"Doctor Dacer--" Lita began. Her throat was dry.
"Oh, don't explain," he said. "What's the use?"
For the first time she saw that she had no explanation whatsoever to
offer. She could only say, "I haven't any idea why that man suddenly
appeared at the house." It sounded feeble, even to her.
"Perhaps to inquire about Aurelia," answered Dacer, and permitted
himself a most disagreeable smile.
"That's not funny," said Lita.
"It's not original. I got the main idea from someone else."
"Doctor Dacer, I never saw Mr. Valentine--nor wrote to him. The only
explanation I can think of is--"
Miss Waverley entered.
"Mr. Andrews on the telephone, doctor."
Dacer snatched up the telephone as if it were a captured standard,
saying as he did so, "Perhaps while I'm telephoning you'll be able to
think of the explanation."
But she wasn't able to think at all. She could just stare at him.
"Yes," she heard him saying, "there is a--someone is here at the
moment, but I shall be free directly." He hung up the receiver and
replaced the telephone on the desk. "Well," he said, "have you got
something good ready for me?"
She had one small idea.
"Can't you see that if things were as you think I would hardly have
left Mr. Valentine to follow you, at once?"
"Oh, quite a time has gone by!"
"Because I had to walk--I had no money with me. Walk? No, I ran!"
He was affected by the picture of her running after him through the
streets, and she pressed on: "Doctor Dacer, I want to tell you why
I let my parents and Miss Barton and everyone think that letter to
Valentine was from me."
He sat down, shrugging his shoulders as if it were useless but he would
not forbid it.
Truth in detail is almost inimitable. Lita told her story in great
detail--Aurelia's request--the hidden photographs--the story of
the tramp--the letter thrust into her pocket and discovered by
Margaret--the identical expressions of her parents on the subject of
her marriage and her own sudden inspiration that here, at least, was
one topic on which they agreed.
"You see," she said eagerly, "it was only a few hours before that my
father had said just the same thing--that I must not think of marrying
for years; and then my mother--"
"You had sounded both your parents on the subject of marriage?"
Lita looked at him. His face was like a mask.
"I had happened to mention in the course of conversation--"
"You are thinking of getting married, Miss Hazlitt?"
"No, Doctor Dacer."
"No? The idea has never crossed your mind?"
"No--at least not in connection with--no."
Someone had told her that blushing could be prevented by a sharp pinch
in the back of the neck. It was a lie. She felt as if she were being
painted in a stinging crimson paint, while Dacer continued to regard
her with a cold, impassive stare. He rose and shut the door between the
two offices.
"Am I to understand," he said, "that you have never considered the
possibility of marriage?"
She shook her head. She felt as if she were drowning.
"Then consider it now," he said, and took her up in his arms, her toes
dangling inches from the floor.
Miss Waverley entered again. The apartment was well built and the doors
opened without any preliminary creaking.
"Doctor Burroughs on the telephone, doctor," she said.
There was nothing to do but to let Lita slide to her feet and to take
up the telephone from the desk. It was all very well for him, with his
attention immediately occupied; but Lita was left alone to encounter
the blank self-control of Miss Waverley's expression as she again
shut the door behind her. Dacer was giving his chief an account of a
professional visit, and was about to receive instructions. Lita heard
him say, "Yes, I'll hold the wire."
In the pause that followed, Lita whispered, pointing toward the door,
"She saw!"
"Unless stricken with blindness."
"She took it so calmly."
"Nothing in her life."
"I mean as if it happened every day."
Dacer shouted, still holding the telephone to his ear, "Miss Waverley!"
Miss Waverley returned, and Dacer went on, "Have you ever found a lady
in my arms before?"
"No, not in yours, doctor," said the nurse, as if she would not wish to
be pressed about some of the people she had worked for.
"Thanks," said Dacer. "Miss Hazlitt thought you were not quite enough
surprised."
"I wasn't surprised at all," answered Miss Waverley, and as Dacer was
obliged to turn back to the telephone and take down some directions
in writing she added, "He's been so absent-minded lately--since
Elbridge--forgetting everything if I didn't follow him up."
Dacer had finished telephoning.
"Miss Hazlitt and I are going to be married," he said. "Get me a taxi,
will you?"
"Not now!" said Lita.
He laughed.
"No, not tonight," he answered. "I've got to see a patient in
Washington Square. You'll go with me and wait in the cab. Then we'll
dine somewhere--and not get you back until late. We'll test this theory
of yours that parents can be reconciled through anxiety."
"Oh, I couldn't!" said Lita. "It would drive my mother mad!"
"Or to your father."
"It would hurt her terribly."
"I'm a surgeon. I know you've got to hurt people sometimes for their
own good. My bag, please, Miss Waverley. My book--thanks. Good-by."
A moment later they had gone, and Miss Waverley was left alone, tidying
the office for the night. She shook her head. Her thought was: "And
they expect us to respect them as if they were grown men." She sighed.
"And the grown-up men aren't any better," she thought.
In the meantime the pleasure of Mrs. Hazlitt's afternoon had been
spoiled by the idea that Lita was sitting at home, waiting for her.
Hers was a nature most open to self-reproach if no one reproached her.
She returned about seven, eager to do her duty. She came running
upstairs, calling to her daughter as she ran, and felt distinctly
foolish when Freebody said coldly that Miss Hazlitt had not yet come in.
"Hasn't come in?" cried Mrs. Hazlitt, and looked very severely at him
over the banisters.
Freebody had been with her long enough to have learned to withstand the
implication that anything he told her was his fault. He moved about,
putting the card tray straight.
"Miss Hazlitt went out before you did, madam."
"Alone?"
"After the other gentleman left. Not Mr. Valentine."
"There was no other gentleman but Mr. Valentine."
Freebody, in his irritating way, would not argue with her. She had to
begin all over again in order to elicit the facts--a gentleman had
come to the house soon after Miss Hazlitt's arrival, and just before
the arrival of Mr. Valentine. When he left, Miss Hazlitt had gone
directly--Freebody would infer that she had been trying to catch up
with him.
"Did she?" asked Mrs. Hazlitt.
"Ah, I couldn't say, madam."
Mrs. Hazlitt was really alarmed. This was the other man--the real
danger. By half past eight she was convinced of disaster. She called
up her former husband at his club. He had gone out to dinner. How
characteristic!
No one in the club seemed to know where he was dining; but the
telephone operator was ill-advised enough to say that if they did know
they were not allowed to give out the information.
Nothing annoyed Mrs. Hazlitt so much as a rule. The idea that the
telephone operator of the club knew something which she wanted to
know and would not tell her was an idea utterly intolerable. Was her
child to be murdered--or worse--because the club had a silly rule?
She ordered her motor and drove down to interview the starter. He
fortunately had heard the address Mr. Hazlitt had given his chauffeur.
It was that of a small restaurant famous for quiet and for good food.
A few minutes later Mrs. Hazlitt was standing in the doorway, fixing
her former husband with a significant stare. He was half through dinner
with a man from Baltimore. Baltimoreans believe that good food is only
terrapin and canvasback; and that terrapin and canvasbacks can only be
properly cooked in Baltimore, hence that no good food is obtainable
outside of their native city. Hazlitt was in process of proving his
friend wrong when he looked up and saw his former wife. He guessed at
once that something had happened to Lita, and began to feel guilty.
Alita, in common with so many wives, had always possessed the power of
making her husband feel guilty. In old times, with just a glance or
an inflection of the voice she could make him feel like the lowest of
criminals. And, rage as he might, he found this power had persisted.
Love may not always endure until death do them part, but the ability of
married people to make each other feel guilty endures to the grave--and
possibly beyond.
Hazlitt sprang to his feet, thinking that he ought to have seen
Valentine. It had been mere obstinacy on his part. If anything had
happened to Lita as a result--
Presently they were driving back to the house in Mrs. Hazlitt's car,
and so strong is the power of association that as they got out at
the house Hazlitt found himself feeling for his latchkey, though it
was thirteen years since he had had a key to that lock. Mrs. Hazlitt
saw it and felt rather inclined to cry. She herself was not without
a sense of guilt, for she had not told him about her interview with
Valentine. When he said repentantly that he ought to have seen the
fellow she answered that she was convinced his first judgment had been
correct--it wasn't necessary. He thought this very generous of her.
It was after nine when they entered the house. Still nothing had been
heard of Lita. Activity for some common interest can make strangers
friends and may keep enemies from open quarrels. Mrs. Hazlitt admired
Hazlitt's methods--his instructions to his secretary--his possession of
a friend in the police department. He complimented her upon the placing
of her telephones, her pens and ink. He thought to himself as he looked
about the room that she had always had the power to make the material
side of life comfortable and agreeable; if only she had understood
mental peace as well--
Their intercourse was impersonal, but not hostile. Hazlitt bore
interruption calmly, and though she could not allow him to say that
Lita resembled him in temperament, she contradicted him without insult.
They came nearest to a disagreement over the question as to whether it
was or was not a good rule that club employes should not be allowed to
give information as to the whereabouts of the members.
"Are all the members' lives so full of secrets?" she asked, and she
made the word "secrets" sound very sly.
Fortunately at that moment the doorbell rang, and Lita and Dacer
entered.
"Where have you been?" asked her father angrily.
"Dining with Doctor Dacer," answered Lita. "He and I are engaged."
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Hazlitt.
"My daughter is not old enough to know her own mind," said Hazlitt to
Dacer.
"I know it all right," said Lita.
"Of course," said Dacer temperately, "we understand that we could not
be married for some time, but we wanted you to know--"
"Oh, that's what young people always say to begin with," Mrs. Hazlitt
answered; "but the first thing you know they are sending out their
wedding invitations."
Lita and Dacer looked a trifle silly. This had been exactly their
idea--to get consent to a long, long engagement, and then by the summer
to start a campaign for an early marriage.
Mr. Hazlitt rose and stood on the hearth rug--as if it were his own.
"You two young people realize," he remarked, "that I have never seen or
heard of Doctor Dacer before, and that so far he has caused me nothing
but anxiety."
"The whole thing has just been a web of deceit," said Mrs. Hazlitt.
"Until I know a little more about him, and until Lita is a year or
so older and more mature, I should not be willing even to discuss an
engagement, and I'm sure my wife agrees with me."
All four noticed that he had used the word without qualification, and
all four successfully ignored the fact. Indeed anyone entering the room
at that moment and seeing Mr. Hazlitt, so commanding on the hearth
rug, and Mrs. Hazlitt in a chair beside the fire, looking up at him
and nodding her head at the end of every sentence, would have supposed
them a married couple entering upon middle age without a thought of
disagreement.
The discussion followed good orthodox lines. The older people,
Olympian above their distress, granted that in a year or so if all went
well an engagement might be discussed; but at present none existed. The
young people, really calm, knew that nothing but their own wills could
change the fact that they were engaged at that moment.
When Dacer had gone home and Lita had gone to bed her parents outlined
their campaign. Delay without definite commitment was the idea--it
always is. In the meantime Hazlitt would have the young man thoroughly
looked up. Mrs. Hazlitt wagged her head despondently.
"I'm afraid there's nothing really against him. Doctor Burroughs
wouldn't have an assistant with anything actually criminal in his
record."
Lita was to be allowed to see him occasionally. To write? No, they
decided, after talking it over, that letters would be a mistake.
The point was, Mrs. Hazlitt explained, that the child must be left
perfectly free to change her mind. This might be just a fancy for the
first man who had asked her to marry him. Mrs. Hazlitt supposed it was
the first. Next winter Lita might meet a dozen men she preferred. She
had a sudden idea: Perhaps it would be wiser if the girl did go to
Italy with her father, to get her out of the way for a few months.
"I'm afraid you'd miss her dreadfully."
"I should cry all summer, but it doesn't matter."
"There's nothing that I can see to prevent your going to Italy
yourself."
"It's not usual to go junketing about Europe with your divorced
husband," she answered.
"It need not be known that we went together; we might meet by
accident," said Mr. Hazlitt, at which his former wife laughed a little
and said it sounded to her like a very improper suggestion, and he
looked serious and blank and monumental.
The Italian trip was left in abeyance, but the other details were
settled in a clear and definite manner. Dacer was to come to the
house once a month, never to write; and there were to be no flowers
or presents, or mention of an engagement. Certainly not! They parted
gravely, like people who had had their last long talk.
But this campaign, like many others, worked better in theory than in
effect. Dacer came the next morning, and again in the afternoon, and
then again the next morning. Mrs. Hazlitt protested. She said three
times in twenty-four hours was not occasionally. Dacer only laughed
and said it seemed very occasional to him. The situation was made more
difficult for her, too, by the fact that she really liked Dacer, and
he and Lita were so friendly and seemed to value her company so much
that she enjoyed herself with them more than was consistent in a stern,
relentless parent. Besides, in old days she had told Lita a great many
clever things she had accomplished in the management of her own parents
when she had been first engaged; and Lita, horrible child, remembered
every word, and would repeat them all to Dacer in her mother's presence.
Finding herself helpless, the second morning she telephoned to Hazlitt.
She said she thought it was almost impossible to forbid a man the house
partially; it ought to be one thing or the other.
Hazlitt said, "Let it be the other then; don't let the fellow come at
all."
Hearing a note of pitiable weakness in her voice, he offered to come in
himself.
He came that afternoon about three--an excellent time, for Lita was
upstairs and Dacer was occupied with office hours. Mrs. Hazlitt sent
Freebody to ask her daughter to come down, while she apologized to her
former husband for troubling him again.
"But the fact is," she said, "turning a young man out of the
house--that really is a father's job."
"Even if it isn't the father's house?"
"It's no affair of Doctor Dacer's whose house it is," answered Mrs.
Hazlitt with dignity. "You see, a mother's relation with a daughter is
too intimate, too tender--"
"I hope a father's may be both."
"I suppose it might, but it's not like a mother's. She respects you
deeply, Jim. I've brought her up to that."
"Have you, Alita?"
A hint of skepticism in his voice wounded Mr. Hazlitt.
"Of course I have," she answered. "Why, what do you mean? Are you
trying to suggest--how unjust! Lita," she added, as her daughter
entered, "have I ever said a word that could in any way reflect on your
father? Haven't I always brought you up to respect him?"
Lita looked at them reflectively. She had, in her time, told a great
many untruths for their sake. Now that she had them here together, she
rather thought it would be a good idea to tell them the truth. As she
paused, her mother repeated her question even more emphatically: "Have
I ever said anything to prejudice you against your father?"
"Why, of course you have, mother," she said. Her father gave a short,
bitter laugh, and she turned on him. "And so have you, Pat--only not so
often as mother."
"How can you be so disloyal?" cried her mother, her eyes getting larger
than ever.
"How can I be anything else? You two make me disloyal."
"Remember you are speaking to your mother," said Hazlitt protectingly.
"And to you, too, Pat," answered his daughter calmly. "You've each
wanted me to hate the other one, and you've both been as open about
it as you dared to be. It was always like giving mother a Christmas
present if I said anything disagreeable about you. And your cold gray
eye would light up, Pat, if I criticized anything about her."
"Divorced or not, we are your parents, please remember," said Hazlitt.
"You don't always remember it yourselves," the girl answered. "Parents!
You seem sometimes as if you were just two enemies trying to injure
each other through me."
Mrs. Hazlitt was already standing, and she drew a step nearer her
former husband.
"Jim," she wailed, "aren't they terrible--these young people? And I
thought she loved me!"
"I do love you, mother," said Lita; "I love you dearly--better than I
love Pat, only I can't help seeing that he behaves better. Or perhaps
not. Women understand the art of undermining better than men do. I
think Pat did all he knew how. You both filled my mind with poison
against the other, drop by drop. Oh, you don't know how dreadful it
is to be poisoned all the time by the two people you love best in the
world!"
Mrs. Hazlitt looked up into the face of her former husband, as to an
oracle.
"Do you think it's our divorce she's talking about?"
"Of course it isn't, mother," Lita answered. "I see you had a perfect
right not to be husband and wife any more if you didn't want to be; but
you couldn't change the fact that you are still my parents. You ought
to be able to coöperate about me, to present a united front."
"You'll find we present a united front on this issue," said Hazlitt
sternly. "I mean your engagement."
"Indeed?" said his daughter. "Let me tell you, I could separate you
tomorrow on it. I'm an expert. I should only have to intimate to Pat
that mother was getting to like Luke so much that behind his back--but
I'm sick of being treacherous and untruthful. You two must face the
fact that I love you both; that I like to be with both of you; and that
I will not be made to feel lower than the wombat because I do love you
both. Now, there it is; settle it between you."
After she had gone they continued to stare at each other, like the last
sane people in a world gone mad.
"What," said her father, "do you gather that that incomprehensible
tirade was all about?"
"I can't make out," answered her mother. "She never was like that
before--so excitable and rude. And I need not tell you that it's
all her fancy. I've been ridiculously scrupulous in never saying
anything to her but what a girl ought to hear about her father--a fixed
principle that our difficulties should not come between you and her."
"Of course, I know," he answered. "I know, because I know how
absolutely without foundation her attack on me was. I've been most
punctilious. To hurt a child's ideal of her mother! No, I have a good
deal to reproach myself with in regard to my treatment of you, Alita;
but not that--not that."
"I'm sure of it," and she gave him quite a starry glance. "The truth
is, I've spoiled her, Jim. I've treated her too much as a friend--as an
equal."
"It can't be done," said Hazlitt, shaking his head.
"It isn't possible to have an equal relation with the younger
generation. You've got to go to your contemporaries for friendship,
Alita. That was true since the world began; but these young people--"
Mrs. Hazlitt, who was still treating him as if he were an oracle,
brightened at these words as if he were an oracle in excellent form.
"Yes," she said, "they are different, aren't they? I can't imagine my
ever having spoken to my parents as Lita just spoke to us."
"Your mother! I should say not. One of the greatest ladies I ever met
anywhere!"
"Wasn't mother wonderful?" murmured Mrs. Hazlitt, and there was a pause
while they both reflected upon common memories.
Then she went on: "I must say I think you are very generous not to
criticize me for the way I've brought Lita up. I feel humiliated."
"My dear Alita," said Hazlitt, "I never have criticized you, and I
never shall."
"She hurt me terribly, Jim. She seemed so hard, so ruthless, so
appraising of things that ought to be held sacred."
These words were faintly reminiscent to Mr. Hazlitt, and he summoned
them up: "In short a little like me, after all."
"Perhaps a little bit. I know what you mean," answered his former wife;
and then, as he laughed at this reply, she saw that it was funny, and
she began to laugh too. But laughter was too much for her strained
nerves, and as she laughed she also cried, and the most convenient
place to cry on was Hazlitt's shoulder. They clung together, feeling
their feet slipping on the brink of that unfathomable abyss--the
younger generation.