"Tub and Jiggers, look under my bed, and haul out a long box you'll find there."
The two fell over each other to do his bidding. In less time than it takes to tell it, the emissaries were returning with their spoils. A whole cooked turkey, only slightly inferior in size to the original one, appeared to the accompaniment of howls of joy. It was cold, to be sure, but what boy would mind that—and to the critical palate is not cold turkey even more delicious than hot? There were piles and piles of sandwiches with the most delectable filling, there were pies and more pies, and there were fruit and cake and candy. Brown had not feared lest these later guests suspect him of too long a purse; he had ordered without stint, and his orders had been filled by a distant firm of caterers and sent by express.
Now there were girls in the neighbourhood as well as boys. By a mysterious invitation they had been summoned to the home of one of their number, a small cripple, and were there at the very moment rejoicing in all manner of festivities. Nobody knew how it had happened, nor where the good things came from, except the little girl who was their hostess, and wild horses could not have dragged the wonderful secret from her. Brown himself, making merry with his boys, remembered the girls with a comfortable feeling at his heart that for once, at least, a goodly number of people, young and old, were happier than they had ever been before in their lives on Thanksgiving Day.
As for his own immediate entertaining the revel now began—no lesser word describes it. If, before the departure of his dinner guests, Brown had experienced a slight feeling of fatigue, it disappeared with the pleasure of seeing his present company disport themselves. They were not in the least afraid of him—how should they be, when he had spent months in the winning of their confidence and affection by every clever wile known to the genuine boy lover? That they respected him was plainly shown by the fact that, ill trained at home as most of them had been, with him they never overstepped certain bounds. At the lifting of a finger he could command their attention, though the moment before their boisterousness had known no limits.
If the earlier guests had been surprisingly rapid in their consumption of the dinner, these later ones were startlingly so. Like grain before a flock of hungry birds, like ice beneath a bonfire, the viands, lavishly provided though they had been, melted away in almost the twinkling of an eye. And it was precisely as the last enormous mouthful of cherry pie vanished down Jiggers Quigg's happy throat that the unexpected happened.
The front door, opening directly into the living-room, with its long table, and its flashing fire lighting the eager faces round it—nobody had thought of or bothered to make any other light in that room—was flung open by a fur-gloved hand, and a large figure appeared in the doorway. A ruddy face looked in upon the scene. This face possessed a pair of keen gray eyes, a distinguished nose, and a determined mouth beneath a close-trimmed moustache with flecks of gray in it.
Brown sprang up. "Doctor Brainard!" he cried joyfully, and came forward with outstretched hand.
The unexpected guest advanced. Behind him appeared others. To the dazed and gazing boys these people might have come from Greenland, so enveloped were they in defences against the cold. Motor coats of rich fur, furry hats and caps, floating silken veils, muffs, rugs—wherever they came from they could not have minded coming, sharp as was the November air outside, as the boys, who had been hanging about the house since the first approach of twilight, well knew.
Dr. Bruce Brainard was followed by two men and three women. In the flickering firelight Brown was obliged to come close to each, as in smiling silence they approached him, before he could make sure whom the furs and scarfs enshrouded. "Sue!" he exclaimed, discovering his sister. "And Hugh Breckenridge! This is great, brother-in-law! Mrs. Brainard—can it be Mrs. Brainard? How kind of you! You must have known how I've been wanting to see you. Webb Atchison, is that you, looming behind there? How are you, old fellow? But—this lady in the veil—"
He bent closer as he took the gloved hand outstretched, but all he could make out in the traitorous light was a pair of dark eyes, and lips that must be laughing behind the heavy silken veil.
"Do I know her?" he asked, looking round upon the others, who were watching him.
"You have met her," Hugh Breckenridge assured him.
"Several times," added Webb Atchison.
"But not of late," said Brown, "or else I—"
"Once to have seen her," declared Doctor Brainard, "means never to forget."
"You put me in a hard place," Brown objected, trying in vain to distinguish outlines through the veil. "She isn't going to lift it? Must I guess?"
"Of course you must guess, Don," cried his sister.
"How can he?" laughed Breckenridge. "He knows so many fair beings of about that height, and furs and veils are disguising things. Without them, of course, though she wore a mask, he would have no difficulty."
"Will you speak one word?" asked Brown of the unknown.
She shook her head.
"Then—forgive me, but I'm puzzled," said he, laying light but determined hold upon the veil. "I can't imagine at all who—would honour me—"
He gently lifted the veil. The others saw his expression change as the drawn folds revealed a face whose dark-eyed beauty was vividly enhanced by the fire-glow upon cheeks which the November frost had stung into a wonder colour. There was a general laugh of appreciation.
"Never would have thought it, eh?" chuckled Webb Atchison, a fine and prosperous figure of a bachelor past his first youth but not yet arrived at middle age, and with the look of one who does what he pleases with other people. "Well, it wasn't her plan, I assure you. She was horror-stricken when she learned where we were bound."
"Donald Brown in his bachelor apartment in the Worthington was one person, this queer fellow living in a roadside cabin is quite another," suggested Dr. Bruce Brainard quizzically. "Still, I'll warrant Miss Forrest will confess to a bit of curiosity, when she found she was in for it."
"Were you curious?" asked Donald Brown. He was still looking steadily down into the lifted face of the person before him. Into his own face had come a look as of one who has been taken unawares at a vulnerable point, but who has instantly rallied his forces to stand out the attack.
"They were all curious," answered Miss Forrest, and the sound of her voice was different from that of the other voices. If, as Doctor Brainard had jestingly but truthfully said, one who had seen her would not forget her, a similar statement might with equal truth be made of the hearing of her voice. The one word Brown had asked from her lips could certainly have revealed her to him—and would have done so while he had a memory.
"To see if we know how to keep Thanksgiving here?" Brown inquired of the group, though his eyes came back again to Helena Forrest's face.
"To see if you had anything to be thankful for," cried Sue Breckenridge."Well, Don, now that we are here, are you going to invite us to stay?Or—is your present company—"
Brown wheeled and went over to the boys, who were staring, open-eyed and motionless.
"You'll help me out, fellows, won't you?" he said in a low tone—and they felt him still one of them, for the tone was the old one of comradeship. "You see, I have nowhere to ask my guests to sit down. If each of you will take what you can at a time, and carry everything out into the kitchen, and then take out the table, I'll be much obliged. You are coming again soon, you know; but for to-night, you see, I must call it off. Tom, you'll see to taking off the tablecloth, will you? Fold it up any sort of way, but don't let the crumbs get out. All right?"
There was a tumultuous pushing back of chairs. In short order it was all accomplished. The guests stood at one side, looking at the boys as curiously as the boys had looked at them, while the dishes disappeared as fast as many hands could carry them. The big bowl of geraniums was removed by Brown himself, who set it carefully upon his reading-table at the side of the room, and the tablecloth was painstakingly manipulated by Tom Kelcey so that hardly a crumb fell upon the floor. There was one crash of crockery in the kitchen, followed by a smothered howl from the boy who in his agitation had done the deed, but this was the only accident.
Brown turned again to his guests.
"Now," said he, "will you make yourselves at home? It's a cold night out. Let's have off the furs and sit by the fire. Mrs. Brainard, allow me to help you out of that coat. This is the happiest sort of a surprise for me!"
Donald Brown stood at the end of his hearth, his elbow resting on the chimney-piece, his eyes, narrowed a little between the lashes, intently regarding these latest guests of his. He was in the shadow, they were in the strong light of the fire. A great lump of cannel coal, recently laid upon the red-hot embers and half-burned logs of the afternoon fire, had just broken apart with a great hissing and crackling of the pitchy richness of its inner formation, and the resultant glow of rosy light which enveloped the figures before the hearth, against the duller background of the room, otherwise unillumined, made them stand out like figures in a cleverly lighted tableau.
They were much more interesting to Brown, however, than anything he had ever seen in the set and artificial radiance of the calcium light. He knew well every face there, and yet, after his year's exile and in contrast to the faces at which he had been lately looking, they formed a more engrossing study than any he had known for many months.
In the centre of the circle, in Brown's old red-cushioned rocker and most comfortable chair, sat Mrs. Brainard, the exquisitely sophisticated wife of the distinguished specialist close by. Her graceful head, with its slight and becoming touches of gray at the temples, rested like a fine cameo against the warm hue of the cushion. Her brilliant eyes reflected the dancing firelight; her shapely hands, jewelled like Mrs. Breckenridge's, but after an even more rare and perfectly chosen fashion, lay in her silken lap. As his glance fell upon these hands some whimsical thought brought to Brown's mind Mrs. Kelcey's red, work-roughened ones. He wondered if by any chance the two hands would ever meet, and whether Mrs. Brainard's would shrink from the contact, or meet it as that of a sister, "under the skin."
Near her his sister Sue's dainty elegance of person showed like a flower against the big figure of Doctor Brainard, who sat at her elbow. Brainard himself, with his splendid head and erect carriage, was always an imposing personage; he had never seemed more so than now, with the face of Patrick Kelcey, Andrew Murdison, and James Benson, the little watchmaker, in the background of Brown's mind with which to contrast it. Beyond Mrs. Brainard lounged Hugh Breckenridge—as nearly as one could be said to lounge—in a plain, cane-seated chair without arms.
At one side of the group was Webb Atchison, the rich bachelor of the party where all were possessed of wealth in plenty. Next Atchison sat Miss Helena Forrest, the one member of the company who had not known where she was going until well upon her way there. Upon her the glance of the man standing by the chimney-piece fell least often, yet there was no person present of whom he was so unremittingly conscious. It may be said that from the moment that he had lifted her veil in his puzzled search for her identity, he had been conscious of little else.
There was not a single movement of Miss Forrest's hands—and she had certain little delightful, highly characteristic ways of helping out her speech with slight yet significant motions—but had its place in Brown's memory. She was not a frequent talker, she did not speak one word to Sue Breckenridge's fifty; but when she did speak, in her voice of slow music, people listened. And yet one never thought of her, Brown remembered, as a silent person; the effect of her presence in any circle was that of a personality of the active, not the passive, sort. The eyes of one speaking must, involuntarily, be drawn to her because she was listening, if I may coin a phrase, vividly. As for her looks—she possessed that indescribable charm which is not wholly a matter of beautiful features, but lies rather in such details as the lift of the eyebrow, the curve of the lip, the droop of the hair upon the brow. She was dressed much more simply than either of the older women present, yet with the simplicity, it must be admitted, of the artist. She seemed somehow to make their goodly showing fade before her own, as a crimson flower draws from the colour of one of delicate blue.
Well, take them separately or as a group, they were an absorbing study to the man who had seen so little of their kind for so long past, yet knew that kind by the wontedness of his lifetime. He seemed to himself somehow to be viewing them all, for the first time, from a vantage point he had never before occupied. Every word they said in their pleasantly modulated, well-bred voices, with the familiar accent of the educated environment from which they came, and from which he came—it was his accent, too, but somehow it sounded a bit foreign to him tonight—struck upon his ear with a new meaning. Each gesture they made, personal and familiar to him as they were, struck Brown now with its special individuality.
"It's not fair, Don," said Sue Breckenridge suddenly, "for you to stand over there in the shadow and watch us, without our being able to see your face at all."
"You don't realize," declared Brown, in answer to this assertion and the general assenting, laugh which followed it, backed by Atchison's. "Hear, hear!" "that the group you all make in the light of my fire is a picture far ahead of anything in Atchison's collection. I should be an unappreciative host indeed if I didn't make the most of it."
"What an artful speech!" laughed Mrs. Brainard, lifting fine eyes in an attempt to make out the shadowy face above her. "It's well calculated to distract our attention from the fact that you are not changing your position by so much as the moving of an arm. We came to see you, man, not to show ourselves to you."
"We came to cheer his loneliness," put in Hugh Breckenridge with a peculiar, cynical-sounding little laugh for which he was famous. "And we find him up to his neck in boys. Jove! How do you stand their dirty hands, Don? That's what would get me, no matter how good my intentions were."
"Those hands were every pair scrubbed to a finish, to-day, in honour ofThanksgiving. Do you think we have no manners here?" retorted Brown.
"That wasn't the dinner party you wrote me of when you refused to come to mine, was it, Don?" questioned his sister.
"No. This was an after-dinner party, partaking of the 'lavin's,'" Brown explained. "The real one was over an hour before."
"Do tell us about it. Did you enjoy it? Won't you describe your guests?"Mrs. Brainard spoke eagerly.
"With pleasure. The Kelceys are my next-door neighbours on the left. Mrs. Kelcey is pure gold—in the rough. Her husband is not quite her equal, but he knows it and strives to be worthy of her. The Murdisons, on the other side, are—Scotch granite—splendid building material. Old Mr. Benson, the watchmaker, is—well, he's full-jewelled. The others I perhaps can't characterize quite so easily, but among them I find several uncut gems of the semi-precious varieties. Of course there's considerable commonplace material—if you can ever call the stuff of which human beings are made commonplace, which I doubt. There's more or less copper and brass, with a good bit of clay—as there is in all of us. And a deal of a more spiritual element which can't be measured or described, but which makes them all worth knowing."
He had spoken in a thoughtful tone, as if he took Mrs. Brainard's question seriously and meant to answer it in the same way. A moment's silence followed. Then Doctor Brainard said slowly:
"I suppose you don't find those priceless elements among the people of your abandoned parish. Down there we're all copper and clay, eh?"
"If you had been clay I might have done more with you," was the quick retort.
"And you can do things with these people, can you? Dig out the rough gold, polish the uncut diamonds, build temples of the granite—and perhaps mold even the clay into works of art?"
The answer to the ironic question was grave enough, and it came with a quietness which spoke more eloquently than fervid tones would have done of the feeling behind it.
"No, Doctor, I can't hope to do those things. I'm not wise enough. But the things these people are going to do to me, if I'll let them, are worth coming for."
"They've done some of them already," murmured Mrs. Brainard. But nobody heard her except Sue Breckenridge, who cried out:
"And you're not a bit homesick, Don, while you're living like this?"
"If you people won't come up here very often and make me remember what being with you is like, I shall get on pretty well," said Brown's voice from the shadow.
"Then we'll come as often as we can," cried Sue triumphantly.
"No, you won't—not if you want to help me. My reputation as an indigent bachelor out of a job won't stand many onslaughts of company dressed as you are. If you want to come to see me you must come disguised. I'm afraid I'm under suspicion already."
"Explain to them that we're the clay, they the uncut diamonds. That will let you out," advised Doctor Brainard grimly.
"Ah, but you don't look the part," said Brown, laughing. "You look like what you are, a big jewel of a fellow, as my friend Mrs. Kelcey would say. To tell the truth, you all seem like jewels to me to-night—and such polished ones you dazzle my eyes. Hugh, I'd forgotten what a well-cut coat looked like. I remember now."
"You seem pretty well dressed yourself," remarked Atchison, peering up into the shadow. "According to Mrs. Breckenridge, you go about dressed in monk's cloth, and a shabby variety at that. This doesn't look like it."
"He was wearing a dreadful, old shiny serge suit when I saw him a fortnight ago," said Sue. "And such a scarf-pin! Don, are you wearing that same scarf-pin to-night? Do show it to them."
"Does choosing to live by himself make a man a fair target for all the quips and arrows of his friends?" Brown queried, at the same time withdrawing obediently the little silver pin from his cravat and giving it into Atchison's outstretched hand. "Be just to that pin, Webb. It was given me by a special friend of mine."
"How will you exchange?" Atchison inquired gravely, touching his own neckwear as he examined the pin. A rare and costly example of the jeweller's art reposed there, as might have been expected.
"I'll not exchange, thank you."
"Neither will I," declared Atchison, leaning back with a laugh and passing the pin on down the line.
Hugh Breckenridge gave the obviously cheap and commonplace little article one careless glance, and handed it to Miss Forrest. She examined it soberly, as if seeking to find its peculiar value in its owner's eyes. Then she looked at Brown.
"This has a story, I am sure, or you wouldn't care so much for it," she said. "Are we worthy to hear it, Mr. Brown?"
His eyes met hers, though as he stood she could barely make out that fact.
"I should like you to hear it."
"Come out of the darkness, Don, please!" begged his sister again.
The others echoed the wish, and Brown, yielding against his will—somehow he had never wanted more to remain in the shadow—took a chair at one end of the hearth, where he was in full view of them all. "It was given me," said Brown, speaking in a tone which instantly arrested even Hugh Breckenridge's careless attention, though why it did so he could not have said, "by a man whose son was wearing it when he stood on a plank between two windows, ten stories up in the air, and passed fifteen girls over it to safety. Then—the plank burned through at one end. He had known it would."
There fell a hush upon the little group. Mrs. Brainard put out her hand and touched Brown's shoulder caressingly.
"No wonder you wouldn't exchange it, Don," she said, very gently.
"Was the father at your dinner, Don?" Doctor Brainard asked, after a minute.
"Yes, Doctor."
"So you wore it to please him," commented Sue.
"He wore it," said Helena Forrest, "as a man might wear theVictoria Cross."
"Ah, but I didn't earn it," denied Brown, without looking up.
"I'm not so sure of that," Mrs. Brainard declared. "You must have done something to make the father feel you worthy to wear a thing he valued so much."
"He fancied," said Brown—"he and the mother—that there was a slight resemblance between my looks and those of the son. And they have a finer memorial of him than anything he wore; they have one end of the burned plank. The father has cut the date on it, with his son's name, and it hangs over the chimney-piece."
"What a tragic thing!" cried Sue, shuddering. "I don't see how they can keep it. Do tell us something else, Don. Doesn't anything amusing ever happen here? Oh—what became of the baby?"
Brown rose suddenly to his feet. "I'm forgetting my hospitality," said he. "I'm going to make you all some coffee. The baby, Sue, is at Mrs. Kelcey's, next door. Having only six of her own, she could easily make room for the seventh."
"Tell us about the baby," demanded Webb Atchison. "Has Don gone into the nursery business, with all the rest?"
Sue began to tell the story, describing the night on which she made her first visit to her brother. Brown disappeared into the kitchen and soon returned, bringing with him, as was his entertaining custom, the materials for brewing his coffee upon the hob.
"You remember," he said, as he came, "the way this room was cleared for your reception?"
"By an avalanche of boys, who swept everything, hurly-burly, into outer darkness," supplied Breckenridge.
"You can guess, perhaps, what the kitchen must be looking like, can't you?"
"Indescribable," murmured Sue. "You're not going to invite us to put it in order for you, are you, Don?—and wash all those dreadful, gaudy plates and cups?"
"Just take a look out there, will you?"
Sue shook her head, but Mrs. Brainard went to the door, followed by Atchison and Miss Forrest. They looked out upon a low-ceiled, lamp-lighted room, in absolute order, in which was not a trace of the late festival-making except the piles of clean dishes upon the table, under which lay Bim, nose on paws, alert eyes on the strangers.
"Magic?" queried Mrs. Brainard. "Surely those noisy boys couldn't accomplish such a miracle?"
"Never. Though I suspect they were put to work by a good general, for the borrowed chairs are gone and so are several other bulky articles. There's no difficulty in guessing who did the deed," said Brown, busy with his coffee-making.
He served his guests presently with a beverage which made Atchison exclaim: "The old chap certainly knows how to make the best stuff I ever drank. When I tasted this brew first I invited myself to come out and stay a week with him, but he wouldn't have me."
"You're too polished an article for his hand; he wants his work-stuff raw," Doctor Brainard said again. Evidently this point rankled. Brown looked up.
"I'll challenge you to stay and have it out with me, Doctor," said he.
"Thank you, I came for no other purpose," retorted the doctor coolly. "These people brought me up to have a look at you, and I'm not going back till morning."
"That's great!" Brown's face showed his pleasure.
When Miss Forrest returned from her survey of the kitchen she had come straight to the corner of the hearth where Brown stood, and had taken the chair beside the one he had lately occupied. He was therefore beside her when he sat down to drink his coffee with his guests. At a moment when Webb Atchison and Sue Breckenridge were engaged in a bit of controversy over the relative merits of varying methods of coffee making, Helena Forrest turned to Brown, who had been looking into the fire without speaking.
"I hope you don't really mind our coming up here to-night," she said.
"Mind it? If I did, I couldn't blame you, for you came against your will," he answered—and his eyes were no longer upon the fire.
"Without my consent, but not, perhaps, against my will."
He regarded her intently. She met his look without turning aside.
"You felt a curiosity to see the hermit in his cell," was his explanation of the matter.
She nodded. "Of course. Who wouldn't, after such reports as Mrs.Breckenridge brought back?"
"And now that you have seen him—you are consumed with pity?"
"No. If I am consumed with anything it is with envy."
His low laugh spoke his disbelief. She read it in the sound and in the way his gaze left her face and went back to the fire.
"You don't think I mean that," said she.
"Hardly."
"Why not?"
"It is—inconceivable."
"Why?"
Her face, turned toward him, invited him to look at it again, but he did not—just then.
"Because you are—Helena Forrest," he answered.
"And what is she, please, in your opinion?"
"An inhabitant of another world than that I live in."
"A world of which you have an even poorer opinion than you used to have when you lived in it yourself!"
He smiled. "Anyhow, I am no longer in it. Nor ever shall go back."
A startled look passed over her face. "You don't mean that you intend to stay here—forever?"
"Not quite that. But I mean to do this sort of work, rather than the sort I began with. To do it I must live much as I am living now, where ever that may be. Now—what about the envy of me you profess?"
He turned, still smiling, at the little sound he caught from her half-closed lips.
"Are you happy in such a decision?" she murmured.
"Do I look like an unhappy man?"
She shook her head. "That's what I have been noticing about you ever since I came. You did look unhappy when you went away. Now, you don't. And it is the look on your face which gives me the sense of envy."
Brown gave one quick glance at the rest of the party. "Do you mean to say," he questioned, very low, "that you are not happy?"
"Does that seem so strange?"
"It might very naturally seem so, to one who knows what you have to make you the happiest of the happy."
"You yourself didn't find happiness among similar surroundings," she said, looking at him intently.
"Similar?" The thought seemed to amuse him.
"Well, weren't they similar? At any rate we were in the same world, and you say now we are not."
"We are so far apart," said he evenly, "that we can only signal to each other. And even then—neither is familiar with the other's code!"
"Oh!" she exclaimed, and a strange expression showed in her eyes. "What a hard, hard thing for you to say! It doesn't sound like you."
"Hard?" he questioned, with a contraction of the brows. "It is substantially what you yourself once said. If it was true then, it must be true now."
Moved by some impulse the two looked at each other searchingly, Donald Brown's face grave but tense, Helena Forrest's full of a proud pain. Clearly they were not understanding each other's code now—so much was evident.
At this instant, without warning, the outer door flew open. Mrs. Kelcey, her round red face disordered, her breath coming short, stood upon the threshold and spoke pantingly, without regard to the company assembled:
"Mr. Brown, sor! The baby's dyin—the sthranger child. It was took all of a suddint. Would ye moind comin' to say a bit of a prayer over him? Father McCarty's away, or I wouldn't ask it."
She was gone with the words. With the first sentence Brown had sprung to his feet. As Mary Kelcey vanished he turned to Doctor Brainard.
"Come, Doctor," he said, with a beckoning hand. "While I say the bit of a prayer you try what you can do to keep the baby here!"
The eminent physician rose rather slowly to his feet. "It's probably no use," he demurred. "The woman knows."
"The Lord knows, too," declared Brown, with a propelling hand on his friend's arm: "knows that you're here to give the child a chance. Come! Hurry!"
The two went out. Doctor Brainard would have stayed for his hat and overcoat, but Brown would brook no delay.
Left behind, the party by the fire looked at one another with faces sobered. Hugh Breckenridge consulted his watch.
"It's time we were off," he declared. "The Doctor's going to stay anyway, and it's no use waiting for Don to come back."
"That's right," agreed Webb Atchison. "I came up here once before, about six months ago, and I saw then enough of the way things went here to know that he lives at the beck and call of every man, woman, and child in this district—and they call him, too. He'd just finished sobering up a drunkard that night, or scant attention I'd have had. Well, I'll walk down to the hotel and send back Rogers and the car. Be ready in ten minutes?"
They said they would be ready. But in Brown's little bedroom, donning furry wraps, Helena Forrest spoke in Sue Breckenridge's ear:
"I can't bear to go till we know how it comes out."
Sue stared at her. "You don't mean to say you care? Why—it's just a forlorn little foundling—better dead than alive. I saw it when I was here two weeks ago. It has nothing to live for, dear. Don't think of it again."
"But he cared—your brother cared," said Helena Forrest.
"Oh, Don cares about everything. I never saw such a soft heart. Of course I think it's lovely of him, though I don't understand how he can be so absorbed in such a class of people."
Miss Forrest went to the one window of the room. She lifted the plain shade which covered it and looked out into the night.
Ten yards away she saw a brightly lighted, uncurtained window, beyond which were figures, plainly discernible. The figures were moving, one bringing a pail, another stooping—the scene was not one of still waiting but of tense action. She caught a glimpse of Doctor Brainard's tall form bending above something at one side, then she saw Brown himself cross the room in haste.
Mrs. Brainard and Sue went back to the outer room to stand before the fire with the purpose of accumulating all the bodily heat possible before the long, cold drive. Miss Forrest, unheeding them, remained by the window in the unlighted bedroom. Minutes passed. Hugh Breckenridge had fallen to examining the larger room's eighteenth century features—he was something of a connoisseur in antiques.
Helena, turning from the window for a moment, scanned the shadowy room in which she stood. It was very scantily furnished with the bare essentials. Upon the plain chest of drawers which held Brown's bachelor belongings stood a few simply framed photographs; an old set of hanging bookshelves was crammed full of books, with more overflowing upon the floor.
Suddenly, as she stood there, an outer door banged; swift footsteps crossed the floor. Helena turned to see Donald Brown himself rushing into the room. He ran to the chest of drawers, pulled one open, searched a minute, withdrew something, and was hurrying out of the room again, when he caught sight of the figure at the window. Involuntarily he halted for an instant.
"Can you save it?" Helena cried, under her breath.
"I don't know—Brainard's got his coat off. Pray for us, will you?"
He was gone again.
Beside the narrow bed on which he lay every night, there dropped upon its knees a figure in sumptuous furs; a face such as men vow themselves ready to die for was pressed into the hard little pillow. Helena Forrest breathed a prayer of beseeching for a life she had never seen, and when she had done lifted eyes wet with tears.
As Hugh Breckenridge, protesting at the lateness of the hour, marshalled his friends into the great car at the door, Doctor Brainard came out of Mrs. Kelcey's house and ran across to the curb.
"Don wants me to tell you that the baby's pulled through. It's gone off to sleep with his finger in its fist, and he won't leave it. He says 'good-night' to you."
"Was it the prayer or the potion that saved it, Doctor?" questionedBreckenridge in his caustic tone.
"I don't know," said the doctor—and there was something new and gentle in his voice. "It was very nearly beyond potions—I'm inclined to think it was the prayer." An hour afterward, Doctor Brainard, sitting wide-awake and thoughtful before Brown's fire, was aware of the quiet entrance of the younger man. He looked up, and a radiant smile met him.
"Still doing well, I see, Don."
Brown nodded. He sank down into the chair opposite the doctor and ran his hand through his hair. In spite of the brightness of his face the gesture betrayed weariness.
Doctor Brainard got up. He went over to the corner where his overcoat hung upon a peg in the wall, and took from a pocket a small instrument composed mostly of tubes. He inserted certain earpieces in his ears and returned to the fire.
"Sit up and let me get at you," he commanded.
Brown glanced round, saw the doctor's grotesque appearance with the stethoscope in position, and shook his head. "That's not fair. I was up rather early, and it's been a fairly full day—and night. Take me in the morning."
"I'll take you right now, when you're tired enough to show up whatever's there. Coat off, please."
He made his examination painstakingly, omitting no detail of his inquiry into the state of both heart and lungs.
"What would you say if I told you you were in a bad way?" he asked.
Brown smiled. "I shouldn't believe you. I know you too well. You can't disguise the fact that you find nothing new, and the old things improved. I know I'm stronger than I was a year ago. Why shouldn't I be—with nothing to do but take care of myself?"
The doctor whistled. "How do you make that out, that 'nothing to do?'"
"With the demands of a great parish off my shoulders the little I do here is child's play."
"After I left you with the baby," said the doctor, "Mrs. Kelcey followed me into the other room and told me a few things. In your old parish you had your sleep o' nights. In your new one I should say you spend the sleeping hours in activity."
"In my old parish," said Brown, studying the fire with an odd twist at the corners of his lips, "I lay awake nights worrying over my problems. Here, I'm asleep the minute my head touches the pillow. Isn't that a gain?"
"Too weary to do anything else, I suppose. Well, I shall have to admit that you are improved—surprisingly so. You are practically well. But what I can't understand is how a man of your calibre, your tastes, your fineness of make-up, can stand consorting with these people. Be honest, now. After such a visit as you've had to-night with the old friends, don't you feel a bit like giving in and coming back to us?"
Brown lifted his head. "Doctor," said he, slowly, and with a peculiar emphasis which made his friend study his face closely, "if the Devil wanted to put temptation in my way, just as I have decided on my future course, he did it by sending you and the others down here to-night. If I could have jumped into that car with the rest of you, and by that one act put myself back in the old place, I would have done it—but for one thing. And that's the sure knowledge that soft living makes me soft. I love the good things of this life so that they unfit me for real service. Do you know what was the matter with my heart when I came away? I do. It was high living. It was sitting with my legs under the mahogany of my millionaire parishioners' tables, driving in their limousines, drinking afternoon tea with their wives, letting them send me to Europe whenever I looked a bit pale. Soft! I was a down pillow, a lump of putty. I, who was supposed to be a fighter for the Lord!"
"Nonsense, man!" cried the doctor, now thoroughly aroused. "You were the hardest worker in the city. Your organizations—your charities—"
"My organizations, my charities!" The words came in a tone of contempt. "They were all in fine working order when I came to them. They continued to work, with no help from me. They are working quite as well now in my absence as they did in my presence. St. Timothy's is a great, strong society of the rich, and the man they engage to preach to them on Sundays has mighty little to do that any figurehead couldn't do as well. Down here—well, there is something to do which won't get done unless I do it. And if this neighbourhood, or any other similar one, needs me, there's no question that still more do I need the neighbourhood."
"In other words," said the doctor, "Mrs. Kelcey can do more for you thanBruce Brainard?"
The look which met his frown was comprehending. "Doctor," said Brown, "every man knows his own weakness. I like the society of Bruce Brainard so well that when I'm in it I can forget all the pain and sorrow in the world. When I'm with Mrs. Kelcey I have to remember the hurt, and the grind, and the hardness of life—and it's good for me. It helps me, as St. Paul said, to 'keep under my body and bring it into subjection.'"
"That's monkish doctrine."
"No, it's St. Paul's, I tell you. Remember the rest of it?—'lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway!'"
"You! A castaway!" The doctor laughed.
Brown nodded, rising. "You can see a long way into a man's body, Doctor, but not so far into his soul. There's been a pretty rotten place in mine…. Come, shall we go to bed? It's almost two."
The doctor assented, and Brown went into his bedroom to make it ready for his guest. Closing the drawers he had opened in such haste two hours before, his eye was caught by something unfamiliar. Against one of the framed photographs which stood upon the top of the chest leaned a new picture, unframed. By the light of the small lamp he had brought into the room he examined it. As the face before him was presented to his gaze he stopped breathing for the space of several thudding heartbeats.
Out of the veiling brown mists of the picture looked a pair of eyes at which one glance had long been of more moment to him than the chance to look long and steadily into other eyes. The exquisite lines of a face which, having seen, men did not forget, were there before him, in his possession. It was the face of the woman, young and rich with beauty and with worldly wealth, who had, three years before, refused to marry Donald Brown.
"How did this come here? Did Sue leave it? Or didyou?" He questioned the photograph in his mind, staring at it with eager eyes. "Wasn't it enough for you to come here to-night, to make me realize how far apart we are? You like to play with men's hearts—so they say. Don't you think it's a bit cruel to play with mine—now?"
But he looked and looked at the enchanting face. And even as he lookedDoctor Brainard called out from the other room:
"By the way, Don, I suppose you've noticed that Atchison seems to be getting on with his suit. Everybody thinks it's either an engagement or likely to be one soon. Pretty fine match, eh?"
It was a full minute before the answer came. When it did it sounded a little as if the speaker had his head in the clothespress which opened from the small bedroom, albeit the tone was gay enough:
"Webb's one of the best men I know. He deserves to win whatever he wants.Do you like a hard pillow or a soft, Doctor?"
On a certain morning in February, Mrs. Hugh Breckenridge alighted in haste from her limousine in front of a stately apartment house in the best quarter of a great city. She hurried through the entrance hall to the lift and was taken up with smooth speed to the seventh story. In a minute more she was eagerly pressing the button at the door of a familiar suite of rooms into which she had not had occasion to enter for more than a year, for the very good reason that they had been closed and unoccupied in the absence of their tenant.
The returned tenant himself opened the door to her, a tall figure looming in the dusk of an unlighted corridor—a tall figure infinitely dear to Sue Breckenridge.
"O Don!" cried the visitor in an accusing tone. "How could you come back without letting us know?"
"I've been back only an hour," explained Donald Brown, submitting to and warmly returning his sister's embrace. "How in the world did you hear of it so soon? Did Brainard—"
She nodded. "Mrs. Brainard called me up at once, of course. She knew you couldn't be serious in trying to keep people from knowing you were here, least of all your sister!"
"I was intending to come to you before luncheon; I only meant to surprise you. As for the rest—I should be glad if they needn't know; at least until I'm ready to leave."
"To leave! Don! You're not going to persist in going back! It can't be true! You won't give up this apartment—tell me you won't!"
His sister's tone was anguished. Before he answered Brown led her into the library of the suite, the room in which he had been occupied when her ring came, and put her into a big arm-chair, taking from her her wrap and furs. Then he sat down upon the edge of a massive mahogany writing-table near by, crossing his long legs and folding his arms, while she mutely waited for him to speak.
"Sue," he said—and his face had in it a sort of reflection of the pain in hers—"you may be sure I haven't come to this decision without a deal of thought. But I've made it, and I'm going to stick to it because I believe it's the thing for me to do. I assure you that since I came into these rooms they have been beseeching me, as loudly as inanimate things can not to desert them. I'm going to find it the hardest task of my life to take leave of them."
"Don't take leave of them! Lock them up for another year, if you must persist in your experiment, but don't,don'tburn your bridges behind you! Oh, how can you think of leaving your splendid church and going off to consign yourself to oblivion, living with poor people the rest of your days? You—you—Don!—I can't believe it of you!"
His face, in his effort at repression, grew stern. His folded arms became tense in the muscles.
"Don't make it harder for me than it is. I can't discuss it with you, because though I argued till I was dumb I could never make you see what I see. Accept my decision, Sue dear, and don't try my soul by pleading with me…. I have a lot to do. I should like your help. See here, would you care to have any of my things? Look about you. This is rather a good rug under your feet. Will you have it—and any others you fancy?"
She looked down at the heavy Eastern rug, exquisite in its softness and richness of colouring.
It was one of which, knowing its value, she had long envied her brother the possession. She put up her hand and brushed away the mist from her eyes.
"Aren't you going to takeanycomfortable things with you? Are you going to go on living on pine chairs and rag carpets—you, who were brought up on rugs like this?"
He nodded. "For the most part. I've been wondering if I might indulge myself in one big easy chair, just for old times. But I'm afraid it won't do."
"Oh, mercy, Don! Whynot?"
"How should I explain its presence, opposite my red-cushioned rocker? Give it a good look, Sue, that chair, and tell me honestly if I can afford to introduce such an incongruous note into my plain bachelor house up there."
She surveyed the chair in question, a luxurious and costly type standing for the last word in masculine comfort and taste. It was one which had been given to Brown by Webb Atchison, and had long been a favourite.
"Oh, I don't know," she said hopelessly, shaking her head. "I can't decide for any monk what he shall take into his cell."
Brown flushed, a peculiar dull red creeping up under his dark skin. He smothered the retort on his lips, however, and when he did speak it was with entire control, though there was, nevertheless, an uncompromising quality in his inflection which for the moment silenced his sister as if he had laid his hand upon her mouth.
"Understand me, once for all, Sue—if you can. I am going into no monastery. To such a man as I naturally am, I am going out of what has been a sheltered life into one in the open. You think of me as retiring from the world. Instead of that, I am just getting into the fight. And to fight well—I must go stripped."
She shook her head again and walked over to the window, struggling with very real emotion. At once he was beside her, and his arm was about her shoulders. He spoke very gently now.
"Don't take it so hard, dear girl. I'm not going to be so far away that I can never come back. You will see me from time to time. I couldn't get on without my one sister—with father and mother gone, and the brothers at the other side of the world. Come, cheer up, and help me decide what disposal to make of my stuff. Will you take the most of it?"
She turned about, presently, dried her eyes determinedly, and surveyed the room. It was a beautiful room, the sombre hues of its book-lined walls relieved by the rich and mellow tones of its rugs and draperies, the distinguished furnishings of the writing-table, and the subdued gleam of a wonderful reading-lamp of wrought copper which had been given to Brown by Sue herself.
"If you will let me," she said, "I'll give up one room to your things and put all these into it. Aren't you even going to take your books?"
"I must—a couple of hundred, at least. I can't give up such old friends as these."
"A couple of hundred—out of a couple of thousand!"
"There are five thousand in this room," said Brown cheerfully. "But two hundred will give me a very good selection of favourites, and I can change them from time to time. I have sixty or seventy already with me…. Hello! Who can that be? Has Brainard been giving me away right and left?"
He answered the ring, and admitted Webb Atchison, rosy of cheek and rather lordly of appearance, as always. The bachelor came in, frowning even as he smiled, and bringing to Donald Brown a vivid suggestion of old days.
"Caught!" he cried, shaking hands. "Thought you could sneak in and out of town like a thief in the night, did you? It can't be done, old man."
He was in a hurry and could stay but ten minutes. Five of those he devoted to telling Brown what he thought of the news he had heard, by which he understood that St. Timothy's was to lose permanently the man whom it had expected soon to have back. Brown listened with head a little down-bent, arms folded again, lips set in lines of determination. He had been fully prepared for the onslaughts of his friends, but that fact hardly seemed to make it easier to meet them. When Atchison had delivered himself uninterrupted, Brown lifted his head with a smile.
"Through, Webb?" he asked.
"No, I'm not through, by a long shot, but it's all I have time for now, for I came on a different matter. Since I heard you were here I've been telephoning around, and I've got together a little dinner-party for to-night that you won't evade if you have a particle of real affection for me. I'm not going to be cheated out of it. It'll be a hastily arranged affair, but there may be something decent to eat and drink. Brainard tells me you're not going to linger in town an hour after your business is done, so I thought best to lose no time. You'll come, of course? The way you're looking just now I don't know but you're equal to refusing me even such a small favour as this one!"
Brown crossed the room, to lay his hands on Atchison's shoulders. His eyes were dark with suppressed feeling.
"My dear old friend," said he affectionately, "I wish you wouldn't take the thing this way. I'm not dealing blows at those I love; if I'm dealing them at anybody it's at myself. I can't possibly tell you what it means to me—this crisis. I can only ask you not to think hardly of me. As for the dinner, if it will please you to have me agree to it I will, only—I should a little rather have you stand me up against a wall and take a shot at me!"
"For a deserter?"
Atchison spoke out of his grief and anger, not from belief in the motive he imputed. When he saw Donald Brown turn white and clench the hands he dropped from his friend's shoulders, Atchison realized what he had done. He winced under the sting of the quick and imperious command which answered him:
"Take that back, Webb!"
"I do—and apologize," said the other man instantly, and tears smarted under his eyelids. "You know I didn't mean it, Don. But—hang it all!—I'm bitterly disappointed and I can't help showing it."
"Disappointed in me—or in my act?" Brown was still stern.
"In your act, of course. I'm bound to acknowledge that it must take a brave man to cut cables the way you're doing—a mighty brave man."
"I don't care about being considered brave, but I won't be called a coward."
"I thought," said Atchison, trying to smile, "there was something in yourBible about turning the other cheek."
"There is," said Brown steadily. "And I do it when I come to your dinner.But between now and then I'll knock you down if you insult the courseI've laid out for myself."
The two men gazed at each other, the one the thorough man of the world with every sign of its prospering touch upon him, the other looking somehow more like a lean and hardened young soldier of the army than a student of theology. Both pairs of eyes softened. But it was Atchison's which gave way first.
"Confound you, Don—it's because of that splendidly human streak in you that we love you here. You've always seemed to have enough personal acquaintance with the Devil and his works to make you understand the rest of us, and refrain from being too hard on us."
At which Sue Breckenridge—who had been listening with tense-strung nerves to the interview taking place in her presence—laughed, with an hysterical little sob shaking her. Both men looked at her.
"Poor Sue," said Brown. "She doesn't like to have you quarrel with me, yet it's all she can do to keep from quarrelling with me herself! Between you, if you don't undermine my purpose, it will be only because I've been preparing my defenses for a good while and have strong patrols out at the weak points."
"I give you fair warning, I'll undermine it yet if I can," and Atchison gripped Brown's hand with fervor before he went away, charging Sue Breckenridge with the responsibility of bringing her brother to the dinner to be given that evening.
"Now, what"—said Brown, turning to his writing-table when Atchison had gone, and absently picking up a bronze paper-weight which lay there—"put it into his head to fire a dinner at me the moment he knew I was here?"
"We all have a suspicion," said Sue, watching him as she spoke, "that he and Helena are ready to announce their engagement. It may have popped into his head that with you here it was just the time to do it. Of course," she went on hurriedly, in answer to something she thought she saw leap into her brother's face, "we don't absolutely know that they're engaged. He's been devoted for a good while, and since he's never been much that sort with women it looks as if it meant something."
"It looks it on his part," said Brown, opening a drawer in the table and appearing to search therein. "Does it look it on hers?"
"Not markedly so. But Helena's getting on—she must be twenty-six or seven—and she always seems happy with him. Of course that's no evidence, for she has such a charmingly clever way with men you never can tell when she's bored—and certainly they can't. It's just that it seems such a splendidly fitting match we're confident there's ground for our expectations."
"I see. Altogether, that dinner promises well for sensations—of one sort or another. Meanwhile, shall we pitch into business?"
Together they went through Brown's apartment, which was a large one, and comprised everything which he had once considered necessary to the comfort of a bachelor establishment. As he looked over that portion of the place pertaining to the cooking and serving of food he smiled rather grimly at the contrast it inevitably brought to his mind. Standing before the well-filled shelves in the butler's pantry he eyed a certain cherished set of Sèvres china, thinking of the cheap blue-and-white ware which now filled all his needs, and recalling with a sense of amusement the days, not so long past, when he would have considered himself ill served had his breakfast appeared in such dishes.
"It's all in the way you look at it, Sue," he exclaimed, opening the doors of leaded glass and taking down a particularly choice example of the ceramic art in the shape of a large Satsuma plate. "Look at that, now! Why should a chop taste any better off that plate than off the one I ate from this morning at daybreak? It tastes no better—I vow it doesn't taste as good. I've a keener appetite now than last year, when Sing Lee, my Chinese cook, was cudgelling his Asiatic brains to tempt me."
"That's not the way I look at it," Sue answered mournfully. "To me it makes all the difference in the world how food is served, not to mention how it is cooked. Do you ever have anything but bacon and eggs at that dreadful place of yours?"
"Bless your heart, yes! I don't deny myself good food, child—get that out of your mind. Why, just night before last Jennings and I had an oyster roast, on the half-shell, over the coals in my fireplace. My word, but they were good! If Webb can give us anything better than that to-night he'll surprise me."
"Who is Jennings? A laundryman or a policeman?"
"Neither. Jennings is a clerk in the office of a great wholesale hardware house. He was down on his luck, a while back, but he's pulled out of his trouble. When his wife's called out of town, as she often is by the old people back home, he keeps me company. He's particularly fond of roasted oysters, is Jennings, since a certain night when I introduced them to his unaccustomed palate. It's great fun to see him devour them."
Sue shook her head again. She could seem to do little else these days, being in a perpetual state of wonder and regret over that which she could not understand—quite as her brother had said. He sent her away an hour before luncheon time, telling her that he would follow when he had attended to certain matters in which she could not help. Having put her into her car, he waved a cheery hand at her as she drove away, and returned to his apartment. He lingered a little at the lift to ask after the welfare of the young man who operated it, whom he had known in past days; but presently he was in his library again with the door locked behind him. And here for a brief space business was suspended.
Before the big leather chair he fell upon his knees, burying his head in his arms.
"Oh, good Father,'" said Brown, just above his breath, "only Thou canst help me through this thing. It's even harder than I thought it would be. I want the old life, I want the old love—my heart is weak within me at the thought of giving them up…. I know the temptation comes not from without but from within. It's my own weak self that is my enemy, not the lure of the life I'm giving up…. Give me strength—fighting strength…. Help me—'not to give in while I can stand and see.'"
Presently he rose to his feet. He was pale, but in his face showed the renewed strength of purpose he had asked for. He set about the task of packing the few things he meant to take with him, working with a certain unhurried efficiency which accomplished no small amount in that hour before luncheon. Then he descended to find his sister's car waiting for him, and was whirled away.