Part 6

“Well, if you will——! I never do anything for myself if there’s a gentleman to do it for me.”

He raised his hat before starting on, and when he looked back she waved her hand to him. The large advancing figure of Mrs. Stone—on her way home from wresting the early chop from the butcher—amply furred and heavily goloshed, her beaver hat as well as her face swathed in a thick, brown veil, threw into high relief the tawdry lightness of Mrs. Lalor’s attire.

He recollected that if he ever objected to a thin jacket on his wife she invariably professed to be “warm underneath.” Mrs. Lalor might also be warm underneath, but he had a masculine preference for having people _look_ warm in winter-time.

Poor little woman! He shook his head as he thought of Lalor, with a quick compression of his lips. Then a long whistle from up the track sent him tearing ahead in the teeth of the wind, to thrust his head at last inside of Harner’s office and call out:

“Send a ton of furnace coal to Mrs. Lalor, 36 Herkimer Street, and be quick about it,” before settling down into that swift run back that carried him swinging up by the guard rail onto the slippery steps of the last car, and out into that region where women and household matters are not.

The first thing Mrs. Laurence said when she came in at lunch time, after a morning spent abroad, was:

“How freezing cold this house is! Hasn’t the coal come yet, Teresa?”

“No, ma’am.”

“How provoking!” Mrs. Laurence stopped short in disgust. “I never saw such a place; it’s as much as your life’s worth to get anything delivered when you want it. Is that Timothy I hear in the cellar now?” Timothy was the furnace man of the Ridge. “Tell him not to let the fire go entirely out; we’ll have to manage it some way. If he comes back between two and three the coal will certainly be here then.”

But two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock passed, and no coal wagon backed up to the sidewalk in front, of the Laurences, though a succession of them passed funereally through the white street, _en route_ for more fortunate householders. At a quarter after four she gave a joyful exclamation—one had stopped, at last, opposite her door; but the joy was short-lived—the wagon honked further along, tentatively, until it stopped at Mrs. Spicer’s half-way down the block.

In a minute more Mrs. Laurence could see the dark legs of alternate men outlined against the drifts, as they carried buckets of the precious fuel to the opening in the cellar at the side of the Spicer villa. Something seemed to shatter through her—an iconoclastic blast, that she had been striving to shut out. Could Will have possibly forgotten between the house and the station? But no, that could not be!

She dressed hastily, in the later stages of her toilet vibrating between the silver-decked dressing-table, and the window, from behind the curtains of which she took recurrent peeps. At her last look she ran hastily down the stairs and opened the front door for Mrs. Stone, who was temporarily garbed in a polo cap and her husband’s spring overcoat, into the pockets of which she had thrust her hands.

“I saw you coming along! It’s too cold to be kept waiting on anybody’s door-step. Walk right in, tea will be ready in a moment.”

“I thought I’d be sure to find you in now,” said Mrs. Stone comfortably, shedding her masculine apparel in the hall on her way to the drawing-room where she established herself with the ease of custom in a Turkish chair by the gas logs. The Ridge was apt to assemble informally at Mrs. Laurence’s for five o’clock tea; it was known that she really had it whether there was any one there or not; there was always something pleasantly cosy about the little function.

Mrs. Stone watched her hostess lazily as she drew the low, china-laden table nearer the fire, and lighted the lamp under the brass kettle just brought in, her dark, graceful head bent over to watch it, and her hands showing very white against the dull red of her gown.

“It’s such a relief to get in here,” said the visitor, breaking the silence as she took the steaming cup of fragrant tea offered her, and helped herself to a tiny hot buttered scone, from a blue Canton dish. “They are getting in coal at the Budds’ this morning, and now they’re at it at the Spicers’—the noise nearly sets me crazy, the houses are so near together. O Mrs. Spicer, I didn’t hear you come in!”

Mrs. Stone looked up with a start to see another visitor walking, unannounced, into the room, a little woman in a long fur wrap with a lace scarf thrown over her head. “I was just saying—perhaps you heard me—what a noise your coal makes when it’s being put in.”

“Oh, don’t speak of it!” said Mrs. Spicer. She seemed to greet her hostess, shed her outer garments, perch herself on a little, straight-backed sofa, and take her cup of tea at one and the same moment with a swiftness of movement accelerated in her further speech, which tumbled forth like a small cataract. “Don’t speak of it, no one knows what I went through last summer, when you were at the seashore and _your_ coal was laid in. I couldn’t sit on the piazza _at all_, and the thermometer was in the nineties. At the end of the third day I nearly had nervous prostration. Ernest Spicer was really worried about me. _I_ never find it any economy to lay in a stock of coal; you use it up so much faster; it seems as if you were paying out for enough to last you until you died, and then, just at the time you didn’t count on taking the money for it you have to buy more. If we laid in a _mine_ full in July we’d have to order coal in February.”

“Well, I wish I were laying it in now,” interposed Mrs. Laurence deftly, with a sigh. “Mr. Laurence ordered some this morning, and it hasn’t come yet. I would have sent a message to Harner’s, but I have been expecting the coal wagon every moment.”

“I saw your husband speaking to Mrs. Lalor as I came back from the butcher’s,” said Mrs. Stone. She paused significantly. “Isn’t she the most noticeable thing you ever saw! She never seems to have any morning clothes.”

“I don’t believe she has any money for new ones,” suggested Mrs. Laurence gently.

“No, I don’t suppose she _has_, but even then—— Of course, I’m sorry for her, we all are; every one knows what Mr. Lalor is, but do you know, the other day when I attempted to allude to all that she must have to bear up under—I felt so sympathetic towards her, after what the Bents told us—she stiffened up at once; she acted as if she hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was driving at. Now _that’s_ absurd. To hear Mrs. Lalor talk about ‘Bennie’ you’d think he was the king-pin, as Mr. Stone expresses it.”

“Oh, but I think that’s really fine of her,” said Mrs. Laurence, with proselyting zeal. “There’s a courage, a devotion about her that always appeals to me; you can’t help seeing that she’s had such a hard time. I’m sure if you knew her better you’d like her.”

“She may be devoted to her husband,” said Mrs. Spicer very fast, “but if you’d see her going in on the train—Ernest Spicer says he always avoids her when he _can_; he does hate to be made conspicuous. I don’t care whether she comes of a good family or not; _I_ think she’s common.”

Mrs. Laurence shook her head wisely. “I’m sure that you’re mistaken, not that I’m so well acquainted with her myself, but still——”

She took occasion later on to detain Mrs. Stone whisperingly a moment by the front door as both visitors were making their exit.

“I thought I wouldn’t say it before _her_—but why don’t you and Mr. Stone make a call at the Lalors to-night? Will has a little business with Mr. Lalor, and I’ll go with him. _Do_ come.”

“Well, I’ll see,” temporized Mrs. Stone with a softening inflection.

Mrs. Stone was, as her hostess well knew, the kind of a person who, after disapproving publicly of a neighbour, privately sends her pickles. She hastened down the steps now to join her friend, her large, mannish figure in the overcoat and cap wobbling ludicrously on the narrow, slippery length of drift-bordered sidewalk under the gas-lamps that were already lighted.

The wind had gone down, but so had the mercury; the air was “bitter chill.” As Mrs. Laurence turned back into her hall the atmosphere there seemed only a few degrees warmer. Gas logs made but slight impression on the general temperature of a house in this weather; the hand that she held over the register received but the faintest, scarce-warm breath upon it. Mrs. Laurence still looked for a belated rattling coal-wagon, but the hour seemed long until her husband’s return; her heart bounded romantically at the sound of his footsteps now, just as it had done when she was a girl. His face was ruefully smiling as he said after the kiss of greeting:

“You don’t know what you’ve missed—all my fault, too! I bought you a two-dollar bunch of violets—— _Now wait_ till I get through—and left them in the train.”

“Oh, _Will_!” His wife’s brows drooped tragically. “That’s so like you! You’re getting too absent-minded to live. My lovely violets!” she mourned tenderly.

“Isn’t the house very cold to-night?”

“Well, I should _think_ it might be! It’s freezing.” Mrs. Laurence’s accumulated wrath poured forth. “There hasn’t been a sign of the coal you ordered this morning, and I’ve been waiting for it all day. It’s a perfect outrage, and I want you to tell Harner so, Will. You _did_ order it, didn’t you?”

“Why, ye——” An extraordinary expression stole over Mr. Laurence’s thin face, it was as if his consciousness had been suddenly arrested in mid-air. Well as his wife knew his expressions and what they covered, this surprisingly baffled her. He drummed with his finger-tips on the edge of the dressing-table before relaxing enough to say guardedly, after a moment:

“By George! I don’t believe I did. I knew there was _something_—I’m awfully sorry, Anna, indeed I am.”

“_You didn’t order it!_—Will, please don’t drum on things that way, you know it drives me wild. Well, if you can’t remember one thing I ask you to do—if you can’t keep a single promise that you make me—— It isn’t the _coal_ I care about—though my feet have been like stones all day—but it’s the fact that I can’t depend on you for _anything_. _Please_ don’t whistle. You can attend to business matters well enough, but when it comes to the comfort of your wife and child——” an unforeseen sob broke across the words. “Of course, it’s been warm enough in your steam-heated office to-day. I’m glad it has been, I wouldn’t have had you cold for anything.” In spite of her tears she was following after him as he searched in his chiffonier drawer for a clean collar. “You’ve done it all so many times! You carried that important letter to Hetty in your pocket for six weeks before you told me.”

“Yes, and if you’re going on like this every time I tell you anything, I’ll stop it,” said Mr. Laurence doggedly. “You don’t give me any credit for owning up, Nan. You wouldn’t know half the time when I make mistakes, if I didn’t tell you.”

“I don’t see what else you could have said when I asked you if you had ordered the coal.”

“I could have lied about it, I suppose,” said Mr. Laurence impatiently.

“O Will!” she gasped with horror. Her white chin went up, her dark eyes looked at him full of agitation. She put her hands on his shoulders and shook him ineffectively. “You wouldn’t—you _couldn’t_ do that! You always tell me the truth, don’t you—all of it?”

“Usually,” assented her husband. He had finished settling his tie and now put his arms around her. “But if it’s going to make you any happier if I _don’t_——”

“No, no, no! You know I never could mean that—never! I could forgive you anything as long as you told me the truth.”

She clung to him as they went down to dinner together, and she forbore to allude to the state of the atmosphere, except by shivering once or twice—the gas logs sent forth a chill, blue flare. There was an odd return to that arrested, baffling expression on Mr. Laurence’s face, however, when his wife announced her intention of going around to the Lalors’ with him afterwards.

“Don’t you think it is too cold for you to go out to-night?” he asked, and she answered with a playful gleam of the sarcasm she couldn’t keep from using. “No, I think it’s too cold for me to stay in.”

It was a matter for ejaculating surprise on arriving at the Lalors’ to find the unexpected Spicers instead of the Stones, who, however, appeared in a few minutes. Mr. Spicer had a slender, correct elegance of aspect, while Mr. Stone was large, grayish, and rather portly. Beside the Spicers, a Mrs. Frere and her son, a dumb, immature youth, were already in possession of the field. Mrs. Frere’s position as a church worker carried her into connection with people whom she might not otherwise have met; the chief effect that she produced on every one now was an ardent desire that she should go. She sat in utter silence with folded hands, but her dumbness differed from that of her son in a patently avid appreciation of everything that was said or done.

Mrs. Lalor, in a low-throated, faded light green gown covered with beautiful old lace, was loud in expression of her surprise and delight at this haphazard gathering. Mr. Lalor, tall, handsome and with wandering dissipated eyes and the same droop alike to his reddish mustache and to his figure, came forward also with hospitable welcome, while his wife volubly ordered not only him but the other men in behalf of her guests:

“Bennie, get that armchair out of the corner for Mrs. Laurence; be careful the top doesn’t fall off of it—we break all our things moving so often! Mr. Stone, won’t you put that footstool under Mrs. Spicer’s feet, I’m sure she’s not comfortable. Mr. Spicer, if you’ll kindly move the table near me to make more room—Bennie, run up-stairs and get the little feather hand-screen for Mrs. Stone—I know that lamp’s shining in your eyes.” She pronounced it “Shinin’ in yo’ eyes,” with a caressing, indolent inflection to her soft voice. “It’s not the least trouble for him, Mrs. Stone—Bennie always waits on me.”

There was a seductive air of luxury about Mrs. Lalor in spite of the fact that the cheap, shabby upholstered chairs and sofa were profusely covered with cheaper “drapings” on such portions as were most subject to wear, and that the mantelpiece, also draped, was simply decorated with a single pink-mouthed grinning conch shell—yet the latter was indeed under an old, old painting of a low-browed woman whose white throat and rounded cheek gleamed out from rich brown shadows—a woman who, even thus dimly seen, seemed to match the lace on Mrs. Lalor’s gown.

“I only came because I thought you’d like me to,” whispered Mrs. Spicer to Mrs. Laurence in a pause of the later conversation. Mrs. Stone gave an affectionate little squeeze to her neighbour’s hand. “I thought Ernest would object, but he seemed quite willing. I wish that Mrs. Frere wasn’t here, you have to be so careful what you say before her.”

“We won’t stay very long,” murmured Mrs. Laurence assentingly. Mr. Lalor and her husband had apologetically disappeared behind closed doors to transact their business together, the latter with that last look at her over the heads of the others that meant their own special farewell. Mrs. Lalor had insisted on supplying every one with hot lemonade, on account of the coldness of the weather, calling the three men back and forth in her services and holding a little couet with them afterwards as she sat reclined in a rocking-chair.

“I reckon Mr. Eddie was right bored with only me to talk to before you all came in,” she announced with a smile directed at young Mr. Frere. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you gentlemen here. I enjoy gentlemen’s society so much. Of course, I’ve always had it till I came up No’th, and I miss it so much. I wish you could have seen our po’ch at home in the old times on a Sunday evenin’, with my sister Mollie’s friends, and Emma Lily’s, and mine, all lined up waiting for us to come down.”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Stone.

“I told Bennie when I married him I never could settle down to just one.” Mrs. Lalor paused lightly. “I was engaged to six before that. But he always said—‘George’ my name is George—‘I want you should enjoy gentleman’s society just the same as you always did.’ I was engaged first when I was fourteen.”

“Oh, _Southern_ engagements!” said Mrs. Laurence indulgently, with a gesture that disclaimed their seriousness of intent to Mrs. Stone’s startled gaze. There seemed to be an unforeseen electrical quality in the air; she had felt it even when she first came in, but every lightest speech was oddly charged with it, you couldn’t tell what was coming. Instead of vindicating her confidence in Mrs. Lalor, the latter seemed bent on a self destruction that might drag any one else down with her. She went on now happily.

“Of course, though I always cared most for Bennie—he was such a beautiful waltzer. Sometimes even now, after breakfast, if I’m a little blue, he says, ‘Come, George, let’s have a waltz,’ and he just spins me around the room while he whistles the tune. I don’t think there’s anything like dancing for keeping up the spirits. I don’t know what I’d do without Bennie up No’th here, he’s so thoughtful of me!”

“How extraordinary!” breathed little Mrs. Spicer to Mrs. Stone, athwart the rapt gaze of the silent Mrs. Frere. It was evident that neither Mr. Stone nor Mr. Spicer felt appalled, both men seemed to be impalpably walled off from the jurisdiction of their wives, as they sat smiling with interested indulgence at their hostess, with young Mr. Frere, open-mouthed, behind them.

In spite of the semi-artificiality of her aspect, Mrs. Lalor had an undoubted charm; her face looked younger and less drawn by lamplight, and her pretty, tear-soft eyes had their coquettish gleam in them, her careless attitude was full of lazy grace. She thrust out a slippered foot with its hanging length of ribbon, and gave an appealing glance at the man nearest her.

“I know you want to tie my shoe for me, Mr. Stone—no, Mr. Spicer, I didn’t say you.”

She laughed gleefully as they both jumped for position, Mr. Stone’s large bulk going down heavily on one knee with exaggerated gallantry.

“Let me fan you while he’s doing it,” cried Mr. Spicer eagerly, seizing the required implement from the table.

“You’d better fan Mrs. Stone, she looks so warm,” suggested Mrs. Lalor. “The house is so heated, it makes one’s face burn after the cold air. Wouldn’t you like a little powder to cool it?” She jumped up hospitably, leaving Mr. Stone still upon the floor. “It isn’t the slightest trouble to get it, I always keep it in this little cupboard, with a puff and a handglass—and some rouge,” she explained in a confidential tone. “Not that I care for rouge myself, Bennie doesn’t like it, but some people always use it for the evenin’.”

Mrs. Stone gasped.

“Thank you, I need nothing of the kind,” she said hastily. She, the mother of four, a member of the Guild and the Vittoria Colonna Club to be spoken to in connection with _rouge_! Even Mrs. Laurence’s white chin went up—this did seem “common.”

“And I really think we’ll have to be going,” added Mrs. Stone with decision, rising as she spoke, a signal imitated by Mrs. Spicer, though Mrs. Frere sat fast.

“Oh, do wait for us,” pleaded Mrs. Laurence eagerly. “Here is my husband now. You’re ready to go now, aren’t you, Will?”

“Yes, as soon as I wrap up those documents,” he assented, with an unconscious exhilaration of tone that caught her ear. He disappeared into the opposite room once more. Mr. Lalor had just walked out of it, and down the length of the bare hall, with echoing steps.

“Oh, you _must_ stay and have some more hot lemonade,” Mrs. Lalor begged warmly, and stopped suddenly short; a faint colour came into her cheek; it was as if she listened, not to the chorus, “No, not to-night——” “Thank you just the same——” “We really must go——” but to something impalpable, unguessed.

“Excuse me for just one moment,” she said and vanished swiftly into the narrow passage, leaving behind her a surprised, disapproving silence—even Mrs. Frere stood up; there was a queer, unexpected sensation that something was happening. Mrs. Laurence went out nervously to get her cloak. In that oblique glimpse down the hall to the dining-room she saw—or didn’t she really see anything?—a man’s arm stretched wildly out as if to reach something—a woman’s hand grasping it—the wavering shadow as of a struggle—and the faintest sound as of a key turning as it might be in a sideboard lock. Something must be happening——! Though only, indeed, one unimportant scene of a tragedy such as these happy, protected women had no knowledge of, that long, exquisitely heart-racking, unmentionable strain of living that companies the degradation of one who is loved.

“Did your coal come to-day, Mrs. Laurence?” asked Mrs. Stone in a chill, unnatural voice. They were all getting on their wraps now.

“No, it didn’t,” answered Mrs. Laurence. Justice compelled her to add, with an effort: “It wasn’t Harner’s fault, after all. Will forgot to order it on his way to the station; he felt so badly about it, but he’s had so much business on his mind lately that I really think I mustn’t ask him to do anything more.”

“You’re more lenient than my wife would have been,” said Mr. Stone jovially. “I’d have gotten it in the neck.”

“You’d have deserved it,” agreed Mr. Spicer.

“I feel dreadfully because you’re all going so soon,” said Mrs. Lalor appearing once more, clinging with both little hands to the arm of her husband, who, sullen and dejected, towered above her. She looked wan and thin, as if some ageing mist had settled over her, but the wrinkles that had deepened around her pretty eyes did not keep them from being indomitably flirtatious as she glanced back to the man who had followed them in.

“Mr. Laurence and I haven’t had a chance to tell any secrets _at all_!—What did you say, Mrs. Spicer? Yes, the house _is_ warm, thanks to Mr. Laurence,” she assented gayly. “He insisted on orderin’ my coal for me this mornin’.”

There was a dead silence. To her dying day Mrs. Laurence could see that whole scene definitely before her—the embarrassed attitudes of the men; the arrested, guilty expression on her husband’s face that all might read; Mrs. Frere’s greedy joy; the compassionate gaze of Mrs. Stone and Mrs. Spicer after their swift flash of comprehension.—Yet after that one paralyzing moment she rose staunchly superior to the petty, yet excruciating entanglement of the situation. She stepped forward and kissed Mrs. Lalor good-bye in the face of her little world, with a hand-pressure that emphasized the words:

“I’m so glad Mr. Laurence could be of service to you,” before she made her exit with him. Yet there were those who felt that they were not deceived and the eyes of Mr. Stone and Mr. Spicer met as the door closed behind the husband and wife—and it was a glance that confided a sinister and mutual thankfulness of escape.

The two in question walked swiftly away in silence on the starlit, drift-bordered path; the wind had gone down but it was infinitely cold. They went, part of the time, in single file, but she ignored his tentative pressure on her arm; there seemed to be an icy chasm between them. The distance to the house was short, and it was not until they were inside it that she broke forth hotly, as if they had been talking together all the way, her crimson cheeks and blazing eyes facing his tall, reluctant figure as she threw off her wraps.