Bessie asked the sleepy man who opened her aunt's door whether her
brother had come in yet, and found that he had not. She helped her aunt
off up-stairs with her maid, and when she came down again she sent the
man to bed; she told him she was going to sit up and she would let
her brother in. The caprices of Alan's latch-key were known to all the
servants, and the man understood what she, meant. He said he had left
a light in the reception-room and there was a fire there; and Bessie
tripped on down from the library floor, where she had met him. She had
put off her ball dress and had slipped into the simplest and easiest
of breakfast frocks, which was by no means plain. Bessie had no plain
frocks for any hour of the day; her frocks all expressed in stuff and
style and color, and the bravery of their flying laces and ribbons, the
audacity of spirit with which she was herself chicqued together, as she
said. This one she had on now was something that brightened her dull
complexion, and brought out the best effect of her eyes and mouth, and
seemed the effluence of her personal dash and grace. It made the most
of her, and she liked it beyond all her other negligees for its
complaisance.
She got a book, and sat down in a long, low chair before the fire and
crossed her pretty slippers on the warm hearth. It was a quarter after
three by the clock on the mantel; but she had never felt more eagerly
awake. The party had not been altogether to her mind, up to midnight,
but after that it had been a series of rapid and vivid emotions, which
continued themselves still in the tumult of her nerves, and seemed to
demand an indefinite sequence of experience. She did not know what state
her brother might be in when he came home; she had not seen anything of
him after she first went out to supper; till then, though, he had kept
himself straight, as he needs must; but she could not tell what happened
to him afterward. She hoped that he would come home able to talk, for
she wished to talk. She wished to talk about herself; and as she had
already had flattery enough, she wanted some truth about herself; she
wanted Alan to say what he thought of her behavior the whole evening
with that jay. He must have seen something of it in the beginning, and
she should tell him all the rest. She should tell him just how often she
had danced with the man, and how many dances she had sat out with him;
how she had pretended once that she was engaged when another man asked
her, and then danced with the jay, to whom she pretended that he had
engaged her for the dance. She had wished to see how he would take it;
for the same reason she had given to some one else a dance that was
really his. She would tell Alan how the jay had asked her for that last
dance, and then never come near her again. That would give him the whole
situation, and she would know just what he thought of it.
What she thought of herself she hardly knew, or made believe she hardly
knew. She prided herself upon not being a flirt; she might not be very
good, as goodness went, but she was not despicable, and a flirt was
despicable. She did not call the audacity of her behavior with the jay
flirting; he seemed to understand it as well as she, and to meet her
in her own spirit; she wondered now whether this jay was really more
interesting than the other men one met, or only different; whether he
was original, like Alan himself, or merely novel, and would soon wear
down to the tiresomeness that seemed to underlie them all, and made one
wish to do something dreadful. In the jay's presence she had no wish to
do anything dreadful. Was it because he was dreadful enough for both,
all the time, without doing anything? She would like to ask Alan that,
and see how he would take it. Nothing seemed to put the jay out, so far
as she had tried, and she had tried some bold impertinences with him. He
was very jolly through them all, and at the worst of them he laughed and
asked her for that dance, which he never came to claim, though in the
mean time he brought her some belated supper, and was devoted to her and
her aunt, inventing services to do for them. Then suddenly he went off
and did not return, and Mr. Westover mysteriously reappeared, and got
their carriage.
She heard a scratching at the key-hole of the outside door; she knew it
was Alan's latch. She had left the inner door ajar that there might be
no uncertainty of hearing him, and she ran out into the space between
that and the outer door where the fumbling and scraping kept on.
“Is that you, Alan?” she called, softly, and if she had any doubt
before, she had none when she heard her brother outside, cursing his
luck with his key as usual.
She flung the door open, and confronted him with another man, who had
his arms around him as if he had caught him from falling with the inward
pull of the door. Alan got to his feet and grappled with the man, and
insisted that he should come in and make a night of it.
Bessie saw that it was Jeff, and they stood a moment, looking at each
other. Jeff tried to free himself with an appeal to Bessie: “I beg your
pardon, Miss Lynde. I walked home with your brother, and I was just
helping him to get in--I didn't think that you--”
Alan said, with his measured distinctness: “Nobody cares what you think.
Come in, and get something to carry you over the bridge. Cambridge cars
stopped running long ago. I say you shall!” He began to raise his voice.
A light flashed in a window across the way, and a sash was lifted; some
one must be looking out.
“Oh, come in with him!” Bessie implored, and at a little yielding in
Jeff her brother added:
“Come in, you damn jay!” He pulled at Jeff.
Jeff made haste to shut the door behind them. He was laughing; and if it
was from mere brute insensibility to what would have shocked another in
the situation, his frank recognition of its grotesqueness was of better
effect than any hopeless effort to ignore it would have been. People
adjust themselves to their trials; it is the pretence of the witness
that there is no trial which hurts, and Bessie was not wounded by Jeff's
laugh.
“There's a fire here in the reception-room,” she said. “Can you get him
in?”
“I guess so.”
Jeff lifted Alan into the room and stayed him on foot there, while he
took off his hat and overcoat, and then he let him sink into the low
easy-chair Bessie had just risen from. All the time, Alan was
bidding her ring and have some champagne and cold meat set out on the
side-board, and she was lightly promising and coaxing. But he drowsed
quickly in the warmth, and the last demand for supper died half uttered
on his lips.
Jeff asked across him: “Can't I get him up-stairs for you? I can carry
him.”
She shook her head and whispered back, “I can leave him here,” and
she looked at Jeff with a moment's hesitation. “Did you--do you think
that--any one noticed him at Mrs. Enderby's?”
“No; they had got him in a room by himself--the caterer's men had.”
“And you found him there?”
“Mr. Westover found him there,” Jeff answered.
“I don't understand.”
“Didn't he come to you after I left?”
“Yes.”
“I told him to excuse me--”
“He didn't.”
“Well, I guess he was pretty badly rattled.” Jeff stopped himself in
the vague laugh of one who remembers something ludicrous, and turned his
face away.
“Tell me what it was!” she demanded, nervously.
“Mr. Westover had been home with him once, and he wouldn't stay. He made
Mr. Westover come back for me.”
“What did he want with you?”
Jeff shrugged.
“And then what?”
“We went out to the carriage, as soon as I could get away from you; but
he wasn't in it. I sent Mr. Westover back to you and set out to look for
him.”
“That was very good of you. And I--thank you for your kindness to my
brother. I shall not forget it. And I wish to beg your pardon.”
“What for?” asked Jeff, bluntly.
“For blaming you when you didn't come back for the dance.”
If Bessie had meant nothing but what was fitting to the moment some
inherent lightness of nature played her false. But even the histrionic
touch which she could not keep out of her voice, her manner, another
sort of man might have found merely pathetic.
Jeff laughed with subtle intelligence. “Were you very hard on me?”
“Very,” she answered in kind, forgetting her brother and the whole
terrible situation.
“Tell me what you thought of me,” he said, and he came a little nearer
to her, looking very handsome and very strong. “I should like to know.”
“I said I should never speak to you again.”
“And you kept your word,” said Jeff. “Well, that's all right.
Good-night-or good-morning, whichever it is.” He took her hand, which
she could not withdraw, or feigned to herself that she could not
withdraw, and looked at her with a silent laugh, and a hardy, sceptical
glance that she felt take in every detail of her prettiness, her
plainness. Then he turned and went out, and she ran quickly and locked
the door upon him.