Part 15

John Gault had gone to this dinner reluctantly. The thought of Letitia's marriage with Tod was as repulsive to him after a month had familiarized his mind with it, as it had been on the day Letitia told him of it. That the large-hearted girl, whose simple honesty of nature he had learned long ago to respect and rely on, was to give the freshness and beauty of her life to the feeble and half-bred son of a day-laborer, seemed to him a sacrilege worthy of the days of Molech. He had seen little of Letitia lately. When he had been at his brother's she had generally been absent, staying at the McCormicks', or dining elsewhere with Tod. Whatever her feelings for her fiancé were, Gault saw that, with her unswerving obedience to convention and duty, she was evidently doing her best to understand and grow fond of him.

To-night, however, at the dinner, he saw that a change had taken place in her. It was so subtle, so illusive, so hard to define, that for a space he watched her surreptitiously, wondering what it was. Yet even as he shook hands with her in the moment of greeting, he saw it in her face, he felt it radiating from her, like the warm individual atmosphere that is said to encompass us and contain the color of our personality.

Her eyes dwelt on his with a bright, soft inner look of happiness, but happiness aloof and far away from him. The impersonal, cold sweetness of her glance seemed to put him at a great distance, to herd him together with all the hundred other casual people that she knew and spoke to, and liked and forgot. Some mysterious influence had suddenly withered their friendship. Its richness and reality were gone, and as he met that sparkling, conscious, and yet distant glance, he realized that Letitia was no longer his friend, nor yet his enemy, but from henceforth would be the same Letitia to him that she was to his brother, that she had once been to Tod.

She was in love with Tod McCormick. It was incredible, inconceivable, but true. He saw it in the abashed and yet proud consciousness of her manner to him, in her averted eye, in the indefinable softening of her whole presence when the meager-visaged lad addressed her. Inside she glowed with the consciousness of the developing of her life; but her eyes only let a little of the inner light out in their shy shining. That was why they had lost their look of a dear, comfortable intimacy when they met his. Now they said that all that was over, a remnant of freedom that must die with girlhood and its other relinquished liberties. Everything belonged to some one else now--not love alone, but interest, loyalty, confidence, duty. The rest of the world was only to get that cool interest, that gentle, remote kindness, which is the husk of the woman's heart. The kernel was for her mate. With her maidenhood would end for Letitia all life but such as bore on the life of her husband.

Gault had lost her, even as he had lost Viola. He had thought of marriage removing her from the close, interested friendliness of the old days, but he had never realized that it would wean her from him with this cold completeness. She wore the semblance of the Letitia of the past, with strange, bright, alien eyes, and a soft hand that held his with the slack, indifferent clasp of polite acquaintance. Women--would he ever understand them? Would any man? What mystery was behind their white foreheads and under their white breasts?

A rush of unutterable sadness, of dreary, sick depression, overwhelmed him. He was hardly able to respond intelligently to the conversational inanities of Pearl, who sat beside him. A numbing consciousness of the futility and hopelessness of life invaded him, and with it, in the midst of the noise and glitter of the brilliant scene, a sense of isolation and a yearning for the woman who, in this gay throng, would have felt lonely as he, and have turned to him as her one soul-mate. Suppose to-night she had been waiting for him in the bare parlor down near South Park!

A sudden resolve seized upon him. As soon as dinner was over he excused himself to Mrs. Gault and Letitia, hurried on his overcoat, and slipped away.

It had been raining all day--the warm, abundant rain of late December. The breath of the night was softly damp, and fragrant with scents from the saturated gardens. The avenue was deserted and noiseless, save for the even rustle of the falling flood, which made the asphalt shine like ice, into which the lamps' reflections stabbed in long, broken poniards. Nobody was abroad. It was Christmas eve. There were wreaths in the lighted windows, and sounds of singing now and then fell upon Gault's ear.

He boarded the car which crossed the avenue farther down, and sat in the glare of its lamps, his face fallen into lines of spiritless apathy. When it reached its terminus he alighted.

There were life and movement enough here. People were jostling on the sloppy sidewalks; umbrellas struck against umbrellas, sometimes, in an elbow-brushing contact, caught together, and were dragged apart with a spattering of moisture over laughing faces. The rain dripped monotonously down on them, between them, across the glare of windows, over the rheumy halo of lamps, off the cope of cornices and the angles of gutters. The even roar of Market Street was broken into by the deep voices of hilarious men and the shrill notes of women. Raucous laughter was interrupted by the sudden petulant wail of tired children. Over all the light of show-windows poured in a steady glare, unsoftened by the veil of rain. It was reflected from innumerable wet surfaces, uncovered faces that were moist, draperies beaded with drops, bits of sidewalk, pools in little hollows, and the black and gleaming bosses of hundreds of umbrellas.

Gault, unheeded and unheeding, hurried through the press, crossed Market Street, and plunged into the region beyond. There were crowds here too, and lights and laughter, brilliant windows that sent gushes of raw radiance across the sidewalks, and Christmas shoppers as busy as those on the other side of the city's great dividing artery. Even in the old street, among the brooding palaces, there was a faint show of life. In one there were lights in the second-story windows. Against the ground-glass panels in the massive front door of another the circular forms of two wreaths were outlined. The iron gate of its bulky neighbor grated grudgingly to give egress to an expressman carrying parcels.

In the smaller streets down which he had so often passed, the windows were alight and, according to the gracious custom of the time, the blinds were undrawn. Sometimes he had a glimpse of darkling interiors, where, alone and glittering frostily in its fairy trimmings, the tree stood, not to be revealed until the morrow. But in many homes they were keeping Christmas eve. The rifled branches, sparkling even in their despoilment, were a-wink with candles. The children clustered about, some flushed and excited, others sitting solemnly among their presents, examining them with grave and pouting intentness. There were mothers with sleeping babies in their arms, and fathers explaining the mechanism of wondrous, uncomprehended toys. They were the city's humblest and least prosperous homes; yet, hidden by the veil of night, a man, rich in all they lacked, stood staring in at them, wistful, heart-hungry, and envious.

He turned the last corner, and the small shape of the colonel's old house defined itself among the surrounding buildings. In the kindly dark it looked as it used to, and he approached slowly, letting his gaze wander over its façade and dwell on the homely bulge of the bay-window, whence, as of old, light broke in cracks and splinters on the small panes of glass on either side of the front door, on the steps, and the porch that used to sag down to one side, and the gate between its squat brick posts.

There was no one on the street, but a block away he could hear the measured tread of Policeman O'Hara on his customary beat from the saloon at the corner to the saloon in the middle of the block. Beyond this there was nothing but the whispering fall of the rain and its warm breath. Then, as he drew nearer, he passed into an atmosphere of delicate, illusive sweetness that told him the jasmine-tree by the gate was in flower. It recalled vividly other times when he had come--but not to stand outside this way, a stranger in the rain.

He advanced slowly. The street was deserted; no one was there to spy upon him. What would he have felt if to-night he had known she was there, and he was coming to see her--coming like a lover to see her, when the door opened to feel her little hand cold in his, and her lips softly respond to his welcoming kiss--the kiss that had never been given, that was never now to be returned! He would not pass by, but would stop at the gate just for a moment, and dream that she was waiting. He paused, and then started with a suppressed exclamation.

Some one was standing close in front of him in the shadow of the jasmine-tree, and almost concealed by its foliage. He could not see whether the figure was that of a man or woman, could only trace the outline of a form through the darkness and rain. Whoever it was, he had not been heard,--the fall of the rain muffling other sounds,--and he was now close at hand. As he stood, undecided whether to pass on or turn back, the figure made a stealthy movement with its arm--appeared to part the flexible jasmine branches and through the aperture look at the house. The head was thus presented to Gault in partial profile, spotted over with the moving lights that filtered between the leaves. He saw it was a woman's, crowned with some sort of small, close hat. She seemed to be watching the house. The light caught the curve of her cheek; it was gleaming with moisture.

"She must be soaking," he thought, "with no umbrella," and made a step forward.

She heard and started, and, still mechanically holding the branches back, turned and looked at him. For one moment, like a memory from another life, he saw her face in the light.

"Viola!" he cried, as a man might cry to whom the beloved dead stood suddenly revealed.

She gave a gasping ejaculation and let go the branches. In the sudden blotting out of the light he lost her, and, in his terror and superstitious dread, he thought he had seen a vision.

"Viola," he cried again, "stay with me! love me! forgive me! I've prayed for you--I've longed for you--I've died for you! Don't leave me now! There is no life for me without you!"

She came forward beyond the dark shadow of the tree, and the light shone full on her. He might still have thought her a vision, for her face was transfigured with a look that seemed hardly of this earth. But the woman that he held in his arms was warm with life, the lips against his gave back his kiss.

A few moments later Policeman O'Hara, having extended his beat beyond the saloons, saw what he supposed to be a single figure standing opposite Robson's house under a dripping umbrella. As he approached, it suddenly resolved itself into two figures, and walked away from him under the umbrella.

"Well, I'll be jiggered!" murmured the bewildered policeman. "Have I got it that bad so early in the evenin'?"

And judging that his case was gone too far for help, he dropped into another saloon.

The two figures under the one umbrella walked down the street, out and away through the rain, seeing nothing but the vistas of glory which open before those who for one moment stand upon the pinnacle of life.

Transcriber's Note:

Minor changes have been made to regularize hyphenation and correct obvious typesetter errors. Variant spellings have been retained.