XVMRS. DODGE DECLINES TO TELL
MRS. DODGE went home early. “I oughtn’t to have come,” she told her hostess, confidentially, in parting. “I try to be a Christian sometimes, but this is one of the days when I think Nero was right.”
“But what——”
“I may tell you—some day,” Mrs. Dodge promised, and gloomily went her way.
At dinner that evening she was grim, softening little when her husband plaintively resumed his defence. Lily inquired why her mother was of so dread a countenance.
“Me,” Mr. Dodge explained. “It began at breakfast before you were up, and it’s the old culprit, Lily.”
“I guessed that much,” Lily said, cheerfully. “I haven’t been falling in love with anybody foolish for three or four months now; and that’s the only thingIever do to make her look like this, so I knew it must be you. What you been up to?”
“Aiding in good causes,” he answered, sighing. “She hates me for helping the Workers, Lily. Our next-door neighbour appealed to Cæsar, over your mother’s head. I’ve explained two or three hundred times that I didn’t know there’d been any previous request to her; but she hates my wicked plotting just the same.”
“No. I only hate your weakness,” Mrs. Dodge said, not relaxing her severity. “You were so eager to please that woman you couldn’t even wait to consult your wife. Her writing to you and ignoring what I’d twice written her was the rudest thing I’ve ever had done to me, and your donation puts you in the position of approving of it. She did it because she’s furious with me, and so——”
But Lily interrupted her. “Mamma!” she exclaimed. “Why, you’re talking just ridiculously! Everybody knows Mrs. Braithwaite couldn’t be ‘furious.’ Not with anybody!”
“Couldn’t she? Then why did she do such an insulting thing to me? Don’t you suppose she knows it’s insulting to show she can get a poor silly husband to do something his wife has declined to do? Is there a cattier trick in the whole cattish repertoire? She did it because she’s the slyest puss in this community and she knows I know it, and hates me for it!”
Lily stared in the blankest surprise. “Why, it just sounds like anarchy!” she cried. “I never heard you break out like that before except when you were talking about some boy I liked! When did you get this way about Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite?”
“I’ve never liked her,” Mrs. Dodge said. “Never! I’ve always suspected she was a whited sepulchre, and now I’ve got proof of it.”
“Proof? That’s quite a strong word, Lydia,” Mr. Dodge reminded her.
“Thank you!” she said. “I mean exactly what I’m saying. Mrs. Braithwaite did this thing to me out of deliberate spitefulness; and she did it because she knows what I think of her.”
“But you said you had ‘proof’ that she’s a ‘whited sepulchre,’ ” he said. “The word ‘proof’——”
“May we assume that it means reliable evidence reliably confirmed?” Mrs. Dodge asked, with satirical politeness. “Suppose you’ve done something disgraceful and another person happens to know you did it. Then suppose you play a nasty trick on this other person. Wouldn’t it be proof that you hate him because he knows you did the disgraceful thing?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” Mr. Dodge said, uncomfortably. “When did I ever do this disgraceful thing you’re talking about? If it’s actually disgraceful to subscribe a hundred dollars to the Workers——”
“I’m not talking of that,” his wife said. “I’ll try to put it within reach of your intellect. Suppose I know Mrs. Braithwaite to be a whited sepulchre; then if she does an insulting thing to me, isn’t that proof she’s furious with me for finding her out?”
“No,” he answered. “It might incline one to think that she resented your poor opinion of her, but it doesn’t prove anything at all.”
“Doesn’t it? You wouldn’t say so if you knew what I know!”
Lily’s eyes widened in hopeful eagerness.
“How exciting!” she cried. “Mamma,whatdo you know about Mrs. Braithwaite?”
“Never mind!”
“But you said——”
“I said, ‘Never mind’!”
“But I do mind!” Lily insisted. “You haven’t got any right to get a person’s interest all worked up like that and then just say, ‘Never mind’!”
“That’s all Ishallsay, however,” Mrs. Dodge informed her stubbornly, and kept to her word, though Lily continued to press her until the meal was over. Mr. Dodge made no effort to aid his daughter in obtaining the revelation she sought;—he appeared to be superior to the curiosity that impelled her; but this appearance of superiority may have been only an appearance: he may have foreseen that his wife would presently be a little more explicit about what she had implied against their neighbour.
In fact, Lily had no sooner gone forth upon some youthful junketing, immediately after dinner, than symptoms of forthcoming revelation were manifested. Mr. Dodge’s physician allowed him one cigar a day, and it had just begun to scent the library.
“I suppose, of course, you’re condemning me for a reckless talker,” Mrs. Dodge said. “You assume that I’m willing to hint slander against a woman with only my own injury for a basis, instead of facts.”
“On the contrary, Lydia,” he returned, mildly, “I know you wouldn’t have said what you did unless you have something serious to found it on.”
Probably she was a little mollified, but she did not show it. “So you give me that much credit?” she asked, sourly. “I imagine it’s because you’re just as curious as Lily and hope to hear what I wouldn’t tell her. Well, I’m not going to gratify your curiosity.”
“No?” He picked up a magazine from the table beside his chair, and began to turn over the pages. “Oh, very well!”
“Iamgoing to tell yousomething, though,” she said. “It’s because I think you ought to be told at leastpartof what I know. It may be good for you.”
“For me?” he inquired, calmly, though he well understood what she was going to say next.
“Yes; you might find it wiser to consult your wife next time, even when you’re dealing with people you think are saints.”
“Why, I don’t think Mrs. Braithwaite’s a saint,” he protested. “Shelooksrather like one—a pretty one, too—and the general report is that sheisone; but I don’t know anything more than that about her. She happens to be a neighbour; but we’ve never had the slightest intimacy with her and her husband. We’ve never been in their house or they in ours; I bow to her when I see her and sometimes exchange a few words with her across the hedge between our two yards, usually about the weather. I don’t think anything about her at all.”
“Then it’s time you did,” Mrs. Dodge said with prompt inconsistency.
“All right. What do you want me to think about her, Lydia?”
“Nothing!” she said, sharply. “Oh, laugh if you want to! I’ll tell you just this much: I found out something about her by pure accident; and I decided I’d never tell anybody in the world—not even you. I’m not the kind of person to wreck anybody’s life exactly; and I decided just to bury what I happened to find out. What’s more, I’d have kept itallburied if she’d had sense enough to let me alone. I wouldn’t even have told you that I know something about her.”
“It’s something really serious?”
“ ‘Serious’?” she said. “No, it’s not ‘serious.’ It’s ruinous.”
Mr. Dodge released a sound from his mouth. “Whee-ew!” Whistled, not spoken, it was his characteristic token that he found himself impressed. “You’ve certainly followed the right course, Lydia. Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s standing isn’t just a high one; it’s lofty. I shouldn’t care to be the person who blasts that statue off its pedestal;—sometimes statues crush the blasters when they fall. I’m glad you kept your information to yourself.” He paused, and then, being morally but an ordinary man, he added, “Not—not that I see any particular harm in your confiding in my discretion in such a matter.”
“Didn’t I explain I’m not confiding in your discretion?” Mrs. Dodge returned. “Lately, I don’t believe you have any. I’ve told you this much so that next time you won’t be so hasty in sending checks to women who are merely using you to annoy your wife.”
He sighed. “There’s where you puzzle me, Lydia. If you found out something ruinous about Mrs. Braithwaite, as you say, and if she knows you did—you intimated she knows it, I think?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I should think you’d be the last person in the world she’d want to annoy. I should think she’d do everything on earth to please you and placate you. She’d want to keep you from telling. That’s the weak point in your theory, Lydia.”
“It isn’t a theory. I’m speaking of facts.”
“But if she knows you’re aware of what might ruin her,” he insisted, “she would naturally be afraid of you. Then why would she do a thing that might infuriate you?”
“Because she’s a woman,” said Mrs. Dodge. “And that’s something you’ll never understand!”
“But even a woman would behave with some remnants of caution, under the circumstances, wouldn’t she?”
“Some women might. Mrs. Braithwaite doesn’t because she’s so sure of her lofty position she thinks she can deliberately insult me and I won’t dare to do anything about it. She wanted to show me that she isn’t afraid of me.”
Mr. Dodge looked thoughtfully at that point upon his long cigar where a slender ring of red glow intervened between the adhering gray ash and the brown tobacco. “Well, at least she shows a fiery heart,” he said. “In a way, you’d have to consider her action quite the sporting thing. You mean she’s sent you a kind of declaration of war, don’t you?”
“If you want to look at it that way. I don’t myself. I take it just as she meant it, and that’s as a deliberate insult.”
“But it isn’t an ‘insult’ if she only meant it to show she isn’t afraid of you, Lydia.”
“It is, though,” Mrs. Dodge insisted. “What she means is derision of me. It’s the same as if she said: ‘Here’s a slap in the face for you. I have the satisfaction of humiliating you as your punishment for knowing what you do know about me, and you can’t retaliate, because you aren’t important enough to be able to injure me!’ It’s just the same as if she’d said those words to me.”
“It seems quite a message,” he observed. “Of course, I can’t grasp it myself because I haven’t any conception of this ruinous proceeding of hers. You were the only witness, I assume?”
“There was a third person present,” Mrs. Dodge said, stiffly. “But not as a witness.”
“Then what was the third person present doing?”
Mrs. Dodge looked at him with severity, as if she reproved him for tempting her to do something wrong; then she took from a basket in her lap a square piece of partly embroidered linen and gave it her attention, not relaxing this preoccupation where her husband began to repeat his question.
“What was the third person——”
“I heard you,” Mrs. Dodge interrupted, frowning at her embroidery. “If I told you that much I’d be virtually telling the whole thing; and I’ve decided not to do that, even under her deliberate provocation. If I let myself be provoked into telling, I’d be as small as she is, so you needn’t hope to get another word out of me on the subject. The only answer I’ll make to your question is that the third person present was not her husband.”
“Oh!” Mr. Dodge said, loudly, and, in his sudden enlightenment, whistled “Whee-ew!” again. “Sothat’sit!”
“Not at all,” she said. “You needn’t jump to conclusions, and you’ll never know anything more about it from me. The only way you could ever know about it would be through her husband’s making a fuss and its getting into the papers or something.”
“I see,” Mr. Dodge said, apparently not much discouraged. “And, since it’s something he hasn’tyetmade any fuss about, it’s evidently because he doesn’t know.”
“He!” Mrs. Dodge cried, and, in her scorn of Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s consort, dropped the embroidery into the basket and stared fiercely at Mr. Dodge; though it was really at an invisible Mr. Braithwaite that she directed this glare of hers. Apparently the unfortunate gentleman was one of those mere husbands whose existence seems either to amuse or to incense the wives of more dominant men: Mrs. Dodge certainly appeared to be incensed. “That miserable little pale shadow of a man!” she cried. “His name’s Leslie Braithwaite, but do you ever hear him spoken of except as ‘Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband’? He goes down to his little brass-rod works at eight o’clock every morning and gets money for her until six in the evening. Then he comes home and works on the account books of her uplifts until bedtime. If they go out, he stands around with her wrap over his arm and doesn’t speak unless you ask him a question. If you do, he begins his answer by saying, ‘My wife informs me’—How could that poor little creature know anything about anything?”
“Butyouknow,” Mr. Dodge persisted. “Youdoknow, do you, Lydia?”
“I know what I know,” she replied, and resumed her preoccupation with the embroidery.
“But you couldn’t substantiate it by another witness, I take it,” he said, musingly. “That is, she feels safe against you because if you should ever decide to tell what you know, she would deny it and put you in the position of an accuser without proofs. It would simply be your word against hers, and she’d have the sympathy that goes to the party attacked and also the advantage of her wide reputation for lofty character and——”
“Go on,” his wife interrupted. “Amuse yourself all you like; you’ll not find out another thing from me. Perhaps, if you should ever spend the morning at home digging around in our flower border along the hedge between her yard and ours, you might happen to hear her talking to her chauffeur, and in that case you might get to know something more. Otherwise, I don’t see how you ever will.”
“Lydia!”
“What?”
“I’m not going to dig in any flower border! I’m not going to spy around any hedge just to——”
“Neither did I!” she cried, indignantly. “Did you ever know me to do any spying?”
“Certainly not. But you said——”
“I said ‘If youhappento.’ You don’t suppose I hid and listened deliberately? I was down on my hands and knees planting tulip bulbs, and the thick hedge was between us. That’s how it happened, and why, she neverdreamedanybody was near her. I didn’t even hear her come in that part of the yard until I heard her speaking right by me, on the other side of the hedge. Please don’t be quite so quick to think your wife would be willing to spy on another woman.”
“I didn’t,” Mr. Dodge protested, hastily. “What did she say to the chauffeur?”
“That,” his wife replied, severely, “is something you’ll never hear from me!”
“From whom shall I hear it, then?”
“I’ve just told you how you might hear it,” she said, plying her needle and seeming to give it all her attention.
“But I can’t spend my time in the tulip bed, Lydia.”
“That’s not what I meant. I said, ‘If her husband ever makes such a fuss that it gets into the papers.’ ”
“If he does, I might find out what she said to the chauffeur?”
“Oh, maybe,” Mrs. Dodge said; and she gave him a sidelong glance of some sharpness, then quickly seemed to be busy again with her work.
“I don’t make it out at all,” the puzzled gentleman complained. “Apparently you overheard Mrs. Braithwaite saying something to her chauffeur that would be ruinous to her if it were known—something that might cause her husband to make a public uproar if he had heard it himself. Is that it?”
Mrs. Dodge began to hum fragmentarily to herself and seemed concerned with nothing in the world except the selection of a proper spool of thread from her basket.
“Is that it, Lydia?”
“You’ll never find out from me,” she said, searching anxiously through the basket. “Anyhow, I shouldn’t think you’d need to ask such simple questions.”
“So thatisit! What you heard her say to her chauffeur would ruin her if people knew about it. Was she talking to the chauffeur about her husband?”
“Good gracious!” Mrs. Dodge cried, derisively. “What would she be talking to anybody aboutthatpoor little thing for? She never does. I don’t believe anybody ever heard her mention him in her life!”
“Then was she talking to the chauffeur about some other man?”
“Of all the ideas! If a woman were in love with a man not her husband, do you think she’d tell her servants about it? Besides, they’ve only had this chauffeur about two weeks. Have you noticed him?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Dodge. “I’ve seen him sitting in their car in front of the house several times, and I was quite struck with him. He seemed to be not only one of the handsomest young men I ever saw, but to have rather the look of a gentleman.”
“So?” Mrs. Dodge said, inquiringly; and her tone was the more significant because of her appearing to be wholly preoccupied with her work-basket. “You noticedthat, did you?”
“You don’t mean to say——”
“I don’t mean to say anything at all,” she interrupted, crisply. “I’ve told you that often enough for you to begin to understand it.”
“All right, I do. Well, when she’d said whatever she did say to the chauffeur, what happened?”
“Oh, that,” she returned, “I’m perfectly willing to tell you. I got up and looked at her over the hedge. I wasn’t going to stay there and listen—and I certainly wasn’t going to crawl away on my hands and knees! I just looked at her quietly and turned away and came into the house.”
“What did she do?”
“She was absolutely disconcerted. Her face just seemed to go all to pieces;—it didn’t look likeherface at all. She was frightened to death, and I never saw anything plainer. That’s one reason she hates me so—because I saw her looking so afraid of me and she couldn’t help it. Of course, as soon as I got into the house I looked out through the lace curtains at a window—you could hardly expect me not to—and I saw her just going back into her own house by the side door. She’d braced up and looked all stained-glass Joan of Arc again by that time.”
Mr. Dodge sat waggling his head and muttering in wonder. “Of all the curious things!” he said. “Human nature is so everlastingly full of oddities it’s always turning up new ones that you sit and stare at and can’t believe are real. There they are, right before your eyes, and yet they’re incredible. What did she say to the chauffeur?”
“No, no,” Mrs. Dodge said, reprovingly. “That’s what Ican’ttell you.” And she added, “I should think you could guess it, anyhow.”
“Was there——” He paused a moment, pondering. “Did she use any specially marked terms of endearment in addressing him?”
“No,” Mrs. Dodge replied, returning her attention to her work;—“not terms.”
“Oh,” he said. “Just one term, then. She used a single term of endearment in addressing him. Is that correct?”
Again Mrs. Dodge became musical: she hummed a cheerful tune, but her face was overcast with a dour solemnity.
“So she did!” her husband exclaimed. “Did she call him ‘dear’?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“ ‘Dearest’?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Not,” he said, incredulously, “not—‘darling’?”
Mrs. Dodge instantly resumed her humming.
“By George!” her husband cried. “Why, that’s just awful! What else did she say to him besides calling him ‘darling’?”
“I didn’t say she said anything else,” Mrs. Dodge returned, primly. “The rest wasn’t so important, anyhow, and she was speaking in a low voice. I thought the rest of it was, ‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.’ I couldn’t be sure because I didn’t hear it distinctly.”
“But youdiddistinctly hear her call him ‘darling’?”
“What I heard distinctly,” Mrs. Dodge replied, “I heard distinctly.”
“So what Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite said to the chauffeur was this: ‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance, darling’?”
“You must draw your own conclusions,” she advised him, severely.
“I do—rather!” he returned, and in a marvelling tone slowly pronounced their neighbour’s name, “Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite! Of all the women in the world, Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite! And when you rose up, and she saw you, she just went all to pieces and didn’t say a word?”
“I told you.”
“What did the handsome chauffeur do?”
“Just stood there.”
“It’s beyond anything!” Mr. Dodge’s amazement was not abated;—he shook his head and uttered groaning sounds of pessimistic wonderment. “I suppose the true meaning of the saying, ‘It’s the unexpected that happens,’ is that life is always teaching us to accept the incredible. How long ago was it?”
“A week ago yesterday.”
“Have you seen her since?”
“I never talk to her or she to me. We say, ‘How do you do? What lovely weather!’ and that’s all we ever do say. We haven’t even any neighbourly contact through congenial servants, because of our having coloured people;—hers are white. I haven’t caught a glimpse of her since it happened until this afternoon, when she came to Mrs. Cromwell’s tea. Of course, she knew I was looking at her, and she knew perfectly what I was thinking—particularly about her insult to me in making such a goose of my husband.”
“But, Lydia——”
“She was having the time of her life over that!”
“Well,” he said, reflectively, “leaving out the question of whether or not I was a goose especially, and considering her without personal bias, I must say that under the circumstances she’s shown a mighty picturesque intricacy of character, as well as a pretty dashing kind of hardihood. If, as you believe, she sent her note to me as really a derisive taunt—a gauntlet flung at you with mocking laughter—and all the while she knows you know of her philandering with a good-looking varlet——”
“She’s a bad woman!” Mrs. Dodge exclaimed, angrily. “That’s all there is to it, and you needn’t be so poetical about her!”
“Good gracious, Lydia, I wasn’t——”
“Never mind! We can talk of her just as well without any references to gauntlets and mocking laughter and varlets. That is, if you insist upon talking about her at all. For my part, I prefer just to keep her entirely out of my mind.”
“Very well,” he assented, meekly. “I don’t know that I can keep anything so singular out of my mind; but I won’t speak of it if it annoys you. What else shall we talk of?”
“Anything in the world except that detestable woman,” Mrs. Dodge replied. Then, after some moments of silence over her embroidery, she added abruptly, “Of course,youdon’t think she’s detestable!”
“I only said——”
“ ‘Picturesque’ was what you said. ‘Dashing’ was another thing you said. You’re quite fascinated with her derisive gauntlets and her mocking laughter! Dearme, if that isn’t like men!”
“But I only——”
“Oh, murder!” Mrs. Dodge moaned, interrupting him. “I thought you said you weren’t going totalkabout her any more!”
At this he showed spirit enough to laugh. “You know well enough we’re both going to keep on talking about her, Lydia. What do you intend to do?”
“About what?” Mrs. Dodge looked surprised. “Abouther, you mean? Why, naturally, I intend to keep on doing what I have been doing, and that’s nothing whatever except to hold my peace;—I don’t descend to the level of feuds with intriguing women. She gave me a clew, though, this afternoon.”
“What sort of a clew, Lydia?”
“I don’t suppose a man could understand, but I’ll try to give you a glimmering. When she wrote that note to you, there was one thing she hadn’t thought of. She thought of it this afternoon at that tea: it struck her all of a sudden that I could make things a little unpleasant for her if I took the notion to. She just happened to remember that Mrs. Cromwell is my most intimate friend, and that she is the grandest old rock-bottomed mountain this community can boast. That woman all at once remembered, and got afraid I might tell my friends.”
“How do you know she did?”
“That’s what a man couldn’t see. I knew it by a lot of little things I couldn’t put into words if I tried, but principally I knew it by watching her manner with Mrs. Cromwell.”
“You mean she tried to ingratiate herself?” he asked. “Her manner was more winsome or flattering than usual?”
“No, not exactly. Not so open—you couldn’t understand—but it was perfectly clear to me she was having the time of her life thinking of what she’d done to me through my husband’s weakness, when all at once she thought of my influence with the Cromwells. Well, she’s afraid of it, and it made her wish she hadn’t gone quite so far with me. She’d give a whole lot to-night, I’ll wager, if she’d been just a little less picturesque with her gauntlet throwing and her mocking laughter! You asked me what I was going to do and I told you ‘Nothing.’ Butshe’lldo something. She’s afraid, and she’ll make a move of some sort. You’ll see.”
“But what? What could she do?”
“I don’t know, but you’ll see. You’ll see before long, too.”
“Well, I’m inclined to hope so,” he said. “It would certainly be interesting; but I doubt her making any move at all. I’m afraid you won’t turn out to be a good prophet.”
On the contrary, he himself was a poor prophet; for sometimes destiny seems to juggle miraculously with coincidences in order to attract our attention to the undiscovered laws that produce them. In fact, Mr. Dodge was so poor a prophet—and so near to intentional burlesque are the manners of destiny in its coincidence juggling—that at this moment Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband had just rung the Dodges’ front door bell. Two minutes later a mulatto housemaid appeared in the doorway of the library and produced a sensational effect merely by saying, “Mrs. Braithwaite and Mr. Braithwaite is calling. I showed ’em into the drawing-room.”
She withdrew, and the staggered couple, after an interval of incoherent whispering, went forth to welcome their guests.
XVIMRS. LESLIE BRAITHWAITE’S HUSBAND
MRS. BRAITHWAITE was superb;—at least, that was Mr. Dodge’s impersonal conception of her. Never before had he seen sainthood so suavely combined with a piquant beauty, nor an evening gown of dull red silk and black lace so exquisitely invested with an angelic presence. For to-night this lady looked not only noble, she looked charming; and either his wife had made a grotesque mistake or he stood before an actress unmatched in his experience. She began talking at once, in her serene and sweet contralto voice—a beautiful voice, delicately hushed and almost imperceptibly precise in its pronunciation. “It seemed to us really rather absurd, Mrs. Dodge, that you and your husband should be our next-door neighbours for so long without even having set foot in our house or we in yours. And as Mr. Dodge has lately been so generous to my poor little Workers’ Welfare League—the unhappy creatures do need help so, and the ladies of the committee were so touched by your kindness, Mr. Dodge—we thought we’d just make that an excuse to call, even thus informally and for only a few minutes. We wanted to express the thanks of the League, of course, and we thought it was about time to say we aren’t really so unneighbourly as we may have seemed—and we hope you aren’t, either!”
“No, indeed,” Mr. Dodge responded with a hasty glance of sidelong uneasiness at his wife. Her large face was red and rather dismayingly fierce as she sat stiffly in the stiffest chair in the Dodges’ white-walled, cold, and rigidly symmetrical drawing-room; but she said, “No, indeed,” too, though not so heartily as her husband did. In fact, she said it grimly; yet he was relieved, for her expression made him fear that she would say nothing at all.
“One of the things I find to regret about modern existence,” Mrs. Braithwaite continued, in her beautiful voice, “is the disappearance of neighbourliness even in a quiet suburban life like yours and ours. Of course, this is anything but a new thought, yet how concretely our two houses have illustrated it! So it did seem time, at last, to break the ice, especially as I have good reason to think that just these last few days you must have been thinking of me as quite a naughty person, Mrs. Dodge.”
Mrs. Dodge stared at her; appeared to stare not only with astounded eyes but with a slowly opening mouth. “What? What did you say?” she asked, huskily.
“I’m afraid you’ve been thinking of me as rather naughty,” the serene caller said, and her ever promised smile seemed a little more emphatically promised than it had been. “I ought to confess to you that as a collector for my poor little Workers’ League I’m terribly unscrupulous. It’s such a struggling little organization, and the need of help is so frightfully pressing, I may as well admit I haven’t any scruples at all how I get money for it. Yet, of course, I know I ought to apologize for asking Mr. Dodge to contribute to a cause that you didn’t feel particularly interested in yourself.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Dodge said, and to her husband’s consternation she added formidably: “Isthatwhat you’re talking about!”
No disastrous effect was visible, however. Mrs. Braithwaite nodded sunnily. “I’m sure you’ll forgive me for the sake of the happiness the money brought to a pitiful little family—the father hasn’t had any work for eight months; there are four young children and one just born. If you could see their joy when——”
“I dare say!” Mrs. Dodge interrupted. “I’m glad it didsomegood!”
“I was sure you’d feel so.” Mrs. Braithwaite glanced gently at her host, whose face was a remarkable study of geniality in conflict with apprehension;—then her gaze returned to her hostess. “I wanted to make my peace not only for myself,” she added, “but for your husband. I’m sure you’re going to forgive him, Mrs. Dodge.”
Innocently, Mr. Dodge supposed this to be intended as a kindly effort on his behalf and in the general interests of amiability. He was surprised, therefore, and his apprehensions of an outbreak on the part of his wife were little abated, when he perceived that its effect upon her was far from placative. Her ample figure seemed to swell; she was red but grew redder; her action in breathing became not only visible but noticeable; to his appalled vision she seemed about to snort forth sparks. For several perilous moments she did not speak;—then, after compressing her lips tightly, she said: “Mr. Dodge sent you his check upon my direction, of course. Naturally, he consulted me. I told him that since you had twice solicited me for a subscription it would be best for us to send you some money and be done with it.”
Mrs. Braithwaite uttered a soothing sound as of amused relief. “That’s so much nicer,” she said. “I was afraid you might have been annoyed with both of us—with both poor Mr. Dodge and myself—but that exculpates us. I’m so very glad.” She turned to the perturbed host. “I wassoafraid I’d involved you, Mr. Dodge—perhaps quite beyond forgiveness.”
“Not at all—not at all,” he said, removing his gaze with difficulty from his wife’s face. “Oh, no. Everything—everything’s been perfectly pleasant,” he floundered, and Mrs. Dodge’s expression did not reassure him that he was saying the right thing. “Perfectly—pleasant,” he repeated, feebly.
“Isohoped it would be,” Mrs. Braithwaite said. “I hoped Mrs. Dodge wouldn’t beveryhard on you for aiding in such a good cause.”
“No,” he returned, nervously. “No, she—she wasn’t. She proved to be entirely—ah—amiable, of course.” And again he was dismayed by Mrs. Dodge’s expression.
“Of course,” Mrs. Braithwaite agreed, sunnily, with only the quickest and sweetest little fling of a glance at her hostess, “I wassureshe’d forgive you. Well, at any rate, we’ve both made our peace with her now and established theentente cordiale, I hope.” She turned toward her husband and spoke his name gently, in the tone that is none the less a command to the obedient follower: “Leslie.” It was apparently her permission for him to prepare himself for departure; but it may also have been a signal or command for him to do something else;—Mr. Dodge noticed that it brought an oddly plaintive look into the eyes of the small and dark Braithwaite.
Throughout the brief but strained interview he had been sitting in one of the Dodges’ rigid chairs as quietly as if he had been a well-behaved little son of Mrs. Braithwaite’s, brought along to make a call upon grown people. He was slender as well as short; of a delicate, almost fragile, appearance; and in company habitually so silent, so self-obliterative that it might well have been a matter of doubt whether he was profoundly secretive or of an overwhelming timidity. But as he sat in the Dodges’ slim black chair, himself rather like that chair, with his trim, thin little black legs primly uncrossed and his small black back straight and stiff, there were suggestions that he was more secretive than timid. Under his eyes were semicircles of darkness, as if part of what he secreted might have been a recent anguish, either physical or mental. Moreover, if he had been in reality the well-trained little boy his manners during this short evening call had suggested, those semicircles under his eyes would have told of anguish so acute that the little boy had wept.
When his wife said “Leslie,” he swallowed; there came into his eyes the odd and plaintive look his host had noticed—it was the look now not of a good little boy but of a good little dog, obedient in a painful task set by the adored master—and he stood up immediately.
“We really must be running,” his wife said, rising, too. “This was just our funny little effort to break the ice. I do hope it has, and that you’ll both come in to see us some evening. Idohope you’llbothcome.” She put an almost imperceptible stress on the word “both” as she moved toward the door; then said “Leslie” again. He was still standing beside his chair.
“Ah—” he said; then paused and coughed. “I—I wonder——”
“Yes?” his host said, encouragingly.
“I—that is, I was going to say, by the way, I wonder if you happen to know of a good chauffeur, Mr. Dodge.”
At this, Mrs. Dodge’s breathing became audible as well as visible, there fell a moment of such silence.
“A—a chauffeur? No,” Mr. Dodge said. “No, I don’t think I do. We haven’t one ourselves; we do our own driving. A chauffeur? No. I’m afraid I don’t know of any.”
“I see,” Braithwaite returned. “I just happened to ask. We’ve—ah—lost the man we’ve had lately. He was a very good driver and we haven’t anybody to take his place.”
Mrs. Dodge spoke sepulchrally as she rose from her chair. “That’s too bad,” she said, and, to her husband’s relief, stopped there, adding nothing.
“Yes,” Braithwaite assented. “He was a very good driver indeed; but he was a college graduate and only yesterday he found another position, tutoring, and left us. He was a very good man—Dolling.”
“What?” Mr. Dodge said. “Who?”
“Dolling,” Braithwaite replied; and followed his wife to the door. “I just happened to mention his name: Dolling. I—I didn’t address you as ‘darling,’ Mr. Dodge, though I see how you might easily have thought I did. The man’s name was Dolling. I shouldn’t like you to think I’d take the liberty of callingyou——”
But here he was interrupted by such an uproarious shout of laughter from his host that his final words were lost. Mr. Dodge’s laughter continued, though it was interspersed with hearty expressions of hospitality and parting cheer, until the callers had passed the outer threshold and the door had closed behind them. Then the hilarious gentleman returned from the hall to face a wife who found nothing in the world, just then, a laughing matter.
“The worst thing you did,” she assured him, “was to be so fascinated that you told her I’d been amiable to you about your sending that check—just after I said I knew all about itbeforeyou sent it and hadtoldyou to send it! That was a pleasant position to put your wife in, wasn’t it?”
“Lydia!” he shouted, still outrageous in his mirth. “Let’s forget that part of it and remember only Dolling!”
“All right,” she said, and her angry eyes flashed. “Suppose his namewasDolling. What was she talking to him about rosemary and remembrance for?”
“I don’t know, and it doesn’t seem important. The only thing I can get my mind on is your keeping to yourself so solemnly the scandalous romance of Dolling!” And becoming more respectably sober, for a time, he asked her: “Don’t you really see a little fun in it, Lydia?”
“What!” she cried. “Do you? After you saw that wretched little man of hers stand up there and recite his lesson like a trained monkey? Did you look atherwhile he was performing? She stood in the doorway and held the whip-lash over him till he finished! And if this idol of yours is so innocent and pure, why did she go all to pieces the way she did when she saw me that morning by the hedge?”
“Why, don’t you see?” he cried. “Of course she saw you thought she’d called the man ‘darling’! She knew you didn’t know his name was Dolling. Isn’t it plain to youyet?”
“No!” his wife said, vehemently. “It isn’t plain to me and it never will be!”
XVII“DOLLING”
AGAINST all reason she persisted in a sinister interpretation of her lovely neighbour’s conduct;—never would Mrs. Dodge admit that Mr. Dodge had the right of the matter, and after a time she complained that she found his continued interest in it “pretty tiresome.”
“You keep bringing it up,” she said, “because you think you’ve had a wretched little triumph over me. It’s one of those things that never can be settled either way, and I don’t care to talk of it any more. If you want to occupy your spare thoughts I have a topic to offer you.”
“What topic?”
Mrs. Dodge shook her head in a certain way. “Lily.”
“Oh, dear me!” he said. “It isn’t happening again?”
She informed him that it was, indeed. Lily’s extreme affections were once more engaged. “We’re in for it!” was the mother’s preface, as she began the revelation; and, when she concluded, her husband sorrowfully agreed with her.
“It’s awful now and will be worse,” he said; and thus his “spare thoughts” became but too thoroughly occupied. In his growing anxiety over his daughter, he ceased to think of his neighbours;—the handsome chauffeur passed from his mind. Then abruptly, one day, as the wandering searchlight of a harboured ship may startlingly clarify some obscure thing upon the shore, a chance conjuncture illuminated for him most strangely the episode of Dolling.
He was lunching with a younger member of his firm in a canyon restaurant downtown, and his attention happened to become concentrated upon a debonair young man who had finished his lunch and was now engaged in affable discussion with the pretty cashier. He was one of those young men, sometimes encountered, who have not only a strong masculine beauty, but the look of talent, with both the beauty and the talent belittled by an irresponsible twinkle of the eye. Standing below the level of the cashier’s desk, which was upon a platform, there was something about him that suggested a laughing Romeo; and, in response, the cashier was evidently not unwilling to play a flippant Juliet. She tossed her head at him, tapped his cheek with a pencil, chattering eagerly; she blushed, laughed, and at last looked yearningly after him as he went away. Mr. Dodge also looked; for the young man was Dolling, once Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s chauffeur.
“Fine little bit of comedy, that,” the junior member of Mr. Dodge’s firm remarked, across their small table. “Talked her into giving him credit for his lunch. She’ll have to make it up out of her own pocket until he pays her. Of course, he’s done it before, and she knows him. Characteristic of that fellow;—he’s a great hand to put it over with the girls!”
“Do you know him, Williams?” Mr. Dodge asked, a little interested.
“Know him? Lord, yes! He was in my class at college till he got fired in sophomore year. Every now and then he comes to me and I have to stake him. He’s a reporter just now; but it’s always the same—whether he’s working or not, he never has any money. He can do anything: act, sing, break horses, drive an airplane, any kind of newspaper work—publishes poetry in the papers sometimes, and he’s not such a bad poet, either, at that. But he’s just one of these natural-born drifters—too good looking and too restless. He never holds a job more than a couple of months.”
“I suppose not,” Mr. Dodge said, absently. “I suppose he’s tried a good many.”
“Rather!” Williams exclaimed. “I’ve got him I don’t know how many, myself. The last time I did he was pretty well down and out, and the best I could get for him was a chauffeur’s job for a little cuss I happened to know in the brass trade—Braithwaite. Lives out your way somewhere, I think. O’Boyletookit all right; it was chauff or starve!”
“I beg your pardon. Who took what?”
“O’Boyle,” said Williams. “Charlie O’Boyle, the man we’re talking about—the chap that was just conning the cashier yonder. I was telling you he took a job as chauffeur for a family out your way in the suburbs.”
“Yes, I understood,” Mr. Dodge returned, with more gravity than Williams expected as a tribute to this casual narrative. “You said this O’Boyle became a chauffeur to some people named Braithwaite and that you obtained the position for him. I merely wondered—I suppose when you recommended this O’Boyle to Mr. Braithwaite you—ah—you mentioned his name? I mean to say: you introduced O’Boyle as O’Boyle.”
“Well, naturally,” Williams replied, surprised and a little nettled. “Why wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t expect people to take on a man for a family job like that and not tell ’em hisname, would I? I don’t see what you——”
“Nothing,” Mr. Dodge said, hurriedly. “Nothing at all. It was a ridiculous question. My mind was wandering to other things, or I shouldn’t have asked it. We’d better get down to business, I suppose.”
But that was something his wandering mind refused to do; nor would it under any consideration or pressure “get down to business” during the rest of that afternoon. He went home early, and, walking from his suburban station in the first twilight of a gray but rainless November day, arrived at his own gate just as the Braithwaites’ closed car drew up at the curb before the next house.
An elderly negro chauffeur climbed down rustily from his seat at the wheel and opened the shining door; Mrs. Braithwaite stepped gracefully down, and, with her lovely saint’s face uplifted above dark furs, she crossed the pavement, entered the low iron gateway, and walked up the wide stone path that led through the lawn to the house. On the opposite side of the street a group of impressed women stopped to stare, grateful for the favouring chance that gave them this glimpse of the great lady.
Mr. Braithwaite descended from the car and followed his wife toward the house. He did not overtake her and walk beside her; but his insignificant legs beneath his overcoat kept his small feet moving in neat short steps a little way behind her.
Meanwhile, the pausing neighbour gazed at them and his open mouth showed how he pondered. It was not upon this strange woman, a little of whose strangeness had so lately been revealed to him, that he pondered most, nor about her that he most profoundly wondered. For, strange as the woman seemed to him, far stranger seemed the little creature pattering so faithfully behind her up the walk.
In so helpless a fidelity Mr. Dodge felt something touching; and perhaps, too, he felt that men must keep men’s secrets. At all events, he made a high resolve. It would be hard on Mrs. Dodge, even unfair to her; but then and there he made up his mind that for the sake of Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband he would never tell anybody—and of all the world he would never tell Mrs. Dodge—what he had learned that day about Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband’s loyalty.