CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Justin was in Chicago,—the fact was verified, and he would start for home on the morrow. There seemed to be no details, save the comforting one that Billy Snow was with him. After that first sharp immediate relief from suspense, Lois again felt its filminess settling down upon her, all the more clingingly each time, not to be fully dissipated, after all, until Justin’s bodily return.

Girard had gone back very early to the Snows’ to breakfast. He talked to Lois by telephone, but he did not come to the house; while Dosia, wrapped in an outward abstraction that concealed a whirl within, went about her daily tasks, living over and over the scene of the night before. The shattering of the pitcher seemed to have shattered something else. Once he had felt, then, as she had done; once—so far away that night of disaster had gone, so long was it since she had held that protecting hand in her dreams, that the touch brought a strange resurrection of the spirit. She had an upwelling new sense of gratitude to him for something unexpressed, some quality which she passionately revered, and which other men had not always used toward her.

“Oh, he’s _good_, he’s good!” she whispered to herself, with the tears blinding her, as she picked up Redge’s blocks from the floor. She felt Lawson’s kisses on her lips, her throat—that cross of shame that she held always close to her; George Sutton’s fat face thrust itself leeringly before her. How many girls have passages in their lives to which they look back with the shame that only purity and innocence can feel! Yet the sense of Girard’s presence before was as nothing to her sense of it now—it blotted out the world. She saw him sitting alone in the dining-room, with his head resting on his hand, the quiet attitude filled intensely with life; the turn of his head, the shape of his hand, were insistent things. She saw him standing in front of her, long-limbed, erect of mien. She saw—If she looked pale and inert, it was because that inner thought of her lived so hard that the body was worn out with it.

Neither telegram nor any other message came from Justin, except the bare word that he had started home. Lois was not expecting him until nine o’clock on the second morning, the early trains from town were coming out at inconvenient intervals, but just as Lois had finished dressing, she heard the hall door open and shut. She called, but cautiously, for fear of disturbing her baby, who had dropped off to sleep again.

Justin was standing by the table, looking at the newspaper, as she entered the dining-room. With a cry, she ran toward him. “Justin!”

He turned, and she put her arms around him passionately. He held her for a moment, and then said, “You’d better sit down.”

“But, Justin—oh, my dearest, how ill you look!” She clung to him. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you send me any word?”

“I’ve been to Chicago.”

“Yes, yes, I know. Why did you go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t _know_?”

“Lois, will you give me some coffee?”

She poured out the cup with trembling hands, and sat while he took a swallow of the hot fluid, still scanning the newspaper. At last she said:

“Aren’t you going to tell me any more?”

“There isn’t any more to tell. There’s no use talking about it. I believe I had some idea of selling the island when I went to Chicago, but I don’t know how I got there. I didn’t know I was there until I woke up two nights ago at a little hotel away out on the West Side; Billy pounded on the door, and said they told him I had been asleep for twenty-eight hours. I suppose I was dead tired out. I don’t want to speak of it again, Lois; it wasn’t a particularly pleasant thing to happen. Will you tell Mary to bring in the rest of the breakfast? I must catch the eight-thirty train back into town. I ought to have stopped there, but I thought you might be bothered, so I came out first. Where are the children?”

“They are coming down now with Dosia,” said his wife, helping Mary with the dishes, as the patter of little feet sounded in the hall. Redge ran up to his father, hitting him jubilantly with a small stick which he held in his chubby hand, and bringing irritated reproof down upon him at once; but Zaidee, her blue eyes open, her lips parted over her little white teeth, slid into the arm outstretched for her, and stood there leaning against “Daddy’s” side, while he ate and drank hurriedly, with only one hand at his disposal. Poor Lois could not help one pang of jealousy at being shut out, but she heroically smothered the feeling.

“Mr. Harker was here the evening before last; he brought me some money,” she ventured at last.

“That was all right.”

“And Mr. Girard was very kind; he stayed here all that night—until your message came.”

“I hope you haven’t been talking about this all over the place.”

“No—oh, no,” said Lois, driving back the tears at this causeless injury. “Mr. Leverich—he was here one morning—said it was best not to. He was rather unpleasant, though. But nobody knows about your being away at all. You’re not going now, Justin—without even seeing baby?”

“I’ll see him to-night when I come home,” said Justin, rising. He kissed the children and his wife hastily, but she followed him into the hall, standing there, dumbly beseeching, while he brushed his hat with the hat-brush on the table, and then rummaged hastily as if for something else.

“Here are your gloves, if that is what you are looking for,” she said.

“Yes, thank you.” He bent over and kissed her again, as if really seeing her for the first time, with a whispered “Poor girl!” That momentary close embrace brought her a needed—oh, so needed!—crumb of comfort. She who had hungered so insatiably for recognition could be humbly thankful now for the two words that spoke of an inner bond.

But all day she could not get rid of that feeling of suspense that had been hers for five days past; the strain was to end, of course, with Justin’s return, but it had not ended—in some sad, weighting fashion it seemed to have just begun. What was he so worried about? Was she never to hear any more?

That night Girard came over, but with him was another visitor—William Snow. No sun could brown that baby-fair skin of William’s, but he had an indefinably large and Western air; the very way in which he wore his clothes showed his independence. Dosia did not notice his swift, covert, shamefaced glance at her when she came into the room where he was talking to Lois—his avoidance of her the year before had dropped clear out of her mind; but his expression changed to one of complacent delight as she ran to him instantly and clasped his arms with both hands to cry, “Oh, Billy, Billy, I’m so glad to see you! I am so glad—I can’t tell you how glad I am!”

“All right, Sweetness, you’re not going to lose me again,” said William encouragingly. “My, but you do knock the spots out of those Western girls. Can’t we go in the dining-room by ourselves? I want to ask you to marry me before we talk any more.”

“Yes, do,” said Dosia, dimpling.

It was sweet to be chaffed, to be heedlessly young once more, to take refuge from all disconcerting thoughts—and from the new embarrassment of Girard’s presence—with Billy in the corner of the other room, where she sat in a low chair, and he dragged up an ottoman close in front of her. Through the open window the scent of honeysuckle came in with the gloom.

“Oh, but you’ve grown pretty!” he said, his hands clasped over his knees, gazing at her. “That’s right, get pink—it makes you prettier. I like this slimpsy sort of dress you’ve got on; I like that black velvet around your throat; I—have you missed me much?”

“No,” said Dosia, with the old-time sparkle. “I’ve hardly thought of you at all. But I feel now as if I had.”

Billy nodded. “All right, I’ll pay you up for that some day. Oh, Dosia, you may think I’m joking, but I’m not! There have been days and nights when I’ve done nothing but plan the things I was going to do and say to make you care for me—but they’re all gone the moment I lay eyes on you. I’ll talk of whatever you like afterwards, but I’ve got to say first,”—Billy’s voice, deep and manly and confident, had yet a little shake in it,—“that nobody is going to marry you but me, and don’t you forget it. I’m no kid any more.” Something in his tone gave his words emphasis. “I know how to look out for you better than anyone else does.”

“Dear Billy,” said Dosia, touched, and resting her cheek momentarily against the rough sleeve of his coat, “it’s so good to have you back again.”

“I’m no kid any more,” said William warningly.

Lois, who had been longing intolerably all day for evening to come, so that she could be alone with her husband, sat in the drawing-room, trying to sew with nervous, trembling fingers, while her husband, looking frightfully tired, and Bailey Girard smoked and talked—of all things in the world!—of the relative merits of live bait or “spoon” bait in trolling, and afterwards went minutely into details of the manufacture of artificial lures for catching trout.

Those waste “social” hours of non-interest, non-satisfaction, that must be lived through before one can get to the place just ahead of them—how long, how unbearably long, they can seem! Lois’ face twitched, as well as her fingers; Girard’s voice, lucidly expressionless, went on and on in reminiscent detail, and Justin, looking frightfully tired, but apparently deeply interested, remembered and remembered the day they caught this, and the way they landed that and, with exasperating monotony, drew diagrams corroboratingly with two fingers on the table beside him. She did not realize, as women do not, that to Justin this conversation, banal and irrelevant to any action of his present life or his present anxiety, was like coming up from under-depths to breathe at a necessary air-hole.

After five days of torturing, unexplained absence, to talk of nothing but fishing, as if his life depended on it! Girard himself had wondered, but he accepted the position allotted to him as a matter of course. He had thought, from Justin’s manner to-day, that he was to know something of his affairs; but if Justin did not choose to confide in him, that was all right. Possibly the affairs were all right, too; they were none of his business, anyway.

Suddenly a word in the fishing conversation caught the ears of the two who were sitting in the dining-room, in a momentary pause.

“That was the kind Lawson Barr used when he went down on the Susquehanna. By the way, I hear that he’s dead.”

Lawson! Dosia’s face changed as if a whip had flicked across it, and then trembled back into its normal quiet. William leaned a little nearer, his eyes curiously scanning her.

“Hadn’t you heard before?”

“No; what?”

“He’s dead.”

“Lawson _dead_! Not Lawson?” Her dry lips illy formed the words.

“Yes, Dosia—don’t look like that—don’t let them see in there, Girard is looking at you; turn your face toward me. Leverich told us, coming up to-night. Lawson died a week ago.”

“How?”

“Fell from his horse somewhere up in a cañon—he was drunk, I reckon. They found him twenty-four hours afterwards; the superintendent of the mines wrote to Leverich. He’d tried to keep pretty straight out there, all but the drinking, I guess that was too much for him. It was the best thing he could do—to die—as Girard says. Girard hates the very sound of his name.”

“Oh,” breathed Dosia painfully.

“The superintendent said that some of the miners chipped in to bury him, and the woman he boarded with sent a pencil scrawl along with the superintendent’s letter to say that she’d ‘miss Mr. Barr dreadful,—that he’d get up and get the breakfast when she was sick, and the kids, they thought the world of him.’ She signed herself, ‘A true mourner, Mrs. Wilson.’”

Lawson was dead!

Dosia sat there, her hand clasping Billy’s sleeve as at first—something tangible to hold on to. Her gaze had gone far beyond the room, even that haunting knowledge that Bailey Girard was near her was but a far, hidden subconsciousness. She was out on a rocky slope beside a dead body—Lawson, his head thrown back, those mocking, caressing eyes, those curving, passionate lips, closed forever, the blood oozing from between his dark locks. Always she had secretly visioned some distant day when, Lucile-like, she might be near him, helping, though he would not know it until he lay dying. As ever with poor Dosia, there was that sharp, unbearable pang of self-reproach, of self-condemnation. Of what avail her prayers, her belief in him, when he had died thus? Oh, she had not prayed enough! She had not been good enough to be allowed to help; she had not believed hard enough. Perhaps it had helped just a little—he had “tried to keep pretty straight, all but the drinking; that was too much for him.”

That covered some resistance in an under-world of which she knew nothing. Poor Lawson, who had so early lost his chance, whose youth had been poisoned at the start! In that grave where he lay, drunkard and reveler, part of the youth of her, Dosia Linden,—once his promised wife, to whom she had given herself in her soul,—must always lie too, buried with him; nothing could undo that. To die so causelessly! But the miners had “chipped in” for a resting-place for him—they had cared a little; he had been kind to a woman and her little children—“the kids had thought the world of him”; she was “a true mourner, Mrs. Wilson.” Dosia imagined him cheeringly cooking for this poor, worn-out mother, carrying the children from place to place as she had once seen him carry that little boy home from the ball, long, long ago.

A strain from that unforgotten music came to her now, carrying her to the stars! Oh, not for Lawson the splendid rehabilitation of the strong, except in that one moment of denial when he had risen by the might of his manhood in renunciation for her sake; only the humble virtues of his weakness could be his—yet perhaps, in the sight of the God Who pities, no such small offering, after all!

“Dosia, you didn’t really _care_ for him!”

She smiled with pale lips and brimming eyes—an enigmatic answer which Billy could not read. He sat beside her, smoothing her dress furtively, until she got up, and, whispering, “I must go,” left the room, unconscious of Girard’s following gaze.

“I think we’d better be getting back,” said the latter suddenly, in an odd voice, rising in the middle of one of Justin’s sentences as Billy came straying in to join the group.

Lois’ heart leaped. She had felt that another moment of live bait and reminiscences would be more than she could stand.

“You need some rest,” she said gratefully. “You have been tired out in our service.”

“Oh, I’m not tired at all,” he returned shortly. Her work seemed to catch his eye for the first time, in a desire to change the subject. “What are you making?”

“A ball for Redge. I made one for Zaidee, and he felt left out—he’s of a very jealous disposition,” she went on abstractedly. “Are you of a jealous disposition, Mr. Girard?”

“I!” He stopped short, with the air of one not accustomed to taking account of his own attributes, and apparently pondered the question as if for the first time. When he looked up to answer, it was with abrupt decision: “Yes, I am.”

“Don’t look so like a pirate,” said young Billy, giving him a thump on the back that sent them both out of the house, laughing, when Lois rose and went over to Justin’s side.

Husband and wife were at last alone.