Twelve o’clock was called slowly and almost spitefully, it seemed, by the clock in Sweezy’s bar and lunch room; usually this was the signal for closing, but to-night no excise regulations were enforced. Sweezy, having sold all the eatables that could be procured and most of the drinkables, was busying himself disposing of people for the night, as it was not possible to remove the débris and get the track in shape under four or five hours. He had spent a profitable evening and was, consequently, in fine joking humour. Peering into the parlour, he saw the sleeping couple, and not remembering that the woman had entered alone and asked for a room, he awakened them, giving the man a cheerful slap on the back to boot. “Be you folks married?” and upon Hasleton’s giving a sleepy assent, he continued, “All right, then, I kin double you up and that’ll take the last room, and then I’ll make shake-downs in here for half a dozen schoolmarms goin’ to a convention. First to the right at the head of the stairs, sir.” Then, setting a spluttering candle on the table at the woman’s elbow, as if he naturally expected her to take the lead, he disappeared.
Helen Hasleton started to her feet, her face lowering and furious. “You might have prevented this, it’s taking a mean advantage of me,” she fairly hurled the words at him. “You can go upstairs, I shall stay down here with the other women.”
Burt rose with difficulty, stiff and aching in every limb, and taking up the candle, said, “Very well, it seems rude to leave you here among strangers and without a bed, but under the circumstances, I can only obey your wish.”
“Obey!” snapped the woman; “there is no such word, or if there is, I do not understand its meaning. This morning I was to obey you. To-night you offer at once to make a spectacle of me and obey me. Rubbish! Go back to the car with your friends and say there was no room for you here.”
Something moved in the alcove, a long shadow fell upon the floor, followed by the presence of a tall, clean-shaven man in the garments of a priest, who stood for a moment looking from one to the other.
“There is a word obey, and it will always have a meaning until the world falls apart. The question is, whom shall we obey and what,” said a deep but quiet voice in the perfect accents of well-born speech. “If one woman had not obeyed to-night, you two perhaps, as well as all on board the train, would have been lying crushed or burned in the river-bed beyond, dead, distorted, horrible! Jim Bradley, the conductor, pinned in the wreck, was found by the woman he was to marry, frantic of course to rescue him. He told her to leave him, to go back and save this train, and she obeyed. They have carried him to her home and the surgeons are at work; the end I do not know. I have left them but now, and with them the two rites of the Church that best could help, belonging to the two ends of life, marriage that gives her the right to care for him, and to him the last sacrament.
“And yet you stand there, man and woman, and bicker and create falsity from empty words, forgetting that nothing can transpose right and wrong. Shame on you both!”
For several moments no one moved; then Hasleton replaced the candle on the table, as he saw the outlines of the man’s face, young in spite of gauntness and close-cropped gray hair, and in his astonishment almost whispered, “John Anthony!”
“Father John,” corrected the voice calmly, but in a tone that forbade further questioning, though recognition gleamed in his own eyes; for John Anthony had been a college mate of Hasleton’s, who, though always serious, had, ten years before, suddenly, and to the world in general unaccountably, given up the brilliant promise of public life for the priesthood. Two men alone knew that the first motive for his course lay in that it was the only immovable barrier he could place between his nature and temptation,—the mad infatuation of a beautiful married woman, whose husband was his friend.
As all this flashed through Hasleton’s brain, he lowered his gaze and stood with bowed head. A few more seconds passed. The woman’s clenched hands relaxed, and raising her eyes, she met those of Father John that had never moved from her face, and in their depth her woman’s instinct saw both comprehension and the scars of conquered temptation. Then she took the candlestick from the table and crossing the room slowly, went up the narrow, uncarpeted stairs, step by step.