CHAPTER XX
Before the divorce suit of Cabot vs. Cabot came to trial reassurance on several of its vital points reached Dolores through the consideration of Rufus Holt. To the greatest possible extent details were to be denied the scandal-hungry public. John Cabot would offer his defense through eminent counsel, as a case unworthy his personal appearance. She herself, the co-respondent so necessary to the severance of marital ties if one lives and sues in the Empire commonwealth, was to remain for the present with Mrs. Morrison, reported as too ill to undertake the vindication of her name. Roscoe Strang, the judge who was to pass upon the Cabot difference, was a friend of Holt’s, indebted to him for many favors, political and otherwise. The small attorney had seen to that. Soon everything would be settled, as Mrs. Cabot’s case would be advanced on the calendar on her plea that she wished to have the painful affair over as soon as possible that she might hasten abroad to undertake certain war-orphan charities to which she had pledged herself in loving memory of her little son.
Despite all these assurances, the girl awaited with keen anxiety a call to a special conference with the plaintiff’s lawyer for which she had been told to hold herself in readiness immediately after the public hearing. Summoned one mid-February afternoon by special messenger, she taxied according to instructions to a down-town “square” not far from the City Hall Park that housed the courts of alleged justice.
One glance at Rufus Holt through the folds of the veil she had been asked to wear convinced her that this, indeed, was his first detour from straight legal paths. Although he smiled in at her from the opened cab door, much of the cheer and most of the youth was gone from his face. After giving a low-voiced address to the driver, he seated himself beside her and forced a return to his wonted sanguineness.
No need for Dolores to ask in words whether the ordeal was over—whether John Cabot had been vindicated of the charge. The moment their machine was underway, her eyes put the demand.
“Judge Strang reserved decision. But they always do that, as I explained a short while since to my client,” answered Holt. “You and I are going now to meet a friend of mine—just that, a friend of mine. In the course of a day or so, the case will be decided—against me.”
Under all the circumstances, his sigh was justifiable. Dolores was beginning to realize that. The change in his face alone told her the enormity of his sacrifice in laying professional honor upon the altar of a man-to-man friendship. As the taxi wound its way up-town, he gave her an idea of the proceedings.
The beautiful Mrs. Cabot, an appealing picture in her sables and crepe, had been, of course, her own chief witness. She had told of her tried determination to believe in her husband and the girl whom she had sheltered from storm-blasts which had seemed driving her to an unthinkable fate. She had been slow—too slow to admit that any form so young and fair could house such veteran vices.
In broken sentences, as if warding off an emotional breakdown, she had outlined the hold which the governess had won upon her own heart through the heart of her only child. Not until after the boy’s death had she brought herself to consider the suggestions of servants and friends that all was not well within her household. When the doctors had prescribed a change of climate for her, she had pretended to go South, but with the idea of returning at once in order to determine the truth for herself. Her maid, a French woman in whom she had felt all confidence, she had sent on an errand back to the house to learn late developments. While Annette was still within, her detectives had followed her husband there. This maid evidently had been over-bribed, for, after signaling the detectives that the moment was propitious to enter, she had disappeared. That fact was stronger than any report could have been as evidence against Mr. Cabot.
All that she felt she needed to add to the testimony of the detectives was the name of the Circe who had destroyed the good-faith of her home. Would New York be surprised to hear this new chapter in the unparalleled career of one already known as “Grief to Men”?
“You let her name me in open court?” Dolores covered her veiled face with her hands.
“What did it matter when you had been named in the legal papers?” the attorney reminded her. “I was able, however, to check her further attempts to pay her respects to you by insisting that she need not distress herself.”
“And the—the defense?”
“John had no defense that could be made in such a proceeding. His attorney’s declaration that Mr. Cabot had nothing which he cared to offer in the way of testimony may have convinced the crowd that you were being used, either with or without your consent, to lift his yoke, but it clearly puzzled the judge. Before we reach our destination, Miss Trent, I want to express something of the high esteem in which I hold you. Oh, don’t draw back—don’t look so frightened! This is no declaration in the ordinary sense.”
Removing his hat, he rubbed his egg-white forehead as though it were a vocabulary from which words might be extracted by friction.
“Never have I been in the plight called ‘love’—never expect to be,” he continued. “In any case, never shall I marry. Maybe because I thought so much of that mother o’ mine. Maybe because I think so little of marriage. Can you see humor in the statement that women, while my professional specialty, are not at all in my line personally? That fact may help you to appreciate what I want to say to you.”
He turned toward her with the combination of wistfulness and whimsicality in his smile which first had attracted and then animated the lonely girl.
“Miss Trent,” said he, “I think you are the truest woman I ever have met. I am obsessed by the thought of you. Oh, not you, really; rather the idea you represent—the idea of absolute truth. A woman like you should not fear the opinion of anyone. Will you remember that—say, when lifting your eyes to those of the very next person you meet?”
Dolores assured him that she would. At the same time, in her thoughts, she assured herself. Just as the primary appetence common to all animal life is the right to live, the second appetence common to women is the right to love. She was not ashamed of her love when facing that inner tribunal called Truth. Why, indeed, should she fear the opinion of any man? Rufus Holt, despite the conventional limitations of his “ideas” of her, was right. She would not, could not feel ashamed.
To a place no more official than the bachelor apartments of Justice Roscoe Strang did Rufus Holt dare take the girl who was not his client. And when a Japanese man-servant had ushered them both into the somewhat sombre anteroom, he passed on into a library, but left the door behind him ajar, evidently that she might overhear his conversation with his friend.
“You, Rufus?”
“Yes, Roscoe, and about that case I tried before you this morning—the Cabot divorce. I’m afraid that a wrong is being done.”
A bass chortle sounded. “That’s what modern marriage is—doing each other wrong.”
“But this is a wrong gone wrong in that it does not strike right. I have the Cabot co-respondent outside. I want you to meet her.”
“Not the Trent girl?” The scrape of a chair underscored a muttered oath. “You don’t dare presume on our friendship to—to——”
“Not to commit a professional breach, no,” interrupted Holt. “You ought to know me better than that. And don’t call her ‘the Trent girl.’ No matter whose lawyer I am, I tell you that she does not deserve it.”
“Then why didn’t she take the stand? It always looks bad for a woman when she won’t fight for her good name. And why wouldn’t this great philanthropist friend of yours say a word for her, not to mention himself?”
“John Cabot is too big a man to be dragged into a court defense of the sort. And any man who hopes to meet his mother’s questioning eyes in Paradise would hesitate to crucify this girl with any more vulgar notoriety. Roscoe, for once in my life, the man in me has convinced the lawyer. Now, as never before, I want the scales of the blind goddess to weigh with justice.”
“It would seem that one latter-day goddess must have been already weighed—and with justice—to have made such gooseberry jam out of your heart of flint. A face that can make you forget to be a lawyer first! I’d like to see——”
Before “the friend” whom Holt wished her to meet could retract or modify, Dolores was led into the larger room. She found that “that very next person” to whose eyes she would lift her own was the judge of the case of Cabot vs. Cabot. And while she did not remember—not exactly—the compliment paid her in the cab, she met his shrewd gaze with her own defense. He looked for the truth. He saw it—that she felt no shame.
What they said did not matter—probably could not have been recalled by any of the three. Their brief chat was significant only through the things they might not say.
In Justice Strang Dolores saw a man who filled her with confidence. The determination to know the worst about himself and conquer it showed in the set of his jaw. His red necktie had action—even daring. His attire otherwise, like his manner, was conventional.
He escorted them into the hall and to the elevator. Just before the door clicked shut upon them he said so emphatically that the elevator-man turned and stared curiously at her:
“Young lady, you have the most eloquent personality I have ever met.”
And so it came about that the decision denying Catherine Cabot her divorce came to the press as a thunder-clap two days later. The comment that resulted Justice Strang met with interviews in which he put unanswerable questions. Who suffered most, the innocent or the guilty? To make the innocent suffer—was not that a culpable act? What had been proved? The wife’s evidence was unavailable. The maid had disappeared. The detectives could testify to nothing that was proof of guilt. Why elect a judicial puppet? Of what use was a judge not entitled to disregard everything except his own honest opinion?
Thus it transpired that Dolores Trent, having been convicted unjustly in the public mind of the several past offenses ascribed to her, found herself vindicated of the one crime against Society of which she really was guilty as charged.
Each morning a magnificent box from an Avenue florist was delivered to the interesting occupant of a small, furnished suite in an up-town apartment hotel. The regularity of the “attention” quipped the management’s curiosity concerning “Miss Trevor.” Usually such regardlessness was followed by a gentleman in a hired car, wearing a fur-lined overcoat and a manner at once suave and impatient. But no gentleman had shown interest in this lady since the apartment had been engaged and paid for by one whose coat was most unpretentious and whose manner was neither suave nor impatient—a pleasant-spoken, bald-pated, breezy type of a man who somehow did not seem the sort to be telling it daily “in flowers.”
Dolores herself had to guess from whom they came, just as she assumed John Cabot’s wish that she let him fulfill his promise to Jack “to look after her” until such time as he thought wise to see her. Rufus Holt, who had found and advised the new location, had made no explanation. Even when he had closed her fingers around a roll of five one-hundred-dollar bills, he had left her to assumption.
But Dolores knew. And, knowing, she was in a way content. Alone except for the Airedale puppy, who had greeted her more vociferously than the rest of her luggage, she relaxed in her sense of an all-protective love and tried to live on the significance of deep-hearted pansies, American beauties and forget-me-nots.
At the end of the fourth week a receipt was tucked under her living-room door for the second month’s rental in advance. That it was not for three months—or six—gave her a feeling of anticipation. A month at a time meant that a change might be expected before the third payment became due. With the expenditure of each dollar of her cash-in-hand this feeling increased. Five hundred dollars was a very great deal of money. But even five hundred would be consumed in time by one healthy young woman and one fast-growing dog. An all-protective love must realize that. Perhaps by the time the five hundred was gone——.
She had to fight her first impulses of extravagance. Her tendency was to tip unwisely and too well, to order a superfluity of the disguising veils she had taken to wearing on the long river-side tramps which were the anticipation of the Airedale’s mornings and the reminiscences of his puppy dreams at night; to let him grow too fat. Unable to decide what name for the dog Jack’s old-young mind would have hit upon, she continued to call him “puppy” or “pups,” as certain unimaginative people she had known were satisfied with “kittie” for their cat or “baby” for their child.
Conscientiously allowing herself only legitimate expenditures, Dolores’ gladness increased, as her roll of bills thinned, that it had not been a thousand, seven hundred, or even six. It might so easily have been more. Toward the end of the second month she felt hopeful—almost sure—that the worst soon would be over. The very thought of it dizzied her with happiness. To see him again, if only for a moment or two——.
But she had to be satisfied with hearing his voice. Rung suddenly from her sleep one night, she half believed his telephone call a dream until the metallic sound of his up-hung receiver told her that the opportunity was passed. Until morning she lay awake, fondling, one by one, his carefully covered sentences.
He had intended not to speak with her at present. But the wish had conquered him to-night to hear her assurance that she understood. He had been a criminal and must work out his sentence. Under a sacred obligation to protect her, he had injured her at each attempt, from the finale at the lingerie shop to her present exile. She had shown pity for his weakness before and perhaps could forgive him now. He never could himself.
He had been overcome in the moment of his greatest strength, when he had felt safe in his sorrow. Now, when weakest, he dared not tempt himself. His only chance of reinstating himself in his own opinion was to win the fight he had undertaken. Their loyal acquaintance would explain.
Meantime was she well and would she try to be contented until he could force a change? And would she believe?
That she did believe steadied Dolores through the discouragement of another prepaid rent receipt. When the “change” came, it was not of John’s enforcement. One afternoon Rufus Holt called on her. He came in on the breeze that wafted him through life. His smile was still cheery, his manner even more courteous than usual. Yet he was different. Considerately he attempted to “explain.”
The late chapters of that gilt-bound edition of womanhood, Catherine Cabot, read like the cheapest of thrillers. Soon after reëstablishing herself in her husband-less home, she had sent for Dr. Shayle. What had passed between her and the likable young man whom she had “made” in a week was best judged by the fact that she un-made him in a day. In notes, over the telephone and during such informal social functions as she could make excuse to attend in her mourning, she ruined him professionally. To his rich practice she expressed her regrets that she no longer could sponsor him—that his conduct with one who had brought disgrace to so many had proved him an unfit person to have about the home in his intimate capacity. All of which reminded Holt that he had a letter for her.
The envelope which he tendered was addressed to and had been opened by John Cabot. Above the heading of a Chicago hotel was scrawled the osteopath’s name. Inside was the request that Mr. Cabot forward to Miss Trent the unsealed enclosure.
The note to Dolores read:
Dear You:
My chief regret is having distressed you. Don’t be distressed about me any more. Already my hurt is healing, salved by the honor of having known you. I daren’t forget you, because remembering you is the best thing in my life at the present moment. Have refused the last bribe of her who made me what I was—yesterday. Am on my way West where I can start fair with doctor men who use their powers to help instead of hinder. The ambition, I find, is not a gift—it’s inherited. You great little chump, there is only one hope in my heart—may you be happy.
Dear Me.
So then; to one, at least, she had not been a lasting grief! Dolores felt very proud for herself and for Clarke Shayle. She turned to her caller with the impulse to confide her good news, but hesitated at the look of him. He had yielded to the Airedale’s importunities and was scratching the stub ears. The eyes of the dog were rolling from realized bliss. Those of the implement of bliss were troubled. She could see that attorney Holt was planning whatever he had come to say.
“Miss Trent,” he began on noting that he again had her attention, “Mr. Cabot has been acting under my insistent advice in not coming to see you. I know that he wishes to come. My stand is based upon my high regard for him and, may I add, for you? He intends to accomplish a divorce from Mrs. Cabot as soon as possible, but on his own terms—terms primarily calculated to repudiate the slurs cast upon you. His ruling desire is to save your good name. I want to see him carry out this idea. Miss Trent, do you?”
“Why—why, yes,” faltered the girl.
“I am glad to hear you say that, because—Well, you and he, lovely little lady, know better than I just why. His position is at present extremely jeopardous. He is watched night and day by detectives.”
“More detectives? But I thought——”
“I did, too. Mrs. Cabot, however, has not accepted Judge Strang’s decision as final. She has postponed her trip abroad and from Newport is directing an attack on his integrity and mine. Through influence and the manipulations of a brilliant shyster, she is trying to re-open the case in another court. Meanwhile, she is acting on the theory expressed in the old French proverb that ‘love and smoke are unable to conceal themselves?’”
Evidently love, at least, was not. With his white, slim hand Holt shielded his eyes from sight of her face and continued:
“More than before is the Cabot name threatened, your good name and mine. Unless we are discreet she may have a case which just might convince a judge less discerning than my friend Roscoe Strang and let the Bar Association get its claws into me. If your whereabouts should be chanced upon, if the florist should be inspired to tell of the daily flowers paid for by the lawyer who lost Mrs. Cabot’s first case, even if friend pup here should yap his identity abroad—Do you see, Miss Trent, why my advice has been insistent?”
After a keen glance at her he continued: “But I fear that my advice is losing its punch. You see, I have an imagination. I know John Cabot and I have seen you. Perhaps I haven’t made clear the absolute faith I feel in both of you. Wish I could put it beautifully with all the words and music. But we men weren’t meant to be gods in strength, you know. Why, even I have a secret vice!”
He smiled across at her youthfully; at her continued silence, added:
“I wriggle my toes.”
But the girl did not smile back. She couldn’t
“What is it you wish me to do?” she asked.
“I wish you to put yourself beyond reach. John’s weak spot is you. He acknowledges it. He looks haggard and acts worse—is beginning to fear that he can’t hold out. And, of course, with that fear in his heart, he won’t. I wish you to remove his temptation—until matters are adjusted, not to let him know your whereabouts and under no circumstances to write to him. Even his mail may be watched—there can be traitors in any man’s office—and nothing is so damning as written evidence.”
“Oh, but I—he——”
“Poor child.” Holt’s interruption expressed ever so much of his pity. “Child first, then woman. You acknowledge that I am right, don’t you? Then aren’t you willing to help him? Only you can help him now. John is not a man to talk, as you know, but he knows that I am his friend. ‘I have just strength enough to stay away,’ he told me. ‘I’m afraid that if I saw her, if she called me by so much as a look——’ You see, Miss Trent, the state to which the long strain has reduced him? You want him to win his fight, don’t you, for sake of his future and your own?”
“But you ask us to act like guilty persons,” she plead. “Judge Strang said ‘not guilty.’ To me that means that what—whatever we feel for each other is not guilt. If he is not guilty, then neither am I. Why should I lower myself to the standards of the world—why should I hide?”
“Because you are in the world and of it. I profess only a man’s friendship for John Cabot. But to protect him I played a rôle which is likely to ruin me professionally. He relies on me at present to look after you. In the event of his demanding to see you it would be better if even I did not know your whereabouts. I’d advise that you go to the shore somewhere. Let my secretary know when you decide just where—you can reach him by telephone—and your remittances will be sent regularly through him. Come, lovely lady, what do you say? Is all John Cabot’s strength to be discounted by his weakness for you?”
Dolores leaned over a bowl of purple pansies that kept eyeing her from a nearby tabourette; gazed into their ingenuous faces.
“But he wouldn’t leave me without a word, I know. What would he think—how would he feel if I——”
“Only in the event of his weakening need he know. Have I impressed you with the fact that once he begins to see you, he and I are done for? You are a woman of whom I would have expected that self-sacrificing passion with which a man’s friendship compares as a handshake to love’s first kiss. Are you unwilling to seem to lose your case with him for a little while?”
He arose, found his hat and stood for a moment looking down at her. But she looked only into the pansies’ hearts. A hopeful smile was on his face as he turned. He nodded confidently at the Airedale, just before closing the door, very quietly, after him.
The puppy, a man’s dog, sat sniffing and whining at the sill for some time after his congenial acquaintance had gone. But Dolores did not bewail the attorney’s exit. With a fury strange to her, she resented his call, his gentleness and the cruelty which it wrapped.
What manner of friendship was his, smilingly to urge the torture of his friend in order to save himself? Where was the worth of admiration that demanded of a peccable human passion the blamelessness of one divine? The pansies knew and she knew. But if John learned that she had hidden herself away from him, how could he be expected to know? Love was tender and easily hurt.
Rufus Holt admitted that he never had loved; that he had only his imagination to depend upon. How dared he, then, dictate to a woman whom he had acclaimed true as truth?
But that night a third voice entered the argument.
As Dolores lay abed, wooing in vain the healthful slumber so seldom denied her, she came to wonder whether the sensations which disturbed her were all mental. Could she be physically ill?
As, hour on hour, the wonder and the strangeness of the stirring within her grew, answer came in a wee, small voice—the voice of fear—the voice of hope—perhaps, indeed, the voice of that God said to speak through “the least of these.” With none else to tell her, Dolores understood. And in the darkness a great glory seemed to flood the room. Her heart, which had slowed almost to stopping lest she miss the message, near burst now with painful joy.
The voice, faint and from far away, had whispered unmistakably:
“Woman, I am coming—thy fulfillment.”