Chapter 9

Presently the party came trooping out, arrayed for the trip. Dorothy in an enveloping white coat, her hat replaced by a particularly effective little rose-coloured bonnet of her own clever manufacture, found herself confronted upon the lantern-lighted porch, as she was about to step into the car, by her brother with a strange man at his elbow.

She looked straight up at him, as Julius presented him. He looked straight down at her, and for an appreciable period of time the two pairs of eyes continued to dwell upon each other. Until this extraordinarily thorough mutual survey was over neither said a word. The rest of the party, diverting themselves with the usual laughter and badinage--some of it of a recognizably sleepy character--took their places, and only those nearest noted the addition to the list of passengers. The other man and girl of Jordan's car were an engaged pair, absorbed in each other, an astute reason for his selection of them to accompany himself and Dorothy.

The rear seat of the great car easily held four people. Ashworth and Miss Vincent occupied two of the places; during the day Jordan and Dorothy had held the other two. Ashworth had already handed in Miss Vincent. The two chaperons of the party young Jordan had throughout the day thoughtfully bestowed in the other cars.

"Put my friend beside Sis, will you, Ridge?" suggested Julius in his host's ear. "They used to be old schoolmates and haven't met for years. He's off to-morrow for a long stay. It's their only chance to talk over old times."

Jordon nodded; there was nothing else to do. He could joyfully have taken his friend Julius by the scruff of his neck and hurled him out into the night, if by some miracle he could suddenly have become that young man's superior in strength. But social training prevailed over natural brute instinct, and it was with entire politeness that he made this arrangement of his guests.

He then put Julius into the seat beside the chauffeur, and himself took one of the extra folding seats, swinging it about to half face those upon the rear seat. In this manner he was nearly as close to Miss Dorothy Broughton as he would have been beside her--nearly, but not quite! To his notion there was all the difference in the world.

Kirke Waldron, understanding intuitively the position as come-between in which he had been placed in Ridgeway Jordan's big automobile by Julius's misreading of the railway timetable, and, as far as that part of the situation was concerned, wishing himself a hundred miles away, was also keenly alive to that which the gods--and Julius--had given him by seating him beside Dorothy. As the car hummed down the long trail from the inn he played his part with all the discretion of which he was capable; and he had learned many things since the days when he had fallen over his own awkward feet on the way to the blackboard. He talked a little with Dorothy--not too much; he talked considerably more with Ridgeway Jordan--but not more than was necessary; the greater part of the time he was silent with the rest, as was most fitting of all in the summer moonlight and the balmy night air.

Dorothy, sitting beside him, reminded Julius, as from time to time he glanced contentedly back at her from, his place beside the chauffeur, of a particularly demure kitten in the presence of two well-bred but definitely intentioned hunting dogs. She was very quiet, and only now and then he caught a word or two from her or the low sound of her attractive contralto laugh.

Just once, as the car whirled through a brightly lighted square in a small village where a country festival of some sort was in progress, he saw her take advantage of a moment when everybody's attention was caught by the scene, and look suddenly and absorbedly at Kirke Waldron's face in profile. But when Ridge Jordan whirled about upon his folding seat, to call her attention to the antics of a clown in the square, she was ready for him with a smile and a gay word of assent. Julius laughed to himself. There was no question that Kirke's face, even in profile, was one to make Ridge's look insignificant. As for the man himself--

The car, rushing on through the summer night, its powerful searchlights sending ahead a long, clear lane of safety where the road was straight, but making the dark walls on either side resolve into black pockets of mystery where the curves came, approached one of those long, winding descents, followed by a second abrupt turn and a corresponding ascent, which are--or should be--the terror of motorists. All good drivers, at such places, hurling themselves through the darkness, sound warning signals, lest other cars, less cautious, be rushing toward them without sound of their coming.

Jordan's chauffeur, sending his car on down the winding hill with hardly appreciable loss of speed, took this precaution, and the mellow but challenging notes of his horn were winding a long warning when the thing happened which was to happen. No accident, but the horror of one which comes so close that it all but seizes its victims, and leaves them weak and shuddering with what might have been.

Another car dashed around the lower turn, apparently not hearing the warning, or determined to ignore it, that no momentum with which to climb the steep grade coming should be lost. There was an instant in which the two drivers glimpsed each other out of the gloom of the unlighted curve; then quick action upon the part of both--lightning-like swerves to avoid the danger--two great cars rocking each on the brink of disaster, then righting themselves and running on into safety, no pausing to let any look back and ponder upon the closeness of the escape.

It was all over so quickly that it was like the swift passage of a hideous thought, but there had been time for every soul in the car to look death in the face. And in that moment of peril there had been individual action--instantaneous--the action which is instinctive and born of character.

Julius himself had sat absolutely still beside the chauffeur, his muscles tensely bracing themselves for whatever might come. Ashworth had caught Miss Vincent, rigid with fear, into his arms. Waldron, throwing up the arm next to Dorothy to grasp her with it, felt her hand leap toward him, and with his free hand seized it in his own.

Staring straight ahead then they saw a strange thing, yet not so strange when one remembers human nature. Ridgeway Jordan had leaped to his feet and thrown one leg over the side of the car ready to jump, when, before he could complete the movement, the car righted itself and he sank back into his seat.

"Holy smoke!" Julius murmured under his breath, and glanced at the chauffeur.

That nearly imperturbable youth grunted in return. His hands were steady upon the wheel, but he laughed a little shakily.

Then Julius gazed back into the depths of the car. He could not see much, for the trees at this point were heavily overshadowing the road, but he made out that Ridge Jordan was sitting stiffly in his seat, with--strange to observe!--his head turned toward the front of the car. Behind him the other figures were still and silent. Julius guessed that nobody felt like speaking; he did not feel like it himself. It had been a little too near a thing to discuss at first hand.

Dorothy, her heart beating in a queer, throat-choking way, became conscious that her hand was held close and warm in another hand. An arm that had been about her, whose clasp she had not consciously felt but now remembered, had been withdrawn at the moment that the danger had passed. But evidently--for the car had now gone a quarter of a mile beyond the crucial point and was running smoothly along a wider and less dangerous highway--her hand had been imprisoned in this strange grasp for some time.

She made a gentle but decided effort to withdraw it, an effort which secured its release at once but brought a low question in her ear:

"Are you all right?"

"I--think so," she murmured in reply.

It was not only the shock of the just avoided danger which held her in its grip, but the other and even more startling revelations which had come with it. Her head was whirling, her pulses were thrilling with the conflict of new and strange impressions. Since three minutes ago a new Heaven and an old earth had suddenly shown themselves.

The low voice pressed the question: "Not faint--nor frightened?"

She looked up at him then for an instant, although she could barely see the outlines of his face. "Not with you here," she answered breathlessly, with the impulse toward absolute honesty with which such an experience sometimes shakes the spirit out of its conventionalities.

He was like a statue beside her for the space of six of her heartbeats. Then his hand again found hers, pressed it in both of his, and let it go; and his quiet speech, the note deeper than before, came once more in her ear:

"I shall never forget that."

They went on in silence.

After a time Ridge Jordan turned about and made a carefully worded inquiry into the comfort of his guests, which they answered with as careful assurances that they were entirely comfortable and confident.

Ridge's voice was not quite natural. A biting shame was harassing him, whose only alleviation was the possibility that nobody--or at least Dorothy--had noticed in the excitement of the part that he had played. He was saying to himself, wretchedly, that he had not known it of himself, that he could not have believed it of himself. How could he have done it--have had the impulse, even, to leap to safety and leave her behind? Had she seen--had she seen? Yet when, after a time, she leaned forward and spoke to him of her own accord, her voice was so kind, rang with such a golden note, that he felt with sudden relief that she could not have seen.

He turned about and began to talk again, growing more and more secure in his belief that at the supreme moment of danger nobody had thought of anybody but himself or herself, and by the time the car drew into the home town Jordan was serene again.

Under the first of the arc lights Julius took counsel with his watch. He swung about and spoke tersely: "You and I'd better jump out here and make the station, Waldron. It's closer to train time than I thought. We're awfully obliged to you, Ridge."

"We'll go that way. It's only a block or two out of our course," Jordan insisted, eager to speed the parting guest.

The car drew toward the string of electrics which lighted the small suburban station at which Waldron had arrived in the morning. The glancing, silver-arrowed radiance illumined the whole interior of the car under its wide-spreading, hooded top. Waldron could see Dorothy's brilliant eyes, the curve of her lips, the rose colour in her cheeks repeating warmly the deeper rose colour of the little silk bonnet which kept her dark hair in order--all but one wild-willed little curly strand which had escaped and was blowing about her face. Dorothy, in her turn, could see Waldron's clean-cut, purposeful face, his deep-set eyes, the modelling of his strong mouth and chin, the fine line of his cheek.

As they had looked at each other when they first met, so they looked at each other again before they parted. Yet between that meeting and that parting something had happened. It was in his eyes as he looked at her; it was in her eyes as for one instant, before she dropped bewildering lashes, she gave him back his look. It meant that South America was not so far away but that a voyager could come back over the same high seas which had conveyed him there. And that when he came--

"I'm grateful to you, Mr. Jordan," Waldron said, shaking hands beside the car, "more than I can say to you. You have done me a greater kindness than you know. Good-night--to you all!"

He went away with Julius without a glance behind after the salute of his lifted hat, which included everybody.

By some common impulse the rest of the party all looked after the two as they walked away toward the station door.

"Seems like an uncommonly nice chap," was Ashworth's comment. "I'll wager he's something, somewhere."

"He has a very interesting face," his fiancee conceded.

"Yes, hasn't he?" Dorothy agreed lightly, something evidently being expected of her.

"He may be the tenth wonder of the world," declared Ridgeway Jordan, springing in to take his old place beside her for the drive of an eighth of a mile left to him; "but I grudge him this hour by you. Jove, but I thought the drive would never end!"

Julius, after seeing his friend off with a sense of comradeship more worth while than any he had known, walked rapidly back, eager for a word with Dorothy. Quick as he was, however, she was quicker, and he found her locked into her own room. By insisting on talking through the door he got her to open it, but there was not so much satisfaction in this as he had expected, because she had extinguished her lights.

"How did you like him?" was his first eager question.

"Very well," said a cool, low voice in the darkness. "Much better than the trick you used to carry out your wishes."

"Trick!" her brother exclaimed, all the angel innocence he could summon in his voice. "When you wouldn't tell me a word of where you were going!"

"You guessed it. It was abominable of you."

"Oh, see here! If I hadn't managed it you wouldn't have seen him--and he wouldn't have seen you."

"And what of that?" queried the cool voice, cool but sweet. Dot's voice, even in real anger, was never harsh.

"Well, what of it?" was the counter-question. "Can you honestly say you wish you hadn't met him, a real man like that?"

There was silence. Julius moved cautiously across the room, avoiding chairs as best he could. "Be honest now. Isn't he the real thing? And isn't Ridge Jordan--"

"Please don't talk about poor Ridge that way, Jule."

"Poor Ridge!" cried Julius. "Well, well, you didn't speak of him that way this morning. What's happened?"

"Nothing has happened. That is--"

He came close. There was a queer little shake in Dorothy's voice. She began to laugh then quite suddenly to cry. Julius came near enough to pat her down-bent head.

"Did that confounded close call shake you up a bit?" he inquired sympathetically. "By George! when I think what I let you and Kirke and everybody in for, starting earlier than they meant and all that, so we were just in time to meet that fool in the worst place on the road--"

Dorothy looked up. To his astonishment she sprang to her feet and clasped him about the neck, burying her face on his shoulder. She began to say something into his ear, laughing and crying at the same time, so that all he was at length able to gather was that she didn't regret the close call at all, for it had shown her--had shown her--

Julius had not seen Ridge Jordan make his move to spring from the car, but he had felt it--felt Ridge's hand strike his shoulder, his knee hit his back. He had not taken in its meaning at the instant, but when he had turned about and seen Ridge sitting stiffly facing ahead it came to him what had happened at the crisis. He had wondered whether Dot had seen it. Now he knew. Not that she said it. In fact, she said nothing intelligible, but she held her brother tight before she sent him away; and somehow he understood that Fate had helped him to show Dorothy her "real man."

Somehow she had known that Waldron would write. It was impossible to recall his face and not know that he was a man of action. He would not go away for six months and leave behind him only a memory to hold her thoughts to his. She wondered only when his letter would come.

Four times a day the postman was accustomed to leave the mail in an interesting heap upon the table in Mrs. Jack Elliot's hall. Dorothy, from the very morning after the trip to Saxifrage Inn, had found herself scanning the pile with a curious sense of anticipation. She wondered what Waldron's handwriting was like. She recalled his workmanlike little figures upon the blackboard, and made up her mind that his penmanship would be of a similar character, compact and regular. Another man would have sent her flowers before he sailed. Instinctively she knew that Waldron would not do this; she did not expect nor wish it. But he would write--unquestionably. How would he write? That was the question which made her pulses thrill.

It was some time before the letter came, as she had guessed it would be. He had written on shipboard, and the letter came back to her from Greater Inagua, the first West Indian island at which his ship had touched. Coming in one September evening from a long walk through the hazy air, its breath fragrant with the peculiar pungent odour of distant forest fires, Dorothy found the letter on the hall table. She knew it was his before she saw the postmark; recognized, as if she had often seen it, the clean cut, regular lettering, the mark of the man of exactness and order, of the well-trained mind. Her heart leaped at sight of it, a heart which had never before really leaped at sight of any man's handwriting. She picked up the letter and went away upstairs with it to her room. Here she locked the door.

She placed the letter upon her dressing-table and studied its envelope while she removed her dress, brushed and arranged her hair, and put on the frock she intended to wear for the evening; she was going with Tom Wendell to a small dance at the home of a special friend. She did not open the letter, but left it, unopened, propped up against a little pink silk pincushion, giving it one last glance as she switched off the light before closing the door. On the evening of the Clifford-Jordan wedding Ridgeway Jordan, brother of the bride and best man to the bridegroom, had offered himself in marriage to the maid of honour, Dorothy Broughton. She had done her best to prevent him, but he had reached such a stage of despairing passion that he could no longer be managed and did the deed at a moment when she could not escape. Being gently but firmly refused, he had declared his life to be irretrievably ruined and immediately after the wedding had flung himself out of town, vowing that she should not be bothered with the sight of the work her hands had wrought. When another long-time friend, Thomas Wendell, seized the opportunity of Ridge's absence to further his own claims to Dorothy's preferment, she, profiting by painful experience, had somehow made it clear to him that only comradeship was in her thoughts. Even on these tacit terms Wendell was eager to serve as escort whenever she would allow it.

On this September evening he was on hand early and bore her away with ill-concealed satisfaction. "I say," he observed suddenly in the pause of a waltz, "did you happen to have a fortune left you to-day?"

"Why, Tommy?" Dorothy's face grew instantly sober.

"Oh, don't turn off the illumination. I'm sorry I spoke. It was only that you somehow seemed--well, not exactly unhappy to-night, and I couldn't get at the cause. I should like to flatter myself that I'm the cause, but I know better."

"I must be a gloomy person ordinarily if there seems any change to-night. Don't be foolish, Thomas; I've had no fortune left me; I never shall have."

She felt not unlike one with a fortune, however, a fortune of unknown character about to be made known to her, as, shortly after midnight--Dorothy kept comparatively early hours when she went to dances--she opened the door of her room again. Her first glance was for the letter. There it stood as she had left it. More than once during the evening she had caught herself fearing that something might happen to it in her absence. She might find the letter gone--forever gone--and unread! She smiled at it as she saw it standing there, but still she did not open it. She took off her dancing frock, braided her hair for the night in two heavy plaits, and slipped into a little loose gown of cambric, lace, and ribbon before at last she approached the waiting letter.

Why she did all this, putting off the reading of it until the latest possible moment, only a girl like Dorothy Broughton could have told. And even when she broke the seal it was with apparently reluctant fingers. It was so delightful not to know, yet to be upon the verge of knowing! But as soon as the first words met her eyes there was no longer any delay. She read rapidly, her glance drinking in the letter at a draught.

"ON BOARD S.S. "WESTERWALD," OFF GREATER INAGUA

"August 21, 19--

"DEAR DOROTHY BROUGHTON: The first time I saw you was the day you came to school for the first time. You wore a blue sailor dress with a white emblem on the sleeve, and your curly black hair was tied with red ribbons. You did not see me that day--nor any other day for a long time. I was simply not in your field of vision. That year I was wearing my older brother's suit, and I had pressed him rather closely in inheriting it, so that it was none too large for me. I remember that the sleeves were a bit short. Anyhow, whether it was the fault of the suit or not, I had a very indefinite idea what to do with my feet when they were not in action, and even less at times when they were. I recall vividly that there seemed to be a sort of ground swell between my desk and the blackboard, so that I never could walk confidently and evenly from one to the other. When by any chance I imagined your eyes were turned my way the ground swell became a tidal wave.

"Once, just once, I was allowed to help you with a lesson. You were unable to make head or tail of a problem in fractions; I don't think figures were your strong point! Miss Edgewood began to show you; an interruption came along. I happened to be at her elbow--I had a sort of reputation for figures--she called on me to help you out. I remember that at the summons my heart turned over twice, and its action after that was irregular, affecting my breathing and making my hand shake. Luckily it did not upset my brain, so that I was able to make the thing clear to you. I dared not look at you! You did not get it at first and you stamped your foot and said: "But I don't see any _sense_ to it!" I replied with a tremendous effort at lightening the situation: "Plenty of cents, and dollars, too!" At which you turned and gave me a look--at first of pride and anger, then melting into appreciation of my wit, and ending by blinding me with the beauty of your laughter! We went on from that famously, and you saw the thing clearly and thanked me. I thought I knew you then--had made myself a friend of yours. Next day, alas! you passed me with a nod. But I never forgot what it might be like to know you.

"We are four days out from New York--shall call at Matthew Town to-day. Another eight days will bring us to Puerto Colombia; then for the river trip which will take me within thirty miles of the camp in the mountains. When I am up at the mines I shall write again. My address will be Puerto Andes, Colombia, the port of the Company. If some day, when I go down the trail to send off my report, I should find a letter from you, I should go back the happier.

"Meanwhile I am,

"Faithfully yours,

"KIRKE WALDRON."

Dorothy went over and stood by the window, gazing out into the September night. It was an unpretentious letter enough, but she liked it--liked it very much. He had gone back to the beginning, picked up the one link between them in their past, the fact that they had been schoolmates. He had dared to remind her of his poverty, of his awkward schoolboy personality, and of the fact that even in those days he had cared how she might regard him. Well, as for the poverty, she knew his family; knew that it was of good stock, that his parents were people of education and refinement, and that circumstances wholly honourable had been the cause of their lack of resources.