Читать книгу Magnificent Obsession - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 11

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Bobby Merrick had grown up about as independent of the normal restraints imposed upon children as could have been possible in civilized society.

When he was a little lad, his father, Clif Merrick, had been too much occupied with business—what time he was not yacht racing, deer hunting, or on other journeys not quite so clearly explained—to pay any attention to the sensitive child beyond an occasional pat on the head as he passed him on the stairs in tow of a governess; or a brief and clumsy tussle in imitation of paternal playfulness. The big man was always half drunk when he made these rough overtures of comradeship. The boy dreaded seeing his father approach, of a late afternoon, with a flushed face, suggesting a good romp together.

On such occasions, if she was present, Bobby's neurotic mother usually intervened.

"You're much too rough with him, Clif," she would expostulate. "He's only a little boy. You hurt him! Stop it, I tell you!"

"Nonsense!" his father would reply, glancing toward the governess for approval, "you don't know anything about boys. Does she, Bobby?"

In all truth, she didn't; but the lad would be distressed over the episode, hardly knowing what answer was expected of him.

Once—how vividly he remembered this!—his mother, upon being sarcastically scorned in his presence for the way she was "bringing up a soft little mollycoddle, with his hands full of dolls and dishes" (true enough), had shocked him by screaming, in a shrill falsetto, "Leave him alone; damn you! I won't have you bullying him any more when you're drunk! You touch him again and I'll call the police!"

The police! For his father! Bobby remembered that it had made him ill—nauseated. The governess had had to carry him upstairs, where he was awfully sick. He even remembered what it was he had eaten—currant pudding. He had never cared much for currants thereafter.

Clif Merrick so steadily ragged the child, after that, about his girlish toys and trinkets, that Bobby himself revolted against the soft programme the women had made for him and gratefully approved when his father suggested boxing lessons. Strangely enough, he found himself happy with the new sport. Eager to test the value of the instruction he was receiving, he occasionally slipped away from the big house about time for school to be out in the afternoon, attired in an immaculate black velvet suit with white lace cuffs, and waited at the corner for somebody to yell "Sissy!" When he returned home he would be very dirty and greatly in need of repair, but grinning from ear to ear.

When he was twelve, Bobby's father had died suddenly of pneumonia brought on by exposure while duck hunting in nasty weather. Young as he was, the boy realized that his mother's bereavement was accepted by her with a calm fortitude out of all proportion to her weakness for indulging in self-pity.

One of her remarks, upon their return from the cemetery that bleak afternoon, was chiselled indelibly upon her son's mind. None of the epitaphs he had regarded with childish curiosity, as they drove slowly along the narrow, winding roads, was carved deeper. Sometimes, when he thought of it, he winced; sometimes he grinned.

"Well," she said, handing Colleen her furs, "that's that!"

"Yes, ma'am," dutifully replied Colleen, accustomed to occasional outbursts of caste-forgetful confidences vouchsafed by her mistress, "it certainly is!"

And then, apparently dissatisfied with her rejoinder, which had taken an almost too casual view of the matter for one who entertained so wholesome a respect for death, Colleen added, sepulchrally, "It must have been very hard, ma'am, to leave him out there."

Upon which followed the memorable elegy spoken by his mother.

"Well; I'll know now where he is!"

Sometimes, when, as a collegian, Bobby was at that exact state of intoxication where the tragic in a man's experience becomes distorted into broad, screaming farce, and even sacred memories make wry faces and put out their tongues in scorn of everything decent, he would recall his mother's elegiac comment, laugh uproariously, and pound his knee. "What a corking epitaph!" he had shouted once, and had instantly cursed himself for a drunken fool.