CHAPTER XIV

SOPHIE'S STORY

I had to lay my journal aside last night before I reached the really thrilling occurrence of Thanksgiving day, which was, strangely enough, neither the dinner nor the ball, although each was in its own peculiar way a decided success.

I have Evelyn's word that the ball was a success, for neither Sophie nor I attended it, albeit Richard had, at my whispered suggestion, sent Sophie a box of long white gloves from the city, getting them off on an early train that they might reach her in time; and sending along with this a box of roses--Maréchal Niel for Sophie, La France for Mrs. Chalmers and Evelyn, while for me there was a great sheaf of American Beauties.

But he did not come back in time for the ball, and I suddenly lost all interest in the affair as the last train out from the city that evening failed to bring him. Sophie had been suffering all day with a frightful neuralgic headache, and, as night drew near, it became so much worse that she declared that she could not go to the ball. The lights and dizzy whirling around would be the death of her, she decided, so she dropped down into a chair in the library after dinner and said she would give it up.

"Then I'll stay with you," I volunteered, and, despite her own protestations and feebler ones from Mrs. Chalmers and Evelyn, the matter was thus arranged. There were always far too many girls at such affairs anyway, they all knew, so that my absence would really be a blessing.

Mr. Maxwell came into the room just as the matter had been thus satisfactorily settled and when he heard of the arrangement his face beamed with a kind of mischievous happiness.

"Now, that's what I call luck," he said, as the door closed upon Mrs. Chalmers' retreating form and left us three alone together. "I'll go with the ladies and stay long enough to see that Evelyn's card is filled--then I'll take a sneak, and come on back home to see how the headache is progressing."

His smile spoke immense approval of his own cleverness, but Sophie cut it short.

"You'll do nothing of the kind," she said decidedly, looking up at him as he stood by the library table, a folded newspaper in his hand; "you'll stay and do your duty by the wall-flowers."

"Not I, sweet lady," he answered banteringly. "Life is too short. I'm coming back here and entertain your headache away!"

And he did. He came in at about half-past ten, for the filling up of Evelyn's card had been a matter quickly despatched, and he was in radiant spirits over having "jumped the game."

"Mrs. Chalmers didn't mind at all," he explained as he drew a chair up to the fire and lighted a cigarette. "I left her in a corner with a few other fond mammas and she even insisted that I should not go back, as Jim goes for them about two o'clock. All I'm to do is to go out to the stables and punch Jim in the ribs and wake him up in time. So we are going to have a jolly evening together."

"Oh, dear, what a pleasant prospect!" Sophie said, only half in jest, as her hand went up to her aching head. "Now, if I could just get rid of this one-eyed pain I might find life decidedly worth living."

"Isn't there anything we can do?" he asked solicitously, casting his cigarette quickly into the fire as if he thought the smoke might make her head worse. "Can't Miss Fielding and I make you a mustard plaster--or something?"

"There is a little bottle of stuff in my bag up-stairs that sometimes acts like magic in a case like this," she finally said with some hesitancy, and I realized that she was hesitating because she disliked the idea of having any one fussing over her. She is one of these capable creatures who seldom ask even a small service of any one.

"Let me run and get it," I said starting up and resolving that I should get the bottle, hand it in to Mr. Maxwell at the door, then betake myself off to my own room and leave them alone together. I imagined that he would enjoy the privilege of hunting about to get her a glass and a spoon himself. And it would make them feel more at home with each other for him to be rendering her these little services.

I went to Sophie's room and found a bag where she had told me to look, in the closet on the lower shelf. I caught it up and moved across to the bed, where I sat down and deposited it by my side; then I began a wrestling match with the most obstinate catch that it has ever been my ill-fortune to come across on an alligator-skin bag.

"I'll just have to take it down and get Mr. Maxwell to open it," I finally decided, after I had worked with the thing until my strength and patience were both exhausted. "It is provoking to see the ease with which a man can subdue a thing like this after a woman has broken off all her best-looking finger-nails over the task."

So I caught the bag up in one hand and my trailing skirts in the other and wended my way back to the library. My load was quite heavy, heavier than an ordinary traveling-bag I remembered afterward; and in struggling with the lock I had at one time pulled slightly apart an end of the stubborn opening. A whiff of drugs was borne to me in that instant--a kind of combination of odors, none of which I knew by name, but they were all strikingly familiar, for they were exactly like the smells in Alfred's small black instrument case.

"I hope you don't take all these different kinds of dope for your headaches," I thought with a quick little feeling of contempt, for I don't have much patience with the headache-powder habit. I learned this contempt from Alfred, of course.

Mr. Maxwell was alone in the library when I returned and told me that Sophie had gone to get a glass of hot water.

"She says that is all she ever takes for these spells of neuralgia," he said, holding out his hand for the bag, when I explained to him about the fastening. "But there is a little bottle of something or other in here that she rubs on her forehead--and that eases the pain."

"Then why on earth didn't she rub it on early this morning?" I inquired wonderingly.

"That's what I asked her," he answered with a slight laugh, "but she says that the stuff burns the skin and leaves a red mark; and she didn't want to be disfigured for the ball--I told her that she would have looked just the same to me--red mark or no red mark."

He was smiling good-naturedly as he worked with the lock of the bag, which after a moment or two came open with a lamb-like docility. He was walking across the room to deposit it upon the table when Sophie came in and saw him with the bag opened in his hand. She gave a little startled exclamation and we both wheeled and faced her.

"That's the wrong bag," she said, speaking with such nervous haste and her face wearing such a white, scared look that we both instinctively glanced into the open case Mr. Maxwell held in his hands. "Don't! There's something in there that I don't want you to see!"

Poor girl, if it had been a dynamite bomb or a counterfeiter's kit of tools, she could scarcely have looked more frightened, for Mr. Maxwell and I had already seen the contents. His face suddenly went white, too, as he quickly strode across the room and laid the bag upon the table.

"_This_ is likely the thing you didn't want us to see," he exclaimed, reaching in and holding up to the light a glittering little object. It was a hypodermic syringe!

When she saw the silvery-looking instrument actually in his hand and observed the stern, harsh look in his eyes she gave a wild, hysterical laugh and walked quickly across to him. She clutched the shining thing from his hand and held it up before me.

"_Now_ you both know the 'disgraceful secret' which Aunt Ida has made me keep so securely locked away from you," she cried, holding the instrument in her hand and pulling the piston backward and forward with a deftness born of long familiarity. "She made me promise to keep it a secret, for she said that if her 'society' friends knew of it I should be considered beyond the pale. Heavens knows that I am sorry for it and ashamed of it, but there was a mighty--temptation."

She sat down in the nearest chair and began to cry, her face buried in her folded arms, and her shoulders heaving convulsively. I went over quickly and laid my hand upon her head.

"Don't cry, Sophie!" I begged, "it will make your head worse; and--_this_ doesn't make the slightest difference in our feeling for you. We are not 'society,' are we, Mr. Maxwell?"

I glanced appealingly toward him, but he did not see me. His eyes were fixed upon Sophie's bowed head with a pitying, yet _horrified_ stare, then the look of bewilderment which he wore at the first sight of her came over his face, painfully intensified this time.

"My God!" he finally broke out, and I knew that he did not know he was speaking aloud. "I have seen you before to-night with that thing in your hand! I can even feel its sharp little sting in _my_ arm--but where--_where_--I can't remember."

At his queer words Sophie looked quickly up, but he had already turned his back to us two and was leaving the room. We heard him linger a moment in the hall as if he might be looking for his hat; then the big front door closed behind him.

"He still doesn't remember!" she said slowly, looking at me in surprise. "I thought he would. I don't imagine that he has had much experience with trained nurses, so I fancied it would all come back to him when he found that I was one."

"You took care of him when his head was hurt last year?"

"Yes. I nursed him from the night he was brought into the hospital until he was almost out of danger--it was a long, tedious case, and we thought for a while that we were not going to save him."

"And you really were telling some child about the little pigs going to market one night when he heard you?" I asked, thinking how much stranger than fiction this case was.

"Yes. That was after he was beginning to be better, but I was still his 'special.' The baby's cot had been moved out into the corridor just beyond his door--it was so hot--and I used to slip out there occasionally and get the little fellow to sleep. But I came down with malarial fever myself before Mr. Maxwell was entirely well. That's the reason his memory of me is so hazy."

"Then why didn't you tell him plainly--when you first met him here and saw that he remembered you?" I asked as she got up and opened the bag wider to try to find the bottle of medicine she wanted, for her hand went to her head in a manner which told me that all this excitement had in nowise lessened the pain.

"That's what I am so sorry for and ashamed of," she answered simply, as she lifted some of the contents of the bag out and placed them upon the table. "I shouldn't have stayed here an _hour_ after Aunt Ida told me I must sail under false covers, but--I said a while ago, in my excitement, that there was a mighty temptation! I didn't intend to say it, but--it is true."

"And the temptation was--"

We heard the front door open then and close again softly. Mr. Maxwell had finished his walk out in the cool night air. I hoped that he would come on back into the library as he heard our voices, but he passed the door and in another moment we heard his footsteps on the stairs.

"They told me that _he_ was coming," Sophie said.

* * * * *

Four days have passed since the night of the Thanksgiving ball; and at a house-party where four days drag there is a greater sense of calamity than would be caused by a dreary four weeks at some other time. For there is always the tormenting thought of how much hay one might have been piling up if the sun would only shine.

Here are the three of us--Evelyn, Sophie and I--all at the age of Eve; and all enduring such a period of gloom that I feel sure if the original Eve had been half as badly bored she would never have waited for a pretty snake to come along and amuse her--she would have started up a flirtation with a _grub-worm_!

Richard is still away and I have not even had a line from him. Neither has any one else on the place, of course, but his name appeared in the society columns of the _Times_ the day after Thanksgiving. He had attended the football game that afternoon with Major Blake's party, the paper stated--and alas! I was in no position to dispute the statement.

Now if there is _one_ thing a girl hates worse than having her rat show in the presence of her beloved it is to have that beloved's name appear in a society column when her own is not in the same line!

"Why the Blakes?" I kept wondering uneasily, as I read over the hateful paragraph again and again; and I tried to fight down the fierce feeling of jealousy which took possession of me. "Why couldn't he have gone to the foot-ball game with some one else--or why couldn't he have come home?"

I found upon this occasion that jealousy is a passion which makes me physically ill, and I thought quickly of how tormented Richard must be by his jealous disposition. I wondered if he had ever felt the quick desire to strangle Alfred Morgan that I now caught myself feeling to annihilate the entire Blake faction. They had no right to make Richard leave home upon such an occasion as this; or they should have finished their hateful business and sent him on back home for Thanksgiving. They certainly had no right to take him off with them to a foot-ball game for all the world to see--and have his name with theirs in the paper next morning.

"Major Blake had with him in his car, besides Mrs. Blake, Miss Berenice Blake, who returned last week from Denver, and Mr. Richard Chalmers."

I knew the horrid words by heart, yet I read them over and over. And even this was not the worst. On the front page of the _Times_ was a cartoon representing Major Blake seated beside a little creek, angling persistently for a fish in midstream--a fish with Richard's handsome head and "Chalmers" printed in big letters across the side. The bait was a bag of gold and a handful of glory; and beneath it was written "Little fishie in the brook, can daddy catch him with a hook?"

Such a cartoon in Rufe's paper struck me as being pregnant with meaning. What did it portend? Why did Richard leave home at this time to spend Thanksgiving with old man Blake if it did not mean that he was entangled with him? How deeply entangled--and for what? Major Blake had some time ago given the anti-liquor forces to understand that they had not money enough for their campaign to make a union with them interesting to him. But the Appleton followers had been equally unsuccessful in trying to gain his support. _Could_ it be that he and Richard intended forming a separate faction where his own personal popularity should cut a tremendous figure in gaining for him what he wanted, and he could have the backing of Richard's friends among the temperance forces? But where would Richard come in then? Why should old man Blake give all the biggest portion of the plum to Richard, when he had never been governor himself?

I thought over the matter and _thought_--until I grew dizzy with the problem, yet I never found anything that could serve even as a half-way solution. But enough of my own grievances.

As I have said, Sophie and Evelyn are both miserable, too, though in entirely different ways. Evelyn is half ill, with a constantly threatening pain in her right side--a trouble which she has had for several years--and Sophie, poor girl, has stayed in her room most of the time because she is so disappointed in the way Mr. Maxwell has acted since he learned that she is a working-woman. Horrid cad! He has watched Sophie every minute she has been in his presence since that night, looking as if he were a detective and suspected her of carrying concealed weapons about her. Yet all the time there is a look of dumb misery in his eyes--sorrow and _incredulity_.

He has several times tried to get me off alone where he could talk to me of the occurrence Thanksgiving night, but I have been careful to avoid him, for I am as much disappointed in him as Sophie is. Each of them has tried to leave, but Mrs. Chalmers has insisted upon their not doing so. She is so upset over Evelyn that she needs Sophie's skilled advice in nursing, although no open acknowledgment of the matter has been made. And she has insisted that Mr. Maxwell remain at least until Richard returns.

Meanwhile she has tried to get a message through to Richard in the city, but she has been so far unable to find him. Altogether it is rather a miserable household.

* * * * *

Another day; and it started so well and ended so queerly that I am not going to try to sleep for hours yet--until I have written the whole thing out so I can read it over and see whether or not it really happened, for I find it so hard to believe.

To begin at the beginning, Richard called up from the city this morning and explained to his mother that he had been on a business trip down in the country--far away from a telephone station, he said, and so he had not been able to communicate with her. He asked her to call me to the telephone and we had as satisfying a little talk as people in our position ever have over wires. He would be down home on the first train in the morning, he told me, and he insisted that I tell him something he might have the pleasure of bringing me.

"Oh, I'll excuse the olive branch," I replied in answer to this question, "for I'll be so glad to see you."

Glad to see him? Ah yes, so glad! And in the joy of the thought I forgot all about being jealous of the Blakes. With this restoration of happiness the day naturally passed more quickly to me, and I found myself wondering why Evelyn didn't get over that hurting in her side, and why Mrs. Chalmers still looked so anxious and why Sophie and Mr. Maxwell continued to eye each other so reproachfully when the one thought the other was not looking. Richard was coming home in the morning! Surely all would be well then!

Dinner was a dismal affair, for Evelyn was not any better--was not so well, Mrs. Chalmers said, with a look of great anxiety, although the doctor had not said positively what the trouble was. As soon as we had left the table Sophie followed Mrs. Chalmers to Evelyn's room, thus leaving Mr. Maxwell to a tête-à-tête evening with me.

There was a brilliant fire in the library and we both were attracted toward its cheer as we crossed the hall. He lit a cigarette and sat staring moodily at the little clouds of smoke which he puffed into the air. Clearly he was not going to thrust conversation upon me. To make sure that he should have no encouragement to do so I began looking around vaguely for something to read. There was a pile of fresh papers which had come by the night's train lying folded on the table, but I have had little appetite for newspapers since the day of the fishy cartoon. I should not read any more of the horrid tales about him, but he should tell me all that there was to tell and I would believe him. But not a question did I expect to ask. His confidence should be entirely voluntary or not given at all.

No newspapers for me then this night; and I glanced around the room for something else. Something forbidding-looking and very deep I decided on as being best to keep Mr. Maxwell's conversational powers in abeyance. I went to one of the book-shelves which lined the walls. Running my hand along a line of Huxley's works I came to _Science and the Christian Tradition_ and promptly decided that this was the very