"LOIS STOLE INTO THE ROOM"
Far over on what must have been the other side of the track, they occasionally saw the light of a house; at one place there seemed to be a little hamlet, from the number of lights. They were clearly on the wrong bank; they should have crossed over at the station. The only house they came to was the skeleton of one, the walls blackened and charred with fire. There was only that endless line of wire fencing along which they pushed forward painfully, with dragging step; instead of passing any given point, the road seemed to keep on with them, as if they could never get farther on. Wire fencing, and moonlight, and silence, and trees. Trees! They became night-marishly oppressive in those dark, solemn ranks and groups—those silent thicknesses; the air grew chill beneath them; terror lurked in the shadows. Oh, to get out from under the trees, with only the clear sky overhead! If that road to the house of Eugene Larue had seemed a part of infinity in the dimness of the unknown, what was this?
They sat down now every little while to rest, Dosia's voice coaxing and cheering, and then got up to shake the earth out of their shoes and struggle on once more—bending, shivering, leaning against each other for support; two silent and puny figures, outside of any connection with other lives, toiling, as it seemed, against the universe, as women do toil, apparently futile of result.
Once the loud blare of a horn sent them over to the side of the road, clinging to the wire fencing, as an automobile shot by—a cheerful monster that spoke of life in towns, leaving a new and sharp desolation behind it. Why hadn't they seen it before? Why hadn't they tried to hail it when they did see? To have had such a chance and lost it! Once they were frightened almost uncontrollably by a group approaching with strange sounds—Italian laborers, cheerful and unintelligible when Dosia intrepidly questioned them. They passed on, still jabbering; two bedraggled women and a baby were no novelty to them. Then there was more long, high fencing, and moonlight, and silence, and shadows, and trees—and trees——
"Do you suppose we'll ever get out of here?" asked Lois at last, dully.
"Why, of course; we can't help getting out, if we keep on," said Dosia, in a comfortingly matter-of-fact tone.
It was she who was helper and guide now.
"Oh, if I had never left Justin! Why, why did I leave him? How far do you think we have walked, Dosia?"
"It seems so endless, I can't tell; but we must be nearly at Haledon," said Dosia. "Let's sit down and rest awhile here. Oh, Lois, Lois dear!" She had taken off her jacket and spread it on the damp grass for them both to sit on, huddled close together, and now pressed the older woman's head down on her shoulder, holding both mother and child in her young arms.
Lois lay there without stirring. Far off in the stillness, there came the murmur of the brook they had passed in the train—so long since, it seemed! The moon hung high above now, pouring a flood of light down through the arching branches of the trees upon her beautiful face with its closed eyes, and the tiny features of the sleeping child. Something in the utter relaxation of the attitude and manner began to alarm the girl.
"Lois, we must go on," she said, with an anxious note in her voice. "Lois! You mustn't give up. We can't stay here!"
"Yes, I know," said Lois. She struggled to her feet, and began to walk ahead slowly. Dosia, behind her, flung out her arms to the shadow-embroidered road over which they had just passed.
"Oh, why don't you come!" she whispered again intensely, with passionate reproach; and then, swiftly catching up with Lois, took the child from her, and again they stumbled on together, haltingly, to the accompaniment of that far-off brook.
The wire fencing ceased, but the road became narrower, the walls of trees darker, closer together, though the soil underfoot grew firmer. They had to stop every few minutes to rest. Lois saw ever before her the one objective point—a dimly lighted room, with Justin stretched out upon the bed, dying, while she could not get there.
"Hark!" said Dosia suddenly, standing still. The sound of a voice trolling drunkenly made itself heard, came nearer, while the women stood terrified. The thing they had both unspeakably dreaded had happened; the moonlight brought into view the unmistakable figure of a tramp, with a bundle swung upon his shoulder. No terror of the future could compare with this one, that neared them with the seconds, swaying unsteadily from side to side of the road, as the tipsy voice alternately muttered and roared the reiterated words:
For I have come from Pad-dy land,
The land—I do adore!
They had fled, crouching into the bushes at the edge of the path, and he passed with his eyes on the ground, or he must have seen—a blotched, dark-visaged, leering creature, living in an insane world of his own. They waited until he was far out of sight before creeping, all of a tremble, from their shelter, only to hear another footfall unexpectedly near:—the pad, pad, pad of a runner, a tall figure as one saw it through the lights and shadows under the trees, capless and coatless, with sleeves rolled up, arms bent at the elbows, and head held forward. Suddenly the pace slackened, stopped.
"Great heavens!" said the voice of Bailey Girard.
"Oh, it's you, it's you!" cried Dosia, running to him with an ineffable, revealing gesture, a lovely motion of her upflinging arms, a passion of joy in the face upraised to his, that called forth an instantly flashing, all-embracing light in his.
In that moment there was an acknowledgment in each of an intimacy that went back of all words, back of all action. The arm that upheld her gripped her close to him as one who defends his own, as he said tensely:
"That beast ahead, did he touch you?"
"Oh, no; he didn't see us. We hid!" She tried to explain in hurrying, disconnected sentences. "I've been longing and praying for you to come! I tried to let you know before we started, and you weren't there. Lois was half crazy about Justin. Come to her now! She wanted to see Mr. Larue, and he was gone. We've walked from Collingswood; we have the baby with us."
"The baby!"
"Yes; she couldn't leave him behind. Oh, it's been so terrible! If you had only known!"
"Oh, why didn't I?" he groaned. "I ought to have known—I ought to have known! I was in that motor that must have passed you; it was just a chance that I got out to walk." They had reached the place where Lois sat, and he bent over her tenderly. She smiled into his anxious eyes, though her poor face was sunken and wan.
"I'm glad it's you," she whispered. "You'll help me to get home!"
"Dear Mrs. Alexander! I want to help you to more than that. I want you to tell me everything." He pressed her hand, and stood looking irresolutely down the road.
"I could go to Haledon, and send back a carriage for you; it's three miles further on."
"No, no, no! Don't leave us!" the accents came in terror from both. "We can walk with you. Only don't leave us!"
"Very well; we'll try it, then."
He took the warm bundle that was the sleeping child from Lois, saying, as she half demurred, "It's all right; I've carried 'em in the Spanish-American war in Cuba," holding it in one arm, while with the other he supported Lois. The dragging march began again, Dosia, stumbling sometimes, trying to keep alongside of him, so that when he turned his head anxiously to look for her she would be there, to meet his eyes with hers, bravely scorning fatigue.
The trees had disappeared now from the side of the road; long, swelling, wild fields lay on the slopes of the hillside, broken only by solitary clumps of bushes—fields deserted of life, broad resting-places for the moonlight, which illumined the farthest edge of the scene, although the moon itself was hidden by the crest of a hill. And as they went on, slowly perforce, he questioned Lois gently; and she, with simple words, gradually laid the facts bare.
"Oh, why didn't Alexander tell me all this?" he asked pitifully, and she answered:
"He said it was no use; he said you had no money."
"No; but I can sometimes get it for other people! I could have gone to Rondell Brothers and got it."
"Rondell Brothers? I thought they were difficult to approach."
"That depends. I was with Rondell's boy in Cuba when he had the fever, and he's always said—but that's neither here nor there. Apart from that, they've had their eye on your husband lately. You can't hide the quality of a man like him, Mrs. Alexander; it shows in a hundred ways that he doesn't think of. They have had dealings with him, though he doesn't know it—it's been through agents. Mr. Warren, one of their best men, has, it seems, taken a fancy to him. I shouldn't wonder if they'd take over the typometer as it stands, and work Alexander in with it. If Rondell Brothers really take up any one!"—Girard did not need to finish.
Even Lois and Dosia had heard of Rondell Brothers, the great firm that was known from one end of the country to the other—a commercial house whose standing was as firm, as unquestioned, as the Bank of England, and almost as conservative. Apart from this, their reputation was unique. It was more than a commercial house: it was an institution, in which for three generations the firm known as Rondell Brothers had carried on their business to high advantage—on the principles of personal honor and honesty and fair dealing.
No boy or man of good character, intelligence, and industry was ever connected with Rondell's without its making for his advancement; to get a position there was to be assured of his future. Their young men stayed with them, and rose steadily higher as they stayed, or went out from them strong to labor, backed with a solid backing. The number of young firms whom they had started and made, and whose profit also afterward profited them, was more than had ever been counted. They were never deceived, for they had an unerring faculty for knowing their own kind. No firm was keener. Straight on the nail themselves, they exacted the same quality in others. What they traded in needed no other guaranty than the name of Rondell.
If Rondell Brothers took Justin's affairs in hand! Lois felt a hope that sent life through her veins.
"Oh, let us hurry home!" she pleaded, and tried to quicken her pace, though it was Girard who supported her, else she must have fallen, while Dosia slipped a little behind, trying to keep her place by his side, so that when he looked for her she would be there.
"You're so tired," he whispered, with a break in his voice, "and I can't help you!" and she tried to beat back that dear pity and longing with her comforting "No, no, no! I'm not really tired"; her voice thrilled with life, though her feet stumbled.
In that walk beside him, toiling slowly on and on in the bright, far solitude of those empty fields, where even their hands might not touch, they two were so heart-close—so heavenly, so fulfillingly near!
Once he whispered in a yearning distress, "Why are you crying?" And she answered through those welling tears:
"I'm only crying because I'm so glad you're here!"
After a while there was a sound of wheels—wheels! Only a sulky, it proved to be—a mere half-wagon set low down in the springs, and a trotting horse in front, driven by a round-faced boy in a derby hat, the turnout casting long, thin shadows ahead before Girard stopped it.
"You'll have to take another passenger," he said, after explaining matters to the half-unwilling boy, who crowded himself at last to the farthest edge of the seat, so that Lois might take possession of the six inches allotted to her.
She held out her arms hastily. "My boy!" she said, but it was a voice that had hope in it once more.
"Oh, yes, I forgot; here's the baby," said Girard, looking curiously at the bundle before handing it to her. "We'll meet you at the Haledon station very soon now."
In another moment the little vehicle was out of sight, jogging around a bend of the road.
So still was the night! Only that long, curving runnel of the brook again accompanied the silence. Not a leaf moved on the bushes of those far-swelling fields or on the hill that hid their summit; the air was like the moonlight, so fragrantly cool with the odors of the damp fern and birch. The straight, supple figure of Girard still stood in the roadway, bareheaded, with that powerful effect which he had, even here, of absorbing all the life of the scene.
Dosia experienced the inexplicable feeling of the girl alone, for the first time, with the man who loves her and whom she loves. At that moment she loved him so much that she would have fled anywhere in the world from him.
The next moment he said in a matter-of-fact tone:
"Sit down on that stone, and let me shake out your shoes before we go on; they're full of sand."
She obeyed with an open-eyed gaze that dwelt on him, while he knelt down and loosened the bows, and took off the little clumpy low shoes, shaking them out carefully, and then put them on once more, retying the bows neatly with long, slowly accomplishing fingers.
"They'll get full of earth again," she protested, her voice half lost in the silence.
"Then I'll take them off and shake them out over again."
He stood up, brushing the earth from his palms, smiling down at her as she stood up also. "I've always dreamed of doing that," he said simply. "I've dreamed of taking you in my arms and carrying you off through the night—as I couldn't that first time! I've longed so to do it, there have been times when I couldn't stand it to see you, because you weren't mine." Then—her hands were in his, his dear, protecting hands, the hands she loved, with their thrilling, long-familiar touch, claiming as well as giving.
"Oh—Dosia!" he said below his breath.
As their eyes dwelt on each other in that long look, all that had hurt love rose up between them, and passed away, forgiven. She previsioned a time when all her life before he came into it would have dropped out of remembrance as a tale that is told. And now——
It seemed that he was going to be a very splendid lover!