As her day dreams merged into vague pictures flitting through her drowsy brain, she heard the plaintive, trembling voice of Morty Sands’s mandolin, coming nearer and nearer, and his lower whistle taking the tune while the E string crooned an obligato; he passed the house, went down the street to the Mortons’ and came back and went home again, still trilling his heart out like a bird. As the chirping faded into the night sounds, the girl smiled compassionately and slept.
As she slept young Thomas Van Dorn walked alone under the elm trees that plumed over the sidewalks in those environs with hands clasped behind him, occasionally gazing into the twinkling stars of the summer night, considering rather seriously many things. He had come out to think over his speech to the jury the next day in a murder case pending in the court. But the murderer kept sinking from his consciousness; the speech would not shape itself to please him, and the young lawyer was forever meeting rather squarely and abruptly the vision of Laura Nesbit, who seemed to be asking him disagreeable and conclusive questions, which he did not like to answer. Was she worth it–the sacrifice that marriage would require of him? Was he in love with her? What is love anyway? Wherein did it differ from certain other pleasurable emotions, to which he was not a stranger? And why was the consciousness of her growing larger and larger in his life? He tried to whistle reflectively, but he had no music in his soul and whistling gave him no solace.
It was midnight when he found himself walking past the Nesbit home, looking toward it and wondering which of the open windows was nearest to her. He flinched with shame when he recollected himself before other houses gazing at other windows, and he unpursed his lips that were wont to whistle a signal, and went down the street shuddering. Then after an impulse in which some good angel of remorse shook his teeth to rouse his soul, he lifted his face to the sky and would have cried in his heart for help, but instead he smiled and went on, trying to think of his speech and resolving mightily to put Laura Nesbit out of his heart finally for the night. He held himself to his high resolve for four or five minutes. It is only fair to say that the white clad figure of the Doctor coming clicking up the street with his cane keeping time to a merry air that he hummed as he walked distracted the young man. His first thought was to turn off and avoid the Doctor who came along swinging his medicine case gayly. But there rushed over Van Dorn a feeling that he would like to meet the Doctor. He recognized that he would like to see any one who was near to Her. It was a pleasing sensation. He coddled it. He was proud of it; he knew what it meant. So he stopped the preoccupied figure in white, and cried, “Doctor–we’re late to-night!”
“Well, Tom, I’ve got a right to be! Two more people in Harvey to-night than were here at five o’clock this afternoon because I am a trifle behindhand. Girl at your partner’s–Joe Calvin’s, and a boy down at Dick Bowman’s!” He paused and smiled and added musingly, “And they’re as tickled down at Dick’s as though he was heir to a kingdom!”
“And Joe–I suppose–not quite–”
“Oh, Joe, he’s still in the barn, I dropped in to tell him it was a girl. But he won’t venture into the house to see the mother before noon to-morrow! Then he’ll go when she’s asleep!”
“Dick really isn’t more than two jumps ahead of the wolf, is he, Doctor?”
“Well,” grinned the elder man, “maybe a jump-and-a-half or two jumps.”
The young man exclaimed, “Say, Doctor! I think it would be a pious act to make the fellows put up fifty dollars for Dick to-night. I’ll just go down and raid a few poker games and make them do it.”
The Doctor stopped him: “Better let me give it to Dick if you get it, Tom!” Then he added, “Why don’t you keep Christian hours, boy? You can’t try that Yengst case to-morrow and be up all night!”
“That’s just what I’m out here for, Doctor–to get my head in shape for the closing speech.”
“Well,” sniffed the Doctor, “I wish you no bad luck, but I hope you lose. Yengst is guilty, and you’ve no business–”
“Doctor,” cut in Van Dorn, “there’s not a penny in the Yengst case for me! He was a poor devil in trouble and he came to my office for help! Do you consider the morals of your sick folks–whether they have lived virtuous and upright lives when they come to you stricken and in pain? They’re just sick folks to you in your office, and they’re just poor devils in trouble for me.”
The Doctor cocked his head on one side, sparrow-wise, looked for a moment at the young man and piped, “You’re a brassy pup, aren’t you!”
A second later the Doctor was trudging up the street, homeward, humming his bee-like song. Van Dorn watched him until his white clothes faded into the shades of the night, then he turned and walked slowly townward, with his hands behind him and his eyes on the ground. He forgot the Yengst case, and everything else in the universe except a girl’s gray eyes, her radiant face, and the glory of her aspiring soul. It was calling with all its power to Tom Van Dorn to rise and shine and take up the journey to the stars. And when one hears that call, whether it come from man or maid, from friend or brother, or sweetheart or child, or from the challenge within him of the holy spirit, when he heeds its call, no matter where he is while he hears, he walks with God!
So it came to pass the next day that Thomas Van Dorn went before the jury and pleaded for the murderer in the Yengst case with the tongue of men and of angels. For he knew that Dr. Nesbit was loitering in the clerk’s office, adjoining the courtroom to listen to the plea. Every faculty of his mind and every capacity of his body was awake, and they said around the court house that it was “the speech of Tom’s life!” The Doctor on the front steps of the courthouse met the young man in the daze that follows an oratorical flight, munching a sandwich to relieve his brain, while the multitude made way for him as he went to his office.
“Well, Tom–” piped the Doctor as he grasped the sweaty, cold hands of the young orator, “if Yengst had been innocent do you suppose you could have done as well?”
Van Dora, gave his sandwich to a passing dog, and took the Doctor’s arm as they walked to their common stairway. Before they had walked a dozen steps the Doctor had unfolded a situation in local politics that needed attention, and Van Dorn could not lead the elder man back to further praises of his speech. Yet the young lawyer knew that he had moved the Doctor deeply.
That night in his office Tom Van Dorn and Henry Fenn sat with their feet in the window sill, looking through the open window into the moon. In their discourse they used that elaborate, impersonal anonymity that youth engages to carry the baggage of its intimate confidences.
“I’ve got to have a pretty woman, Henry,” quoth the lawyer to his friend, while the moon blushed behind a cloud. “She must have beauty above everything, and after that good manners, and after that good blood.”
The moon came out and smiled at Henry. “Tom, let me tell you something, I don’t care! I used to think I’d be pickey and choosey. But I know my own heart. I don’t care! I’m the kind of fellow, I guess, who just gets it bad and comes down all broken out with it.” He turned his glowing smile into Tom Van Dorn’s face, and finding no quick response smiled whimsically back at the moon.
“Some fellows are that way, Henry,” assented Van Dorn, “but not I! I couldn’t love a servant girl no matter how pretty she was–not for keeps, and I couldn’t love an ugly princess, and I’d leave a bluestocking and elope with a chorus girl if I found the bluestocking crocked or faded in the wash! Yet a beautiful woman, who remained a woman and didn’t become a moral guide–” he stared brazenly at the moon and in the cloud that whisked by he saw a score of fancies of other women whose faces had shone there, and had passed. He went on: “Oh, she could hold me–she could hold me–I think!”
The street noises below filled the pause. Henry rose, looked eagerly into the sky and wistfully at the moon as he spoke, “Hold me? Hold me?” he cried. “Why, Tom, though I’d fall into hell myself a thousand times–she couldn’t lose me! I’d still–still,” he faltered, “I’d still–” He did not finish, but sat down and putting his hand on the arm of his friend’s chair, he bent