The Wayfarers

by Mary Stewart Cutting

Dosia’s grateful and sympathetic eyes raised to his opened up a sweet vista of domestic joys. She did not notice his growing silence as she gayly accepted the engines and dolls and sail-boats that he bought for the young Alexanders. She insisted on carrying them herself to be deposited near Lois, and then afterwards went off again with him, to be fed on ices, and have chances taken for her in everything; she did not notice that she was the recipient of his whole attention, although everyone else smilingly observed it. Dosia was only filling up the time until the dancing began.

Then Mr. Sutton stood against the wall and watched her. He had not learned to dance in the days of his youth, and heroic effort since had been of no avail. He had, indeed, after humiliating and anguished perseverance, succeeded in learning the correct mathematical movements of the feet in the two-step and the waltz, and he knew how to turn, without tuition; but to take the steps and turn as he did so he could not have done to save his immortal soul. If the offering up of pigeons or of lambs could have propitiated the gods who presided over the Terpsichorean art, Mr. Sutton’s domestic altars would have been reeking with sacrifice. Girls never looked so beautiful to his susceptible heart as when they were whirling past him to the inspiriting dance music. It seemed really pathetic not to be able to do it too! He would have liked in the present instance, in default of greater skill, to have symbolized his lightness of heart by taking Dosia by her two hands and jumping up and down the room with her, after a fashion he had practiced as a little boy.

It was at the end of the evening that Dosia saw Lawson Barr standing in the doorway by one of the booths, with his overcoat on and his hat held in his hand. He was not looking at her, but talking to another man. She watched him under her eyelids, as she had done once before, and rather wondered that she had thought him attractive; he looked thinner and darker than she had thought, and more worn, and he had more than ever the peculiar effect of being unlike other people—his overcoat hung carelessly on him, and his necktie was prominent when almost all the other young men were in evening dress. He gave somewhat the impression of an Oriental in civilized clothing. She disclaimed to herself the fact that he had lingered in her thought at all.

He had been the subject of Lois’ conversation on one of the afternoons of Dosia’s convalescence, and she had since heard him spoken of by others, and always in the same tone. When she asked particularly about him, she was met by the casual answer, “Oh, everybody knows what Lawson is.” He was liked, she found, to a certain extent, by everyone; but he carried no weight, and there seemed to be social limitations which it was an understood thing that he was not to pass.

Seven or eight years before, he had come from the little country town of his birth with a past such as places of the kind are too fatally apt to fasten upon the boys who grow up in them. Witty, talented, good-hearted, Heaven only knows to what terrible influences Lawson Barr’s idle youth had been subject; and nobody in his new home had cared to hear. Scandal may be interesting, but one instinctively avoids filth. It was an understood thing, when he first came to Woodside, that his brother-in-law, Joseph Leverich, had lifted him out of “a scrape” in response to the appeal of a weeping aunt, and had brought the boy back with him to get him away from village temptations and substitute the more bracing conditions of city life, where entertainment that was not vicious could be had.

The experiment had apparently worked well; in the eight years which Lawson Barr had passed in Woodside, no one had anything bad to tell of him. He was more inclined to the society of men than of women, and shared the imputation of being fond of what is called “a good time”; but he was never seen really under the influence of liquor. Shy in general company at first, he became rather a favorite afterwards in a certain way; he was fond of sports, and was very kind to women and children; he was also witty and clever, and played entrancingly on the piano when he was in the mood; he was one of those gifted people who can play, after their own fashion, on any instrument. When he felt pleasantly inclined, no one was more amiable; in another humor, he spoke to no one. He had become engaged to a girl in good standing, after a summer flirtation. The girl had come there on a visit, and the engagement lasted only until her return and the revelation of his prospects to parental inspection.

For Lawson never had any prospects—or, at least, they never solidly materialized. He never kept his positions for more than a few months at a time. There was always a different reason for this, more or less unimportant on each occasion, but the fact remained the same. Strangers whom he met invariably took a great interest in him, and, captivated by his undoubted cleverness and charm, were enthusiastic in finding new openings for him, ready to champion hotly his merits against that most galling of all criticism, which consists in the simple statement of adverse facts.

“You will never be able to make anything out of him,” was a sentence which his relays of friends were sure to hand on to one another.

One summer Lawson had come down so far as to keep the golf-grounds in order—a position, however, which he filled in such a well-bred manner, and with so many niceties of consideration for everyone’s comfort, that to have him around considerably enhanced the pleasures of the game, and the players were sorry when he bought a commutation-ticket once more and started going in to town mornings as one of them.

Part of the time he boarded at a small hotel in the village, and part of the time he stayed with the Leverichs; rumor said that Leverich alternately turned him out or welcomed him, as he lost or renewed patience, but the relations of the two men, as seen by outsiders, always appeared to be friendly.