Part 5

That was unjust of her mother, Lita thought. Her father was trying to be nice. It was her mother who kept making the interview bitter, and yet in essentials her mother had behaved so much better. Why did she suffer so much in the atmosphere of their anger? Why did she wish so passionately that they should treat each other at least fairly? She couldn't understand.

"You have not met me in a coöperative spirit," her father was saying, "and I see no point in my staying. Good night."

"And you're going--just like that--without doing anything at all?"

"Of course, I shall write to Miss Barton--and if you are not able to take Lita back to school tomorrow I'll go myself."

Lita noticed that though an instant before her mother had reproached him with indifference, she treated his last suggestion as if it were impertinent.

"I think I shall be able to take my daughter safely to school," she said. "But you must see this man; that I cannot do."

"I shall do nothing so ridiculous," said Mr. Hazlitt. "Valentine! Why, a man like that gets a basketful a day of letters from idiotic women of all ages! He's bored to death by them."

"I have yet to find a man who is bored by the adoration of idiotic women," said Mrs. Hazlitt, and there was no mistake in anybody's mind as to what she meant by that.

A discussion on the relative idiocy of the sexes broke out with extraordinary violence. Lita's conduct was utterly forgotten. She might have slipped out of the room without being noticed, except that her father was standing between her and the door. She tried to remember Dacer's saying that quarreling meant love, and found to her surprise that that idea was almost as shocking. Could it be that she did not want her parents to have any emotions at all?

When her father had gone, her mother burst into tears.

"I am so sorry," she said, "that you should have seen him like that--at his very worst."

Lita had just been thinking how much the better of the two he had appeared. She felt as hard as a stone. She had no wish to be continually appraising her parents; they left her no choice. Her childish acceptance of them had been destroyed, and at the moment her friendly emotion towards them as companions and human beings had not yet flowered. Instead of wanting to tell her mother about Dacer, she wanted to tell Dacer about her mother.

She saw that her whole scheme about Valentine had been ridiculous--a complete failure. She ought to clear that up at once, but she did not feel up to explaining it; an explanation with her mother involved so much. Mrs. Hazlitt would give those she loved anything in the world--except her attention. It was necessary to hold her attention with one hand and feed her your confidence with the other. Lita was too exhausted to attempt it that evening. She would do it the next day, of course.

The next morning--Sunday--Mrs. Hazlitt awoke with a severe headache. Though she insisted on Lita's remaining in sight--for fear that she would rush to the arms of Valentine--it was made clear that no friendly intercourse between parent and child was possible. Lita felt herself to be the direct cause of the agony of mind which had led to the headache.

After luncheon, looking like carved marble, Mrs. Hazlitt got up and announced her intention of escorting Lita back to school. The girl saw that her mother was not well enough to make the double journey, and suggested that it would be better for her father to go with her. Mrs. Hazlitt treated this proposal with the coldest scorn.

"I think we will not trouble your father further," she said.

At times like this she used a flat, remote voice; as dead, Lita thought, as a corpse talking on a disconnected telephone. In old times it had nearly broken her heart when her mother spoke to her in that tone. Today it had lost its power.

They drove to the station in silence, every jar of the car sending a tremor through Mrs. Hazlitt's eyelids. In the train, she put Lita's knitting bag behind her head and shut her eyes. Lita, sitting in silence beside, felt so wooden--inside and out--that, she said to herself, not even the appearance of Doctor Dacer would make any difference to her. But when, before they were out of the tunnel, he did pass through the car--not stopping, just raising his hat--she found it did affect her.

Her mother opened her eyes.

"Who's that man?" she said in an almost human tone.

"I think he's one of the surgeons who is taking care of Aurelia," Lita answered, and instantly regretted the "I think." It was positively deceitful, where she had intended to be merely noncommittal. But all the relations of her life seemed to have gone wrong.

She had not done any of her work for the next day; not the original in geometry or the sonnet she should have learned by heart; in fact she had not opened a book. She couldn't concentrate her mind now on mathematics or poetry, but she might do some of the collateral reading for Greek History. She slipped the book out of its strap and opened it.

"Of Lycurgus the lawgiver, we have nothing to relate that is certain and uncontroverted--" Lita thought: that's at least a candid way to begin a biography. The door opened, letting in the roar of the train and the smell of coal smoke, and Lita's nerves remembered it, as if only once before in her life had she ever known a car door open, and looked up--to see the conductor. She dropped her eyes and went on: "For there are different accounts of his birth, his death--" The door again; this time a passenger in search of a seat. She made a vow to herself to read three pages without looking up--and did. "Endeavoring to part some persons who were concerned in a fray, he received a wound by a kitchen knife, of which he died, and left the kingdom--"

She was aware that something in blue serge was stationary beside her. She looked slowly up. Yes, there he was.

She introduced him to her mother. The seat in front of them was now free, and Dacer, turning it over, sat down. Mrs. Hazlitt was not sorry to show that her coldness concerned her daughter only. She was very willing to talk agreeably to a stranger. The conversation was carried on between them as if Lita were too young to be expected to take part. She was not sorry, and went on glancing at a sentence here and there: "He set sail, therefore, and landed in Crete--" "--in which the priestess called him beloved of the gods, and rather a god than a man."

At this she really could not help looking at Dacer, and finding his eyes on her, she said, "I saw you at the theater yesterday."

He was interested.

"I didn't see you."

"Oh, yes, we were there," said Mrs. Hazlitt languidly. "Such a poor play! And as for Valentine--these popular actors in America--"

"He was thought very handsome and dashing, in our box," said Dacer.

And then Lita was surprised to hear her own voice saying, "Was that lady your wife?"

He stared at her for a second as if he had not heard, or could not understand what he seemed to have heard, and then answered quietly, "No, I don't care for them by the cubic foot."

Never had such a perfect reply been made, Lita thought. It reconstructed their relation and the whole world, and yet it took place so gently that her mother had hardly noticed that they had spoken to each other. Life was simply immense, she said to herself; she had been quite wrong about it before.

Then presently Dacer drew from Mrs. Hazlitt the admission that she had a wretched headache--hadn't slept--had had a disagreeable day--so foolish, but she was affected by scenes--

"Everybody is, you know," said Dacer.

She should not have come on such an expedition. The idea of her driving four miles out to the school in a jiggling car--and right back again--was absurd. He spoke almost sternly. He had a time-table in his pocket; a train left for New York five minutes after their train arrived at Elbridge; Mrs. Hazlitt must take that back, go straight to bed; he would give her a powder. Of course he would see Miss Hazlitt safely to the school--yes, even into Miss Barton's presence. He wrote his prescription. Lita saw that her mother was going to obey.

As they got out at the station they saw the New York train already waiting. Dacer put Mrs. Hazlitt on it; and Lita, watching them, saw Mrs. Hazlitt turn at the steps and give him some special injunction. Well, she probably would not confide to him so soon the scandal of the letter to Valentine; and if she did, it would be easy to explain. Dacer's face was untroubled as he returned to her.

"She's all in," he said.

A sharp self-reproach clutched at Lita's heart, the capacity for emotion having unexpectedly returned to her.

"Did it really do her harm to come out here?"

"It really is better for her to go straight home," he answered, as if admitting other motives had entered into his advice.

They got into the school flivver, which was waiting for them. Rain had just stopped and the back curtains were down. It was dark.

As they wheeled away from the station lights Lita heard him saying, "Didn't you know I wasn't married?" She did not immediately answer. Her hand was taken. "Didn't you know?" he said again.

A strange thing was happening to Lita. She formed the resolution of withdrawing her hand; she sent the impulse out from her brain, but it seemed only to reach her elbow; her hand, limp and willing, continued to remain in his.

They spoke hardly at all. The near presence of Matthew, the driver, a well-known school gossip, made speech undesirable. Besides, it wasn't necessary. Lita was perfectly content with silence as long as that large, solid hand enveloped hers.

As they turned in at the school gate he said, "You'll come over to see Aurelia this evening, I suppose."

She knew it wouldn't be possible, and was obliged to say so. And he was going back to town by a morning train. There was a pause.

As they got out he said, "Do you ever get up very early--as early as six?"

"I could always make a beginning," said Lita.

And then, true to his promise, he turned the chairman of the self-government committee over to the keeping of Miss Barton herself.

One excellent way of waking early is not to sleep at all. Lita hardly slept and was out of bed in time to watch the slow but fortunately inevitable spreading of the dawn. The new day was evidently going to be one of those days in late March when, though the earth has no suggestion of spring, the sky and the air are as vernal as May. Lita could see a light in the upper story of the infirmary. Dacer's perhaps.

It was not yet six when she stole downstairs and across the green. She had a good reason for being anxious about Aurelia--the stitches had been taken out of the wound the night before. That's what she would say if anyone asked her. But no one was awake, except far away in the school kitchen. The door of the infirmary was locked, but as she pressed noiselessly against it a figure faced her on the other side of the glass--Dacer. He opened the door and came out. It shut behind him, and as the night latch was still on, they were locked out. So they sat down on the narrow steps of the cottage, each with a pillar to lean against, and for the first time looked long and steadily at each other, as people who have met by deliberate acknowledged plan.

"Do you like the early morning?" he asked.

"I never did before," she answered.

He smiled at her.

"Do you realize," he said, "that in this lifelong friendship of ours that is the first decent thing you have ever said to me?"

Why, it was true! To Lita it had been so clear that she was more interested than he was; more eager; but it was true, she had given him none of those poignant, unforgettable sentences which he had left with her, to go over in his absence. She smiled, too--very slowly.

"Perhaps it won't be the last," she said.

At half past seven Dacer went in, and a few minutes later Lita arrived at Room 11 to inquire after her friend. When it was time to go, she shook hands with Doctor Dacer in the presence of Aurelia, Aurelia's mother, who had just arrived, and the trained nurse.

It was the last possible meeting before the Easter holidays.

III

Immediately after breakfast Lita had geometry, and then a study period. During this she received a message that Miss Barton wished to speak to her. Such a message was not necessarily alarming; as chairman of the self-government committee she was consulted on many school problems. It was known that Miss Barton relied more on her judgment than on that of the senior president. Still, with a poor classroom record for the past week, and that unlicensed hour and a half on the infirmary steps, Lita did feel a trifle nervous; not that she could care very much about such minor matters. And then there was Matthew and the flivver----

The head mistress was sitting at her desk in her study, with its latticed windows and the etchings of English cathedrals on the walls. Her head was slightly on one side, which meant, according to school lore, that she was going to be particularly airy. She was.

"Oh, well, come, my dear Lita," she said. "This is really going rather far--a bit thick, as our little English friend would say."

"But what is it, Miss Barton?" Lita breathed, with all the pearly innocence of young guilt.

"Oh, dear, dear!" said Miss Barton. "So we have nothing on our conscience!"

"I have a great many things," said Lita quietly. She knew just how to talk to her chief--if that would do any good.

"One asks oneself whether girls are worth educating at all if this is the way the more intelligent ones expend their time and energy." And Miss Barton handed Lita the crumpled but familiar letter to Valentine. "I've had a sharp note from your father this morning, and I must say I don't blame him--really I don't. The grammar would be a sufficient humiliation to any school, even if the letter were addressed to your grandmother. And I may tell you that five different photographs of Mr. Valentine have been discovered hidden about your room--most ingeniously, it is true, but quite against our rules. Really, it's a question whether the school can keep on if this sort of thing is general."

Lita listened in what appeared to be the most respectful silence. Her relief was intense. Also she was trying to remember what Miss Barton said word for word so as to repeat it to Aurelia, to whom, after all, it justly belonged. Aurelia did a wonderful imitation of the head mistress, and could make use of every phrase; she was always on the lookout for material.

Lita was dismissed with a warning that she was to be kept in bounds until the holidays, and all her mail, outgoing and incoming, would be watched. This was rather serious, as Dacer had distinctly intimated that he intended to write. Still, a way could probably be found-- She would speak to Aurelia about it.

She did not see Aurelia until the late afternoon. Dacer, as she expected, had gone; but he had left a message for her, Aurelia said--a very particular message.

With what extraordinary rapidity does the human imagination function! Between the time Aurelia announced the fact that a message existed and the giving of the message, Lita had time to envisage half a dozen possibilities, from the announcement of his immediate return to an offer of marriage.

The message was this: "He said to tell you that he had no idea you were so fond of the stage, or he would have behaved very differently. Do you understand what that means?--for I don't."

It meant, of course, that Miss Barton had told him about Valentine; had possibly even shown him the letter. It was just the sort of thing that she might do. Lita could almost hear her describing the comic complications of a head mistress' life: "This note, for instance, discovered in the pocket of one of my best girls; not even English; that hurts us most."

Why did Aurelia do such silly things--write such silly letters? Then, her sense of justice reasserting itself, she admitted it was not her friend's fault that the authorship of the letter had been mistaken. She was conscious of a physical nausea at the idea that Dacer was going about in the belief that she, Lita Hazlitt, had written thus to another man.

In the first few minutes she sketched an explanatory letter to him, and then remembered that her mail--in and out--was watched. That wouldn't do. In fact, there was nothing to do but to wait for two interminable weeks to pass and bring the Friday of the Easter holiday. Once in the same town with him, she could make him listen to her. There was nothing agreeable in life except the recollection of a large hand on hers, and even that memory was beginning to take on mortality.

She had not even the attentions of her parents to console her--not that forty thousand parents would have made up to her for the estrangement of Dacer. Her mother wrote conscientiously, but coldly. If she had seen her mother Lita would have told her everything, but the next Sunday was Mr. Hazlitt's official visiting day.

He came, but he came in a somewhat disciplinary mood. He gave Lita a long talk on how men felt when women forced attentions upon them. Lita did not dare take the risk of telling him; she had so little control over him that he might possibly tell the whole story to Miss Barton and involve Aurelia. At the same time she did not want him to find it out for himself by a futile visit to Valentine. Before he left she asked him point-blank if he contemplated such a step.

"Of course not," he answered.

And at almost that exact moment Freebody was ushering Valentine into Mrs. Hazlitt's library. For Mrs. Hazlitt was not a woman to let the grass grow under her feet, where her maternal obligations were concerned. The more she thought the matter over the more obvious it became that one or the other of Lita's parents must see Valentine and let him know that, however silly and forthputting the child had been, she was not without conventional protection. Of course, this was her father's duty; but since men as fathers were complete failures, all the disagreeable tasks of parenthood devolved inevitably on mothers. After Dacer had put her on the train the Sunday before, she had gone home and taken the powder he gave her and slept through a long night; and when she waked the next morning she had seen her duty clearly--to interview Valentine herself. It was a duty which implied a reproof to her former husband.

She looked for Valentine's name in the telephone book, but of course he was not there. Then she called up the theater where he was acting, and they refused to give her his address, but said a letter directed to the theater would reach him. Mrs. Hazlitt was in no mood to brook the mail's delays, and telegraphed him that it was necessary that she should see him for a few minutes at any time or place convenient to him, and signed her name with a comfortable conviction that all New York knew just who Alita Hazlitt was.

Now Valentine, like most people busy with a successful career, was utterly uninterested in conventional social life; he hardly ever opened his mail, rarely answered telegrams; and if, by mistake, he did make a social engagement, he always told his secretary to call the people up and break it. In the ordinary course of events Mrs. Hazlitt's telegram would have been opened in his dressing room, and would have lain about for a day or two until Valentine thought of saying to someone who might know, "Who is this woman--Alita Hazlitt?" And then it would have dropped on the floor, and would eventually have been swept up and put in the theater ash can.

But, as it happened, Valentine had always cherished a wish to play the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet before he was too old to wear a round-necked doublet; and a charitable institution, of which Mrs. Hazlitt was a most negligent trustee, had made a suggestion that Valentine should help them out in a benefit they were about to give. So Valentine, remembering her name on the letterhead of the institution, jumped at the conclusion that she had been selected to clinch the arrangement.

And so not more than three or four days went by before he answered her telegram by calling her up on the telephone, and it was arranged that he was to come and see her on Sunday at five.

She felt nervous as the time approached. She kept saying to herself that she had no idea how to deal with people like this. So awkward for a woman alone; but she was alone--utterly alone. She had become rather tearful by the time Valentine was announced. She waited a moment to compose herself and became even more unnerved in the process.

When she went down she found him standing by one of the bookcases, reading. She saw with a distinct pang that he was a handsomer man off the stage than on, with his fine hawklike profile and irrepressibly thick, furrowed light hair. He slid a book back into place as she entered, with the soft gesture of a book lover.

"I see you have a first edition of Trivia," he said. "I envy you."

Mrs. Hazlitt, who had thought up a greeting which was now rendered utterly impossible, was obliged to make a quick mental bound. She had never opened her edition of Gay, which she had inherited from her grandfather, and had never suspected it of being a first.

She said, "Oh, do you go in for first editions?"

"Not any more," answered Valentine. "I've become more interested in autographs and association books. I have a wonderful letter of Gay's from--from--oh, you know, where he was staying when he wrote the Beggar's Opera--that duke's place--well, it will come to me."

But it never did come to him--not, at least, until he went home and looked it up--because, glancing at his hostess, he saw in those anxious, dark-fringed eyes that she wasn't a bit interested in his Gay letter; and so, with that tact that all artists possess if they will only use it, he said gently, "But it wasn't about autographs that you wanted to see me, was it? It's about your benefit."

"The benefit?"

"No? Well, what is it then?"

"Oh, I hoped you would understand without my being obliged to dot all the _i_'s."

She said this with a great deal of meaning. Leaning forward on her elbow, in her mauve and silver tea gown, behind her silver tea tray, she looked very charming. Valentine thought that he had never known a woman who combined such perfection of appointments with such simplicity of manner. He had a strong instinct for the best in any art. It struck him that for a certain sort of thing this was the best.

She went on: "Perhaps you will think I should not have sent for you; but what could I do? I am so alone. My husband and I, as you perhaps know, are divorced."

Valentine achieved just the right sort of murmur at this, indicating that he personally could not regret the fact, but found it of intense interest.

Mrs. Hazlitt hurried on: "I feel I must apologize for my silly child--so vulgar and absurd, though I suppose girls must think they're in love--not that I mean it's absurd to think--I mean in your case it's natural enough--your last play--so romantic, dear Mr. Valentine--only, would you mind telling me just how it was you brought my daughter home a week ago Friday?"

Valentine emerged from this like a dog from the surf, successive waves had passed over him without his having had any idea what it meant.

"I don't think I have the pleasure of knowing your daughter," he said.

"Ah, not by name!"

She was ready for him there. She rose, and taking a silver-framed photograph from the table she thrust it into his hands.

He studied it and said politely, "What a charming little face! How like you, if I may say so!"

"Don't you recognize it? Hasn't she sent it to you? Hasn't she written you letters?"

"Possibly," said Valentine, and he added apologetically, "You know, I can't read all my letters. The telegrams I do try to manage, although--"

Mrs. Hazlitt could not pretend to be interested in how Valentine managed his telegrams.