"Perhaps. I've always hoped so, in my saner moments. We stumbled along
from day to day, and slept out at night, always trying to keep away from
people, when--she thought we were going home, and that they would
prevent me." He stopped for a moment, and then went on, driven by that
Ancient Mariner spirit which makes people, once they have touched on a
forbidden subject, probe it to its haunting depths. "Did Cater tell you
how she died? She died in a barn. My _mother_! She used to hold me in
her arms at night, and make me rest my head against her bosom when I was
tired; and I didn't even have a pillow for her when she was dying! It's
one of those things you can never make up for--that you can never
change, no matter how you live, no matter what you do. It comes back to
you when you least expect it."
Both were silent for a while before Lois murmured: "But the pain ended
in happiness and peace for her. It would hurt her more than anything to
know that you grieved."
"Yes, I believe that," he acquiesced simply. "I'm glad you said it now.
I couldn't rest until I got money enough to take her out of her pauper
grave and lay her by the side of her own people at home."
"And you have had a pretty hard time."
"Oh, that's nothing!" He squared his shoulders with unconscious rebuttal
of sympathy. "When I was a kid, perhaps--but I get a lot of pleasure out
of life."
"But you must be lonely without any one belonging to you," said Lois,
trying to grope her way into the labyrinth. "Wouldn't you be happier if
you were married?"
He laughed involuntarily and shook his head, with a slight flush that
seemed to come from the embarrassment of some secret thought. The
action, and the change of expression, made him singularly charming.
"Possibly; but the chance of that is small. Women--that is, unmarried
women--don't care for my society."
"Oh, oh!" protested Lois, with quick knowledge, as she looked at him, of
how much the reverse the truth must be. "But if you found the right
woman you might make her care for you."
He shook his head, with a sudden gleam in his gray eyes. "No; there
you're wrong. I'd never make any woman care for me, because I'd never
want to. If she couldn't care for me without my _making_ her--! I'd have
to know, when I first looked at her, that she was _mine_. And if she
were not, if she did not care for me herself, I'd never want to make
her--never!"
"Oh, oh!" protested Lois again, with interested amusement, shattered the
next instant as a fragile glass may be shattered by the blow of a
hammer.
The telephone-bell had rung, and Girard ran to it, closing the
intervening door behind him. The curtain of anxiety, lifted for
breathing-space for a moment, hung over them again somberly, like a
pall. Where was Justin?
The two women clinging together hung breathlessly on Girard's movements;
his low, murmuring voice told nothing. When he returned to where they
stood, his face was impassive.
"Nothing new; I'm just going to town for a couple of hours, that's all."
"Oh, must you leave us?"
"I'm coming back, if you'll let me." He bent over Lois with that earnest
look which seemed somehow to insure protection. "I want you to let me
stay down-stairs here all night, if you will. I'm going to make
arrangements to get a special message through, no matter what time it
comes, and I'll sit here in the parlor and wait for it, so that you two
ladies can sleep."
"Oh, I'd be so glad to have you here! Redge has that croupy cough again.
But you can't sit up," said Lois.
"Why not? It's luxury to stay awake in a comfortable chair with a lot of
books around. I'll be back in a couple of hours without fail."
A couple of hours! If he had said a couple of years, the words could
have brought, it seemed, no deeper sense of desolation. Hardly had he
gone, however, when the door-bell rang, and word was brought to Lois,
who with Dosia had gone up-stairs, that it was Mr. Harker from the
typometer office. The visitor, a tall, colorless, darkly sack-coated
man, with a jaded necktie, had entered the little drawing-room with a
decorously self-effacing step, and sat now on the edge of his chair, his
body bent forward and his hat still held in one hand, with an effect of
being entirely isolated from social relations and existing here solely
at the behest of business. He rose as Lois came into the room, and
handed her a small packet, in response to her greeting, before reseating
himself.
"Thank you very much," said Lois. "This is the money, I suppose. I'm
sorry you went to the trouble of bringing it out yourself. I thought you
might send me out a check."
Mr. Harker shook his head with a grim semblance of a smile. "That's the
trouble, Mrs. Alexander. We can't send any checks. Mr. Alexander is the
one who does that. Everything is in Mr. Alexander's name. I went to Mr.
Leverich to-day to see how we were going to straighten out things; but
he doesn't seem inclined to take hold at all, though he could help us
out easily enough if he wanted to. I--there's no use keeping it back,
Mrs. Alexander. This is a pretty bad time for Mr. Alexander to stay
away. He ought to be home."
"Why, yes," said Lois.
"Exactly. His absence places us all in a very strange, very unpleasant
position." Mr. Harker spoke with a sort of somber monotony, with his
gaze on the ground. "The business requires the most particular
management at the moment--the most particular. I--" He raised his eyes
with such tragic earnestness that Lois realized for the first time that
this manner of his might not be his usual manner, but was called forth
by the stress of anxiety. For the first time also, the force of the
daily tie of business companionship was borne in upon her. She looked at
Mr. Harker. This man spent more waking hours with Justin than she
did--knew him, perhaps, in a sense, better.
He went on now, with a tremor in his voice: "Mrs. Alexander, your
husband and I have worked together for a year and a half now, with never
a word between us. I'm ready to swear by him any moment, if I've got him
to swear by. I'll back him up in anything, no matter what, if it's his
say-so. We've pulled through a good many tight places. But I can't do it
alone; it's madness to try. If he doesn't show up, I'd better close the
place down at once."
"Why do you say this to me?" asked Lois, shrinking a little.
"Why? Because, Mrs. Alexander, this is no time to mince words. If you
know where your husband is, for God's sake, get word to him to come
back--every minute is precious. He may be ill,--Heaven knows he had
enough to make him so; my wife knows the strain I've been through; she
says she wonders I'm alive,--but he can't look after his health now. If
he's on top of ground, he's got to _come_. I've put every cent I own
into this business. I haven't drawn my whole salary, even, for months. I
don't know what reasons he has for staying away, but his nerve mustn't
give out now."
"Mr. Harker!" cried Lois. She turned blankly to Dosia, who had come
forward. "What does he mean?"
"She doesn't know where her husband is," said the girl convincingly. Her
eyes and Mr. Harker's met. The somber eagerness faded out of his; he
sighed and rose.
"Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Alexander? I think I'll hurry to catch
the next train; I haven't been home to my dinner yet."
"Won't you have something here before you go?" asked Lois. "It's so
late."
"Oh, that's nothing. I'm used to it," returned Mr. Harker, with a pale
smile and the passive, self-effacing business manner as he departed,
while Lois went up-stairs once more. The baby cried, and she soothed
him, holding the warm little form close, closer to her--some thing
tangible before she put him down again to step back into this strange
void where Justin was not.
For the first time, in this meeting with Mr. Harker, Lois realized the
existence of a world beyond her ken--a world that had been Justin's. New
as the visitor's words had been, they seemed to open to her a vision of
herculean struggle: the way this man had looked--_his_ wife had
"wondered that he was still alive." And Justin--where was he now? _She_
had not noticed, she had not wondered--until lately.
Slight as seemed her recognition, her sympathy, her help, it was the one
thing now that kept her reason firm. She knew that she had not been all
unfaithful; sometimes he had been rested, sometimes cheered, when she
was near. She had suffered, too; _she_ had longed for _his_ help and
sympathy. No, she would not think of that; she would not. When two are
separated, one must love enough to bridge the gulf--what matter which
one? It seemed now as if there were so much that she might have given,
if all this torrent of love that nearly broke her heart might have been
poured out and poured out at his feet--lavished on him, without regard
to need or fitness or expense, as Mary lavished her precious box of
spikenard on One she loved. Now that he was gone, there could be nothing
too hard to have done for him, no words too sweet for her to have said
to him.
Redge woke up and cried for her, and she told him hoarsely to be still;
and then, suddenly conscience-stricken and fearful at the slighting of
this other demand of love,--what awful reprisal might it not exact from
her?--she went to kiss the child, to infold him in her arms, the boy
that Justin loved, before she bade him go to sleep, for mother would
stay by her darling. And, left to herself again, the grinding and
destroying wheel of thought had her bound to it once more.
He could not have left her of his own will! If he did not come, it would
be because he was dead--and then he could never know, never, never know.
There would be nothing left to her but the place where he had been. She
looked at the walls and the homely furnishings as one seeing them for
the first time bare forever of the beloved presence, and fell on her
knees, and went on them around the room, dragging herself from chair to
sofa, from sofa to bed,--these were the Stations of the Cross that she
was making,--with sobs and cries, low and inarticulate, yet carrying
with them the awful anguish of a heart laid bare before the Almighty.
Here his dear hand had rested, while he thought of her; on this
table--here--and here; and here his head had lain. Her tears ceased; she
buried her face in the pillow. She must go after him, wherever he was,
in this world or another. For he was her husband. Where he was she must
be, either in body or in spirit.
The telephone-bell rang, and Dosia answered it, the voice at the other
end inquiring for Mr. Girard, cautiously, it seemed, withholding
information from any other. The doctor rang up, in response to an
earlier call, with directions for Redge. Hardly had the receiver been
laid down when the door-bell clanged. This was to be a night of the
ringing of bells!
XXII
This time, of course, the visitor was Mrs. Snow. In any exigency, any
mind-and body-absorbing event of life, the inopportune presence of Mrs.
Snow was inexorably to be counted on, though it came always as one of
those exasperating recurrences which bring with them a ridiculously
fresh irritation each time. It seemed to be the one extra thing you
couldn't stand. In either trouble or joy, she affected one like a
clinging, ankle-flapping mackintosh on a rainy day. She bowed now to
Dosia with a patronizing dignity, pointed by the plaintive warmth of the
greeting to Lois, who had come hurrying down-stairs out of those
passion-depths of darkness, so that Mrs. Snow wouldn't suspect anything.
She had an uncanny faculty of divining just what you didn't want her to.
Once before Lois had suspended tragedy for Mrs. Snow. The same things
happen to us over and over again daily in our crowded yet restricted
lives--it is we who change in our meeting with them. We have our great
passions, our great joys, our heartbreaks, no matter how small our
environment.
"How do you do, my dear? Mr. Girard has just told me that he was going
to stay here to-night, in Mr. Alexander's absence. He said little Redge
was threatened with the croup. Now, if I had only known that Mr.
Alexander was away, _I_ could have come and stayed with you!"
"Oh, that wasn't at all necessary," said Lois hastily. "Thank you very
much. Do sit down, won't you, Mrs. Snow?"
"Only for a minute, then; I must go back to Bertha," said Mrs. Snow,
seating herself and fumbling for something under her cloak. "I just came
over to read you a letter. It's in my bag--I can't seem to find it.
Well, perhaps I'd better rest for a minute." Mrs. Snow's face looked
unusually lined and set; in spite of her plaintiveness, her eyes had a
harassed glitter.
"Isn't it rather late for you to be out alone?" asked Lois.
"Yes; Ada would have come around here with me, but she was expecting Mr.
Sutton. She was expecting him last night, but he didn't come. If _I_
were a young lady, I'd let a gentleman wait for _me_ the next time; it
used to be thought more attractive, in my day: but Ada's so afraid of
not seeming cordial; gentlemen seem to be so sensitive nowadays! I said
to her, 'Ada, when a man is enough at home in a house to kick the cat,
and ask for cake whenever he feels like it, I do _not_ see that it is
necessary to stand on ceremony with him.' But Ada thinks differently."
"It is difficult to make rules," said Lois vaguely.
"Yes," sighed Mrs. Snow. "As I was saying to Bertha, you don't find a
young man like Mr. Girard, so considerate of every one--not that he's so
_very_ young, either; I'm sure he often appears much older than he is.
It's his manner--he has a manner like my dear father. He and Bertha have
long chats together; really, he is what _I_ would call quite attentive,
though she won't hear of such a thing--but sometimes young men _do_ take
a great fancy for older girls. I had a friend who married a gentleman
twenty-seven years younger--he died soon afterward. But many people
think nothing of a little difference of twelve or fifteen years. I said
to Bertha this morning, 'Bertha, if you'd dress yourself a little
younger--if you'd only wear a blue bow in your hair.' But no; I can't
say anything nowadays to my own children without being flown at!" Mrs.
Snow's voice trembled. "If my darling William were here!"
"Have you heard from William lately?" asked Lois, with supreme effort.
"My dear, he's in Chicago. I came over to read you a letter from him
that I got to-night. That new postman left it at the Scovels', by
mistake, and they never sent it over until a little while ago. There was
a sentence in it," Mrs. Snow was fumbling with a paper, "that I thought
you'd like to hear. Where is it? Let me see. 'Next month I hope to be
able to send you more'--no, no, that's not it. 'When my socks get holes
in them I throw them'--that's not it, either. Oh! he says, 'I caught a
glimpse of Mr. Alexander last night, getting on a West Side car'--this
was written yesterday morning. 'I called to him, but too late. I'm
sorry, for I'd like to have seen him,' That's all; but Mr. Girard seemed
so pleased with the letter, I promised that I would bring it around to
you that very minute,--he had to run for the train,--but I was detained.
He thought you'd like to hear that William had seen Mr. Alexander."
Like to hear! The relief for the moment turned Lois faint. Yet, after
Mrs. Snow went, the torturing questions began to repeat themselves
again. Justin was alive--Justin was alive on Tuesday night. Was he alive
now? And why had he gone to Chicago at all? Why had he sent her no word?
The wall between them seemed only the more opaque. Every fear that
imagination could devise seemed to center around this new fact.
She and Dosia went around, straightening up the little drawing-room,
making it ready for Girard's occupancy--pulling out a big chair for his
use, and putting fresh books on the table. The maid had long ago gone to
bed, and there was coffee to be made for him--he might get hungry in the
night. When he came in at last, he brought all the brightness and
courage of hope with him. He had wired to William; he had phoned to a
dozen different places in Chicago.
"Oh, what should we do without you?" breathed Lois, her foot on the
stairway.
"It doesn't seem to me I've helped you very much so far. Our one clue
has been from Mrs. Snow. I want you to go to bed now, and to sleep, Mrs.
Alexander; take all the rest you can. I'm here to do the watching. If
there's anything really to tell, I'll call you. I promise faithfully.
What is it, Miss Linden? Did you want to speak to me?"
"There was a message for you while you were gone," said Dosia in a low
tone.
His eyes assented. "Yes, I know. I went there--to the place that
they--but it wasn't Alexander, I'm glad to say, though I was afraid when
I went in----"
"I know," said Dosia.
Another strange night had begun, with the master of the house away. Lois
went to her room to lie down clothed, jumping up to come to the head of
the stairs whenever the telephone-bell rang, and then going back again
when she found that those who were consulting were asking for
information instead of giving it; but by and by the messages ceased.
Suppose Justin never came back! She began to feel that he had been gone
for years, and tried confusedly to plan out the future. There were the
children--how should she support them? She must support them. It was
hard to get work when you had a baby. If she hadn't the baby--no one
should take the baby from her! She clasped him to her for a moment in
terror, as if she were being hunted, before she grew calm and began
planning again. There was only a little money left. To-morrow they must
still eat. She must make the money last.
Dosia, on the bed by Redge's crib, went softly after a while into the
other room, and saw that Lois at last slept, though she herself could
not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger,
so far removed was he from her dream of him. Through all his softness,
his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if nobody else did
(though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too), that the
fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up from
the cruel circumstances of his early days without that hardening streak
to uphold him. She divined, with some surprising new power of
divination, that, for all his strong, capable dealing with actualities,
his magnetic drawing of men, for the inner conduct of his own life he
was shyly dependent on odd, deeply held theory--theory that he had
solitarily woven for himself. She felt impersonally sorry for him, as
for a boy who must be disappointed, though he was nothing to her.
Yet, as Dosia lay there in the dumb stretches of the night, her tired
eyes wide open, close to Redge's crib, with his little hot hand clinging
to hers, the mere fact of Girard's bodily presence in the house,
down-stairs, seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn't get
away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it
called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with
Lawson--unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement.
This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not
to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She
tried to lose it in the thought of Lois' great trouble, of this
weighting, pitiful mystery of Justin's absence--of what it meant to him
and to the household. She tried to lose it in the thought of Lawson,
with the prayer that always instinctively came at his name. Nothing
availed; through everything was that wearing, persistent consciousness
of Girard's bodily presence down-stairs. If it would only fade out, so
that she might sleep, she was so tired! The clock struck two. A voice
spoke from the other room, sending her to her feet instantly:
"Dosia?"
"Yes, Lois, dearest, I'm here."
"Has any word come from Justin?"
"No."
Lois shivered. "I think, when Redge wakes up next, you'd better give him
a drink of water; he sounds so hoarse. I've used all I brought up. Do
you mind going down to get some more? I would go myself, but I can't
slip my arm from under baby; he wakes when I move. Here is the pitcher."
"Yes," said Dosia, stopping for a moment to pull the coverlet tenderly
over Lois, before stepping out into the lighted hall.
It seemed very silent; there was no sound from below. Dosia went down
the low, wide stairs with that indescribable air of the watcher in the
night. Her white cotton gown, the same that she had worn throughout the
afternoon, had lost its freshness, and clung to her figure in twisted
folds; the waist was slightly open at the throat, and the long white
necktie hung half untied. One cheek was warm where it had pressed the
pillow; the other was pale, and her hair, half loosened, hung against
it. Her eyes, very blue, showed a rayed starriness, the pupils
contracted from the sudden light--her expression, tired and half
bewildered, had in it somewhat of the little lost look of a child, up in
the unwonted middle of the night, who might go naturally and comfortably
into any kind arms held out to her. The turn of the stairs brought her
fronting the little drawing-room and the figure of Girard, who sat
leaning forward, smoking, in the Morris chair, with his elbow resting on
the arm of it and his head on his hand. The books and bric-a-brac on the
table beside him had been pushed back to make room for the tray
containing the coffee-pot, a cup and saucer, and a plate with some
biscuits. A newspaper lay on the floor at his feet. Notwithstanding the
light in the hallway and the room, there was that odd atmospheric effect
which belongs only to the late and solitary hours of the night, when the
very furniture itself seems to share in a chill detachment from the life
of the day. Yet, in the midst of this night silence, this withdrawing of
the ordinary vital forces, the figure of Bailey Girard seemed to be
extraordinarily instinct with vitality, even in that second before he
moved; his attitude, his eyes, his expression, were informed with such
intense and eager thoughts that it was as startling, as instantly
arresting, as the blast of a trumpet.
At the sound of Dosia's light oncoming step opposite the door, he rose
at once--however, laying the cigar on the table--and with a quick stride
stood beside her. He seemed tall and unexpectedly dazzling as he
confronted her; his deep-set gray eyes were very brilliant.
"What is the matter? Is Mrs. Alexander ill?"
"No--oh, no; the children have been restless, that is all," said Dosia,
recovering, with annoyed self-possession, from a momentary shock, and
feeling disagreeably conscious of looking tumbled and forlorn. "I came
down to get a pitcher of water."
"Can't I get it in the dining-room for you?" he asked, with formal
politeness.
"Thank you. The water isn't running in the butler's pantry; I have to go
in the kitchen for it. If you would light the gas there for me----"
"Yes, certainly," he responded promptly, pushing the portieres aside to
make a passage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light
the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed
floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in
which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as
of deep darkness of the night outside around everything.
A large white cat lying on a red-striped cushion on a chair by the
chilly hearth stretched itself and blinked its yellow eyes toward the
two intruders.
"Let me fill this," said Girard, taking the pitcher from her--a rather
large, clumsy majolica article with a twisted vine for a handle--and
carrying it over to the faucet. The intimacy of the hour and the scene
emphasized the more the punctilious aloofness of this enforced
companionship.
Dosia leaned back against the table, while he let the water run, that it
might grow cold. It sounded in the silence as if it were falling on a
drumhead. The moment--it was hardly more--seemed interminable to Dosia.
The white cat, jumping up on the table, put its paws on her shoulders,
and she leaned back very absently, and curved her throat sideways, that
her cheek might touch him in recognition. Some inner thought claimed
her, to the exclusion of the present; her eyes, looking dreamily before
her, took on that expression that was indescribably gentle, intolerably
sweet.