Justin was in Chicago--the fact was verified--and he would start for
home on the morrow. There seemed to be no details, save the comforting
one that Billy Snow was with him. After that first sharp immediate
relief from suspense, Lois again felt its filminess settling down upon
her.
Girard had gone back very early to the Snows' to breakfast. He talked to
Lois by telephone, but he did not come to the house; while Dosia,
wrapped in an outward abstraction that concealed a whirl within, went
about her daily tasks, living over and over the scene of the night
before. The shattering of the pitcher seemed to have shattered something
else. Once he had felt, then, as she had done; once--so far away that
night of disaster had gone, so long was it since she had held that
protecting hand in her dreams, that the touch brought a strange
resurrection of the spirit. She had an upwelling new sense of gratitude
to him for something unexpressed, some quality which she passionately
revered, and which other men had not always used toward her.
"Oh, he's good, he's _good_!" she whispered to herself, with the tears
blinding her, as she picked up Redge's blocks from the floor. She felt
Lawson's kisses on her lips, her throat--that cross of shame that she
held always close to her; George Sutton's fat face thrust itself
leeringly before her. How many girls have passages in their lives to
which they look back with the shame that only purity and innocence can
feel! Yet the sense of Girard's presence before was as nothing to her
sense of it now--it blotted out the world. She saw him sitting alone in
the dining-room, with his head resting on his hand, the attitude
informed with life. The turn of his head, the shape of his hand, were
insistent things. She saw him standing in front of her, long-limbed,
erect of mien. She saw--If she looked pale and inert, it was because
that inner thought of her lived so hard that the body was worn out with
it.
Neither telegram nor any other message came from Justin, except the bare
word that he had started home. On the second morning, just as Lois had
finished dressing, she heard the hall door open and shut. She called,
but cautiously, for fear of disturbing her baby, who had dropped off to
sleep again.
Justin was standing by the table, looking at the newspaper, as she
entered the dining-room. With a cry, she ran toward him. "Justin!"
He turned, and she put her arms around him passionately. He held her for
a moment, and then said, "You'd better sit down."
"But, Justin--oh, my dearest, how ill you look!" She clung to him.
"Where have you been? Why didn't you send me any word?"
"I've been to Chicago."
"Yes, yes, I know. Why did you go?"
"I don't know."
"You don't _know_?"
"Lois, will you give me some coffee?"
She poured out the cup with trembling hands, and sat while he took a
swallow of the hot fluid, still scanning the newspaper. At last she
said:
"Aren't you going to tell me any more?"
"There isn't any more to tell. There's no use talking about it. I
believe I had some idea of selling the island when I went to Chicago,
but I don't know how I got there. I didn't know I was there until I woke
up two nights ago at a little hotel away out on the West Side. Billy
pounded on the door, and said they told him I had been asleep for
twenty-eight hours. I suppose I was dead tired out. I don't want to
speak of it again, Lois; it wasn't a particularly pleasant thing to
happen. Will you tell Mary to bring in the rest of the breakfast? I must
catch the eight-thirty train back into town. I thought you might be
bothered, so I came out first. Where are the children?"
"They are coming down now with Dosia," said his wife, helping Mary with
the dishes. Redge ran up to his father, hitting him jubilantly with a
small stick which he held in his chubby hand, and bringing irritated
reproof down upon him at once; but Zaidee, her blue eyes open, her lips
parted over her little white teeth, slid into the arm outstretched for
her, and stood there leaning against "Daddy's" side, while he ate and
drank hurriedly, with only one hand at his disposal. Poor Lois could not
help one pang of jealousy at being shut out, but she heroically
smothered it.
"Mr. Harker was here the evening before last; he brought me some money,"
she ventured at last.
"That was all right."
"And Mr. Girard was very kind; he stayed here all that night--until your
message came."
"I hope you haven't been talking about this all over the place."
"No--oh, no," said Lois, driving back the tears at this causeless
injury. "Mr. Leverich said it was best not to. Nobody knows about your
being away at all. You're not going _now_, Justin--without even seeing
baby?"
"I'll see him to-night when I come home," said Justin, rising. He kissed
the children and his wife hastily, but she followed him into the hall,
standing there, dumbly beseeching, while he brushed his hat with the
hat-brush on the table, and then rummaged hastily as if for something
else.
"Here are your gloves, if that is what you are looking for," she said.
"Yes, thank you." He bent over and kissed her again, as if really seeing
her for the first time, with a whispered "Poor girl!" That momentary
close embrace brought her a needed--oh, so needed!--crumb of comfort.
She who had hungered so insatiably for recognition could be humbly
thankful now for the two words that spoke of an inner bond.
But all day she could not get rid of that feeling of suspense that had
been hers for five days past; the strain was to end, of course, with
Justin's return, but it had not ended--in some sad, weighting fashion it
seemed just to have begun. What was he so worried about? Was she never
to hear any more?
That night Girard came over, but with him was another visitor--William
Snow. No sun could brown that baby-fair skin of William's, but he had an
indefinably large and Western air; the very way in which he wore his
clothes showed his independence. Dosia did not notice his swift, covert,
shamefaced glance at her when she came into the room where he was
talking to Lois--his avoidance of her the year before had dropped clear
out of her mind; but his expression changed to one of complacent delight
as she ran to him instantly and clasped his arm with both hands to cry,
"Oh, Billy, Billy, I'm so glad to see you! I am so glad--I can't tell
you how glad I am!"
[Illustration: "STOOD THERE LEANING AGAINST 'DADDY'S' SIDE"]
"All right, Sweetness, you're not going to lose me again," said William
encouragingly. "My, but you do knock the spots out of those Western
girls. Can't we go in the dining-room by ourselves? I want to ask you to
marry me before we talk any more."
"Yes, do," said Dosia, dimpling.
It was sweet to be chaffed, to be heedlessly young once more, to take
refuge from all disconcerting thoughts--from a new embarrassment--with
Billy, in the corner of the other room, where she sat in a low chair,
and he dragged up an ottoman close in front of her. Through the open
window the scent of honeysuckle came in with the gloom.
"Oh, but you've grown pretty!" he said, his hands clasped over his
knees, gazing at her. "That's right, get pink--it makes you prettier. I
like this slimpsy sort of dress you've got on; I like that black velvet
around your throat; I--have you missed me much?"
"No," said Dosia, with the old-time sparkle. "I've hardly thought of you
at all. But I feel now as if I had."
Billy nodded. "All right, I'll pay you up for that some day. Oh, Dosia,
you may think I'm joking, but I'm not! There have been days and nights
when I've done nothing but plan the things I was going to do and say to
make you care for me--but they're all gone the moment I lay eyes on you.
I'll talk of whatever you like afterward, but I've got to say
first"--Billy's voice, deep and manly and confident, had yet a little
shake in it--"that nobody is going to marry you but me, and don't you
forget it. I'm no kid any more." Something in his tone gave his words
emphasis. "I know how to look out for you better than any one else
does."
"Dear Billy," said Dosia, touched, and resting her cheek momentarily
against the rough sleeve of his coat, "it's so good to have you back
again."
Lois, who had been longing intolerably all day for evening to come, so
that she could be alone with her husband, sat in the drawing-room,
trying to sew with nervous, trembling fingers, while her husband,
looking frightfully tired, and Bailey Girard smoked and talked--of all
things in the world!--of the relative merits of live or "spoon" bait in
trolling, and afterward went minutely into details of the manufacture of
artificial lures for catching trout.
Those wasted "social" hours of non-interest, non-satisfaction, how long,
how unbearably long, they can seem! Lois' face twitched, as well as her
fingers; she did not realize, as women often do not, that to Justin this
conversation, banal and irrelevant to any action of his present life or
his present anxiety, was like coming up from under-depths to breathe at
a necessary air-hole.
After five days of torturing, unexplained absence, to talk of nothing
but fishing, as if his life depended on it! Girard himself had wondered,
but he accepted the position allotted to him as a matter of course. He
had thought, from Justin's manner to-day, that he was to know something
of his affairs; but if Justin did not choose to confide in him--that was
all right. Possibly the affairs were all right, too; they were none of
his business, anyway.
[Illustration: "IT WAS SWEET TO BE CHAFFED, TO BE HEEDLESSLY YOUNG ONCE
MORE"]
Suddenly a word caught the ears of the two who were sitting in the
dining-room.
"That was the kind Lawson Barr used when he went down on the
Susquehanna. By the way, I hear that he's dead."
Lawson! Dosia's face changed as if a whip had flicked across it, and
then trembled back into its normal quiet. William leaned a little
nearer, his eyes curiously scanning her.
"Hadn't you heard before?"
"No; what?"
"He's dead."
"Lawson _dead_! Not Lawson?" Her dry lips illy formed the words.
"Yes, Dosia. Don't look like that--don't let them see in there, Girard
is looking at you; turn your face toward me. Leverich told us, coming up
to-night. Lawson died a week ago."
"How?"
"Fell from his horse somewhere up in a canyon--he was drunk, I reckon.
They found him twenty-four hours afterward. The superintendent of the
mines wrote to Leverich. He'd tried to keep pretty straight out there,
all but the drinking, I guess that was too much for him. It was the
best thing he could do--to die--as Girard says. Girard hates the very
sound of his name."
"Oh," breathed Dosia painfully.
"The superintendent said that some of the miners chipped in to bury him,
and the woman he boarded with sent a pencil scrawl along with the
superintendent's letter to say that she'd 'miss Mr. Barr
dreadful,'--that he'd get up and get the breakfast when she was sick,
and 'the kids, they thought the world of him.' She signed herself, 'A
true mourner, Mrs. Wilson.'"
Lawson was dead!
Dosia sat there, her hand clasping Billy's sleeve as at first--something
tangible to hold on to. Her gaze had gone far beyond the room; even that
haunting consciousness that Bailey Girard was near her was but a far,
hidden subconsciousness. She was out on a rocky slope beside a dead
body--Lawson, his head thrown back, those mocking, caressing eyes, those
curving, passionate lips, closed forever, the blood oozing from between
his dark locks. As ever with poor Dosia, there was that sharp,
unbearable pang of self-reproach, of self-condemnation. Of what avail
her prayers, her belief in him, when he had died thus? Oh, she had not
prayed enough. She had not been good enough to be allowed to help; she
had not believed hard enough. Perhaps it had helped just a little--he
had "tried to keep pretty straight, all but the drinking; that was too
much for him."
That covered some resistance in an underworld of which she knew nothing.
Poor Lawson, who had never had the right chance, whose youth had been
poisoned at the start! In that grave where he lay, drunkard and reveler,
part of the youth of her, Dosia Linden,--once his promised wife, to whom
she had given herself in her soul,--must always lie too, buried with
him; nothing could undo that. To die so causelessly! But the miners had
cared a little; he had been kind to a woman and her little
children--"the kids had thought the world of him"; she was "a true
mourner, Mrs. Wilson." Dosia imagined him cheeringly cooking for this
poor, worn-out mother, carrying the children from place to place as she
had once seen him carry that little boy home from the ball, long, long
ago.
A strain from that unforgotten music came to her now, carrying her to
the stars! Oh, not for Lawson the splendid rehabilitation of the strong,
except in that one moment of denial when he had risen by the might of
his manhood in renunciation for her sake; only the humble virtues of his
weakness could be his--yet perhaps, in the sight of the God who pities,
no such small offering, after all!
"Dosia, you didn't really _care_ for him!"
She smiled with pale lips and brimming eyes--an enigmatic answer which
Billy could not read. He sat beside her, smoothing her dress furtively,
until she got up, and, whispering, "I must go," left the room,
unconscious of Girard's following gaze.
"I think we'd better be getting back," said the latter, in an odd voice,
rising in the middle of one of Justin's sentences, as Billy came
straying in to join the group.
Lois' heart leaped. She had felt that another moment of live bait and
reminiscences would be more than she could stand.
"You need some rest," she said gratefully. "You have been tired out in
our service."
"Oh, I'm not tired at all," he returned, shortly. Her work seemed to
catch his eye for the first time and, in a desire to change the subject,
"What are you making?" he asked.
"A ball for Redge. I made one for Zaidee, and he felt left out--he's of
a very jealous disposition," she went on abstractedly. "Are you of a
jealous disposition, Mr. Girard?"
"I!" He stopped short, with the air of one not accustomed to taking
account of his own attributes, and apparently pondered the question as
if for the first time. When he looked up to answer, it was with abrupt
decision: "Yes, I am."
"Don't look so like a pirate," said young Billy, giving him a thump on
the back that sent them both out of the house, laughing, when Lois rose
and went over to Justin's side.
Husband and wife were at last alone.