CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Lois?”

“Yes?”

Dosia had come into the nursery, where Lois sat sewing, a canary overhead singing with shrill velocity in a stream of sunshine. Her look gave no invitation to Dosia. She did not want to talk; she was busy, as ever, with—no matter what she was doing—the self-fullness of her thoughts, which chained her like a slave. She had been longing to move into the other house, where, amid new surroundings, she could escape from the familiar walls and outlook that each brought its suggestion of pain, with the wearying iterancy of habit, no matter how she wanted to be happy.

Dosia dropped half-unwillingly into a chair as she said:

“I’ve something to tell you, Lois.”

“Well?”

“I’m engaged to George Sutton.”

“Dosia!”

Lois’ work fell from her hand as she stared at the girl.

“I’m sure I don’t see that you need be surprised,” said Dosia. She looked pale and expressionless, as one who did not expect either sympathy or interest.

“No, I suppose not,” said Lois. “Of course, I know he has been paying you a great deal of attention, but then, he has paid other girls almost as much.” She stopped, with her eyes fixed on Dosia. In a sense, she had rather hoped for this; the marriage would certainly solve many difficulties, and be a very fine thing for Dosia—if Dosia could——! Yet now the idea revolted Lois. To marry a man without loving him would have been to her, at any time or under any stress, a physical impossibility. Marriage for friendship or suitability or support was outside her scheme of comprehension. She spoke now with cold disapproval:

“Dosia, you don’t know what you are doing. You don’t love George Sutton.”

Dosia’s face took on the well-known obstinate expression.

“He loves me, anyhow, and he is satisfied with me as I am. If he is satisfied, I don’t see why anyone else need object! He likes me just as I am, whether I care for him or not.”

She clasped both hands over her knee as she went on with that unexplainable freakishness to which girlhood is sometimes maddeningly subject, when all feeling as well as reason seems in abeyance, though her voice was tremulous. “And I _do_ care for him. I like him better than anyone I know; we are sympathetic on a great many points. No one—_no one_ has been so kind to me as he! He doesn’t want anything but to make me happy.”

Lois made a gesture of despair. “Oh, _kind_! As if a man like George Sutton, who has done nothing but have his own way for forty years, is going to give up wanting it now! Marriage is very different from what girls imagine, Dosia.”

“I suppose so,” said Dosia indifferently. She rose and came over to Lois. “Would you like to see my ring?” She turned the circle around on her finger, displaying a diamond like a search-light. “He gave it to me last night.”

“It is very handsome,” said Lois. “I suppose you will have to be thinking of clothes soon,” she added, with a glimmer of the natural feminine interest in all that pertains to a wedding, since further protest seemed futile. “I will write to Aunt Theodosia.”

“Thank you,” said Dosia dutifully.

A hamper of fruit came for her at luncheon, almost unimaginably beautiful in its arrangement of white hothouse grapes and peaches, and strawberries as large as the peaches, and the contents of a box of flowers filled every available vase and jug and bowl in the house, as Dosia arranged them, with the help of Zaidee and Redge—the former winningly helpful, and the latter elfishly agile, his bare knees nut-brown from the sun of the spring-time, jumping on her back whenever she stooped over, to be seized in her arms and hugged when she recovered herself. Flowers and children, children and flowers! Nothing could be sweeter than these.

In the afternoon, in a renewed capacity for social duties, she put on her hat with the roses and went to make a call, long deferred and hitherto impossible of accomplishment, on a certain Mrs. Wayne, a bride of a few months, who, as Alice Torrington, had been one of the girls of her outer circle. Dosia did not mean to announce her engagement, but she felt that Alice Wayne’s state of mind would be more sympathetic, even if unconsciously so, than Lois’.

As she walked along now, she thought of George with a deeply grateful affection. How good he was to her! He had been unexpectedly nice when he had asked her to marry him; the very force of his feeling had given him an unusual dignity. His voice had broken almost with a groan on the words:

“I have never known anyone with such a beautiful nature as yours, Miss Dosia! I just worship you! I only want to live to make you happy.”

He did not himself care for motoring—being, truth to tell, afraid of it—but she was to choose a car next week. She had told him about her father and her mother and the children. She was to have the latter come up to stay with her after she was married—do anything for them that she would. In imagination now she was taking them through all the shops in town, buying them toy horses and soldiers and balls, and dressing them in darling little light-blue sailor-suits. She could hardly wait for the time to come! She thought with a little awe that she hadn’t known that Mr. Sutton was as well off as he seemed to be. And the way he had spoken of Lawson—Ah, Lawson! That name tugged at her heart; this suddenly became one of those anguished moments when she yearned over him as over a beloved lost child, to be wept for, succored only through her efforts. She must never forget! “Lawson, I believe in you.” She stopped in the shaded, quiet street with its garden-surrounded houses, and said the words aloud with a solemn sense of immortal infinite power, before coming back to the eager surface planning of her own life, with an intermediate throb of a new and deeper loneliness. The Dosia who had so upliftingly faced truth had only strength enough left now to evade it. Perhaps some of that exquisite inner perception of her nature had been jarred confusingly out of touch.

Mrs. Wayne was in, although, the maid announced, she had but just returned from town. A moment later Dosia heard herself called from above:

“Dosia Linden! Won’t you come up-stairs? You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, indeed,” answered Dosia, obeying the summons with alacrity, and pleased that she should be considered so intimate. This was more than she had expected—an informal reception and talk! With Dosia’s own responsive warmth, she felt that she really must always have wanted to see more of Alice, who, in her lacy pink-and-white negligée, might be pardoned for wishing to show off this ornament of her trousseau.

“I hope you won’t mind the appearance of this room,” she announced, after a hospitable violet-perfumed embrace. “I went to town so early this morning that I didn’t have time to really set things to rights, and I don’t like the new maid to touch them.”

“You have so many pretty things,” said Dosia admiringly.

“Yes, haven’t I? Take that seat by the window, it’s cooler. Please don’t look at that dressing-table; Harry leaves his neckties everywhere, though he has his own chiffonier in the other room—he’s such a _bad_ boy! He seems to think I have nothing to do but put away his things for him.”

Mrs. Wayne paused with a bridal air of important matronly responsibility. She was a tall, thin, black-haired, dashing girl, not at all pretty, who was always spoken of compensatingly as having a great deal of “style,” but she seemed to have gained some new and gentle charm of attraction because she was so happy.

“Have this fan, won’t you?” She went on talking: “Harry and I saw you and George Sutton out walking yesterday. We were in the motor, and had stopped up on the Drive to speak to Mr. Girard. He _is_ just the loveliest thing! What a pity he won’t go where there are girls! Harry is quite jealous, though I tell him he needn’t be.” Mrs. Wayne paused with a lovely flush before going on. “You didn’t see us, though we stopped quite near you. My dear, it’s _very_ evident that—” She paused once more, this time with arch significance. “Oh, you needn’t be afraid, I never know anything until I’m told. But George is such a good fellow! I’m sure I ought to know—he was perfectly devoted to me. He’s not the kind girls are apt to take a fancy to, perhaps,—girls are so foolish and romantic,—but he’d be awfully nice to his wife. Harry says he’s a lot richer than anybody knows. And people are so much happier married—the right people, of course.”

“Did you have a pleasant time while you were away?” asked Dosia, as she lay back in her low, wide, prettily chintz-covered arm-chair. If she had had some half-defined impulse to confide in Alice Wayne, it was gone, melted away in this too fervid sunshine of approval. She had, instead, one of her accessions of dainty shyness; the ring on her finger, underneath her glove, seemed to burn into her flesh. Her eyes roved warily around the room as Mrs. Wayne talked about her wedding-trip and her husband, folding up her Harry’s neckties as she chattered, her fingers lingering over them with little secret pats. She brought out some of her pretty dresses afterwards for Dosia’s inspection. From the open door of a closet beyond, a pair of shoes was distinctly visible—Harry’s shoes, which the wife laughingly put back into place as she went and closed the door. It was impossible not to see that even those clumsy, monstrously thick-soled things were touched with sentiment for her because the feet of her dearest had worn them.

In Dosia’s world so far it was a matter of course that some people were married—their household life went unnoticed, the fact had no relation to her own intangible dreams or hopes; it was a condition inherent to these elders, and not of any particular interest to her. But Alice Wayne had been a girl like herself until now. This matter-of-fact community of living forced itself upon her notice, as if for the first time, as an absolutely new thing. The blood surged up suddenly through the ice of her indifference; the room choked her. George Button’s neckties, not to speak of his shoes——!

“I’ll have to be going,” she interrupted precipitately, rising as she spoke.

“Why,”—Alice Wayne stopped in the middle of a sentence, looking at her in surprise,—“what’s the matter? Aren’t you well?”

“Yes, yes, but I have an appointment,” affirmed Dosia desperately. “I’ve been enjoying it all so much, but I’d forgotten I must go—at once! Good-by.”

She almost ran on the way home. There was no appointment, but it was imperative that she should be alone, away from all suggestion of the newly married. She hoped that there would be no visitors, but as she neared the house she saw that there was some one on the piazza—George Sutton, frock-coated and high-hatted, with a rose above his white waistcoat and a beaming face that rivaled the rose in color as he came to meet her.

“Why, I thought you were not coming until this evening,” said Dosia demandingly,—“not until you could see Justin.”

“Did you think I could stay away as long as that?” asked George. His manner the night before had been almost reverential in the depth of his honest emotion; the kiss he had imprinted on her forehead had seemed of an impersonal nature, and she a princess who regally allowed it. She was conscious now of a change.

“Where is Lois?” she asked, as they went up the steps together.

“The maid said she had stepped out for a moment.”

“Then we’ll sit here on the piazza and wait for her,” said Dosia, without looking at her lover. Taking the hat-pins out of her hat, she deposited it on a chair with a quick decision of movement, and then seated herself by a wicker table, while Mr. Sutton, looking disappointed, was left perforce to the rocker on the other side.

The piazza was rather a long one, and, except for a rambling vine, open toward the street; but around the corner of the house Japanese screens walled it off from passers-by into a cozy arbored nook, sweet with big bowls of roses.

“Come around to the other end of the porch,” said George appealingly.

“No,” said Dosia, with her obstinate expression; “I like it here.”

She stripped the long gloves from her arms, and spread out her hands, palms upward, in her lap. The diamond, which had been turned inward, caught the sunshine gloriously. His gaze fell upon it, and he smiled. Dosia saw the smile and reddened.

“I wish you wouldn’t sit there looking at me,” she said in a tone which she tried to make neutral.

“Come down to the other end of the piazza—just for a moment.”

“No!” said Dosia again. She gave a sudden movement and changed her tone sharply: “Oh, there’s a spider on the table there, crawling toward me! Please take it away.” Her voice rose uncontrollably. “I hate spiders— oh, I _hate_ spiders! I’m afraid of them. Make it go away! please! There—now you’ve got it; throw it off the piazza, quick! Don’t bring it near me!”

“The little spider won’t hurt you,” said George enjoyingly.

Dosia, flushing and paling alternately, carried entirely out of her deterring placidity, her blue eyes dilatingly raised to his, her red lips quivering, was distractingly lovely; fear gave to her quick, uncalculated movements the grace of a wild thing. George, in spite of his solid good qualities, possessed the mistaken playfulness of the innately vulgar. He advanced, the spider now held between his thumb and forefinger, a little nearer to her—a little nearer yet. There is a type of bucolic mind to which the causeless, palpitating fear of a woman is an exquisitely funny joke.

“Don’t,” said Dosia again, in a strangled voice, ready to fly from the chair. The spider touched her sleeve, with George’s fatuously smiling face behind it. The next instant she had fled wildly down to the screened corner of the veranda, with George after her, only to be stopped by the screens at the end. His following arms closed tightly around her as he kissed her in happy triumph.

After one wild, instinctive effort at struggle, Dosia stood perfectly still, with that peculiarly defensive self-possession that came into play at such times. She seemed to yield entirely now to the rightful caresses of an accepted lover as she said in a perfectly even and casual tone of voice:

“Let me go for a moment, George! I must get my handkerchief from up-stairs. I’ll be right back again.”

“Don’t be gone long,” said George fondly, releasing her half-unconsciously at the accent of custom.

“No,” said Dosia, very pale, and smiling back at him coquettishly as she went off with unhurried step—to dart up two pairs of stairs like a flying, hunted thing, and into her room, to lock the door fast and bolt it as if from the thoughts that pursued her.

Lois, coming up the stairs half an hour later, rattled the door-knob ineffectually before she knocked.

“Dosia, what’s the matter? To whom are you talking? Let me in! Katy said, when she came up, you would not answer—she said Mr. Sutton had been walking up and down the piazza for a long time. Dosia, let me in; let me in this minute!”

The key clicked in the lock, the bolt slipped back, and the door flew open. Dosia, in her blue muslin frock, her hair in wild disorder, was standing in the center of the room, fiercely rubbing her already scarlet cheeks with a rough towel. Every trace of assumed listlessness had vanished; she was frantically alive, with blazing, defiant eyes, and talking half-disconnectedly.

“Never let him come here again—never, never!” she appealed to Lois.

“Whom do you mean?”

“George Sutton!”

A contraction passed over her face; she began rubbing again with renewed fury.

“Don’t do that, Dosia! You’ll take the skin off. Stop it!”

Lois, alarmed, put her arm around the girl, trying to push the towel away from her. “Dosia, sit down by me here on the bed—how you’re trembling! What on earth is the matter? Dosia, you must not, you’ll take the skin off your face.”

“I want to take it off,” whispered Dosia intensely. “I hate him, I hate him! I never want to see him again. I can’t see him again! I threw the ring out in the hall somewhere. You’ll have to find it—— I couldn’t have it in the room with me! Lois, you must tell him I can’t see him again; promise me that I’ll never see him again—promise, _promise_!” She clung to Lois as if her life depended on that protection.

“Yes, yes, dear, I promise,” said Lois with a sudden warmth of sympathy such as she had never before felt for the girl. This situation, this feeling, she could comprehend—it might have been her own in similar case. She had known girls before who had been engaged for but a day or a week, and then revolted; it was not so new a circumstance as the world fancies.

She drew the towel now from Dosia’s relaxed fingers, and held her closer as she said:

“There, be quiet, Dosia, and don’t make yourself ill. I don’t see what that poor man is going to do—of course he’ll feel dreadfully; but you can’t help that now—it’s a great deal better than finding out the mistake later. I’ll tell him not to come again, I promise you. Of course, I’ll have to speak to Justin; I don’t know what he will say!” Lois broke into a rueful smile. “Dosia, Dosia! What scrape will you get into next?”

“Isn’t it dreadful!” gasped poor Dosia. She sat up straight and looked at Lois with tragic eyes.

“Now two men have kissed me. I can never get over that in this world. I can never be nice again—no one can ever think I’m nice again! No one can ever—_love_ me in this world!” She buried her hot face in Lois’ bosom, sobbing tearlessly against that new shelter, in spite of the other’s incoherent words of comfort so unalterably, so inherently a woman made to be loved that the loss of the dream of it was like the loss of existence. After a moment Dosia went on brokenly:

“It seems so strange—things begin—and you think they are going to turn out to be something you want very much, and then all of a sudden they end—and there is nothing more. Everything is all beginning—and then it ends—there is nothing more. And now I can never be really nice again!”

“Nonsense! You’ll feel very differently about it all after a while,” said Lois sensibly.

“I don’t want to go down-stairs again.” Dosia began to shake violently. “If he were to come back——”

“Well, stay up here. Zaidee shall bring you your dinner,” said Lois humoringly. “I must go down now; I hear Justin. Only, you’ll have to promise me to be quiet, Dosia, and not begin going wild again the moment I’m out of the room.”

“No, I’ll be good,” murmured Dosia submissively. “Oh, Lois, you’re so kind to me! I love you so much!”

Her head ached so hard that it was easy to be quiet now. She could not eat the meal which Zaidee, assisted to the door by the maid, brought in to her. It seemed, oddly enough, like a reversion back to that first night of her arrival—oh, so long ago!—after tempest and disaster. Yet then the white, enhancing light of the future had shone down through everything, and now there was no future, only a murky past, and she a poor girl who had dropped so far out of the way of happiness that she could never get back to it, never be nice again. That hand that had once held hers so firmly, so steadily, that she could sleep secure with just the comfort of its remembered touch—the thought of it had become only pain, like everything else. Oh, back of all this shaming hurt with Lawson and George Sutton was another shame, that went deeper and deeper still. Since that visit of Bailey Girard’s, she had known that he had thought of her as she had thought of him, with a knowledge that could not be controverted. It is astonishing that we, who feel ourselves to be so dependent on speech as a means of communication, have our intensest, our most revealing moments without it. He had thought of her as she had of him, and, with the thought of her in his heart, had been content easily that it should be no more.

Oh, if this stranger had been indeed the hero of her dreams,—lover, protector, dearest friend,—to have sought her mightily with the privilege and the prerogative of a man, so that she might have had no experience to live through but that white experience with him!

“Dosia! Open the door quickly.”

It was the voice of Lois once more, with a strange note in it. She stood, hurried and breathless, under the gas she turned on as she held out a telegram—for the second time the transmitter of bad news from the South. The message read: “Your father is ill. Come at once.”