Chapter 6

Pierson went away to his fraternity house and at half-past eight Scarborough, Chalmers, Jack Wilton and Brigham sat down to a game of poker. They had played about an hour, the cards steadily against Chalmers and Brigham--the cards were usually against Brigham. He was a mere boy, with passionate aspirations to be considered a sport. He had been going a rapid gait for a year. He had lost to Scarborough alone as much as he had expected to spend on the year's education.

Toward ten o'clock there was a jack-pot with forty-three dollars in it and Brigham was betting wildly, his hands and his voice trembling, his lips shriveled. With a sudden gesture Chalmers caught the ends of the table and jerked it back. There--in Brigham's lap--were two cards.

"I thought so!" exclaimed Chalmers. "You dirty little cheat! I've been watching you."

The boy looked piteously at Chalmers' sneering face, at the faces of the others. The tears rolled down his cheeks. "For God's sake, boys," he moaned, "don't be hard on me. I was desperate. I've lost everything, and my father can't give me any more. He's a poor man, and he and mother have been economizing and sacrificing to send me here. And when I saw I was ruined--God knows, I didn't think what I was doing." He buried his face in his hands. "Don't be hard on me," he sobbed. "Any one of you might have done the same if he was in my fix."

"You sniveling cur," said Chalmers, high and virtuous, "how dare you say such a thing! You forget you're among gentlemen----"

"None of that, Chalmers," interrupted Scarborough. "The boy's telling the truth. And nobody knows it better than YOU." This with a significant look into Chalmers' eyes. They shifted and he colored.

"I agree with Scarborough," said Wilton. "We oughtn't to have let the boy into our games. We must never mention what has happened here this evening."

"But we can't allow a card sharp to masquerade as a gentleman," objected Chalmers. "I confess, Scarborough, I don't understand how you can be so easy-going in a matter of honor."

"You think I must have a fellow-feeling for dishonor, eh?" Scarborough smiled satirically. "I suppose because I was sympathetic enough with you to overlook the fact that you were shy on your share of our Chicago trip."

"What do you mean?"

"The three hundred you borrowed of Pierson when you thought he was too far gone to know what he was doing. My back was turned--but there was the mirror."

Chalmers' sullen, red face confirmed Scarborough's charge.

"No," continued Scarborough, "we GENTLEMEN ought to be charitable toward one another's DISCOVERED lapses." He seated himself at his desk and wrote rapidly:

We, the undersigned, exonerate Edwin Brigham of cheating in the poker game in Hampden Scarborough's rooms on Saturday evening, February 20, 18--. And we pledge ourselves never to speak of the matter either to each other or to any one else.

"I've signed first," said Scarborough, rising and holding the pen toward Chalmers. "Now, you fellows sign. Chalmers!"

Chalmers signed, and then Wilton.

"Take Chalmers away with you," said Scarborough to Wilton in an undertone. "I've something to say to Brigham."

When they were gone he again seated himself at his desk and, taking his check-book, wrote a check and tore it out.

"Now, listen to me, Brig," he said friendlily to Brigham, who seemed to be in a stupor. "I've won about six hundred dollars from you, first and last--more, rather than less. Will that amount put you in the way of getting straight?"

"Yes," said Brigham, dully.

"Then here's a check for it. And here's the paper exonerating you. And--I guess you won't play again soon."

The boy choked back his sobs.

"I don't know how I ever came to do it, Scarborough. Oh, I'm a dog, a dog! When I started to come here my mother took me up to her bedroom and opened the drawer of her bureau and took out a savings-bank book--it had a credit of twelve hundred dollars. 'Do you see that?' she said. 'When you were born I began to put by as soon as I was able--every cent I could from the butter and the eggs--to educate my boy. And now it's all coming true,' she said, Scarborough, and we cried together. And----" Brigham burst into a storm of tears and sobs. "Oh, how could I do it!" he said. "How COULD I!"

"You've done wrong," said Scarborough, shakily, "but I've done much worse, Eddie. And it's over now, and everything'll be all right."

"But I can't take your money, Scarborough. I must pay for what I've done."

"You mean, make your mother pay. No, you must take it back, Brigham. I owe it to you--I owe it to your mother. This, is the butter and egg money that I--I stole from her."

He put the papers into the boy's pocket. "You and I are going to be friends," he went on.

"Come round and see me to-morrow--no, I'll look you up." He put out his hand and held Brigham's hand in a courage-giving grasp. "And--I hope I'll have the honor of meeting your mother some day."

Brigham could only look his feelings. Soon after he left Pierson came. His anger had evaporated and his chief emotion was dread lest Scarborough might still be angry. "I want to take back----" he began eagerly, as soon as his head was inside the door.

"I know you do, but you shan't," replied Scarborough. "What you said was true, what Olivia said was true. I've been acting like a blackguard."

"No," said Pierson, "what I said was a disgraceful lie. Will you try to forget it, Scarborough?"

"FORGET it?" Scarborough looked at his friend with brilliant eyes. "Never! So help me God, never! It's one of three things that have occurred to-day that I must never forget."

"Then we can go on as before. You'll still be my friend?"

"Not STILL, Fred, but for the first time."

He looked round the luxurious study with a laugh and a sigh. "It'll be a ghastly job, getting used to the sort of surroundings I can earn for myself. But I've got to grin and bear it. We'll stay on here together to the end of the term--my share's paid, and besides, I'm not going to do anything sensational. Next year--we'll see."

While Pierson was having his final cigarette before going to bed he looked up from his book to see before him Scarborough, even more tremendous and handsome in his gaudy pajamas.

"I wish to register a solemn vow," said he, with mock solemnity that did not hide the seriousness beneath. "Hear me, ye immortal gods! Never again, never again, will I engage in any game with a friend where there is a stake. I don't wish to tempt. I don't wish to be tempted."

"What nonsense!" said Pierson. "You're simply cutting yourself off from a lot of fun."

"I have spoken," said Scarborough, and he withdrew to his bedroom. When the door was closed and the light out he paused at the edge of the bed and said: "And never again, so long as he wishes to retain his title to the name man, will Hampden Scarborough take from anybody anything which he hasn't honestly earned."

And when he was in bed he muttered: "I shall be alone, and I may stay poor and obscure, but I'll get back my self-respect--and keep it--Pauline!"

X.

MRS. JOHN DUMONT.

And Pauline?--She was now looking back upon the first year of her married life.

She had been so brought up that at seventeen, within a few weeks of eighteen, she had only the vaguest notion of the meaning of the step she was about to take in "really marrying" John Dumont. Also, it had never occurred to her as possible for a properly constituted woman not to love her husband. It was clearly her duty to marry Jack; therefore, the doubting thoughts and the ache at the heart which would not ease were merely more outcroppings of the same evil part of her nature that had tempted her into deceiving her parents, and into entangling herself and Scarborough. She knew that, if she were absolutely free, she would not marry Jack. But she felt that she had bartered away her birthright of freedom; and now, being herself, the daughter of HER father and HER mother, she would honorably keep her bargain, would love where she ought to love--at seventeen "I will" means "I shall." And so--they were "really married."

But the days passed, and there was no sign of the miracle she had confidently expected. The magic of the marriage vow failed to transform her; Pauline Dumont was still Pauline Gardiner in mind and in heart. There was, however, a miracle, undreamed of, mysterious, overwhelming--John Dumont, the lover, became John Dumont, the husband. Beside this transformation, the revelation that the world she loved and lived in did not exist for him, or his world for her, seemed of slight importance. She had not then experience enough to enable her to see that transformation and revelation were as intimately related as a lock and its key.

"It's all my fault," she told herself. "It must be my fault." And Dumont, unanalytic and self-absorbed, was amused whenever Pauline's gentleness reminded him of his mother's half-believed warnings that his wife had "a will of her own, and a mighty strong one."

They were back at Saint X in August and lived at the Frobisher place in Indiana Street--almost as pretentious as the Dumont homestead and in better taste. Old Mrs. Dumont had gone to Chicago alone for the furnishings for her own house; when she went for the furnishings for her son's house, she got Mrs. Gardiner to go along--and Pauline's mother gave another of her many charming illustrations of the valuable truth that tact can always have its own way. Saint X was too keen-eyed and too interested in the new Mrs. Dumont to fail to note a change in her. It was satisfied with the surface explanation that Europe in general and Paris in particular were responsible. And it did not note that, while she had always been full of life and fond of company, she was now feverish in her restlessness, incessantly seeking distraction, never alone when she could either go somewhere or induce some one to come to her.

"You MUST be careful, my dear," said her mother-in-law, as soon as she learned that she had a grandmotherly interest in her daughter-in-law's health. "You'll wear yourself out with all this running about."

Pauline laughed carelessly, recklessly.

"Oh, I'm disgustingly healthy. Nothing hurts me. Besides, if I were quiet, I think I should--EXPLODE!"

Late in September Dumont had to go to New York. He asked her to go with him, assuming that she would decline, as she had visitors coming. But she was only too glad of the chance to give her increasing restlessness wider range. They went to the Waldorf--Scarborough and Pierson had been stopping there not a week before, making ready for that sensational descent upon Battle Field which has already been recorded. The first evening Dumont took her to the play. The next morning he left her early for a busy day down-town--"and I may not be able to return for dinner. I warned you before we left Saint X," he said, as he rose from breakfast in their sitting-room.

"I understand," she answered. "You needn't bother to send word even, if you don't wish. I'll be tired from shopping and shan't care to go out this evening, anyhow."

In the afternoon she drove with Mrs. Fanshaw, wife of one of Jack's business acquaintances--they had dined at the Fanshaws' when they paused in New York on the way home from Europe. Pauline was at the hotel again at five; while she and Mrs. Fanshaw were having tea together in the palm garden a telegram was handed to her. She read it, then said to Mrs. Fanshaw: "I was going to ask you and your husband to dine with us. Jack sends word he can't be here, but--why shouldn't you come just the same?"

"No you must go with us," Mrs. Fanshaw replied. "We've got a box at Weber and Fields', and two men asked, and we need another woman. I'd have asked you before, but there wouldn't be room for any more men."

Mrs. Fanshaw had to insist until she had proved that the invitation was sincere; then, Pauline accepted--a distraction was always agreeable, never so agreeable as when it offered itself unannounced. It was toward the end of the dinner that Mrs. Fanshaw happened to say: "I see your husband's like all of them. I don't believe there ever was a woman an American man wouldn't desert for business."

"Oh, I don't in the least mind," replied Pauline. "I like him to show that he feels free. Why, when we were in Paris on the return trip and had been married only two months, he got tangled up in business and used to leave me for a day--for two days, once."

At Pauline's right sat a carefully dressed young man whose name she had not caught--she learned afterward that he was Mowbray Langdon. He was now giving her a stare of amused mock-admiration. When he saw that he had her attention, he said: "Really, Mrs. Dumont, I can't decide which to admire most--YOUR trust or your husband's."

Pauline laughed--it struck her as ridiculous that either she or Jack should distrust the other. Indeed, she only hazily knew what distrust meant, and hadn't any real belief that "such things" actually existed.

Half an hour later the party was driving up to Weber and Fields'. Pauline, glancing across the thronged sidewalk and along the empty, brilliantly lighted passage leading into the theater, saw a striking, peculiar-looking woman standing at the box-office while her escort parleyed with the clerk within. "How much that man looks like Jack," she said to herself--and then she saw that it was indeed Jack. Not the Jack she thought she knew, but quite another person, the one he tried to hide from her--too carelessly, because he made the common mistake of underestimating the sagacity of simplicity. A glance at the woman, a second glance at Dumont, his flushed, insolent face now turned full front--and she KNEW this unfamiliar and hitherto-only-hinted Jack.

The omnibus was caught in a jam of cars and carriages; there were several moments of confusion and excitement. When the Fanshaw party was finally able to descend, she saw that Jack and his companion were gone--the danger of a scene was over for the moment. She lingered and made the others linger, wishing to give him time to get to his seats. When they entered the theater it was dark and the curtain was up. But her eyes, searching the few boxes visible from the rear aisle, found the woman, or, at least, enough of her for recognition--the huge black hat with its vast pale blue feather. Pauline drew a long breath of relief when the Fanshaws' box proved to be almost directly beneath, the box.

If she had been a few years older, she would have given its proper significance to the curious fact that this sudden revelation of the truth about her husband did not start a tempest of anger or jealousy, but set her instantly to sacrificing at the shrine of the great god Appearances. It is notorious that of all the household gods he alone erects his altar only upon the hearth where the ashes are cold.

As she sat there through the two acts, she seemed to be watching the stage and taking part in the conversation of the Fanshaws and their friends; yet afterward she could not recall a single thing that had occurred, a single word that had been said. At the end of the last act she again made them linger so that they were the last to emerge into the passage. In the outside doorway, she saw the woman--just a glimpse of a pretty, empty, laughing face with a mouth made to utter impertinences and eyes that invited them.

Mrs. Fanshaw was speaking--"You're very tired, aren't you?"

"Very," replied Pauline, with a struggle to smile.

"What a child you look! It seems absurd that you are a married woman. Why, you haven't your full growth yet." And on an impulse of intuitive sympathy Mrs. Fanshaw pressed her arm, and Pauline was suddenly filled with gratitude, and liked her from that moment.

Alone in her sitting-room at the hotel, she went up to the mirror over the mantel, and, staring absently at herself, put her hands up mechanically to take out her hat-pins. "No, I'll keep my hat on," she thought, without knowing why. And she sat, hat and wrap on, and looked at a book. Half an hour, and she took off her hat and wrap, put them in a chair near where she was sitting. The watched hands of the clock crawled wearily round to half-past one, to two, to half-past two, to three--each half-hour an interminable stage. She wandered to the window and looked down into empty Fifth Avenue. When she felt that at least an hour had passed, she turned to look at the clock again--twenty-five minutes to four. Her eyes were heavy.

"He is not coming," she said aloud, and, leaving the lights on in the sitting-room, locked herself in the bedroom.

At five o'clock she started up and seized the dressing-gown on the chair near the head of the bed. She listened--heard him muttering in the sitting-room. She knew now that a crash of some kind had roused her. Several minutes of profound silence, then through the door came a steady, heavy snore.

The dressing-gown dropped from her hand. She slid from the bed, slowly crossed the room, softly opened the door, looked into the sitting-room. A table and a chair lay upset in the middle of the floor. He was on a sofa, sprawling, disheveled, snoring.

Slowly she advanced toward him--she was barefooted, and the white nightgown clinging to her slender figure and the long braid down her back made her look as young as her soul--the soul that gazed from her fixed, fascinated eyes, the soul of a girl of eighteen, full as much child as woman still. She sat down before him in a low chair, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her eyes never leaving his swollen, dark red, brutish face--a cigar stump, much chewed, lay upon his cheek near his open mouth. He was as absurd and as repulsive as a gorged pig asleep in a wallow.

The dawn burst into broad day, but she sat on motionless until the clock struck the half-hour after six. Then she returned to the bedroom and locked herself in again.

Toward noon she dressed and went into the sitting-room. He was gone and it had been put to rights. When he came, at twenty minutes to one, she was standing at the window, but she did not turn.

"Did you get my note?" he asked, in a carefully careless tone. He went on to answer himself: "No, there it is on the floor just where I put it, under the bedroom door. No matter--it was only to say I had to go out but would be back to lunch. Sorry I was kept so late last night. Glad you didn't wait up for me--but you might have left the bedroom door open--it'd have been perfectly safe." He laughed good-naturedly. "As it was, I was so kind-hearted that I didn't disturb you, but slept on the sofa."

As he advanced toward her with the obvious intention of kissing her, she slowly turned and faced him. Their eyes met and he stopped short--her look was like the eternal ice that guards the pole.

"I saw you at the theater last night," she said evenly. "And this morning, I sat and watched you as you lay on the sofa over there."

He was taken completely off his guard. With a gasp that was a kind of groan he dropped into a chair, the surface of his mind strewn with the wreckage of the lying excuses he had got ready.

"Please don't try to explain," she went on in the same even tone. "I understand now about--about Paris and--everything. I know that--father was right."

He gave her a terrified glance--no tears, no trace of excitement, only calmness and all the strength he knew was in her nature and, in addition, a strength he had not dreamed was there.

"What do you intend to do?" he asked after a long silence.

She did not answer immediately. When she did, she was not looking at him.

"When I married you--across the river from Battle Field," she said, "I committed a crime against my father and mother. This is--my punishment--the beginning of it. And now--there'll be the--the--baby--" A pause, then: "I must bear the consequences--if I can. But I shall not be your wife--never--never again. If you wish me to stay on that condition, I'll try. If not--"

"You MUST stay, Pauline," he interrupted. "I don't care what terms you make, you must stay. It's no use for me to try to defend myself when you're in this mood. You wouldn't listen. But you're right about not going. If you did, it'd break your father's and mother's hearts. I admit I did drink too much last night, and made a fool of myself. But if you were more experienced, you'd--"

He thought he had worked his courage up to the point where he could meet her eyes. He tried it. Her look froze his flow of words. "I KNOW that you were false from the beginning," she said.

"The man I thought you were never existed--and I know it. We won't speak of this--ever--after now. Surely you can't wish me to stay?" And into her voice surged all her longing to go, all her hope that he would reject the only terms on which self-respect would let her stay.

"Wish you to stay?" he repeated. And he faced her, looking at her, his chest heaving under the tempest of hate and passion that was raging in him--hate because she was defying and dictating to him, passion because she was so beautiful as she stood there, like a delicate, fine hot-house rose poised on a long, graceful stem. "No wonder I LOVE you!" he exclaimed between his clenched teeth.

A bright spot burned in each of her cheeks and her look made him redden and lower his eyes.

"Now that I understand these last five months," she said, "that from you is an insult."

His veins and muscles swelled with the fury he dared not show; for he saw and felt how dangerous her mood was.

"I'll agree to whatever you like, Pauline," he said humbly. "Only, we mustn't have a flare-up and a scandal. I'll never speak to you again about--about anything you don't want to hear."

She went into her bedroom. When, after half an hour, she reappeared, she was ready to go down to lunch. In the elevator he stole a glance at her--there was no color in her face, not even in her lips. His rage had subsided; he was ashamed of himself--before her. But he felt triumphant too.

"I thought she'd go, sure, in spite of her fear of hurting her father and mother," he said to himself. "A mighty close squeak. I was stepping round in a powder magazine, with every word a lit match."

In January she sank into a profound lassitude. Nothing interested her, everything wearied her. As the time drew near, her mother came to stay with her; and day after day the two women sat silent, Mrs. Gardiner knitting, Pauline motionless, hands idle in her lap, mind vacant. If she had any emotion, it was a hope that she would die and take her child with her.

"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with youth's morbid fondness for finalities.

When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man--wrinkled, copperish. Yet the face was fat--ludicrously fat. A painfully homely face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that driveled and drooled.

"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is it here?"

Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging mouth.

"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came--"MY baby!"