Dosia had come back from the Leverichs' to a household in which her
presence no longer made any difference for either pleasure or
annoyance. She came and went unquestioned, practised interminably, and
spent her evenings usually in her own room, developing a hungry
capacity for sleep, of which she could not seem to have enough--sleep,
where all one's sensibilities were dulled and shame and tragedy
forgotten. She had, however, rather more of the society of the
children than before, owing to their mother's preoccupation. Nothing
could have been more of a drop from her position as princess and
lady-of-love in the Leverich domicile, where she had been the center
of attraction and interest. Everything seemed terribly unnatural here,
and she the most unnatural of all--as if she were clinging temporarily
to a ledge in mid-air, waiting for the next thing to happen.
Lois had really tried to show some sympathy for the girl, but was held
back by her repugnance to Lawson, which inevitably made itself felt.
She couldn't understand how Dosia could possibly have allowed herself
to get into an equivocal position with such a man--"really not a
gentleman," as she complained to Justin, and he had answered with the
vague remark that you could never tell about a girl; even in its
vagueness the reply was condemning.
The people whom Dosia met in the street looked at her with curiously
questioning eyes as they talked about casual matters. Mrs. Leverich
bowed incidentally as she passed in her carriage, where another
visitor was ensconced, a blonde lady from Montreal, in whom her
hostess was absorbed.
Dosia had been twice to see Miss Bertha, with a blind, desultory
counting on the sympathy that had helped her before; but she had been
unfortunate in the times for her visits. On the first occasion Mrs.
Snow, with majestic demeanor and pursed lips, had kept guard; and on
the second the whole feminine part of the family were engaged, in
weird pinned-up garments, in the sacred rite of setting out the
innumerable house-plants, with the help of a man hired semiannually,
for the day, to set out the plants or to take them in. Callers are a
very serious thing when you have a man hired by the day, who must be
looked after every minute, so that he may be worth his wage. As Mrs.
Snow remarked, "People ought to know when to come and when not to."
Dosia got no farther than the porch, and though Miss Bertha asked her
to come again, and gave her a sprig of sweet geranium, with a kind
little pressure of the hand, she was not asked to sit down.
Your trouble wasn't anybody else's trouble, no matter how kind people
were; it was only your own. Billy Snow, who had always been her
devoted cavalier, patently avoided her, turning red in the face and
giving her a curt, shamefaced bow as he went by, having his own
reasons therefor. It would have hurt her, if anything of that kind
could have hurt her very much. But Dosia was in the half-numb
condition which may result from some great blow or the fall from a
great height, save for those moments when she was anguished suddenly
by poignant memories of sharpest dagger-thrusts, at which her heart
still bled unbearably afresh, as when one remembers the sufferings of
the long-peaceful dead which one must, for all time, be terribly
powerless to alleviate.
Mr. Sutton alone kept his attitude toward her unchanged. He sent her
great bunches of roses, that seemed somehow alive and comfortingly
akin when she buried her face in them. He had come to see her every
week, though twice she had gone to bed before his arrival. If his
attitude was changed at all, it was to a heightened respect and
interest and solicitude. It might be that in the subsidence of other
claims Mr. Sutton, who had a good business head, saw an occasion of
profit for himself which he might well be pardoned for seizing. He
required little entertaining when he called, developing an unsuspected
faculty for narrative conversation.
Foolish and inane in amatory "attentions" to young ladies, George was
no fool. He had a fund of knowledge gained from the observation of
current facts, and could talk about the newsboys' clubs, or the
condition of the docks, or the latest motor-cars and ballooning, or
the practical reasons why motives for reform didn't reform; and the
talk was usually semi-interesting, and sometimes more--he had the
personal intimacy with his topics which gives them life. Dosia began
to find him, if not exciting, at least not tiring; restful, indeed.
She began genuinely to like him. He took her thoughts away from
herself, while obviously always thinking of her.
This Sunday afternoon Dosia--modish and natty in her short
walking-skirt and little jacket of shepherd's check, and a clumpy,
black-velveted, pink-rosed straw hat--walked companionably beside the
square-set figure of George up the long slope of the semi-suburban
road. Dosia had preferred to walk instead of driving. There was a
strong breeze, although the sun was warm; and the summerish wayside
trees and grasses had inspired him with the recollection of a country
boy's calendar--a pleasing, homely monologue. He was, however, never
too occupied with his theme to stoop over and throw a stone out of her
path, or to hold her little checked umbrella so that the sun should
not shine in her eyes, or to offer her his hand with old-fashioned
gallantry if there was any hint of an obstacle to surmount. The way
was long, yet not too long. They stopped, however, when they reached
the summit, to rest for a while.
As they stood there, looking into the distance for some minutes, Dosia
with thoughts far, far from the scene, George Sutton's voice suddenly
broke the silence:
"I had a letter from Lawson Barr yesterday."
Dosia's heart gave a leap that choked her. It was the first time that
anybody had spoken his name since he left. She had prayed for him
every night--how she had prayed! as for one gone forever from any
other reach than that of the spirit. At this heart-leap ... fear was
in it--fear of any news she might hear of him; fear of the slighting
tone of the person who told it, which she would be powerless to
resent; fear of awakening in herself the echo of that struggle of the
past.
"He's at the mines, isn't he?" she questioned, in that tone which she
had always striven to make coolly natural when she spoke of him.
"Yes; but I don't believe he's working there yet. He seems to be
mostly engaged in playing at the dance-hall for the miners. Sounds
like him, doesn't it?"
"Yes," assented Dosia, looking straight off into the distance.
"I call it hard luck for Barr to be sent out there," pursued Mr.
Sutton. "It's the worst kind of a life for him. He's an awfully clever
fellow; he could do anything, if he wanted to. I don't know any man I
admire more, in certain ways, than I do Barr."
Sutton spoke with evident sincerity. Lawson's clever brilliancy, his
social ease and versatility and musical talent, were all what he
himself had longed unspeakably to possess. Besides, there was a deeper
bond. "I've known him ever since he was a curly-headed boy, long
before he came to this place," he continued.
"Oh, did you?" cried Dosia, suddenly heart-warm. With a flash, some
words of Mrs. Leverich's returned to her--"Mr. Sutton brought Lawson
home last night." So that was why! Her voice was tremulous as she went
on: "It is very unusual to hear any one speak as you do of Mr. Barr.
Everybody here seems to look down on--to despise him."
"Oh, that sort of talk makes me sick," said George, with an unexpected
crude energy. His good-natured face took on a sneering, contemptuous
expression. "Men talking about him who----" He looked down sidewise at
Dosia and closed his lips tightly. No man was more respectable than
he,--respectability might be said to be his cult,--yet he lived in
daily, matter-of-fact touch with a world of men wherein "ladies" were
a thing apart. No man was ever kept from any sort of confidence by the
fact of George Sutton's presence. His feeling for Barr and toleration
of his shortcomings were partly due to the fact that George himself
had also been brought up in one of those small, dull country towns in
which all too many of the cleanly, white, God-fearing houses have no
home in them for a boy and his friends.
"If Lawson had had money, everybody would have thought he was all
right," he asserted shortly. "Perhaps we'd better be going home; it
looks as if there was a shower coming up. Money makes a lot of
difference in this world, Miss Dosia."
"I suppose it does; I've never had it," said Dosia simply.
"Maybe you'll have it some day," returned Mr. Sutton significantly.
His pale eyes glowed down at her as they walked back along the road
together, but the fact was not unpleasant to her; Lawson's name had
created a new bond between them. Poor, storm-beaten Dosia felt a warm
throb of friendship for George. He sympathized with Lawson; _he_
prized her highly, if nobody else did, and he was not ashamed to show
it. He went on now with genuine emotion: "I know one thing; if--if I
had a wife, she'd never have to wish twice for anything I could give
her, Miss Dosia."
"She ought to care a good deal for you, then," suggested Dosia,
picking her way daintily along the steeply sloping path, her little
black ties finding a foothold between the stones, with Mr. Sutton's
hand ever on the watch to interpose supportingly at her elbow.
"No, I wouldn't ask that; I'd only ask her to let me care for _her_. I
think most men expect too much from their wives," said George. "I
don't think they've got the right to ask it. And I don't think a man
has any right to marry until he can give the lady all she ought to
have--that's my idea! If any beautiful young lady, as sweet as she was
beautiful, did me the honor of accepting my hand,"--Mr. Sutton's voice
faltered with honest emotion,--"I'd spend my life trying to make her
happy; I would indeed, Miss Dosia. I'd take her wherever she wanted to
go, as far as my means would afford; she should have anything I could
get for her."
"I think you are the very kindest man I have ever known," said Dosia,
with sincerity, touched by his earnestness, though with a far-off,
outside sort of feeling that the whole thing was happening in a book.
Her vivid imagination was alluringly at work. In many novels which she
had read the real hero was the other man, whom no one noticed at
first, and who seemed to be prosaic, even uncouth and stupid, when
confronted with his fascinating rival, yet who turned out to be
permanently true and unselfish and omnisciently kind--the possessor,
in spite of his uninspiring exterior, of all the sterling qualities of
love; in short, "John," the honest, patient, constant "John" of
fiction. His affection for the maiden might be of so high a nature
that he would not even claim her as a wife after marriage until she
had learned truly to love him, which of course she always did. If Mr.
Sutton were really "John"--Dosia half-freakishly cast a swift
inventorial side-glance at the gentleman.
The next moment they turned into the highroad, and a rippling smile
overspread her face.
"Here's the very lady for you now," she remarked flippantly, as Ada
Snow, prayer-book in hand, came into view at the crossing against a
dust-cloud in the background, on her way to a friend's house from
service at the little mission chapel on the hill. Ada's cheeks took on
a not unbecoming flush, her eyes drooped modestly beneath Mr. Sutton's
glance,--a maidenly tribute to masculine superiority,--before she went
down the side-road.
Mr. Sutton's face reddened also. "Now, Miss Dosia! Miss Ada may be
very charming, but I wouldn't marry Miss Ada if she were the only girl
left in the world. I give you my word I wouldn't. _You_ ought to
know----"
"We'll have to hurry, or we'll be caught in the rain," interrupted
Dosia, rushing ahead with a rapidity that made further conversation an
affair of ineffective jerks, though she dreaded to get back to the
house and be left alone to the numb dreariness of her thoughts. Justin
and Lois were gathering up the rugs and sofa-pillows, as they reached
the piazza, to take them in from the blackly advancing storm. Lois
greeted Mr. Sutton with unusual cordiality; perhaps she also dreaded
the accustomed dead level.
"Do come in; you'll be caught in the rain if you go on. Can't you stay
to a Sunday night's tea with us?"
"Oh, do," urged Dosia, disregarding the delighted fervor of his gaze.
Lois' hospitality, never her strong point, had been much in abeyance
lately; to have a fourth at the table would be a blessed relief. She
felt a new tie with Mr. Sutton: they both sympathized with Lawson,
believed in him!
She ran up-stairs to change her walking-suit for a soft little
round-necked summer gown of pinkish tint, made at Mrs. Leverich's,
which somehow made her pale little face and fair, curling hair look
like a cameo. When she came down again, she ensconced herself in one
corner of the small spindle sofa, to which Zaidee instantly
gravitated, her red lips parted over her little white teeth in a smile
of comfort as she cuddled within Dosia's half-bare round white arm,
while Mr. Sutton, drawing his chair up very close, leaned over Dosia
with eyes for nobody else, his round face getting brick-red at times
with suppressed emotion, though he tried to keep up his part in an
amiable if desultory conversation. Lois reclined languidly in an
easy-chair, and Justin alternately played with and scolded the
irrepressible Redge, in the intervals of discourse.
Through the long open windows they watched the sky, which seemed to
darken or grow light as fitfully, in the progress of the oncoming
storm, the wind lifted the vines on the piazza and flapped them down
again; the trees bent in straightly slanting lines, with foam-tossing
of green and white from the maples; still it did not rain. Presently
from where Dosia sat she caught sight of a passer-by on the other side
of the street--a tall, straight, well-set-up figure with the easy,
erect carriage of a soldier. He stopped suddenly when he was opposite
the house, looked over at it, and seemed to hesitate; then he moved
on hastily, only to stop the next instant and hesitate once more. This
time he crossed over with a quick, decided step.
"Why, here's Girard!" cried Justin, rising with alacrity. His voice
came back from the hall. "Awfully glad you took us on your way.
Leverich told you where I lived? You'll have to stay now until the
storm is over. Lois, this is Mr. Girard. You know Sutton, of course.
Dosia----"
"I have already met Mr. Girard," said Dosia, turning very white, but
speaking in a clear voice. This time it was she who did not see the
half-extended hand, which immediately dropped to his side, though he
bowed with politely murmured assent. Stepping back to a chair half
across the room, he seated himself by Justin.
A wave of resentment, greater than anything that she had ever felt
before, had surged over Dosia at the sight of him, as his eyes, with a
sort of quick, veiled questioning in them, had for an instant met
hers--resentment as for some deep, irremediable wrong. Her cheeks and
lips grew scarlet with the proudly surging blood, she held her head
high, while Mr. Sutton looked at her as if bewitched--though he turned
from her a moment to say:
"Weren't you up on the Sunset Drive this afternoon, Girard?"
"Yes; I thought you didn't see me," said the other lightly, himself
turning to respond to a question of Justin's, which left the other
group out of the conversation, an exclusion of which George availed
himself with ardor.
There is an atmosphere in the presence of those who have lived through
large experiences which is hard to describe. As Girard sat there
talking to Justin in courteous ease, his elbow on the arm of his
chair, his chin leaning on the fingers of his hand, he had a
distinction possessed by no one else in the room. Even Justin, with
all his engaging personality, seemed somehow a little narrow, a little
provincial, by the side of Girard.
Lois, who had been going backward and forward from the
dining-room,--with black-eyed Redge, sturdy and turbulent, following
after her astride a stick, until the nurse was called to take him
away,--came and sat down quite naturally beside this new visitor as if
he had been an old friend, and was evidently interested and pleased.
As a matter of fact, though all women as a rule liked Girard at sight,
he much preferred the society of those who were married, when he went
in women's society at all. Girls gave him a strange inner feeling of
shyness, of deficiency--perhaps partly caused by the conscious
disadvantages of a youth other than that to which he had been born;
but it was a feeling that he would have been the last to be credited
with, and which he certainly need have been the last to possess. Like
many very attractive people, he had no satisfying sense of
attractiveness himself.
It was raining now, but very softly, after all the wild preparation,
with a hint of sunshine through the rain that sent a pale-green light
over the little drawing-room, with its spindle-legged furniture and
the water-colors on its walls, though the gloom of the dining-room
beyond was relieved only by the silver and the white napkins on the
round mahogany table with a glass bowl of green-stemmed, white-belled
lilies-of-the-valley in the center.
The people in the two separate groups in the drawing-room took on an
odd, pearly distinctness, with the flesh-tints subdued. In this
commonplace little gathering on a Sunday afternoon the material seemed
to be only a veil for the things of the spirit--subtle
cross-communications of thought-touch or repulsion, impressions
tinglingly felt. Something seemed to be curiously happening, though
one knew not what. To Dosia's swift observation, Girard had lost some
of the brightness that had shone upon her vision the night of the
ball; he looked as if he had been under some harassing strain. Her
first impression that he had come into the house reluctantly was
reinforced now by an equal impression that he stayed with reluctance.
Why, then, had he come at all? Was it only to escape the rain? Her
rescuer, the hero of her dreams, still held his statued place in the
shrine of her memory, as proudly, defiantly opposed to this stranger.
Had he known? He must have known, just as she had. It was not Lawson
who had hurt her the most! She could not hear what he said, though the
room was small; he and Justin and Lois were absorbed together. It was
evident that he frankly admired Lois, who was smiling at him. Yet, as
he talked, Dosia became curiously aware that from his position
directly across the room he was covertly watching her as she sat
consentingly listening to George Sutton, whose round face was bending
over very near, his thick coat sleeve pinning down the filmy ruffles
of hers as it rested on the carved arm of the little sofa.
She still held Zaidee cuddled close to her, the light head with its
big blue bow lying against her breast, as the child played with the
simple rings on the soft fingers of the hand she held.
Mr. Sutton got up, at Dosia's bidding, to alter the shade, and she
moved a little, drawing Zaidee up to her to kiss her; Girard the next
instant moved slightly also, so that her face was still within his
range of vision, the intent gray eyes shaded by his hand. It was not
her imagining--she felt the strong play of unknown forces: the gaze of
those two men never left her, one covertly observant, the other most
obviously so. George came back from his errand only to sit a little
closer to Dosia, his eyes in their most suffused state. He was,
indeed, in that stage of infatuation which can no longer brook any
concealment, and for which other men feel a shamefaced contempt,
though a woman even while she derides, holds it in a certain respect
as a foolish manifestation of something inherently great, and a
tribute to her power. To Dosia's indifference, in this strange dual
sense of another and resented excitement,--an excitement like that
produced on the brain by some intolerably high altitude,--Mr. Sutton's
attentions seemed to breathe only of a grateful warmth; she felt that
he was being very, very kind. She could ask him to do anything for
her, and he would do it, no matter what it was, just because she asked
him. He was planning now a day on somebody's yacht, with Lois, of
course; and "What do you say, Miss Dosia--can't we make it a family
party, and take the children too?" he asked, with eager divination of
what would please this lovely thing.
"Yes, oh, why can't you take _us_?" cried Zaidee, trembling with
delight.
The rain had ceased, but the sunlight had vanished, too; the whole
place was growing dark. There was a sudden silence, in which Dosia's
voice was heard saying:
"I'll get my photograph now, if you want it." She rose and left the
room,--she could not have stayed in it a moment longer,--and Zaidee
ran over to her father, her white frock crumpled and the cheek that
had lain against Dosia rosy warm.
"You had better light the lamp, Justin," said Lois, and then, "Oh,
you're not going?" as Girard stood up.
He turned his bright, gentle regard upon her. "I'm afraid I'll have
to."
"I expected you to stay to tea; I've had a place set for you."
"I'd like to very much--it's kind of you to ask me--but I'm afraid not
to-night. I'll see you to-morrow, Sutton, I suppose. Good evening,
Mrs. Alexander." His hand-touch seemed to give an intimacy to the
words.
"Your stick is out here in the hall somewhere," said Justin,
investigating the corners for it, while Zaidee, who had followed the
two, stood in the doorway.
"I wonder if this little girl will kiss me good-by?" asked Girard
tentatively.
"Will you, Zaidee?" asked her father, in his turn.
For all answer, Zaidee raised her little face trustfully. Girard
dropped on one knee, a very gallant figure of a gentleman, as he put
both arms around the small, light form of the child and held her
tightly to him for one brief instant while his lips pressed that warm
cheek. When he strode lightly away, waving his hand behind him in
farewell, it was with an odd, somber effect of having said good-by to
a great deal.
For the second time that day, it seemed that Zaidee had been the
recipient of an emotion called forth by some one else.