"IT WAS SWEET TO BE CHAFFED, TO BE HEEDLESSLY YOUNG ONCE MORE"
Suddenly a word caught the ears of the two who were sitting in the dining-room.
"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 afterward. 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 consciousness 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. 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 underworld of which she knew nothing. Poor Lawson, who had never had the right 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 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, 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 and, in a desire to change the subject, "What are you making?" he asked.
"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.