He came toward her with the pitcherHe came toward her with the pitcher
Justin was in Chicago,—the fact was verified, and he would start for home on the morrow. There seemed to be no details, save the comforting one that Billy Snow was with him. After that first sharp immediate relief from suspense, Lois again felt its filminess settling down upon her, all the more clingingly each time, not to be fully dissipated, after all, until Justin’s bodily return.
Girard had gone back very early to the Snows’ to breakfast. He talked to Lois by telephone, but he did not come to the house; while Dosia, wrapped in an outward abstraction that concealed a whirl within, went about her daily tasks, living over and over the scene of the night before. The shattering of the pitcher seemed to have shattered something else. Once he had felt, then, as she had done; once—so far away that night of disaster had gone, so long was it since she had held that protecting hand in her dreams, that the touch brought a strange resurrection of the spirit. She had an upwelling new sense of gratitude to him for something unexpressed, some quality which she passionately revered, and which other men had not always used toward her.
“Oh, he’sgood, he’s good!” she whispered to herself, with the tears blinding her, as she picked up Redge’s blocks from the floor. She felt Lawson’s kisses on her lips, herthroat—that cross of shame that she held always close to her; George Sutton’s fat face thrust itself leeringly before her. How many girls have passages in their lives to which they look back with the shame that only purity and innocence can feel! Yet the sense of Girard’s presence before was as nothing to her sense of it now—it blotted out the world. She saw him sitting alone in the dining-room, with his head resting on his hand, the quiet attitude filled intensely with life; the turn of his head, the shape of his hand, were insistent things. She saw him standing in front of her, long-limbed, erect of mien. She saw—If she looked pale and inert, it was because that inner thought of her lived so hard that the body was worn out with it.
Neither telegram nor any other message came from Justin, except the bare word that he had started home. Lois was not expecting him until nine o’clock on the second morning, the early trains from town were coming out at inconvenient intervals, but just as Lois had finished dressing, she heard the hall door open and shut. She called, but cautiously, for fear of disturbing her baby, who had dropped off to sleep again.
Justin was standing by the table, looking at the newspaper, as she entered the dining-room. With a cry, she ran toward him. “Justin!”
He turned, and she put her arms around him passionately. He held her for a moment, and then said, “You’d better sit down.”
“But, Justin—oh, my dearest, how ill you look!” She clung to him. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you send me any word?”
“I’ve been to Chicago.”
“Yes, yes, I know. Why did you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’tknow?”
“Lois, will you give me some coffee?”
She poured out the cup with trembling hands, and sat while he took a swallow of the hot fluid, still scanning the newspaper. At last she said:
“Aren’t you going to tell me any more?”
“There isn’t any more to tell. There’s no use talking about it. I believe I had some idea of selling the island when I went to Chicago, but I don’t know how I got there. I didn’t know I was there until I woke up two nights ago at a little hotel away out on the West Side; Billy pounded on the door, and said they told him I had been asleep for twenty-eight hours. I suppose I was dead tired out. I don’t want to speak of it again, Lois; it wasn’t a particularly pleasant thing to happen. Will you tell Mary to bring in the rest of the breakfast? I must catch the eight-thirty train back into town. I ought to have stopped there, but I thought you might be bothered, so I came out first. Where are the children?”
“They are coming down now with Dosia,” said his wife, helping Mary with the dishes, as the patter of little feet sounded in the hall. Redge ran up to his father, hitting him jubilantly with a small stick which he held in his chubby hand, and bringing irritated reproof down upon him at once; but Zaidee, her blue eyes open, her lips parted over her little white teeth, slid into the arm outstretched for her, and stood there leaning against “Daddy’s” side, while he ate and drank hurriedly, with only one hand at his disposal. Poor Lois could not help one pang of jealousyat being shut out, but she heroically smothered the feeling.
“Mr. Harker was here the evening before last; he brought me some money,” she ventured at last.
“That was all right.”
“And Mr. Girard was very kind; he stayed here all that night—until your message came.”
“I hope you haven’t been talking about this all over the place.”
“No—oh, no,” said Lois, driving back the tears at this causeless injury. “Mr. Leverich—he was here one morning—said it was best not to. He was rather unpleasant, though. But nobody knows about your being away at all. You’re not going now, Justin—without even seeing baby?”
“I’ll see him to-night when I come home,” said Justin, rising. He kissed the children and his wife hastily, but she followed him into the hall, standing there, dumbly beseeching, while he brushed his hat with the hat-brush on the table, and then rummaged hastily as if for something else.
“Here are your gloves, if that is what you are looking for,” she said.
“Yes, thank you.” He bent over and kissed her again, as if really seeing her for the first time, with a whispered “Poor girl!” That momentary close embrace brought her a needed—oh, so needed!—crumb of comfort. She who had hungered so insatiably for recognition could be humbly thankful now for the two words that spoke of an inner bond.
But all day she could not get rid of that feeling of suspense that had been hers for five days past; the strain wasto end, of course, with Justin’s return, but it had not ended—in some sad, weighting fashion it seemed to have just begun. What was he so worried about? Was she never to hear any more?
That night Girard came over, but with him was another visitor—William Snow. No sun could brown that baby-fair skin of William’s, but he had an indefinably large and Western air; the very way in which he wore his clothes showed his independence. Dosia did not notice his swift, covert, shamefaced glance at her when she came into the room where he was talking to Lois—his avoidance of her the year before had dropped clear out of her mind; but his expression changed to one of complacent delight as she ran to him instantly and clasped his arms with both hands to cry, “Oh, Billy, Billy, I’m so glad to see you! I am so glad—I can’t tell you how glad I am!”
“All right, Sweetness, you’re not going to lose me again,” said William encouragingly. “My, but you do knock the spots out of those Western girls. Can’t we go in the dining-room by ourselves? I want to ask you to marry me before we talk any more.”
“Yes, do,” said Dosia, dimpling.
It was sweet to be chaffed, to be heedlessly young once more, to take refuge from all disconcerting thoughts—and from the new embarrassment of Girard’s presence—with Billy in the corner of the other room, where she sat in a low chair, and he dragged up an ottoman close in front of her. Through the open window the scent of honeysuckle came in with the gloom.
“Oh, but you’ve grown pretty!” he said, his hands clasped over his knees, gazing at her. “That’s right, getpink—it makes you prettier. I like this slimpsy sort of dress you’ve got on; I like that black velvet around your throat; I—have you missed me much?”
“No,” said Dosia, with the old-time sparkle. “I’ve hardly thought of you at all. But I feel now as if I had.”
Billy nodded. “All right, I’ll pay you up for that some day. Oh, Dosia, you may think I’m joking, but I’m not! There have been days and nights when I’ve done nothing but plan the things I was going to do and say to make you care for me—but they’re all gone the moment I lay eyes on you. I’ll talk of whatever you like afterwards, but I’ve got to say first,”—Billy’s voice, deep and manly and confident, had yet a little shake in it,—“that nobody is going to marry you but me, and don’t you forget it. I’m no kid any more.” Something in his tone gave his words emphasis. “I know how to look out for you better than anyone else does.”
“Dear Billy,” said Dosia, touched, and resting her cheek momentarily against the rough sleeve of his coat, “it’s so good to have you back again.”
“I’m no kid any more,” said William warningly.
Lois, who had been longing intolerably all day for evening to come, so that she could be alone with her husband, sat in the drawing-room, trying to sew with nervous, trembling fingers, while her husband, looking frightfully tired, and Bailey Girard smoked and talked—of all things in the world!—of the relative merits of live bait or “spoon” bait in trolling, and afterwards went minutely into details of the manufacture of artificial lures for catching trout.
Those waste “social” hours of non-interest, non-satisfaction, that must be lived through before one can getto the place just ahead of them—how long, how unbearably long, they can seem! Lois’ face twitched, as well as her fingers; Girard’s voice, lucidly expressionless, went on and on in reminiscent detail, and Justin, looking frightfully tired, but apparently deeply interested, remembered and remembered the day they caught this, and the way they landed that and, with exasperating monotony, drew diagrams corroboratingly with two fingers on the table beside him. She did not realize, as women do not, that to Justin this conversation, banal and irrelevant to any action of his present life or his present anxiety, was like coming up from under-depths to breathe at a necessary air-hole.
After five days of torturing, unexplained absence, to talk of nothing but fishing, as if his life depended on it! Girard himself had wondered, but he accepted the position allotted to him as a matter of course. He had thought, from Justin’s manner to-day, that he was to know something of his affairs; but if Justin did not choose to confide in him, that was all right. Possibly the affairs were all right, too; they were none of his business, anyway.
Suddenly a word in the fishing conversation caught the ears of the two who were sitting in the dining-room, in a momentary pause.
“That was the kind Lawson Barr used when he went down on the Susquehanna. By the way, I hear that he’s dead.”
Lawson! Dosia’s face changed as if a whip had flicked across it, and then trembled back into its normal quiet. William leaned a little nearer, his eyes curiously scanning her.
“Hadn’t you heard before?”
“No; what?”
“He’s dead.”
“Lawsondead! Not Lawson?” Her dry lips illy formed the words.
“Yes, Dosia—don’t look like that—don’t let them see in there, Girard is looking at you; turn your face toward me. Leverich told us, coming up to-night. Lawson died a week ago.”
“How?”
“Fell from his horse somewhere up in a cañon—he was drunk, I reckon. They found him twenty-four hours afterwards; the superintendent of the mines wrote to Leverich. He’d tried to keep pretty straight out there, all but the drinking, I guess that was too much for him. It was the best thing he could do—to die—as Girard says. Girard hates the very sound of his name.”
“Oh,” breathed Dosia painfully.
“The superintendent said that some of the miners chipped in to bury him, and the woman he boarded with sent a pencil scrawl along with the superintendent’s letter to say that she’d ‘miss Mr. Barr dreadful,—that he’d get up and get the breakfast when she was sick, and the kids, they thought the world of him.’ She signed herself, ‘A true mourner, Mrs. Wilson.’”
Lawson was dead!
Dosia sat there, her hand clasping Billy’s sleeve as at first—something tangible to hold on to. Her gaze had gone far beyond the room, even that haunting knowledge that Bailey Girard was near her was but a far, hidden subconsciousness. She was out on a rocky slope beside a dead body—Lawson, his head thrown back, those mocking,caressing eyes, those curving, passionate lips, closed forever, the blood oozing from between his dark locks. Always she had secretly visioned some distant day when, Lucile-like, she might be near him, helping, though he would not know it until he lay dying. As ever with poor Dosia, there was that sharp, unbearable pang of self-reproach, of self-condemnation. Of what avail her prayers, her belief in him, when he had died thus? Oh, she had not prayed enough! She had not been good enough to be allowed to help; she had not believed hard enough. Perhaps it had helped just a little—he had “tried to keep pretty straight, all but the drinking; that was too much for him.”
That covered some resistance in an under-world of which she knew nothing. Poor Lawson, who had so early lost his chance, whose youth had been poisoned at the start! In that grave where he lay, drunkard and reveler, part of the youth of her, Dosia Linden,—once his promised wife, to whom she had given herself in her soul,—must always lie too, buried with him; nothing could undo that. To die so causelessly! But the miners had “chipped in” for a resting-place for him—they had cared a little; he had been kind to a woman and her little children—“the kids had thought the world of him”; she was “a true mourner, Mrs. Wilson.” Dosia imagined him cheeringly cooking for this poor, worn-out mother, carrying the children from place to place as she had once seen him carry that little boy home from the ball, long, long ago.
A strain from that unforgotten music came to her now, carrying her to the stars! Oh, not for Lawson the splendid rehabilitation of the strong, except in that one moment of denial when he had risen by the might of his manhoodin renunciation for her sake; only the humble virtues of his weakness could be his—yet perhaps, in the sight of the God Who pities, no such small offering, after all!
“Dosia, you didn’t reallycarefor him!”
She smiled with pale lips and brimming eyes—an enigmatic answer which Billy could not read. He sat beside her, smoothing her dress furtively, until she got up, and, whispering, “I must go,” left the room, unconscious of Girard’s following gaze.
“I think we’d better be getting back,” said the latter suddenly, in an odd voice, rising in the middle of one of Justin’s sentences as Billy came straying in to join the group.
Lois’ heart leaped. She had felt that another moment of live bait and reminiscences would be more than she could stand.
“You need some rest,” she said gratefully. “You have been tired out in our service.”
“Oh, I’m not tired at all,” he returned shortly. Her work seemed to catch his eye for the first time, in a desire to change the subject. “What are you making?”
“A ball for Redge. I made one for Zaidee, and he felt left out—he’s of a very jealous disposition,” she went on abstractedly. “Are you of a jealous disposition, Mr. Girard?”
“I!” He stopped short, with the air of one not accustomed to taking account of his own attributes, and apparently pondered the question as if for the first time. When he looked up to answer, it was with abrupt decision: “Yes, I am.”
“Don’t look so like a pirate,” said young Billy, giving him a thump on the back that sent them both out of the house, laughing, when Lois rose and went over to Justin’s side.
Husband and wife were at last alone.
In the days that followed, Justin, going away in the morning very early with a set face, coming home very late in the evening with that set face still, hardly seemed to notice the children or Dosia. Some tremulous change had affected Dosia; her eyelashes were often mysteriously wet, though no one saw her weep.
“Justin has so much on his mind.” Lois kept repeating the words over and over, as if she found in them something by which to hold fast. Rich in beauty as she was, full of love and tender favor, with the sweetness and the pathos of an awakening soul, her husband seemed to have no eyes, no thought for her. That one murmured sentence in the hallway was all her food to live on—his only personal recognition of her.
On the other hand, he poured out his affairs and his plans to her with a freedom of confidence unknown before, a confidence which seemed to presuppose her oneness of interest with him. He had talked exhaustively about everything but those few days’ absence; that was a sore that she must not touch, a wound that could bear no probing. She had striven very hard not to show when she didn’t understand, taking her cues for assent or dissent as he evidently wished her to, letting him think aloud, as it seemed to be a relief to him, and saying little herself. The only time when she broke in on her own account was whenhe had told her about Cater, and the defective bars, and Leverich’s ultimatum. Here was an issue that she could comprehend; here her woman’s instinct rang true. A man may juggle with that fluctuating line where sharp practice and honest shrewdness meet, so that he fails to see where one begins and another ends; but a woman of Lois’ caliberknows. Her “Justin, you wouldn’t do that; you wouldn’t tell!” met with his quick response: “No, I couldn’t.”
“Oh, I know that, I know that! I’m glad, whatever comes, that you couldn’t do it. I’d rather be a hundred times poorer than we are! Aren’t you glad that you couldn’t do it?”
“No; I think I’m rather sorry,” said Justin, with a half-smile. The peculiar sharpness of the thought that it was between Cater and Leverich—his friends, Heaven save the mark! that he was being pushed toward ruin, had not lost any of its edge.
There had been a tonic in a certain attitude of Cater’s mind toward Justin—an unspoken kindliness and admiration and tenderness such as an older man who has been along a hard road may feel toward another who has come along the same way. Cater’s kind, unobtrusive comradeship, the fair-dealing friendliness of his rivalry, had seemed to be one of the factors of support, of honesty, of commercial righteousness.
Justin was surprised to find out how much the morning greeting with Cater, or the occasional lunch-hour together, had meant to him. Cater and he had mutually understood a great many things. Cater had done nothing wrong now, except to pull the foothold from under hisfriend’s feet. It was not men who were known to be bad who hurt you when they were dishonest; it was thegoodmen who slid over that dividing-line, with apparent unconsciousness that they were on that other, shaming side. To break an unwritten bond is perhaps worse than to break one printed and scheduled, because it presupposes a greater faith and trust. Justin could smile proudly at Leverich, but he couldn’t smile when he thought of Cater—it weighed upon and humiliated him for the man who had been his friend.
“I am glad that you couldn’t do it anyway!” said Lois. “It wouldn’t have been you if you had! Can’t you take a rest now, dear, whenyoulook so ill? No, no; I didn’t mean that—of course you can’t!”
“Arest!” He rose and walked up and down the room. “Lois, do you know that, in some way, I’ve got to get that money before the thirteenth? Those days in Chicago—at the worst time! It makes me wild to think of the time I’ve lost. I’m looking out for a partner who will buy out Leverich and Martin, and we’ve got a chance yet—I’ll swear we have! But Lewiston’s note has got to be paid first; then I can take time to breathe. Harker saw a man from Boston from whom we might have borrowed the money, if I had only been here. If we get that we can hold over; if we don’t we go to smash, and so does Lewiston. Lewistontrustedme. I’ve been to several places to-day to men that would be willing enough to lend the money if they didn’t know I needed it.”
“George Sutton?” hazarded Lois.
Justin’s lips curved bitterly. “Oh, he’s a cur. He had some money invested last year when he was sweet on Dosia,and drew it all out afterwards! And, after all, I went to him to-day, like a fool!”
“Can’t you go to Eugene Larue?”
“No. We talked about it once, but he fought shy; he didn’t think the security enough. If he thought so then, it would be worse than useless now.”
“Mr. Girard?”
“There’s no use telling things to him, he hasn’t any money.” Justin turned a dim eye on her. “I tell you, Lois, I haven’t left a stone unturned so far, that I could get at. If we could only sell the island! Girard’s looking it up for me; there may be a chance of that. There are lots of chances to be thought out. I don’t even know how we keep running, but we do. Harker’s a trump! If I can hold up my end, we’ll be all right.”
“Then go to bed now,” said Lois, with a quick dread that gave her courage. “And you must have something to eat first—and to drink, too. Come, Justin! Do as I say.” Her voice had a new firmness in it which he unconsciously obeyed. She crept to her bed at last, aching in every limb, but with her baby pressed close to her, her one darling comfort, the source from which she drew a new love as the child drew its life from her. It was the first time in all her married life that she had borne the burden of her husband’s care, a burden from which she must seek no solace from him. Yet the thought of him was in itself solace—her faith in him so strong that she simply knew he must succeed. A king of men! If only he did not look so badly!
She bent all her energies, these next days, to keeping him well fed, and ordering everything minutely for hiscomfort when he came home, aided and abetted by Dosia. The two women worked as with one thought between them, as women can work, for the well-being of one they love, with fond and minute care. Every detail, from the time he went away in the morning, stooping slightly under the weight of something mysterious and unseen, was ordered with reference to his homecoming at night—the husband and father on whose strength all this helpless little family hung for their own sustenance. The children were shown him at their best, and whisked away the moment they got troublesome.
Lois dressed herself in the colors he had liked. The cloth was laid immaculately for dinner, although the maid had gone and had not been replaced, and dainty dishes for him were concocted with delicate care—the more care, that every penny had to be counted; when Justin took out that lean pocket-book to give her money, Lois winced. If he seemed to relish anything he ate, she and Dosia looked at each other with covert triumph.
Everything that was done for him had to be done covertly, it was found; he disliked any manifestation of undue attention to his wants. Sometimes he was terribly irritable and unjust, and at others almost heartbreakingly gentle and mild. Lois had persuaded him to have the doctor, who told him seriously that he must stay home and rest—a futile prescription which he treated with scorn. Rest! He knew very well that it was not rest that he needed, but money—money, money, the elixir of life! He looked drawn and haggard and old, despite his nervous energy, but a sufficient quantity of that magic metal would smooth out those premature wrinkles, and round outthose hollow checks, and give a cheerful brightness to his eye, and take ten years from his age.
Both women came to know the days when the prospects for selling the island looked well or ill, with those telegrams of Girard’s. Lois poured out her heart about him to Dosia, her minute anxieties and fears.
William came around several times to see Dosia—his visit almost invariably followed by one from Mrs. Snow, to see if her William were there. For the rest, there were few callers.
It was near the end of this week when Justin came home, as Lois could see at once, revived and encouraged, though still abstracted. He had an invitation to take a ride in the doctor’s motor, the doctor being a man who, when the hazard of dangerous cases had been extreme, absented himself for a couple of hours, in which, under a breathless and unholy speed of motoring, he reversed the pressure on his nerves, and came to the renewed sanity of a wind-swept brain when every idea had been rushed out of it.
Lois felt that it would be good for Justin, too, and was glad that he had been persuaded to go; yet she caught him looking at her with such strange intentness a couple of times during the dinner that it discomposed her oddly. It made her a little silent; she pondered over it after she had gone up, as usual, to the baby. Was there something wrong with her appearance? She looked anxiously in the glass, and was annoyed to find that the white fichu, open at the throat, was not on quite straight, and her hair was a little disarranged. She was pale, and there were dark lines under her eyes. She hated not to look nice— Yet it might not be that. Was it, perhaps, thatsomething else was wrong—that he had bad news which he did not like to tell? Was he to leave her again on some journey? She turned white for a moment, and sat down, to get the baby to sleep, and then resolutely tried to drive the thought from her. Yet, as she sat there rocking gently, the thought still came back to her, oddly, puzzlingly. Why had he looked at her like that? The smoke of his pipe down-stairs kept her still aware of his presence.
Presently he came up-stairs and tiptoed into the room in clumsy fashion, for fear of waking the baby, in his quest for a handkerchief in a chiffonier drawer. After finding it, he stopped for a moment in front of her, with that odd, arrested expression once more.
“You don’t mind my going out to-night and leaving you?” he murmured. “The doctor ought to have askedyouto go instead; you need it more than I.”
“Oh, no, no!” she hastened to reassure. “I don’t mind at all, really!” Her eyes gazed up at him limpidly clear, and emptied of self. “I have to run up and down stairs so many times to baby now that I couldn’t go, no matter how much I was asked to. I’m only glad that you will have the distraction—you need it. I hope you’ll have a lovely time.”
She listened to his descending footsteps, and after a moment or two arose and laid the sleeping child down in his crib. From across the hall she could hear Redge and Zaidee prattling to each other from their beds with an elfish glee that began to have long waits between its outbursts.
In the dim light she went about the room, picking uptoys and little discarded garments left by the children, folding the clothes away, her tall, graceful figure, in the large curves of its repeated bending and straightening, seeming to exemplify some unpainted Millet-like idea of mother-work, emblematic of its unceasing round. She was hanging up a tiny cloak in the half-gloom of her closet, when she heard her husband’s step once more stealing into the room, and the next moment saw him beside her.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, with quick premonition.
“Nothing, nothing at all; we haven’t started yet.” He put one arm around her, and with the other lifted her face up toward his. “I only came back to tell you—“His voice broke; there seemed to be a mist over the eyes that were bent on hers. “I can’t talk. I can’t be as I ought to be, Lois, until all this is over—but—I don’t know what’s getting into me lately, you look so beautiful to me that I can’t take my eyes off you! I went around all to-day counting the hours, like a foolish boy, until it was time to come back to you; I grudge every minute that I spend away from my lovely wife.”%
Sometimes we have a happiness so much greater, so much more blessed than our easily imagined bliss that we can only hide our eyes from it at first, like those of old, when in some humble and unthought-of place they were visited by angels.
Very late that night Bailey Girard arrived at the house, after an absence of ten days. Dosia had gone to bed unusually early, but she could not sleep. She could not seem to sleep at all lately—the more tired she was the more ceaselessly luminous seemed her brain; it was like trying to sleep in a white glare in which all sorts of trivial things became unnaturally distinct. So many wakeful nights had she passed that one seemed to presuppose another, darkness brought, not a sense of rest, but that dread knowledge that she was going to lie there staring through all the hours of it. Since that night that the pitcher had broken, she was ever waiting tensely for the day to bring her something that it never brought. Lawson’s death—Girard—Billy, who was getting a little troublesome lately—the dear little brothers far away, mixed up with tiny household perplexities, kept going through and through her mind. Her heart was wrung for those two in the house, Justin and Lois; yet they had each other! Dreams could no longer comfort and support Dosia; they had had their day. Prayer but wakened her further, wandering off in desultory thought. If she could only sleep and forget!
To-night she heard Justin’s return from the automobile ride; apparently the machine had broken down, but the accident seemed only to have added to the zest. Lois wasstill dressed and waiting up for him. Then Girard came—he had seen the light in the window. Dosia could hear the murmuring of the voices down-stairs—Girard’s sent the blood leaping to her heart so fast that she pressed her hands against it. For a moment his face seemed near, his lips almost touched hers—her heart stopped before it went on again. Why had he come now? It seemed suddenly an unbearable thing that those others down-stairs should see him and hear him, and that she could not. Why, oh why, had she gone to bed so early to-night of all nights? She was ready to cry with the passion of a disappointment that seemed, not a little thing, but something crushing and calamitous, a loss for which she never could be repaid. She could imagine Justin and Lois meeting the kind glances of those gray eyes, smiling when he did. He was beautiful when he smiled! She was within a few yards of him, but convention, absurd yet maddening, held her in its chains. She couldn’t get dressed and break in upon their intimate conference—or it seemed as if she could not. Besides, he would probably go very soon. But he did not go! After a while she could lie there no longer. She crept out upon the landing of the stairs, and sat there desolately on the top step, “in her long night-gown, white as boughs of May,” with her little bare feet curled over each other, and her hands clasping the balustrade against which her cheek was pressed, watching and waiting for him to go. The ends of her long fair hair fell into large loose curls where it hung over her shoulder, as she bent to listen—and to listen—and to listen.
“I want to be there, too—I want to be there, too!” she whispered, with quivering lips, in her voice thesobbing catch of a very little child. “I want to be there, too. They’re having it all—without me. And I want to be there, too. They might have called me to come down, and they didn’t.” They might have called her! All her passion, all her philosophy, all her endurance, melted into that one desire. If she had only known at first that he was going to stay so long, she would have dressed and gone down. She could hardly bear it a moment longer.
After a while a door on the landing of the second story below opened, and a little figure crept out—Zaidee. She stood irresolute in the hall, looking down; then she looked up, and, seeing Dosia, ran to her and climbed into her lap, resting her little pigtailed head confidingly against Dosia’s warm young shoulder.
“They woke me up,” she said placidly. “Did they woke you up, too, Cousin Dosia?”
“Yes,” said Dosia, hugging the child close. Some spell was broken.
Zaidee listened. “Papa and mamma talking down-stairs, oh, so-o-o-o late!” Zaidee gave a little wriggle of delight; her eyes gleamed winkingly. “Redge doesn’t know, but I do! Who is that with papa and mamma, Cousin Dosia? Oh, I know! it’s the lovely man—that’s what Redge and me calls him. I wish I was down-stairs, don’t you? Cousin Dosia, don’t you wish you were down-stairs?”
“Yes,” said Dosia again. “Hush! some one is coming; you’ll get sent to bed again.” This time it was Lois. Her abstracted gaze seemed to take in the two on the upper stairway as a matter of course.
Sat desolately on the top stepSat desolately on the top step
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she said. “I thought I heard some one talking.” She rested on the post below, looking up. “I came to see if you’d take Zaidee in with you for the rest of the night, Dosia. I want to give Justin’s room to Mr. Girard.”
“Is he going to stay?” asked Dosia.
“Yes. It’s too late for him to disturb the Snows, and he’s been traveling all day; he’s dreadfully tired. He wanted to sleep on the sofa down-stairs, but I wouldn’t let him.” She was carrying Zaidee, already half asleep again, in her arms as she talked, depositing her in Dosia’s bed, while Dosia followed her.
“Did he sell the island?” asked Dosia.
Lois shook her head. “No. They may really sell it next week, but not now— The woman who was surely going to buy it—she’s withdrawn; she’s bought a steam-yacht instead. But Mr. Girard says he has hopes of another purchaser next week. Only that will be too late to save the business. Of course he doesn’t know that, and Justin will not tell him—he says Mr. Girard cannot help. Oh, Dosia, when Justin came in from that ride he looked so well, and now—” She covered her face with her hands, before recovering herself. “It’s time you were both asleep.”
“Can’t I help you?” asked Dosia; but Lois only answered indifferently, “No, it’s not necessary,” and went around making arrangements, while Dosia, with Zaidee nestling close to her, slept at last.
It was late the next morning before Girard came down. Justin had had breakfast, and gone; Lois was up-stairs with the children, and Dosia, who had been tidying up the place, was arranging some flowers in the vases when he strode in. There was no vestige of that sick-hearted, imploring maiden of the night before; no desolate frenzywas to be seen in this trim, neat, capable little figure, clad in blue gingham, that made her throat very white, her hair very fair. Something in Girard’s glance seemed to show an instant pleasure that she should be the one to greet him, but he bent anxiously over the watch he held in his hand.
“Will you tell me what time it is? My watch has stopped.”
“It’s half-past nine,” said Dosia.
“Half-pastnine!” He looked at her in a sort of quick, horrified arraignment. “What do you mean?” His eye fell upon the clock, and conviction seemed to steal upon him against his will. “Heavens and earth, why wasn’t I called? On this morning of all others, when every moment’s of importance! I thought I asked particularly to be waked early.”
“I suppose they thought you were tired and needed the rest,” apologized Dosia.
“Needed the rest!” His tone was poignant; he looked outraged, but his anger was entirely impersonal—there was in it even a sort of boyish appeal to her, as if she must feel it, too.
“You had better sit down and have some breakfast.”
“Oh,breakfast!” His gesture deprecated her evident intention. “Please don’t. Thank you very much, but I don’t want any breakfast; I only want to get to town.”
“There isn’t any train for twenty-five minutes, so you might as well sit down and eat,” said Dosia firmly. “Come out to this little table on the piazza.” She led the way to the screened corner at the end, sweet with the honeysucklethat swung its long loops in the wind, and faced him sternly. “Do you take coffee?”
“Please don’t, please don’t cook me anything! I’d hate to trouble you.” He seemed so distressed that she relented a little.
“A glass of milk and some fruit, then; you’llhaveto take that.”
“Very well—if I must. Can’t I get the things myself?”
“No.” She ran away to get them for him, with some new joy singing in her heart as she went backward and forward, bringing a pitcher of milk, a glass, a dish of strawberries, some cream, and the sugar, sitting down herself by the table afterwards as he ate and drank. He gave her a sudden smile, so surprised and pleased that the color surged in her cheeks.
“I’m not used to this,” he said simply. “What is that dress you have on—silk?”
“No, it’s cotton; do you like it?”
“Verymuch. Oh, please don’t get up—Zaidee wasn’t calling you. I won’t eat another mouthful unless you stay just where you are—please!”
“Well!” said Dosia, with laughing pleasure.
“Besides, I’ve been wanting to consult you about the Alexanders,” he went on, leaning across the table toward her, intimately. “It’s so beautiful to me to see them together that to feel that they’re in trouble distresses me beyond words. You’re so near to them both I thought that perhaps—— Do you know anything about the real state of Mr. Alexander’s affairs?”
Dosia shook her head. “No; only that he is very much worried over them.”
“He wanted to sell the island; he sent me off on that business lately. He’ll sell it some time, of course, but I don’t know how complicating the delay is. He’s the kind of man you can’t ask; you have to wait until he tells you. You can’tmakea person have confidence in you. Won’t you please have some of these strawberries with me? Do!”
“No; you must eat themall,” said Dosia, with charming authority, her arms before her on the table, elbow-sleeved, white and dimpled, as she regarded him. He seemed to take up all the corner, against the background of the green honeysuckle in the fresh morning light. With that smile upon his face, he seemed extraordinarily masculine and absorbing, yet appealing, too, inviting of confidence.
Dosia felt carried out of herself by a sudden heady resolution—or, rather, not a new resolution, but one that she had had in mind for a long, long time, before, oh, before she had even known who this man was. She had planned over and over again how she was to say those words, and now the time had come. She could not sit here with him in this new, sweet friendliness without saying them. She had imagined the scene in so many different ways! When she had gone over it by herself, her cheeks had flushed, her eyes had shone with the tears in them; the words as she spoke them had gone deeply, convincingly, from heart to heart—or perhaps, in an assumed, tremulous lightness, the meaning in her impulse had shown all the clearer to one who understood. For a year and a half the uttered thought had been the climax to which her dreams had led; it would have seemed a monstrous, impossible thing that it had not been reached before.
She began now in a moment’s pause, only to find, too late, that all warmth and naturalness had left her with the effort. Fluent dream-practice is only too apt to make one uncomfortably crude and conscious in real life.
“I want to thank you for being so kind to me the night of that accident on the train coming up from the South.” Poor Dosia instantly felt committed to a mistake. Her eyes fell for a moment on his hand, as it lay upon the table, with a terribly disconcerting remembrance that hers had not only rested in it, but that in fancy she had more than once pillowed her cheek upon it, and knew that he had seen the look; she continued in desperation, with still increasing stiffness and formality: “I have always known, of course, that it was you. You must pardon me for not thanking you before.”
The old unapproachable manner instantly incased him as if in remembrance of something that hurt. “Oh, pray don’t mention it,” he said, with a formality that matched hers. “It was nothing but what anyone would have done—little enough, anyway.”
What happened afterwards she did not know, except that in a few minutes he had gone.
She watched him go off down the path with that swift, long, easy step; watched till the last vestige of the gray suit was out of sight—he had a fashion of wearing gray!—before clearing off the table. Then she went and sat on the back steps that led into the little garden, bright with the sunshine and a blaze of tulips at her feet. Justin was fond of flowers.
Much has been written about the power of the mind toreproduce minute details of a scene that has served as the setting for some great emotion; the pattern of a table-cover or a rug, the flowers in a vase, the titles of the books, the strain of music being played in the next room—all stand out, separate and distinct, indelibly imprinted upon the memory. There is another variety of the same phenomena, seldom commented on, where an entirely unreal impression of the scene as a whole is left on the mind by one or two details. To Dosia, sitting there by the little plot of tulips, the sun was the brilliant sun of July, and those scarlet tulips a garden wide and far-reaching, an endless vista of flowers, the blue sky an endless vault above her—high noon and midsummer, with that sweet-scented warmth at the busy heart of things, a circle of infinite life humming in the low grasses, in the almost windless, hardly stirring air. Warmth and color and life, at high noon, listening close to the heart of things.
And Dosia! She had never supposed that any girl could care for a man until he had shown that he cared for her—it was the unmaidenly, impossible thing. And now—how beautiful he was, how dear! A wistful smile trembled around her lips. All that had gone before with other men suddenly became as nothing, forgotten and out of mind, and she herself made clean by this purifying fire. Even if she never had anything more in her whole life, she had this—even if she never had anything more. Yet what had she? Nothing and less than nothing. If he had ever thought of her, if he had ever dreamed of her, if her soft, frightened hand trustfully clinging fast to his, only to be comforted by his touch, had been a sign and a symbol to him of some dearer trust and faith for him alone—if in some way, asshe dimly visioned it, the thought had once been his, it had gone long ago. Every action showed it. And yet, and yet—so unconquerably does the soul speak that, though he might deny her attraction for him, she knew that she had it. It was something to which he might never give way, but it was unalterably there—as it was unalterably there with her. All that year at home, when she believed she had not been thinking of him, she really had been thinking of him. We learn to know each other sometimes in long absences. She began to perceive in him now a humility and a pride strangely at variance with each other, and both equally at variance with the bright assurance of his outer manner. He gave to everyone; he would work early and late for others, in his yearning sympathy and affection: yet he himself, from the very intenseness of his desire for it, stood aloof, and drew back from the insistence of any claim for himself. They might meet a hundred times and grow no closer; they might grow farther and farther away.
Dosia felt that other women must have loved him—how could they have helped it? She had a pang of sorrow for them—for herself it made no difference. If she had pain for all her life afterwards, she was glad at this moment that he was worthy to be loved; she need never be ashamed of loving him—he was “good.” The word seemed to contain some beautiful comfort and uplifting. No matter what experience he had passed through in his struggle with the world, he had held some simple, honorable,cleanquality intact. The Dosia who must always have some heart-warm dream to live by had it now; for all her life she could love him, pray for him. She had always thought that to lovewas to be happy; now she was to love and be unhappy—yet she would not have it otherwise.
So slight, so young, so lightly dealt with, Dosia had the pathetically clear insight and the power that comes to those who see, not themselves alone, their own desires and hopes, but the universe in which they stand, and view their acts and thoughts in relation to it. She must see Truth, “and be glad, even if it hurt.”
The sunshine fell upon her in the garden; she was bathed in it. Whether she had nights of straining, bitter wakefulness and days of heartache afterwards, this joy of loving was enough for her to-day—the joy of loving him. She saw, in that lovely, brooding thought of him, what that first meeting had taught of his character, and molded in with it her knowledge of him now, to make the real man far more imperfect, though far dearer. Yet, if he ever loved her as she loved him, part of that for which she had always sought love would have to be foregone—she could never come to him, as she had fondly dreamed of doing, and pour out to him all those hopes and fears, those struggles and mistakes and trials and indignities, the shame and the penitence that had been hers. She could never talk of Lawson—her past must be forever unshriven and uncomforted. Bailey Girard would be the last man on earth to whom she could bare her heart in confession; these were the things that touched him on the raw. He “hated the sound of Lawson’s name.” How many times had George Sutton’s face blotted out hers? If he knewthat! She must forever be unshriven. There would be things also, perhaps, thatshecould not bear to hear! The eternal hurt of love, that it never can be truly one with the beloved, touched her withits sadness, and then slipped away in the thought of him now—not just the man who was to help and protect her with his love, but the man whom she longed to help also. His pleased eyes, his lips, the way his hair fell over his forehead—— She thought of him with the fond dream-passion of the maiden, that is often the shyest thing on earth, ready to veil itself and turn and elude and hide at the first chance that it may be revealed.
“Dosia! Dosia, where are you?”
Suddenly she saw that the sunshine had faded out, the sky had grown gray, a chill wind had sprung up. All the trouble, all the stress of the world, seemed to encompass her with that tone in the voice of Lois.
“Justin has come home ill, he was taken with a chill as soon as he got to town; he drove back in a carriage from the station. I want you to telephone for the doctor, and ask him to get here as soon as he can.” Lois spoke with rapid distinctness, stooping as she did so to pick up the scattered toys on the floor and push the chairs into place, as one who mechanically attends to the usual duties of routine, no matter what may be happening. “And, Dosia!” she arrested the girl as she was disappearing, “I may not be down-stairs again. Will you see about what we need for meals? My pocket-book is in the desk. And see about the children. They’re in the nursery now, but I’ll send them down; they had better play outdoors, where he won’t hear them.”
“Oh, yes, yes; I’ll attend to everything,” affirmed Dosia hurriedly, while Lois disappeared up-stairs. For a man to stop work and come home because he is not well argues at once the most serious need for the act. It is the public crossing of the danger zone.
With all her anxiety, Dosia was filled now with a wondering knowledge of something unnatural about Lois, not to be explained by the fact of Justin’s illness. There was something newly impassioned in the duskiness of her eyes, in the fullness of her red lips, in every sweeping movement of her body, which seemed caused by the obsession of ahidden fiery force that held her apart and afar, goddess-like, even while she spoke of and handled the things of every-day life. She looked at the commonplace surroundings, at the children, at Dosia; but she saw only Justin. When she was beside him, she smiled into his gentle, stricken eyes, telling him little fondly-foolish anecdotes of the children to make him smile also; patting him, talking of the summer, when they would go off together—anything to make him forget, even though the effort left her breathless afterwards. When she went out of the room and came back again, she found him still watching the place where she had been, with haggard, feverish, burning eyes. He would not go to bed, but lay on the outside of it in his dressing-gown, so that he might get ready the more quickly to go down-town again if the doctor “fixed him up,” though now he felt weighted from head to foot with stones.
There was a ring at the door-bell in the middle of the morning, which might have been the doctor, but which turned out surprisingly to be Mr. Angevin L. Cater.
“I heard Mr. Alexander was taken ill this morning and had gone home, and as I had to come out this way on business, I thought I’d just drop in and see if there was anything I could do for him in town,” he stated to Dosia.
“I’ll find out,” said Dosia, and came down in a moment with the word that Justin would like to see the visitor.
Cater himself had grown extraordinarily lean and yellow. The fact that his clothes were new and of a fashionable cut seemed only to make him the more grotesque. He looked oddly shrunken; the quality of his smile of greeting appeared to have shrunk also—something had gone out of it.
“Well, Cater, you find me down,” said Justin, with glittering, cold cheerfulness.
“I hope not for long,” said the visitor.
“Oh, no; but, when I get up, you won’t see me going past much longer; I’ll soon be out of the old place. I guess the game is up, as far as I’m concerned. Your end is ahead.”
“Mr. Alexander,” began Cater, clearing his throat and bending earnestly toward Justin, who, with the folds of his blue dressing-gown around him, had the unnatural surroundings of the flowered-chintz-covered bedroom furniture, and Lois’ swinging-glassed, mahogany dressing-table with its silver appointments. The room had already the cleared-up neatness with which one prepares for illness, with everything irrelevant put away. A cluster of white tulips was in a thin glass vase on the mantel; the shades were drawn to an inch, so that an unglaring yet dimly cheerful light came through them; on the little mahogany stand by Cater there was a glass of water and a watch, ticking face upward. Cater’s elbow jostled into the light table as he turned, and he steadied it before bracing himself to go on. “I hope you ain’t going to hold it up against me that I had to make a different business deal from what we proposed; I’ve been thinking about it a powerful lot. There wasn’t any written agreement, you know.”
“No, there was no written agreement,” assented Justin; “there was nothing to bind you.”
“That’s what I said to myself. If there had been, I’d ’a’ stuck to it, of course. But a man’s got to do the best he can for himself in this world.”
“Has he?” asked the sick man, with an enigmatic questioning smile.
“I’d be mighty sorry to have anything come between us. I reckon I took a shine to you the first day I met up with you,” continued Cater helplessly. “I’d be mighty sorry to think we weren’t friends.”
Justin’s brilliant eyes surveyed him serenely. Something sadly humorous, yet noble and imposing, seemed to emanate from his presence, weak and a failure though he was. “I can be friends with you, but you can’t be friends with me, Cater; it isn’t in you to know how,” he said. “Good-by.”
“Well, good-by,” said the other, rising, his long, angular figure knocking awkwardly against chairs and tables as he went out, leaving Justin lying there alone, with his head throbbing horribly. Yet, strangely enough, in spite of it, his mind felt luminously clear, in that a certain power seemed to have come to him—a power of correlating all the events of the past eighteen months and placing them in their relative sequence. A certain faith—the candid, boyish, unquestioning faith in the adequacy of his knowledge of those whom he had called his friends—was gone; the face of Leverich came to him, brutal in its unveiled cupidity, showing what other men felt but concealed, yet his own faith in honor and honesty remained, stronger and higher than ever before. Nothing, he knew, could take it from him; it was a faith that he had won from the battle with his own soul. If other so-called material things had to go, then they had to—he couldn’t pay the price, for one! He saw now that he had been foredoomed from the start. Men who ventured on a capital controlled by others, hadn’t any chance of free movement.
By to-morrow night that note of Lewiston’s would be protested, and then—the burning pain of failure grippedhim in its racking clutches once more, though he strove to fight it off. He would have to get well quickly, so as to begin to hustle for a small clerkship somewhere, to get bread for Lois and the babies. Men of his age who were successful were sought for, but men of his age who were not had a pretty hard row to hoe.
Lois was long gone—probably she was with the baby. He missed his handkerchief, and rose and went over, with a swaying unsteadiness, to his chiffonier drawer in the farther corner to get one. A pistol lying there in its leather case, as it had done any time this five years, for a reserve protection against burglars, caught his eyes. He took it out of its case, examining the little weapon carefully, with his finger on the trigger, half cocking it, to see if it needed oil. It was a pretty little toy. Suddenly, as he held it there, leaning against the chiffonier, his thin white face with its deep black shadows under the eyes reflected by the high, narrow glass, the four walls faded away from him, with their familiar objects; his face gleamed whiter and whiter; the shadows grew blacker; only his eyes stared——
A room, noticed once a year and a half ago, came before him now with a creeping, all-possessing distinctness—that loathsome, dreadful room (long since renovated) which, with its unmentionable suggestion of horror, had held him spellbound on that morning when he had begun his career at the factory. It held him spellbound now, evilly, insidiously. He stood by that blackened, ashy hearth in the foul room, with its damp, mottled, rotting walls, his eyes fastened on that hideous sofa to which he was drawn—drawn a little nearer and a little nearer; the thing in his hand—did it move itself? Cold to his touch it moved——
The door opened, and Lois, with a face of awful calm, glided up to him. She took the pistol from his relaxed hold; her lips refused to speak.
“Why, you needn’t have been afraid, dear,” he said at once, looking at her with a gentle surprise. “I’m not a coward, to go and leave youthatway. You need never be afraid of that, Lois.”
“No,” said Lois, with smiling, white lips. She could not have told what made the frantic, overmastering fear, under the impulse of which she had suddenly thrown the baby down on the bed and fled to Justin—what strange force of thought-transference, imagined or real, had called her there.
She busied herself making him comfortable, divining his wants and getting things for him, simply and noiselessly, and then knelt down beside him where he lay, putting her arms around him.
“You oughtn’t to be doing this for me; I ought to be taking care ofyou,” he said, with a tender self-reproach that seemed to come from a new, hitherto unknown Justin, who watched her face to see if it showed fatigue, and counted the steps she took for him.
The doctor came, and sent him off sternly to bed, and came again later. The last time he looked grave, ordered complete quiet, and left sedatives to insure it. Grip, brought on by overwork, had evidently taken a disregarded hold some time before, and must be reckoned with now. What Mr. Alexander imperatively needed was rest, and, above all things, freedom from care. Freedom from care!
Every footfall was taken to-day with reference to this. An impression of Justin as of something noble and firmseemed to emanate from the room where he lay and fill the house; in his complete abdication, he dominated as never before. More than that, there seemed to be a peculiar poignancy, a peculiar sweetness, in every little thing done for him; it made one honorable to serve him.
The light was still brightly that of day at a quarter of seven, when Dosia, who had been putting Zaidee and Redge to bed, came into Lois’ room, and found her with crimson cheeks and eyes red from weeping. At Dosia’s entrance she rose at once from her chair, and Dosia saw that she was partially dressed in her walking-skirt; she flared out passionately as she was crossing the room, as if in answer to some implied criticism:
“I don’t care what you say—I don’t care what anybody says. I can’t stand it any longer, when it’skillinghim! Hecan’trest unless he has that money. Am I to just sit down and let my husband die, when he’s in such trouble as this? Isthatall I can do? Why, whose trouble is it? Mine as well as his! If it’s his responsibility, it’s mine, too—mine as well as his!”
She hit her soft hand against the sharp edge of the table, and was unconscious that it bled. “If there’s nobody else to get that money for him,I’llrise up and get it. He’s stood alone long enough—long enough! He says there is no help left, but he forgets that there’s his wife!”
“Oh, Lois,” said Dosia, half weeping. “Oh, Lois, what canyoudo? There, you’ve waked the baby—he’s crying.”
“Get me the waist to this skirt and my walking-jacket. No, give me the baby first; he’s hungry.”
She spoke collectedly, bending over the child as she held him to her, and straightening the folds of the littlegarments. “There, there, dear little heart, dear little heart, mother’s comfort—oh, my comfort, my blessing! Get my things out of the closet now, Dosia, and my gloves from that drawer, the top one. Oh, and bring me baby’s cloak and cap, too. I forgot that I couldn’t leave him. I must take him with me.” She had sunk her voice to a low murmur, so as not to disturb the child.
“Where are you going?” asked Dosia.
“To Eugene Larue.”
“Mr. Larue!”
“Yes. He’ll let me have the money—he’ll understand. He wouldn’t let Justin have it, but he’ll give it to me—if I’m not too proud to ask for it; and I’m not too proud.” She spoke in a tone the more thrilling for its enforced calm. “There are things a man will do for a woman, when he won’t for a man because then he has to be businesslike; but he doesn’t have to be businesslike to a woman—he can lend to her just because she needs it.”
“Lois!”
“Oh, there’s many a woman—like me—who always knows, even though she never acts on the knowledge, that there is some man she could go to for help, and get it, just because she washerself—a woman and in trouble—just for that! Dosia, if I go to Eugene Larue myself in trouble—suchtrouble——”
“But he’s out at Collingswood!” said Dosia, bewildered.
“Yes, I know. The train leaves here at seven-thirty, it connects at Haledon. It only takes three quarters of an hour to get to the place; I’ve looked it up in the time-table. I’ll be back here again by ten o’clock. I——” She stoppedwith a sudden intense motion of listening, then put the child from her and ran across the hall to the opposite room.
When she came back, pale and collected, it was to say: “Justin’s gone to sleep now. The doctor says he will be under the influence of the anodynes until morning. Mrs. Bently is in there—I sent for her; she says she’ll stay until I get back.” Mrs. Bently was a woman of the plainer class, half nurse, half friend, capable and kind. “If the children wake up they won’t be afraid with her; but you’ll be here, anyway.”
“Leave the baby with me,” implored Dosia.
“No, I can’t—suppose I were detained?ThenI’d go crazy! He won’t be any bother, he’s so little and so light.”
“Very well, then; I’ll go, too,” stated Dosia in desperation. “I am not needed here. You must have some one with you if you have baby! Let me go, Lois! Youmust!”
“Oh, very well, if you like,” responded Lois indifferently. But that the suggestion was an unconscious relief to her she showed the next moment, as she gave some directions to Dosia, who put a few necessaries and some biscuits in a little hand-bag, and an extra blanket for the baby if it grew chilly.
The train went at seven-thirty. The house must be lighted and the gas turned down, and the new maid impressed with the fact that they would be back at a little after nine, though it might really be nearer ten. After Lois was ready, she went in once more to look at Justin as he slept—his head thrown forward a little on the pillow, his right hand clasped, and his knees bent as one supinely running in a dream race with fate. Lois stoopedover and laid her cheek to his hair, to his hand, as one who sought for the swift, reviving warmth of the spirit.
Then the two women walked down the street toward the station, Lois absorbed in her own thoughts, and Dosia distracted, confused, half assenting and half dissenting to the expedition.
“Are you sure Mr. Larue will be at Collingswood?” she asked anxiously.
“Justin saw him Saturday. He said he was going out there then for the summer.”
So far it would be all right, then. They had passed the Snows’ house, and Dosia looked eagerly for some sign of life there; she hesitated, and then went on. As they got beyond it, at the corner turning, she looked back, and saw Miss Bertha had come out on the piazza.
“I’ll catch up to you in a moment,” she said to Lois, and ran back quickly.
“Miss Bertha!”
“Why, Dosia, my dear, I didn’t see you; don’t speak loud!” Miss Bertha’s face, her whispering lips, her hands, were trembling with excitement. “We’ve been under quite a strain, but it’s all over now—I’m sure I can tellyou. Dear mother has gone up-stairs with a sick-headache! Mr. Sutton has just proposed to Ada—in the sitting-room. We left them the parlor, but they preferred the sitting-room. Mother’s white shawl is in there, and I haven’t been able to get it.”
“Oh!” said Dosia blankly, trying to take in the importance of the fact. “Is Mr. Girard in? No? Will he be in later?”
“No, not until to-morrow night,” said Miss Bertha asblankly, but Dosia had already gone on. She did not know whether she were relieved or sorry that Girard was not there. She did not know what she had meant to say to him, but it had seemed as if shemustsee him. She caught up to Lois and the baby in a few steps, and drew back into the station as Billy passed it. She had felt anxiously as if some one ought to know where they were going, but not Billy—Billy, who was always now either too melancholy or too joyous, as she rebuffed or relented.
Lois did not ask her why she had stopped; her spirit seemed to be wrapped in an obscurity as enshrouding as the darkness that was gathering around them. Only, when they were at last in the train, she threw back her veil and smiled at Dosia, with a clear, triumphant relief in the smile, a sweetness, a lightness of expression that was almost roguish, and that communicated a similar lightness of heart to Dosia.
“He will lend me the money,” said Lois, with a grateful, touching confidence that seemed to shut out every conventional, every worldly suggestion, and to breathe only of her need and the willingness of a friend to help—not alone for the need’s sake, but for hers.
Dosia tried to picture Eugene Larue as Lois must see him; his bearded lips, his worn forehead, his quiet, sad, piercing eyes, were not attractive to her. The whole thing was very bewildering.
It was twenty miles, a forty-minute ride, to Haledon, where they changed cars for the little branch road that went past Collingswood—a signal station, as the conductor who punched their tickets impressed on Lois. Haledonitself was a junction for many lines, with a crowd of people on the platform continually coming and going under the electric lights. As Lois and Dosia waited for their train, an automobile dashed up, and a man and a woman, getting out of it with wraps and bundles, took their place among those who were waiting for the westbound express. The woman, large and elegantly gowned, had something familiar in her outline as she turned to her companion, a short, ferret-faced man with a fair mustache—the man who lately had been seen everywhere with Mrs. Leverich. Yes, it was Mrs. Leverich. Dosia shrank back into the shadow. The light struck full athwart the large, full-blown face of Myra as she turned to the man caressingly with some remark; his eyes, evilly cognizant, smiled back again as he answered, with his cigar between his teeth.
Dosia felt that old sensation of burning shame—she had seen something that should have been hidden in darkness. They were going off together. All those whispers about Mrs. Leverich had been true.
There were only a few people in the shaky, rattling little car when Lois and Dosia entered it, whizzing off, a moment later, down a lonely road with wooded hills sloping to the track on one side and a wooded brook on the other. The air grew aromatic in the chill spring dusk with the odor of damp fern and pine. Both women were silent, and the baby, rolled in his long cloak, slept all the way. It was but seven miles to Collingswood, yet the time seemed longer than all the rest of the journey before they were finally dumped out at the little empty station with the hills towering above it. A youth was just locking upthe ticket-office and going off as they reached it. Dosia ran after him.
“Mr. Larue’s place is near here, isn’t it?” she called.
“Yes, over there to the right,” said the youth, pointing down the board walk, which seemed to end at nowhere, “about a quarter of a mile down. You’ll know when you come to the gates. They’re big iron ones.”
“Isn’t there any way of riding?”