CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“I guess not,” said the youth, and disappeared into the woods on a bicycle.

“Oh, it will be only a step,” said Lois, starting off in the direction indicated, followed perforce by Dosia with the hand-bag, both walking in silence.

The excursion, from an easily imagined, matter-of-fact daylight possibility, had been growing gradually a thing of the dark, unknown, fantastic. A faint remnant of the fading light remained in the west, vanishing as they looked at it. Above the treetops a pale moon hung high; there seemed nothing to connect them with civilization but that iron track curved out of sight.

The quarter of a mile prolonged itself indefinitely, with that strangely eternal effect of the unknown; yet the big iron gates were reached at last, showing a long winding drive within. It was here that Eugene Larue had built a house for his bride, living in it these summers when she was away, alone among his kind, a man who must confess tacitly before the world that he was unable to make his wife care for him—a darkened, desolate, lonely life, as dark and as desolate as this house seemed now. An undefined dread possessed Dosia, though Lois spoke confidently:

“The walk has not really been very long. We’ll probably drive back. It’s odd that there are no lights, but perhaps he is sitting outside. Ah, there’s a light!”

Yet, as she spoke, the light left the window and hung on the cornice above—it was the moon and not a lamp that had made it. They ascended the piazza steps; there was no one there.

“There is a knocker at the front door,” said Lois. She pounded, and the noise vibrated terrifyingly through the stillness. At the same instant a scraping on the gravel walk behind them made them turn. It was the boy on the bicycle, who, having sped back to them, was wheeling around at the moment that he might lose no impetus in retracing his way, while he leaned over to call:

“Mr. Larue ain’t there. The woman who closed up the house told me he had a cable from his wife, and he sailed for Europe this afternoon. She says, do you want the key?”

“No,” said Lois, and the messenger once more disappeared.

“I wish he had waited until we could have asked him some questions,” said Dosia, vexed. “Don’t let’s stay here; it’s too dark and too dreadfully lonely under these trees. We had better get back to the station and wait for the train.”

“I suppose so,” said Lois drearily. This, then, was the end of her exaltation—for this she had passionately nerved herself! There was to be neither the warmth of instant comprehension of her errand, nor the frank giving of aid when necessity had been pleaded; there was nothing. She shifted the baby over to the other shoulder, and theyretraced their way, which now seemed familiar and short. There was, at any rate, a light on a tall pole in front of the little station, although the station itself was deserted; they seated themselves on the bench under it to wait. The train was not scheduled for nearly an hour yet. The watch that Lois carried showed that it was a quarter to nine.

“Oh, if I could only fly back!” she groaned. “I don’t see how I can wait—I don’t see how I can wait! Oh, why did I come?”

“Perhaps there is a train before the one you spoke of,” said Dosia, with the terribly self-accusing feeling now that she ought to have prevented the expedition at the beginning. She got up to go into the little box of a house, in search of a time-table. As she passed the tall post that held the light, she saw tacked on it a paper, and read aloud the words written on it below the date:

NOTICENO TRAINS WILL RUN ON THIS ROAD TO-NIGHTAFTER 8.30 P.M., ON ACCOUNT OF REPAIRS

NOTICE

NO TRAINS WILL RUN ON THIS ROAD TO-NIGHT

AFTER 8.30 P.M., ON ACCOUNT OF REPAIRS

Dosia and Lois looked at each other with the blankness of despair—the frantic, forlornly heroic impulse, uncalculating of circumstances, began to show itself in all its piteous woman-folly.

Only fifty miles from a great city, the little station seemed like the typical lodge in a wilderness; as far as one could see up or down the track, on either side were wooded hills. A vast silence seemed to be gathering from unseen fastnesses, to halt in this spot.

There were no houses and no light to be seen anywhere, except that one swinging on the pole above, and the moon which was just rising. It was, in fact, one of those places which consist of the far, back-lying acres of the great country-owners, and which seem to the casual traveler forgotten or unknown in their extent and apparently primitive condition. The other railroad, six or seven miles away, went past the country towns and the façaded mansions and the conventional horticultural grounds of the possessors of these uncultivated tracts of woodland.

To the women sitting on the bench, wrapped around by the loneliness and the intense stillness of the oncoming night, the whole expedition appeared at last unveiled in all its grim betrayal. While Lois had been exaltedly imaginative, had resolved so desperately, had acted so daringly, there had never been, from the inception of the scheme, any chance that it could succeed. For the first time since Lois had left home, a wild seething anxietyfor Justin possessed her. How could she have left him? She must go back to him at once!

“Oh, Dosia, we must get home again; we must get home!” she cried, starting up so vehemently that the baby in her arms screamed, startled, and Lois walked up and down distractedly hushing him, and then, as he still wailed, sat down once more and bared her white bosom to quiet him, talking the while in a low tone: “We will have to get back; Dosia, we must start at once.”

“We will have to walk to Haledon,” said Dosia.

“Yes, yes. Perhaps we may come to some farmhouse where they will let us have a wagon, or one may pass us on the way and give us a lift. It is seven miles to Haledon—that isn’t very far! I often walked five miles with Justin before I was married, and a mile or two more is nothing. There are plenty of trains from Haledon.”

“Oh, we can do it easily enough,” said Dosia, though her heart was as lead within her breast. “You had better eat some of these biscuits before we start,” she advised, taking them out of the bag; and Lois munched them obediently, and drank some tepid water from a pitcher which Dosia had found inside. As she put it back again in its place, she slipped to the side of the platform and looked down the moon-filled narrow valley.

Through all this journey Dosia had carried double thoughts; her voice called where none might hear. It spoke to far distances now as she whispered, with hands outspread:

“Oh,whyweren’t you in when I went for you? Why didn’t you come and take care of us, when I needed you so much? Why did you let us go off this way? You mighthave known! Whydon’tyou come and take care of us? There’s no one to take care of us but you!Youcould!” A dry sob stopped the words—the deep, inherent cry of womankind to man for help, for succor. She stooped over and picked up an oak-leaf that had lain on the ground since the winter, and pressed it to her bosom, and sent it fluttering off on a gust of wind down the incline, as if it could indeed take her message with it, before she went back to Lois.

After some hesitation as to the path,—one led across the rails from where they were sitting,—they finally took that behind the station, which broadened out into a road that lay along the wooded slope above, from which they could look down at intervals and see the track below. One side of that road was bordered by a high wire fencing inclosing pieces of woodland, sometimes so thick as to be impenetrable, while along other stretches there would be glimpsed through the trees some farther open field. To the right toward the railway, there were only woods and no fencing.

The two walked off briskly at first, but the road was of a heavy, loose, shelving soil in which the foot sank at each step; the grass at the edge was wet with dew and intersected by the ridged, branching roots of trees; the pace grew, perforce, slower and slower still. They took turns in carrying the baby, whose small bundled form began to seem as if weighted with lead.

Far over on what must have been the other side of the track, they occasionally saw the light of a house; at one place there seemed to be a little hamlet, from the number of lights. They were clearly on the wrong bank; theyshould have crossed over at the station. The only house they came to was the skeleton of one, the walls blackened and charred with fire. There was only that endless line of wire fencing along which they pushed forward painfully, with dragging step; instead of passing any given point, the road seemed to keep on with them, as if they could never get farther on. Wire fencing, and moonlight, and silence, and trees. Trees! They became nightmarishly oppressive in those dark, solemn ranks and groups—those silent thicknesses; the air grew chill beneath them; terror lurked in the shadows. Oh, to get out from under the trees, away into the open, with only the clear sky overhead! If that road to the house of Eugene Larue had seemed a part of infinity in the dimness of the unknown, what was this?

They sat down now every little while to rest, Dosia’s voice coaxing and cheering, and then got up to shake the earth out of their shoes and struggle on once more—bending, shivering, leaning against each other for support; two silent and puny figures, outside of any connection with other lives, toiling, as it seemed, against the universe, as women do toil, apparently futile of result.

Once the loud blare of a horn sent them over to the side of the road, clinging to the wire fencing, as an automobile shot by—a cheerful monster that spoke of life in towns, leaving a new and sharp desolation behind it. Why hadn’t they seen it before? Why hadn’t they tried to hail it when theydidsee? To have had such a chance and lost it! It seemed to have come and gone too swiftly for coherent thought. Once they were frightened almost uncontrollably by a group of men approaching with strange sounds—agroup of Italian laborers, cheerful and unintelligible when Dosia intrepidly questioned them. They passed on, still jabbering, two bedraggled women and a baby were no novelty to them. Then there were more long, high fencing, and moonlight, and silence, and shadows, and trees—and trees—

“Do you suppose we’lleverget out of here?” asked Lois at last, dully.

“Why, of course; we can’t help getting out, if we keep on,” said Dosia, in a comfortingly matter-of-fact tone.

It was she who was helper and guide now.

“Oh, if I had never left Justin! Why, why did I leave him? How far do you think we have walked, Dosia?”

“It seems so endless, I can’t tell; but we must be nearly at Haledon,” said Dosia. “Let’s sit down and rest awhile here. Oh, Lois, Loisdear!” She had taken off her jacket and spread it on the damp grass for them both to sit on, huddled close together, and now pressed the older woman’s head down on her shoulder, holding both mother and child in her young arms. “Oh, Lois, Lois!”

Lois lay there without stirring. Far off in the stillness, there came the murmur of the brook they had passed in the train—so long since, it seemed! The moon hung higher above now, pouring a flood of light down through the arching branches of the trees upon her beautiful face with its closed eyes, and the tiny features of the sleeping child. Something in the utter relaxation of the attitude and manner began to alarm the girl.

“Lois, we must go on,” she said, with an anxious note in her voice. “Lois! Youmustn’tgive up. We can’t stay here!”

“Yes, I know,” said Lois. She struggled to her feet, and began to walk ahead slowly. Dosia, behind her, flung out her arms to the shadow-embroidered road over which they had just passed.

“Oh, whydon’tyou come!” she whispered again intensely, with passionate reproach; and then, swiftly catching up to Lois, took the child from her, and again they stumbled on together, haltingly, to the accompaniment of that far-off brook.

The wire fencing ceased, but the road became narrower, the walls of trees darker, closer together, though the soil under foot grew firmer. They had to stop every few minutes to rest. Lois saw ever before her the one objective point—a dimly lighted room, with Justin stretched out upon the bed, dying, while she could not get there. Hope was crushed out. Death and ruin—that was the end.

The end! There are paths one walks along in life that seem only to end in the barrier of a stone wall, with “No thoroughfare” written on it; there is no way beyond. Yet, when one gets close to that insurmountable, impenetrable barrier, how often there is seen to be some hitherto unnoticed aperture, some little postern-gate by which one can pass on into the highroad!

“Hark!” said Dosia suddenly, standing still. The sound of a voice trolling drunkenly made itself heard, came nearer, while the women stood terrified. The thing they had both unspeakably dreaded had happened; the moonlight brought into view the unmistakable figure of a tramp, with a bundle swung upon his shoulder. No terror of the future could compare with this one, that neared them with the seconds, swaying unsteadily from side to side of the road,as the tipsy voice alternately muttered and roared the reiterated words:

“For I have come from Pad-dy land,The land—I do adore!”

They had fled, crouching into the bushes at the edge of the path, and he passed with his eyes on the ground, or he must have seen—a blotched, dark-visaged, leering creature, living in an insane world of his own. They waited until he was far out of sight before creeping, all of a tremble, from their shelter, only to hear another footfall unexpectedly near—the pad, pad, pad of a runner, a tall figure as one saw it through the lights and shadows under the trees, capless and coatless, with sleeves rolled up, arms bent at the elbows, and head held forward. Suddenly the pace slackened, stopped.

“Greatheavens!” said the voice of Bailey Girard.

“Oh, it’s you, it’s you!” cried Dosia, running to him with an ineffable, revealing gesture, a lovely motion of her upflinging arms, a passion of joy in the face upraised to his, that called forth an instantly flashing, all-embracing light in his.

In that moment there was an acknowledgment in each of an intimacy that went back of all words, back of all action. The arms that upheld her gripped her close to him as one who defends his own as he said tensely:

“That beast ahead, did he touch you?”

“Oh, no; he didn’t see us. We hid!” She tried to explain in hurrying, disconnected sentences. “I’ve been longing andprayingfor you to come! I tried to let you know before we started, and you weren’t there. Lois was half crazyabout Justin. Come to her now! She wanted to see Mr. Larue, and he was gone. We’ve walked from Collingswood; we have the baby with us.”

“Thebaby!”

“Yes; she couldn’t leave him behind. Oh, it’s been so terrible! If you had only known!”

“Oh, why didn’t I?” he groaned. “I ought to have known—Ioughtto have known! I was in that motor that must have passed you; it was just a chance that I got out to walk.” They had reached the place where Lois sat, and he bent over her tenderly. She smiled into his anxious eyes, though her poor face was sunken and wan.

“I’m glad it’s you,” she whispered. “You’ll help me to get home!”

“Dear Mrs. Alexander! I want to help you to more than that. I want you to tell me everything.” He pressed her hand, and stood looking irresolutely down the road.

“I could go to Haledon, and send back a carriage for you; it’s three miles further on.”

“No, no, no! Don’t leave us!” the accents came in terror from both. “We can walk with you. Only don’t leave us!”

“Very well; we’ll try it, then.”

He took the warm bundle that was the sleeping child from Lois, saying, as she half demurred, “It’s all right; I’ve carried ’em in the Spanish-American War in Cuba,” holding it in one arm, while with the other he supported Lois. The dragging march began again, Dosia, stumbling sometimes, trying to keep alongside of him, so that when he turned his head anxiously to look for her she would be there, to meet his eyes with hers, bravely scorning fatigue.

The trees had disappeared now from the side of the road; long, swelling, wild fields lay on the slopes of the hillside, broken only by solitary clumps of bushes—fields deserted of life, broad resting-places for the moonlight, which illumined the farthest edge of the scene, although the moon itself was hidden by the crest of a hill. And as they went on, slowly perforce, he questioned Lois gently; and she, with simple words, gradually laid the facts bare.

“Oh, why didn’t Alexander tell me all this?” he asked pitifully, and she answered:

“He said it was no use; he said you had no money.”

“No; but I can sometimes get it for other people! I could have gone to Rondell Brothers and got it.”

“Rondell Brothers? I thought they were difficult to approach.”

“That depends. I was with Rondell’s boy in Cuba when he had the fever, and he’s always said—but that’s neither here nor there. Apart from that, they’ve had their eye on your husband lately. You can’t hide the quality of a man like him, Mrs. Alexander; it shows in a hundred ways that he doesn’t think of. They have had dealings with him, though he doesn’t know it—it’s been through agents. Mr. Warren, one of their best men, has, it seems, taken a fancy to him. I shouldn’t wonder if they’d take over the typometer as it stands, and work Alexander in with it. If Rondell Brothers really take up anyone——!” Girard did not need to finish.

Even Lois and Dosia had heard of Rondell Brothers, the great firm that was known from one end of the country to the other—a commercial house whose standing was as firm, as unquestioned, as the Bank of England, and almostas conservative. Apart from this, its reputation was unique. The house was more than a commercial establishment: it was an institution, in which for three generations the firm known as Rondell Brothers had carried on, in the conduct of their business—and carried to high advantage—the principles of personal honor and honesty and fair dealing.

No boy or man of good character, intelligence, and industry was ever connected with Rondell’s without its making for his advancement; to get a position there was to be assured of his future. Their young men stayed with them, and rose steadily higher as they stayed, or went out from them strong to labor, backed with a solid backing. The number of young firms whom Rondell Brothers had started and made, and whose profit also afterwards profited them, were more than had ever been counted. They were never deceived, for they had an unerring faculty for knowing their own kind. No firm was keener. Straight on the nail themselves, they exacted the same quality in others. What they traded in needed no other guaranty than the name of Rondell.

If Rondell Brothers took Justin’s affairs in hand! Lois felt a hope that sent life through her veins.

“Oh, let us hurry home!” she pleaded, and tried to quicken her pace, though it was Girard who supported her, else she must have fallen, while Dosia slipped a little behind, still trying to keep her place by his side, so that she might meet his look when he turned to her.

“You’re so tired,” he whispered, with a break in his voice, “and I can’t help you!” and she tried to beat back that dear pity and longing with her comforting “No, no,no! I’m not really tired”; her voice thrilled with life, though her feet stumbled.

In that walk beside him, toiling slowly on and on in the bright, far solitude of those empty fields, where even their hands might not touch, they two were so heart-close—so heavenly, so fulfillingly near!

Once he whispered in a yearning distress, “Why are you crying?” And she answered through those welling tears:

“I’m only crying because I’m so glad you’re here!”

After a while there was a sound of wheels—wheels! Only a sulky, it proved to be—a mere half-wagon set low down in the springs, and a trotting horse in front, driven by a round-faced boy in a derby hat, the turnout casting long, thin shadows ahead before Girard stopped it.

“You’ll have to take another passenger,” he said, after explaining matters to the half-unwilling boy, who crowded himself at last to the farthest edge of the seat, so that Lois might take possession of the six inches allotted to her.

She held out her arms hastily. “My boy!” she said, but it was a voice that had hope in it once more.

“Oh, yes, I forgot; here’s the baby,” said Girard, looking curiously at the bundle before handing it to her. “We’ll meet you at the Haledon station very soon now; my friends will have left my hat and coat there for me.”

In another moment the little vehicle was out of sight, jogging around a bend of the road.

So still was the night! Only that long, curving runnel of the brook again accompanied the silence. Not a leaf moved on the bushes of those far-swelling fields or on the hill that hid their summit; the air was like the moonlight, so fragrantly cool with the odors of the damp fern andbirch. The straight, supple figure of Girard still stood in the roadway, bareheaded, with that powerful effect which he had, even here, of absorbing all the life of the scene.

Dosia experienced the inexplicable feeling of the girl alone, for the first time, with the man who loves her and whom she loves. At that moment she loved him so much that she would have fled anywhere in the world from him.

The next moment he said in a matter-of-fact tone:

“Sit down on that stone, and let me shake out your shoes before we go on; they’re full of earth.”

She obeyed with an open-eyed gaze that dwelt on him while he knelt down and loosened the bows, and took off the little clumpy low shoes, shaking them out carefully, and then put them on once more, retying the bows neatly with long, slowly accomplishing fingers.

“They’ll get full of earth again,” she protested, her voice half lost in the silence.

“Then I’ll take them off and shake them out over again.”

He stood up, brushing the sand from his palms, smiling down at her as she stood up also. “I’ve always dreamed of doing that,” he said simply. “I’ve dreamed of taking you in my arms and carrying you off through the night—as I couldn’t that first time! I’ve longed so to do it. There have been times when I couldn’tstandit to see you, because you weren’t mine.” Then—her hands were in his, his dear, protecting hands, the hands she loved, with their thrilling, long-familiar touch, claiming as well as giving.

“Oh—Dosia!” he said below his breath.

As their eyes dwelt on each other in that long look, allthat had hurt love rose up between them, and passed away, forgiven. She foresaw a time when all her life before he came into it would have dropped out of remembrance as a tale that is told. And now——

It seemed that he was going to be a very splendid lover!

The summer was nearly at an end—a summer that had brought rehabilitation to the Typometer Company, yet rehabilitation of a certain kind, under strict rule, strict economy, endless work. Nominally the same thing, the typometer was now but one factor of trade among a dozen other patented inventions under the control of Rondell Brothers.

If there was not quite the same personal flavor as yet in Justin’s relation to the business which had seemed so inspiringly his own, there was a larger relation to greater interests, a wider field, a greater sense of security, and a sense of justice in the change; he felt that he had much to learn. There was something in him that could not profit where other men profited—that could not take advantage when that advantage meant loss to another. He was not great enough alone to reconcile the narrowing factors of trade with that warring law within him. The stumbling of Cater would have been another stumbling-block if it had not been that one; that for which Leverich, with Martin always behind him, had chosen Justin first had been the very thing that had fought against them.

He held out his arm unconsciously as Lois stole into the roomHe held out his arm unconsciously as Lois stole into the room

The summer was far spent. Justin had been working hard. It was long after midnight. Lois slept, but Justin could not; he rose and went into the adjoining room, and sat down by the open window. The night had been very close, but now a faint breath stirred from somewhere out of the darkness. It was just before the dawn—Justin looked out into a gloom in which the darkness of trees wavered uncertainly and brought with it a vague remembrance. He had done all this before. When? Suddenly he recollected the night he had sat at this same window, at the beginning of this terrible journey, and his thoughts and feelings then; his deep loneliness of soul, the prevision of the pain even of fulfillment—an endless, endless arid waste, with the welling forth of that black spirit of evil in his own nature as the only vital thing to bear him secret company—a moment that was wolfish to his better nature. Almost with the remembrance came the same mood, but only as reflected in the surface of his saner nature, not arising from it.

As he gazed, wrapped in self-communing, on the vague formlessness of the night, it began gradually to dissolve mysteriously, and the outlines of the trees and the surrounding objects melted into view; a bird sang from somewhere near by, a heavenly, clear, full-throated call that brought a shaft of light from across the world, broadening, as the eye leaped to it, into a great and spreading glory of flame.

It had rained just before; the drops still hung on bush and tree, and as the dazzling radiance of the sun touched them every drop also radiated light, prismatic and scintillating—an almost audibly tinkling joy. So indescribably wonderful and beautiful, yet so tender, seemed this scene—as of a mighty light informing the least atom of our tearful human existence—that the profoundest depths of Justin’s nature opened to the illumination.

In that moment, with calm eyes, and lips firmly pressed together, his thoughts reached upward; far, far upward. For the first time, he felt in accordance with something divine and beyond—an accordance that seemed to solve the meaning of life; what had gone and what was to come. All the hopes, the planning, the seeking and slaving, whatever they accomplished or did not accomplish, they fashioned us, ourselves. As it had been, so it still would be. But for what had gone before, he had not had this hour.

It was the journey itself that counted—the dear joys by the way, that come even through suffering and through pain—the joy of the red dawn, of the summer breeze, of the winter sun; the joy of children, the joy of companionship.

He held out his arm unconsciously as Lois stole into the room.

THE END

By Mary Stewart Cutting

THE SUBURBAN WHIRL

The first story in the book may be properly termed a “long” story of married life. It is a wholesome, delicately humorous and pathetic account of the struggles of a young couple to establish themselves in the suburbs. With this, three equally charming shorter stories of “the happiest time” make up the volume.

“The charm of these stories is that they are about real people in a real world.”San Francisco Call.

Illustrations by Alice Barber Stephens. $1.25

LITTLE STORIES OF MARRIED LIFE

“Mrs. Cutting has written a book so typically American that it should appeal to every American reader who respects the institution of marriage, and who is honest enough to admit that love is the only solution of the problem.”New York Globe.

Seventh Edition. Cloth, $1.35