XXVI
"Justin has come home ill; he was taken with a chill as soon as he got to town; he came in a carriage from the station. I want you to telephone for the doctor, and ask him to get here as soon as he can." Lois spoke with rapid distinctness, stooping as she did so to pick up the scattered toys on the floor and push the chairs into place, as one who mechanically attends to the usual duties of routine, no matter what may be happening. "And, Dosia!" she arrested the girl as she was disappearing, "I may not be down-stairs again. Will you see about what we need for meals? My pocket-book is in the desk. And see about the children. They're in the nursery now, but I'll send them down; they had better play outdoors, where he won't hear them."
"Oh, yes, yes; I'll attend to everything," affirmed Dosia hurriedly, going off for her first duty at the telephone, while Lois disappeared up-stairs. For a man to stop work and come home because he is not well argues at once the most serious need for it. It is the public crossing of the danger zone.
With all her anxiety, Dosia was filled now with a wondering knowledge of something unnatural about Lois, not to be explained by the fact of Justin's illness. There was something newly impassioned in the duskiness of her eyes, in the fulness of her red lips, in every sweeping movement of her body, which seemed caused by the obsession of a hidden fiery force that held her apart and afar, goddess-like, even while she spoke of and handled the things of every-day life. She looked at the common-place surroundings, at the children, at Dosia; but she saw only Justin. When she was beside him, she smiled into his gentle, stricken eyes, telling him little fondly-foolish anecdotes of the children to make him smile also; patting him, talking of the summer, when they would go off together—anything to make him forget, even though the effort left her breathless afterward. When she went out of the room and came back again, she found him still watching the place where she had been with haggard, feverish, burning eyes. He would not go to bed, but lay on the outside of it in his dressing-gown, so that he might get ready the more quickly to go downtown again if the doctor "fixed him up," though now he felt weighted from head to foot with stones.
There was a ring at the door-bell in the middle of the morning, which might have been the doctor, but which turned out surprisingly to be Mr. Angevin L. Cater.
"I heard Mr. Alexander was taken ill this morning and had gone home, and as I had to come out this way on business, I thought I'd just drop in and see if there was anything I could do for him in town," he stated to Dosia.
"I'll find out," said Dosia, and came down in a moment with the word that Justin would like to see the visitor.
Cater himself looked extraordinarily lean and yellow. The fact that his clothes were new and of a fashionable cut seemed only to make him the more grotesque. He looked oddly shrunken; the quality of his smile of greeting seemed to have shrunk also—something had gone out of it.
"Well, Cater, you find me down," said Justin, with glittering, cold cheerfulness.
"I hope not for long," said the visitor.
"Oh, no; but, when I get up, you won't see me going past much longer. I'll soon be out of the old place. I guess the game is up, as far as I'm concerned. Your end is ahead."
"Mr. Alexander," began Cater, clearing his throat and bending earnestly toward Justin, "I hope you ain't going to hold it up against me that I had to make a different business deal from what we proposed. I've been thinking about it a powerful lot. There wasn't any written agreement, you know."
"No, there was no written agreement," assented Justin; "there was nothing to bind you."
"That's what I said to myself. If there had been, I'd 'a' stuck to it, of course. But a man's got to do the best he can for himself in this world."
"Has he?" asked the sick man, with an enigmatic, questioning smile.
"I'd be mighty sorry to have anything come between us. I reckon I took a shine to you the first day I met up with you," continued Cater helplessly. "I'd be mighty sorry to think we weren't friends."
Justin's brilliant eyes surveyed him serenely. Something sadly humorous, yet noble and imposing, seemed to emanate from his presence, weak and a failure though he was. "I can be friends with you, but you can't be friends with me, Cater; it isn't in you to know how," he said. "Good-by."
"Well, good-by," said the other, rising, his long, angular figure knocking awkwardly against chairs and tables as he went out, leaving Justin lying there alone, with his head throbbing horribly. Yet, strangely enough, in spite of it, his mind felt luminously clear, in that a certain power seemed to have come to him—a power of correlating all the events of the past eighteen months and placing them in their relative sequence. A certain faith—the candid, boyish, unquestioning faith in the adequacy of his knowledge of those whom he had called his friends—was gone; the face of Leverich came to him, brutal in its unveiled cupidity, showing what other men felt but concealed; yet his own faith in honor and honesty remained, stronger and higher than ever before. Nothing, he knew, could take it from him; it was a faith that he had won from the battle with his own soul.
By to-morrow night that note of Lewiston's would be protested, and then—the burning pain of failure gripped him in its racking clutches once more, though he strove to fight it off. He would have to get well quickly, so as to begin to hustle for a small clerkship somewhere, to get bread for Lois and the babies. Men of his age who were successful were sought for, but men of his age who were not had a pretty hard row to hoe.
Lois was long gone—probably she was with the baby. He missed his handkerchief, and rose and went over, with a swaying unsteadiness, to his chiffonier drawer in the farther corner to get one. A pistol lying there in its leather case, as it had done any time this five years, for a reserve protection against burglars, caught his eyes. He took it out of its case, examining the little weapon carefully, with his finger on the trigger, half cocking it, to see if it needed oil. It was a pretty little toy. Suddenly, as he held it there, leaning against the chiffonier, his thin white face with its deep black shadows under the eyes reflected by the high, narrow glass, the four walls faded away from him, with their familiar objects; his face gleamed whiter and whiter; the shadows grew blacker; only his eyes stared——
A room, noticed once a year and a half ago, came before him now with a creeping, all-possessing distinctness—that loathsome, dreadful room (long since renovated) which, with its unmentionable suggestion of horror, had held him spellbound on that morning when he had begun his career at the factory. It held him spellbound now, evilly, insidiously. He stood by that blackened, ashy hearth in the foul room, with its damp, mottled, rotting walls, his eyes fastened on that hideous sofa to which he was drawn—drawn a little nearer and a little nearer, the thing in his hand—did it move itself? Cold to his touch, it moved——
The door opened, and Lois, with a face of awful calm, glided up to him. She took the pistol from his relaxed hold; her lips refused to speak.
"Why, you needn't have been afraid, dear," he said at once, looking at her with a gentle surprise. "I'm not a coward, to go and leave you that way. You need never be afraid of that, Lois."
"No," said Lois, with smiling, white lips. She could not have told what made the frantic, overmastering fear, under the impulse of which she had suddenly thrown the baby down on the bed and fled to Justin—what strange force of thought-transference, imagined or real, had called her there.
She busied herself making him comfortable, divining his wants and getting things for him, simply and noiselessly, and then knelt down beside him where he lay, putting her arms around him.
"You oughtn't to be doing this for me; I ought to be taking care of you," he said, with a tender self-reproach that seemed to come from a new, hitherto unknown Justin, who watched her face to see if it showed fatigue, and counted the steps she took for him.
The doctor came, and sent him off sternly to bed, and came again later. The last time he looked grave, ordered complete quiet, and left sedatives to insure it. Grip, brought on by overwork, had evidently taken a disregarded hold some time before, and must be reckoned with now. What Mr. Alexander imperatively needed was rest, and, above all things, freedom from care. Freedom from care!
Every footfall was taken to-day with reference to this. An impression of Justin as of something noble and firm seemed to emanate from the room where he lay and fill the house; in his complete abdication, he dominated as never before. More than that, there seemed to be a peculiar poignancy, a peculiar sweetness, in every little thing done for him; it made one honorable to serve him.
The light was still brightly that of day at a quarter of seven, when Dosia, who had been putting Zaidee and Redge to bed, came into Lois' room, and found her with crimson cheeks and eyes red from weeping. At Dosia's entrance she rose at once from her chair, and Dosia saw that she was partially dressed in her walking-skirt; she flared out passionately in speech as she was crossing the room, as if in answer to some implied criticism:
"I don't care what you say—I don't care what anybody says. I can't stand it any longer, when it's killing him! He can't rest unless he has that money. Am I to just sit down and let my husband die, when he's in such trouble as this? Is that all I can do? Why, whose trouble is it? Mine as well as his! If it's his responsibility, it's mine, too—mine as well as his!"
She hit her soft hand against the sharp edge of the table, and was unconscious that it bled. "If there's nobody else to get that money for him, I'll rise up and get it. He's stood alone long enough—long enough! He says there is no help left, but he forgets that there's his wife!"
"Oh, Lois," said Dosia, half weeping. "Oh, Lois, what can you do? There, you've waked the baby—he's crying."
"Get me the waist to this and my walking-jacket. No, give me the baby first; he's hungry."
