly, as if he had stumbled on 
 the truth. "Seen him? No, Corbett, we'd better 
 not see him not at all." 
 
 "Yes. It would be useless dangerous. He's 
 crazy an anarchist, a murderer no one knows 
 what he would do if I failed to accept him." 
 
 "That's true," she watched him, wondering what 
 faint ideal of his manhood seemed now fainter, 
 whitening to nothing. "O, no," she roused up, "we 
 can't see him it would do no good none !" 
 
 But with the thing between them they sat silent 
 as one will sit in the wreck of a house after a storm, 
 looking about at the semblance of familiar objects 
 that can not again be made to stand upright, to have 
 office, to give their old solace of association. "Let 
 him be," the man said at last. "Let Rand go on 
 with him. Yes, if it pleases him this hollow great- 
 ness for the brother, as he calls him the beast- 
 brother." 
 
 "Yes," she repeated after him; "brother," and she 
 tried to say the word again, but her lips seemed 
 dry. 
 
 "I saw the evening papers," Corbett went on; 
 "they were still filled with it the children's war, 
 one called it. And the Neivs said that the principal 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 165 
 
 dynamiter was supposed to have reached Chicago." 
 He took the hand from her lap and caressed it. 
 "And they'd hang him if they caught him the 
 proof is clear against this one the Polish boy, 
 Karasac." 
 
 "And he's here," she muttered, "Karasac he 
 came to you wounded starving Rand said, a rat. 
 And Rand, he knows " 
 
 "Demetra," he cried, "what do you mean? Your 
 eyes so strange!" 
 
 She forced a laugh: "O, nothing I'm silly. Of 
 course we can't acknowledge him see him. Of 
 course not ! It would compromise you for ever !" 
 
 "Yes. And I'm fighting the great fight, Demetra, 
 not only for you and Tad, but beyond the great 
 love of the world, Demetra the coming brother- 
 hood of men, some day, beyond us all!" 
 
 "I've heard so much of it," she answered wearily. 
 
 "And you'll never quite understand, dear." He 
 got up and looked at his watch. "I telephoned 
 Louise to come this evening. I thought I'd pitch 
 into work and try to forget. We're getting that 
 address in shape which I'm going to deliver before 
 the Social Equality Club just an after-dinner thing, 
 but I want it big. There'll be some men there I 
 want to reach. I called it The Brother Keeper." 
 
 "Yes yes " she answered, again in her indiffer- 
 ence. "Go on work " Then she started : "There's 
 Louise now on the veranda. Go, let her in." 
 
 "Let her in? Why?" he asked curiously. 
 
166 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "She you need her, Corbett." 
 
 While he looked at his wife, still amazed, the 
 maid had let Miss Hergov into the hall. She went to 
 the study opposite the open door of the living-room. 
 The man and wife saw her by the familiar desk, her 
 blue, close-fitting gown about her slender form, a 
 form yet full, vibrant, a steel in spring; her coarse 
 black hair suggesting a race close to some primal 
 untaint of life. The wife's glance snapped to his. 
 He was watching the girl and his own trouble seemed 
 to have lightened. 
 
 "Yes," he began, "she's so clear, so sane. A 
 woman like that can do so much " his hand went to 
 his tired eyes "she seems to feel in advance for 
 me she can hold a man to his best his ideals 
 his greatness." 
 
 The wife endured patiently she knew the rote 
 of this; knew, too, its honesty. 
 
 "To be great, Carbett? I suppose a woman can 
 send a man on to that, or drag him down is that 
 it ? She can be clean, warm, a mere weight on him 
 a cat content to sit by the fire, too can't she?" 
 
 "What ?" he put in quickly. "Rand said something 
 like that he mocks at all women. He has made 
 even Louise hate him in the three days he's been 
 here" 
 
 "Has he? How do you know " she clutched his 
 arm _ -has he?" 
 
 "O, let's be through with Rand," the husband 
 cried; "everything comes back to him his spirit sits 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 167 
 
 on this house and every one in it. I'm sick with it 
 all. The way he's slipped in on this matter his 
 power over us. And it's on you, Demetra you're 
 sick with it he's moved you so with his eternal 
 playing and his gibing." 
 
 "Yes, he has/ 5 she said apathetically; but she 
 walked away from him, stinging her hands one upon 
 the other with cruel little beats, her eyes hard. 
 Yes, he was playing on her and beyond the husband's 
 power to fathom the range of her soul, its depths 
 and greatnesses, before untouched her life a harp 
 to which he reached his idle fingers. 
 
 When she looked about, Corbett had gone to the 
 study and was speaking to the girl, sorting his 
 papers with well-remembered motions. And when 
 he had sat, with Louise at her place before the ma- 
 chine, her note-book in her hand, he began dictating, 
 the familiar singsong of his voice but little changed, 
 it seemed, from any other night in his busy life; 
 the girl's silent faithfulness, and the wife beyond 
 idling in the warm room. 
 
 But once she saw him glance, with a start, over 
 his shoulder, and then go on; and presently she 
 herself whirled in a nervous expectance, to look 
 about her at the quiet room. The clock, a solid ball 
 'of glass with the dial showing crystal clear, was 
 ticking the only sound. But she wondered at his 
 start and hers ; a presence in the still house haunting 
 them. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 SO, in the comforting intimacy of his study, they 
 were af their accustomed places, the secretary 
 in her small chair a little lower than his, as if, at 
 the feet of the master, she sat to learn and serve. 
 The friendly cases, the walls, the table with its 
 scuffed green cloth showing through heaps of man- 
 uscript, the scattered files, the closed door, the still- 
 ness here a man could recreate his nobleness. 
 
 Miss Hergov was saying in her cool voice : "Mrs. 
 Stratton of the Woman's Service Club telephoned 
 to know if you could set a date for your address. 
 They will make it at your convenience/' 
 
 "I'd forgotten" he mused a bit "tell them the 
 twenty-fifth. Let's see? no." He pondered. "If 
 I knew how this thing at Rand's mills was coming 
 out. You see there are things I'd want to say 
 an attack I could deliver that I can't, if if " 
 
 "Why should you fear?" she said intently. 
 
 He looked away from her clear gaze ; he got up 
 to pace the little den ; he came back and sighed before 
 her: "Ah, God this thing's a nightmare! Every- 
 thing comes back to it, Louise all my life at every 
 point back to this this pitiful mill-boy hidden 
 here. . . . And Rand, he knows !" 
 
 1 68 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 169 
 
 "How can you be afraid? Go on." 
 
 "Those are Rand's words?" he had a curious 
 query: "Why fear? How would the world look 
 at it ? How could we explain ? I might prove myself 
 clear as the stars of guilt for this anarchy, but the 
 damage would be done, the public mind poisoned. 
 Nothing could repair that." 
 
 She saw his bright, tired eyes on her, his hand 
 troubledly in his tousled brown hair, like a boy per- 
 plexed. 
 
 He went on eagerly: "If the world could see it 
 like you, Louise the greater way. Yet, to-day, I 
 can't understand you something seems to have 
 come up you evade me. You have such truthful 
 eyes, Louise, and they seem hurt " 
 
 She did, indeed, evade him. Then she hurried 
 on : "Never mind, you must go on. You can't re- 
 nounce, nor give an inch never!" 
 
 And he caught at this in his heart-hunger. He 
 needed the strength of women, they had been his 
 shield through all his fighting life. "Dear girl," he 
 muttered : "how you understand ! Yes, my work 
 your whole life's wrapped up in it. And I'll go on 
 fighting you keep a man to his best. You know 
 it's not for myself at all !" 
 
 "I've never doubted that." 
 
 He was pathetic in his grasping for her praise. 
 It seemed suddenly sweeter than his easy plaudits 
 from the world. To be the hero to the one who 
 knows you best and Louise knew him best of all, 
 
170 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 his enthusiasms, battles and defeats, his little van- 
 ities, and child's love of support, even his domestic 
 truces and failures she knew all, and he was con- 
 scious of it to give his confidences to those about 
 him was one of his charms of personality. And with 
 it all she honored him that was the greatest test 
 to honor him. 
 
 And as he sat in this great comforting faith in 
 her both now conscious, a little confused, evading 
 each other directly, the door opened and his mother 
 entered. She looked about in her habitual want of 
 confidence in herself : "My boy, I am clean tuckered 
 out readin' so. My glasses is outgrowed, I do be- 
 lieve. I just want to say to my boy, 'Good night.' ' 
 
 He went to kiss her eagerly. SHe would never 
 remain long in his study it was a sort of miracle 
 shop to her where he was working the magic fame 
 and fortune, somehow or other. She was a bit fear- 
 some of it all even in her pride. 
 
 "And Louise," she went on "a girl workin' so 
 late. Time a body was abed." 
 
 "Sit down, mother we're not working yet." Cor- 
 bett went on in his affectionate intent : "Louise and 
 I get to discussing things and work goes smash !" 
 
 "You're a dretful slave," the mother chided in her 
 fond way. He put his arm about her and drew her 
 to him. "Little mother, if I could only break you 
 of worrying about me!" He lifted her yellowed 
 fingers which he could recall working on the button- 
 holes of the first pair of trousers h^ had owned : 
 
' Dear girl," he said, "how you understand ! " 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 171 
 
 "Louise," he cried gaily, "whatever can we do to 
 make her feel at home here to feel she belongs 
 where I belong, and shares what I share? This 
 big Chicago it scares her she saw it in the fifties 
 when the cows were pastured across the river." 
 
 The pioneer mother laughed shyly : "It does beat 
 all ! The folks all rushin' and rarin'< it ain't loway 
 Center, nor anywhere else in the whole govern- 
 ment !" 
 
 Louise watched them, mother and son,, in this joy 
 of little things that made a home life she had never 
 known a one-time shop-girl, parentless, with mem- 
 ories of Kishenef. She could never quite grasp this 
 mid-West mother nor Ennisley's simplicity of 
 refuge. 
 
 He broke in with a burst of his old fire : "Chi- 
 cago ! It's wonderful ! It's all America in the mak- 
 ing ! How it heartens a man and sends him on fight- 
 ing building yes dreaming, too !" 
 
 The mother looked her admiration: "And you 
 gittin' to be such a great man!" she quavered tri- 
 umphantly, "eatin' with the president, and I don't 
 know what all!" 
 
 His deprecating, pleased laugh came ; his buoyant 
 spirit was already slipping past his trouble, finding 
 courage in the day's work and his home's solace. 
 With his wife he watched the mother go on her 
 eternal puttering about the rooms, while Demetra 
 stood by in her clean indifference. She had quite 
 recovered, it seemed, and before her husband was 
 
172 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 her usual tolerant, disengaged self, a burden 
 would carry gladly, life long, so strange is 1( 
 so eager to scourge itself, to wear chains, to 
 hungry, to go fetch for the scantiest meed. 
 
 "Eh, mother?" he mused, "she'll never char 
 She sits up for me now as she used to do w 
 Archie and I were late getting home from sc 
 church ice-cream festival !" 
 
 The eyes of the two foreign women went to 
 fine, brown-bearded face dreaming back to his sn 
 town rearing seeing Jessie home from the Met 
 dist social, loitering on the drug : store corner 01 
 the depot for the Sunday papers ; all the charm 
 his mid- West American boyhood was about him ; 
 They, from their childhood memories of dirty 
 lages and sodden fields, the sense of the peasai 
 hopelessness, the shop, the steerage, the night sch< 
 coming up to new freedom from this they triec 
 bridge the gap to him. 
 
 Then, on their common reverie, came a s 
 Rand had appeared from the shadows of the 1 
 of the great house beyond. He stood gravely wat 
 ing them ; always, it seemed, he was coming on tf 
 privacy and complacence to prick some one on 
 outrage. 
 
 Corbett started impatiently: "I thought yo 
 gone?" 
 
 Rand came nearer: "Where?" 
 
 "Oh, I don't know! John Bride's aren't 3 
 staying there?" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 173 
 
 "My brother," he went on gravely, "was thirsty 
 I fetched him more water. His arm was bleed- 
 ing he hurt it striking me. I tied it with fresh 
 bandages." 
 
 The wife looked at him in a terror that was part 
 fury. The music of his voice cut Corbett as would 
 an acid. And from one man to the other Louise 
 looked with strange stealth. 
 
 The doctor fidgeted. "I'm trying to work, Rand. 
 There's much to do. I I want to forget this 
 to take my mind off " his hand went to his eyes 
 as if to banish a phantom "work, a little," he mut- 
 tered. 
 
 "The brother-beast," Rand gravely said, "is still, 
 his wounds washed, and asleep. Work on, go your 
 way in peace. Why fear?" 
 
 "Rand," the other man began, burning in some 
 hope that seemed a degradation, "he's only a tool 
 a child crushed in the mills. I know his history 
 since he was seven. A child brutalized what could 
 one expect?" 
 
 "Eh? What!" His eyes went to the wife with 
 a smile that drew her fire, that played upon her as 
 if, indeed, she were a harp in his hands. "What 
 would one expect?" 
 
 "In your mills, Rand !" the wife cried, then rose 
 with a mutter: "I'll not stay. You play on us 
 you've haunted this house you're a devil moving 
 through it! I'll not stay I'll not listen!" 
 
 With that she burst from them, and the husband 
 
174 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 stood pale, staring at the guest, confused at De- 
 metra's passion, seeking light. At the door she 
 turned with half a shriek : "Did you think we'd con- 
 fess to him?" 
 
 "No. That is beyond you." He grimaced at 
 them both. "That is given only to the fools, the 
 martyrs and the Christs." 
 
 And they left the room, the husband and wife to- 
 gether, as if driven by a scourge. Rand sat down 
 across from Miss Hergov with an air of some 
 satisfaction and fell to scratching in his tobacco 
 pocket. 
 
 "You know well enough Doctor Ennisley can not 
 recognize this man/' the secretary said. "He can 
 help him get away, clothe him, give him money, 
 but not receive him." 
 
 "Those are the least of his needs. He came cry- 
 ing out his soul to his brother. A faith, a dream 
 well, who put it there ?" 
 
 She watched him, curiously stilled. "I wonder," 
 she said, "what is behind your mask? Tell me!" 
 
 And because only his slow smile came, she rose 
 and went before the gross hulk sunken in the chair 
 and put her hand upon him. "Tell me," she re- 
 peated, "you're a puzzle." 
 
 "You do not seem to fear," he answered. 
 
 "Why fear?" 
 
 They were his own words he listened with an 
 odd shift of his unlit eyes. Then, as ever, out of 
 his reserve of humor, he rebuffed her. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER , 175 
 
 "You are admirable. I notice you dare lay a 
 hand on me. I believe you would dare twist the 
 robe of God, if you saw there what you wanted. 
 And how much there is you want! To love, to 
 worship and ennoble! And now you stand before 
 a dying altar fire I could really be eloquent over 
 you I could find the language of a poet. Here 
 you watch this man in the test, and your hero-wor- 
 ship crumbles." 
 
 "I do not speak for him," she retorted steadily. 
 "But the great thing beyond. I tell you, if I could 
 take this anarchist's guilt on myself if I could give 
 myself" 
 
 "For what?" he put in "the usual sort of thing 
 a woman sacrifices for her love, or her sentiment 
 for the mere thing, love " 
 
 "No." 
 
 "What, then?" 
 
 "The brotherhood." 
 
 He laughed inconsequentially. "You tire me 
 with repetitions. We've just tested the brotherhood. 
 It at once created a panic. Now leave it." 
 
 "Tell me," she muttered, "why you took this boy 
 sheltered him fed him, are patient with him? 
 Ah, yes, I've seen a hunger in your face, seeking 
 always in this man's home for something denied 
 you! You've nothing a beggar!" 
 
 "I am, first of all, a humorist," Tie retorted, "and 
 lastly a humorist. Do not disturb yourself with 
 seeking any significances in me. I take the most 
 
176 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 obvious and reasonable things and hold them up 
 to men's gaze ; it makes one shout with laughter to 
 watch them howl and run. Christ might have had 
 a like diversion if He had not been such a serious 
 person." 
 
 She was preparing to go, leaving him sleepily 
 apathetic in the chair. She tried to summon her 
 hate of him, but one can neither hate nor love a 
 fat man who seems intent on regarding one with 
 mere good humor. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THURSDAY evening Rand came alone to the 
 house, John Bride, who had told him of his 
 father's request an invitation that had the per- 
 emptoriness of an order being busied at his flats 
 on some of his interminable small meddlings with 
 his tenants' fortunes. The old Scot had touched 
 Rand's arm as he told of it : "Lad, it did na' surprise 
 me. I've watched the auld man since ye came; he 
 drew himself further away, but he can not deceive 
 me. It's the loosening of waters long held back 
 the father's crying out for ye behind his pride." 
 
 The son had met the news with silence unlike 
 himself. 
 
 "Ye'll go?" Brother John continued; "ye' 11 go and 
 ye'll be civil for the common humanity o' it apart 
 from its policy, and I do not say ye are above that. 
 Ye'r the sole heir of Rand's. Ye'll go, man?" 
 
 "To eat with him, drink with him perhaps more 
 - listen to him. I am equal to it, John Bride." 
 
 "This is no the speerit for it, Herford. It was 
 not so the prodigal came." 
 
 "Did you think me one?" 
 
 The old man sighed; his had been a thankless 
 employ for a thankless guest the week since Rand 
 
 177 
 
178 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 came to him. "Ye both need kindlier way/' he 
 murmured, "two stubborn pieces hard coin to lie 
 o' the same pocket. Ah, well let be ! Til meet ye 
 there. There'll be Hayes and his woman, and the 
 professor and his handsome wife, and auld John 
 the old ghost house will have seen no such dinner 
 party in sixteen years. Eh? just to open it to the 
 sun would be a human service." 
 
 From this Rand had come alone to his father's 
 house, entering, not as he had done, by the side way 
 past Ennisley's apartments, but up the broad walk 
 of old cracked tiles to the front. Bullock opened 
 the door and, without greeting, the son passed in. 
 He paused on the noiseless rugs and looked back at 
 the aged servant closing the door, his bald head 
 grotesque under the flicker of the high bluish lights 
 shed from the crystal pendants in the chandelier. 
 The son remembered this Bullock's head like a 
 blue beetle shining in the ironic shadows of the hall 
 so he had seen it twenty-five years ago. 
 
 The old man ambled back to his wonted quarters, 
 under the turn of the rear stairs. Rand went to 
 the library; he stood looking quietly at the rear 
 alcove. In the heavy and austere draping of 
 the entrance some one moved. The light was dim, 
 but he saw now a form drawing about itself the 
 hem of the portiere and glancing beyond to the 
 ancient begilded pier glass that ran from floor to 
 ceiling between the shuttered windows. Louise 
 moved softly, she bent, holding the fabric about her 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 179 
 
 shoulders, her hips, smoothing it, looking back at 
 the dim reflection, a single glint of light on her face, 
 her hand to her hair this was the picture he saw. 
 She drew her shoulders back, she breathed deep 
 she imagined herself quite alone, and she lived the 
 brief moment. It was a trick she had done many 
 times when time hung in the silent house to come 
 here to the great rooms, tomb-like to draw about 
 her the heavy weave and stand watching herself. 
 She imagined herself the mistress here ; she had an 
 orientalized love of draperies, the feel of rich stuffs, 
 perfumes suggesting passions dead, hidden in other 
 years. She pictured herself thus standing rapt, at- 
 tentive, commanding in some theatric crisis of the 
 world, or an immolation exquisite in its pure offer- 
 ing of self to some call of the soul, the pathos that 
 you can not quite call out to the imagination. 
 
 This was a secret giving to her secret self; she 
 wondered at it at times; it seemed an atavistic 
 prompting from some line of queens, this spell to 
 which she gave herself in the rich man's house; 
 she, the essentially modern, agnostic, tolerant, res- 
 olute, steadfast day by day in her meager life a 
 Jew girl, pale, with thick coarse hair, a grave face 
 and eyes with their fixing blue. It was only here in 
 Rand's house, silent, alone, she lent herself to this. 
 She stood in this dream, believing herself a 
 Boadicea, a Joan, the Roman matron offering her 
 jewels. . . . She would, indeed, have been a 
 mother, to send a man-child to the world, grasping 
 
180 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 power, dominating his time, compelling pause. And 
 with all this inner woman splendor she was merely 
 Miss Hergov, a secretary-stenographer in a rich 
 man's house, subdued, contained, faithful. 
 
 And now, past her apparition in the glass, she saw 
 Rand. Instantly she turned, still in the drapery ; but 
 he had come nearer, and she stood, transfixed in her 
 pose, when he spoke. 
 
 "I told you once," he said gravely, "to wear 
 always a flower in your hair. Here this." He 
 had held out a sprig of young lilac which he had 
 plucked, coming from the gate. "This " he went 
 on "it will complete the picture it will satisfy 
 even me, and that, I assure you, is much." And 
 with his serious gesture he held it to her. She let 
 the curtains fall slowly, her fingers closed on the 
 green, rough-broken stem. She was too surprised 
 for words; too studied with her attempt to hate. 
 From the shadows of the house he was always com- 
 ing silently on one or the other of them to burst 
 their bubbles. He stepped away to his first position, 
 looking back, not at her, but at the picture in the 
 mirror which had that inexplicable charm of a pre- 
 sentment, the mystery of verisimilitude which one 
 would rather see than the life it counterfeits 
 there is, in fact, in a mirror, always the occult. 
 
 Then he spoke again, gravely, musically. You 
 would have supposed him a master staging an epi- 
 sode ; an artist setting his model. "Don't speak go 
 on with your dream, the lilac in your hair, the 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 181 
 
 drapery about you. You are beyond yourself a 
 little drab of duty don't speak the thing is admir- 
 able complete. It satisfies even me." 
 
 Then he had gone, leaving her dumfounded, 
 alone in the half-lights. And after a moment when 
 she stole swiftly to the hall, he had disappeared. 
 She went back mute, feeling of the lilac stem. 
 
 Rand had gone to the upper hall ; he paused once, 
 listening, the silence intolerable. He met old Bul- 
 lock toiling heavily up the rear stairs. 
 
 "I forgot to say, sir/' he began, "that dinner is 
 to be served at half -past seven. Mr. Hayes could 
 not come sooner, and Judge Rand is lying down." 
 
 There was an hour to wait. The son nodded. 
 When the man had gone, he frowned against the 
 accusing walls. He would not endure this. He went 
 to the rear and down a corridor to a zinc-covered 
 door beaten full of nails, close-fitting, padlocked. 
 He opened this with his key, stepped down, and was 
 in a narrow cross corridor on whose mattinged floor 
 the dust lay thick with a stirred trail down its mid- 
 dle to the end of the wing. He went on and at a 
 closed door, knocked, rattled it until the dynamiter 
 came, Karasac, thin- faced, rat-eyed, suspicious, sav- 
 age, refusing to speak, holding his broken arm in 
 its dirty clothes, merely watching the other, his dim 
 soul groping, too, at the enigma. 
 
 At half-past seven Stephen Rand met his guests 
 in the drawing-room, with its gilt oval mirrors, its 
 
1 82 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 shuttered windows in whose laces hung the smell of 
 disuse, its stiff furniture of horsehair and oak, the 
 pitiableness of fashion gone. The wife of Byron 
 Hayes, the superintendent of his South mills, greeted 
 him with the sympathetic effusion, the adulatory 
 smirk which the dependent rich give to the over-rich 
 and great. She had the sort of middle-class over- 
 dressing, the conforming type of matron you will 
 see about the best hotels and in Pullman sections, 
 the smug assumption of caste in the American 
 woman which the rub of the democracy of business 
 has kept from her complementing man. Hayes, the 
 self-made, was more true. Corbett Ennisley was 
 there, quiet, paler than usual, greeting the judge 
 with some constraint. And John Bride, in a quaintly 
 long coat and bulging shirt bosom, his face red, 
 rich as a beet salad, with his dry quip about the 
 weather and his dig at the billiards this was the 
 group gathered in more or less pretense of urbanity 
 for this momentous night the return of the prodi- 
 gal. They had a trying period of waiting, the point- 
 less, uncertain talk of the expectant and unsecure. 
 The justice glanced again at his watch. 
 
 "Your wife, Doctor," he said to Corbett, "is not 
 here. . . . And my son " he stopped, his clean- 
 cut lips closing it was like the fellow at the crisis 
 of his life to make them wait, to draw their nerves 
 to intolerable tension. 
 
 "The mon put off early," John, Bride said. 
 "Stephen, he must be here." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 183 
 
 "I've not seen him." The judge beckoned Bul- 
 lock. 
 
 "He is here," the man answered, "I left him 
 in the hall above an hour ago, sir." 
 
 "Well- well" the judge was testy it was not 
 a good omen. "We shall go on without him. He 
 can find his place in his own way he'd always do 
 that at the best. Come, my friends Mrs. Ennisley 
 here?" 
 
 . Demetra joined them without, the justice bowing 
 in his austere courtesy. Corbett's mother was with 
 the wife, greatly frightened, wondering if her lace 
 neck-piece was up or down, her claw of a hand go- 
 ing to it ever. 
 
 So they got seated at last in that inconsequential 
 and silly ferment of the guest ill at ease ; Mrs. Hayes 
 at the justice's right, the others along with no order, 
 John Bride's bloom of a face peering up from the 
 end among the tarnished candlesticks, like a monkey 
 behind bars. Corbett had his mother by his side, 
 and his wife was across with Mr. Hayes. Demetra 
 studied his face. It seemed older within the week. 
 She wondered if, too, the nights had lined her own. 
 
 John Bride brought in some clatter with the soup 
 his tenants and Tubby's toothache looking 
 roguishly across at the country woman and her awe. 
 He drew her out with this. She forgot the judge's 
 mask-like face at the end of the table, the pompous 
 bulk of Mrs. Hayes, the stealthy serving-man and 
 the close room all this fearsomeness beyond her 
 
1 84 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 Iowa conceptions. The rest listened to old John's 
 jokes and the old woman's wide-eyed if furtive little 
 cackles they were ill-placed, waiting . . . the 
 justice's face one you would not look at long. 
 
 "La' sakes," answered the country woman to 
 John's quip, "you must like young ones, advertisin' 
 for poor folks that has 'em to fill your flats. It's 
 rill queer like my Corbetty and his young ones 
 workin' in them mills down South." 
 
 Brother John tried to cover with his snigger. The 
 mention of the mills was as a dagger thrust up from 
 the board before each guest. 
 
 "Ah, woman I get my toll of them. They do 
 an old heart good, comin' down the stairs wi' their 
 clatter. Some folk complain o' the noise, but it 
 does me good. It's a cheerfu' human sound in the 
 morning, and grand to think of o' nights my prop- 
 erty shelterin' the bairns." 
 
 "And you never had none?" she returned. "You 
 never married, Mr. Bride?" 
 
 The old Scot laughed ; he looked about and at his 
 cousin perhaps they knew something that forty 
 years had hidden. But the judge put in, gravely: 
 "Madam, he had a wife and child in one it was 
 the railroad he put out through the Northwest in 
 pioneer days, and nursed and dandled until it could 
 walk alone. There's towns full of folk out through 
 the Dakotas that would never have been if John had 
 preferred a snug bed to storm and work and build- 
 ing. There were branches where we faltered, but 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 185 
 
 John went ahead, pleading for the country, proclaim- 
 ing what it should come to. He's been husband and 
 father to more cities than there are fingers on my 
 hands . . . and little they know or care." 
 
 John laughed ; the old woman getting back from 
 her confusion at being addressed so long and boldly 
 by the great man, so simply, too, and humanly. To 
 hear him praise another man suddenly enlarged you. 
 
 "I've heard tell," she began, finding a pride in her 
 courage to talk. "We was West afore that. My 
 boys' pa and me come from Pennsylvania afore the 
 war months and months, when they wan't no road 
 beyond the Missouri. The prairie schooners 
 wormin' on and on, the critters droppin' in the heat 
 and dust and the men folks fightin' the Indians off 
 ahead, and the wimmen and children livin' on corn- 
 bread and buffalo juice, the critters was that thin. 
 And my Jared led that train and when he come on 
 trappers and traders on the Platte he'd say : 'Which 
 road, neighbor which way?' And they p'inted on, 
 and so we come to the Black Hills country, the 
 critters droppin' in their yokes with heat and hunger 
 and the arrows in 'em. And we stayed year in and 
 out till the grasshoppers took the corn and the In- 
 dians the stock, and we was drove back across the 
 river to loway. But I remember the wimmen and 
 children huddled under the canvas tops while the 
 men parleyed ahead, findin' the road for 'em through 
 the short grass country allus it was that 'Which 
 road, neighbor?' ' 
 
1 86 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 They looked upon her curiously, the judge, the 
 son, the foreign wife; her scrawny neck and year- 
 worn face the dowdy little mid- West woman, who 
 followed the fighting men and gave her sons to its 
 newer battles for the last of the races pressing on the 
 long trail to the sunset. The wife regarded her and 
 the old shy eyes came back to this astonishing, full- 
 lifed creature her son's wife in her black, low-cut 
 gown of filmy stuff accenting her sensuous charm. 
 
 "That was the land we came to/' said the judge, 
 "we old ones. There's different breed now, madam 
 more evil questions." 
 
 "Man, it's grand still," John Bride retorted. "Ye 
 must look larger, that's all. There's the same roarin' 
 and pourin' in and buildin' and hammerin' wi' all 
 the foreign folk. Ye can see, Mrs. Ennisley, can't 
 ye we were the first rough workers only that." 
 
 "That's what my Corbetty says. He never gives 
 up standing for these foreign folks these strikes 
 and fights and all. Tears like a body can't pick up 
 a paper nowadays without somebody gittin' blowed 
 up." 
 
 They were stilled again. The judge looked grimly 
 down the board at his men guests ; they had no re- 
 assurance. Hayes made an impatient gesture. And 
 then his wife, who had found herself overborne, 
 said, with an air of putting a snaffle on the question : 
 "There's more in the papers to-night." She looked 
 about triumphantly at Stephen Rand and at Corbett 
 Ennisley. "Another one is dying!" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 187 
 
 "Dying?" Corbett muttered, despite himself. 
 
 "Another policeman. And the papers said they 
 were tracing the anarchists back to Chicago that 
 most likely they were hid here." 
 
 "Yes?" The wife sat forward; she glanced at 
 Corbett's profile turned up the table to the judge's 
 composed face. The old mother fidgeted with the 
 intuition which told her that her beloved was in 
 question. 
 
 The mill superintendent thought it was his turn; 
 the subject had been introduced, and it was one thing 
 on which he could talk victoriously, undefeatably. 
 He went on in the pause : 
 
 "But the thing's over, Judge. Fourteen arrests 
 made at the college settlement only one of the 
 dynamiters got away a fellow named Karaski, or 
 something like that a Pole a mill-boy." 
 
 The judge grunted. Hayes took it for assent and 
 went on: "Karaski did you know any hand of 
 that name at your meetings, Professor?" 
 
 Corbett's eyes went slowly from Hayes to his 
 wife. He saw her eyelids flitting, low. 
 
 "No," he answered quietly, "I never heard of 
 him." 
 
 "Well, they'll get him." Hayes' voice had the 
 snap of the hungry hound long deferred. "The po- 
 lice are wild five killed." He chuffed away at his 
 salad. "They'll catch the beast and hang him yes, 
 it's a wild beast hunt, that's what it is." 
 
 The judge's eyes wandered to the somber door 
 
1 88 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 and to the unturned plate at Brother John's side. 
 Hayes took his reverie for patience ; he continued : 
 
 "How long would it be, sir, before the assassins 
 are at our throats if this teaching is continued 
 the magazines and the colleges and some of the 
 churches? How long, sir, with this socialistic pap 
 preached and listened to, unrebuked, unpunished?" 
 
 The socialist across from him stirred, his eyes 
 shone; he would have spoken, but the judge's patient 
 voice came in : "The laws will uphold, my friend 
 will punish and protect " 
 
 The wife had started, turned, her white hand up- 
 lifted. "Listen!" 
 
 And they paused, they knew not why. She was 
 looking at the butler by the door. 
 
 "A sound " they heard her whisper, as if to her- 
 self. 
 
 The servant inclined his head as if she had ques- 
 tioned him: "A sound," he said. "Madam is right." 
 
 And on the instant old Bullock put a startled face 
 in their line of vision of the hall: "A noise?" they 
 heard him mutter. "Footsteps in the wing, and 
 something like a body falling !" 
 
 They were stilled; the butler cleared his throat 
 apologetically; he appeared to be thrusting the old 
 door man to one side. 
 
 "I did not hear," the father put in to the silence. 
 "A fall?" And then he quavered, an old man 
 perturbed, haunted: "My dear a fall!" "Lis- 
 ten!" the wife retorted, and each who saw her 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 189 
 
 start the dread upon her. And then they heard 
 again old Bullock's exclamation, the butler moved 
 with a mutter and Rand was in the way. They 
 stared at him; he was in evening clothes much too 
 small, tight across his heavy shoulders, the white 
 linen and the tie bringing out the year-hardened 
 bronze of his full neck and broad face tall, grave, 
 with his Indian stealth he had come. He fixed the 
 dim room, the group with a look, and then came 
 with his astonishing agility to the empty chair be- 
 tween John Bride and Demetra and dropped easily 
 into it. He looked about with his imperturbable 
 eyes, his half-leer, half-smile of humor. 
 
 They stared at him; they awaited his word, the 
 father the dumbest of them all. Then John Bride 
 rose with a hand out to him in an honest joy. 
 
 "Rand, lad, I say ye welcome! There's four 
 times welcome here !" 
 
 "You well may, John Bride," the new guest re- 
 torted, "it's been overlong." 
 
 "You're late," the father said, his heavy eyes 
 upon him. "Bronson, take the plates and serve 
 him as he wishes." 
 
 But if the devil had stepped among them they 
 could not be more obsessed. The superintendent 
 and his wife stilled, Corbett staring, and his wife, 
 her eyes_bloodshot, unable to leave his face. And to 
 her he now grimaced with his old barbaric trick, 
 baring his teeth like a gargoyle, bald, acrid, silent. 
 The country mother clucked in her throat; John 
 
190 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 Bride sighed. His presence smote them it drove 
 out what of common ease the hour had found. 
 
 "Your Honor," he began, "let us forego the soup. 
 Bring meat and bread the elemental things. 
 There's too much made of this eating. There's 
 neither poetry nor taste in it. A man should eat 
 alone and be done with it. ... And there's 
 nothing pretty in watching a woman tear flesh with 
 her teeth." 
 
 "Man," old John chuckled, "ye'r bauld out wi' 
 it!" 
 
 The son was unmoved if he played with them, 
 they could not guess. On Hayes and his wife his 
 glance went with ironic indifference the wife felt 
 the sting of the ignoring. She must assert herself : 
 "Now, I think nothing's finer than a dinner party. 
 It brings people together and makes 'em sociable. 
 Society depends a great deal on 'em dinners." 
 
 "So it does on the police." 
 
 "The police?" The little Iowa woman was un- 
 comprehending : "More killed ?" 
 
 "We were speaking of the riots, sir," Hayes got 
 back his managerial manner. "Five dead from the 
 bomb now." 
 
 "Most of the devices to get people out of the 
 world are indecent." He singled the manager's wife 
 with his unlit eye. "And death settles nothing. It's 
 like a fool who interrupts a reasonable discussion by 
 beating a drum." 
 
 The one-time dressmaker's assistant mumbled the 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 191 
 
 ineffectual dissent of the inept of mind; for twelve 
 years she had had a curiosity about the son of 
 Rand's house she had promised herself this week 
 that he should not badger her as was said to be his 
 way with his father's associates. 
 
 They little relished him; this was plain. Hayes 
 went on with the injured ponderosity of the right- 
 eous and the bewildered : "The police, sir, were de- 
 fending your property." 
 
 "Exactly. For my profit. We're lucky we 
 rich." 
 
 The judge's face hardened. "My son, have you 
 come back to this? still the mocker of all good the 
 very hands that would protect you?" 
 
 "I have little love for that which I buy and one 
 can buy duty, the cheapest bargain in the world." 
 
 The old man sat wearied; his dream, it seemed, 
 faded. "We need not discuss the mills now, at this 
 table." 
 
 "Eh? Why not? Let us see clearly a police- 
 man dynamited a mill-boy hanged? What does it 
 come to? Merely that we preserve our profit." 
 
 They stirred. He saw the wife's face steel itself 
 against his look. The superintendent's woman took 
 up the matter with a voice that trembled : "You're 
 unhuman impossible. The mills " 
 
 "The mills?" he retorted. "Great God the mills, 
 whirring- whirring, always, day and night! The 
 wheels go round, the smoke drifts off, and the 
 traders haggle and lie for what ? Merely our divi- 
 
I 9 2 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 dends? Why quarrel about a policeman more or 
 less blown up, deleted ? We can buy others in their 
 places what of it, then?" 
 
 The old judge, it appeared, was trying to rise, 
 feebly. "Unchanged unregenerate," he muttered. 
 "I'd hoped you'd come back a man." 
 "I am more a prophet." 
 
 They had no answer for a time, and then John 
 Bride brought his : "I think you are fair cracked, 
 Herford. Stephen's mills the property they need 
 a strong hand now. There have come evil times." 
 The superintendent spoke: "The mills, Rand, 
 have not paid a dividend this season, what with the 
 mollycoddling interference of some we know." 
 
 "That is, indeed, a crime." His grave voice lifted 
 in solicitude. "The little beasts that work for us 
 haven't they enough to eat? Wear? Brains to rea- 
 son with? It is a beautiful world to live in see 
 dream of and they live but once. God help me, 
 but give the little animals what they wish and be 
 done with it !" 
 
 "They said," muttered the manager's wife, "that 
 you were mad " 
 
 "I never could live within smell of my tribe 
 that's true." 
 
 "And you come to us preaching of morality," she 
 went on, despite Hayes' frown : "You to tell us 
 truth!" 
 
 "I could instruct the wisest of you. I could 
 preach endlessly to you. I do, indeed, lie awake 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 193 
 
 nights to coin phrases to heap on you. Let us, then, 
 discuss the matter. In your gardens you breed the 
 pure soul of a flower; in your stables the strength 
 of fine horses; in your preserves the beauty of the 
 deer all for your pleasure, your profit. And in 
 the mills, eh? what? The beast also for your 
 profit." 
 
 "You are beyond reason or common sense/' she 
 snapped against the judge's gesture for her silence. 
 "This is all your vanity !" 
 
 "Doubtless. For that I would build much. When 
 this place is mine I'll have no money-getters at its 
 table. All the tongue-tied poets, the old men and 
 the cripples, the blind, the failures and the children 
 all those who knew not how to work their 
 brothers for a profit. To lie on the grass and look 
 up at the sky to drip their fingers in cool water in 
 the fountains." 
 
 "One day and the next, may I ask?" Hayes 
 grinned at him. 
 
 "The next to the devil with them, I suppose? 
 Man, I can't lift the world !" 
 
 The doctor muttered ; he had had no word in this. 
 His hand was on his mother's knee, her hand within 
 his fingers. When his eyes found his wife she did 
 not look again at him. The old justice shifted in 
 his seat. 
 
 "Enough of this. It was like you to start a fool's 
 talk on the instant you came back. You will re- 
 member that there are women present." 
 
194 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Women ? Let them listen to me. They are the 
 Sybarites of the age the autocrats. All the cruelties 
 are upheld by their cat's love of a warm bed, their 
 truckling to authority." 
 
 The manager's wife quivered, jelly-like she half 
 rose: "I suppose you've never found one great 
 enough for your vanity!" 
 
 "Once I thought I had a beautiful harp, and 
 she thrilled at my touch. Soul a nobleness you 
 can not imagine seemed in her. Eh, well in 
 the end she was only a woman bought with a ring 
 and some stuff or other. They gave her a house 
 fat and rich, smelling of servants, and they told her 
 the lies they tell to be content and please them. 
 Yes, they put the soul of my woman there she be- 
 came common enough." 
 
 The old mother, it appeared, had sobbed; she 
 murmured: "Lord bless us! And him a minister 
 of God!" 
 
 Her daughter-in-law had not stirred from her 
 composure. At times she looked at Rand and at 
 times away at times she met his easy glance at 
 times she did not dare. 
 
 "You you dare speak of women!" Mrs. Hayes 
 'cried out. "You!" 
 
 ! "There you go, barking at me again," he an- 
 swered gravely. "Women I seem to earn their 
 hate." 
 
 "You're strange," the old man whispered, "the 
 actor, the poseur always." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 195 
 
 "That, Your Honor, is why I am listened to. It 
 is a fine trick. I think, indeed, that I have done 
 excellently to-night I have had the tongue of a 
 poet in me, the audacity of a god." 
 
 They stirred impotently; they fretted for words 
 that he could not turn bitter on their lips. Their 
 silence seemed to annoy him presently, for from one 
 to another his gray eye sought and studied and came 
 back again to each in turn. The father broke the 
 constraint after a time, raising his weary hand. 
 
 "Let us be still of this/' he said, "let us suffer 
 him and go our ways." 
 
 Rand sat before them in the yellow table light, 
 sunken in his chair, eating little. Corbett's wife did 
 not look at him ; her body shrank to the table, lean- 
 ing on it, her eyes across the board at her husband, 
 or intent on John Bride at the end, or shifting 
 calmly to the host beyond the others. So moveless 
 had she been, one would have thought she was a 
 child drinking the words of some tale of wonders. 
 
 But now, in the pause, they heard a voice without 
 the room, a maid's excitement, and then old Bul- 
 lock's querulousness. The butler, too, was there, 
 exclaiming, warning in reproof. But the girl's 
 shrill fright rose; she stared within the dining- 
 room. 
 
 "A man they caught him sneaking down the 
 laundry steps. He had a knife he's bloody, and 
 Terance, grabbed him." 
 
 Her cackle came too loud to disregard. The but- 
 
196 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 ler made a motion to keep her back, to check her, 
 but again she cried : "A man Terance has him 
 he's bringing him!" 
 
 Within the room Hayes lifted back his chair: 
 "What's this?" he said "in the house a man?" 
 
 He went out. With a sound of some alarm his 
 wife followed. The justice looked up perturbed, 
 questioningly. The butler went out fidgeting again. 
 And the others had no speech. Corbett's eyes were 
 staring at the table all disarrayed; they lifted pres- 
 ently, slowly across, rising to meet his wife's; and 
 steadily they looked at each other, so still, so 
 moveless, that it was as if a finger pointed at them, 
 jeering. 
 
 And while they stared at each other the old 
 woman's dry throat clucked: "This house it's 
 possessed seems like. A burglar what next?" 
 Then, looking at Rand's son across the table, she 
 cried perplexedly : "Lord bless us there's blood on 
 you your sleeve !" 
 
 The wife whirled, glanced down. Beside her, by 
 his chair, the stuff had dripped. It lay a glassy little 
 pool upon the polished floor. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 IN the hall without, the altercation of the discov- 
 ery went on. Within, the eyes of Stephen Rand, 
 of old John, of Corbett and his wife and mother 
 were on the newer guest. He lifted his left arm a 
 trace after the old woman's exclamation, to show a 
 slight stain. 
 
 "Merely that I scratched myself," he said, "no 
 matter." And, apart from the wife staring down 
 past her skirts at the blood by his chair, they thought 
 this all they resumed their intent on the voices 
 without. John Bride rose and went to peer cur- 
 iously; and then at the heavy tone of the stableman, 
 Terance, the host followed, coming to lean feebly 
 on John's arm at the door and look out. "What's 
 this? A man in my house?" 
 
 "He said he was here to see a friend, sir that's 
 all he'd say." 
 
 "And hurt, too a youngish fellow with a bad 
 face, but I can not think a thief," said Terance. 
 
 Beyond they had him a little fearful and dis- 
 ordered group of servants about a figure urged on by 
 the stableman's hand on his wounded shoulder, twist- 
 ing and halting and shuffling with the pain. They 
 
 197 
 
198 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 stopped him before the superintendent and his wife 
 and the two old men in the door, Terance still 
 gripping his coat. Karasac faced them all, sullen, a 
 brute trapped. 
 
 In the dining-room the wife leaned forward, her 
 eyes on Corbett. It would seem that in her the press 
 of sensation was dead a woman of stone but with 
 eyes that could flit, watch, fear, hate. By her Rand 
 was sunk, his face complacent; you would have 
 thought him a mathematician absorbed in an ab- 
 straction. 
 
 "Lord bless us," put in the old mother; "a bur- 
 glar!" 
 
 Corbett rose and pushed out, as a man will crowd 
 to see a killing, though it twists his brain with its 
 horror: "Stay here, mother," he said, but she went 
 after; she put her arm about him in the doorway, 
 and they, with the others, watched the little drama 
 beyond. 
 
 Hayes was saying: "A friend? come to see a 
 friend?" 
 
 "That's what he said, sir." The maid gasped and 
 went on, gathering a pride in telling: "Alice saw 
 him first trying to get to the door to the laundry. He 
 must have come down the stairs from the wing." 
 
 "And he had a knife, sir, and when I called at 
 him he ran, and when I reached him he whirled and 
 struck. He hit the wood, sir, and it went that close 
 to me ! I knocked him down and he howled then 
 we saw he was hurt his arm in splints, sir." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 199 
 
 "I do believe wrapped in linen of this house," the 
 maid put in. They stood in triumphant apprehen- 
 sion about him. Beside big Terance the prisoner 
 was a weakling, disheveled, in a coat too large, his 
 narrow shoulders drawn, his thin face a wedge 
 thrust out, his rat eyes moving from one to the 
 other, as an animal's awaiting the kill. 
 
 "A man caught here wounded in my house?" 
 the justice echoed. "A friend to see a friend? 
 What's this?" 
 
 They heard the tinkle of falling silver; the swish 
 of a skirt Demetra had come out, leaving Rand 
 now alone by his father's board in his apathy. The 
 wife faced the group, the captured man, old Bullock, 
 the wan light on his bald head, Terance with his 
 gray side chops, the fluttered maids beyond. And 
 above them, on the stairs, with a note-book in her 
 hand, was Louise Hergov, who must have heard the 
 gabble and the fighting somehow. She was still, 
 watching, listening. From her vantage it must, in- 
 deed, have been a stage of players there below. 
 
 The justice turned to Mrs. Ennisley : "My dear, 
 it must have been the noise you heard the man 
 getting in." 
 
 "There was no chance," said Terance. "No, he's 
 been here long that I'm sure of." 
 
 The wife tried to move against their questioning: 
 "A noise ?" she said faintly. "Yes I remember." 
 
 The captured man looked at her, a long disdain. 
 She cleared the hair from her eyes to watch him, 
 
200 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 his glance going now to Corbett, a stubborn ques- 
 tion, a wonder his hand moving troubledly in the 
 grotesque pockets. Once he was about to speak, his 
 lips baring, and then he relapsed to his sullen defense 
 against them, the hostiles who would slay him on a 
 word of the law. 
 
 "The police, sir?" said Bullock. "Sara tried to 
 telephone at once and it wouldn't work. She's wait- 
 ing to get central." 
 
 "Wait!" muttered the justice. "This let us see." 
 
 The manager's wife had waddled near in an ex- 
 cess of curiosity : "Byron, he's like a mill-hand his 
 shirt, the kind the store sells them. He looks like 
 one of those foreigners such a dogged look do 
 you notice, Hayes?" 
 
 They stirred with an articulation or so, one could 
 not have told from whom. The superintendent came 
 nearer. "By George," he said. "He has! And his 
 face they get that way, raised in the mills a sort 
 of hound type look at him !" 
 
 "Does he speak English?" put in his wife. 
 "What? A little broken you say, Terance? By- 
 ron, he's a Polack a mill-man. God help us here? 
 For what?" She half shrieked "To assassinate you 
 the judge to blow us up !" 
 
 "Preposterous!" the justice answered. "He's a 
 mere boy hurt probably escaping from the po- 
 lice." 
 
 Hayes seized the heavy and ungainly coat, drew it 
 aside : "He's wearing one of the shirts we sell the 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 201 
 
 hands and his shoes company store shoes! And 
 he's a Polack. Here speak !" he growled. 
 
 The other said nothing; they shook him again 
 he muttered in pain and glared nothing more. "I 
 tell you," went on the mill manager, "here in Chi- 
 cago is a fugitive from Randsville Good God! I 
 see! The anarchist who escaped!" 
 
 His wife's voice came shrilly: "The papers said 
 one was headed North- Karaski something like 
 that!" She bawled her genius of intuition. They 
 crowded nearer except the doctor and his wife 
 and mother; and beyond, in the other room, Rand 
 the impassive, sunk huge, gross, in his chair. 
 
 "Eh? man?" John Bride muttered. "Can it be?" 
 
 "Byron," cackled the manager's wife, "the po- 
 lice ! An anarchist " 
 
 "Be still," the judge said gravely. "Let's see to 
 this. You've come here, man for what? To see 
 a friend, you said. Why, that can't be !" 
 
 "Look at his hands!" Hayes tore one from its 
 concealment. (( A mill-man's hands they get that 
 way before they're fourteen. And who'd he come 
 to see? Look here his shirt it's blackened by 
 powder torn and bloody. That's what the papers 
 said the dynamiter was wounded !" 
 
 "But here " the judge put in; he turned, he 
 swept the circle of faces ; he looked aloft at Louise 
 Hergov on the stairs. Then he made a gesture to 
 the servants that they knew in the recluse: "You 
 will go." 
 
202 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "But, sir/' Terance blurted, "the police" 
 
 "Not a word yet. We shall attend to this. Go, 
 all of you." 
 
 They went with the slow feet of the dispersed and 
 underling. The old man was tottering on as if to 
 close the door behind them, when Demetra flashed 
 ahead of him and did it, then turned facing them, 
 but with no word. It seemed they all were struck 
 dumb. Then Hayes whirled with the quickness of 
 an inquisitor of the third degree : "Karaski that's 
 your name and you're the dynamiter By God, 
 yes!" 
 
 The prisoner merely sneered. His eyes wandered 
 over them, the pallor of the judge, the old woman 
 with her arm about her son, the wife silhouetted 
 against the door to the servants' passage, John Bride 
 with his red face. 
 
 "I tell you, it's plain," Hayes said. "The bomb- 
 thrower fled here seeking help a friend. In your 
 house, Judge Rand a justice of the supreme court !" 
 
 "Concealed here," whipped in his wife "the 
 house linen on his wounds. There's that great barn 
 of a wing unused never visited." She turned to 
 Corbett Ennisley: "Professor, you know all that 
 scum that used to gather at your college settlement 
 the foreigners, children and men. Was this man 
 one of them?" 
 
 The professor, his hands folded, stood by the 
 door. Before he could speak, Hayes added : "Yes 
 do you know him?" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 203 
 
 Corbett looked from him to the prisoner, their 
 eyes met full, steadily. Rand had come with his 
 curious stealth, was peering past John's head to the 
 center of the group. The prisoner's gaze wandered 
 stupidly from one to another. 
 
 "No," retorted the doctor, "I do not know the 
 man." 
 
 "I think," JHayes snarled, "he knows you. His 
 eyes watching all the time." 
 
 "Corbetty," quavered the old mother, clinging to 
 him, "whatever is the matter?" 
 
 He seemed to feel they knew he lied : He went 
 before the prisoner: "I never saw the man," he re- 
 peated. He saw his wife's eyes glitter as he turned 
 aside. Louise, on the staircase, stirred. Over John 
 Bride's shoulder Rand's full face had a smile. 
 
 John came forward, touched the captured man's 
 sleeve ; he was, in fact, to all of them, a sort of new 
 and hunted animal. "This coat," John said "it's 
 a bit odd I've seen it somewhere a big man's 
 friendly coat for sic a shrunk boy's body." 
 
 "Yes," the manager's wife put in, "a hunting 
 coat. I've seen it too and where? Mr. Rand, you 
 had one like it." 
 
 "Eh Lord!" John said. "I think so!" 
 
 "My son," the justice turned "your coat has 
 it been stolen?" He started at the other's face: 
 "Is this it?" 
 
 "Honored Judge " the man bowed gravely 
 you would have said he had rehearsed the part, that 
 
204 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 he had found by study the sonorous music of his 
 voice for this climacteric "it is." He raised his 
 right hand open to the captured man "A gift, 
 merely." 
 
 "You gave it to him?" Hayes laughed. "A mill- 
 boy bomb-thrower flying for his life coming here 
 hidden by a friend. Who else, besides myself 
 and Doctor Ennisley, has been at the mills who'd 
 be his friend?" 
 
 The stranger's eyes went always with their shift 
 to Corbett, to Demetra, and back at his captors. 
 He had become bewildered; he watched Rand fas- 
 cinated ; once he muttered, cursed, shook his head. 
 
 "Your coat, my son?" the judge went on then 
 sharply "Man, you're bleeding there, and on the 
 floor! What's this?" 
 
 Their eyes were all on him. He heard the wife 
 behind him at the door, whisper, sob. They were too 
 intent on him to notice. He raised his hand with 
 some airy assurance as an orator who had at last got 
 the attention of each auditor. 
 
 "We fought," he went on gravely. "He would 
 leave the house and I tried to stop him. Eh this ? 
 a scratch, merely." 
 
 "You knew he was here? Concealed him?" 
 Hayes' voice was incredulous. "Look here he's a 
 mill-hand he knows the doctor, too !" 
 
 His jerky questions faltered before Rand's gray 
 eye, the lift of his amused lip, his bald indifference: 
 "I can not answer for that." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 205 
 
 "Rand," the father muttered, staring, "you can 
 not mean he came here to see you his friend?" 
 
 "You are a wise, an upright judge. The very 
 same." 
 
 They fell back from him. Hayes laughed briefly, 
 unbelievingly. "You fool," he said, "to play at 
 this!" He turned to Karasac, seizing roughly his 
 coat, giving it a jerk that made the mill-boy twinge 
 with agony. "Here the truth you can tell it 
 you!" 
 
 The prisoner's restless eye had not left Rand ; he 
 stepped before them, looking now at Corbett, then 
 at Demetra. He seemed to find some course through 
 the mystery; his eyes beckoned her: "Brot!" he be- 
 gan, and half -pointed "Brot!" 
 
 Her cry stopped him a ^ngle word in Polish, 
 like his own. They started. "My dear?" the old 
 judge muttered. 
 
 "To see me," Rand broke in, and smiled : "Merely 
 that." 
 
 "I don't believe you," Hayes retorted. "Explain 
 it, then!" 
 
 "Go to my rooms. A man has slept there four 
 nights. You will find there food I brought it from 
 John Bride's. . . . The old man will tell you." 
 
 "God help him yes !" the Scotchman answered. 
 "For a dog, he said." 
 
 "Go on," the father said patiently. "Where did 
 you meet him, then?" 
 
 "The road. I was with him once in New Or- 
 
206 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 leans. He can tell you on the levees there he was 
 a common tramp and I ? well that is my affair." 
 
 "But this an anarchist ? the mills?" 
 
 "Yes how came he to find you out the other 
 night?" 
 
 "A comradeship. I have belonged to the circle. 
 He will tell you he was sent. Engle, the New York 
 comrade Breitmann I know them well enough. 
 You know we have an organization." 
 
 Hayes started from him : "Good God ! You ask 
 us to believe you?" 
 
 "A member of an anarchistic circle?" The fa- 
 ther was steel in spring. "Go on !" 
 
 "Eh on ? There is no more. The boy came here. 
 The comrades South have kept in touch with me. 
 When they had put through the thing they hurried 
 the tool off he was directed here. I had told them 
 I should be here. *?t is program, merely." 
 
 They stood back, stupefied. 
 
 "You ask us to believe?" Hayes muttered. "Here 
 you!" He turned on the mill-hand. But Rand 
 was before him, taking Karasac's arm gently, raising 
 it as he spoke : "Speak, then. Quit playing the fool, 
 or you'll swing. Speak Rand Rand friend 
 brother!" 
 
 The youth looked about, seeking other eyes; he 
 met stony faces, alien, hostile. He nodded, he 
 grinned in a sickly assent : "Yass Meest Rand he 
 know!" 
 
 Hayes swung on him: "You lie!" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 207 
 
 Karasac smiled his cunning, his eye lit on the sis- 
 ter clothed, rich, beautiful all that the great 
 world held of life was about her, it seemed; his 
 dulled face lit again with cunning : " Yass Rand 
 brother comrade. I come se-eck heem." Then 
 he extended his hand in a vain enjoyment. "Yass, 
 Karasac, ze anarchist hang me! Karasac hang 
 me!" 
 
 They looked at his blatant howling; then at Rand 
 in his smiling. "Is that enough ?" he went on easily. 
 "It is a long story. I have been with them yes. 
 One of the San Francisco group. And this boy, 
 here a hunted beast coming to me it is my affair 
 a comrade a brother-beast, here in this house." 
 
 He overbore them, seeming to find a surpassing 
 pleasure in the situation. The justice did not stir 
 for a time; then his voice came, a mutter, an at- 
 tempt to give it its old coldness and control. "Well, 
 the thing is like you. I can not tell what truth is in 
 you, but your life out of the darkness you've come 
 from the thing is not beyond you." 
 
 The old man was groping to a chair, he sat down 
 weakly. "Out of the dark you came to me," he 
 whispered, "the dark " 
 
 The manager's wife came nearer. "Judge Rand, 
 the police " 
 
 The father mumbled: they could not hear; they 
 clung one to the other, dulled, confused. Byron 
 Hayes said : "Yes, man the law " 
 
 Rand's grimace stopped him. "Eh? the law 
 
2o8 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 kill the beast strangle him. The law what did it 
 ever do for him a boy of the mills, a rat night 
 long in the spool rooms? Who made him, then? 
 The law? The schools and doctrines? You? I? 
 We took our profit, as the law directed from him." 
 
 The manager's wife shifted. "You defend 
 him" 
 
 He went to her with the serious, high pose of a 
 preacher; he reached to touch a necklace that she 
 wore. "In the mills they made him for you, madam. 
 Eh? on your breast you wear a stone who won 
 its light for you ? Its gleam ? A little profit wrung 
 from a child's soul a dividend from his needs, his 
 dreams, his hopes to make what, eh? Your neck- 
 lace, madam." 
 
 She would not listen to his voice filling the room 
 with its music, his actor's ease, his smile a pity on 
 them you would not forget. 
 
 The father muttered brokenly: "My son, will 
 you be still?" 
 
 "You fool," sneered the manager, "Judge Rand, 
 the police " 
 
 Demetra had come nearer : "No no " she said 
 as if her soul was on the rack. 
 
 Hayes moved, to the door. "Judge Rand, we'd 
 best take no chances. We'd best telephone " 
 
 The justice rose. "Yes, the law must take its 
 course." 
 
 But the son proposed, with the inconsequentiality 
 of a parlor conundrum, another course. 
 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 209 
 
 "Come now, let us be reasonable. Here are we 
 all. Here is this man by whom our fortunes, repu- 
 tations, peace of mind are endangered. He has 
 broken our laws, he has outraged us he admits it. 
 Well, then, why the police, and a trial with all its 
 clamor and sensation merely to kill the fellow? 
 Here we are gathered, the law, society, commerce, 
 the schools, all our respectablenesses, and worthi- 
 nesses represented; and here's the beast who defies 
 us, weak, ignorant, alone, shut in by the walls of 
 this house. He can't resist us let us then try 
 him, and condemn him, strangle him where he 
 stands." 
 
 They were speechless. He went on with serious 
 good nature. "What more reasonable, safe, cheaply 
 done? Why we are saved all of us, not a smirch 
 on our damned good names eh ? The justice shall 
 condemn, Hayes and the doctor shall hold him, the 
 women look on and approve and I I'll cut his 
 throat." 
 
 The women_raised a cry, shuddering. The men 
 turned heavy faces to him. 
 
 "You fool," the mill manager said, "be still. 
 Judge, we'll turn him over to the law." 
 
 But again the son intercepted. "I think not. I've 
 made you a proposal, reasonable, secret, appealing 
 to any one of taste, rather than all the publicity that 
 will otherwise follow. But you won't : then let me 
 say, call the police, and I'll pollute your name to 
 Heaven! You, Stephen Rand, justice of the su- 
 
210 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 preme court, whose son is Rand, the anarchist the 
 red brother !" 
 
 Rand paused. He looked at the silent father. 
 The bigness of the thing was on them. Half con- 
 cealed by the shadows of the staircase Corbett had 
 sunk to a seat. His mother's arm was about his 
 neck; her bewildered comforting in his ear, at what, 
 for what, she did not know. Only this her boy was 
 sunk, dumb, stricken, a little apart from this talking 
 her boy in his proud manhood. 
 
 "My name!" the father answered. "What is it? 
 My wasted life!" He turned aside; he muttered: 
 "Ah, well give me a moment !" And then he turned 
 again to them: "My friends, will you go? I wish 
 to be alone to think of this." 
 
 Suddenly past them the wife flashed, passing the 
 preacher, to come kneeling by the old man's chair, 
 to touch his hand: "You'll not believe him no! 
 you'll not believe him." 
 
 "What else? My son, is not this true?" 
 
 "It's true." 
 
 Hayes came again to Karasac and caught his coat 
 with a jerk that made the wounded man reel and 
 scream his agony. "Speak is this true?" 
 
 The mill-hand recovered, sobbing, biting back his 
 pain. "Yass brother !" 
 
 The old man rose, tottered to the door and 
 pointed. "Go," he said "my friends all. And 
 you'll not speak of this. I'd be alone." 
 
 They moved to go, but the manager pointed to 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 211 
 
 the prisoner: "Judge Rand this man a crazed 
 criminal " 
 
 The justice had a touch of his old courtly bearing, 
 his frail dignity : "Go all. I am answerable." 
 
 "If he escapes. There's the interests of society 
 the law property!" 
 
 The old judge straightened; he was again, indeed, 
 the judge. "My countrymen have entrusted these 
 to me, have they not, for thirty years?" 
 
 They felt the rebuke. With a gesture Hayes left 
 him, his wife following; brother John hesitating 
 with a coo, and then, at Stephen's look, departing. 
 The wife had not stirred; Corbett was sunk, his 
 hands in his hair, his mother's arm about him. 
 
 "Doctor," the justice gravely said, "you heard 
 me, did you not ?" 
 
 The doctor rose ; they heard his mighty sigh, ex- 
 plosive, as if some inordinate issue in him had 
 flamed to vapor and must be exhaled. He looked at 
 the wife, not at the son, nor at the mill-hand. 
 
 "Demetra!" he cried, and held his hand to her, 
 moving away, the mother still clinging to him. 
 
 The wife, it seemed, was stupefied. She stood and 
 heard him go, the old woman clinging, her quaver- 
 ing words at his ear. Their footsteps went on, drag- 
 ging, weary, old, and she did not move. The judge's 
 courtly gesture came to her again ; his bow, stately 
 for so frail and aged a man. 
 
 "My dear," he gently said, "go, leave us." 
 
 And then she went hurriedly after; in the door- 
 
212 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 way, her hand to her mouth, as if setting her teeth 
 in it, she blurted: "He would not speak not 
 speak !" 
 
 In the rear hall she came on them, and if one 
 could shriek below the breath, she did it. as she 
 took her husband's arm: "Not speak not speak!'' 
 
 "Did you?" he whispered, as the mother stupidly 
 gazed at them. And he went on with his women 
 hanging to him, his face pale, but hardening, a 
 mighty strength rising in him from some vision 
 stretching from these walls to all the land, its huge- 
 ness, its mystery, its purpose; from all the world of 
 underrunning life, struggling, beaten, failed, to 
 which he could bring a man's gift of hand and brain 
 and heart from all this came faith and a fighting 
 ardor. There was no sacrifice for it too great he 
 belonged to them, the coming ages that was his 
 work, his life. He said to her, steadily: 
 
 "I did not speak. There's a greater thing . . . 
 let him accept I accept." 
 
 The wife followed him with her inarticulate mut- 
 ter. 
 
 Back in the front hall the others had not moved. 
 Louise Hergov on the turn of the stairs, silent, un- 
 seen in the shadows, looked down on them still, the 
 father, the son and in the middle of the space under 
 the light the beast watching them. 
 
I 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THEY stood within the lighted hall, the father 
 and son, and a little way from them the mill- 
 hand in the blood and stink of his unwashed clothes. 
 When he moved, surprised that his guards had left 
 him, the son, with an upraised hand, commanded his 
 silence. He muttered sullenly, but obeyed. 
 
 The justice faced them slowly, dumb, it seemed 
 that the ironic hand of coincidence had at this hour, 
 this place, thrust itself upon his forgiveness; that 
 behind a man's fairest endeavor lurks for ever 
 chance, the blind devil whose grimace none may 
 exorcise. But he came from this to his simple dig- 
 nity; he said calmly: "My son, what is there to 
 say?" 
 
 "We've never been given to much speech," an- 
 swered the other. 
 
 "True true. There is little need." The father's 
 step seemed uncertain, his hand shaken, belying his 
 hard face. "To-night I summoned you. It cost me 
 much to do that a human feeling that perhaps is 
 weakness. You have told me this strange story, but 
 I can not be surprised, knowing what your life has 
 
 213 
 
214 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 been your words, your philosophy your truth, 
 you say." 
 
 "Simple enough. Submission is the arch sin of 
 the world I've submitted to nothing. I regard you 
 and your law-mongering and profit-taking as rather 
 infamous, but let that be we can go our ways." 
 
 The father made a pathetic gesture, and went on 
 in his worn, even voice: "It's curious that we've 
 come to this the last of my line dying out in you 
 an unbelievable figure." He looked with some fas- 
 cination at the son, his graven face attentive. "Well, 
 go. No law can punish you as you have me. I think 
 I can stop the mouths of my friends. Let the thing 
 be buried take this boy and go." 
 
 With that he turned his back and was going 
 slowly out when Rand's voice came. 
 
 "A moment?" He touched the old man's arm 
 lightly. "I'll go, but there's a fancy of mine I might 
 explain. The mills what will you do with them?" 
 
 The justice did not answer. "See here," Rand 
 went on, "I've given up much, and it's a rough road 
 I'll travel. I'm not made for your harness, but 
 here's the mills and our little beast -brother, eh? 
 Look at him he's not pretty. Well, if this fellow 
 Ennisley knows how to breed a better look in the 
 beast's face, in God's name, let him! If the little 
 rats down there are hungry, feed them what more 
 simple and better for you to be about? But it's not 
 a job for me I'd not make a clerk or money-coun- 
 ter I'd rather tramp first. But the mill rats let 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 215 
 
 this professor hammer away at them I'm damned 
 if I care about the money. There's no man in all 
 America can understand- that, but damn me, if I 
 want the money! I can't think of a thing it would 
 buy for me." 
 
 The justice did not answer. Rand saw his white 
 hair gleam under the light by the stairs. Then by 
 his side he found the mill-boy, staring, brushing the 
 matted hair from his eyes, in a frenzy to read the 
 master's face. "You save me," he whispered, "and 
 you lie lie !" 
 
 The older man seemed to find a humor in this 
 groping grotesque; his hand went to the other's 
 shoulder he went on with more gravity, after his 
 instant study "Boy, did you ever see the West?" 
 
 The other grunted, shaken in bewilderment. 
 
 "It's big. There's no mill smoke a man can 
 breathe." He paused, his great voice, low, intent: 
 "Wait for me outside. I want a moment here alone." 
 
 The other followed his motion; he went to the 
 door, looked back, his eyes glittering their suspicion, 
 their hostile dread; then, a glance without, and he 
 stepped to the balcony to the rainy night. Rand 
 saw his white face leer once at the small side win- 
 dow, fitting the diamond pane for an instant, an evil 
 picture that vanished. 
 
 The man within went to the library. He saw 
 once in the reflecting panels his presentment, his 
 evening clothes, his swarthy face above he laughed 
 with some complacence then was stilled, for on 
 
216 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 him and this human note there came the disdain of 
 the house, its hate breathed to him. From here he 
 saw across the hall the dining-room, its snowy 
 cloth disordered above a flicker of candles, the chairs 
 drawn back, the dark wainscoting, a jet of dulled 
 metal here, there upon it deserted, emptied, hollow. 
 The room, its gasping lights, the great hall dark- 
 ened to the turn of the stairs somewhere on all 
 this silence the faint closing of a door, as if from 
 the house the last living had fled, as though from 
 room to room a leper's touch had hunted them to 
 the outside that was all. He, alone, was here cen- 
 tered in the malign watching of the walls, the breath- 
 ing of their hate to him. 
 
 He was before a picture indistinct above the glass- 
 imprisoned books when Demetra came. He must 
 have heard her skirts rustling, the quickness of her 
 step down the front way flicking the stillness, but he 
 had not turned when she stopped on the threshold. 
 Once she tried to speak and failed and then again, 
 nervously, an odd, brisk note. 
 
 -You here?" 
 
 He checked her: "A moment. I wished to be 
 alone. I was a boy here. That picture " he indi- 
 cated "my mother the fellow who painted it 
 caught some fantastic trick that I seem to remem- 
 ber. There is a covert prophecy in the smile. I can 
 not fathom it. It has for me the quality of the 
 Mona Lisa you may have seen it? This woman I 
 can hardly remember has an odd interest to me. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 217 
 
 Eh ? there are some queer corners in these cunning 
 boxes of some sort of stuff we call brains." 
 
 She came nearer, disregarding his air of detached 
 study and exploitation of the portrait: "Your fa- 
 ther?" She breathed it low. "He sent you away?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Free?" 
 
 "Free." 
 
 She almost touched him wonderingly. "And my 
 brotherfree?" 
 
 "Free as air if we manage to escape." 
 
 "You escape? You? You've done nothing in 
 this ! You mean you'll take him. Good God you've 
 saved him for what where?" 
 
 He flicked his dead ash lightly. "To the road, I 
 imagine. I've tramped it. There is a thing about it 
 that is beyond you, but let me assure you I have 
 fared worse than being a tramp. From the street, 
 if one is a supreme egotist and has a sense of hu- 
 mor, the view is not so bad." 
 
 "Ah, you !" she cried, "to speak so now in this 
 situation!" 
 
 "What now? What situation?" 
 
 She was suffering; she turned; she whispered: 
 "Going back, just when it seemed life offered 
 when there seemed light a way for you " 
 
 She could not speak further; he took it gravely 
 up. "That is a concern. To give up Rand's place 
 his fortune and power it did, indeed, exasperate 
 me. But the chance was too great." 
 
2i8 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Chance?" She answered blindly, at his medita- 
 tion. 
 
 "It was complete, exquisite. They were all there 
 I should say, all America. Hayes, with his bour- 
 geois importance of commerce, his wife with her 
 pretense of caste and class and whatever else you 
 women love to make of it when your husbands are 
 not actually scratching the soil or on day-wages. 
 Then, the doctor, with his underdog yelping, and the 
 owl consequentiality of Stephen the jurist of the 
 Constitution, who, when he beats the puddle, all the 
 other frogs shut up. Well, there they were, and if 
 the devil had me I couldn't have resisted the oppor- 
 tunity. To walk before them all and say what none 
 wants said eh? Could I resist it I, who am the 
 greatest humorist of all this land between the seas? 
 To make them crawl away, one after the other it 
 was an achievement, I assure you. It was round, 
 complete. I feel now the jubilance of the artist who 
 knows, and knows he knows." 
 
 "You you " she quivered "At least I know 
 you saved us." She slipped close to him, her voice 
 beating out a passion she could not check "Beneath 
 it all, Herford," she whispered now, "we lied 
 we dared not speak and you saved us!" 
 
 "Eh? a pity! Lying is a dull device of fools. 
 Mine, if you notice, was not a lie; it was a creation 
 distinctive, matchless. Look at it hold it to the 
 light it will dazzle, you." 
 
 She writhed, and presently she said: "If one but 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 219 
 
 knew but knew!" and then she flashed about on 
 him in a sort of crouch : "Herford, what did I ever 
 mean to you ? Tell me I was a child then. Tell me 
 I will not mind !" 
 
 "I told you once. I thought I saw a marvel in 
 you. I gave you all I could to bring it out. I am for 
 ever pottering around with the souls of the ones who 
 interest me, trying to see what stuff's in them. But 
 yours eh? It's common enough." 
 
 She drew in her shoulders, looked about as if in 
 the shadows the beast lurked. "Ah, well, one's used 
 to being lashed by you ! But now you save me. Per- 
 haps you cared perhaps you dreamed " 
 
 "Say it then," he grinned : "Might have loved you, 
 eh ? A memory ? Look here. Did you actually sup- 
 pose I'd give tip my comfort here this house, the 
 mills, power everything? Come now, did you im- 
 agine I'd throw it all up for a woman?" 
 
 She went to the table and sat as in a dream. Then 
 she laughed strangely : "Go on let me hear it all ! I 
 might have known no, it wasn't for me ! Ah, no 
 and I was fool enough to dream " 
 
 He laughed. "We are back," he said, "where 
 women bring all things. Love its itch its little 
 round of hot lips, and hand claspings its tears and 
 smiles and home-comings, and hidden meanings and 
 pretty ways to remember one day with a flower, 
 and another with a sweet. How marvelously easy 
 to hold you subject lifelong a word, a gesture 
 even a single look back at you as a man leaves the 
 
220 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 house! It is indeed a marvel. I shall some day 
 make a study of that, also." 
 
 She would not listen it was as if she was beat- 
 ing her ears as she rose, throwing out her arms. 
 And then she hurried back to him and poured to him 
 her fierceness. "You come back out of the dark 
 God knows from where but you come back, think- 
 ing, hoping, for release. Yes, the adventure's about 
 done and you I've seen a hunger in you for a 
 hand to be reached to you, for a heart to forgive 
 to love! And now now you go you renounce 
 this you go back, you take this terror from me, on 
 yourself. No, I'll not believe I'll not! It was for 
 me to save me, Herford !" And her passion cried 
 again : "To save me !" 
 
 He had for her the smile of a master tolerant of 
 a pupil's lagging imagination : "At least do not be 
 dull," he commented. 
 
 And while she watched, hardening herself against 
 him, Louise Hergov came to the library. She was 
 dressed for the street, her jacket closely buttoned, 
 her short skirt showing the stout boots. She looked 
 at them with a studied ignoring of what she must 
 have heard. 
 
 "Where is he?" she asked at once. 
 
 "Waiting for me," Rand answered briefly. "Out- 
 side." 
 
 "He's not safe on the street. I have a plan for 
 both of you for the present. If he's caught every- 
 thing's undone. John Bride's is hardly the place for 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 221 
 
 him, but there are my rooms unused day long 
 never visited. To-night you'll go there." 
 
 She held her resolution against the consciousness 
 of the other woman's scrutiny. And then, looking 
 him over, she added : "You're hurt. Before you go 
 we'd better fix that up. I'll get water where are 
 you wounded?" 
 
 He smiled at her so long that her pale face had 
 to evade him. Then slowly he removed his coat, the 
 waistcoat; then, with a single swift movement he 
 tore the shirt from his shoulders, stripped it to his 
 waist and raised his left arm. Across his swart side 
 the upthrust of the knife had laid a six-inch wound 
 between the bloody lips you could well-nigh have 
 placed the thickness of this book. 
 
 "Good God," the wife cried, "like this you've 
 said nothing!" 
 
 "My shoes," he said, with some concern, "are full 
 of it listen ?" 
 
 The girl touched him: "Sit down," she spoke in- 
 differently, "I'll get water." And when she had 
 gone out. the wife sat across from him muttering: 
 "You said a scratch I did not ask you said it was 
 a scratch." 
 
 "No matter. A few ribs hacked up. He struck 
 like a cat merely because I made him go back when 
 he insisted on leaving. He hates me, it seems the 
 little beast-brother. He is quite beyond reason. Eh? 
 well? What could one expect of a little beast- 
 brother?" 
 
222 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 She got up, stung. Within the day she had been 
 transformed her luxurious sureness, ease, domi- 
 nance, flicked out; her fears, hopes, passions now 
 naked a barbarian mother, a woman of the tribes. 
 
 Then Louise came back quietly with her basin 
 from the rear house regions. She went directly to 
 him, knelt and with a towel touched the gap the 
 knife had plowed. The wife leaned to watch. The 
 cloth in a minute was blood-soaked; she used then 
 his shirt it, too, was filled, but she sponged and 
 cleaned the bulge of the flesh, he, meantime, with 
 some new curiosity, looking down at her intent, then 
 across at Demetra in her chair. 
 
 "I'm afraid it won't stop easily," Louise said. 
 "It's not terribly deep, but your arm moving so 
 keeps it bleeding, and it'll be hard to bandage." 
 
 "Do your best," he directed complacently. 
 
 She pressed the wound together, held it with the 
 shirt fragment, then looked about. The other wom- 
 an came to bend near. She had a horror of blood. 
 Louise's quietness in the task was to her incredible. 
 "Hold this," the Jew girl commanded, and Demetra 
 placed her hand upon the bandage. "Stand up," 
 Louise said, and he rose, lifted his arm and waited. 
 He seemed huge with some enjoyment. A Roman 
 of the days before Caesar, back from a field with the 
 triumph of a wound, could not have bulked higher 
 among his slaves and women with their cloths and 
 ointments than did he. The wife, her hand upon his 
 side, trembled. The girl had knelt away from them ; 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 223 
 
 she tore the hem of her underskirt from its encir- 
 cling breadth. 
 
 'This will hold it," she reached the laced thing 
 about him and about, binding it close and asking : "Is 
 it tight too tight?" 
 
 "No/' he said, and then checked the tying of the 
 knot and looked down at her. "A moment why 
 are you doing this ?" 
 
 "You must get away/' she answered composedly; 
 "you can't lose any more blood." 
 
 "Beyond that," he went on "what?" 
 
 "This Karasac," she retorted, "he must be got 
 away. It's the first duty." 
 
 He grimaced : "I don't like that word it's a dog's 
 whine." 
 
 "O words what matter!" 
 
 "Words are the most important matters. With 
 them I am beating you two women into something 
 you did not dream was in you. I am clearing the 
 way for you you will in the end thank me for your 
 souls." 
 
 "Come on," said Louise patiently. "There's dan- 
 ger here." 
 
 The wife stood staring after them as he gravely 
 offered his arm to the girl on the wet steps. When 
 they had gone she stood looking at the blood and 
 water on the floor. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 AT midnight they were in Miss Hergov's flat in 
 John Bride's block, wet all from the spring 
 night blown with rain. Old John was with them, had 
 waited, in fact, on the coping without Stephen's 
 yard. 
 
 They had stilled him on the journey, but now as 
 the four were about the cheap little round table in 
 Miss Hergov's dining-room, John would out with it. 
 
 "I was trying to think it's wonderfu' this 
 night ! I canna believe but what ye lied." 
 
 "You're not called on to believe," retorted Rand. 
 "Old man, still your clatter." 
 
 "I'm fair dazed. Louise will have to think for ye. 
 She's takin' danger on her, but it's like her. It'd 
 be a bad day the law had word of this. . . . The 
 professor and his doctrines. . . . I'm guessing 
 much." 
 
 Old John sat on the edge of a chair holding his 
 hat and staring about. Three wet, dank men they 
 were, watching the woman untangle the veil from 
 her hat in the stuffy room opening on its white air 
 shaft. "My word for it this flat was never made 
 for a biggish family." 
 
 224 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 225 
 
 "They are to stay in the kitchen/' she answered. 
 "It's safer and is little used. I'll put two cots 
 there. There'll be plans to consider later where 
 you shall go, and how." She turned to Rand : "Is 
 the man hungry?" 
 
 His eye went to Karasac by the wall, thin, mute, 
 watching ceaselessly to make out the inexplicable 
 thing. "The beast is hungry," retorted Rand. "Can't 
 you see that? He's never been anything else but 
 hungry. And anyhow, if he's lived the life of the 
 road as I have, he'll know enough to eat when it's 
 about whether he's hungry or not, against the day 
 when food's lacking. Bring on your stuff, Jew girl 
 whatever it is." 
 
 She was shaking the water from her skirt hem. 
 "John Bride," she said clearly, "will you keep an 
 eye on the front of the house from your window 
 now and then? And you can call me across the 
 court from your flat when I'm needed. We'd best 
 lock the door and answer no one while they're here." 
 
 Old John went to her, touched her shoulder. 
 "Trust Brother John I canna see all, but this I 
 know ye'r at a service for Stephen's good name 
 and the state's, and the professor's grand work be- 
 yand I can well guess the bigness to ye of it all !" 
 
 But old John was much bewildered; again he 
 fumbled his hat, staring at the wounded two Rand 
 with his swagger, and Karasac, the rat, cornered, 
 sullen. When she took them to the kitchen and 
 showed them where, among its clean array, they 
 
226 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 could make shift to sleep on the cots, John went out 
 and to his own rooms across the hall. The girl left 
 the two men here, sitting each on his bed looking at 
 the other across the gulf they looked one to the 
 other. 
 
 But the mill-man would not speak and Rand could 
 not endure silence. With his need of baiting what- 
 ever was about him he rose presently and went to 
 the other. "Here, you," he began, "I can forgive 
 everything except dullness. Your wounds are smart- 
 ing, but so are mine. Tell me what do you think 
 of it all?" 
 
 The dynamiter grunted; he drew a sleeve across 
 his dirty brow, brushing the black hair from his 
 eyes ; he cast on the other his perplexed disdain, the 
 hate of class, the fear of the beaten: "Ah, Hell!" 
 he said, "alldis w'at?" 
 
 The bigger man turned away in some patient in- 
 trospect. "Beast-brother, you've got to the bottom 
 of it all in three words you have at once upset all 
 the philosophies. 'All dis w'at?" He tapped 
 Karasac's arm. "It is distinctly good better than 
 any man has yet evolved." 
 
 But the other merely glowered, uncomprehending. 
 Rand went to the window facing the diamond- 
 shaped air space ; he saw beyond another window, a 
 shadow pass before it. He went to the door it was 
 locked. He tried to force it, and then, stepping 
 back, he lowered his bull neck and swung his shoul- 
 der against the panels. The latch crashed out. He 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 227 
 
 tore the door open and went beyond, working him- 
 self free of the stableman's coat and throwing it 
 aside. Miss Hergov hurrying from the rooms for- 
 ward, met him as he was entering, pulling abruptly 
 at the bandage below his arm to adjust it. 
 
 "You locked me in," he said; "I'm not used to 
 that." 
 
 "No one must come upon you there," she an- 
 swered. "You must stay hidden. I had only gone to 
 find things to make you more comfortable." 
 
 "We're well enough the beast and I. I'm going 
 to sit here a while. I'd as soon be dead as unable to 
 clatter my tongue, to exploit myself, celebrate the 
 ego, to quarrel with the universe if I can get a word 
 back. And you you interest me you are filled 
 with conceits you go about lugging what you're 
 pleased to call duty, and a squalling, ungrateful brat 
 it is but beyond this stupidity you are a tissue of 
 dreams." 
 
 She was perplexed. "Is this a time to talk?" she 
 asked. 
 
 "Excellent. The night is not half done." 
 
 "Your cut," she added seriously. "I was search- 
 ing for some peroxide of hydrogen and there is 
 some medicated cotton " 
 
 "Let it wait. It is a mere shallow gouge a rib 
 or two scarred up. The beast and I will dress each 
 other's hurts. I'll teach him to." 
 
 "You'll be cold you have no coat." And looking 
 at him again in her serious intent, she went to the 
 
228 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 chamber beyond and came back with a fluffy quilt 
 of soft blue stuff the sort of thing you would wrap 
 about a baby's skin . . . strange enough to 
 cover the swart bull aspect of a big man naked to 
 the waist. She put it about his shoulders and sat 
 across the round table from him as if guessing at 
 his grave smile which now and then broke to open 
 humor. 
 
 "Well," he bantered, "shall I thank you?" 
 
 "For what?" 
 
 "True. You've done nothing for me because the 
 blood was dripping from me. But for this fanfaro- 
 nade of yours and the professor's the brotherhood 
 and the like for this you'd martyr yourself. I have 
 spent many a moment summing you up. You are 
 harder to solve than most women who are ludi- 
 crously far from being the mysteries they imagine 
 themselves, or as indispensable as they flatter them- 
 selves." 
 
 She regarded him with a pretense of ignoring. 
 
 "Come, now," he went on good-humoredly, from 
 under his baby quilt of blue, "let us hear each other 
 out. Let us look clearly behind each other's mask 
 or yours, for I wear none. To begin with and then 
 we can dismiss the matter for all time you have the 
 most astonishing eyes I have ever seen beautiful, 
 exquisite, unafraid. They look wide out on one, re- 
 vealing, accusing, solacing. If there was a soul be- 
 hind the skies in June when it stares down unclouded, 
 I'd swear it would remind me of you." 
 
! What sort of man are you ? " 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 229 
 
 She had no word. He shifted his long legs under 
 the table, and fell to scratching in a dirty paper for 
 tobacco. "Your nose/ 1 he went on leisurely, "turns 
 slightly. It is also too small. Your hair is a trifle 
 coarse and heavy with a barbaric purple hardly 
 pleasing. Your ears are fine, but over-large; your 
 face, on the whole, not good-looking, and yet " He 
 eyed her with an indifferent intent. "Well, your fig- 
 ure is good. Your foot which I saw once on the 
 stair had an ankle beautifully molded." 
 
 She drew it in. You could hear the fillip of her 
 skirts. 
 
 "Well," he continued, "that is all. One may as 
 well at the beginning let a woman know what he 
 thinks of her looks, otherwise he'd never be done 
 with her curiosity as to what he thinks. . . . 
 Now we can go on and debate the eternal questions, 
 and not ears or eyes or feet." 
 
 She glanced up with a pretense. "You," she said 
 indifferently, "are preposterous!" 
 
 "Come, now," he reproved, "get away from the 
 common ideas of your tribe. Why should I look 
 you over, save as a man will judge a portrait or a 
 bit of stone? The devil take you if you're to be 
 as common as that, I'll go back to the beast and start 
 him yelping about how he hates me the rich man's 
 son." 
 
 "Go on, then," she murmured, "I'll listen I can 
 listen!" 
 
 "I fear not. You'll interrupt eternally. But here's 
 
230 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 the case: Here you are, Louise Hergov, a Russian 
 Jewess, apostate, exiled, obscure, coming up from 
 the shops, living alone in a dingy Chicago flat, get- 
 ting your breakfast over a gas stove and going each 
 day to sit at a man's side, working, helping his soul 
 to grow for another. Year long seeing the light in 
 his eyes, his breath on you at times, knowing that he 
 feels your worth and knowing you're all the other 
 woman is not you, with your marvel of a soul, your 
 mother feeling here you've sat by the good you 
 could not claim, not daring to lift your eyes lest he 
 see what's burning in them. And here, now I come 
 I crush this hero-worship of yours with what? 
 Merely a rant of words, a whim of mine to do some- 
 thing he does not dare. Yet you go working calmly 
 on you'll go hungry, loveless, all your life long. 
 Eh ? I wonder that you women do not take bombs 
 and blow up something or other !" 
 
 Her eyes did not leave him; she had not lost a 
 modulation of the voice. He went on softly : "Tell 
 me have I read you?" 
 
 "Why should I lie?" she answered. "You know 
 me better than I can tell." 
 
 "Well," he went on airily, "if one does not have 
 love, one should have the wit to do without it." 
 
 "There's a greater thing," she said. "O, yes be- 
 yond there's work there's giving !" She turned to 
 him intently : "I asked you to save Doctor Ennisley. 
 You gave greatly. I, too, could do that. Oh, if the 
 chance was given a woman ! To have the feeling that 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 231 
 
 in your power his whole career lay, and the great 
 cause beyond it, and that you gave simply, unknown, 
 unrequited and turned away! O, Rand that was 
 yours ! And I had nothing to give nothing ! I begin 
 to understand you. You're for ever seeking the 
 finest the rapture of a sentiment that's beyond 
 other men." 
 
 "Comrade," he smiled, "I've lived most else and 
 found it not worth while. Come on let's live be- 
 yond them and their claptrap." 
 
 "Ah, don't!" she whispered, and now could not 
 look at him. She laid her head upon the table in her 
 arm, the wondrous, heavy hair by his hand. And 
 then she lifted it and smiled wanly. "You are a sort 
 of conscience to me a devil pricking me to go hurt 
 myself to shatter my vanities. It's very late 
 hadn't you better go?" She smiled again as she 
 rose. "Why me? There are others who deserve 
 your tortures better." 
 
 "They are not worth the scourge. You " 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "Your eyes are marvelous with those tears in 
 them." 
 
 She rubbed them out. "I thought," she answered, 
 "that you saw no need of referring to them again." 
 
 "Your nose is infamously red," he continued stud- 
 iedly. 
 
 Unsmiling, she sought her handkerchief. "And 
 your hair is coming down. I told you once" he 
 spoke with his schoolmaster's air now "to wear 
 
232 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 always a flower in it. Here on this side . . . 
 a trifle higher up." 
 
 "It's ghastly to think of you," she muttered, 
 "hidden driven from your father's house your 
 inheritance lost your position name ^everything. 
 . . . And here, wounded without a shirt to 
 your back without a friend except the beast who 
 stabbed you whom you're saving!" 
 
 "I congratulate you. There are few who'd have 
 the sense to see the extraordinary quality of it. The 
 entire episode is, indeed, a jewel. I hold it up I 
 juggle it it flashes from many facets. I shall wear 
 it with the air of a man who's won the Victoria 
 Cross. I shall take it sometime before my God and 
 whistle up to Him: "Look here what I've got!" 
 
 She seemed not to hear. Presently, from her 
 reverie, she went on slowly. "I wonder if a thought 
 ever comes to you of what you might have been? 
 The master of the mills the priceless chance for 
 good to give to thousands for all time a chance at 
 life a better life hope love? O, to be rich, to 
 have the master's feeling the power to make life 
 mean so much ! Power power that's it power !" 
 
 She looked at him, his smile, his ironic pity. It 
 seemed within her soul a dream was fading. She 
 could not tell from whence this great grief came 
 what dark upon the light that had led her on in cour- 
 age to the work of all the days. 
 
 He was about to go, uprising to drag the blue 
 little quilt from his brown shoulders. "Who'll get 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 233 
 
 breakfast?" he said abruptly. "He'll be hungry, 
 the little beast-brother will be hungry, and so shall 
 I. See here, we don't know what the day will bring, 
 eh do we ? Well, I'd like lamb chops and rolls and 
 chocolate a sudden fancy has seized me. Get them 
 for breakfast. ... I will assume that the 
 beast-brother likes lamb chops get them for us 
 some way or other." 
 
 She followed him, murmuring. "Yes, yes." And 
 then she stopped him with her hand on his arm. "You 
 can't rest this way. Your wound's still bleeding 
 some see here! It needs attention' an antiseptic." 
 
 He sat down. For half an hour she washed and 
 pressed and bound the wound, seeming to linger, at 
 times, with little questionings, over the task. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 SHE came to her work the next morning, out- 
 wardly the same, the secretary of a busy man 
 at the left of his desk in the study acrpss the hall 
 from the living-room. 
 
 The place seemed deserted. There was about it 
 in this month of young odors of the earth, and 
 its springing life, the terrible beauty of a day 
 after the death of one beloved. You move, then, as 
 one apart through familiar environs whose forms 
 appear now oddly acute; you wonder at your sen- 
 sibility to the insistent all-enveloping quality of the 
 yellow sunshine it sleeps on a well-known wall, a 
 tree, a path, with a beautified actuality; peace 
 breathes from all, as though the world had enlarged 
 for some ineffable, sweet intrusion; sea, sky and 
 land indeed, speak the new ordination. It is as 
 though the universe had loosed a dimension noble 
 enough for grief, measureless enough for its solace, 
 and was waiting tranquilly for you to step again 
 with its progression after this moment's flash of the 
 lesser reality, to go once more in the common and 
 mystic patience and fortitude of life to its end. 
 
 It was from this spell that Corbett came after a 
 234 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 235 
 
 sleepless night. The servants had not stirred as he 
 went along the checked walk by the budding elms, all 
 gray and misty in the spring cool, the sparrows chir- 
 ruping; he walked from the ordered park along a 
 sweep of rough and treeless ground reaching out to 
 the great warehouses and slips of the city front, be- 
 fore him the east banked with slow-moving cloud 
 washed with a blur of rain above the lake ; but in all 
 this fine sanity found nothing, and so came back 
 again across the precise boulevards of the north side 
 to Rand's home. 
 
 The city was awakening then, burring to the south 
 like a mighty mill under its ever-flexing smoke cloud. 
 ,When Corbett came through the lawn paths to the 
 side door he found his wife at the dining-room win- 
 dow, reaching to free the first grimy sweet tendrils 
 of naked jessamine twisting in the decayed bricks. 
 
 "I did not hear you go out," she said; "it must 
 have been early." 
 
 "I could not sleep Demetra at all." 
 
 They looked at each other; they were, indeed, 
 worn. She muttered, as though her control had 
 slipped at sight of him: "Corbett, there's a horror 
 in this. O, we shall not sleep !" 
 
 He came to her and said gravely : "See here, we 
 can't go on this way. We can't let it sit on us. Rand, 
 the devil, he never saw this boy before, but this is 
 like him. If I were to sum up the spirit of America 
 its money lust, its brutish humor, its ruthlessness 
 I'd point to that man's face." 
 
236 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "He gave up all/' she answered. 
 
 "Yes, the swaggerer the actor it delighted his 
 grotesque soul." 
 
 "No matter," the wife went on; "I suppose we're 
 safe now if he gets Karasac away. They went last 
 night to John Bride's with Louise." 
 
 Corbett started: "How could she? It isn't safe." 
 He seemed dazed again: "Louise she's known as 
 a socialist Altmayer, Markey all the city leaders 
 know her, and she's my secretary. The girl, in her 
 quiet way, has encouraged them she's even written 
 a bit for the Voice. She shouldn't have anything to 
 do with Karasac, an anarchist." 
 
 "I suppose," the wife continued, "it was to save 
 you." 
 
 He winced. She was not looking at him, and he 
 went on nervously : "O, the girl ! It's like her. She's 
 borne many a hard lick for me one way and another. 
 Rand ought to know what's in her. He's always 
 jeering about the lack of soul in women that they 
 can't give greatly without love he should know 
 that girl, what she's capable of!" 
 
 The wife stirred ; she sank her fists together and 
 said and it was like the snapping of a bar of steel : 
 "You did not speak you did not speak!" 
 
 "Demetra," he muttered, his eyes taking on their 
 hunted look, "were you waiting for that ? It was of 
 you I w^as thinking you and my little Tad and 
 the great work beyond. It shook me unnerved me. 
 It seemed as if a vision of all America was before 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 237 
 
 me what it shall be the place where all the peo- 
 ples will work out the problem the failed and de- 
 feated the drift of all the races the toilers and 
 the oppressed. Russians, Jews, Slavs, Germans, 
 Poles your own people, Demetra it seemed as if 
 the whole tide of inpouring life was to be judged in 
 me and if I failed failed " 
 
 "Yes," she answered patiently, "I know all that. 
 I've heard you tell of it before." 
 
 He came to take her hand. "Demetra, listen 
 here. If I was charged with inciting violence if 
 they fixed this thing on me from my talks to the 
 mill-men if I was dishonored and had to give 
 everything up my place at the university every- 
 thing dear, would you stand by me?" 
 
 She turned from him; she cried in a sort of pas- 
 sion. "O, if it would happen!" 
 
 "If it would happen, Demetra!" 
 
 She strode from him to the sunlit window she 
 burst back on him. "If you would let us be great, 
 we women! Only that give what is best in 
 us!" 
 
 He was astonished. To his attempt to speak, she 
 broke in. "To give what is best you, your posi- 
 tion in the world ; I well, I married you for peace 
 -rest. O, I can give that !" 
 
 He watched her uncomprehending, and muttered : 
 "To give my work in the world?" 
 
 And on his amazed study, she came again with 
 her new, moving sharpness : "Corbett, have I failed 
 
238 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 in anything? I've hurt you I've disappointed you 
 as a wife!" 
 
 He drew her hand to his, the old hunger for her 
 in his eyes, the pathos of the idealist, the lover, year 
 by year learning that there is no enchantment. 
 "Dear heart, what is the mystery about you? It's 
 in all our love. I look into your eyes as one would 
 a temple " 
 
 "A temple? Corbett!" 
 
 "A place in your soul to which you go alone." He 
 drew her closer, in his old fond eagerness. "And 
 always, outside, I'm waiting. . . . Ah, can't 
 you see what I want to see?" 
 
 "What?" she muttered. 
 
 "A great love there for me." 
 
 She moved a little in his arms, her eyes flitted. 
 "And you think I've not given all a great love, 
 Corbett?" 
 
 "There's something a mystery, dear." 
 
 She drew from him after his gentle pause; and 
 then, as one recovering from a reverie which had 
 a sweetness and a pain, she laughed slightly. "Cor- 
 bett, there's always a temple in a woman's soul, a 
 shrine to which she goes alone. That is the mys- 
 tery why she must always go alone with her 
 dreams, her loves and look at them in silence. Yes, 
 to turn them over and judge them, and only the best 
 and purest can she leave there. Perhaps all her life 
 long she's nothing to bring she finds nothing, and 
 the temple's empty. Or there comes a child, or a 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 239 
 
 great ambition for some one, the man she loves 
 something proves itself the highest and the best. 
 ... Or perhaps there's but a memory, a dream, 
 and the temple's empty her life long." 
 
 He asked after a while, gently as before, his tired 
 eyes on her. "Dear heart is yours?" 
 
 "How can a woman tell?" she murmured; and 
 he was hurt. She saw it ; she went on : "One must 
 be great to find the great way. And we are not, 
 Corbett. O, we've not proved anything!" 
 
 "I'll find the way," he whispered. "It seems I was 
 never so close to you, Demetra, as now. I'll find 
 the way." 
 
 "Suppose," she answered, turning in a new intent 
 on him, "there was a way?" 
 
 "I'd take it, dear ; I love you so. Our ways of life 
 have been different, but I love you so !" 
 
 "You've trusted me," she whispered, and put her 
 hands about his neck as she sat on the chair's arm, 
 "all the old doubts the things women whisper of 
 each other you've trusted me." 
 
 "Demetra!" He had clasped her, checking his 
 feeling with his kiss. 
 
 "Ah, well, let's be frank. You've tried to shield 
 me, but these women of your college crowd well, 
 I suppose our lives have been apart." 
 
 "Dear, you've been unhappy?" 
 
 "No," she smiled, "you've done all a man could 
 do." She suddenly slipped into his arms, drawing 
 back his head to look deep into his wondering hurt 
 
240 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 eyes. "Corbett, you've a name a future. Could 
 you give it up for me?" 
 
 "For you, Demetra?" 
 
 "For me. To go away alone beaten a fail- 
 ure." 
 
 He held her off, astounded : "Failed ? f or you ?" 
 
 "Yes, would that be happiness?" 
 
 "Happiness? To fail? To give up everything?" 
 His dreamer's eyes marveled. He could not under- 
 stand her stealth, her leaning, her caress. 
 
 "To step beyond happiness, then, if that was the 
 price of the brotherhood." 
 
 He sat back more amazed. "Demetra, the brother- 
 hood? I can't understand a woman doesn't care 
 for that the bigger things." 
 
 She, too, drew away. She rose and turned. "You, 
 also, tell us that! O, do you think that at love a 
 woman stops and dwells ?" 
 
 He could not answer for his staring at her. She 
 seemed taller, hardening, rising before him, her 
 eyes wide, dark in a sort of horror. He stepped 
 toward her, muttering inarticulately her name, and 
 she drew off. 
 
 "I think I know, now," she retorted, and he saw 
 in her eyes some cruel thing it was as if she had 
 thrust him from her. 
 
 And as they stood, she by the window with its 
 woods' smell of spring, the ineffable sweetness of 
 morning's inconsequentially, the dew dripping from 
 the eaves, the sparrows twittering, the level sun 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 241 
 
 across the velvet grass, Louise came along the hall 
 unannounced, in the freedom she had in this house. 
 They saw her go to the study and remove her veil, 
 and, as usual, pick up the mail and arrange a paper 
 or two. Her face was composed, pale, but that was 
 her way. The wife looked greedily upon her about 
 her first little affairs of the desk. Then, while Cor- 
 bett still stood in his bitterness, she hurried to the 
 room. The secretary turned at the noise to find her 
 touching the desk. 
 
 "Louise," the wife said sharply. "Rand is he 
 still there?" 
 
 "Yes." The girl's eyes steadily looked bade. 
 "Still there." 
 
 "His wound ? How is that ? How did he sleep 
 tell me!" 
 
 The husband had followed. He listened, and 
 after a look at him, briefly and without greeting, 
 and seeming to have in it a dismissal such as Deme- 
 tra's words had borne, Louise went on shortly : "He's 
 sore and tired but well. They I got them break- 
 fast." 
 
 "Rand," the wife pursued, "didn't he say? send 
 nothing no message?" 
 
 "Message?" The girl's blue eyes widened: 
 "What would he and to you?" 
 
 The wife turned, speaking through her teeth as a 
 woman will do holding thread in them. "No of 
 course not nothing!" 
 
 Then she went out, leaving them constrained. 
 
242 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "You took them in, Louise," the doctor said nerv- 
 ously. "It was fine! If they'd been on the street 
 they'd have been arrested. You saved them." 
 
 "It was not for that," she answered "you your 
 work. The week after next you are to dine at the 
 White House, I remember." 
 
 "Yes, the world's work that's the first thing," 
 he answered. 
 
 "Yes," she repeated briefly ; "the first thing." But 
 she became confused then, in some trivial explana- 
 tion of the mail, and he stood stupidly trying to as- 
 sist. It was as if each was trying to hide from the 
 other what each knew the other knew as if, to- 
 gether, they struggled piteously to keep a faith from 
 breaking, a hope and splendor from being crushed 
 as if in their souls they writhed, unable to save the 
 thing his manhood, her loyalty, the flame of their 
 bright ardor. 
 
 "Good God!" he found himself groaning, for it 
 was wrung from him "this thing when will it 
 end?" 
 
 She had motioned. Through the open window 
 they saw Stephen coming slowly about the corner 
 of the house on the ancient walk. The old man 
 was bent, leaning on his stick; his face was pitted, 
 livid, eaten with aging, his eyes blue, sunken. He 
 seemed a dwarf shrunken from the frail dignity of 
 yesterday, the justice. Before the window he saw 
 them and smiled up wanly a curious thing, indeed, 
 for him. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 243 
 
 "The air," he said, "is cool. And I slept little, 
 Doctor/' 
 
 "We did not sleep," Corbett answered. "I think 
 no one." 
 
 The father smiled again his patience. "An old 
 machine fast playing out," he murmured, and went 
 slowly on, "fast playing out." 
 
 The man within extended his hand, but the old 
 judge did not see it on his groping way. The wife 
 at the other window of the dining-room was look- 
 ing out they could see her face set upon the am- 
 bling figure along the dew-wet grass. They stared 
 across at her and she at them. Then she disappeared, 
 and a moment later they heard her step flying across 
 the hall and she was with them in the study, by them 
 at the window, pointing out. 
 
 "You heard?" she said; "he did not sleep last 
 night he drove away his son !" 
 
 "Yes yes," the man retorted; "good God, be 
 still!" 
 
 He looked from her to Louise, then his haunted 
 eyes shot from both of them. He had been one to 
 seek eager as a child for praise of women, their 
 faiths behind him, their hands awaiting to bind his 
 hurts, their courage to send him on again. And now 
 these two stood mute, evading. 
 
 "The thing is on us all," the wife muttered; 
 "we've killed something!" 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 AFTER that the thing lay between them like a 
 sword in their bed. At night, after dinner in 
 the little room, with his fond, foolish mother queru- 
 lously asking of his abstraction, Corbett did not look 
 at the wife nor speak more than the essentials for 
 the mask. He went away at eight, nor did they 
 know the hours he strode the shore along the trou- 
 bled lake with its fitful winds of spring and found 
 no surcease from his thoughts nothing. 
 
 Louise came for the usual hour with his corre- 
 spondence after dinner and waited, clearing up the 
 remnants of the day's work. 
 
 But as the doctor did not return, the wife came to 
 the study and said that she need not wait. 
 
 "But Professor Ennisley made the appointment 
 to-night. His club address is to be worked over," 
 the secretary answered resolutely, and Demetra 
 looked sharply at her. 
 
 "What is the haste?" she retorted, and then mut- 
 tered : "Louise, you are so calm. Can you imagine 
 things ever being like they were before?" 
 
 "What else can there be? To work that's all." 
 
 "Ah, well how easily we take it ! That boy, and 
 Rand. Tell me, how did you leave them?" 
 
 244 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 245 
 
 The girl looked coolly at her. "Why should you 
 ask? They eat and sleep a deal, and quarrel. The 
 mill-man curses him, and he is patient." 
 
 "Rand patient?" 
 
 "Yes. And kind like a big brother to a child, 
 good-humored and patient." 
 
 "But, Louise," pursued the wife swiftly, "you 
 hate him, don't you ?" 
 
 Louise evaded: "No, I can't say that. No I 
 think he plays with us all." 
 
 "That's it," the other retorted. "He plays with 
 you. He couldn't care for you it's not possible !" 
 
 The girl started at the wife's greedy eyes. "For 
 me? How silly!" 
 
 "Ah, well. I've seen you look at him so curiously ! 
 A man who'd do as he's done when he held us all in 
 the hollow of his hand. It's the sort of thing a girl 
 would idealize. We're not so far from the barbarian 
 that we can't see that his great savage way ! And 
 you you're given to dreaming." Then she cried in 
 a sort of fury: "Louise, you're so changed! You 
 used to stand before my husband with something 
 wonderful in your eyes. And now Rand's come. 
 You took him in endured him, fed him, washed his 
 wounds " 
 
 The girl rose, her face pale. "I'm going now. 
 You're not yourself." 
 
 "Be still, he's coming," the wife whispered; "yes, 
 you loved him, and Rand pricked the bubble! Be 
 still!" 
 
246 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 For Corbett came out of the shadows of the ve- 
 randa and the night. He saw them, and smiled wan- 
 ly : "Demetra? How are you, dear?" 
 
 His voice was not that in which he used to ask, 
 cheerily, rushing buoyantly from his work to the 
 home's solacing now he asked wearily, as one does 
 a duty. 
 
 "Well," she answered, and he went on in the same 
 mechanical mutter: "I'd forgotten. I've tried to 
 work to-day plunge in big " then he seemed to 
 realize for the first time that Louise was by the 
 door "Why, you it's late, girl!" 
 
 "I was going," she answered. "I've waited two 
 hours for you." 
 
 He stared at her evasiveness. It seemed that the 
 tone of every voice he knew was changed they 
 were lifeless, acrid, brief, where once they had been 
 like the flowing of fresh waters to bear him on. 
 
 "There's a little work," he added stonily; and 
 she responded with a hollow pretense : "Yes some 
 letters. . , . And your address before the Equal- 
 ity Club The Brother Keeper, I think you were to 
 call it. We'd better work. You deliver it to-mor- 
 row night." 
 
 He looked strangely at her as she went back to 
 the study, taking off again her hat and coat. Yes, 
 that was the name he had given it. It was one of 
 his brilliant and audacious effusions with its trace of 
 phantasy, of imagining, of easy sophistry, even in 
 the title. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 247 
 
 "The Brother Keeper,' repeated the wife, and 
 he found himself between the two, both looking at 
 him. He began an awkward jest at the stubborn 
 type-writer ribbon, offering to help Louise with it. 
 But she said clearly : "Let us work and be through." 
 
 He found again on him her astonishing blue eyes, 
 full, quiet, impenetrable . . but their splendor 
 gone, their great faiths dead. He discovered that 
 his hand shook on the manuscript, as he went on, 
 confused : 
 
 "Let's see page thirty-four that's where we 
 left off . . . we won't bother with much to- 
 night.' 5 
 
 The wife left them. She opened the door and 
 went out, but the rain was falling and blowing 
 in the width of the veranda, so she went in again, 
 and along the narrow hall to the main portion of the 
 house. It was, as ever, untenanted, the master's 
 aversion to lights of stricter observance than before. 
 But when the woman reached the front landing, she 
 saw a light in the library. She went on unthinkingly 
 enough, and reached the threshold, and there stood 
 still, checking a cry. 
 
 For Rand had risen. It was as if an apparition 
 had appeared he, before a huge chair, with a book 
 in his hand. He wore a shirt and tie, procured some- 
 how or other. He looked at her dryly. 
 
 "You here!" she cried "dared come back?" 
 
 "Doubtless. I never thought of that daring to 
 
248 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 come. Eh ? there was a book here I wished to get 
 at a moment something that seemed to be Mon- 
 taigne had been rapping in my head " 
 
 "Your father forbade you " she put in. 
 
 "That w T ould be an excellent reason for coming, 
 if I needed one. In fact, a part of the persistent 
 obstinacy I have in living when the world would 
 long since have consigned me to perdition. I am 
 not wanted therefore, I go planting my presence. 
 ... I am ignored therefore, I go about yelling 
 in their faces. I am not a relish to the feast." 
 
 "But how " she whispered "did you get 
 here?" 
 
 "The front way I have my keys got them a 
 week ago from the rooms. And I knew no servants 
 are about this portion they smell ghosts here." 
 
 "Ah, well !" She turned from his inconsequential 
 and sonorous voice "Here again. You will 
 wreck us all yet! I thought you'd stay away." 
 
 "I was bored a bit. Eh? that brother of yours 
 an extraordinary fellow, but I have sounded him. 
 His philosophy is good, but I can't get him to enlarge 
 on it. 'All dis 1 w'at?' says he, but he will not ex- 
 pound it further. Your brother, the beast, has no 
 relief from his profundity. I play the fool before 
 him I exhaust my wit I coddle and cajole him 
 I tickle him with the very button of fancy, and 
 he merely retires to his tub and curses me and my di- 
 versions. Eh? I, the brother . . . the well- 
 beloved of men." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 249 
 
 "Will you stop?" she said. "Have you come to 
 torture me?" 
 
 . "I move you? You are far too comfortable a 
 creature fed, warm, filled " 
 
 She was calm now hate or love seemed puny 
 weapons to bring against him. "I know you so 
 well," she said, "it's not worth while to listen." 
 
 "There you have me. To find none to listen 
 would be the only misfortune I could name. If they 
 want a hell for me let that be it." 
 
 "You're not safe here," she muttered, and she 
 looked about and went to draw the curtains: "It's 
 late very late." x 
 
 "The better. Let us sit down and discuss you 
 or rather myself. I'm a deal more interesting. I 
 have never yet got to the bottom of the problem. 
 But you women eh? you are like a wheel of for- 
 tune a bewildering array of colors and devices and 
 numbers spinning brilliantly . . . but put your 
 hand on it, stop it, read it coldly, there is nothing 
 to amaze one." 
 
 She stood erect, silent, regarding his round heavy 
 face, the gray unlit eyes always on her, the swiftly 
 moving mobile lips she sank back to a chair with 
 something like a sigh. 
 
 "Your wound," she said at last "and that boy 
 out in the dark you've haunted us the thought of 
 
 "I am doing well. We've eaten well and sleep. 
 , It is a famous place to sleep the cubby she put us 
 
250 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 in she? By the way her name? it's slipped 
 from me." 
 
 "Miss Hergov," she answered indifferently. 
 
 "There is about her a great possibility. I have 
 begun to believe again " 
 
 "What?" she put in sharply. 
 
 "A marvel. She loved your husband a weak- 
 ness, but what of it? The marvel is not that, for 
 you women are for ever yearning after what you've 
 not and he's big in her world she, sitting always 
 at his feet but the wonder was to see her face the 
 thing to admit it, reason it calmly out, pat it on the 
 back and put it in its place. Once I laid a day and 
 night in a Brazilian forest, fighting the heat and 
 fever, tortured with insects, sunk in muck to my 
 neck to await the unfolding of a rare and exquisite 
 lily the natives told me of. And alone slowly, in 
 the moonlight of the second night it came. I think 
 I could so await the soul of Louise." 
 
 The wife's face set stonily. "There's something 
 monstrous about you. You'd better go. But one 
 thing I'd like to ask my brother what of him?" 
 
 He lifted his hand airily: "The beast is mine to 
 make or break another piece of clay to potter with 
 to see what can be made out of such dull stuff." 
 
 "He's my brother." 
 
 "He's my beast." 
 
 She leaped to her feet. "Do you play with us 
 all? My husband he's crushed by this thing 
 he's living in an agony; your father it has killed 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 251 
 
 him as it were in the night. And I my life my 
 soul" 
 
 He leaned forth as does a physician to whom a 
 patient has revealed a telling symptom; he rubbed 
 his fingers slightly. His rich voice had the fullness 
 of encompassing and all-wise pity: "A soul?" he 
 murmured: "That would be well worth waiting 
 for!" 
 
 She had not heard, it seemed, in her bitterness. 
 "And you came back," she cried, "to play the actor, 
 to outrage and defy! You're filled with the mag- 
 nificence of all this that you, of all men, could give 
 up your place, money, honor love could take a 
 stranger a pitiful hunted boy by the hand and 
 save him call him 'brother!' Yes " she stepped to 
 him, and he saw the set and light of her eyes "I 
 see at last all a conceit a magnificent vanity 
 that is your whole life to have men hate you to 
 make women fear an incredible vanity!" 
 
 He looked at her apparently in some concern. 
 "My dear," he said mildly, "you are splendid 
 repeat it." 
 
 But she was beyond reason she cried on his 
 words: "That's nothing! Only for love are men 
 great . . . you've given nothing after all done 
 nothing! Are capable of nothing! I'll show you 
 what a man can do what love can tell him to do !" 
 
 "Love?" he said with some dry surprise: "Then 
 what?" 
 
 "You've said no woman is great enough for you 
 
252 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 to go beyond her happiness to be all give all! 
 Well, I shall demand that give that sacrifice/ 1 
 
 "You're like an admirable barbarian. Sacrifice ?" 
 He rose to look at her "A woman? You 
 give what, eh?" 
 
 "O, it's hateful that we kept silent! I'll tell him 
 all!" 
 
 "Your husband? Tell him Karasac's your 
 brother?" 
 
 She went on slowly, as one gathering strength for 
 her resolves: "He loves me he'll do this. What 
 you've done for vanity, he'll do because he loves 
 me." 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders, regarding her easily. 
 "He'll not speak not he!" 
 
 "Love shall speak for him. Here, in this house 
 this very night I'll tell him, and he shall tell Judge 
 Rand. Yes, he'll confess it to all the world if need 
 be, that I Demetra, his wife a foreign woman 
 am sister to Karasac, the anarchist." 
 
 "For love of you?" 
 
 "For the great love!" She hurried on as if in a 
 new and mighty pride, "I know now I know you 
 both. O, he's doubted he thinks he wishes to 
 possess me wholly ! Yes, this will try him." 
 
 "Let us be frank," Rand went on. "It is an inter- 
 esting problem; it has, indeed, diverted me. He 
 sees in you a dream a memory ? he does not know 
 that I'm the man . . . you dared not trust that 
 to him that once you loved me?" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 253 
 
 She looked at him with fresh aroused disdain: 
 "A child a child once loved you no more than a 
 child. And, yes I'll tell him that, now I'll heap 
 upon him all that a man can endure for the woman 
 he loves. He shall be great enough for that." 
 
 Rand smiled: "He does not dare!" 
 
 "And if he does not," the wife retorted, "here, 
 this very night, take Karasac for brother yes, for 
 love of me hide him, protect him, acknowledge, 
 if it comes to that, that I, his wife, am sister to the 
 mill-boy if he does not do this, I'll leave this house 
 for ever!" She looked coldly at him, her dark eyes 
 without a flitting, without fear; she gathered her 
 skirts closer and went out of the room: "We shall 
 accept," she said back at him from the hall "we, 
 too, can accept!" 
 
 He heard her footfall hasten, die away; and, as 
 if held by it, stole nearer the door to listen, his heavy 
 face, under the single lamp-glow, lit, intent, ab- 
 sorbed, the small eyes shifting here and there. If 
 mask he wore it had, for the moment, slipped. He 
 leaned forth listening, as if his soul had followed 
 her. Then, presently, he took his hat and left the 
 house. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE wife came back to the living-room where 
 the little round clock of crystal ticked insist- 
 ently, and where, now, the old woman sat sleepily 
 with her sewing. To Demetra's brief surprise the 
 mother answered: "I thought I'd wait. My boy's 
 worriet so. The type-writer girl went away and 
 then him, too, after a bit. Seems like he's possessed 
 these days with worryin' so." 
 
 The wife sat by the window, looking out, listen- 
 ing to the rhythmic clock whose beat caught her 
 fancy, seeming to regularize her purposes, to clear 
 her brain, to calm her passion. She could see it, a 
 globe of glass containing the dial and held up by a 
 grotesque hand of green copper from the pedestal 
 a sphere shot with iridescent tremors, like the turn 
 of a trout in clear water, a magician's crystal held 
 to the light. And it ticked, ticked, an infinite pa- 
 tient business on the still night. 
 
 Nearer, by the table, sat Corbett's mother, sleepy, 
 a wisp of her thin gray hair caught in the chair 
 back, pitiable, betraying baldness, a cheap comb 
 sticking askew, lacking the wizardry of women's 
 care, revealing her whole life's need of that nicety, 
 
 254 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 255 
 
 the intricate wisdom of the body on which women 
 evolve distinction. This inutile dowdiness and fem- 
 inine poverty held the wife's eye. It contrasted 
 pregnantly with her own eloquent completion of 
 self, her irradiation of personality. It struck her 
 as odd that now, of all moments, she should feel an 
 ardent pity for the other and as always, when she 
 was moved to act, her course was direct, she rose 
 and came to the back of the chair. 
 
 "Mother, your comb is out shan't I fix your 
 hair?" 
 
 The old woman started. Before her confused 
 answer she felt the slim, cool fingers in her hair. 
 "Why, so 'tis," she quavered in her foolish depreca- 
 tion. "I must a-slept I was that beat out. But my 
 hair it ain't worth much bother." 
 
 But she resigned herself with a fluttering hap- 
 piness. "I'll take it down and do it for the night," 
 the other went on, "and you must go to bed it's 
 very late for you." 
 
 "My boy," she answered "I'd rather wait." 
 That was always her cry the matter she came back 
 to. The wife dwelt on it, and continued : "It may 
 be very late. But let me fix your hair. Here see 
 this ? It must have been pretty, wasn't it ? Mother, 
 it's pretty, now !" 
 
 The old woman cackled diffidently, sitting back 
 in this new pleasure at the touch of the swift, deft 
 hands. Once within the other room the child 
 coughed, and they paused and commented, and then 
 
256 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 went on, listening to the nurse's stir, a glimpse of 
 her in a blue and white checked gown about the 
 green-shaded lamp, a mosaic inlaid in the open door. 
 
 "I expect I can't wait up," the mother went on 
 "he's such a busy man. Did you ever think he'd 
 be so big when you married him three years ago?" 
 
 "Yes," the wife answered clearly, "one couldn't 
 fail to see it he had that about him a wonderful 
 capacity for work and a dashing way of making him- 
 self believed of seeming to be true." 
 
 "Seemin' ?" queried the mother, oddly struck. 
 
 "You see, I mean personality the impression 
 he'd give out to a stranger. That is the secret of 
 his power, mother." 
 
 "Mebbe," the old lady did not understand analy- 
 sis: "But seemin' true? He wa'nt ever anythin' 
 else." 
 
 The wife drew her breath sharply: "Yes, but 
 some men with the truth in them have to fight vainly 
 all their lives for the hearing that Corbett wins 
 simply by his charm his personality, his open- 
 ness" ' 
 
 "It's just him," the mother affirmed. "He allus 
 was so. Just open, fine and brave I brung him so." 
 
 "Mother," the wife went on, "if he was hurt in 
 men's eyes discredited caught in anything it 
 would break your heart?" 
 
 "No," she answered proudly, "not if he come told 
 me. I'd never believe unless he come told me and 
 then I'd send him on again cleared of it all for- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 257 
 
 given." She looked about solemnly over her glasses : 
 "He'd come put his head down here, and then no 
 disgrace'd count. If he was despised of all men it 
 wa'nt matter so's I knew. I'd send him out again 
 we'd be like we was before he rose we was all 
 so happy and so pore." 
 
 The wife's face changed the other could not see. 
 "There there," she whispered, and gave the old 
 head a little pat, and then her voice broke curiously, 
 odd, surcharged "O, little mother, believe that 
 of me, also always!" The grizzled woman felt 
 the other's arms, a quick warm clasp ; she could not 
 see or understand she murmured fondly, foolish, 
 in bewildered happiness : "Demetry dear heart " 
 
 For never had they been so never had they 
 clasped each other. And then the wife went 
 swiftly from the room. The old woman looked 
 about and got up, feeling of her braids. She stared 
 at the dim chamber door, at the clock, an iridescent 
 globe against the curtains. She waddled to the hall 
 and called: "Daughter! Daughter!" Then she came 
 back confused, fluttering, a great vague hope of 
 what she knew not, trembling in her brain. She 
 went on to her room uncertainly muttering, lifting 
 the strand of her frayed gray hair to touch it, to 
 find the perfume of the other woman's fingers. 
 
 It was after midnight when Ennisley returned, 
 and a misshapen moon had arisen to glimmer 
 through the eastward windows of the living-room 
 
258 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 where a fire had burned low, for the April night 
 was cool. A light beyond in the chamber showed a 
 figure by the child's bed. Thinking it the nurse, he 
 came to the door and'said softly : "Ellen? The boy 
 asleep ?" 
 
 The woman rose. He stifled a joyful whisper- 
 ing at her upraised hand: "Demetra! It's you?" 
 
 "Yes," she said, and came out to the living-room. 
 
 "My boy," he added seriously, "you with him, 
 Demetra? He's not sick? Ellen, where's she?" 
 
 "I sent the nurse to bed . . . she was tired 
 out." She watched him listening at the child's door. 
 
 "My little Tad," he murmured in the self-reproof 
 of the hurried father, "and you caring for him!" 
 
 He had not known of this before it seemed, 
 some way, a marvel. He could not know that she 
 had been groping piteously for him the night long, 
 reaching out to build again, to uprear faith in him, 
 to find there whatever fragments of treasure were 
 left her. They stood now across the room from each 
 other, and she turned up the dim light. 
 
 "Demetra!" he followed her a step. "You're 
 up, dressed and it's very late." 
 
 She had wont to be indifferent to his comings and 
 goings, his vigils, ardors, and his outer life. He 
 had often found her idling in a dressing-gown when 
 he had come back late, but it was her choosing 
 and not to ask of his battles and his wearinesses. 
 
 "Yes," she went on again, "I waited. I wanted 
 to think." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 259 
 
 "Demetra, you're strange. What is it?" 
 
 She went to draw the curtains ; then faced him. 
 
 "Never mind I'll tell you in time. Sit down. I 
 remember now, that this wa the night of the 
 Equality Club dinner the Auditorium, wasn't it? 
 How did it go?" 
 
 "Fine. I spoke almost thirty minutes, I'm afraid, 
 but I could have gone on for ever. There were some 
 men there I wanted to reach Covington of the 
 Manufacturers' Association, and Senator Brown and 
 McCall, president of the United Glass Workers a 
 curious lot every element of our industrial life 
 brought together. It seemed like all America was 
 facing me and it didn't matter that most of them 
 were hostile. I made 'em listen ! Roderman said I 
 never spoke better." 
 
 "I know," she answered, used of old to all this 
 frank, fine boy's ardor "I thought it would be 
 good I read it." 
 
 "You? Read it!" 
 
 "To-night the copy that lay on your desk. The 
 Brother Keeper it was fine." 
 
 He was surprised. She had never cared for his 
 work. He went on a trifle confused : "A little far- 
 fetched that name on it." 
 
 "It was good." She sat down and looked across 
 at him: "Corbett, here's a chair." 
 
 He obeyed her gesture, pulling at his brown beard, 
 perplexed. To cover it, he continued: "Dear, it 
 seemed when I was speaking, with the applause I 
 
260 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 made them give me -that I'd forgotten. That we 
 were back a week ago, before this this thing hap- 
 pened . . . Rand and the boy." 
 
 "Tell me/' she answered, "how does it stand? 
 Do you hope to escape it now?" 
 
 "I think so. The rioting at the mills is over. The 
 police have the conspirators, except this Karasac. 
 If they don't get him, I think we're safe ... if 
 Rand gets him away. And the judge ah, God 
 that hurts ! But he's not turned from me even with 
 Hayes trying to poison his mind against me, the 
 judge is patient giving me another show to go on 
 with the work." 
 
 Her calm, her ceaseless watching, seemed to be 
 on him. It was not her old idling indifference, her 
 cat-like ease and tolerance. 
 
 He studied her an instant, then revolved his own 
 thought always he went back to it, even now when 
 the night's triumphant glow had put it from him: 
 "Rand that's a strange thing! His taking this 
 friendless boy. . . . Somehow, it's magnificent !" 
 
 She leaned to him, her elbow on her knee. He saw 
 the glint of their wedding-ring pressed to the soft 
 mold of her chin. She asked merely: "Could you 
 be that?" 
 
 "Be what?" 
 
 "Magnificent?" 
 
 He sat back, his dreamer's eyes raised afar, the 
 fine contour of his pointed beard and face distinct 
 to her. He thought slowly and from this he spoke ; 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 261 
 
 "To swagger through life to mock men, society 
 its shams and cruelties. To be the outcast from all 
 this the actor in an impossible part the man 
 beyond the common feeling. N6, I'm not like that, 
 I'm afraid." 
 
 "To be all to give all?" 
 
 He rose he was big with it the idealist could 
 see the thing could lift him. 
 
 "For one thing. . . . Yes my work." 
 
 "Yes the social regeneration the dawn of the 
 new day, I think I've heard you call it your 
 brotherhood. Something to do with books and 
 lecturing, it seems to me. But for a man a beaten 
 man a beast, hated feared. See here! for that 
 could you go beyond your happiness your life 
 work?" 
 
 He turned to listen at her intent voice. After a 
 moment he started slightly. "Beyond happiness? 
 That's Rand's idea of something or other. Demetra, 
 what do you mean?" 
 
 She regarded him clearly: "I'm asking a great 
 thing of you." 
 
 For a time they were still. His glance did not 
 flinch from hers. 
 
 "I know what you mean I can read it in your 
 eyes." 
 
 "To take this mill-boy by the hand shelter him 
 save him and if you must, proclaim to all the 
 land that he's your pupil that it was what you 
 taught, him which first raised him to even the little 
 
262 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 light he has. He came to you he called you 
 brother." 
 
 The husband stirred a little. "You know what 
 it would be for us absolute ruin." 
 
 "Rand took it." 
 
 "Yes, always the poseur. I saw that clearly, he 
 loved to play the part." 
 
 "No matter, he saved you." She struck her fists 
 together: "O, God if you had spoken!" 
 
 He crouched forward as if struck, indeed; he 
 lifted the brown curls from his damp brow : "De- 
 metra, I've seen this in you two days now. In you 
 and in Louise your looks on me. It's been an 
 agony, and now you out with it you ask me to 
 confess to Karasac." 
 
 "To get him away to confess; then, to go out 
 despised failed." She stopped and then, mechan- 
 ically, she muttered : "Rand did." 
 
 He whirled in a sort of fury: "Rand always 
 Rand!" 
 
 She raised her head: "This I know he hates 
 wrong he does not fear." 
 
 "I'm fighting, too, a bigger fight and differently. 
 What's all his wild talk what can it amount to?" 
 
 She nodded : "What, indeed ? Only this I know 
 he saved you." And she went on slowly : "Saved 
 me, also; that's the bitterest of it." 
 
 "Ah, I know, dear. I'd save you the smallest 
 grief. I'd give up anything to brighten a day of 
 your life I love you so!" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 263 
 
 "There's but one way to save me." 
 
 He looked at her quietness in a strange awe. She 
 went on steadfastly : "One way you must be great 
 as he!" 
 
 "Great ? An actor an impossible figure !" 
 
 "No matter. You shall do for love what he did 
 for vanity, Corbett!" She had risen, her dark eyes 
 shining, her faith, her fullness of confidence in her 
 power over him "As great as he!" 
 
 "Demetra ! How can the thing appear so to you ?" 
 
 "Do you think I'll have him go all his life long 
 thinking I dared not speak? . . . that you dared 
 not!" And she put both hands upon his shoulders 
 and pressed him back. "I'll tell you, Corbett, and 
 you shall tell all the world if needs be, that Karasac 
 is my brother." 
 
 "Brother?" He simply sat in wonder. 
 
 "I've told you much," she added slowly, still from 
 the calm that awed him. "You knew me when you 
 married me a girl come from the people a child 
 who could remember little of the Polish village 
 where she grew. Well, you know of my coming to 
 America. It seems my family followed they were 
 people of the mills and mines I hardly know where, 
 but this mill-hand recognized me the night he came 
 Ludovic, brother. The others, I hardly knew 
 mere babies in the old days . . . but they ended 
 it all in Rand's mills. And Ludovic knew me. He 
 spoke that night, hardly a week ago. Good God, how 
 long it seems!" 
 
264 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Your brother? And I taught him in the mill 
 school? It's strange " and then he turned swiftly 
 on her "Rand he knew this ? He did it to save 
 you!" He sat as one dulled, the real import held 
 from him. 
 
 The move of her head might have been assent 
 hope. She muttered : "He shall not go all his life 
 thinking I dared not speak." 
 
 And then, with her leaning to him, a pleading, 
 a passion, a threat her voice breaking : "You'll do 
 this, Corbett ! You'll bring him back to his place 
 his father you'll take this thing on you!" 
 
 He was still. And presently he said quietly: "I 
 think I see. You want to save him, Demetra that's 
 it." 
 
 She drew proudly back: "A bigger thing to 
 prove you. Come, we can be calm we can talk this 
 over, Corbett. It's hateful that we dared not speak. 
 Come, we can do this !" 
 
 But her calm was a menace ; she blurted on with 
 it: "As God lives, Stephen Rand shall judge us. 
 This mill-man you lifted to what little light he got 
 I, his sister. As God lives, you shall tell him all, 
 and he's to judge!" 
 
 He looked off above her; he took mechanically 
 from his pocket the manuscript of his last speech; 
 he looked at it unrolling, the blue type, the marginal 
 notes. "And on me," he muttered, "the blow will 
 come. I married the anarchist's sister I taught 
 him he came to me!" It seemed the land out in 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 265 
 
 the dark was the land of dreams a bubble that a 
 breath might burst. "You can't understand. . . . 
 If the justice turned on me sent me away " 
 
 "You shall go if he despises you you shall 
 accept !" 
 
 "I can't." 
 
 She was on him with a tiger's swiftness, clutch- 
 ing him, her breath on his, striking his knees, her 
 eyes brilliant, staring. "For me," she cried, "Cor- 
 bett, because you love me !" 
 
 "Yes, and for that I'd keep this thing from you 
 protect you -conceal it all my life long because I 
 love you." 
 
 "There's a greater way," she was calm again. 
 "Love can make a man great beyond himself that 
 only!" 
 
 "Love? Dear heart it's ruin." 
 
 "Rand took it." 
 
 "Look here," he whispered, staring wildly at her, 
 paling: "Rand yes for you ... he loves 
 you." 
 
 She laughed wildly; and a cry broke from him. 
 He whirled up from her grasp. "Demetra, I'm find- 
 ing the way now! Rand your old life abroad? 
 You told me once that a man took you, a child. 
 You admitted " He seized her hands, stung with 
 the truth. "Always I've seemed to see a playing be- 
 tween you ! Rand he's the man he knows every- 
 thing!" 
 
 "He is the man," she retorted. 
 
266 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 He recoiled, lifting a shaking finger to her com- 
 posure, "A child and he took you sent you to 
 school gave you your chance at life you've told 
 me all this . . . but it was Rand! And you never 
 forgot him !" 
 
 "Never." 
 
 His brain was at white heat, catching at the flash- 
 ing colors of her life, fitting them to a pattern, burn- 
 ing them beyond erasure. "And you'd confess the 
 thing to save him save him !" He cried out again 
 with his stinging intuition: "To save him you 
 love him!" 
 
 She smiled drearily: "To save him, then," she 
 went on, standing now, composed, before him. "If 
 you do not do this thing to-night tell Judge Rand 
 all I shall leave this house for ever." 
 
 "With him ?" the husband cried. 
 
 "Alone." 
 
 "You shall not stir," he muttered, the veins on 
 his white brow beating as he wiped his head: 
 "There's a child to be born to you. It's mine 
 and you shall not disgrace it." 
 
 "Well," she went on pitilessly, "it shall not be born 
 here, under this roof no never nor with you 
 near never never !" 
 
 He stood as in a dream ; she knew what his infinite 
 tenderness had meant his visions of the race-child, 
 the mingling of their variant blood for this passion 
 of his life, the New American the type beyond, 
 sprung from the moderns, the free and mighty 
 
" If you do not do this thing to-night ' 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 267 
 
 women it was this for which he had married her, 
 the underflow of his great thought. 
 
 "No, it isn't so," he muttered; "a woman doesn't 
 sacrifice herself so merely for an idea she never 
 loves that way it's beyond her!" He added, from 
 his daze: "No her love that's first!" 
 
 "Do you, too, tell us that? Is that what women 
 are ? For love of him that's your only idea, then ?' 5 
 
 "You're the guardian of a man's honor, his home, 
 his future, and you wreck it for what? For an old 
 passion Rand !" 
 
 She turned wearily away : "I hoped you'd under- 
 stand. He told me this, too that I was not great 
 enough that none of us was great enough but 
 you. I thought you'd understand you loved me 
 believed in us ! Is this all we are, Corbett ? Greedy 
 creatures who cling passionately to man's love 
 and only that? Who offer our bodies, lives, souls, 
 for nothing but that? O, I could go back again 
 a girl of the mills the fields a peasant with 
 wooden shoes and bent back in the fields for him 
 now! He took my brother, ignorant, friendless, 
 bloody, a hunted criminal, he took him, called him 
 brother. . . . Corbett, did you?" 
 
 "I was thinking of my work, Demetra, and you 
 all I could do for you." 
 
 "A man does not need to do anything for a 
 woman except to keep himself a hero in her eyes 
 that places him beyond all laws and creeds for her. 
 Then she can go be an outcast and ask nothing." 
 
268 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "And then she loves/' he retorted, and laughed, 
 shrilly, bitterly: "What a joke it is! How it all 
 comes back he, the man who fired a passion in you 
 he comes back and the old flame leaps up, ideal- 
 izing him, defying your soul for him, asking me to 
 sacrifice myself for him ! You told me once of some 
 man in your child life I did not question I for- 
 gave. But you you never forgot !" 
 
 "Corbett," she answered quietly, "are you great 
 enough to believe me?" He stopped his outburst, 
 the tone drove him illimitable leagues from her. 
 "If I tell you truth, are you great enough to 
 believe?" 
 
 "You confessed you loved him?" 
 
 "I do not love him." 
 
 "But you did and you never forgot him!" 
 
 "Will a woman ever forget what's denied her?" 
 
 "Denied her?" he was stupid before her purpose: 
 "See here, what was this man to you?" 
 
 "Nothing!" she retorted. "Are you big enough 
 to believe?" 
 
 "What was he to you?" the husband whispered, 
 staring. 
 
 "What he is to-day the fool, the jester. He took 
 me off the streets a little animal, starved, homeless 
 a child with some peasant singers, who was pretty 
 and had a voice. He bought me from old Jurak, the 
 master he sent me to school eight years the years 
 of his downfall, his years that I never knew of un- 
 til long after rich, luxurious, learning new ways 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 269 
 
 of life, giving me everything a girl could want 
 except " She broke off and faced him. "Well, do 
 you believe me?" 
 
 "Go on/' he muttered. 
 
 "Ah, well, in the end, it seemed, I ruined him. 
 I never knew his other life but they called him a 
 renegade preacher. And then, one night Rand came 
 to me penniless. He tore the pearls he had given me 
 from my throat to sell for the hospital bills of some 
 man he'd picked up and left me. ... I never 
 saw him until last Sunday Easter Day!" 
 
 "Go on," he repeated, his eyes following hers. 
 
 "Well, you know the rest. I came to America 
 after my voice failed. Then Washington and I 
 met you . . . you brought me here to the home 
 of your benefactor the father of the man to whom 
 I owed more than life. And I did not speak how 
 could I speak? They said for years that Rand was 
 dead!" 
 
 Corbett's gaunt eyes glittered : "And he loved 
 you." 
 
 "Love? That pagan who delighted in beauty 
 and let it grow?" 
 
 "What do you mean, Demetra?" 
 
 "He kept me as he found me a child, always. 
 What he meant for me you might as well ask the 
 wind. This only I know he gave me my chance. 
 What I'd been but for him " She drew her shoul- 
 ders out and faced him calmly: "Look at me! 
 Would I have been a wife mother?" 
 
270 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 His eyes were hopeless in their battling to find 
 hope in hers: "And you never forgot. Yes, a 
 woman could not forget nor forgive the man who 
 denied her who laughed as he does to-day!" And 
 then he tortured himself with this recurrence : "To 
 save him you love him!" 
 
 "No to be myself. O, is not that plain? 
 plain?" She had come to him again, pleading, kneel- 
 ing, now, by his chair. "Corbett, you'll do this! 
 Yes, to show him we do not fear!" 
 
 He took her face between his hands and looked 
 down to it; he had become so still again that she 
 might have read the answer: 
 
 "There have been times when I was quite mad 
 about you," he began gently. "There was something 
 in you beyond me all the fascination of a mystery 
 was in you. There was the temple I could not enter. 
 Yes, a dream hung in }^our soul always of him 
 that no man could be what he might be the terrible 
 thing about him, his heights and the depths to which 
 he could descend, the music of his voice, his un- 
 flinching eyes, the incomprehensible godlike brutish- 
 ness about him he thought he saw in you his mate, 
 a comrade, but you disappointed him . . . and 
 now the thing's possessed you. O, my dear!" he 
 muttered, "we see clearly now. The temple in you 
 you shrined him there !" 
 
 She moved; her tears were starting: "You will 
 
 not see," she pleaded. "Suppose there was a way?" 
 
 He set her head a little farther back and looked 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 271 
 
 steadfastly at her: "To give everything up to 
 bring Rand to this house his place his father?" 
 
 "Once you dreamed of me/' she whispered, cling- 
 ing to him. "I was to be a forerunner of the new, 
 wonderful women you'd imagined a sort of tribune 
 of the people with my heritage of the old world. 
 In your fine boy's way I was to be something like 
 that, and the mother of a son for you ! O, I was to 
 be great and you came to find it wasn't in me ! O, 
 you dreamer! But now suppose there was a way 
 for us?" 
 
 "You mean to confess to this to go down 
 failed for you?" 
 
 "For a great love, Corbett !" 
 
 He sat stilled. It seemed the walled room fell 
 from them to vistas of the land, its endlessness with 
 myriad destinies that in some mystic way were inter- 
 woven with his own. He saw himself going from 
 it all as from a vast arena, humbled, broken, to a 
 murmur of sad voices a leader fallen the pathos 
 of silence when he had gone. He felt her arms 
 about him, now, drawing his head to her own ; the 
 great sweetness of her breath she held him with 
 her passion breaking full, a torrent now filling all 
 the courses of his lonely life, its inner need of wom- 
 en, their strength of love, their noble judgments 
 . . . and then, as if stung by some dart from her 
 embrace, he raised her white arms and put her by 
 and rose. 
 
 "Corbett," she whispered, "love me love me !" 
 
272 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Here's my life," he answered slowly, "my work. 
 It's not mine to sacrifice to save any man it belongs 
 there " he pointed from the windows to the city's 
 dark "here there everywhere that it can bring 
 hope even a word. The children in Rand's mills, 
 the children in the Pennsylvania mines, the child 
 workers in the glass factories everywhere, in all 
 the land. The fight's big they look to me all the 
 great hearts that hope to lift the burden they look 
 to me for leadership. And beyond, all the ages 
 the cleaner lives the happier souls the better way 
 for the race fighting up always up from the brute. 
 I feel like one inspired with it ... do you think 
 I'd give it up to save this man ?" 
 
 "For me," she said, and looked at him, his calm- 
 ness and his strength with sudden terror. "Corbett !" 
 
 "No, not for you." 
 
 "He took your place, Corbett your burden !" 
 
 "Let him. What's his life worth? There are 
 things beyond any man's life beyond beyond! 
 Let him accept I accept !" 
 
 "You'd let me go," she whispered, and then, 
 mechanically, she beat her clenched hands one on 
 the other, dazed with his quietness, his power, 
 her failure with him : "I pleaded with you I asked 
 you with all my love and you could save it. Good 
 God ! You're sending me away, Corbett your child 
 with me !" 
 
 And he did not move, merely looked at her ; while 
 the little crystal clock struck three. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 THE next afternoon at three o'clock Demetra 
 met John Bride as he was passing from the 
 brick steps between the gates of painted iron along 
 the street. The old Scot greeted her with his wonted 
 cheer. 
 
 "Well, well," he went on slowly, "a fairish day 
 a bit frost coming. Nelse says there'll be snow up 
 the Lake diveesion, late as it is." 
 
 But she saw Brother John's mind was not on his 
 usual comforting affairs of the "Grand property 
 housin' forty families." He had, indeed, come from 
 Stephen sore with hurt. The judge had sat apatheti- 
 cally through John's hale attempt at cheer, hardly 
 speaking, sunk, his chin on his shirt bosom with an 
 uncertain waver. They had had their whisky and 
 water, John stirring with a tinkle and a quip before 
 the silent host, then he had come away. 
 
 "A fairish day," he went on, after the greeting, 
 "but bringin' cold. I think I'll be at my walk six 
 miles in it will hearten a man." 
 
 Demetra looked at the sleek skin of John's face, 
 the stout hand over the silver cane head. He had 
 the stuff about him that goes well with tugging 
 
 273 
 
274 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 winds and north distances. "John Bride/' she said, 
 "it seems that you've been the one thing that brought 
 a breath of life to this house the one man always 
 welcomed." 
 
 She had never spoken so to him ; she had been the 
 beautiful and indifferent alien giving him a bit of 
 ill-ease. Now he fumbled his stick in surprise, his 
 eyes blinking. "Mrs. Ennisley," he answered, "a 
 mon needs only carry his honesty before him well 
 or ill, he canna fear wi' that." 
 
 "There're some dare not," she muttered, and he 
 looked alertly. 
 
 "Ye may well say it was indeed a strange thing 
 the other night." And at this, as one who had 
 waited for her chance, she turned swiftly on him: 
 "It was not honest! It was not honest and you 
 know!" 
 
 He lifted his shoulders shrewdly: "There's this 
 and that to consider. A weakling mill-boy a puir 
 dragged creature of Rand's shanties and then this 
 son o' the house who boasts that he despises all hu- 
 man service a defyin' speerit a bucaneer of civ- 
 ilizeetiori wha'd he care for the children o' the 
 mills? Is that a likely union this brotherhood? I 
 think the devil's in it !" 
 
 "Yes," she said, "he's at your house. You'll take 
 me there to confront him." 
 
 He started: "Eh you? He has a sneer for 
 women! There's that Jew girl patient wi' him 
 but he lashes even her." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 275 
 
 "Come," the wife retorted "and now. I'll not 
 have another night.go by! 1 ' 
 
 He went along at her dominant urging, but hesi- 
 tant : "What is it ye'd have ? Ye can do naught > 
 the girl's carin' for him and his wounds." 
 
 He saw her dark eyes dilate : "What more ?" she 
 cried and touched his sleeve. "Tell me, John Bride !" 
 
 "I know this," he answered, "Rand and the an- 
 archist are hidden in her rooms and the police are 
 watching the place. Yes. How, I canna say, but the 
 baker's boy first called me to it he knew the de- 
 tective they had across. And I speered a bit into 
 it someway, the neighbors must have noticed two 
 strange men and wounded hidden there., But they're 
 watched and it's bad. I told them a', and Rand 
 would go wi' the boy and Louise wouldna have it 
 she clung to them." 
 
 "To him?" The wife's grasp tightened; he was 
 amazed. 
 
 "Eh? She will not chance them in the street 
 no, not if she was taken wi' them. Eh? it would 
 be hard to explain! But women God save the 
 fools! When they love they'll love the hand that 
 beats them !" 
 
 "Do you believe," she whispered, staring at him, 
 "she loves him? No, it's unthinkable!" 
 
 He studied her craftily: "Nothing about ye is 
 impossible, I take it. Eh? the braggart, the blus- 
 terer ! Why did she take him in why offer a'most 
 her life her good name to save him?" 
 
276 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Come/ ' the other woman retorted, "let us go." 
 
 "To them? Ye'd best not." 
 
 "I've heard strange things of you, John," she an- 
 swered; "that on a dirty railroad crossing you 
 spent eight hours a day waving a red flag because 
 you wanted to be in service to go out in service to 
 the road you'd helped build. And men call you crazy 
 but let them. That is a great thing to you, John !" 
 
 "Ye canna know," he muttered. "Woman, I gave 
 my young blood and bone to it the road drivin' on 
 always west wi' the people now, I canna keep hand 
 off it. It's grand to stand there lookin' along the 
 rails and think of where it'll be leadin' the lands 
 and homes and cities, buildin' greater for a' time. 
 Eh ? this America can ye follow ?" 
 
 "Well, then take me," she retorted. "I, too, will 
 show you something !" 
 
 They went along, John Bride bewildered, shaking 
 his head, not looking at her, but conscious of her 
 swing and freedom by his side, her eagerness and ag- 
 gression, her resolves. And when they came to his 
 red brick block among the dun warehouses and 
 smoky environ of the road ten squares to the w r est 
 among the frowsy, slinking foreign people of the 
 quarter, he took her up without word, and before the 
 clean paint and staining of the flat hallway, paused 
 by a nickel door number. 
 
 "She keeps it close-locked," he said, "and the bell 
 muffled. Did ye notice the mon on the grocery cor- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 277 
 
 ner? We're thinkin' he's spyin' on the block to see 
 who leaves and enters that is my suspicion." 
 
 But to her hand the door opened, and they went 
 directly along the passage to the little back dining- 
 room with its proper tints and polishing of wood 
 and new smells. There they surprised the three 
 Louise by the round table, paused, a coffee-pot in 
 her hand,; Rand by the window and Karasac beyond, 
 sunk in a chair, dirty, ill-arrayed, sullen. 
 
 The girl had cried out. Old John interrupted: 
 "Ye'r over careless wi' the door there might be 
 other guests." 
 
 Louise stared at them at Demetra in a sort of 
 fear then hurried without a word down the hall. 
 They heard her turn the latch; then she came back 
 and was watching the new-comers, her breath sharp 
 when she spoke. 
 
 "You here?" she said to the other woman "for 
 what?" 
 
 Her directness had unwelcome, menace. The wife 
 felt Rand's covert glance ; she put her hands on the 
 back of the chair John, drew up and leaning on it, 
 faced them. The little room, its table in disarray, 
 the bread scattered, a salad despoiled, had a round- 
 ing of fitness and content, even a brief, defiant gai- 
 ety. You would have thought that from the hostile 
 world three refugees were making merry, and were 
 little disposed to this unexpected coming. 
 
 "I've come for a matter that needs few words. 
 
278 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 It's to you, Rand you, alone. You shall go back 
 the thing is done." 
 
 His gray eyes, quiet, unlit, had a moment's gleam : 
 "Your husband?" He sat forward with some easy 
 interest. "You told him everything, then? Why, 
 then, does he not come with your message?" 
 
 The wife evaded : "The thing's done," she mut- 
 tered. 
 
 Louise spoke sharply: "You've not told him! 
 Confessed that Karasac's your brother!" 
 
 "He knows, now." The wife turned from her. 
 "And to-night the judge shall know. I've come to 
 tell you, Rand you shall go back." 
 
 He did not appear as one interested, but revolving 
 some other matter. 
 
 "Your husband?" he said at length, for they ap- 
 peared waiting on him "I think I read him well 
 enough. You told him but he does not dare ! You 
 pleaded, I imagine, and he eh? Ah, the pity of it!" 
 
 She could not endure his brooding, the measure- 
 less pity, indeed, in his deep voice. The girl had 
 come nearer: "Mrs. Ennisley, surely you've not 
 spoken ! Surely you know what it means !" 
 
 The wife ignored her; she crossed with a simplic- 
 ity that had a pathos greater than all words to touch 
 the brother's hand. She spoke in Polish, a murmur, 
 then a rising word a cry. It was a beseeching an 
 appeal, a love. . . . Her hand, so upon his 
 her other raised to brush back the matted hair from 
 his brow. And to it all he muttered, he shook his 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 279 
 
 head, then, with a snarl, leaped back from the chair 
 and cursed her in their common tongue. She stood 
 pale before them, a timid tenderness unthinkable in 
 her, reaching again to him the splendid woman and 
 the black-browed mill-hand in his dirt and hostile 
 suspicion. 
 
 "Ludovic," she whispered, and he whipped out an 
 oath to her. "Brother," she murmured, and he bared 
 his teeth and grinned in hate. 
 
 The thing was on them big. They could not have 
 endured more. Old John put forward : "Leave be, 
 man!" he said dully. "None o' that now. The 
 woman's askin' o' ye !" 
 
 Louise reached to Rand across the table the wife 
 saw her hand touch his, draw it with a pressure 
 she checked her hurt ; she stood silent in her abnega- 
 tion, looking again at Karasac by the wall holding 
 his bandaged elbow, in the unreasoning anger of the 
 brute. Always his little black eyes roved from Rand 
 to her and back. 
 
 "I came," the wife said, "to take him somehow 
 to acknowledge him. Yes," she added, and turned 
 again to Rand. Beneath the sense of insult she 
 was calm. "To-night, the judge shall know. We 
 can do this thing yes, I, alone then go. As God 
 lives, I can do this!" 
 
 "For what?" Rand said. "You will spoil a mar- 
 velous fancy of mine." 
 
 Demetra had turned to John Bride: "This is 
 what you could not see my brother, here. And the 
 
280 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 other night I knew yes, and I dared not speak 
 when Rand took the blame on him. You see, John 
 Bride? This Karasac is my brother." 
 
 In his uncomprehending it seemed a great light 
 flashed. He did not cry out nor question, but merely, 
 his old head shaking, muttered : "Puir bodies ! I 
 felt the hauntin' on them all !" And then, as if he 
 did not care to see the woman's soul bared further, 
 old John stole softly to his rooms across the hall. 
 
 Back in the little room they listened further to 
 her. Louise once put in: "You should not have 
 come here. The house is watched for some reason. 
 Well, to-night they must be moved must get away, 
 somehow." 
 
 "He's mine," the wife said clearly. "My brother, 
 here mine to protect." 
 
 "You can't," the girl retorted; "there's more to 
 think of than a piece of foolishness. They're hunted 
 both of them and they've got to get away." 
 
 Rand's ceaseless eyes were on them, one to the 
 other. His rare smile came it had a trace of sleepy 
 malice. "To paint the lily, and to gild pure gold," 
 he put in. "Eh? what has come out of the old 
 death's head of a house? What miracles? Tell me! 
 You will, Demetra, for some idea wholly beyond 
 you, wreck yourself, the professor, and all he's at, 
 to save me I who take my catgut soul and fiddle 
 on it while I watch the rest of you burning? I will 
 confess to you an extraordinary thing ... I 
 do not believe I'm worth it !" 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 281 
 
 The wife watched him steadily : "No. But there 
 is this greater than you. To prove myself to go 
 simply to what needs be. I can accept/* 
 
 He looked at her with his dissembling surprise. 
 "I," he went on sententiously, "would like to see 
 it. Demetra with something of the magnificent 
 barbarian about you that you should be so aroused ! 
 Good heavens, it would be worth a score of com- 
 mon years to see you rise and tell the justice that 
 I, his son, am a person much maligned ; that I am, 
 indeed, a hero with something of the proportions 
 of a demigod ! It would be worth the hearing." 
 
 She turned from them to the door : "No matter 
 you shall come." 
 
 Louise came between them. "You'll not," she 
 answered sharply. "Don't you see what it would 
 mean? All Doctor Ennisley's built in a lifetime the 
 thing he's fought for. I think he can be the first to 
 point to the dawn of a new day. He will make so- 
 cialism a thing appealing to men's imaginations. He 
 has it in him, and he's coming on so fast, so far. 
 No, you shan't wreck it with this this anarchist 
 this brother!" 
 
 "Louise, once you loved him," the wife cried, 
 "and it's dead, now! O, you can talk of your so- 
 cialism and greater things, but a woman can't mind 
 that ! This thing's crushed him, and you've had your 
 dream killed the thing in him you loved !" 
 
 "Be still, there's no use in this," the other whis- 
 pered. 
 
282 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "But I'll not be still. He shall go on and be great. 
 O, yes there's a way for him, too ! Do you think 
 he could go all his life long under this? Rand sent 
 away, an outcast, laughing and Corbett knew! 
 Good God! can any man be great for the work of 
 the world and have that on his soul ?" And then she 
 whipped about on him : "Here's Rand he shall not 
 go!" 
 
 "Rand?" the girl said slowly. "Let him go. 
 What's a single life worth against the others?" 
 
 He nodded, but with no trace of feeling: "An 
 addled knight, fighting windmills. Consider me so 
 if you wish and if it will cause your voices to 
 lower! Old John's tenants may have Scotch ears." 
 
 "You shall not drag the doctor into it," the girl 
 said hotly. "There's more than he or Rand, I tell 
 you. What's one man's soul?" 
 
 "There's mine," the other woman answered. 
 "One must see to one's own." 
 
 Rand had risen ; he bowed gravely : "One's soul 
 is altogether one's own property. I, indeed, have 
 wrangled that my life long and found none to agree 
 in practice. Women, at least, are bound to be hitch- 
 ing some baggage to it ; or as it were making of 
 the thing a duet. One ought to be free to draw from 
 it what one will ; a strain to mingle with the seraphic 
 choir, or, as I prefer at times to make mine catgut 
 on which to fiddle the lively ditties of the day. God's 
 sun is warm. I sit in it and caterwaul as long as He 
 will let it shine. . . . It's not my affair to meddle 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 283 
 
 with to inquire why He is He, and I am I but 
 yet I can sit here and discuss it with lively interest. 
 Here we are the three of us and at a most extra- 
 ordinary moment of living. I feel about me ex- 
 quisite and hidden essences of mind soul. I am 
 positively acute with it. It is rare, indeed, to come 
 upon a matter such as this." 
 
 The women looked upon him; the face of one had 
 colored the other was as steel. And the last went 
 on : "Yes, it's like you now, to pause and divert your- 
 self to pick fine words and make a bit of fooling 
 of it all. O, very like you !" 
 
 "One of the distressing things is the mere frag- 
 mentary catching at things with which we have to be 
 content," he answered. "Even I can not quite attain 
 the necessary impersonality. My vanity is for ever 
 rendering me disastrously human. I lose much 
 through the weaknesses common to you all/' 
 
 "Be still !" she cried. "I've only asked you this 
 that you shall come to-night and find whether I have 
 dared or not ! You shall not go life long thinking 
 this you shall hear me !" 
 
 He appeared distantly amused. "I shall be there." 
 
 Louise was quick upon him : "No," she said, "you 
 can't. You know how matters are here the house 
 watched and then she must not tell this thing to 
 your father no, at any cost no !" 
 
 "My father? Did you think I feared him? I 
 could stand before the devil, and, if my digestion 
 was well, out-talk him." 
 
284 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 The older woman went from the room and along 
 the passage. They heard her snap the lock and go 
 out. The mill-hand looked after her in his suspicion, 
 his helplessness ever to Rand's moods. Louise came 
 hotly to Rand. "She's mad with it all see what 
 you've done !" 
 
 "It is excellently done. I believe I shall yet awake 
 the soul in her." 
 
 "Ah, you!" the girl cried out, and turned away. 
 "You're not human . . . and yet half an hour 
 ago, it seemed I had some desperate hope in you 
 you had a gentleness a humor O, what's in you?" 
 
 "You had a hope?" he asked leisurely. "Of 
 what?" 
 
 She looked at him confused. Her eyes had not 
 their clear and fixing steadiness of yesterday : "You 
 are the falsest, the most ridiculous person I ever 
 knew!" 
 
 "Yet," he answered gravely, "you'd sell ten years 
 of life to prove to yourself that I was not." 
 
 She went on in her feeling: "See what you've 
 done you've goaded her to confession. The doctor 
 his place. I tell you," she added resolutely, "you 
 must save him yet. I tell you, you must you must 
 find a way." 
 
 The anarchist had gone out; they heard him in 
 the farther sleeping-room, groping about among the 
 furnishings. Rand slowly took the girl's hands 
 across the table, drew her near, studied her. 
 
 "There's in you," he began, "the thing that's 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 285 
 
 driven men to the block. You could walk out and 
 lay down your own head for that which you loved." 
 
 "Yes," she answered, "what's greater tell me?' 5 
 
 "The man," he remarked airily, "is not worth 
 your while. Eh? there's the wife who can hold 
 him by a hair." 
 
 "I was not thinking of him," she muttered. "No 
 not now. And you've played on her driven her 
 to what she thinks is a great sacrifice. You, who've 
 jeered at women there's one woman's answer." 
 
 He smiled with his ironic assurance: "And for 
 what tell me ? Eh ? Disinterestedly, I should say 
 she loves me." 
 
 The girl drew from him : "And you can speak of 
 that! So! Calmly as if it were a play you're 
 watching! Loved you? suppose she did?" 
 
 "Her soul," he answered, from his thought. "I 
 still will polish the thing Eh? I'd rub it, as one 
 would a flawless gem, clean and complete its beauty 
 and then, on a bit of velvet with a bow hand 
 it back to her and assure her: 'Madam, it is very 
 good, indeed ! But my taste runs to simpler effects !' ' 
 
 "And you?" Louise murmured. "And then ah, 
 you!" 
 
 "I," he answered, with some circumspection, 
 "would then go on to the next study one might find 
 of interest." 
 
 She sat back and could not look at him for a 
 moment. "Well, then," she said, after her abstrac- 
 tion, "if that's the way you look at things, here's the 
 
286 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 man's honor his career beyond, a matchless 
 chance to find this jewel of good deed you're always 
 seeking, it seems, as a collector does his gems. O, 
 you could save him for his work his life's pur- 
 poses !" 
 
 "Granted. And if I could induce you women to 
 keep your hands off and cease tinkering with your 
 sentimentalisms, I'd accomplish it." 
 
 She turned on him intently. His round face was 
 unmoved her blue eyes searched him long. "I 
 don't love him," she muttered, at last. "You should 
 know that now!" 
 
 "Obviously. I've broken the thing. But here I 
 am about to complete my ruin for what you hold 
 beyond anything in your life to protect your fan- 
 atic's dream of the social regeneration which I 
 have not a deal of faith in, sure as it is to come. I 
 say that I, Rand, am about to take off my hat, bow 
 gravely, and mount the scaffold for you and your 
 visions ... in return therefor, my dear young 
 woman, you will love me." 
 
 She rose from him, looking down, unflinching. 
 He shrugged his shoulders and went on with some 
 patience: "That is the distressing thing about 
 women. You confuse all our heroisms with some- 
 thing of the sort." 
 
 For a time she had no answer; then, from the 
 other door, she turned, her eyes unfearingly on him: 
 "I'll not," she said clearly "I shall not love you 
 never . . . never!" 
 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 287 
 
 He rubbed his chin with some concern : "Possibly 
 not. You have the merest chance of escape by the 
 law of averages. But wait let us round the thing 
 let us make it a brilliant to flash in the sun. Eh ? it 
 will be of amazing interest! Let us see to it purely 
 with the eye of the master-craftsman ... we 
 may, indeed, find a marvel surpassing all." 
 
 She did not try to answer. He got up and looking 
 at the clock, assured her good night with his usual 
 gravity ; then went to the room in the rear. She did 
 not move for a time her eyes were intent on the 
 court window through which she saw him moving 
 to lay about the other sleeping man the blanket from 
 his own bed. The spring air was cold. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE wife went back through the wet spring 
 night, the press of a tepid and fitful wind from 
 off the lake upon her cheek, heralding more of the 
 showers that had made the week uncertain with its 
 intermittent sunshine and its cool north breath. 
 When she reached the rooms she threw open the 
 windows so that the damp puffing came in. Corbett 
 was not in his study; she remembered having seen 
 a light in the library at times he studied there. 
 She put off her street things and went to the main 
 portion of the house, and when she reached the door 
 from the hall, she heard voices in the library. She 
 saw beyond, Corbett sitting, his arm about his 
 mother, and her thin fingers on his brow. She was 
 murmuring in her shy restraint of love, and they 
 did not stir when the wife came. Only the old 
 mother looked up inquiringly, almost unfriendly at 
 first, to the intrusion. Corbett was looking away, 
 the profile of his beard, full nose and white brow 
 high, clear-cut. Demetra had ever a detached admi- 
 ration for the daintiness about him, oddly variant 
 with his studies, his fighting life, his rude upbring- 
 ing, his hot ardors his clean, trim aspect had al- 
 
 288 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 289 
 
 ways satisfied the esthete's sense in her, if nothing 
 more. And when he turned and saw her, she was 
 conscious of this same detached liking of his clean 
 personality, his charm of manner. 
 
 But his eyes winced at sight of her, the well-loved, 
 the beautiful always to him; the full figure in its 
 dark close-fitting serge, the laced neck, making a 
 delicate net colored with the flesh beneath it rushed 
 to him as a hot tide that he loved her splendidly, his 
 ardent life with ever its underrunning note of lonely 
 pathos, the need of strength behind him. 
 
 "Dear " he said, and stopped. His mother's 
 arm slipped from him ; the old lady got up with the 
 air of a school-girl caught at love-making. 
 
 "I been sparkin' with your boy," she said. 
 
 The wife smiled faintly. "I've been looking for 
 him," she went on. And then, as if the fullness of 
 it would not be denied : "Corbett, I've sent word to 
 Judge Rand that he meet us here. . . . I'm glad 
 you're already on the spot." 
 
 He looked hopelessly at her. "You're still deter- 
 mined," he muttered, and then looked at his mother. 
 "Demetra, can't you wait? This is no time to dis- 
 cuss it." 
 
 "There's no need for pretense." She crossed and 
 threw open the tall unwieldy shutters, and heard him 
 whisper : "Incredible madness !" 
 
 "Nothing more sure more sane. I've asked him 
 here and Rand will come at nine . . . and you 
 shall tell them, Corbett !" 
 
290 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 He would not answer to her incision. The old 
 woman looked about perplexed. "What now? The 
 judge's wild limb of a son has he been arrested 
 with that boy yit?" 
 
 They each turned to her. "Corbett," the wife 
 said composedly, "now tell her tell them all the 
 truth!" 
 
 And he went down the long room to the windows 
 where she stood, her clear voice ringing, and left the 
 mother by the table, groping blindly among their di- 
 rectnesses. 
 
 "I asked you once before," Demetra went on, "to 
 speak." 
 
 "And I told you I'd not. I'm guilty of no wrong 
 to any man. And if this thing's come on me that 
 a mill-boy whom I raised a bit from the brutish child 
 he was, is your brother if he came flying back to 
 me in his hate and fear, that's no fault pf mine." 
 
 "Another man took your place we were not 
 great enough to go his way. No no !" 
 
 "You love him," the husband answered listlessly, 
 "I can see it in you, always now." Then his voice 
 broke : "A sort of madness in you !" 
 
 "I was never so calm so clear. O, it seems I 
 never before was awake ! I slept as he told me a 
 cat by a fire and all about me was the fight and 
 struggle. There were my people. It seems I must 
 have fattened on them here with you." 
 
 "You feel this?" he muttered. "What's come to 
 lyou? Great God, if you'd felt that at the first 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 291 
 
 what I imagined I saw in you!" Then he went on 
 in a swift appeal : "Demetra, this boy there'll be 
 a way found to protect him without our confessing. 
 I'm in a position where a pebble's weight against me 
 would topple the whole thing I've built all I've 
 done with my life." 
 
 "Let it tumble," she retorted, "if it's built on 
 lies." 
 
 He stared at her calm face, he reached to touch 
 her arm ; his voice came low and hard : "Mine's a 
 man's work, and who can take my place ? The good 
 that I can do ? And you'd ask me to throw it over 
 for a woman's whim." 
 
 "A woman's whim?" Her voice was curiously 
 intent: "Go on I want to hear you out," she 
 added. 
 
 "Yes, an insane idea of chivalry, I call it. To 
 sacrifice everything for the sake of one and that 
 one, Rand! If you knew all if you could realize 
 where I stand that they say I'm the man whose in- 
 fluence is arousing the lethargy of the universities 
 that here I'm teaching to the young manhood of the 
 state the juster social relations the dawn of the 
 new day." 
 
 "The new day?" she repeated: "Well, for me 
 it's here!" 
 
 "You're mad," he muttered, "you can't mean it !" 
 
 "Yes," she drew from him, "I shall go." 
 
 He looked at her and did not flinch. "Well then, 
 if you think I fear, let me tell you what I can give 
 
2 9 2 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 up. I love you you know I love you the dearest 
 thing in all my life but I'll give you up for the 
 greater thing beyond. Yes, I'll have you think me 
 a coward, and I'll be patient with it all my life. 
 . . . I can do that, and you can go." 
 
 She stepped farther back; she seemed in wonder 
 at this fanaticism beyond their pettiness of fortunes. 
 And then she muttered : "Corbett, you're suffering 
 so!" 
 
 "No matter. I've come up fighting I'll go down 
 fighting. You can ruin me, but some way I'll fight 
 back I'll clear myself." 
 
 "But you love me, Corbett !" 
 
 And to her cry, he answered : "God knows that. 
 I placed you higher than anything in my life, except 
 a man's work . . . that's beyond us all." 
 
 "Well," she said patiently, "I'll go to-night." 
 
 "To-night?" His hopeless tone returned, his 
 eye's resolution sank. "There's no need to-night." 
 
 "I'll not spend it beneath this roof, or with you. 
 And in late summer my child shall come. Corbett, 
 I'll let you know of it." 
 
 He cried out sharply, groping his way back to his 
 mother, who had risen, bewildered, grasping here 
 and there a meaning, giving now and then an inar- 
 ticulation of amazement. 
 
 And when he had reached her they saw in the hall 
 door the master of the house. The light was on 
 his white thin hair, the Roman face, smooth, gray, 
 the plum-colored jacket and white waistcoat. He 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 293 
 
 looked in apathetically. "My dear," he asked of 
 Demetra, "what's this?" 
 
 She paused. Corbett, beyond her, faced him 
 calmly : "My wife is leaving me." 
 
 The old man did not comprehend ; only the mother 
 murmured, staring. 
 
 "Eh?" the justice said: "It's a bad night out, 
 Mrs. Ennisley." He fingered his watch fob list- 
 lessly. "You'd best have the carriage ordered if 
 you're going out." 
 
 And on their stillness, he turned, his old eyes dull- 
 ing : "Doctor, I am not well. This has been strange 
 my son home then back to the darkness from 
 whence he came." 
 
 "He's gone beyond us all to the new day." 
 The father turned to Demetra curiously. "Eh ? 
 a day?" 
 
 "He has found," she said, "the brotherhood." 
 Stephen raised his hand : "You puzzle me you 
 speak riddles." 
 
 "No, it's very clear as all great things are sim- 
 ple." 
 
 The old man nodded to her, his tired eyes closing : 
 "Strange strange." 
 
 The wife went swiftly to Corbett. "Speak," she 
 whispered, "you can save me !" 
 
 But he did nothing except to say resolutely : "Sir, 
 my wife is leaving me." 
 
 Clinging to his arm the old woman fluttered in ap- 
 prehension. The justice turned a face resigned with 
 
294 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 the querulous half-patience of the aged : "Leaving 
 this house?" He turned now to her: "Mrs. 
 Ennisley?" 
 
 "Yes," she said, and the tone troubled him; he 
 leaned heavily on the chair back and nodded : "Why, 
 no my friends. Impossible !" He peered curiously 
 at them. "You mean to say you're parting?" 
 
 The wife came before him: "I asked you here. 
 I would like to have had you in your robes. O, I 
 wanted it great enough for that I wanted to be 
 proud " she turned to Corbett; he saw her agony 
 "Ah, well there's nothing now to say! He failed!" 
 
 The justice stood doubting: "Why, Doctor," he 
 began, "you love her !" 
 
 -Yes yes." 
 
 And to his exclamation the wife brought her cry: 
 "You love me, and you'll give me up! That's the 
 horror of it but men can do it!" 
 
 "But my dear," the judge went on, more evenly, 
 "we need you. I Brother John you've seemed to 
 brighten this old place a bit. And your husband 
 his work . . . you must help him. I'm leaving 
 much to him." 
 
 "He's the stronger now," she answered, and 
 turned again to the old man and put her hand upon 
 his sleeve : "Your son is coming," she said clearly, 
 "at nine it is very near now. Let's wait I'd 
 much rather he were here for every word of it." 
 
 And Corbett hardly stifled his cry. The father 
 trying to straighten his bent form to its old diminu- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 295 
 
 live but notable dignity, went on with his expostula- 
 tions : "My son back? What can you mean? And 
 you leaving? What can it be?" 
 
 "Wait," the wife said calmly. "Rand will be 
 here. Be seated." And the father hobbled back 
 to his great chair, sat shaking his head at them ; by 
 the door the wife stood, tall, silent, listening in a sort 
 of stealth. They waited for him always this house 
 was waiting for him to come and jeer, to break and 
 mock to solve the thing. 
 
 The judge began his bewildered muttering pres- 
 ently, and then Demetra stole forward with a warn- 
 ing. She listened, flew to the door ; they heard her 
 exclamation in the hall ; and Rand had come in while 
 she closed it was before them shaking a sparkle of 
 rain from his big shoulders, crushing back his gray 
 hat to look about. The wife followed. 
 
 "He's here," she said, in a sort of authority. 
 
 The old man rose, seeming to harden himself to 
 answer: "Three nights ago I sent you from this 
 house." 
 
 "And I've come back. You might have expected 
 I'd come back if the fancy took me." 
 
 "I sent for him," the wife put in "he knows 
 Corbett knows. Now you shall all know. Rand's 
 here that much is due him." 
 
 "Due me? All life is due me, but who gets a 
 tenth the world owes him. It's a thief, a rascally 
 trader that sneaks and bargains. It owes us joy, 
 sunlight, peace and we're cowardly beggars who 
 
296 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 dare not take by force. I've wondered that men 
 should stand so pitifully dumb and be denied that 
 they should mumble prayers and mind laws eh? 
 For what? to let the fruit go unsucked just out of 
 their bruised fingers. That's another marvel that I 
 see!" 
 
 "My son," the old man muttered; and the wife 
 hastened: "Be still I did not bring you here to 
 preach to us. Judge Rand, you called him 'son' just 
 now ... he shall be that again." She looked 
 back at Corbett, calm, his arms folded, the mother by 
 him. "I've given up all." 
 
 "She's leaving this house," the husband added 
 coolly. 
 
 "Alone ?" Rand asked, regarding him. 
 "Alone," the other retorted. 
 "You'd not speak not even for your love of 
 her?" 
 
 "Not for the love of any woman. Rand, you 
 know well enough. Here she could stay I'd pro- 
 tect her I'd find a way to save her good name 
 yes, I'd fight for her all my life long, but I'd not 
 give up my work for her the higher truth the 
 greater love! O, man, is it beyond you to under- 
 stand me?" 
 
 The other man was curiously stilled. 
 "And let you go," the wife put in, "the outcast!" 
 "He's boasted that was his great way his broth- 
 erhood of the road. Well, that's his way, but here's 
 mine." 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 297 
 
 "You've done this?" Rand muttered, still ab- 
 sorbed: "Man, she's free of you!" 
 
 "She can go," Corbett retorted quickly, "the way 
 is open." 
 
 "I can go," the wife began, her calm breaking 
 here and there in her voice : "I can take him es- 
 cape somehow somewhere. It will not matter. 
 Back to our people, if need be the mills, the tene- 
 ments the dirty shops anywhere, to be myself 
 and true !" They stirred before her she went on : 
 "You told me that I that women were not strong 
 enough great enough that I Demetrai was 
 only a woman a creature moved by passion for one 
 or the other of you no more . . . that I could 
 give nothing except that. Ah, well !" She crossed 
 before them to the old man's chair "Here, now," 
 she cried "I speak!" 
 
 The old man struggled up amazed, and she took 
 his hand and drew him out a step. 
 
 "He shall judge me he shall say if I've been less 
 than either of you!" And then, to the old man's 
 quavering, she went on dispassionately: "You've 
 been kind to me your home, my home your pro- 
 tection and your friendship well, we've built our 
 lives on it. But I'm not what you thought. Judge 
 Rand, a girl of your mills South ! A sister to that 
 man who came here Karasac, the anarchist." 
 
 He muttered the name and was puzzled still : "The 
 mill-boy," she continued, "my brother, and we 
 knew 1 we knew, and did not speak. And Rand 
 
298 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 took the thing on him he lied ... to save us, 
 he lied!" 
 
 "Karasac your brother?" The old man's doubt- 
 ful note arose. He faced the men : 'The mill-boy ? 
 He came to find her? Sir, will you tell me 
 truth?" His eyes were on his son; but the woman 
 spoke before them: "He knew nothing he never 
 saw this boy until last Monday. And Karasac fled 
 here to find protection from us us do you see 
 that! A boy of the mills whom Corbett taught 
 his friend my brother don't you see that!" she 
 cried again, her passion rising. 
 
 "You brought me here," the judge began, "to lis- 
 ten to this astounding story !" 
 
 "And we'll go," the woman said, "people of the 
 mills where you breed hate and fear. My brother 
 see what America made of him a rat a thing de- 
 spising me. That's what the mills do ... he was 
 a child there!" 
 
 "The mills," the old man murmured. "They 
 trouble me." His head shook wearily ; then turned : 
 "Doctor, you've done this ?" 
 
 "The thing's true. The mill-boy was my pupil 
 I tried to raise him. Well, I can go, too." He 
 turned from them to the window. "There's a man's 
 work somewhere, even yet!" 
 
 "Go?" The justice's cracked voice arose : "Doc- 
 tor, you can't go. I've been strangely moved of late. 
 That boy's face the other night a child raised in 
 my mills its hate, its fear, its infamy. In the 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 299 
 
 shadows of my house I saw it it seems to haunt 
 me." He moved down the room ; he tottered a little, 
 and went on : "Eh, Doctor? You can't leave me 
 there's much to do. To-day I signed away two hun- 
 dred thousand for the training school down there. 
 Man, was not that what you were after?" 
 
 Corbett turned his eyes a trifle wild. The old 
 man muttered on : "Some light a little kindlier 
 perhaps more just . . . that boy's brute face a 
 child raised in Rand's mills." 
 
 "You mean " Corbett quivered with it "my 
 work's going on?" 
 
 "Who else?" the justice answered wearily. "Man, 
 you can not leave it." 
 
 The wife had stirred: she came near them and 
 spoke confusedly: "You forgive all?" she said, and 
 repeated it: "Forgive forgive?" And then she 
 cried : "The mills where you crushed us ! Stanis- 
 laus Joseph little Marta ! And Ludovic, living 
 see what they made of him ! An anarchist hunted, 
 now no place for him in all America ! No friend 
 nothing !" 
 
 "The boy?" the justice added mildly, seeming 
 dazed again, "Let him be treated kindly. Perhaps 
 there's much to say a boy raised in the mills." 
 
 "He can't," Corbett retorted. "The police they'd 
 dog him to the earth they'd hang him . . . five 
 of them were killed." 
 
 "True true " the judge was thoughtful. "The 
 law he'd have to face it." 
 
300 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "What justice could there be for him?" the wife 
 cried "for us now, it's done what justice?" 
 
 The judge gently raised his hand. "It's a prob- 
 lem. The law can not consider every phase of it." 
 He sighed: "If there was a way. Here's the doc- 
 tor's work here's the good name of this house 
 if there was a way " 
 
 Rand grimaced: "I was waiting for that your 
 reputations, eh ? Yes, you'd look first to your good 
 names if the race rotted for it." 
 
 The wife's face set hard. "Well, at least I have 
 not feared. I can go !" 
 
 "She can't see," the husband said, "how a man 
 might love her and refuse her. We may as well all 
 know, Judge. Here's the man who first awoke in 
 her a child's passion. An actor, genius, fool 
 whatever he is to stab the world with his tongue. 
 And I I'm a man of home and child and work I 
 offered that, but she'd rather go." 
 
 "She can not go," the justice muttered, "it's mad- 
 ness!" He went to her: "Madam, your place is 
 here by his side." 
 
 "My brother," she retorted, and was still. 
 
 They looked at Rand. He rubbed his finger-tips, 
 his grimace came. 
 
 "The beast-brother," he said, "is mine. I would 
 be for ever consumed with curiosity if I gave him up. 
 Eh? The soul of the beast? One might find it in 
 time!" 
 
 "My son," the old man muttered, "the affair ap- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 301 
 
 pears to be on you. We've stood within your power 
 now it seems we turn to you in the dark." 
 
 The outcast twirled his fingers with the air of a 
 diagnostician to whom is propounded a query un- 
 worthy of his powers. "Nothing easier. I have 
 lectured you more than enough you've been dili- 
 gent pupils. Go about your affairs be as human as 
 you can I will not expect too much of you. And I 
 will be off with the brother there is no chance for 
 him here, that's sure." 
 
 "You'll leave," the wife cried. "Good God, have 
 you no common feeling?" 
 
 "I? I am exasperatingly sentimental. I am for 
 ever immersed in human feeling from every one 
 about me. Eh? if I could ever attain the purely 
 scientific attitude ! But I'm too much a poet of the 
 senses I've too much a heart open to the world 
 I am far too religious. ... I dig for truth un- 
 fearingly, and then, when I find it, I must carry it 
 to God with some hullaballoo, even though we both 
 disdain adoration and the bumping of heads on the 
 ground. Eh? you, Doctor! You men of books 
 and naturalistic laws when the new order comes, 
 and you have considered all things; when the last 
 wilderness is plowed up, and the last sea explored 
 when the last beast is shot, and the last savage 
 tamed and in a collar and cravat when the whole 
 round earth is gardened out, and all the mills are 
 built and administered with the due humanitarian 
 philosophy when, in short, the final analysis is 
 
302 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 made and the complete code set forth, and the last 
 adventure done, when the road lies white and 
 smooth and broad before us, and life goes on on 
 always on upon my soul, what then?" 
 
 "Rand, the day will come." 
 
 "Doubtless this socialism. It will be the last 
 epic." He shrugged and turned away. "I have 
 enough to do to live my own. You will notice that 
 even in this matter of the little beast-brother, I was 
 not allowed to complete it God knows, my jewel 
 of good deed seems now a cracked bit of slate. I 
 was going off alone with the boy to discover what 
 was in him." 
 
 "My son," the justice muttered, "out of your in- 
 credible life, one thing seems sure. You would save 
 us all. I wonder what is in you?" 
 
 "A preacher ; what would you have me ?" 
 
 A flick of a grim smile touched the father's face. 
 "You're going? Have you money?" 
 
 "As much as eighty cents, and I owe that to John 
 Bride. Eh, give me money! Give me enough and 
 I could lift the shadow off the world ! I could make 
 all the fields green, and have all the children laugh- 
 ing. It's the magician it can take a starved body 
 and in it breed a soul !" 
 
 They looked at him in their old despair. In the 
 pause a sound came, and John Bride thrust his 
 red face through the open door. It lit at sight of 
 Rand. 
 
 "Man, ye've been long. There's need of ye. 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 303 
 
 The girl's left she and the brother. The police 
 were on them." 
 
 "Louise ? She's left the house !" 
 
 "The baker down the block warned us. I canna 
 tell all." He looked about : "Come, lad again, it's 
 on ye!" 
 
 Rand had turned. The wife came swiftly near. 
 
 "It's dark it's raining wait think !" 
 
 "There's none to act save Rand," old John re- 
 torted. "There'd be danger to the rest. It's bad 
 enough Louise hunted down. Come, lad !" 
 
 Rand's eyes were already on the outer dark. 
 
 The father moved toward the hall. "A moment 
 ' you'll need money. Doctor, will you order the 
 carriage ?" 
 
 John went with him to his rooms, the footfalls 
 died, the rain splashed the panes, the shadows grew, 
 and in this the wife and the outcast stood alone. 
 From the tenseness and the talk, they now stood in 
 silence across the room from each other. Rand did 
 not speak ; his thoughts, it seemed, upon the dark. 
 
 "My brother," she said at length, as if to her own 
 heart. "I would have gone I've given up all, but it 
 seems this last is denied me." She came to him in 
 a sort of timidness now. "O, it seems I've awakened. 
 My brother! ... I wanted to say to have 
 him know to remember that I could not see before! 
 Ah, will you have him think kindly of me?" 
 
 And because Rand did not at once answer, she 
 went swiftly on. "O, I can envy you! To stand a 
 
304 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 moment heroic with it all even if it was mere mad- 
 ness . . . but I tried. Herford, I tried did 
 you see that?" 
 
 "What's come to you?" he answered, "you're 
 changed, indeed." 
 
 "Have I proved myself?" she retorted. "See here 
 I'm not afraid. Herford, I can offer my hand to 
 you. ... I see so clearly now. I'm strong 
 and a strong man loves me a brave man. He stood 
 against me when he loved ! I understand now what 
 he was thinking of, his work the dream he had of 
 the new race. Rand, his child is to be born to me." 
 
 He looked at her wondering. 
 
 "And you," she said, "who made a jest of women 
 you stung my soul with it now as you did long 
 ago you came back here to whip me with my tin- 
 worth. O, you're very wonderful ! And the old way 
 I loved you, Herford it's quite dead. I'm strong, 
 now can't you see?" 
 
 But when the deep stealth of his voice came, she 
 turned and would not look at him, she nervously 
 evaded: "Go, now." And she kept at it, as he 
 raised her hands. "Go, now go go!" 
 
 "You women," he muttered; "life beats you back 
 it withholds and mocks you the pity of it ! The 
 ages have left this in the eyes of all of you that 
 you shall be merely patient and deny." 
 
 He laid away her hand and smiled. "Go back. 
 The thing's well enough complete. Eh? it was 
 well worth while to see you stand, to hate, re- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 305 
 
 nounce unf earing! Indeed, you did not fail in 
 the least, Demetra!" 
 
 She twisted nearer in some feeling. "And is that 
 all?" she whispered. "Herford, see I'm strong, 
 now. Tell me ... you might have loved me!" 
 
 And as he stood with his brooding smile, un- 
 touched, it seemed, John Bride's voice came from 
 the hall, with Stephen's quaver beyond. The draw 
 of the cool air filled the room. Rand went without; 
 she saw him conferring with the old Scot, and then 
 the glint of the polished wheels at the door. She 
 followed, and by Stephen's side, heard the grit of 
 the wet gravel, the sludge of wheels in the drive, 
 the clacking of the hoofs on the crossing. And 
 still they stood the old man and the wife peering 
 after, listening to the blur of sound, the flick and 
 whisper of the rain covering it; the air blowing on 
 them, stirring the blue hall light, alive, disengaging 
 spring. Then, leaving the father muttering, she hur- 
 ried back and up the stairs and along the passage 
 swiftly and alone. 
 
 Corbett and his mother saw her ; with a whisper, 
 the man left the old woman. When he reached the 
 living-room it was empty, dim-lit. 
 
 "Demetra !" he cried, and looked about. She came 
 from the child's chamber beyond and stood watching 
 him, her hand raised in warning. "Be still," she 
 answered, "Tad's asleep." 
 
 "You've come to him and to me/' he said. "Dear, 
 what other way what other way !" 
 
306 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Yes," she whispered, "he sent me here, Corbett 
 If I'm awakened, it was he!" And then, because he 
 stood stilled and apart from her, she suddenly came 
 to him, her arms about his neck and kissed him. 
 "Always you were calling and I could not hear," 
 she whispered on, "I let you go alone !" 
 
 And as he had been alone, coming at his great call 
 down to the sea of life, so now they sat and listened 
 to the breathing child ; and, it seemed, to the other, 
 awed, in this spring night, at the ineffable achieve- 
 ment, Nature fecundating the immemorial cycle, 
 life starting green, for ever at return along the 
 highway. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 BY one of those curious chances which lead one 
 to credit, at times, the intervention of the un- 
 seen, they came upon the fugitives within the hour. 
 The driver had been told to follow the Lake Shore 
 Drive southward from the lower end of Lincoln 
 Park ; and the two men in the carriage had watched 
 the roughened made land of the lean park. The 
 place was lone ; to the right the young wet trees and 
 the twinkling lamps against the bulked^ far houses ; 
 to the left the dumped dirt heaps with the flash of 
 white breakers now and then, beyond. John cracked 
 a doubt. 
 
 "I was told they'd seek the shore and wait for us 
 that was her message/' Then his old eyes peered. 
 "Hist! Two figures beyond the turn, and one a 
 woman and they're comin'." 
 
 And from over the asphalt shore-work she came 
 to them, the light from the clouds on her face, 
 a black silk-netted scarf about her blacker hair, her 
 eyes resolute. "I was sure of you when the carriage 
 stopped," she said, "none other would come out 
 here." 
 
 "Ye're wet, girl," John put in eagerly, "and the 
 man whaur is he ?" 
 
 307 
 
308 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 Rand had opened the door, but she waited until 
 Karasac had come. The mill-man had no word be- 
 yond a mutter ; he swung in and by John's side, with 
 a glitter of eye from a distant lamp. "Beast- 
 brother/' murmured Rand, "you're giving us a deal 
 of discomfort with saving this neck of yours. Well, 
 now John Bride which way ?" 
 
 "Ye've money?" John asked. "Stephen saw to 
 that? Well, it's out of the city for ye both before 
 daybreak. Let's think o' it." 
 
 The girl watched Rand intently. "And you're go- 
 ing?" she said, "after all, she confessed and still 
 you took him on you ?" 
 
 "I did," he answered, "that's the last joke. I'm 
 off with him, and a rough night and a wet skin 
 ahead. Eh? it was worth the price!" 
 
 To his old grimace she had a nervous gesture. 
 "Well, now to find a way. We'll be followed. The 
 railroad stations will be watched. Karasac is 
 wounded they must have his description and you 
 you are a poor actor when it comes to disguising, 
 I'm afraid. They probably spotted you coming to 
 the flat I think that caused the first comment. We 
 did not slip from the house half an hour too soon 
 to-night." 
 
 They watched her flicking the water from her 
 sleeves, listening to her incisive voice. The carriage 
 went slowly southward along the new-made land, 
 the horses splashing the churned mud. 
 
 "West," Louise muttered in the dark, "if you'd 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 309 
 
 get a train at Winnetka, or somewhere up the north 
 shore any of the stations there. It seems the only 
 safe chance. Down-town I'd fear for you you, 
 with your wild talk, and Karasac, ignorant, helpless, 
 defiant." 
 
 "Beast-brother," murmured Rand, "she gives us 
 an evil reputation." 
 
 She stirred her hand touched his on the cushions 
 cold, wet, she did not withdraw it, as she went on : 
 "O, you must drop this now ! Be reasonable." Then 
 she went on to John with her eager importuning. 
 
 "Ye fool," old John answered, "mind what she 
 says! If ye were confronted down-town by officers 
 what wad ye say?" 
 
 "I would make faces. My brother, here, would 
 doubtless yelp of equality, fraternity anarchy, jus- 
 tice, brotherhood God knows the rest of it. He 
 has an irrefutable philosophy, however he would 
 wind up: 'All dis w'at?' " 
 
 She sat back in despair, and drew her hand away. 
 His voice, cool, unmoved, melodious he seemed en- 
 joying the matter greatly. 
 
 "Drive on," old John called softly "the river 
 take Rush Street and turn left to the docks. I have 
 a way, it seems a cracked scheme, but 'twill do." 
 
 "A lake boat?" she said, "it would not do for 
 them to be seen leaving Rand's carriage at the docks 
 the monogram in the side Terance known." 
 
 "That's not it. Old Nelse's nephew keeps small 
 boats near by launches and the like. Only last week 
 
310 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 he asked me go fish. I can dicker wi' the man he'll 
 not ask nor give about it." 
 
 She caught the old man's arm. "A launch? That 
 would put them up the lake shore for a midnight 
 train! It's a chance." 
 
 "A bit chance if the lad's by." 
 
 "Well, for it," muttered Rand, "believe me, I'd 
 rather not be hanged, and as for prison, I've tasted 
 it four times in my life the fare's not to my taste." 
 
 "O, man be done !" John Bride glowered. "You'd 
 have gab before the Almighty, and to spare, I've no 
 doubt. Be still we're turning on the wharves the 
 light from that big steamer's fair on ye." 
 
 The carriage had come to a narrow pebbled cleft 
 between tall warehouses and the black river. John 
 Bride swung open the door; he was out and along 
 the planked way where a single red light hung at 
 a staging. Across the stream the lights of the 
 lake steamer made the water a coiling, begilded 
 snake. In this interval, encompassed by the wet 
 dark, they sat stilled; the girl in some nameless 
 despair; the mill-hand sullen, and Rand ceaselessly 
 watching. 
 
 Old John came bobbing back from the shadows. 
 "It's fair easy. Not a soul's about to see us, and the 
 lad's got the boat swinging free, the. engine workin'. 
 He's just come in from up the north branch on some 
 shippin' business. Come away follow." 
 
 Rand took the girl's hand on the stairs to the 
 landing. As in a dream she let him seat her on 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 311 
 
 the cushioned seat forward; as in a dream she 
 felt the bobbing launch, the grate on the dock 
 piles; heard the murmur of voices aft, old John's 
 in some reproof, and Rand's melody, a sonorous 
 jest and quarrel. The boatman held a lantern 
 down, as Rand crouched by the tiny engine amid- 
 ships. "I can run it," he retorted, "I've handled 
 them." 
 
 "The girl?" John still insisted from above, 
 "Louise ye canna take her!" 
 
 "I'll not leave them," she answered, "until I see 
 them on a train away free of the city." 
 
 "It's grand," John muttered, "and I'll go home. 
 There'll be much to explain to gloss about and lie 
 over. I'll go see Stephen wi' the word of you." And 
 then his shout of warning about the breakwater and 
 the wind outside came faintly, for the eighteen- foot 
 power boat was turning in the snaky water, and had 
 fled, stealthy as a ferret, after one sobbing exhaust, 
 down the dirty stream. They saw the last light 
 flicker by the warehouse end the Polack crouched 
 in the stern, Rand forward of the engine, his hand 
 on the tiny wheel, and Louise in the peaked seat 
 by him. 
 
 "Pull in that dragging line," he ordered, and she 
 obeyed, and cleared her damp and heavy hair and 
 stared ahead. And on to the river's mouth the slim 
 launch flew, with but a spatter, now and then, of 
 sound, and when the first roller lifted and the breeze 
 blew free in their faces, the last red light behind 
 
312 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 and ahead the inky blackness, she found the man 
 by her was laughing. Laughing, and putting about 
 her shoulders a yellowed oilskin coat. 
 
 "Comrade," he broke forth, "it's an adventure 
 alone to watch you worth, indeed, a dozen mis- 
 chances. I can see, I think the marvel in your eyes. 
 . . . I told you once of their quality." 
 
 "It's rough," she said, "and dark ahead. Is that 
 the breakwater light?" 
 
 "I'd not know the thing if it was labeled," he re- 
 torted. "Eh? the road's ahead of us the long 
 trail and many a tough night by the way! And 
 what brought you, comrade tell me?" 
 
 "You know," she answered ; "look ahead a tim- 
 ber floating." 
 
 He spun the wheel and laughed his lightness. 
 "You're here, for what? To save what? A little 
 beast of the mills a man of the colleges and the 
 socialisms and the brotherhoods !" 
 
 "Surely," she muttered ; "yes, you know !" 
 
 "A week ago you loved him loved them all 
 these wonder workings of his dreams. But was it 
 for this to-night you put your neck in danger?" 
 
 "I've not feared what's there to fear?" 
 
 "There's a bright thing about you.," he said ; and 
 then added, in his abrupt authoritative way : "here, 
 hold the wheel, so. I'll look to the gasolene. No 
 off a bit keep that light on your left wide. She's 
 rocking mightily small wonder. Devil a load's she 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 313 
 
 ever carried like this anarchy in the stern, a wom- 
 an for pilot, and an engineman who does not know 
 the top of the thing from the bottom." 
 
 "You said you did !" she cried. 
 
 "What odds ? The man started her for me, and 
 I was tired of the palaver on the dock. I wanted 
 to get off the night smelled good and free. . . . 
 I wanted a swing in the dark to go off plunging if 
 I had to go. To tell the truth between you and me 
 I was afraid of the police. But here with 
 you here, hold your hand feel this air blowing 
 on your cheek, comrade free air ! Who'd be cooped 
 in a bottle of a jail or mill or house? Eh? feel 
 this !" And he seized the wheel again from her and 
 brought the boat quartering on, so that the third 
 wave leaping, struck the bow and spattered them 
 from head to foot. "And this !" he cried, "and this !" 
 And again he sent the tiny craft against the east 
 seas so that they showered her bow. 
 
 The girl did not move. He saw her pale face 
 staring calmly on, the water trickling from her hair. 
 "Are you mad?" she whispered. 
 
 "It's the mad who live buoyantly. Eh, come 
 forget you're you great God, you women you 
 crawl about in stays and under rules tied to some 
 duty or other that's always my impatience with 
 you ! And yet, to-night I saw one face fate with as 
 lordly a manner as I might have had." 
 
 "She dared confess ?" Louise went on ; "she told !" 
 
314 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Beautifully. The soul in her it leaped like a 
 fire I'd touched." 
 
 "To save you," the girl muttered, "she dared 
 where is she?" 
 
 "By his side. I, in fact, rather blessed them. The 
 thing was cut clear as a cameo the woman rising 
 there, unfearing hot with it." 
 
 "You drove her to it you maddened them all!" 
 
 "And excellently done. I assure you, it's some- 
 thing to make them stare at me confounded, if one 
 even mentions truth to them. I, indeed, am the arch 
 humorist of America. When the end comes you 
 ought to hear me say something worth while." 
 
 "The end?" 
 
 "Did you, really," he went on, with some solici- 
 tude, "expect to get out of here alive?" 
 
 She sat about to see him more clearly. "Alive? 
 Why, when we make a landing up the north shore 
 and you get safely off, I intend to take the first 
 suburban back " 
 
 He was watching the far line of tossing lights 
 marking Sheridan Drive and the thinning districts. 
 "You have a deal of faith," he answered dryly. 
 
 She was still while the throbbing engine tore the 
 seas it was not running so smoothly, and again 
 he gave her the wheel and turned back to it. 
 
 He spoke to Karasac, crouched in the stern 
 seat. The Pole snarled unintelligibly; he was 
 beaten with fear, shivering with cold they 
 could see his white face glaring in that curious light 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 315 
 
 which comes from the proximity of a city reflected 
 in the clouds. The rain had ceased, but the sky 
 hung dark, the lake swept heavily from the east. 
 At times the launch wallowed, hardly getting her 
 head up before the next wave smote her; already 
 there was water washing in the engine pit. 
 
 Rand came back and motioned off the starboard. 
 "More in," he said laconically, "keep the shore line 
 in sight. We've run a good bit and I think day's 
 not far off." 
 
 "Where shall you land?" she said; "have you a 
 thought of it?" 
 
 "Not the remotest. Keep on would you lose a 
 night like this? You a creature of the cities tell 
 me did you ever see a sunrise?" 
 "No." 
 
 "Then you've never lived. Come one day of life. 
 Comrade, it's hardly more than a week since I saw 
 you, and here you are risking your neck with me. 
 Eh? this is extraordinary! A night like this to 
 watch your eyes grow wide under the sunrise! It 
 repays one for growing older even for getting fat. 
 . . . I found it unpleasant just now to stoop 
 down to that engine." 
 
 "O, will you spoil it all?" she cried. "You've 
 given much and then you make it cheap with your 
 talk. You, who might make men silent before you 
 with something else than your brute wit who might 
 find a man's work a giving to the higher law to 
 love!" 
 
316 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 "Love" he grimaced "a powder that women 
 sprinkle on their shoulders, and of which men carry 
 away the imprints on their coats until they get out 
 of the room . . . then they brush it off." 
 
 "I did not mean that/' she retorted; "but to live 
 and serve." 
 
 "Your eyes," he put in, with his dry and rare 
 reserve; "it pleases you to have me speak of them." 
 
 Then she would not look at him. And presently 
 he went to Karasac, their voices coming to her 
 a muffled quarrel or chaffing. Her wrists had begun 
 aching with the strain of the wheel; she looked 
 back at them, Rand at some interminable harangue. 
 She braced her feet, cleared her eyes of the sting of 
 water breaking on the bow, and watched ahead. 
 And back they stood and quarreled, regardless of 
 the wash of the seas in the pit, the jerky, intermit- 
 tent engine. Presently the import of it came . . . 
 in this hour he had seen fit to lecture the anarchist 
 a man with a broken arm on the need of keep- 
 ing cleaner his finger-nails. 
 
 All untried and helpless she clung to the brass 
 wheel and made what shift she might of steering. 
 The seas were rising, the white ghosts leaped about 
 the bow and dissolved upon her, the water running 
 down inside the oilskin he had given her. And the 
 bleak, long shore-line rose clearer, and to east, under 
 the somber clouds, the light sifted dimly. And as 
 again the seas viciously showered her until she bent 
 her head blindly, she was conscious of his hand clos- 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 317 
 
 ing on her own upon the wheel. His grave voice 
 came : 
 
 "Comrade, youVe done well. I merely waited 
 to see if you'd cry out or shrink." He drew closer 
 the coat about her ; she wondered at her gratefulness 
 when she said quietly : "Thank you." 
 
 Into the north they plunged, while the east light- 
 ened the bit of day, the yellow cliff, streaked with 
 washes, blurred with shrub down to the very line of 
 breakers; while here and there a proper farmstead 
 rose far back, a cluster of village lights, a line of 
 poles all dank. Rand watched seriously; at length 
 he said: "Beyond that station ahead we'll take a 
 chance on getting in. Highland Park is miles be- 
 hind, but you can get the electric line back. Girl, 
 you're cold, and Karasac, the brute, is asleep. Well, 
 he'll need it before he's done with the road and me." 
 
 "And you!" she said, stirring to watch him. "If 
 one but knew?" She went on in a sort of despair: 
 "Your father an old man waiting!" 
 
 "Tell him that the last you saw of his son he was 
 at a country station still clamoring that his stomach 
 was hungry and his back wet that he had no other 
 wisdom except to try get food and fire, and some- 
 thing of a disaster he was making. But say that 
 he wore no man's collar." 
 
 She could not smile, her face was weary. In an 
 hour he would be gone ... he would leave no 
 word save the uncaring echo of his life. 
 
 And as the launch labored on with the gray 
 
3i8 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 clouds lightening, the east seas coming troubled and 
 unceasing, they were silent, for, wet, under a dirty; 
 dawn, you can get neither wit nor passion, but only 
 the animal-enduring patience of the trapped. Then, 
 again the engine fluttered. Rand gave the wheel to 
 her and went back to awaken Karasac. 
 
 The fellow moved then, bewildered, leaped up 
 and fell half over the gasolene tank, held by braces 
 on the gunwale. The can tore away and as Karasac 
 struggled back, a sheet of flame sprang from the pit, 
 and then, with the thunder of the explosion in her 
 ears, she crouched higher in the bow and steadied 
 the wheel. That was all the thing was done ; she 
 looked about to see the engine pit black, with mar- 
 gins of tiny fire here, there, starting, dying, a dingy 
 column of flecked smoke rising. The launch was 
 still, save for a gasp of water somewhere in her 
 frail body still, save for the next pounding sea. 
 Karasac stood upright, yelling on the decked after- 
 space. Rand's head rose by the boat's side ; he clung 
 to the torn gunwale, and then began working his way 
 forward, hand over hand. 
 
 Louise had not screamed merely stared, fasci- 
 nated by the burning oil washing on the water in 
 the pit, drawing her feet above it. Rand's blackened 
 face was near her; he looked up smiled. "Be still," 
 he said, "we'll wash in it's not far. Are you hurt?" 
 
 "No," she answered; "but you?" 
 
 He was trying to raise himself and peer along the 
 brass rail at the boat's interior. "A pipe smashed 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 319 
 
 through the metal/' he said, "she's taking in water 
 broadside on. Is the gear off?" 
 
 "I suppose " the wheel was idle in her hands; 
 there was a futile rattle of cord and chain some- 
 where. "But you come, try get in." 
 
 "She's filling she'll not stand more weight. I'm 
 very well here." 
 
 The blue haze drifted; the last fire wisps were 
 struck out by the smashing seas only aft a blue 
 tongue flickered, with Karasac's black and white 
 face staring at it. Broadside on, the launch drifted, 
 down to the beading along her sides. 
 
 The girl looked calmly off. There was the yellow- 
 washed bank of earth, the green fringing willows, 
 the line of boulders whitened by the waves. It was 
 not far. North and south the gray wastes of lake 
 ran, but in the east a pink rift widened. The air 
 was sweet, strong with life, the wind not rough 
 the storm had passed. The day came as a pink 
 flower might have opened. 
 
 "It isn't far," she said, and laid her hand upon 
 his; "can you swim? You mustn't worry about me." 
 
 His deep voice found its humor: "Did you im- 
 agine so? We're doing very well. In ten minutes 
 we'll be on bottom if she floats that long." 
 
 "I think," she said, watching him intently, "you're 
 hurt!" 
 
 "A little something struck me. Go on the bow 
 it's higher." 
 
 "Where?" she cried, and brushed back the hair 
 
320 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 from his blackened and burned face, round, heavy, 
 the eyebrows gone. The next wave over him flung 
 a bloody froth upon her she crowded nearer, star- 
 ing. "Rand," she cried, "tell me !" Then she started 
 up and ran back through the wreck. "Come, help 
 me get him in!" 
 
 But the other man, crouched on the stern of the 
 sinking boat, yelled insanely, shook his head. The 
 girl, erect in the middle of the pit, her wet hair 
 stringing, cursed him. "Damn you, then stay!" 
 she cried, and ran forward, kneeling to seize Rand's 
 arm, for he had sunk lower, his eyes closing. At 
 her cry he opened them, from his lips a bloody 
 trail floating away. The next sea buried him . . . 
 it seemed a day before the boat heaved up, with her 
 clinging to him. "You're bleeding fast," she mut- 
 tered; "Rand hold to me hold!" 
 
 "Bottom," he whispered ; "my feet, wait a mo- 
 ment." The boat struck with a jar and a dizzy heel- 
 ing in the waves. She clung to his coat lapels, and 
 tried to beat the water from his face, her black, 
 coarse hair tangled in his and about the brass rail 
 and floating away on the next racing wave. 
 
 "Keep off," he murmured; "she's grounded now 
 she'll smash you." 
 
 "Rand!" she cried; "hold hold. . . . O, a 
 little longer !" 
 
 The next wave buried them again; their faces 
 hardly rose. The launch was wrenched from 
 beneath them, rose, sank, was rolled, smashing 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 321 
 
 Rand from his feet. The mill-hand was washed 
 against them, his elbow struck Rand's cheek, he 
 clung fast, yelling; and the big man staggered on, 
 his feet among the boulders, fighting on, with both 
 the others clinging to him, stumbling on, carrying 
 them with the fury of the waves on their backs. He 
 fell in the shallows, and then was crawling on, with 
 the girl's hand trying to upraise him ; while Karasac 
 had left them, leaping on to the shingly beach. 
 
 But the other man stopped, lying tired, still, in 
 the racing water, with the girl pleading, lifting, at 
 his arm. "Come another yard just a step more." 
 
 "For what ?" His voice took its old music. "The 
 thing's done well enough. Here get this from my 
 pocket for the little beast-brother. You'll see him 
 well away?" He fumbled in his coat; her hand went 
 to clasp the object. "Beast-brother," he went on, 
 "comrade, you'll set him on the road. West . . . 
 and say to him that I was not unkind after all was 
 I?" 
 
 She cried her terror at his weakness, on his face 
 the gray of the sea. His tired eyes opened. 
 
 "Eh? Go leave me. Little comrade go back. 
 The other man he's right go serve them, some- 
 how." And as she would not leave him, fighting 
 to raise his head above the waves, he went on: 
 "You'd like to die here with me, eh ? Well, the pity 
 that it's denied you . . . you'll be lonely, com- 
 rade. Sacrifice is a gift for few." 
 
 And when she cried out of her mighty loneliness 
 
3 22 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 he again opened his eyes, his glance down over his 
 helpless body, ever the first satire at himself: "I 
 told you when the end came I'd say something 
 worth while. Eh? And now nothing except 
 that I always insisted it was a tragedy to grow fat!" 
 
 She knelt in the water, dragging at his heavy 
 head; she fought the lake from him, kissing the 
 burned face again and again in the froth of the 
 waves. Then she looked up to find the world above 
 blue, the clouds slipping to the west as a handker- 
 chief from a crystal sphere. Karasac sat at the foot 
 of the bank and about him the blackbirds sang in 
 the willows. 
 
 The girl looked down at the twist of blood from 
 Rand's side, then went on to the Pole, scrambling 
 up the muddy bank and calling clearly to him. 
 
 He followed her. They went across the level 
 green, the many-twinkling lake behind, and ahead 
 the land with houses white, detached, here and there, 
 with budding trees about. A line of telegraph poles 
 followed a cut in the earth, and when Louise reached 
 this she climbed the fence, and he came after. When 
 they reached the cindered track between the rails, 
 the girl looked up. A sparrow balanced itself on the 
 telegraph wire among a string of water drops shin- 
 ing against the sky, and ahead of them the road 
 ran, vanishing to immensity, sky, earth, poles, rails, 
 converging to a point. The morning was of 
 marvelous stillness. 
 
 The girl looked at the man slinking by her, his 
 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 323 
 
 hat in his hand, his wet clothes dripping, his thin 
 face awed, obetiient, silent. She reached the packet 
 to him. 
 
 "Rand meant it for you," she said, "it's a thou- 
 sand dollars, I believe. Rand wants you to get away 
 West. Rand wants you to be free, to be kind, to be 
 happy. Rand wants everything for you every- 
 thing!" 
 
 He took the wet parcel, staring at it, and she 
 turned and climbed the muddy bank to the fields. 
 
 She could see Rand's body, moved now and then 
 by the lessening waves. With serious practicality 
 she turned to watch the other man. He had gone 
 along the road westward on his way, a tiny figure 
 now, a single black point on the green earth, the 
 center of an immensity, the dome of the sky hung 
 like a magician's crystal. After a moment she went 
 back to her dead. 
 
 At two o'clock, dressed in a fresh white lawn 
 for the spring sun was warm she came to En- 
 nisley's study by the side door and sat down at her 
 type-writer. They heard it clicking and came hur- 
 riedly from the front of the house where they had 
 waited since dawn. They crowded about her, the 
 father with his shaking lip, old John with his coo, 
 the pioneer mother, and Corbett, pale and still, with 
 his wife's arm about his neck as he sat on a chair 
 arm. They cried out at her composure, her neat 
 gowning fitted to the day's work. 
 
324 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 
 
 She told them as much as was needed, and what 
 now they should do. 
 
 "But, Louise," the wife whispered at the last, "he 
 sent back no word nothing nothing?" 
 
 "He meant for us to keep on working the best we 
 could/' the girl answered. 
 
 The next day, in fact, she was transcribing the 
 professor's new lecture. 
 
 Still it was against nature that she should stay 
 within the month she resigned, quietly, despite their 
 protests, to take up some sort of settlement work in 
 Pittsburg. She wrote, now and then, in friendly 
 fashion, and then, within the year, they lost her; 
 when Corbett wrote happily that a son was born to 
 Demetra, she did not answer. After a few years 
 they recalled her, now and then, as people will 
 a quiet girl, faithful, pale, unpretty save for her 
 marvelous eyes of blue they supposed she might 
 be lonely except for her work. 
 
 THE ENE> 
 
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