CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“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 a hidden 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 gripped him 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 you

_that_ way. 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 of

_you_,” 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 firm seemed 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’s _killing_ him! He _can’t_ rest unless he

has that money. Am I to just sit down and let my husband die, when he’s

in such trouble as this? Is _that_ all 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’ll_ rise 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 can _you_ do?

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 little garments. “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 was _herself_—a woman and in

trouble—just for that! Dosia, if I go to Eugene Larue myself in

trouble—_such_ trouble——”

“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 stopped with 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? _Then_ I’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! You _must!_”

“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

stooped over 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

tell _you_. 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 as blankly, 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 she _must_ see 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.

Haledon itself 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 up the

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?”

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

bicycle.

“Oh, it will be only a step,” said Lois, starting off in the direction

indicated, followed perforce by Dosia with the hand-bag, both walking in

silence.

The excursion, from an easily imagined, matter-of-fact daylight

possibility, had been growing gradually a thing of the dark, unknown,

fantastic. A faint remnant of the fading light remained in the west,

vanishing as they looked at it. Above the treetops a pale moon hung

high; there seemed nothing to connect them with civilization but that

iron track curved out of sight.

The quarter of a mile prolonged itself indefinitely, with that strangely

eternal effect of the unknown; yet the big iron gates were reached at

last, showing a long winding drive within. It was here that Eugene Larue

had built a house for his bride, living in it these summers when she was

away, alone among his kind, a man who must confess tacitly before the

world that he was unable to make his wife care for him—a darkened,

desolate, lonely life, as dark and as desolate as this house seemed now.

An undefined dread possessed Dosia, though Lois spoke confidently:

“The walk has not really been very long. We’ll probably drive back. It’s

odd that there are no lights, but perhaps he is sitting outside. Ah,

there’s a light!”

Yet, as she spoke, the light left the window and hung on the cornice

above—it was the moon and not a lamp that had made it. They ascended

the piazza steps; there was no one there.

“There is a knocker at the front door,” said Lois. She pounded, and the

noise vibrated terrifyingly through the stillness. At the same instant a

scraping on the gravel walk behind them made them turn. It was the boy

on the bicycle, who, having sped back to them, was wheeling around at

the moment that he might lose no impetus in retracing his way, while he

leaned over to call:

“Mr. Larue ain’t there. The woman who closed up the house told me he had

a cable from his wife, and he sailed for Europe this afternoon. She

says, do you want the key?”

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

“I wish he had waited until we could have asked him some questions,”

said Dosia, vexed. “Don’t let’s stay here; it’s too dark and too

dreadfully lonely under these trees. We had better get back to the

station and wait for the train.”

“I suppose so,” said Lois drearily. This, then, was the end of her

exaltation—for this she had passionately nerved herself! There was to

be neither the warmth of instant comprehension of her errand, nor the

frank giving of aid when necessity had been pleaded; there was nothing.

She shifted the baby over to the other shoulder, and they retraced their

way, which now seemed familiar and short. There was, at any rate, a

light on a tall pole in front of the little station, although the

station itself was deserted; they seated themselves on the bench under

it to wait. The train was not scheduled for nearly an hour yet. The

watch that Lois carried showed that it was a quarter to nine.

“Oh, if I could only fly back!” she groaned. “I don’t see how I can

wait—I don’t see how I can wait! Oh, why did I come?”

“Perhaps there is a train before the one you spoke of,” said Dosia, with

the terribly self-accusing feeling now that she ought to have prevented

the expedition at the beginning. She got up to go into the little box of

a house, in search of a time-table. As she passed the tall post that

held the light, she saw tacked on it a paper, and read aloud the words

written on it below the date: