WHOSE FAULT?
This went on for three or four days; and, with nothing to do but eat
and sleep and in between whiles to lie at languid ease, Devons grew
stronger and stronger, and all the minor sore spots vanished. He was
even able to sit up and read. All the magazines he ever heard of were
sent to him, and a brand-new book every day. Yet he did not read very
much. There was too much here to live.
For the time being he was as well off personally—except for the
inconvenience of being half-swathed in bandages—as though all his
dreams had come true. It gave him an opportunity to compare the
actuality with the vision. He resolutely barred his thoughts from the
future. He refused for a little while to ask himself how this was going
to end, and what was to become of him as soon as he was able to leave.
After all, there was not much he could do about that, anyway. There was
not even any one whom it was necessary to inform as to his whereabouts.
The few at Mullen Court who were aware of his existence would presume
that he had gone away on a business trip. They did not worry much
there about where men came from or where they went.
The sheer material comforts surrounding Devons were as balm to his
soul. There are those who seem able to find on a cot in a garret
everything they crave. Arkwright with his drawing set was more or
less of this sort, though he had more than some others. Prescott was
another—Prescott, the slight young fellow just back from Paris, who
lived at the top of the next house across the alley and who used to
call to him out of his window. Prescott painted wonderful things in
oil, and appeared content with doing that, whether he sold them or not.
He went over to see him one night, and in the course of the evening
several young ladies in queer, unconventional costumes came in, and by
the light of a single candle Prescott read to them from the plays of
Maeterlinck. It was a weird performance, with a great deal of smoke and
not much to eat. Yet every one but himself was satisfied. He returned
to his room with something of a headache and dreamed of blind children
all night.
Frankly he liked where he was now much better. For years he had tried
to make dreams, tried to make the future take the place of reality and
the present. This, instead of growing easier with passing time, became
increasingly more difficult. At Technology he had seen men doing the
same work he was doing, and at the same time enjoying the comforts of
life to a reasonable degree while they were at it. He had no advantage
over them even in dreams. And, after all, clean linen was clean linen
and decent garments were decent garments, and good food was good food,
and money was a conjurer’s wand.
Then there were the others—his father and mother and sisters. But here
they did not count. It disturbed him when he thought of them. If only
they could come on and be pummeled by an automobile—
He forced himself back to the present. He must avoid even the past. He
informed the nurse that he was thirsty and she brought him a glass of
milk—rich milk in a glass that sparkled from its many cut facets. It
tasted like nectar.
It was on the fifth day, in the afternoon, that the nurse informed him
that Miss Fairburne expressed a desire to visit him if he thought he
had the strength to see any one.
“I’d like to see her,” answered Devons.
And yet, he faced the prospect uneasily. It made him realize, for
one thing, how self-centered he had been. Except remotely, he had
not associated her either with the accident or with his present
surroundings. The mere fact that she had been in the car when he was
struck was an important detail, to be sure; but, not having seen her at
the time, it was as vague as hearsay evidence. That he was indebted to
her for all that he had recently been enjoying was also an undeniable
fact; but as long as she had been embodied to him no more concretely
than through the fragrance of the roses she sent him daily, she had not
played a vital part in his thoughts. Now he was a little afraid that
with her actual presence would come disillusionment. She would bring
him back to actual work-a-day conditions.
The few times he had seen her with Mildred, it had been with a sort of
resentment. He had thought of her as having in excess all the choice
things of life that Mildred lacked—as completely as he himself did.
Even to her physical beauty. It seemed as though if justice had held
the balance true, Mildred should at least have been the one to possess
that abundant silken black hair, those dark eyes that set a man to
wondering, the fine nose and mouth that were so subtly distinctive.
In every line and feature she revealed her tender nurture. It was as
though she had taken on something from all the beautiful things for
which the four corners of the earth had been searched. Beside her, poor
Mildred’s blunt, irregular nose and mouth appeared plainer than ever.
Knowing as he did the woman beneath, he felt something to be unjust
there.
But he must remember that Miss Fairburne herself had found the real
Mildred and clung to her and been faithful to her to the end. It was
Miss Fairburne who had held Mildred’s hand at the last—the thin,
pitiful little hand—and it was Miss Fairburne whom Mildred had trusted
to send home the bitter news. Those few moments when he had seen her in
the infirmary reception-room, her eyes moist, he remembered that she
had seemed to him like another Mildred. She had been almost like one of
the home folks—just an ordinary body who had lost a sister.
Then she had gone out of his mind. His own affairs had preempted all
his thoughts. Besides, she vanished shortly into her own world, which
to him then was as though she had been whisked to some distant planet.
Yet it could not have been so far that she had gone. Between a sleep
and an awakening which to him was no longer than a heart-beat, he had
without effort compassed the distance which lay between them. In the
old days such things had been done, he knew, with the aid of magic
carpets. But he had no such aid. Besides, these were not the old days.
He was living in very modern times and in the most modern of all modern
cities.
Glancing up from the bed, he saw in the door, what at first looked to
be a framed picture. It might have been one of those old masterpieces
with the vague title “Portrait of a Young Lady,” which leaves one
eager to know a great deal more about the young lady than history
vouchsafes. So she stood for a moment, and then with some uncertainty
moved into the room. Devons tried to sit up. He was awkward about it,
and she hurried to his side.
“Please don’t!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I’m so sorry for you!”
The beautiful eyes endorsed the assertion. She appeared so genuinely
pained that he did not understand.
“For me?” he replied.
The sight of his bandaged shoulder and his helplessness so dramatized
the accident that for a second it was more vivid to her than it had
been at the moment it occurred.
“I suppose the fact that you’re—you’re alive is something to be
thankful for,” she faltered on.
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad to be alive, if that’s what you mean.”
“You’ve suffered a great deal?”
“None at all, to speak of,” he replied.
“Then you’re not uncomfortable—now?”
He smiled a little.
“In most ways I’m more comfortable than I ever was in my life.”
She looked skeptical. It was difficult for her to believe that, with
the evidence of her two eyes.
“I’m afraid you’re just trying to take away the blame from me,” she
returned.
“Blame—for what?” he demanded.
“For—for the accident. After all, if it had not been for me you would
not have been injured.”
“It’s just as true that if I hadn’t tried to cross the street without
looking, this wouldn’t have happened,” he declared.
“But if Charles had been more careful!”
“Or if I had been more careful! Or if I had taken a different street!
Or if I had delayed anywhere along the route thirty seconds! I wonder
if we know any more about such things than that either they happen or
they don’t.”
“You feel like that?” she exclaimed, as though she found relief in the
notion.
“I haven’t thought very much about it,” he admitted. “But when you
stop to figure out the blame you have to go back further than just
the second before. And if you do that, where are you going to stop?
If something had turned out a little differently for either of us ten
minutes before—”
She started. It sent her thoughts back to Dicky. It was he who had
detained her at Delmonico’s. Perhaps, then, it was he who was to blame!
“Or an hour before,” he went on. “Or a day or a month or a year. I was
born on Friday, but supposing I had not been born until Saturday?”
It was her seriousness that urged him to follow his fancy through to
so grotesque a conclusion—her seriousness and a desire to make her
accept the situation more lightly.
“That sounds like fatalism,” she said.
“Does it?”
He was unaware that he was unfolding any particular philosophy. He had
given little study and less thought to such abstract subjects. His work
had all been along distinctly more concrete and material lines.
She had taken the chair by his bed, and her nearness stimulated him
like wine.
“At any rate,” he went on, “we might as well call it that and let it
go. The major point seems to be that here I am.”
And there she was. Here was another point which until this moment he
had not considered. All this while she had been in the house, and he
had never given that a thought. She would probably have visited him
yesterday had he asked for her.
“Do you ever hear from Mildred’s folks?” he inquired.
It was the expression about her mouth that recalled to him that brief
former association with her.
“Yes,” she nodded. “But I have to write at least three letters to get
one back. I have a feeling that, merely because I was the one to—to
tell them, they blame me.”
“That is possible,” he admitted. “But surely you don’t blame yourself?”
“Sometimes I think I might have done something to prevent it.”
Devons flushed. There had been times when he had thought as much
himself. He had wondered why, with all her wealth, she had not relieved
Mildred of part of the burden of her poverty. Yet he knew that it was
more than doubtful if Mildred would have allowed it—any more than
he himself would have allowed anything of the sort from one of his
classmates. It had always been said of the Devonses that they would
starve before accepting a favor. His father was like that. On his
little hundred-acre farm he was as cocky as a lord on country-wide
estates.
“You could have done nothing,” he assured her, with a sense of pride.
“But why should she be like that—when I wanted to help?”
“It’s in her blood,” he replied.
“It wasn’t quite fair,” she protested. “She was always eager to do what
she could for me. She helped me in my studies.”
“Yes.”
“And when I wanted—in the only way I could—”
She checked herself. His eyes were meeting her eyes.
“What you gave her at the end was what she wanted,” he finished for
her. “Your sympathy and friendship.”
“But the other—”
“Money?” he asked bluntly.
“It sounds crude to put it that way,” she objected. “But it might have
prevented the end.”
“Perhaps.”
“So—why wouldn’t she let me?”
“It would be difficult to make you understand,” he said. “And yet, if
you had been in her place I’m pretty sure you’d have felt exactly as
she felt.”
She shook her head.
“Every one ought to be allowed to help every one else in any way one
can,” she declared. “I—I don’t know what else we’re living for.”
“I guess most of us don’t ask that. We just plug ahead,” he smiled.
“Have you been in town since you graduated?”
“Since fall,” he answered.
He offered no further details. It was impossible for him to conceive
that his personal affairs could be of any interest to her.
“Mildred told me how hard you work,” she went on. “This must have
seriously interfered with your business.”
“It hasn’t,” he assured her.
The naked truth was that, if anything, it had been a Godsend to him.
What would have become of him in another day? Sawyer might have
offered something; but even then there would have been an intervening
week before pay-day. The chances seemed to be that he would leave his
bed stronger and more fit than he had been in a decade.
“If you have any business letters to write—won’t you let me write them
for you?”
“I haven’t any.”
“You’re—you’re going to be like Mildred?”
There was a curiously pathetic note in her voice. It was almost
childlike in its plaintiveness.
“I’m telling you the truth,” he answered quickly. “My plans were at a
standstill. They hadn’t worked out as I expected.”
“Are you a fatalist about such things too?” she asked.
He thought a moment.
“I guess I might as well be,” he answered.
Her eye caught the magazines on a table near the bed.
“If I can’t write for you, I can read to you. Have you any reason to
offer why I shouldn’t do that much?”
“No,” he replied frankly. “I’d like to have you.”
“Would you like to hear anything in particular?”
“Nothing in particular,” he answered.
So she picked up a magazine and selected a story at random. She read
very well, but after all that was more or less beside the point. What
he was really interested in was her and the fact that she was sitting
here within arm’s length of him. It was quite the nearest he had ever
come in personal contact to any one as supremely beautiful as she. And
he realized that she was an integral part of all these surroundings he
was so enjoying. It was odd that Arkwright had neglected to include
something of the sort in the plans for his house. Something of the sort
was necessary in the plans of any house assuming to be more than a mere
shelter. If it took money to turn the blue-prints into masonry, after
that it took something like this to turn the masonry into a home. It
had been rather stupid of Arkwright to ignore so important a detail. He
must call his attention to it when he next saw him.
Devons watched her eyes, and her moving lips, and the velvet softness
of her cheek, and her shell-like ear, and the curve of her neck, and
her tender hands. And all those things set him to dreaming along new
lines. And the dreams stiffened his lips. And the dreams made him fret
a little that he was so tied up.
Suddenly she closed the magazine.
“That was a very good story, wasn’t it?” she smiled.
“A very good story, indeed,” answered Devons. “Thank you.”
“You’d like me to read another to-morrow?”
“I’d like nothing better,” replied Devons.
“Then I’ll come up—about this time,” she promised him.
From that moment he began to look forward to this time to-morrow.