READJUSTMENTS
For a minute Gabriella stood outside the door of what had once been the
drawing-room of the house, while she listened attentively to the sound
of animated voices within. Then suddenly Archibald's breezy laugh rang
out into the hail, and raising her hand from the knob, she knocked
softly on the white-painted panel of the door.
"Come in!" called O'Hara's voice carelessly; and Gabriell entered and
imperatively held out her hand to her son, who was standing by the
window.
"Come, Archibald, I want you," she said gravely. "You went off without
seeing your gifts." She had invaded the sitting-room of a strange man,
but her purpose was a righteous one, and there was no embarrassment in
her manner.
"Oh, mother, are they upstairs? I'll run up and see them!" cried,
Archibald delightedly. "I thought they were all in the trunks."
Darting past her in a flash, he bounded up the staircase, while
Gabriella stood facing O'Hara, who had risen and thrown away his cigar
at her entrance. The room was still fragrant with tobacco; there was a
light cloud of smoke over the mignonette in the window box, and beyond
it, she could see the dim foliage of the elm tree waving over the
flagged walk to the gate. With an eye trained to recognize the value of
details, she saw that the sitting-room was furnished with the same
deplorable taste which had selected the golden-oak hatrack and the
assortment of ornamental walking-sticks. The woodwork had been stained
to match the oak of the barbarous writing-table, which held a distorted
bronze lamp, with the base composed of a heavily draped feminine figure,
a massive desk set, also of bronze, a pile of newspapers, a dictionary,
and several dull-looking books with worn covers and dog's eared pages.
She noticed that the chairs were all large and solid, with deep arms and
backs upholstered in red leather, which looked as if it would never wear
out, that the rug was good, and that, except for a few meretricious oil
paintings on the greenish walls, the room was agreeably bare of
decoration. After her first hesitating glance, she surmised that a
certain expensive comfort was the end sought for and achieved, and that
in the furnishing beauty had evidently been estimated in figures.
"Mr. O'Hara," she began firmly, "I wish you would not take my son away
from me."
He did not lower his gaze, and she saw, after an instant in which he
appeared merely surprised, a look of amusement creep into his expressive
eyes. Within four walls, in his light summer clothes, with the gauzy
drift of tobacco smoke over his head, he looked larger and more
irrepressibly energetic than he had done out of doors.
"I am sorry you feel that way," he returned very slowly after a pause.
Already she had discovered that he had great difficulty with his words
except when he was stirred by excitement into self-forgetfulness. At
other times he seemed curiously inarticulate, and she saw now that,
while she waited for his answer, he was groping about in his mind for a
suitable phrase in which to repel her accusation.
"I appreciate your interest in him," she resumed smoothly, "but he is
with you too much. I do not know you. I know nothing in the world about
you."
"Well--" Again he hesitated as if over an impediment in his speech.
Then, finding with an effort the words he needed, he went on more
easily: "If there's anything you'd like to know, I guess you can ask
me."
She frowned slightly, and leaving the door moved resolutely to the
writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of
newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with
its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian
fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In her blue summer gown
she looked almost girlish in spite of the imperious dignity of her
carriage; and from her delicate head to her slender feet, she diffused
an air of fashion which perplexed and embarrassed him, though he was
unaware of the conscious art which produced it.
"The only thing I'd like to know about you," she answered, "is why you
have taken so sudden a fancy to my son?"
At this he laughed outright, with a boyish zest which dispelled the
oppressive formality of her manner. He was completely at his ease again,
and while he ran his hand impatiently through his hair, he answered
frankly:
"Well, you see, when it comes to that, I didn't take any sudden fancy,
as you call it--I didn't take any fancy at all--it was the other way
about. The boy is a nice boy--a bully good boy, anybody can see
that--and I like boys, that's all. When he began trotting round after
me, we got to be chums in a way, but it would have been the same with
any other boy who had come to the house--especially," he added with a
clean blow given straight from the shoulder, "if he'd been a decent chap
that a parcel of women were making into a muff."
For a minute anger, righteous anger, kept her silent; then she responded
with stateliness: "I suppose I have a right to decide how my son shall
be brought up?"
He met her stern gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her resentment
she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of his judgment. The
peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as "Western" sounded in
his voice as he answered:
"By George, I'm not so sure that you have!"
Before his earnestness she felt her anger melt slowly away. The basic
reasonableness of her character--her passion to investigate experience,
to examine facts, to search for truth--this temperamental attitude
survived the superficial wave of indignation which had swept over her.
"So you think I am making a mistake with Archibald?" she asked quietly;
and growing tired of standing, she sank instinctively into one of the
capacious leather-covered chairs by the table. "But the question is--are
you able to judge?"
"Well, I'm a man, and I hate to see a boy coddled. It's going to be
devilish hard on the kid when he grows up."
"Perhaps you're right"--her manner had grown softer--"and because I've
thought of this, I am going to send him away to school this autumn--in a
few weeks. Much as it will hurt me to part with them, I am going to send
both of my children away from me. I have made the arrangements."
Insensibly the note of triumph had crept into her voice. By the simple
statement of her purpose she had vindicated her motherhood to this man.
She stood clear now of his aspersions on her wisdom and her devotion.
"I don't know much about girls," he replied, seating himself on the
opposite side of the table, where the green light from the shaded lamp
fell directly on his features. "I can't remember ever noticing one until
I grew up, and then I was afraid to death of them, particularly when
they were young--but I've been a boy, and I know all about boys. There
isn't a blooming thing you could tell me about boys!" he concluded with
animation.
"And you think that all boys are alike?"
"More or less under the skin. Of course some are washed and some are
dirty--I was dirty--but they're all boys, every last one of them, and
all boys are just kids. With the first money I made out West, I started
a lodging-house for them--the dirty ones--down in the Bowery," he added.
"They can get a wash and a supper and a night's lodging in a bed with
real sheets any night in the year."
She was suddenly interested. "Do you care for boys just because you were
a boy yourself?" she asked.
"Because I was such a God-forsaken little chap, I guess. You were never
down in a cellar, I suppose, the kind of cellar people live in? Well, I
was born in one, and my father had killed himself the week before
because he was ill with consumption, and couldn't get work. He'd been a
teamster, and he lost his job when he came down with pneumonia, and
after they let him out of the hospital, he looked such a scarehead that
nobody would employ him. After he died, my mother struggled on somehow,
taking in washing or scrubbing floors--God knows how she managed
it!--and by the time I was five, and precious big for my age, I was in
the street selling papers. I used to say I was seven when anybody asked
me, but I wasn't more than five; and I remember as plain as if it was
yesterday, the way mother used to take me to a corner of Broadway, and
put a bundle of papers in my arms, and how I used to hang on to the
coppers when the bigger boys tried to get 'em away from me. Sometimes
I'd get an extra dime or nickel, and then we'd have Irish stew or fried
onions for supper. After my mother died, when I was about eight, I still
kept on selling papers because I didn't know what else to do, but I
didn't have any place to sleep then so I used to crawl into machine
shops or areas (he said 'aries') or warehouses, when the watchmen
weren't looking. In summer I'd sometimes hide under a bush in the park,
and the policeman would never see me until I slipped by him in the
morning. There was one policeman I hated like the devil, and I used to
swear that I'd get even with him if it took me all the rest of my life."
For a moment he paused, brooding complacently. "I did get even with him,
too," he added, "and it didn't take me more than twenty years."
"You never forget anything?"
"Forget?" he laughed shortly. "When you find a thing I forget, it'll be
so small you'll have to put on spectacles to recognize it!"
She nodded comprehendingly. "And after that?"
"After that they caught me and sent me to school, and I learned to read
and write and do sums--I always had a wonderful head for figures--but
after school I went on selling papers so I'd have something to eat---"
The door burst open, and Archibald rushed in to show the evening clothes
Gabriella had brought him from Paris.
"They are jolly, mother! May I keep them on?"
"If you like, dear, but they'll have to be altered a little. The coat
doesn't quite fit across the shoulders."
"You're a dandy, kid, a regular dandy," observed O'Hara, with humorous
gravity.
After a few moments Archibald rushed off again, and Gabriella made an
uncertain movement to follow him. "I must go," she said, without rising,
and added abruptly: "So you got on in spite of everything?"
"Right you are!" He leaned back in his chair and regarded her with
benevolent optimism. "You can always get on if the stuff is in you. I
meant to get on, and a steam engine couldn't have kept me back. It's the
gospel truth that I believe I came into the world meaning to get out of
that cellar, and it was the same thing with areas and ash-bins. I knew
all the time I wasn't going to keep grubbing a living out of an ash-bin.
I was always growing, shooting up like one of those mullein stalks out
there, and eating? Great Scott! I used to eat so much when I was a kid
that mother starved herself near to death so as to give me a square
meal. By the time I was twelve I had grown so fast that I got a job at
cleaning the streets--my first job from the city. But I never went
hungry. As far as I recollect I never went hungry except the time I beat
my way out to Chicago--"
Without moving, without lowering her eyes from his face, Gabriella
listened, while she clasped and unclasped the hands in her lap. There is
a personality that compels attention, and she realized for the first
time that O'Hara possessed it. A new vision of life had opened suddenly
before her, and she felt, with the illuminating intensity of a religious
conversion, that the world she had been living in was merely a fiction.
In spite of her experience she had really known nothing of life.
"Yes, a lot of 'em went hungry, but I never did," he resumed in a tone
of frank congratulation. "Sometimes, of course, I'd go without supper or
breakfast, but that was nothing--that was not being really hungry, you
know. I always managed, even when I was at school, to make enough to
keep satisfied. What I minded most," he added musingly, "was not having
a regular place to go home to at night, and that's why I started that
lodging-house. When you've slept in holes and on benches, and under
freight cars, and hidden away in machine shops, you know there's nothing
on God's earth--not a blessed thing--that can take the place of a real
sure enough bed with real sure enough sheets and pillow cases on it."
"But how did you come out of it? How did you succeed? For you have
succeeded beyond your dreams, haven't you?"
"Beyond my dreams?" He threw back his big, bright head, laughing
happily. "Did any man alive ever succeed beyond his dreams? Why, I used
to dream of being President, and I guess I shan't be President this
side of the Great Divide, shall I? But I made money, if that's what you
mean. Why, I have a million to-day to every dollar I had when I was
twenty. Do you mind my smoking? I can't talk unless I've got hold of a
cigar."
While he struck a match, she noticed with surprise how very neat and
orderly he was about the ashes of his cigars, which lay in an exact gray
heap in the massive bronze ash-tray. What a pity, she thought, moved by
a feeling of compassion, that he had had no advantages!
"I'll tell you how I got on," he pursued after a minute, leaning forward
with the cigar in his hand--it was a good cigar, she knew from the smell
of it. "Do you see this room?"--he glanced proudly about him--"do you
know why I keep this place even when I am in the West?" She shook her
head, and he went on with a kind of half-ashamed, whimsical tenderness:
"Well, a man lived here once you never heard of--a common Irishman--just
a common Irish politician--the Tammany sort, just the sort the
newspapers are so down on. I guess he wasn't strong on civic morality as
they call it, and the social conscience and all the other new-fashion
catchwords, but he found me out there in the snow one night selling
newspapers without any overcoat, and he brought me in and gave me one of
his. He was a little fellow--not big as the Irish usually grow--and I
could wear his clothes, though I wasn't thirteen at the time. The coat
wasn't an old one, either," he explained with retrospective complacency;
"no, sirree, he had just bought it, and he made me take it off after I'd
tried it on and sit down at the table in that back room there--it's all
just as he left it--and eat supper with him--the best supper I ever had
in my life before or since, you may take my word for it. Then when I'd
finished he gave me a dollar and told me to go out and rent a bed--" He
broke off, glanced about the room with the pride of ownership, and added
softly: "Who'd ever have thought on that night that this place would one
day belong to me?"
"Did you see him again?"
"After that he never lost sight of me. He got me a room, he sent me to
school--not that he thought much of education, the more's the pity--and
when I was through with school he got me into the Mechanics' Institute,
and gave me a job at engineering. But the job was too small for me, and
so was New York--there ain't room enough here to get on without stepping
on somebody's toes--and when I was twenty I set out to beat my way to
Chicago, and went clean out to Arizona. That's a long story--I'll tell
you that some day, for I've been everything on earth you can be in order
to keep alive, and done pretty much everything you can do with two hands
that will earn you a square meal. I've cut corn and ploughed fields, and
greased wheels, and chopped wood, and mended machinery, and cleaned the
snow away, and once out in some little town in Arizona, I even dug a
grave because the sexton was down with pneumonia. I've been brakesman,
and freightman, and, after that, freight agent. That was just before I
struck it rich in Colorado. I was one of the first men at Bonanza City,
and when I went there with the railroad--I was on the very first train
that ever ran there--the whole town was just a row of miners' shacks
near the foot of old Bonanza. It's the richest mineral streak in the
State, and yet twenty-five years ago, before the C.A. & F.W. tapped it,
there wasn't even a saloon out there at Bonanza. City. When you wanted a
drink--and that didn't worry me, for I haven't tasted anything but water
since I was twenty-five--you had to go all the way to Olympia to get it;
and what was worse, all the ore had to go to Olympia, too, on a little
no account branch road to be shipped over the main line. Well, as soon
as I discovered Bonanza City I said that had to change, and it did
change. I guess I did as much to make that town as any man out there,
and to-day I own about two thirds of it. I've got a house on Phoenix
Avenue, and I gave the town a church and a theatre and the ground for a
library. We've got one of the handsomest churches in the State," he
proclaimed with his unconquerable optimism, "and we've just begun
growing. Why, in ten years more Bonanza City will be in the race with
Denver."
"And what about your friend?" she asked, finding it difficult to become
enthusiastic over the most progressive town in Colorado, a State which
she always pictured imaginatively as a kind of rocky desert, inhabited
by tribes of gregarious invalids, which one visited for the sake of the
scenery or the climate, when one had exhausted the civilized excitements
of Europe.
"I am coming back to him," he responded with a manner of genial
remonstrance. "You just give me time. But I'd honestly like you to see
Bonanza City. Why, it would take your breath away if I told you it
hadn't even begun to grow twenty years ago. You people in New York don't
know what progress means. Why, out there in Bonanza City we do things
while you're thinking about doing them. But to come back to
Barney--that was his name, Barney McGoldrick--after I made my pile out
of Bonanza, I used to strike here once in a while to see how he was
getting along, and when he died I took these rooms just as he left 'em.
There wasn't a chick or a child to come after him, but he had a string
of pensioners as long as the C.A. & F.W. His money--it must have been
half a million--all went to charity, but I kept on in the rooms."
"What kind of man was he?" she asked, sincerely interested.
"What kind?" He pondered the question with deep puffs of his cigar.
"Well, do you know, I don't believe, to save my life, I could tell you.
The more you know of men, and of women, too, for they're all alike, the
more you understand, somehow, that you can't judge unless you've been
right in the other man's place--unless you know exactly what they've had
to pull up against and how hard they have pulled. Now, if I was drawing
my last breath, and you asked me what I thought of Barney McGoldrick,
I'd be obliged to answer that he was the best man I ever knew, though
there are others in this town, I guess, and the newspapers among 'em,
who would tell you that he was--" He broke off abruptly, and she waited
without speaking, until he solaced himself with his cigar, and went on
less boisterously: "It's a downright shame, isn't it, that the same man
can't manage to corner all the virtues. I can't explain how it is, but
I've noticed that the virtues don't seem able to work along peaceably in
one another's company, for if they did, I guess we'd have pure saints or
pure sinners instead of the mixed lot we've got to make a world out of.
I've seen a man who wouldn't have lied or stolen to save his wife from
starving, and who was the first in the pew at church every Sunday, grind
the flesh and blood out of his factory girls until they were driven into
the streets, or crush the very life out of the little children he put to
work in his mills. Yes, and I've seen a tombstone over him with 'I know
that my Redeemer liveth' carved an inch deep in the marble. Well, Barney
wasn't like that, but he had his weaknesses, and they were the kind
people don't raise marble tombstones over. I never had a taste for
politics myself, but it seems to be like any other weakness, and to drag
a man a little lower down if it once gets too strong a hold on him. It's
all right, of course, if you keep it in moderation, but there's precious
few chaps, particularly if it's in their blood, and they're Irish, who
can keep the taste under control. Barney was the most decent man to
women I ever knew. He wouldn't have hurt one for a million dollars, in a
factory or out of it, and he was faithful to his old wife up to the day
of her death and long after. He grieved for her till he died, and I
don't believe any woman ever asked his help without getting it. His
private life was absolutely clean, but his public morality--well, I
guess that wasn't exactly spotless. At any rate, they had an
investigation--there was a committee of citizens appointed to sit in
judgment on his record. The chairman was a pillar of the church and a
public benefactor; he had led every political reform for a generation;
and I happened to know that he kept two mistresses up somewhere in the
Bronx, and his wife, who was old and ugly, wore herself to a shadow
because he neglected her. Mark you, I'm not upholding Barney, but, good
Lord! ain't it queer how easy men get off when they just sin against
women and not against men or against the State?"
"It's all queer." She rose from the leather chair, and held out her
hand. "I'm glad I came in, Mr. O'Hara. Some day you must tell me the
rest."
"The rest?" His embarrassment had descended upon him, and he was
awkwardly stammering for words, with her cool hand in his grasp. As long
as his enthusiasm had lasted he had talked fluently and naturally, swept
away from his self-consciousness; but with the return of the formal
amenities he became as ill at ease and shy as a boy. "There ain't
anything more except that we're building a railroad out there, and I'm
going back to finish it next spring if I'm alive."
The September breeze entered from the dim stretch of yard, under the
waving elm boughs, and in an instant the room was filled with the
fragrance of mignonette.
"But you won't be if you never get your dinner," she retorted, as she
smiled brilliantly. Then, turning quickly, she crossed the threshold,
and went down the hall to the staircase.
She was tremendously excited, and while she mounted the stairs she felt
that she had not been so alive, so filled with energy since her girlhood
in Richmond. It was as if a closed door into the world had been suddenly
flung open, and she knew that she had passed beyond the narrow paths of
convention into the sunny roads and broad fields of vision. In a moment
of enlightenment she saw deeper and farther than she had ever dreamed
of seeing before. "It teaches one not to judge," she thought, with a
stab of self-reproach, "it teaches one not to judge others until one
really knows." Twice before to-night, on the day when she resolved for
the sake of Jane's children to go to work, and again on the June evening
when George returned to her, she had felt this sudden quickening of
life, this magical sense of the unexplored mystery and beauty of the
world that surrounded her. But she had been very young then, and on that
June evening she had been deeply in love. To-night, she assured herself,
there was no touch of personal romance. In some inexplicable way the
talk with O'Hara had renewed her broken connection with her Dream, and
she felt closer in sympathy to Arthur than she had been able to feel for
months. No, this awakening was utterly different from the awakening of
love, for it shed its illumination not on a single person, but on the
whole of humanity. O'Hara had moved her, not as a man, but as a force--a
force as impersonal as the wind or the sea, which had swept her
intellect away from its anchorage in the deeps of tradition. She had
thought herself free, but she understood now that she had never really
broken away--that in spite of her struggles to escape, the past had
still held her. To-night it was more than an awakening, it was a
conversion through which she was passing, and she knew she could never
again believe as she had believed a few hours ago, that she could never
judge again as unintelligently as she had judged yesterday. "So that is
a man's world," and then with a rush of impulse: "What a mean little
life I have been living--what a mean little life!" For she really knew
nothing of life except dressmaking; she was familiar with no part of it
except the way to Dinard's. She had been living a little life, with
little standards, little creeds, little compromises. And yet, though the
personality of O'Hara had enlarged her vision of the world, it had not
altered her superficial view of the man. She still saw him outwardly at
least without the glamour of romance--she still thought of him as
boisterous, uneducated, slangy--but she was beginning almost
unconsciously to distinguish between the faults of manner and the faults
of character; she was beginning to be tolerant.
From Fanny's open door a humming voice floated out to her, and going
inside, she found the girl, in a new frock, practising a dance step
before the mirror. "This is the lame duck, mother, but it's different
from the one we danced last year."
"Yes, dear, it's very pretty." Stopping before the dressing-table,
Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man in a silver frame--a
young man with a fascinating smile and inane features.
"Fanny, where did you get this?"
"Oh, mother, I didn't mean you to see it. I meant to put it away."
"Where did you get it?"
"He sent it to me. I wrote and asked him for it, and it has his
autograph. Isn't he handsome? That's just the way he looked in 'Stolen
Sweets' last winter."
"Well, he looks like a calf, I think," returned Gabriella severely. "I
suppose you may keep it out until you get tired of it, but please try to
be sensible, Fanny." Though she spoke jestingly, she was secretly
disturbed by the discovery of the photograph. "If she were not pretty,
it wouldn't matter," she thought, "but she is so pretty that almost any
man might be tempted to begin a flirtation. Thank Heaven, she didn't
take a fancy to Mr. O'Hara. That would have been a calamity." For, in
spite of the fact that she had become personally reconciled to O'Hara,
she was as firmly resolved as ever to keep Fanny out of his sight. "You
know so many nice boys, dear," she resumed after a minute, "that I think
you might be content to let actors alone."
"But boys are so stupid, mother." Fanny's tone was withering in its
disdain. "They are wrapped up in sports, and I despise sports."
"Then you oughtn't to tease them as you do. You're too young to have
fancies."
"I am sixteen."
"Well, that is much too young for anything of that sort. I like you to
have boy friends, but I don't like you to be foolish. What has become of
that attractive boy, Carlie's brother? He doesn't come here any more,
and I'm afraid you've hurt his feelings."
"Oh, mother," hummed Fanny to the music of the lame duck as she
practised before the mirror, "how can you really hurt a man?"
The next morning when Gabriella, in a Parisian gown of black taffeta and
one of the absurdly small hats of the autumn, started for Dinard's, she
found herself thinking, not of Fanny's flirtation, but of her long talk
with O'Hara. She cast a friendly glance on the golden-oak hatrack as she
passed--for O'Hara had risen in her regard since she had discovered that
he had not selected the furniture on the first floor--and then stopping
for a few moments on the front steps, she closed her eyes, and inhaled
the fragrance of the mignonette in the window box. The yard was
brilliant in the early sunshine; and at the gate she saw the wife of the
caretaker, who had looked after the flowers in her absence. Detaining
the woman by a gesture, she joined her in the street, and the two
started together to walk the long blocks that stretched to Fifth Avenue.
"You are going home early to-day, Mrs. Squires."
"Yes, ma'am; it's Johnny's birthday and I promised to take him up to the
Bronx. Mr. O'Hara had his breakfast at seven, and I got through earlier
than usual. He is so tidy that there ain't much to do except to dust
around a little."
She was a neat, red-faced woman, in rusty mourning for a child she had
lost in the early summer, and while she talked, Gabriella felt an
irresistible impulse to question her about O'Hara. "She has known him
for thirty years, and I can find out more from her than I could discover
for myself in six months," she thought; but she only said indifferently:
"You've worked at this house a long time, haven't you?"
"For thirty years--ever since I came here at eighteen as housemaid to
Mr. McGoldrick. My husband was coachman for Mr. McGoldrick, you know--he
drove the prettiest pair of bays in New York--and that was how I met
him. When we married, Mr. McGoldrick set us up, and John drove his
carriage for him as long as he lived. I often wonder what the old
gentleman would think of everybody having automobiles. They were just
beginning to come into fashion when he died."
"You knew Mr. O'Hara then?"
"Oh, yes, he was a great deal with Mr. McGoldrick. After he went West we
didn't see much of him for a time--that was while he was making his
money. Then he came back and brought his wife to a place here to be
treated--"
"His wife?"
"Didn't you know? She died a few years ago, but before that he used to
keep her with some doctor over on Long Island, and he went regularly to
see her every Sunday afternoon as long as she lived."
"What was the matter?"
"Drugs. Drugs and drink, too, they said, though I never knew for certain
about that. But they couldn't do anything with her. They tried all the
cures anybody ever heard of, and she went back every time. No sooner
would one thing fail, however, than Mr. O'Hara would hear of something
or other over in Europe, and make them begin trying it. Finally for the
last ten or twelve years she was quite out of her mind--clean crazy they
said, and didn't know anybody. But he still went to see her every Sunday
when he was staying in town, and he still made the doctors go on trying
new things. He never gave up till the very last. Mr. McGoldrick used to
say of him that he was the sort that would go on hoping in hell."
"Who was she? Where did he meet her?"
"God only knows. He never would say much about her even to Mr.
McGoldrick, but John always stuck it out that she was never the right
sort in the beginning, and that Mr. O'Hara got tangled up with her
somewhere in a mining town out West, and couldn't get out. I've heard
she was a chambermaid or a barmaid or something in a miners' hotel, but
I don't know, and nobody else knows, for Mr. O'Hara never opened his
mouth about her. All we know positive is that she must have been a drug
fiend long before he ever married her, and that he stuck to her for
better or for worse until she died and was buried. Some men are like
that, you know, a few of 'em. When a thing once belongs to 'em, no
matter what it is or how little it's worth, they'll go through fire and
water for the sake of it--and it makes no difference whether it's a
woman or a railroad or a dog or a mine. They've got the sense of
responsibility like a disease. You see, Mr. O'Hara is that sort, and you
might as well try to turn a steam roller as to start to reason him out
of a notion. It would have been as easy as talking for him to have got a
divorce. Time and again Mr. McGoldrick used to go after him about it,
and talk himself hoarse; but it didn't do any good, not a particle.
Instead of getting free out there in the West where it was easy, he kept
on lugging that crazy woman back and forth, trying to cure her long
after everybody else had given up hope and was wishing that she was
dead."
"Well, I suppose he loved her."
"No, ma'am, that's the funny part, but it didn't look like love to
me--not like what men call love, anyway. If it had been love, it would
have worn itself out long ago. Who on earth could love a crazy, yellow,
shrieking, cursing creature like that? I saw her sometimes when he'd
send me to take things down to her, and I tell you it wasn't love--not
man's love, anyhow--that made him do what he did."
"Then it must have been something finer even than love," Gabriella
acquiesced after a moment. "It's strange, when we come to think of it,
how often we find spirituality in places where we'd never expect it to
be."
"I don't know that I'd call Mr. O'Hara spiritual exactly," replied Mrs.
Squires thoughtfully. "I don't believe he ever puts his foot inside a
church, and I've heard him swear when he got ready till you'd expect the
roof to drop in on you, but when you come to think of it," she
concluded, "I guess there's a good deal of religion floating around
outside of walls."
At the next corner they parted, and as the caretaker stopped to shake
hands with Gabriella and thank her for a birthday present for Johnny,
she added nervously: "I hope I haven't said anything that I oughtn't to
have said, Mrs. Carr. Mr. O'Hara has been as good as gold to me, and I
shouldn't like him to hear I'd been talking about him."
"He shan't hear, I promise you"; and while Mrs. Squires hurried,
reassured, to her home in Sixth Avenue, Gabriella walked briskly with
the crowd which was streaming along Twenty-third Street into Broadway.
A week ago she would scarcely have noticed the people about her. For ten
years she had gone every morning to her work through the streets, and
she had felt herself to be as aloof from the masses as the soaring
skyscraper at the corner of Broadway. The psychology of the crowd had
not touched her; even when she walked with it, when she made a part of
it, she had felt herself to be detached from its purposes.
To-day, however, a change had come over her, and she was happy with a
large and impersonal happiness which seemed to belong less to herself
than to the throng which surged about her and gathered her in. Her
little standards, her little creeds, had become a part of the larger
standards and creeds of humanity. In Broadway, moving onward with the
other workers who were returning to the day's work, she was aware of an
invisible current of joy which flowed from the crowd into her thoughts
and through her thoughts back again into the crowd. For the first time
she was feeling and thinking in unison with the multitude.
That night, when she sat alone with Miss Polly, she said to her
suddenly:
"I believe I was wrong to wish Archibald not to see anything of Mr.
O'Hara. Yesterday we had a long talk, and I think he must have some very
fine traits."
"Maybe," replied Miss Polly, a little snappishly. "I never could see
what set you so against him, Gabriella."
"Oh, he is dreadfully slangy, and, of course, he isn't educated. I
suppose if I mentioned Hamlet to him, he'd think I was talking about
some town in Oklahoma."
"Well, I reckon he's been his own Hamlet," retorted Miss Polly; "and
knowing about Hamlet don't make a man, anyhow. George knew all about
Hamlet, but it didn't make him easy to live with."
"Yes, that's just it. What did George's advantages do for him? I used to
think it was love that mattered most," she said musingly after a pause,
"and then, when love failed, I began to think it was culture. But I see
now that it is something else. Do you ever wonder what the essential
thing really is, Miss Polly?"
"No, I never wonder," responded Miss Polly tartly, "but when you stew it
down to the bones, I reckon it's just plain character."
"Yes, if you can't have both culture and character, of course character
is the more important. But think how much that man might have made of
the university training that was wasted on George." While she spoke
there came back to her in snatches a conversation she had had with an
Englishman on the boat last summer, and she remembered that he had
alluded to Judge Crowborough as "a man of the broadest culture." Surely
the "broadest culture" must include character, and yet she could feel
even now the casual and business-like clasp of the judge, she could see
again the admiring gleam in his small, fishy eyes. "After all, I suppose
it is a kind of spiritual consciousness that makes character," she said
aloud, "and you can't train that into a man if he isn't born with it."
"It seems to me that Mr. O'Hara has done mighty well, all things
considered," pursued Miss Polly, and she inquired suspiciously: "Did
Mrs. Squires ever tell you anything about his marriage?"
"I met her this morning on my way to work, and she told me about it."
"Well, what do you make of it? Don't it beat anything you ever heard?"
"It does. There's not the slightest doubt of it. And, do you know,"
Gabriella went on hurriedly, "that story made a remarkable impression on
me--I've been thinking about it ever since. It made me see everything
differently, and I've even asked myself if I had enough patience with
George. If I wasn't too hard and intolerant with him in the beginning?"
"I shouldn't worry about that, honey, because I don't believe it would
have made any difference if you'd been gentler. It's the stuff in a man,
I reckon, that counts more than the way a woman handles him. You
couldn't have saved George any more than that other woman could ruin the
man downstairs."
"Perhaps not." Rising from her chair, Gabriella drew the pins from the
smooth, close coil of her hair. "But I see things so differently since I
had that talk with Mr. O'Hara. I am glad to have him for a friend," she
added generously, "but of course I still feel the same about Fanny. I
hope he won't begin to notice Fanny."
"Well, he won't. He ain't thinkin' about it. I declare, Gabriella," the
little woman went on with a change of tone, "your head don't look much
bigger than a pincushion with your hair fixed that way. It makes you
seem mighty young, but there ain't many women that could stand it."
"It's the fashion in Paris. I have to be smart. Do you suppose many
people guess that I wear extreme styles," she added laughingly, "because
they are so hard to sell?"
"You certainly do look well in 'em. I never saw anybody with more
natural style. Why, you can put on those slouchy things without a piece
of corset and look as if you'd just stepped out of a fashion plate."
"When you aren't pretty, you're obliged to be smart."
"Well, of course you never had the small features and pink and white
colouring that Jane had; but you always had a way of your own even as a
girl, and you're handsomer now than you ever were in your life. If you
were to ask Mr. O'Hara, I bet you he'd say you were a heap better
lookin' than Fanny."
A gasp broke from Gabriella, and she turned from the mirror to stare
blankly at the seamstress. "Mr. O'Hara! Why, what in the world made you
think of him?"
But Miss Polly had grown suddenly impenetrable. "Oh, nothin'," she
responded evasively; "I've just seen him look at you both when you were
together."
Gabriella laughed brightly. "Oh, he looks at everything. I never saw
such eyes."
There was the note of accomplishment, of success, in her voice, and she
brushed her fine, soft hair with long, vigorous strokes which had in
them something of this same quality of unwavering confidence. To look at
her as she sat, relaxed yet dominant, before the glass, was to recognize
that she was a woman who had achieved the purpose of her life, who had
succeeded in whatever she had undertaken. Not a great purpose,
perhaps--there were hours when her purpose seemed to her to be
particularly trivial--but still, great or small, she had accomplished
it. She was not only directing Dinard's now--she _was_ Dinard's. Without
her the business would collapse like a house of cards, and it was
because she knew this, because Madame also knew this, that she had been
able to perfect the arrangements she had planned that May afternoon
after her depressing visit to Judge Crowborough. For she managed the
house of Dinard's now by an arrangement which gave her one third of the
profits; and in the last six months, since this scheme had gone into
effect, the business had grown tremendously in certain directions. The
millinery department, for instance, which Madame had once treated with
such supercilious disdain, had become to-day the most fashionable hat
shop in Fifth Avenue. The work was hard, but the returns were wonderful;
and with a strange gloating, she told herself that she was making
money--always more money for the children. "When Fanny finishes school
year after next, we'll take a large apartment in Park Avenue, and spend
every summer in Europe," she concluded.
In the morning she rather expected to see O'Hara, but a month passed
before she met him one evening in October, when she came home late from
work. The autumn rains had come and gone, destroying the fugitive bloom
of Miss Polly's flower-beds, and scattering the leaves of the elm tree
in a moist, delicately tinted carpet over the grass. An hour ago the sun
had set in a purple cloud, and beneath the electric lights, which shone
through the fog with a wan and spectral glimmer, the dark outlines of
the city assumed an ominous vagueness. There was no light in the house;
and the deserted yard, silvered from frost and strewn with dead leaves,
which lay in wind-drifts along the flagged walk, had the haunted aspect
of a place where youth and happiness have passed so recently that the
fragrance of them still lingers.
"Archibald went off to school without telling you good-bye," she said in
a friendly voice. "He was much disappointed."
Stopping in the walk, he looked at her with unaffected surprise.
"Why, I thought that was what you wanted!"
She met this quite honestly. "Not after I talked to you."
"What in thunder did I say to change your opinion of me?" The strong
west wind blowing around him and lifting the roughened red hair from his
forehead, appeared to lessen by contrast the breezy animation of his
manner.
"It wasn't anything you said," she answered simply. "I found out you
were different from what I thought, that is all."
"Then you must have thought something!" he laughed aloud.
"I was afraid at first that you might have a bad influence over
Archibald."
"Oh, the kid!" His mirth was as irrepressible as his energy.
"You see I have to be very careful," she went on gently. "I want to do
my best by him."
At this he turned on her with sudden earnestness. "You can't do your
best by being too careful--take my word for it. If you want him to be a
man, don't begin by making a mollycoddle of him. Let him rough it a bit,
or it will be twice as hard for him when he grows up."
"But I do--I do. I am sending him away from me. Isn't that right?"
"You bet it is. Let him learn his own strength. I've lived among men
ever since I was born, and I tell you, nine times out of ten, the boy
who is tied to his mother's apron-strings, loses his grip when he is
turned out into the world. At the first knock-down he goes under."
Instinctively she flinched. If only he wouldn't!
"After he leaves school of course he will go to the university," she
said.
"That's right," he agreed emphatically, and pursued a little wistfully:
"Now, that's what I was cheated out of, and there've been times when I'd
have given my right arm to have been through college instead of having
to keep my mouth shut and then run home and look up the meaning of
things in an encyclopædia. It's a handicap, not knowing things. Nobody
who hasn't had to get along in spite of, it knows what a darned handicap
it is!"
"But you read, don't you?"
"Not much. Never had time to form the habit. But I've read
Shakespeare--at least I've read Julius Cæsar six times," he explained.
"I had it in the desert once where there wasn't a newspaper for two
months. And I've read the Kings, too--most of 'em."
"But not Hamlet?" She was smiling as she looked from him into the
street.
He shook his head with a laugh. "Too much meandering in that. I don't
like talk unless it is straight."
Though he was upon the most distant terms of acquaintance with the
English language, it occurred to her that he probably possessed a
knowledge of men and things which no university training could have
given him.
"It is wonderful," she remarked, touched to sympathy by his confession,
"that you should have succeeded."
"Oh, any man could have done it--any man, that is, who loved a fight as
much as I do. It was half luck and half bulldog grip, I suppose. When I
once get my grip on a thing, I'll hold on no matter what happens. There
ain't the power this side of Kingdom Come that could make me let go if I
don't want to."
She thought of his wife, of his losing fight against the craving for
morphine, and she replied very gently: "If you hadn't been a good
fighter, I suppose you would have been beaten long ago."
"So long ago," he retorted with jovial humour, "that you wouldn't have
known me."
An impulse of curiosity urged her to an utterly irrelevant response. "I
wonder if you have known many women?" She felt that she should like to
hear his story from him, there in the deserted yard; but when he
answered her, he revealed a personal reticence worthy of the
aristocratic traditions of Mrs. Carr. "Oh, I haven't had time for them,"
he replied indifferently.
"Perhaps there aren't so many in Bonanza City?"
"Oh, there're plenty," he rejoined gaily, "if you take the trouble to
look for them."
"And you didn't?" They had entered the house, and she spoke merrily as
she crossed to the staircase.
"Well, the sort I found didn't take my fancy, you see!" he tossed back
playfully from his door.
Her foot was on the lowest step, when, hesitating with a birdlike
movement, she looked at him over her right shoulder.
"Well, that's a pity. A woman could have told you a good many things,"
she observed.
"For instance?" He was still jesting.
Poised for flight, she gazed back at him, challenging his eyes.
"Oh, not to collect gold-headed walking-sticks, not to believe in
golden-oak, and not to be so extravagantly--slangy."
As she ran up the staircase, a burst of laughter followed her in the
midst of which she distinguished the retort: "Well, I own to the slang,
but I inherited the oak, and the sticks were all given me--by women."
The temptation to fling back, "of a sort?" came to her; but she
conquered it as she passed demurely into the sitting-room, where Miss
Polly was reading the afternoon paper before an open fire. "I mustn't
get too friendly," she told herself, reprovingly. "It is better to keep
up a certain formality." And she determined that at the next meeting she
would be dignified and aloof.
But the next meeting did not occur until January, for O'Hara went West
the following day, and for more than two months Miss Polly and Gabriella
were alone in the house. Though she was working doubly hard at Dinard's,
the loneliness of the winter evenings after the Christmas holidays were
over became almost intolerable to Gabriella; and the bleak month of
January stretched ahead of her in an interminable prospect of cold and
gloom. For the past ten years the children had absorbed her life, after
her working hours, so entirely that the parting from them had been an
unbearable wrench, and had left her with an aching feeling as if an arm
had been cut away. She had had little time to make friends; the streets
of the city isolated her as completely as if they had been spaces of
uninhabited wilderness; and, except for her casual remarks to Miss
Polly, she had lived from day to day without speaking a word that was
not directly concerned with the management or the sales of Dinard's.
Since her divorce, obeying perhaps some inherited tradition, she had
avoided men almost instinctively; and even if she had cared to make
friends among them, her life was so narrow that it would have been
almost impossible for her to do so. When she was not too tired, she
still read as widely as she could; but at thirty-seven books had become
but a poor substitute for the more robust human activities. As the
theatres and the lecture rooms offered the only opportunities of
relaxation and amusement, she went twice a week, accompanied by the
little seamstress, who appeared to thrive on self-sacrifice, to see a
play that was noticed in the papers, or to listen to explanatory
descriptions of the scenery of South America or the grievances of the
oppressed natives of Asia.
"You mustn't let yourself mope, honey," urged Miss Polly, one snowy
morning in January, when Gabriella was putting on a fur coat, cut in the
latest fashion, which had been left on her hands after the mid-winter
sales. "The children had to go sooner or later, and it's just as well it
happened while you are young enough to get over it. A boy never stays at
home anyway, and you know I always told you Fanny was the sort to marry
before she is out of her teens."
"Oh, I'm not moping, but of course I can't help missing them. The house
seems so empty."
"It's obliged to be empty with only us two women in it. I declare I got
such a creepy feelin' about burglars last night that I kept wishin' Mr.
O'Hara would hurry up and come home. Mrs. Squires says she was expectin'
him all last week, but he didn't turn up, so she is kind of lookin' for
him to-day."
"Is she?" Gabriella's voice was charged with sincere thankfulness.
Merely to know that there was a man on the first floor afforded a sense
of security; and an occasional meeting with him would make, she was
aware, a trivial diversion from the monotony of her existence. The
loneliness of the winter had driven her like a storm-swept bird back to
the enduring refuge of her Dream; but, after all, the flesh and blood
presence of O'Hara could not seriously interfere with the tender and
pensive visions her memory spun of the past. Every morning, standing
beside her window and gazing on the bleak street and the bare elm
boughs, she thought of Arthur and of her first love, with a pious and
reverent mind--for they occupied in her day the hour and mood which her
mother, belonging to a more orthodox generation, piously dedicated to
"Daily Strength for Daily Need." But never for an instant would it have
occurred to the granddaughter of that sanctified snob, Bartholomew
Berkeley, who despised the lower orders and fraternized with the Deity
in his pulpit every Sabbath, that the red-blooded and boisterous
O'Hara--the man of force and slang--could by any accident usurp the
sacred shrine where the consecrated relics of her first love reposed.
Before the whirlwind of O'Hara's energy, she would congratulate herself
that her Arthur, with the milder fluid of the Peytons in his veins,
would never allow himself to be carried away by his impulses.
"Well, I'm glad he's coming back, if it's only to protect us," she said,
while she fastened her fur coat. "I wonder what he has been doing out
West all this time?"
"Makin' money, I reckon. They say he makes so much he don't know what to
do with it."
"We could teach him, couldn't we? But he ought to marry and let his wife
spend it for him. Only," she concluded carelessly, "I suppose he'd
select some dizzy chorus girl who would bring him to ruin. Men of his
kind always pick out chorus girls, don't they?"
"I thought 'twas the other sort that did that," observed Miss Polly,
fresh from the perusal of the Sunday newspapers; "Dukes and society men
and the sons of millionaires."
"Perhaps. Maybe they're all alike," and taking up her umbrella,
Gabriella started bravely out into the storm.
At six o'clock, when she struggled back along Twenty-third Street, the
wind had changed, and the storm driving furiously down the long blocks
caught her in a whirl of blinding snowflakes. In the swirling whiteness
of the distance, the black outlines of the city appeared remote and
shadowy, while the waning lights, which shone like dim moons at the
crossing, revealed the ghostly figures of a few struggling pedestrians.
The gate was open, and she had almost reached it, when the lurching form
of a man, emerging suddenly from the storm, was flung against her with
such violence that she fell back for support on the icy railing of the
yard. Then, as the obscure figure, drawing away from her with a
staggering motion, began fumbling blindly at the gate, she caught sight
of a ghastly face, which looked as if it had been stricken by an
incurable illness. The man wore no overcoat; a knitted muffler was
wrapped tightly about his neck; and she saw that the hands fumbling at
the gate were red and trembling from cold.
Steadying herself against the fence, she drew her purse from her muff,
and she had already taken out a piece of silver, when she heard her name
called in a voice which sounded vaguely familiar, though it awoke no
immediate associations in her mind.
"Gabriella! My God! I was looking for you, Gabriella!"
With the money still in her hand, she stooped to look into his face.
"You don't know me. I'm George," he said in an angry voice as if he were
about to burst into tears. "I'm George, but you don't know me."
The storm drove him against her, and he clung weakly to her arm, crying
softly in a terrified whimper like a child that is awaking from a
horrible nightmare. Though she did not realize that he was dying, not of
disease, but of drink, the thought shot through her mind: "So this is
George. So this is what George has come to--George who took everything
that he wanted!"
"Where are you going?" she asked, for the shock had restored him to some
poor semblance of sanity.
"I was looking for you. I heard you lived down here, and I knew you'd
take me in. I've been ill--I'm ill enough to die, and they turned me out
of the hotel. There was a woman who stole everything I had. She stole it
and ran off in the night, damn her!"
He shivered violently while he spoke, and she saw a glassy look creep
into his eyes and over his face, as if his features had been frozen in
an instant of terror. Panic seized her lest he should die there in the
street, and she grasped his arm almost roughly as if she would shake him
back into life. As she supported him his teeth began to rattle, not as
the teeth of the living chatter from fear, but as the teeth of a dead
man might rattle when he is jolted in his coffin. For a minute she felt
the madness of her panic pass from her pulses to her brain, and her
terror of him turned her as cold as the sleet-covered iron railing
against which she leaned. A cowardly impulse tempted her to desert him
and run for her life, to seek shelter behind bolted doors, to leave him
there alone to freeze to death at her gate.
"Gabriella, I'm afraid," he whined, clinging to her arm. "I'm afraid,
Gabriella. You can't let go of me!"
An unspeakable loathing swept over her; his very touch seemed
contamination; and while she turned toward the gate, she knew that
every fibre of her flesh, every quiver of her nerves, revolted against
the thing she was doing. But something stronger than her flesh or her
nerves--the vein of iron in her soul--decided the issue.
"Come in with me, and I'll take care of you," she said. "There is the
step. Don't stumble. Here, steady yourself with the umbrella. We are
almost there now." Her voice was cold and hard; but the words were those
she might have used to Archibald had she been leading him in out of the
storm.
Still whimpering and stumbling, George clung to her with his desperate
clutch, while she dragged him up the short walk, which was deep in snow,
to the six steps, which appeared to her to reach upward into eternity.
As she approached the house, a light shone out suddenly in one of the
windows and a sense of safety, of perfect security descended upon her,
for she knew that it was the red glimmer of O'Hara's fire. With the
sensation, she heard again her mother's voice speaking above the storm:
"Gabriella, we'll send immediately for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn!" So, in
the old days of her childhood, Cousin Jimmy had brought her this feeling
of relief in the midst of distress.
Opening the door with her latchkey, she dragged George into the hall,
where her thankful eyes fell on O'Hara's overcoat, from which the water
was, still dripping. For an instant she was tempted to call to him; then
checking the impulse, she went on to the staircase, which she ascended
with difficulty because George's legs seemed to give way when he tried
to lift them to a step. At last, after what she felt to be an eternity,
they reached the upper floor, and she pushed her burden into
Archibald's room, where he fell like a log on the hearthrug. The sound
of his fall shook the house, and when Miss Polly came running in, with a
cry of alarm, Gabriella almost expected to see O'Hara behind her. But
O'Hara did not come, and before the seamstress could recover from the
palpitations the shock had produced, George was on his feet again, and
was staring blankly, as if fascinated, at the reflection of the electric
light in the mirror.
"It's George," Gabriella explained in a harsh voice. "I found him in the
street. He was looking for me, and I couldn't leave him to freeze. I
think he's either drunk or ill. I don't know which it is, but it sounds
like pneumonia."
"God have mercy!" exclaimed Miss Polly, which was quite as lucid as she
ever became in a crisis. Her face had turned blue, she was trembling
with terror, and the violence of her palpitations almost exceeded the
painful sounds in George's chest. "If there was only a man we could send
for," she wailed hysterically. "Oh, Gabriella, if there was only a man!"
"Well, there's the doctor," replied Gabriella shortly. "You'd better
telephone for him at once. Get the nearest one. I think his name is
McFarland."
"And a nurse? You'll want a nurse, won't you?"
"I'll want anything I can get, and I'll want it quickly. There, hurry,
while I find a bathrobe of Archibald's. He's wet through--soaking wet.
He must have been out all day in the storm."
Miss Polly vanished into the dimness of the hall, and after a few
minutes Gabriella heard her fluttering voice demanding a telephone
number as if she were still supplicating the Deity.
"Take off your wet clothes while I get you a drink and some hot
blankets!" said Gabriella when she had found one of Archibald's
bathrobes in the closet. It occurred to her that George was really
incapable of undressing himself, but she felt that she would rather die
than touch him again. The loathing which had overpowered her outside in
the storm became stronger in the close air of the house. "I can't touch
him. I don't care what happens I can't touch him," she told herself,
while she placed the flannel robe on the rug, and hurried back to the
kitchen. Her whole body was benumbed and chilled, not from cold, but
from disgust, yet her mind was almost unnaturally active, and she found
herself thinking over and over again: "So this is the man I loved, this
is the man I married instead of Arthur!"
When she came back with a cup of broth and some hot blankets, she found
George in the flannel gown of Archibald's, with his wet clothes on the
floor at his feet, from which he had forgotten to remove his shoes. He
drank the soup greedily, while Miss Polly lighted the wood-fire she had
laid in the open grate.
"The heat's comin' up all right in the radiator," she said, "but I
thought a blaze might make him more comfortable."
"Yes, it's better," replied Gabriella sternly, while she stooped to
unlace George's boots. There was no compassion in her heart, and it
seemed to her, while she struggled with the wet lacing, that the fumes
of whiskey spread contagion and disease over the room. She was not only
hard and bitter--she felt that she loathed him with unspeakable
loathing.
"I declare, Gabriella, I believe he has gone deranged!" Miss Polly
cried out sharply, dropping the poker and starting to her feet in an
erratic impulse of flight.
With the flannel gown clutched tightly to his chest, where the dull
rattling sounds went on unceasingly, George was staring in fascinated
intensity at the reflection of the electric light in the mirror. Then
suddenly, with a scream of terror, he lifted the poker Miss Polly had
dropped, and flung it over Gabriella's head in the direction of the
dressing-table. At the noise of breaking glass, Gabriella rose from her
knees, and said in the hard, quiet voice she had used ever since the
first shock of the meeting:
"If you are afraid, lock yourself in your room, Miss Polly. I am going
downstairs for Mr. O'Hara."
Without waiting for a response, she ran out into the hall and down the
staircase, while her eyes clung to the comforting glimmer of light under
the drawing-room door. As her feet touched the lowest step, the door
opened quickly, and O'Hara stood on the threshold.