"I don't know whether or not you heard of Mrs. Brooke's death three months ago," the letter ran, "but this is to say that Mr. Beverly dropped down with a paralytic stroke last week; and now since he's dead and buried, the place is to be sold for debt and the children sent off to school to a friend of Miss Emily's where they can go cheap. Miss Emily has a good place now in the Tappahannock Bank, but she's going North before Christmas to some big boarding school where they teach riding. There are a lot of things to be settled about the sale, and I thought that, being convenient, you might take the trouble to run down for a day and help us with your advice,which is of the best always."Hoping that you are in good health, I am at present,Baxter."
"I don't know whether or not you heard of Mrs. Brooke's death three months ago," the letter ran, "but this is to say that Mr. Beverly dropped down with a paralytic stroke last week; and now since he's dead and buried, the place is to be sold for debt and the children sent off to school to a friend of Miss Emily's where they can go cheap. Miss Emily has a good place now in the Tappahannock Bank, but she's going North before Christmas to some big boarding school where they teach riding. There are a lot of things to be settled about the sale, and I thought that, being convenient, you might take the trouble to run down for a day and help us with your advice,which is of the best always.
"Hoping that you are in good health, I am at present,
Baxter."
As he folded the letter a flush overspread his face. "I'll go," he said, with a new energy in his voice, "I'll go to-morrow."
Then turning in response to a knock, he opened the door and received the mustard plaster which Lydia had made.
HE had sent a telegram to Banks, and as the train pulled into the station, he saw the familiar sandy head and freckled face awaiting him upon the platform.
"By George, this is a bully sight, Smith," was the first shout that reached his ears.
"You're not a bit more pleased than I am," he returned laughing with pleasure, as he glanced from the station, crowded with noisy Negroes, up the dusty street into which they were about to turn. "It's like coming home again, and upon my word, I wish I were never to leave here. But how are you, Banks? So you are married to Milly and going to live contented forever afterward."
"Yes, I'm married," replied Banks, without enthusiasm, "and there's a baby about which Milly is clean crazy. Milly has got so fat," he added, "that you'd never believe I could have spanned her waist with my hands three years ago."
"Indeed? And is she as captivating as ever?"
"Well, I reckon she must be," said Banks, "but it doesn't seem so mysterious, somehow, as it used to." His silly, affectionate smile broke out as he looked at his companion. "To tell the truth,"he confessed, "I've been missing you mighty hard, Smith, marriage or no marriage. It ain't anything against Milly, God knows, that she can't take your place, and it ain't anything against the baby. What I want is somebody I can sit down and look up to, and I don't seem to be exactly able to look up to Milly or to the baby."
"The trouble with you, my dear Banks, is that you are an incorrigible idealist and always will be. You were born to be a poet and I don't see to save my life how you escaped."
"I didn't. I used to write a poem every Sunday of my life when I first went into tobacco. But after that Milly came and I got used to spending all my Sundays with her."
"Well, now that you have her in the week, you might begin all over again."
They were walking rapidly up the long hill, and as Ordway passed, he nodded right and left to the familiar faces that looked out from the shop doors. They were all friendly, they were all smiling, they were all ready to welcome him back among them.
"The queer part is," observed Banks, with that stubborn vein of philosophy which accorded so oddly with his frivolous features, "that the thing you get doesn't ever seem to be the same as the thing you wanted. This Milly is kind to me and the other wasn't, but, somehow, that hasn't made me stop regretting the other one that I didn't marry—the Milly that banged and snapped at me about my clothes and things all day long. I don't know whatit means, Smith, I've studied about it, but I can't understand."
"The meaning of it is, Banks, that you wanted not the woman, but the dream."
"Well, I didn't get it," rejoined Banks, gloomily.
"Yet Milly's a good wife and you're happy, aren't you?"
"I should be," replied Banks, "if I could forget how darn fascinating that other Milly was. Oh, yes, she's a good wife and a doting mother, and I'm happy enough, but it's a soft, squashy kind of happiness, not like the way I used to feel when I'd walk home with you after the preaching in the old field."
While he spoke they had reached Baxter's warehouse, and as Ordway was recognized, there was a quiver of excitement in the little crowd about the doorway. A moment later it had surrounded him with a shout of welcome. A dozen friendly hands were outstretched, a dozen breathless lips were calling his name. As the noise passed through the neighbouring windows, the throng was increased by a number of small storekeepers and a few straggling operatives from the cotton mills, until at last he stopped, half laughing, half crying, in their midst. Ten minutes afterward, when Baxter wedged his big person through the archway, he saw Ordway standing bareheaded in the street, his face suffused with a glow which seemed to give back to him a fleeting beam of the youth that he had lost.
"Well, I reckon it's my turn now. You canjust step inside the office, Smith," remarked Baxter, while he grasped Ordway's arm and pulled him back into the warehouse. As they entered the little room, Daniel saw again the battered chair, the pile of Smith's Almanacs, and the paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, upon the desk.
"I'm glad to see you—we're all glad to see you," said Baxter, shaking his hand for the third time with a grasp which made Ordway feel that he was in the clutch of a down cushion. "It isn't the way of Tappahannock to forget a friend, and she ain't forgotten you."
"It's like her," returned Ordway, and he added with a sigh, "I only wish I were coming back for good, Baxter."
"There now!" exclaimed Baxter, chuckling, "you don't, do you? Well, all I can say, my boy, is that you've got a powerful soft spot that you left here, and your old job in the warehouse is still waiting for you when you care to take it. I tell you what, Smith, you've surely spoiled me for any other bookkeeper, and I ain't so certain, when it comes to that, that you haven't spoiled me for myself."
He was larger, softer, more slovenly than ever, but he was so undeniably the perfect and inimitable Baxter, that Ordway felt his heart go out to him in a rush of sentiment. "Oh, Baxter, how is it possible that I've lived without you?" he asked.
"I don't know, Smith, but it's a plain fact that after my wife—and that's nature—there ain't anybody goin' that I set so much store by. Why, whenI was in Botetourt last spring, I went so far as to put my right foot on your bottom step, but, somehow, the left never picked up the courage to follow it."
"Do you dare to tell me that you've been to Botetourt?" demanded Ordway with indignation.
"Well, I could have stood the house you live it, though it kind of took my breath away," replied Baxter, with an embarrassed and guilty air, "but when it came to facing that fellow at the door, then my courage gave out and I bolted. I studied him a long while, thinking I might get my eyes used to the sight of him, but it did no good. I declar', Smith, I could no more have put a word to him than I could to the undertaker at my own funeral. Bless my soul, suh, poor Mr. Beverly, when he was alive, didn't hold a tallow candle to that man."
"You might have laid in wait for me in the street, then, that would have been only fair."
"But how did I know, Smith, that you wan't livin' up to the man at your door?"
"It wouldn't have taken you long to find out that I wasn't. So poor Mr. Beverly is dead and buried, then, is he?"
Baxter's face adopted instantly a funereal gloom, and his voice, when he spoke, held a quaver of regret.
"There wasn't a finer gentleman on earth than Mr. Beverly," he said, "and he would have given me his last blessed cent if he'd ever had one to give. I've lost a friend, Smith, there's no doubt of that, I've lost a friend. And poor Mrs. Brooke, too,"he added sadly. "Many and many is the time I've heard Mr. Beverly grieven' over the way she worked. 'If things had only come out as I planned them, Baxter,' he'd say to me, 'my wife should never have raised her finger except to lift food to her lips.'"
"And yet I've seen him send her downstairs a dozen times a day to make him a lemonade," observed Ordway cynically.
"That wasn't his fault, suh, he was born like that—it was just his way. He was always obliged to have what he wanted."
"Well, I can forgive him for killing his wife, but I can't pardon him for the way he treated his sister. That girl used to work like a farm hand when I was out there."
"She was mighty fond of him all the same, was Miss Emily."
"Everybody was, that's what I'm quarreling about. He didn't deserve it."
"But he meant well in his heart, Smith, and it's by that that I'm judgin' him. It wasn't his fault, was it, if things never went just the way he had planned them out? I don't deny, of course, that he was sort of flighty at times, as when he made a will the week before he died and left five hundred dollars to the Tappahannock Orphan Asylum."
"To the Orphan Asylum? Why, his own children are orphans, and he didn't have five hundred dollars to his name!"
"Of course, he didn't, that's just the point,"said Baxter with a placid tolerance which seemed largely the result of physical bulk, "and so they have had to sell most of the furniture to pay the bequest. You see, just the night before his stroke, he got himself considerably worked up over those orphans. So he just couldn't help hopin' he would have five hundred dollars to leave 'em when he came to die, an' in case he did have it he thought he might as well be prepared. Then he sat right down and wrote the bequest out, and the next day there came his stroke and carried him off."
"Oh, you're a first-rate advocate, Baxter, but that doesn't alter my opinion of Mr. Beverly. What about his own orphans now? How are they going to be provided for?"
"It seems Miss Emily is to board 'em out at some school she knows of, and I've settled it with her that she's to borrow enough from me to tide over any extra expenses until spring."
"Then we are to wind up the affairs of Cedar Hill, are we? I suppose it's best for everybody, but it makes me sad enough to think of it."
"And me, too, Smith," said Baxter, sentimentally. "I can see Mr. Beverly to the life now playin' with his dominoes on the front porch. But there's mighty little to wind up, when it comes to that. It's mortgaged pretty near to the last shingle, and when the bequest to the orphans is paid out of what's over, there'll be precious few dollars that Miss Emily can call her own. The reason I sent for you, Smith," he added in a solemn voice, "was that I thought youmight be some comfort to that poor girl out there in her affliction. If you feel inclined, I hoped you'd walk out to Cedar Hill and read her a chapter or so in the Bible. I remembered how consolin' you used to be to people in trouble."
With a prodigious effort Ordway swallowed his irreverent mirth, while Baxter's pious tones sounded in his ears. "Of course I shall go out to Cedar Hill," he returned, "but I was wondering, Baxter," he broke off for a minute and then went on again with an embarrassed manner, "I was wondering if there was any way I could help those children without being found out? It would make me particularly happy to feel that I might share in giving them an education. Do you think you could smuggle the money for their school bills into their Christmas stockings?"
Baxter thought over it a moment. "I might manage it," he replied, "seein' that the bills are mostly to come through my hands, and I'm to settle all that I can out of what's left of the estate."
As he paused Daniel looked hastily away from him, fearful lest Baxter might be perplexed by the joy that shone in his face. To be connected, even so remotely, with Emily in the care of Beverly's children, was a happiness for which, a moment ago, he had not dared to hope.
"Let me deposit the amount with you twice a year," he said, "that will be both the easiest and the safest way."
"Maybe you're right. And now it's settled, ain't it, that you're to come to my house to stay?"
"I must go back on the night train, I'm sorry to say, but if you'll let me I'll drop in to supper. I remember your wife's biscuits of old," he added, smiling.
"You don't mean it! Well, it'll tickle her to death, I reckon. It ain't likely, by the way, that you'll find much to eat out at Cedar Hill, so you'd better remember to have a snack before you start."
"Oh, I can fast until supper," returned Daniel, rising.
"Well, don't forget to give my respects to Miss Emily, and tell her I say not to worry, but to let the Lord take a turn. You'll find things pretty topsy-turvy out there, Smith," he added, "but if you don't happen to have your Bible handy, I'll lend you one and welcome. There's the big one with gilt clasps the boys gave me last Christmas right on top of my desk."
"Oh, they're sure to have one around," replied Ordway gravely, as he shook hands again before leaving the office.
From the top of the hill by the brick church, he caught a glimpse of the locust trees in Mrs. Twine's little yard, and turning in response to a remembered force of habit, he followed the board sidewalk to the whitewashed gate, which hung slightly open. In the street a small boy was busily flinging pebbles at the driver of a coal wagon, and calling the child to him, Ordway inquired if Mrs. Twine still lived in that house.
"Thar ain't no Mrs. Twine," replied the boy,"she's Mrs. Buzzy. She married my pa, that's why I'm here," he explained with a wink, as the door behind him flew open, and the lady in question rushed out to welcome her former lodger. "I hear her now—she's a-comin'. My, an' she's a tartar, she is!"
"It's the best sight I've laid eyes on sense I saw po', dear Bill on his deathbed," exclaimed the tartar, with delight. "Come right in, suh, come right in an' set down an' let me git a look at you. Thar ain't much cheer in the house now sence I've lost Bill an' his sprightly ways, but the welcome's warm if the house ain't."
She brought him ceremoniously into her closed parlour, and then at his request led him out of the stagnant air back into her comfortable, though untidy, kitchen. "I jest had my hand in the dough, suh, when I heard yo' voice," she observed apologetically, as she wiped off the bottom of a chair with her blue gingham apron. "I knew you'd be set back to find out I didn't stay long a widder."
"I hadn't even heard of Bill's death," he returned, "so it was something of a surprise to discover that you were no longer Mrs. Twine. Was it very sudden?"
"Yes, suh, 'twas tremens—delicious tremens—an' they took him off so quick we didn't even have the crape in the house to tie on the front do' knob. You could a heard him holler all the way down to the cotton mills. He al'ays had powerful fine lungs, had Bill, an' if he'd a-waited for his lungs to take him, he'd be settin' thar right now, as peart as life."
Her eyes filled with tears, but wiping them hastily away with her apron, she took up a pan of potatoes and began paring them with a handleless knife.
"After your former marriages," he remarked doubtful as to whether he should offer sympathy or congratulations, "I should have thought you would have rested free for a time at least."
"It warn't my way, Mr. Smith," she responded, with a mournful shake of her head. "To be sure I had a few peaceful months arter Bill was gone, but the queer thing is how powerful soon peace can begin to pall on yo' taste. Why, I hadn't been in mo'nin' for Bill goin' on to four months, when Silas Trimmer came along an' axed me, an' I said 'yes' as quick as that, jest out a the habit of it. I took off my mo'nin' an' kep' comp'ny with him for quite a while, but we had a quarrel over Bill's tombstone, suh, for, bein' a close-fisted man, he warn't willin' that I should put up as big a monument as I'd a mind to. Well, I broke off with him on that account, for when it comes to choosin' between respect to the dead an' marriage to the livin' Silas Trimmer, I told him 'I reckon it won't take long for you to find out which way my morals air set.' He got mad as a hornet and went off, and I put on mo'nin' agin an' wo' it steddy twil the year was up."
"And at the end of that time, I presume, you were wearied of widowhood and married Buzzy?"
"It's a queer thing, suh," she observed, as she picked up a fresh potato and inspected it as attentively as if it had been a new proposal, "it's a queerthing we ain't never so miserable in this world as when we ain't got the frazzle of an excuse to be so. Now, arter Bill went from me, thar was sech a quiet about that it began to git on my nerves, an' at last it got so that I couldn't sleep at nights because I was no longer obleeged to keep one ear open to hear if he was comin' upstairs drunk or sober. Bless yo' heart, thar's not a woman on earth that don't need some sort of distraction, an Bill was a long sight better at distractin' you than any circus I've ever seen. Why, I even stopped goin' to 'em as long as he was livin', for it was a question every minute as to whether he was goin' to chuck you under the chin or lam you on the head, an' thar was a mortal lot a sprightliness about it. I reckon I must have got sort a sp'iled by the excitement, for when 't was took away, I jest didn't seem to be able to settle down. But thar are mighty few men with the little ways that Bill had," she reflected sadly.
"Yet your present husband is kind to you, is he not?"
"Oh, he's kind enough, suh," she replied, with unutterable contempt, "but thar ain't nothin' in marriage that palls so soon as kindness. It's unexpectedness that keeps you from goin' plum crazy with the sameness of it, an' thar ain't a bit of unexpectedness about Jake. He does everything so regular that thar're times when I'd like to bust him open jest to see how he is wound up inside. Naw, suh, it ain't the blows that wears a woman out, it's the mortal sameness."
Clearly there was no comfort to be afforded her, and after a few words of practical advice on the subject of the children's education, he shook hands with her and started again in the direction of Cedar Hill.
The road with its November colours brought back to him the many hours when he had tramped over it in cheerfulness or in despair. The dull brown stretches of broomsedge, rolling like a high sea, the humble cabins, nestling so close to the ground, the pale clay road winding under the half-bared trees, from which the bright leaves were fluttering downward—these things made the breach of the years close as suddenly as if the divided scenery upon a stage had rolled together. While he walked alone here it was impossible to believe in the reality of his life in Botetourt.
As he approached Cedar Hill, the long melancholy avenue appeared to him as an appropriate shelter for Beverly's gentle ghost. He was surprised to discover with what tenderness he was able to surround the memory of that poetic figure since he stood again in the atmosphere which had helped to cultivate his indefinable charm. In Tappahannock Beverly's life might still be read in the dry lines of prose, but beneath the historic influences of Cedar Hill it became, even in Ordway's eyes, a poem of sentiment.
Beyond the garden, he could see presently, through a gap in the trees, the silvery blur of life everlasting in the fallow land, which was steeped in afternoon sunshine. Somewhere from a nearer meadow therefloated a faint call of "Coopee! Coopee! Coopee!" to the turkeys lost in the sassafras. Then as he reached the house Aunt Mehitable's face looked down at him from a window in the second story: and in response to her signs of welcome, he ascended the steps and entered the hall, where he stopped upon hearing a child's voice through the half open door of the dining-room.
"May I wear my coral beads even if I am in mourning, Aunt Emily?"
"Not yet, Bella," answered Emily's patient yet energetic tones. "Put them away awhile and they'll be all the prettier when you take them out again."
"But can't I mourn for papa and mamma just as well in my beads as I can without them?"
"That may be, dear, but we must consider what other people will say."
"What have other people got to do with my mourning, Aunt Emily?"
"I don't know, but when you grow up you'll find that they have something to do with everything that concerns you."
"Well, then, I shan't mourn at all," replied Bella, defiantly. "If you won't let me mourn in my coral beads, I shan't mourn a single bit without them."
"There, there, Bella, go on with your lesson," said Emily sternly, "you are a naughty girl."
At the sound of Ordway's step on the threshold, she rose to her feet, with a frightened movement, and stood, white and trembling, her hand pressed to her quivering bosom.
"You!" she cried out sharply, and there was a sound in her voice that brought him with a rush to her side. But as he reached her she drew quickly away, and hiding her face in her hands, broke into passionate weeping.
It was the first time that he had seen her lose her habit of self-command, and while he watched her, he felt that each of her broken sobs was wrung from his own heart.
"I was a fool not to prepare you," he said, as he placed a restraining hand on the awe-struck Bella. "You've had so many shocks I ought to have known—I ought to have foreseen——"
At his words she looked up instantly, drying her tears on a child's dress which she was mending. "You came so suddenly that it startled me, that is all," she answered. "I thought for a minute that something had happened to you—that you were an apparition instead of a reality. I've got into the habit of seeing ghosts of late."
"It's a bad habit," he replied, as he pushed Bella from the room and closed the door after her. "But I'm not a ghost, Emily, only a rough and common mortal. Baxter wrote me of Beverly's death, so I came thinking that I might be of some little use. Remember what you promised me in Botetourt."
As he looked at her now more closely, he saw that the clear brown of her skin had taken a sallow tinge, as if she were very weary, and that there were faint violet shadows in the hollows beneath her eyes. These outward signs of her weakness moved him toa passion deeper and tenderer than he had ever felt before.
"I have not forgotten," she responded, after a moment in which she had recovered her usual bright aspect, "but there is really nothing one can do, it is all so simple. The farm has already been sold for debt, and so I shall start in the world without burdens, if without wealth."
"And the children? What of them?"
"That is arranged, too, very easily. Blair is fifteen now, and he will be given a scholarship at college. The girls will go to a friend of mine, who has a boarding school and has made most reasonable terms."
"And you?" he asked in a voice that expressed something of the longing he could not keep back. "Is there to be nothing but hard work for you in the future?"
"I am not afraid of work," she rejoined, smiling, "I am afraid only of reaching a place where work does not count."
As he made no answer, she talked on brightly, telling him of her plans for the future, of the progress the children had shown at their lessons, of the arrangements she had made for Aunt Mehitable and Micah, and of the innumerable changes which had occurred since he went away. So full of life, of energy, of hopefulness, were her face and voice that but for her black dress he would not have suspected that she had stood recently beside a deathbed. Yet as he listened to her, his heart was torn by the sharp anguish of parting, and when presently she began toquestion him about his life in Botetourt, it was with difficulty that he forced himself to reply in a steady voice. All other memories of her would give way, he felt, before the picture of her in her black dress against the burning logs, with the red firelight playing over her white face and hands.
An hour later, when he rose to go, he took both of her hands in his, and bending his head laid his burning forehead against her open palms.
"Emily," he said, "tell me that you understand."
For a moment she gazed down on him in silence. Then, as he raised his eyes, she kissed him so softly that it seemed as if a spirit had touched his lips.
"I understand—forever," she answered.
At her words he straightened himself, as though a burden had fallen from him, and turning slowly away he went out of the house and back in the direction of Tappahannock.
IT was after ten o'clock when he returned to Botetourt, and he found upon reaching home that Lydia had already gone to bed, though a bottle of cough syrup, placed conspicuously upon his bureau, bore mute witness to the continuance of her solicitude. After so marked a consideration it seemed to him only decent that he should swallow a portion of the liquid; and he was in the act of filling the tablespoon she had left, when a ring at the door caused him to start until the medicine spilled from his hand. A moment later the ring was repeated more violently, and as he was aware that the servants had already left the house, he threw on his coat, and lighting a candle, went hurriedly out into the hall and down the dark staircase. The sound of a hand beating on the panels of the door quickened his steps almost into a run, and he was hardly surprised, when he had withdrawn the bolts, to find Alice's face looking at him from the darkness outside. She was pale and thin, he saw at the first glance, and there was an angry look in her eyes, which appeared unnaturally large in their violent circles.
"I thought you would never open to me, papa," she said fretfully as she crossed the threshold. "Oh,I am so glad to see you again! Feel how cold my hands are, I am half frozen."
Taking her into his arms, he kissed her face passionately as it rested for an instant against his shoulder.
"Are you alone, Alice? Where is your husband?"
Without answering, she raised her head, shivering slightly, and then turning away, entered the library where a log fire was smouldering to ashes. As he threw on more wood, she came over to the hearth, and stretched out her hands to the warmth with a nervous gesture. Then the flame shot up and he saw that her beauty had gained rather than lost by the change in her features. She appeared taller, slenderer, more distinguished, and the vivid black and white of her colouring was intensified by the perfect simplicity of the light cloth gown and dark furs she wore.
"Oh, he's at home," she answered, breaking the long silence. "I mean he's in the house in Henry Street, but we had a quarrel an hour after we got back, so I put on my hat again and came away. I'm not going back—not unless he makes it bearable for me to live with him. He's such—such a brute that it's as much as one can do to put up with it, and it's been killing me by inches for the last months. I meant to write you about it, but somehow I couldn't, and yet I knew that I couldn't write at all without letting you see it. Oh, he's unbearable!" she exclaimed, with a tremor of disgust. "You will never know—you will never be able to imagine all that I've been through!"
"But is he unkind to you, Alice? Is he cruel?"
She bared her arm with a superb disdainful gesture, and he saw three rapidly discolouring bruises on her delicate flesh. The sight filled him with loathing rather than anger, and he caught her to him almost fiercely as if he would hold her not only against Geoffrey Heath, but against herself.
"You shall not go back to him," he said, "I will not permit it!"
"The worst part is," she went on vehemently, as if he had not spoken, "that it is about money—money—always money. He has millions, his lawyers told me so, and yet he makes me give an account to him of every penny that I spend. I married him because I thought I should be rich and free, but he's been hardly better than a miser since the day of the wedding. He wants me to dress like a dowdy, for all his wealth, and I can't buy a ring that he doesn't raise a terrible fuss. I hate him more and more every day I live, but it makes no difference to him as long as he has me around to look at whenever he pleases. I have to pay him back for every dollar that he gives me, and if I keep away from him and get cross, he holds back my allowance. Oh, it's a dog's life!" she exclaimed wildly, "and it is killing me!"
"You shan't bear it, Alice. As long as I'm alive you are safe with me."
"For a time I could endure it because of the travelling and the strange countries," she resumed, ignoring the tenderness in his voice, "but Geoffreywas so frightfully jealous that if I so much as spoke to a man, he immediately flew into a rage. He even made me leave the opera one night in Paris because a Russian Grand Duke in the next box looked at me so hard."
Throwing herself into a chair, she let her furs slip from her shoulders, and sat staring moodily into the fire. "I've sworn a hundred times that I'd leave him," she said, "and yet I've never done it until to-night."
While she talked on feverishly, he untied her veil, which she had tossed back, and taking off her hat, pressed her gently against the cushions he had placed in her chair.
"You look so tired, darling, you must rest," he said.
"Rest! You may as well tell me to sleep!" she exclaimed. Then her tone altered abruptly, and for the first time, she seemed able to penetrate beyond her own selfish absorption. "Oh, you poor papa, how very old you look!" she said.
Taking his head in her arms, she pressed it to her bosom and cried softly for a minute. "It's all my fault—everything is my fault, but I can't help it. I'm made that way." Then pushing him from her suddenly, she sprang to her feet and began walking up and down in her restless excited manner.
"Let me get you a glass of wine, Alice," he said, "you are trembling all over."
She shook her head. "It isn't that—it isn't that. It's the awful—awful money. If it wasn'tfor the money I could go on. Oh, I wish I'd never spent a single dollar! I wish I'd always gone in rags!"
Again he forced her back into her chair and again, after a minute of quiet, she rose to her feet and broke into hysterical sobs.
"All that I have is yours, Alice, you know that," he said in the effort to soothe her, "and, besides, your own property is hardly less than two hundred thousand."
"But Uncle Richard won't give it to me," she returned angrily. "I wrote and begged him on my knees and he still refused to let me have a penny more than my regular income. It's all tied up, he says, in investments, and that until I am twenty-one it must remain in his hands."
With a frantic movement, she reached for her muff, and drew from it a handful of crumpled papers, which she held out to him. "Geoffrey found these to-night and they brought on the quarrel," she said. "Yesterday he gave me this bracelet and he seems to think I could live on it for a month!" She stretched out her arm, as she spoke, and showed him a glittering circle of diamonds immediately below the blue finger marks. "There's a sable coat still that he doesn't know a thing of," she finished with a moan.
Bending under the lamp, he glanced hurriedly over the papers she had given him, and then rose to his feet still holding them in his hand.
"These alone come to twenty thousand dollars, Alice," he said with a gentle sternness.
"And there are others, too," she cried, making no effort to control her convulsive sobs. "There are others which I didn't dare even to let him see."
For a moment he let her weep without seeking to arrest her tears.
"Are you sure this will be a lesson to you?" he asked at last. "Will you be careful—very careful from this time?"
"Oh, I'll never spend a penny again. I'll stay in Botetourt forever," she promised desperately, eager to retrieve the immediate instant by the pledge of a more or less uncertain future.
"Then we must help you," he said. "Among us all—Uncle Richard, your mother and I—it will surely be possible."
Pacified at once by his assurance, she sat down again and dried her eyes in her muff.
"It seems a thousand years since I went away," she observed, glancing about her for the first time. "Nothing is changed and yet everything appears to be different."
"And are you different also?" he asked.
"Oh, I'm older and I've seen a great deal more," she responded, with a laugh which came almost as a shock to him after her recent tears, "but I still want to go everywhere and have everything just as I used to."
"But I thought you were determined to stay in Botetourt for the future?" he suggested.
"Well, so I am, I suppose," she returned dismally, "there's nothing else for me to do, is there?"
"Nothing that I see."
"Then I may as well make up my mind to be miserable forever. It's so frightfully gloomy in this old house, isn't it? How is mamma?"
"She's just as you left her, neither very well nor very sick."
"So it's exactly what it always was, I suppose, and will drive me to distraction in a few weeks. Is Dick away?"
"He's at college, and he's doing finely."
"Of course he is—that's why he's such a bore."
"Let Dick alone, Alice, and tell me about yourself. So you went to Europe immediately after I saw you in Washington?"
"Two days later. I was dreadfully seasick, and Geoffrey was as disagreeable as he could be, and made all kinds of horrid jokes about me."
"You went straight to Paris, didn't you?"
"As soon as we landed, but Geoffrey made me come away in three weeks because he said I spent so much money." Her face clouded again at the recollection of her embarrassments. "Oh, we had awful scenes, but I hadn't even a wedding dress, you know, and French dressmakers are so frightfully expensive. One of them charged me five thousand dollars for a gown—but he told me that it was really cheap, because he'd sold one to another American the day before for twelve thousand. I don't know who her husband is," she added wistfully, "but I wish I were married to him."
The wildness of her extravagance depressed him even more than her excessive despair had done; andhe wondered if the vagueness of her ideas of wealth was due to the utter lack in her of the imagination which foresees results? She had lived since her girlhood in a quiet Virginia town, her surroundings had been comparatively simple, and she had never been thrown, until her marriage, amid the corrupting influences of great wealth, yet, in spite of these things, she had squandered a fortune as carelessly as a child might have strewed pebbles upon the beach. Her regret at last had come not through realisation of her fault, but in the face of the immediate punishment which threatened her.
"So he got you out of Paris? Well, I'm glad of that," he remarked.
"He was perfectly brutal about it, I wish you could have heard him. Then we went down into Italy and did nothing for months but look at old pictures—at least I did, he wouldn't come—and float around in a gondola until I almost died from the monotony. It was only after I found a lace shop, where they had the most beautiful things, that he would take me away, and then he insisted upon going to some little place up in the Alps because he said he didn't suppose I could possibly pack the mountains into my trunks. Oh, those dreadful mountains! They were so glaring I could never go out of doors until the afternoon, and Geoffrey would go off climbing or shooting and leave me alone in a horrid little hotel where there was nobody but a one-eyed German army officer, and a woman missionary who was bracing herself for South Africa.She wore a knitted jersey all day and a collar which looked as if it would cut her head off if she ever forgot herself and bent her neck." Her laughter, the delicious, irresponsible laughter of a child, rippled out: "She asked me one day if our blacks wore draperies? The ones in South Africa didn't, and it made it very embarrassing sometimes, she said, to missionary to them. Oh, you can't imagine what I suffered from her, and Geoffrey was so horrid about it, and insisted that she was just the sort of companion that I needed. So one day when he happened to be in the writing-room where she was, I locked the door on the outside and threw the key down into the gorge. There wasn't any locksmith nearer than twenty miles, and when they sent for him he was away. Oh, it was simply too funny for words! Geoffrey on the inside was trying to break the heavy lock and the proprietor on the outside was protesting that he mustn't, and all the time we could hear the missionary begging everybody please to be patient. She said if it were required of her she was quite prepared to stay locked up all night, but Geoffrey wasn't, so he swung himself down by the branches of a tree which grew near the window."
All her old fascination had come back to her with her change of mood, and he forgot to listen to her words while he watched the merriment sparkle in her deep blue eyes. It was a part of his destiny that he should submit to her spell, as, he supposed, even Geoffrey submitted at times.
He was about to make some vague commentupon her story, when her face changed abruptly into an affected gravity, and turning his head, he saw that Lydia had come noiselessly into the room, and was advancing to meet her daughter with outstretched arms.
"Why, Alice, my child, what a beautiful surprise! When did you come?"
As Alice started forward to her embrace, Ordway noticed that there was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of her body.
"Only a few minutes ago," she replied, with the characteristic disregard of time which seemed, in some way, to belong to her inability to consider figures, "and, oh, I am so glad to be back! You are just as lovely as ever."
"Well, you are lovelier," said Lydia, kissing her, and adding a moment afterward, as the result of her quick, woman's glance, "what a charming gown!"
Alice shrugged her shoulders, with a foreign gesture which she had picked up. "Oh, you must see some of my others," she replied, "I wish that my trunks would come, but I forgot they were all sent to the other house, and I haven't even a nightgown. Will you lend me a nightgown, mamma? I have some of the loveliest you ever saw which were embroidered for me by the nuns in a French convent."
"So, you'll spend the night?" said Lydia, "I'm so glad, dear, and I'll go up and see if your bed has sheets on it."
"Oh, it's not only for the night," returned Alice,defiantly, "I've come back for good. I've left Geoffrey, haven't I, papa?"
"I hope so, darling," answered Ordway, coming for the first time over to where they stood.
"Left Geoffrey?" repeated Lydia. "Do you mean you've separated?"
"I mean I'm never going back again—that I detest him—that I'd rather die—that I'll kill myself before I'll do it."
Lydia received her violence with the usual resigned sweetness that she presented to an impending crisis.
"But, my dear, my dear, a divorce is a horrible thing!" she wailed.
"Well, it isn't half so horrible as Geoffrey," retorted Alice.
Ordway, who had turned away again as Lydia spoke, came forward at the girl's angry words, and caught the hand that she had stretched out as if to push her mother from her.
"Let's be humbly grateful that we've got her back," he said, smiling, "while we prepare her bed."
WHEN he came out into the hall the next morning, Lydia met him, in her dressing-gown, on her way from Alice's room.
"How is she?" he asked eagerly. "Did she sleep?"
"No, she was very restless, so I stayed with her. She went home a quarter of an hour ago."
"Went home? Do you mean she's gone back to that brute?"
A servant's step sounded upon the staircase, and with her unfailing instinct for propriety, she drew back into his room and lowered her voice.
"She said that she was too uncomfortable without her clothes and her maid, but I think she had definitely made up her mind to return to him."
"But when did she change? You heard her say last night that she would rather kill herself."
"Oh, you know Alice," she responded a little wearily; and for the first time it occurred to him that the exact knowledge of Alice might belong, after all, not to himself, but to her.
"You think, then," he asked, "that she meant none of her violent protestations of last night?"
"I am sure that she meant them while she uttered them—not a minute afterward. She can't helpbeing dramatic any more than she can help being beautiful."
"Are you positive that you said nothing to bring about her decision? Did you influence her in any way?"
"I did nothing more than tell her that she must make her choice once for all—that she must either go back to Geoffrey Heath and keep up some kind of appearances, or publicly separate herself from him. I let her see quite plainly that a state of continual quarrels was impossible and indecent."
Her point of view was so entirely sensible that he found himself hopelessly overpowered by its unassailable logic.
"So she has decided to stick to him for better or for worse, then?"
"For the present at all events. She realised fully, I think, how much she would be obliged to sacrifice by returning home?"
"Sacrifice? Good God, what?" he demanded.
"Oh, well, you see, Geoffrey lives in a fashion that is rather grand for Botetourt. He travels a great deal, and he makes her gorgeous presents when he is in a good humour. She seemed to feel that if we could only settle these bills for her, she would be able to bring about a satisfactory adjustment. I was surprised to find how quietly she took it all this morning. She had forgotten entirely, I believe, the scene she made downstairs last night."
This was his old Alice, he reflected in baffled silence, and apparently he would never attain to thecritical judgment of her. Well, in any case, he was able to do justice to Lydia's admirable detachment.
"I suppose I may have a talk with Heath anyway?" he said at last.
"She particularly begs you not to, and I feel strongly that she is right."
"Does she expect me to sit quietly by and see it go on forever? Why, there were bruises on her arm that he had made with his fingers."
Lydia paled as she always did when one of the brutal facts of life was thrust on her notice.
"Oh, she doesn't think that will happen again. It appears that she had lost her temper and tried her best to infuriate him. He is still very much in love with her at times, and she hopes that by a little diplomacy she may be able to arrange matters between them."
"Diplomacy with that insufferable cad! Pshaw!"
Lydia sighed, not in exasperation, but with the martyr's forbearance.
"It is really a crisis in Alice's life," she said, "and we must treat it with seriousness."
"I was never more serious in my life. I'm melancholy. I'm abject."
"Last night she told me that Geoffrey threatened to go West and get a divorce, and this frightened her."
"But I thought it was the very thing she wanted," he urged in bewilderment. "Hadn't she left him last night for good and all?"
"She might leave him, but she could not give up his money. It is impossible, I suppose, for you torealise her complete dependence upon wealth—the absurdity of her ideas about the value of money. Why, her income of five thousand which Uncle Richard allows her would not last her a month."
"I realised a little of this when I glanced over those bills she gave me."
"Of course we shall pay those ourselves, but what is twenty thousand dollars to her, when Geoffrey seems to have paid out a hundred thousand already. He began, I can see, by being very generous, but she confessed to me this morning that other bills were still to come in which she would not dare to let him see. I told her that she must try to meet these out of her income, and that we would reduce our living expenses as much as possible in order to pay those she gave you."
"I shall ask Uncle Richard to advance this out of my personal property," he said.
"But he will not do it. You know how scrupulous he is about all such matters, and he told me the other day that your father's will had clearly stated that the money was not to be touched unless he should deem it for your interest to turn it over to you."
Her command of the business situation amazed him, until he remembered her long conversations with Richard Ordway, whose interests were confined within strictly professional limits. His fatal mistake in the past, he saw now, was that he had approached her, not as a fellow mortal, but as a divinity; for the farther he receded from the attitude of worship, the more was he able to appreciate the quality of her practicalvirtues. In spite of her poetic exterior, it was in the rosy glow of romance that she showed now as barest of attractions. The bottle of cough syrup on his bureau still testified to her ability to sympathise in all cases where the imagination was not required to lend its healing insight.
"But surely it is to my interest to save Alice," he said after a pause.
"I think he will feel that it must be done by the family, by us all," she answered, "he has always had so keen a sense of honour in little things."
An hour later, when he broached the subject to Richard in his office, he found that Lydia was right, as usual, in her prediction; and with a flash of ironic humour, he pictured her as enthroned above his destiny, like a fourth fate who spun the unyielding thread of common sense.
"Of course the debt must be paid if it is a condition of Alice's reconciliation with her husband," said the old man, "but I shall certainly not sacrifice your securities in order to do it. Such an act would be directly against the terms of your father's will."
There was no further concession to be had from him, so Daniel turned to his work, half in disappointment, half in admiration of his uncle's loyalty to the written word.
When he went home to luncheon Lydia told him that she had seen Alice, who had appeared seriously disturbed, though she had shown her, with evident enjoyment, a number of exquisite Paris gowns. "She had a sable coat, also, in her closet, whichcould not have cost less, I should have supposed, than forty thousand dollars—the kind of coat that a Russian Grand Duchess might have worn—but when I spoke of it, she grew very much depressed and changed the subject. Did you talk to Uncle Richard? And was I right?"
"You're always right," he admitted despondently, "but do you think, then, that I'd better not see Alice to-day?"
"Perhaps it would be wiser to wait until to-morrow. Geoffrey is in a very difficult humour, she says, more brutally indifferent to her than he has been since her marriage."
"Isn't that all the more reason she ought to have her family about her?"
"She says not. It's easier to deal with him, she feels, alone—and any way Uncle Richard will call there this afternoon."
"Oh, Uncle Richard!" he groaned, as he went out.
In the evening there was no news beyond a reassuring visit from Richard Ordway, who stopped by, for ten minutes, on his way from an interview with Geoffrey Heath. "To tell the truth I found him less obstinate than I had expected," he said, "and there's no doubt, I fear, that he has some show of justice upon his side. He has agreed now to make Alice a very liberal allowance from the first of April, provided she will promise to make no more bills, and to live until then within her own income. He told me that he was obliged to retrench for the next six months in order to meet his obligations withouttouching his investments. It seems that he had bought very largely on margin, and the shrinkages in stocks has forced him to pay out a great deal of money recently."
"I knew you would manage it, Uncle, I relied on you absolutely," said Lydia, sweetly.
"I did only my duty, my child," he responded, as he held out his hand.
The one good result of the anxiety of the last twenty-four hours—the fact that it had brought Lydia and himself into a kind of human connection—had departed, Daniel observed, when he sat down to dinner, separated from her by six yellow candle shades and a bowl of gorgeous chrysanthemums. After a casual comment upon the soup, and the pleasant reminder that Dick would be home for Thanksgiving, the old uncomfortable silence fell between them. She had just remarked that the roast was a little overdone, and he had agreed with her from sheer politeness, when a sharp ring at the bell sent the old Negro butler hurrying out into the hall. An instant later there was a sound of rapid footsteps, and Alice, wearing a long coat, which slipped from her bare shoulders as she entered, came rapidly forward and threw herself into Ordway's arms, with an uncontrollable burst of tears.
"My child, my child, what is it?" he questioned, while Lydia, rising from the table with a disturbed face, but an unruffled manner, remarked to the butler that he need not serve the dessert.
"Come into the library, Alice, it is quieter there,"she said, putting her arm about her daughter, with an authoritative pressure.
"O, papa, I will never see him again! You must tell him that. I shall never see him again," she cried, regardless alike of Lydia's entreaties and the restraining presence of the butler. "Go to him to-night and tell him that I will never—never go back."
"I'll tell him, Alice, and I'll do it with a great deal of pleasure," he answered soothingly, as he led her into the library and closed the door.
"But you must go at once. I want him to know it at once."
"I'll go this very hour—I'll go this very minute, if you honestly mean it."
"Would it not be better to wait until to-morrow, Alice?" suggested Lydia. "Then you will have time to quiet down and to see things rationally."
"I don't want to quiet down," sobbed Alice, angrily, "I want him to know now—this very instant—that he has gone too far—that I will not stand it. He told me a minute ago—the beast!—that he'd like to see the man who would be fool enough to keep me—that if I went he'd find a handsomer woman within a week!"
"Well, I'll see him, darling," said Ordway. "Sit here with your mother, and have a good cry and talk things over."
As he spoke he opened the door and went out into the hall, where he got into his overcoat.
"Remember last night and don't say too much, Daniel," urged Lydia in a warning whisper, comingafter him, "she is quite hysterical now and does not realise what she is saying."
"Oh, I'll remember," he returned, and a minute later, he closed the front door behind him.
On his way to the Heath house in Henry Street, he planned dispassionately his part in the coming interview, and he resolved that he would state Alice's position with as little show of feeling as it was possible for him to express. He would tell Heath candidly that, with his consent, Alice should never return to him, but he would say this in a perfectly quiet and inoffensive manner. If there was to be a scene, he concluded calmly, it should be made entirely by Geoffrey. Then, as he went on, he said to himself, that he had grown tired and old, and that he lacked now the decision which should carry one triumphantly over a step like this. Even his anger against Alice's husband had given way to a dragging weariness, which seemed to hold him back as he ascended the brown-stone steps and laid his hand on the door bell. When the door was opened, and he followed the servant through the long hall, ornamented by marble statues, to the smoking-room at the end, he was conscious again of that sense of utter incapacity which had been bred in him by his life in Botetourt.
Geoffrey, after a full dinner, was lounging, with a cigar and a decanter of brandy, over a wood fire, and as his visitor entered he rose from his chair with a lazy shake of his whole person.
"I don't believe I've ever met you before, Mr. Ordway," he remarked, as he held out his hand, "thoughI've known you by sight for several years. Won't you sit down?" With a single gesture he motioned to a chair and indicated the cigars and the brandy on a little table at his right hand.
At his first glance Ordway had observed that he had been in a rage or drinking heavily—probably both; and he was seized by a sudden terror at the thought that Alice had been so lately at the mercy of this large red and black male animal. Yet, in spite of the disgust with which the man inspired him, he was forced to admit that as far as a mere physical specimen went, he had rarely seen his equal. His body was superbly built, and but for his sullen and brutal expression, his face would have been remarkable for its masculine beauty.
"No, I won't sit down, thank you," replied Ordway, after a short pause. "What I have to say can be said better standing, I think."
"Then fire away!" returned Geoffrey, with a coarse laugh. "It's about Alice, I suppose, and it's most likely some darn rot she's sent you with."
"It's probably less rot than you imagine. I have taken it upon myself to forbid her returning to you. Your treatment of her has made it impossible that she should remain in your house."
"Well, I've treated her a damned sight better than she deserved," rejoined Geoffrey, scowling, while his face, inflamed by the brandy he had drunk, burned to a dull red; "it isn't her fault, I can tell you, that she hasn't put me into the poorhouse in six months."
"I admit that she has been very extravagant, and so does she."
"Extravagant? So that is what you call it, is it? Well, she spent more in three weeks in Paris than my father did in his whole lifetime. I paid out a hundred thousand for her, and even then I could hardly get her away. But I won't pay the bills any longer, I've told her that. They may go into court about it and get their money however they can."
"In the future there will be no question of that."
"You think so, do you? Now I'll bet you whatever you please that she's back here in this house again before the week is up. She knows on which side her bread is buttered, and she won't stay in that dull old place, not for all you're worth."
"She shall never return to you with my consent."
"Did she wait for that to marry me?" demanded Geoffrey, laughing uproariously at his wit, "though I can tell you now, that it makes precious little difference to me whether she comes or stays."
"She shall never do it," said Ordway, losing his temper. Then as he uttered the words, he remembered Lydia's warning and added more quietly, "she shall never do it if I can help it."
"It makes precious little difference to me," repeated Geoffrey, "but she'll be a blamed fool if she doesn't, and for all her foolishness, she isn't so big a fool as you think her."
"She has been wrong in her extravagance, as I said before, but she is very young, and her childishness is no excuse for your brutality."
Rage, or the brandy, or both together, flamed up hotly in Geoffrey's face.
"I'd like to know what right you have to talk about brutality?" he sneered.
"I've the right of any man to keep another from ill-treating his daughter."
"Well, you're a nice one with your history to put on these highfaluting, righteous airs, aren't you?"
For an instant the unutterable disgust in Ordway's mind was like physical nausea. What use was it, after all, to bandy speeches, he questioned, with a mere drunken animal? His revulsion of feeling had moved him to take a step toward the door, when the sound of the words Geoffrey uttered caused him to stop abruptly and stand listening.
"Much good you'll do her when she hears about that woman you've been keeping down at Tappahannock. As if I didn't know that you'd been running back there again after that Brooke girl——"
The words were choked back in his throat, for before they had passed his lips Ordway had swung quickly round and struck him full in the mouth.
With the blow it seemed to Daniel that all the violence in his nature was loosened. A sensation that was like the joy of health, of youth, of manhood, rushed through his veins, and in the single exalted instant when he looked down on Geoffrey's prostrate figure, he felt himself to be not only triumphant,but immortal. All that his years of self-sacrifice had not done for him was accomplished by that explosive rush of energy through his arm.
There was blood on his hand and as he glanced down, he saw that Geoffrey, with a bleeding mouth, was struggling, dazed and half drunk, to his feet. Ordway looked at him and laughed—the laugh of the boastful and victorious brute. Then turning quickly, he took up his hat and went out of the house and down into the street.
The physical exhilaration produced by the muscular effort was still tingling through his body, and while it lasted he felt younger, stronger, and possessed of a courage that was almost sublime. When he reached home and entered the library where Lydia and Alice were sitting together, there was a boyish lightness and confidence in his step.
"Oh, papa!" cried Alice, standing up, "tell me about it. What did he do?"
Ordway laughed again, the same laugh with which he had looked down on Geoffrey lying half stunned at his feet.
"I didn't wait to see," he answered, "but I rather think he got up off the floor."
"You mean you knocked him down?" asked Lydia, in an astonishment that left her breathless.
"I cut his mouth, I'm sure," he replied, wiping his hand from which the blood ran, "and I hope I knocked out one or two of his teeth."
Then the exhilaration faded as quickly as it had come, for as Lydia looked up at him, while he stoodthere wiping the blood from his bruised knuckles, he saw, for the first time since his return to Botetourt, that there was admiration in her eyes. So it was the brute, after all, and not the spirit that had triumphed over her.
Fromthat night there was a new element in Lydia's relation to him, an increased consideration, almost a deference, as if, for the first time, he had shown himself capable of commanding her respect. This change, which would have pleased him, doubtless, twenty years before, had only the effect now of adding to his depression, for he saw in it a tribute from his wife not to his higher, but to his lower nature. All his patient ideals, all his daily self-sacrifice, had not touched her as had that one instant's violence; and it occurred to him, with a growing recognition of the hopeless inconsistency of life, that if he had treated her with less delicacy, less generosity, if he had walked roughshod over her feminine scruples, instead of yielding to them, she might have entertained for him by this time quite a wholesome wifely regard. Then the mere possibility disgusted him, and he saw that to have compromised with her upon any lower plane would have been always morally repugnant to him. After all, the dominion of the brute was not what he was seeking.
On the morning after his scene with Geoffrey, Alice came to him and begged for the minutest particulars of the quarrel. She wanted to know howit had begun? If Geoffrey had been really horrible? And if he had noticed the new bronze dragon she had bought for the hall? Upon his replying that he had not, she seemed disappointed, he thought, for a minute.
"It's very fine," she said, "I bought it from what's-his-name, that famous man in Paris? If I ever have money enough I shall get the match to it, so there'll be the pair of them." Then seeing his look of astonishment, she hastened to correct the impression she had made. "Of course, I mean that I'd like to have done it, if I had been going to live there."
"It would take more than a bronze dragon, or a pair of them, to make that house a home, dear," was his only comment.
"But it's very handsome," she remarked after a moment, "everything in it is so much more costly than the things here." He made no rejoinder, and she added with vehemence, "but of course, I wouldn't go back, not even if it were a palace!"
Then a charming merriment seized her, and she clung to him and kissed him and called him a dozen silly pet names. "No, she won't ever, ever play in that horrid old house again," she sang gaily between her kisses.
For several days these exuberant spirits lasted, and then he prepared himself to meet the inevitable reaction. Her looks drooped, she lost her colour and grew obviously bored, and in the end she complained openly that there was nothing for her to doin the house, and that she couldn't go out of doors because she hadn't the proper clothes. To his reminder that it was she herself who had prevented his sending for her trunks, she replied that there was plenty of time, and that "besides nobody could pack them unless she was there to overlook it."
"If anybody is obliged to go back there, for heaven's sake, let me be the one," he urged desperately at last.
"To knock out more of poor Geoffrey's teeth? Oh, you naughty, naughty, papa!"—she cried, lifting a reproving finger. The next instant her laughter bubbled out at the delightful picture of "papa in the midst of her Paris gowns. I'd be so afraid you'd roll up Geoffrey in my precious laces," she protested, half seriously.
For a week nothing more was said on the subject, and then she remarked irritably that her room was cold and she hadn't her quilted silk dressing-gown. When he asked her to ride with him, she declared that her old habit was too tight for her and her new one was at the other house. When he suggested driving instead, she replied that she hadn't her fur coat and she would certainly freeze without it. At last one bright, cold day, when he came up to luncheon, Lydia told him, with her strange calmness, that Alice had gone back to her husband.
"I knew it would come in time," she said, and he bowed again before her unerring prescience.
"Do you mean to tell me that she's willing toput up with Heath for the sake of a little extra luxury?" he demanded.
"Oh, that's a part of it. She likes the newness of the house and the air of costliness about it, but most of all, she feels that she could never settle down to our monotonous way of living. Geoffrey promised her to take her to Europe again in the summer and I think she began to grow restless when it appeared that she might have to give it up."
"But one of us could have taken her to Europe, if that's all she wanted. You could have gone with her."
"Not in Alice's way, we could never have afforded it. She told me this when I offered to go with her if she would definitely separate from Geoffrey."
"Then you didn't want her to go back? You didn't encourage it?"
"I encouraged her to behave with decency—and this isn't decent."
"No, I admit that. It decidedly is not."
"Yet we have no assurance that she won't fly in upon us at dinner to-night, with all the servants about," she reflected mournfully.
His awful levity broke out as it always did whenever she invoked the sanctity of convention.
"In that case hadn't we better serve ourselves until she has made up her mind?" he inquired.
But the submission of the martyr is proof even against caustic wit, and she looked at him, after a minute, with a smile of infinite patience.
"For myself I can bear anything," she answered,"but I feel that for her it is shocking to make things so public."
It was shocking. In spite of his flippancy he felt the vulgarity of it as acutely as she felt it; and he was conscious of something closely akin to relief, when Richard Ordway dropped in after dinner to tell them that Alice and Geoffrey had come to a complete reconciliation.
"But will it last?" Lydia questioned, in an uneasy voice.
"We'll hope so at all events," replied the old man, "they appeared certainly to be very friendly when I came away. Whatever happens it is surely to Alice's interest that she should be kept out of a public scandal."
They were still discussing the matter, after Richard had gone, when the girl herself ran in, bringing Geoffrey, and fairly brilliant with life and spirits.
"We've decided to forget everything disagreeable," she said, "we're going to begin over again and be nice and jolly, and if I don't spend too much money, we are going to Egypt in April."
"If you're happy, then I'm satisfied," returned Ordway, and he held out his hand to Geoffrey by way of apology.
To do the young man justice, he appeared to cherish no resentment for the blow, though he still bore a scar on his upper lip. He looked heavy and handsome, and rather amiable in a dull way, and the one discovery Daniel made about him was that he entertained a profound admiration for RichardOrdway. Still, when everybody in Botetourt shared his sentiment, this was hardly deserving of notice.
As the weeks went on it looked as if peace were really restored, and even Lydia's face lost its anxious foreboding, when she gazed on the assembled family at Thanksgiving. Dick had grown into a quiet, distinguished looking young fellow, more than ever like his Uncle Richard, and it was touching to watch his devotion to his delicate mother. At least Lydia possessed one enduring consolation in life, Ordway reflected, with a rush of gratitude.
In the afternoon Alice drove with him out into the country, along the pale brown November roads, and he felt, while he sat beside her, with her hand clasped tightly in his under the fur robe, that she was again the daughter of his dreams, who had flown to his arms in the terrible day of his homecoming. She was in one of her rare moods of seriousness, and when she lifted her eyes to his, it seemed to him that they held a new softness, a deeper blueness. Something in her face brought back to him the memory of Emily as she had looked down at him when he knelt before her; and again he was aware of some subtle link which bound together in his thoughts the two women whom he loved.
"There's something I've wanted to tell you, papa, first of all," said Alice, pressing his hand, "I want you to know it before anybody else because you've always loved me and stood by me from the beginning. Now shut your eyes while I tell you, and hold fast to my hand. O papa, there's to bereally and truly a baby in the spring, and even if it's a boy—I hope it will be a girl—you'll promise to love it and be good to it, won't you?"
"Love your child? Alice, my darling!" he cried, and his voice broke.
She raised her hand to his cheek with a little caressing gesture, which had always been characteristic of her, and as he opened his eyes upon her, her beauty shone, he thought, with a light that blinded him.
"I hope it will be a little girl with blue eyes and fair hair like mamma's," she resumed softly. "It will be better than playing with dolls, won't it? I always loved dolls, you know. Do you remember the big wax doll you gave me when I was six years old, and how her voice got out of order and she used to crow instead of talking? Well, I kept her for years and years, and even after I was a big girl, and wore long dresses, and did up my hair, I used to take her out sometimes and put on her clothes. Only I was ashamed of it and used to lock the door so no one could see me. But this little girl will be real, you know, and that's ever so much more fun, isn't it? And you shall help teach her to walk, and to ride when she's big enough; and I'll dress her in the loveliest dresses, with French embroidered ruffles, and a little blue bonnet with bunches of feathers, like one in Paris. Only she can't wear that until she's five years old, can she?"
"And now you will have something to think of, Alice, you will be bored no longer?"