# Tom Beauling/Chapter 3

"YOU don't know?"
"I was very proud," she said. "He never told me his name; I never asked him."
"I don't understand that kind of pride," said Judge Tyler.
"You would if you were a woman," said she.
"Perhaps," a little dryly. "Perhaps I would. But as it is, I do not. You tell me that you do not know this man. Does he—did he ever know that you had a son?"
"How should he know? I went out of his life, he out of mine."
"He must be found," said Judge Tyler. "This is his affair, not mine."
"Yes," she said plaintively, "I suppose so, but—"
"Have you no means of tracing him?"
​"I did—I did try to find him," she said. "Here." She took a small leather case containing a photograph out of her pocket and handed it to the judge. He looked at the photograph attentively.
"This is you and he?" he said.
"Yes."
The lady in the photograph was certainly Harmony. You could tell that by the eyes and the mouth. It was too big, as mouths go, but so very sweet and mobile as to make you forget that it was not the most perfectly sized and beautiful mouth extant. The eyes were too far apart, of an untroubled, starry kind; they sometimes made you look away from the mouth. But the present Harmony was only a pale, tired, thin copy of the Harmony in the photograph. It made Judge Tyler start to see her again as he remembered her.
"I've changed, haven't I?" said she.
Women say so many things that only women can answer.
"I might not know this man if I met him on the street," said Judge Tyler. "It ​is already faded, and was taken evidently at an age when the marks of a man's character, whatever it may be, are still held in abeyance by the youth of his face. Here are no lines of race, no marks of profession. Five years may have changed his face completely. He may have worked, he may have idled. He may wear a mustache, he may be dead. Have you no idea what his name was?"
"No."
"But he must have had a name that you called him by?"
"Would that matter?" she asked. "I—I gave him that name."
"Then it doesn't matter what it was," said Judge Tyler, hastily. He glanced at the photograph again. "He looks like a gentleman."
"He was," said the lady, in a tone implying that she expected contradiction.
Judge Tyler started to return the photograph, but his judicial habit of cross-questioning even inanimate objects caused him first to turn it over and examine the back. The cardboard was yel​low with age, and stained. In the center was an object in gilt purporting to be the ferocious head of a winged gryphon, the trade-mark of a once popular firm of photographers. Across the upper righthand corner a name and date were written, with violet ink, in a fine, slanting, feminine hand.
"There is a name written here," said Judge Tyler. "Did you know that?"
"Yes. I wrote it there—it's my son's name."
"Tomas Beauling," read the judge. "May I ask why you call him that?"
"I call him that," she said, "because it belonged to a brave and loyal gentleman who asked me to marry him, and wanted to take my sin on his own head. He is dead now, and I want my son to have his name. I know he wouldn't mind."
"I have never heard the name," said the judge. "I presume he was an actor?"
"I think he was," said the lady; "but the world wasn't good to him. You wouldn't have heard of him, though, ​even if he had been celebrated, for Beauling was only his real name—he only told it to me."
"I see," said the judge.
"And I want my son," she went on, "to grow up as good and loyal a gentleman as Tomas Beauling was; and I have come to you, Judge Tyler, for help. Won't you help me about it? I beg your pardon." She began to cough again.
"You place me in a very difficult position," said Judge Tyler; "pardon me, if I am blunt. If you were to die, the position would not be altered. I am willing to do anything you ask—in reason; but you cannot expect me to provide for your son's future, or to act as his guardian. I have no gift with children. The habits of my life are opposed to any change, and if I undertake to help you in this matter it can only be with advice. You did right in coming to me, perhaps. But if, as you say, you are seriously ill, you must go to your sister Dorothy. She is the proper person to appeal to. And I feel sure that if anything were to happen ​to you, she would feel it her duty to take your son into her own family and do by him as by her own."
"You advise me," she said excitedly, "to leave my son with a woman who would bring him up as I was brought up—in a cold, dark house, with a cold, dark God in the parlor and a red-hot hell in the basement! That's what you would advise me to do!"
"Don't talk so wildly, Harmony," said Judge Tyler.
"Do you know what I hoped you would say," she said, without heeding—"what I expected you to say? I expected you to say, 'Harmony, I will look after your son to the best of my ability; I will be good to him, and see that he is brought up in the sunlight.' I expected you to take all the cares and worries of dying off my hands. And instead of that you say, 'Harmony, before you die, it would be perhaps advisable if you buried your son alive!'"
With that she burst into tears.
"Harmony," said the judge, "I don't ​know why you should expect these things of me."
"Because," she sobbed, "I thought you had a heart as big as a church. I thought you would love poor little Tom the moment you saw him, and want him for your son. 'Who can help loving Tom?' I said. But instead of that, you have no heart at all. It has been dried out of you." She got up. "Get me my boy," she said. "I will take him away; we won't trouble you any more. Even I can't breathe in your uncharitable house. Get me my child before he smothers. I said, when I knew I had to die, 'I will just take Tom to Judge Tyler.' And that comforted me so! I said, 'I will just take Tom to Judge Tyler.' Oh, I thought I knew you! I thought your heart was as warm as an oven, but it's as cold as my father's God."
She made three quick steps for the door, staggered, and, before Judge Tyler could get to her, fell full length.
Blood came out of her mouth, and she died.