To the casual observer there was nothing heroic in Ritchie’s coming, but
truly it was heroic. It had cost him a horrible effort to subdue his
outrageous pride, to forego the Coyotes’ dance, and to return here for
the ungracious Madeline. And how did he find her? Bending over a strange
man in evening dress, all alone, long after the place should have been
closed!
“Well!” he said. “What’s all this?”
With vehement indignation Madeline told him the story of the base
desertion of the helpless sufferer.
“And what am I going to do with him?” she ended. “It’s the worst I ever
heard--going off and leaving him like this!”
“Well, send for the police,” said Mr. Ritchie, but he regretted his
words when he saw her eyes blaze.
“Shame on you!” she cried. “The state he’s in!”
“Well, now, see here,” said Ritchie. “I guess you don’t know what’s the
matter with him. He’s not sick; he’s just--”
“Hush up!” she interrupted fiercely. “I guess I do know! It isn’t his
fault--he got in with bad comp’ny.”
“How do you know?” he inquired.
“I _do_ know,” she replied firmly. “Never you mind how! And I’m going to
see he gets taken care of till he’s all well again.”
All this did not contribute to Mr. Ritchie’s happiness. Wasn’t it just
like a woman, he thought, to be captious and haughty to a devoted young
man of blameless life, and an angel of compassion to this unknown
profligate?
Nevertheless, in spite of his jealous alarm and his pain and his
distrust, it was Ritchie’s sure instinct to behave generously. Heaven
knows where he got his magnanimity. He hadn’t learned it in the mean and
sordid little home of his childhood. He hadn’t been taught it in school,
and it had been a part of his nature long before he had read a line of
those improving little books.
His sallow face flushed.
“Well!” he said. “I’ll take him home with me.”
Madeline didn’t know how to be gracious, but she appreciated this.
“He can’t walk,” was all she said.
“All right!” said Ritchie grandly. “I’ll call a taxi.”
He had never done this before. He hastened to a cab stand on Fifth
Avenue, and it seemed to his proud soul that all the chauffeurs knew he
had never used a taxi, and despised him. He was very truculent about it.
An infinitely greater humiliation was in store for him. When he returned
to the restaurant, he couldn’t lift, or even move, the helpless young
man. All those hours with the exerciser availed him nothing. His
physique was shamefully deficient.
“Let me,” said Madeline. “I’m real strong.”
Without much trouble, she took the fellow under his arms and got him to
his feet. He opened his eyes, then, and smiled a dreamy, innocent smile.
Supported by Madeline and pushed by Ritchie, he made a sort of attempt
at walking to the cab.
“I’d better go with you,” said she, “or you’ll never get him up the
stairs.”
Sick with shame, Ritchie was obliged to consent. Neither of them for an
instant contemplated asking the chauffeur’s assistance; and the
chauffeur, being class conscious, did not volunteer it.
Ritchie had the worst fifteen minutes of his life during his first ride
in a taxi. He felt himself a mean, contemptible, worthless thing, with
his lack of bodily strength. He contrasted his worn, shabby suit with
the stranger’s expensive clothes. He knew that Madeline must despise
him. She would despise him far more when she saw his room, yet he could
devise no way for preventing that.
When the cab stopped before his door, he paid the fare, torn between a
certainty that his natural enemy, the chauffeur, was cheating him, and
his desire to appear lordly before Madeline. Then, together, they began
to get the stranger up the stairs.
The noise of the operation made Ritchie’s blood run cold. Suppose some
one saw him with a drunken man and a girl? He hauled at the fellow’s arm
in no very gentle manner.
At last, at the top of the house, he unlocked a door, and, supporting
the stranger against the wall of the corridor, he brusquely said to
Madeline:
“All right! You might as well go now.”
“I’d like to see him settled,” said she.
So Ritchie had to light the gas and had to let her in.
The room was a bleak, bare, cold little cell, with the exerciser
fastened to the wall, and the window nailed open, to admit all the
hygienically fresh air possible. On the bureau, instead of the little
accessories of a fastidious gentleman, were a pair of military brushes,
the vital library, all in a row, and a bottle of ink. On the table were
an alarm clock and the apparatus of the correspondence course. There
were no other visible articles personal to Ritchie, except a razor strop
and six cakes of carbolic soap, economically unwrapped to dry.
He pushed the stranger down on his cot.
“All right!” he thought defiantly. “Now you can see just how I live--and
I hope you’ll like it! Go on--laugh, if you want to!”
But she was not laughing.
“Oh, my, what a dusty towel!” she was thinking, in distress. “And no
curtains. The woman that runs this house ought to be ashamed of
herself!”
She turned to Ritchie without the least trace of haughtiness.
“Well, good night, Everard,” she said.
It was the first time she had used his name. He needed that assuagement
to compensate for the lingering glance she gave to the prostrate
unknown.