CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

This time, of course, the visitor was Mrs. Snow. In any exigency, any

mind- and body-absorbing event of life, the inopportune presence of Mrs.

Snow was inexorably to be counted on, though it came always as one of

those exasperating recurrences which bring with them a ridiculously

fresh irritation each time. It seemed to be the one extra thing you

couldn’t stand; in either trouble or joy she affected you like a

clinging, ankle-flapping mackintosh on a rainy day. She bowed now to

Dosia with a patronizing dignity, pointed by the plaintive warmth of the

greeting to Lois, who had come hurrying down-stairs out of those

passion-depths of darkness so that Mrs. Snow wouldn’t suspect anything.

She had an uncanny faculty of divining just what you didn’t want her to.

Once before Lois had suspended tragedy for Mrs. Snow. The same things

happen to us over and over again daily in our crowded yet restricted

lives—it is we who change in our meeting with them. We have our great

passions, our great joys, our heartbreaks, no matter how small our

environment.

“How do you do, my dear? Mr. Girard has just told me that he was going

to stay here to-night, in Mr. Alexander’s absence. He said little Redge

was threatened with the croup. Now, if I had only known that Mr.

Alexander was away, _I_ could have come and stayed with you!”

“Oh, that wasn’t at all necessary,” said Lois hastily. “Thank you very

much. Do sit down, won’t you, Mrs. Snow?”

“Only for a minute, then; I must go back to Bertha,” said Mrs. Snow,

seating herself and fumbling for something under her cloak. “I just came

over to read you a letter. It’s in my bag—I can’t seem to find it.

Well, perhaps I’d better rest for a minute.” Mrs. Snow’s face looked

unusually lined and set; in spite of her plaintiveness, her eyes had a

harassed glitter.

“Isn’t it rather late for you to be out alone?” asked Lois.

“Yes; Ada would have come around here with me, but she was expecting Mr.

Sutton. She was expecting him last night, but he didn’t come. If _I_

were a young lady, I’d let a gentleman wait for _me_ the next time; it

used to be thought more attractive, in my day, but Ada’s so afraid of

not seeming cordial; gentlemen seem to be so sensitive nowadays! I said

to her, ‘Ada, when a man is enough at home in a house to kick the cat,

and ask for cake whenever he feels like it, I do _not_ see that it is

necessary to stand on ceremony with him.’ But Ada thinks differently.”

“It is difficult to make rules,” said Lois vaguely.

“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Snow. “As I was saying to Bertha, you don’t find a

young man like Mr. Girard so considerate of everyone—not that he’s so

_very_ young, either; I’m sure he often appears much older than he is.

It’s his manner—he has a manner like my dear father. He and Bertha have

long chats together; really, he is what _I_ would call quite attentive,

though she won’t hear of such a thing—but sometimes young men _do_ take

a great fancy for older girls. I had a friend who married a gentleman

twenty-seven years younger—he died soon afterwards. But many people

think nothing of a little difference of twelve or fifteen years. I said

to Bertha this morning, ‘Bertha, if you’d dress yourself a little

younger—if you’d only wear a blue bow in your hair.’ But no; I can’t

say anything nowadays to my own children without being flown at!” Mrs.

Snow’s voice trembled. “If my darling William were here!”

“Have you heard from William lately?” asked Lois, with supreme effort.

“My dear, he’s in Chicago. I came over to read you a letter from him

that I got to-night. That new postman left it at the Scovels’, by

mistake, and they never sent it over until a little while ago. There was

a sentence in it,” Mrs. Snow was fumbling with a paper, “that I thought

you’d like to hear. Where is it? Let me see. ‘Next month I hope to be

able to send you more’—no, no, that’s not it. ‘When my socks get holes

in them I throw them’—that’s not it, either. Oh! he says, ‘I caught a

glimpse of Mr. Alexander last night, getting on a West Side car’—this

was written yesterday morning. ‘I called to him, but too late. I’m

sorry, for I’d like to have seen him.’ That’s all, but Mr. Girard seemed

so pleased with the letter, I promised that I would bring it around to

you that very minute,—_he_ had to run for the train,—but I was

detained. He thought you’d like to hear that William had seen Mr.

Alexander.”

Like to hear! The relief for the moment turned Lois faint. Yet, after

Mrs. Snow went, the torturing questions began to repeat themselves

again. Justin was alive—Justin was alive on Tuesday night. Was he alive

now? And why had he gone to Chicago at all? Why had he sent her no word?

The wall between them seemed only the more opaque. Every fear that

imagination could devise seemed to center around this new fact.

She and Dosia went around, straightening up the little drawing-room,

making it ready for Girard’s occupancy—pulling out a big chair for his

use, and putting fresh books on the table. The maid had long ago gone to

bed, and there was coffee to be made for him—he might get hungry in the

night. When he came in at last, he brought all the brightness and

courage of hope with him; he had wired to William, he had phoned to a

dozen different places in Chicago.

“Oh, what should we do without you?” breathed Lois, her foot on the

stairway.

“It doesn’t seem to me I’ve helped you very much so far, our one clue

has been from Mrs. Snow. I want you to go to bed now, and to sleep, Mrs.

Alexander; take all the rest you can. I’m here to do the watching. If

there’s anything really to tell, I’ll call you, I promise faithfully.

What is it, Miss Linden? Did you want to speak to me?”

“There was a message for you while you were gone,” said Dosia in a low

tone.

His eyes assented. “Yes, I went there—to the place that they—but it

wasn’t Alexander, I’m glad to say, though I was afraid when I went

in——”

“I know,” said Dosia.

Another strange night had begun, with the master of the house away. Lois

went to her room to lie down clothed, jumping up to come to the head of

the stairs whenever the telephone-bell rang, and then going back again

when she found that those who were consulting were asking for

information instead of giving it, but by and by the messages ceased.

Suppose Justin never came back! She began to feel that he had been gone

for years, and tried confusedly to plan out the future. There were the

children—how should she support them? She must support them. It was

hard to get work when you had a baby. If she hadn’t the baby—no one

should take the baby from her! She clasped him to her for a moment in

terror, as if she were being hunted, before she grew calm and began

planning again. There was only a little money left—to-morrow they must

still eat. She must make the money last.

Dosia, on the bed by Redge’s crib, went softly after a while into the

other room, and saw that Lois at last slept, though she herself could

not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger,

so far removed was he from her dream of him; through all his softness,

his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if nobody else

did—though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too—that

the fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up

from the cruel circumstances of his early days without that hardening

streak to uphold him. She divined, with some surprising new power of

divination, that in spite of all his strong, capable dealing with

actualities and his magnetic drawing of men, for the inner conduct of

his own life he was shyly dependent on odd, deeply held theory—theory

that he had solitarily woven for himself. She felt impersonally sorry

for him, as for a boy who must be disappointed, though he was nothing to

her.

Yet, as Dosia lay there in the dumb stretches of the night, her tired

eyes wide open, close to Redge’s crib, with his little hot hand clinging

to hers, the mere fact of Girard’s bodily presence in the house,

down-stairs, seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn’t get

away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it

called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with

Lawson—unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement.

This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not

to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She

tried to lose it in the thought of Lois’ great trouble, of this

weighting, pitiful mystery of Justin’s absence—of what it meant to him

and to the household; she tried to lose it in the thought of Lawson,

with the prayer that always instinctively came at his name. Nothing

availed; through everything was that wearing, persistent consciousness

of Girard’s bodily presence down-stairs. If it would only fade out, so

that she might sleep, she was so tired! The clock struck two. A voice

spoke from the other room, sending her to her feet instantly:

“Dosia?”

“Yes, Lois, dearest, I’m here.”

“Has any word come from Justin?”

“No.”

Lois shivered. “I think, when Redge wakes up next, you’d better give him

a drink of water, he sounds so hoarse. I’ve used all I brought up. Do

you mind going down to get some more? I would go myself, but I can’t

slip my arm from under baby; he wakes when I move. Here is the pitcher.”

“Yes,” said Dosia, stopping for a moment to pull the coverlet tenderly

over Lois, before stepping out into the lighted hall.

It seemed very silent; there was no sound from below. Dosia went down

the low, wide stairs with that indescribable air of the watcher in the

night. Her white cotton gown, the same that she had worn throughout the

afternoon, had lost its freshness, and clung to her figure in twisted

folds; the waist was slightly open at the throat, and the long white

necktie was half untied. One cheek was warm where it had pressed the

pillow; the other was pale, and her hair, half loosened, hung against

it. Her eyes, very blue, showed a rayed starriness, the pupils

contracted from the sudden light—her expression, tired and half

bewildered, had in it somewhat of the little lost look of a child, up in

the unwonted middle of the night, who might go naturally and comfortably

into any kind arms held out to her. The turn of the stairs brought her

fronting the little drawing-room and the figure of Girard, who sat

leaning forward, smoking, in the Morris chair, with his elbow resting on

the arm of it and his head on his hand; the books and bric-à-brac on the

table beside him had been pushed back to make room for the tray

containing the coffee-pot, a cup and saucer, and a plate with some

biscuits; a newspaper lay on the floor at his feet. Notwithstanding the

light in the hallway and the room, there was that odd atmospheric effect

which belongs only to the late and solitary hours of the night, when the

very furniture itself seems to share in a chill detachment from the life

of the day. Yet, in the midst of this night silence, this withdrawing of

the ordinary vital forces, the figure of Bailey Girard seemed to be

extraordinarily instinct with vitality, even in that second before he

moved; his attitude, his eyes, his expression, were informed with such

intense and eager thoughts that it was as startling, as instantly

arresting, as the blast of a trumpet.

At the sound of Dosia’s light oncoming step opposite the door, he rose

at once, and with a quick stride stood beside her. He seemed tall and

unexpectedly dazzling as he confronted her; his deep set gray eyes were

very brilliant.

“What is the matter? Is Mrs. Alexander ill?”

“No—oh, no; the children have been restless, that is all,” said Dosia,

recovering, with annoyed self-possession, from a momentary shock, and

feeling disagreeably conscious of looking tumbled and forlorn. “I came

down to get a pitcher of water.”

“Can’t I get it in the dining-room for you?” he asked, with formal

politeness.

“Thank you. The water isn’t running in the butler’s pantry, I have to go

in the kitchen for it. If you would light the gas there for me——”

“Yes, certainly,” he responded promptly, pushing the portières aside to

make a passage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light

the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed

floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in

which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as

of the deep darkness of the night outside around everything.

A large white cat lying on a red-striped cushion on a chair by the

chilly hearth stretched itself and blinked its yellow eyes toward the

two intruders.

“Let me fill this,” said Girard, taking the pitcher from her—a rather

large, clumsy majolica article with a twisted vine for a handle—and

carrying it over to the faucet. The intimacy of the hour and the scene

emphasized the more the punctilious aloofness of this enforced

companionship.

Dosia leaned back against the table, while he let the water run, that it

might grow cold. It sounded in the silence as if it were falling on a

drumhead. The moment—it was hardly more—seemed interminable to Dosia.

The white cat, jumping up on the table, put its paws on her shoulders,

and she leaned back very absently, and curved her throat sideways that

her cheek might touch him in recognition. Some inner thought claimed

her, to the exclusion of the present; her eyes, looking dreamily before

her, took on that expression that was indescribably gentle, intolerably

sweet.

Dosia has been ill described if it has not been made evident that to

caress, to _touch_ her, seemed the involuntarily natural expression of

any feeling toward her. Something in the bright, tendril-curling hair,

the curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet

rounded form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as

inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, with

always the suggestion of that illusive spirit that dared, and retreated,

ever giving, ere it veiled itself, the promise of some lovelier glimpse

to come.

The water had stopped running, and Dosia straightened herself. She

raised her head, to meet his eyes upon her. What was in them? The color

flamed in her face and left her white, although in a second there was

nothing more to see in his but a deep and guarded gentleness as he came

toward her with the pitcher.

“I’ll take it now, please,” she said hurriedly.

“Won’t you let me carry it up for you?”

“Thank you, it isn’t necessary. I’ll go along, if you’ll wait and turn

out the light.”

“Very well. You’re sure it’s not too heavy for you?” he asked anxiously,

as her wrists bent a little with the weight.

“Oh, no, indeed,” said Dosia quickly, turning to go. At that moment the

white cat, jumping down from the table in front of her, rubbed itself

against her skirts, and she stumbled slightly.

“Take care!” cried Girard, grasping the shaking pitcher over her slight

hold of it.

Their hands touched—for the first time since the night of disaster, the

night of her trust and his protection. The next instant there was a

crash—the fragments of the jug lay upon the kitchen floor, the water

streaming over it in rivulets.

“Dosia!” called the frightened voice of Lois from above.

“Yes, I’m coming,” Dosia called back. “There’s nothing the matter!” She

had run from the room without looking up at that figure beside her,

snatching a glass of water automatically from the dining-table as she

passed by it. Fast as her feet might carry her, they could not keep pace

with her beating heart.

When the telephone-bell rang a moment after, it was to confirm the

tidings given before. Justin was in Chicago.

[Illustration: _He came toward her with the pitcher_]