The Wayfarers Part 20

How dazzlingly bright the room was, how brilliantly showed the people, how gay the scene! One partner after another claimed Dosia. She danced and danced, and did not know she danced. This was her ball! And in all that throng there was not one person whom she could call her friend. She fancied that people were whispering as she pa.s.sed them. She had but one prayer-that the evening might end. She met Justin's eyes from time to time; they looked stern and disapproving. Even Leverich had an altered expression. She knew both he and Justin blamed her, and she was right.

Those who are responsible are squeamish as to the appearance of delicacy in the conduct of a young girl. Lawson was in the greater condemnation, yet there was more of personal irritation felt with her, in that such a thing had been possible; it lowered her, and it placed them all in an awkward position. Justin had said to Leverich briefly, "She had better come back to us at once," and Leverich had answered, "Well, perhaps it would be best."

William Snow stayed outside in the hall, not coming into the ball-room at all. He stood, instead, leaning against a doorway, and watched everyone who approached Dosia; his brows were lowering, his att.i.tude aggressive. He saw that George Sutton hovered around Dosia when she was not dancing, his round moon-face, suffused with pleasure, bent solicitously toward her. Once she sent him for a gla.s.s of water, and William saw that she had lapsed momentarily on a corner divan by his sister Bertha. He noticed the wistful eyes raised to the elder woman, but he did not hear the younger say with a suddenly tremulous voice:

"Oh, Miss Bertha, I'm so glad to be here with you!"

"Thank you, my dear."

"I'm homesick," said Dosia, with a white smile. "Oh, Miss Bertha, I'm so homesick!" Her fancy had leaped pa.s.sionately to the security of the untidy cottage in the South, with its irresponsive inmates, as if it were really the loving home she longed for.

"Homesick at a ball!" said Miss Bertha, with a kind inflection. She patted the folds of the dress near her comfortingly with her thin ungloved hand. "You oughtn't to be homesick now, you must enjoy yourself, my dear; you're young."

Something in her tone nearly brought the tears to Dosia's burning eyes.

If she could only have stayed with Miss Bertha! But she was claimed for the dance. Why must you dance when you were dead? Would the ball never end?

The evening was half over when she found herself in front of Mr. Girard, with some one hastily introducing them. He had just come from up-stairs with several men, all laughing and talking together interestedly, but he hardly had been in the room at all, and she had sensitively fancied that he had kept out of her way on purpose, though she remembered hearing Leverich say that he did not know how to dance, and so did not care for b.a.l.l.s. Now, as she had looked at him coming through the crowd, his personality made itself felt, through her dull misery, as something unaffectedly charming and magnetic. He was tall, straight, and well made, with the square shoulders she remembered, and the easy, erect carriage of a soldier. The thick waves of his light-brown hair, his long, thin face with its large, well-shaped nose and resolute chin, all gave an impression of young vitality and power that accorded well with her thought of him. His eyes were light gray, and not very large; Dosia had seen them full of laughter a moment before, but they seemed to acquire a sudden baffling hardness now as they met hers. She had thought of him so long and intimately that his presence near her brought its exquisite suggestion of help and comfort. She looked up at him. It might help even her to be near anyone as strong as that, if he were kind-as kind as she knew he could be. Her heart was in her eyes, as ever, unconsciously, as she half extended her hand.

Was it by accident that he did not see it? He bowed formally as he said: "Pardon me, but I am just on my way to the train."

He stepped aside, leaving a free pa.s.sage for the youth who came pus.h.i.+ng by to claim his dance with her, and was gone almost before she knew it.

He _could_ have stayed-he did not want to talk to her! She was lonely and disgraced, and the thought of Lawson an agony.

She did not see that, as Girard went into the hall, some one gripped him there and said fiercely, "Come with me!" Billy Snow, his eyes blazing, had pulled him out on the piazza beyond.

"You've got to answer to me for that," he stuttered. "You've got to answer to me for that, Mr. Girard. Why did you turn away from Do-from Miss Linden like that?"

"What right have you to ask?" questioned the other man coolly, but with a sudden frown.

"None, except that I-love her," said Billy, with a queer, boyish catch in his voice. "Yes, I love her, and she doesn't care a snap of her finger for me. But I don't care; I love her anyway, and I always shall.

I'm proud to!" The catch came again. "She may step on me, if she wants to. You saw what happened here to-night when that d.a.m.ned brute-" He made a gesture toward the hallway.

Girard made no answer, but looked into vacancy for a moment. Before the sight of both of them came a vision of Dosia in all the radiance of her beautiful innocence, the flush on her cheek, and the divine, shy look in her eyes when she first raised them to Lawson, before it changed to--

"You saw what happened here to-night," said Billy, with renewed heat at the other's silence. "I don't care what _he_ said, or what you think; she's no more to blame than--"

The other stopped him with a quick, peremptory gesture.

"You mistake," he said shortly. "You're speaking to the wrong person. I saw nothing. I don't know what you mean, and I don't want to."

"What!" cried William, staring.

"Let me give you a piece of advice," said Girard incisively, with an odd whiteness in his face. "Don't you know better than to bring the name of a woman into a discussion like this? If a girl needs no defense-by Heaven, she needs none! And that's the end of it. Only a fool talks."

"Yes," said William, with a sharp breath, after a pause,-"yes; thank you-I'll remember. But when I meet _him_-" He stopped significantly.

"Oh, whatever you please!" said Girard, spreading out his hands lightly, with a smile and a quick, steely gleam in his eyes that cut like a scimitar.

"Sorry I've got to go-my overcoat is just inside. No, I don't want to drive, I'd rather walk. Good-by!"

He went off in a moment, with long strides, down the carriage-drive to the station, the dance-music growing fainter in the distance. She was dancing still. Her face-her pure, sweet, pleading child's face-went with him through the moonlight. He knew that look! When helpless things were hurt like that-He couldn't talk to her that night, nor touch her hand, because of that burning desire to leap on Lawson Barr and choke the life out of him first.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The morrow after the ball was drawing to a close in darkening clouds and an eerie, rus.h.i.+ng wind. It had been one of the gray, cold days of spring, with a leaden sky and a pervading damp and chill-a long, long day to some of those in the Leverich house. Rumor whispered that Lawson had been found upon the highroad in the early morning, unconscious, with his face and head cut, and that there were tracks yet on the side piazza from the feet of those who had carried him in from the muddy roads.

Rumor said that the wounds had not come from accident. The doctor's carriage had been there, and had gone again; but the doctor might have come to see Miss Linden, who was also said to be prostrated and in bed, or Mrs. Leverich, who was excused to callers as having a headache. The great house was silent and deserted-looking inside, except for the servants engaged in setting it to rights and carrying the furniture down from the attic, where it had been stored overnight.

Only a few even of the inmates-of whom Dosia was one-knew that Lawson was in an upper room, with his head bandaged, sobered and sullen, watching through the wide windows the gray clouds s.h.i.+fting overhead, as he waited the completion of the arrangements that were to take him at nightfall a couple of thousand miles away. Leverich had put his foot down this time; Lawson was to go. He was bringing his vices too near home, concealment was no longer possible. All his unsavory hidden past rose to make a fetid exhalation about his name that also affected Dosia's.

"It's no use," Leverich had said to his wife, in a stormy interview that morning, "I won't have the fellow here another day. I'll s.h.i.+p him off to Nevada, and not another penny will I give him while he lives. He can sink or swim, for all me; and he _will_ sink-down to h.e.l.l."

"Oh, don't say that you won't send the poor boy any money," pleaded his wife.

"Not a red. I've had enough of him, Myra. _You_ know! As long as he could appear half-way decent, I was willing to carry my end, but he's going to the dogs now too fast for me. I've done with him; he goes to-night, whether he's able to or not."

Dosia was not to leave the house until the next day. Mrs. Leverich, impelled by what sometimes seems to be the very demon of hospitality, still pressed her to stay longer, while knowing that her absence would be a relief.

"It is too bad that you want to go like this," she had said crossly, sitting in gorgeous negligee by the side of Dosia's bed, her handsome, richly colored face showing mean lines in it. "I looked upon you quite as a daughter; I thought we would have such nice times together. Why on earth couldn't you let Lawson alone, as I told you to? Then none of this would have happened." Her tone was complaining, as of one compelled to suffer unnecessarily; there was such a total absence of warmth as to prove that shown before as but a tinsel glow. Mrs. Leverich hated unpleasant things, discomfort of any kind gave her an injured feeling; if there had been a glamour around Dosia the glamour had departed. What little depth the nature of Myra Leverich contained was all in the tie of blood, which made her resent any imputation on Lawson.

"I suppose you'd like to rest up-stairs to-day, and have your meals in your room," she went on in a businesslike way. "I'll send Martha up to pack your trunk for you-that is, if you insist on going-if she's not too busy. The servants have so much to do to-day."

"Oh, I can pack it myself," said Dosia. What did one stab the more matter now? She took Mrs. Leverich's hand impulsively. "You've been so good, so kind to me-you've given me so many pretty things,"-her voice sank to a whisper,-"it doesn't seem to me that I ought to keep them now. I want to give them back to you."

"What is it you say?" asked Mrs. Leverich impatiently. "You speak so low, I can hardly hear you. Oh, these!" She turned to a little pile of jewel-cases on the table. "Why, I gave them to you to keep. Well, if you feel that way about it-These pearls, perhaps, but the pins were quite inexpensive; do keep them, really, there's no reason why you shouldn't, you know."

"I'd rather not," said Dosia; and her hostess gathered the things when she went out.

It was a long day-a long, long day. From the bed where Dosia lay, she saw the gray clouds s.h.i.+fting, s.h.i.+fting endlessly above through the opening made by the parted window-curtains. What had happened?

Nothing-and everything; nothing-and everything!

Gossip reigned in the village, carrying Dosia and Lawson up and down its gamut, even reaching the high crescendo of a secret marriage, with the inevitably hinted smirching reasons therefor. The Leverich ball promised to supply subject-matter for many a day to come. Mrs. Snow, from as early as eleven o'clock in the morning, sat with a white worsted shawl wrapped around her-the sign of elegant leisure-and rocked in the green-bowered and steaming little sitting-room between the geraniums and the begonias while awaiting visitors. She greeted each one who "ran in"

with the invariable remark:

"I suppose you know all about the Leverichs' ball last night. Well, what do you think of the goings-on there?" being intent mousingly on getting every last little cheesy crumb of detail, and peacefully unaware of deep, rich stores concealed in her own family. The incident of the stairway was common property, but Miss Bertha had told nothing of Dosia's little heart-breaking confidence to her. Her mother was amazed at the very conservative disapproval expressed by this elder daughter, turning for confirmation of her own views to her callers.

"I thought, before all this, that the girl was a bold thing," she announced in virtuous condemnation. "It's all very well for you to try and defend her, Bertha, but neither you nor Ada would have gone on in that way.-Oh, yes, Mrs. Willetts, my dear, he kissed her on the stairs-just as they all say. But that was the least part of it. They say his _manner_ to her-And he was-yes, exactly. Oh, a man doesn't take liberties, in _such_ a way, unless a girl has allowed a good deal.

It's evident that they've-been-pret-ty-intimate. I'm sorry for the Alexanders, they'll have a handful in her. Bertha, will you knock on the window? The man with the eggs is pa.s.sing by, and we want three.

_Bertha!_ you are not paying any attention to me. She is not herself at all to-day, Mrs. Willetts, she looks so yellow. Yes, you do, Bertha.

Don't you think she's very yellow, Mrs. Willetts?"

"Perhaps it is the light," suggested Mrs. Willetts evasively.

"No, it's not the light; it's the late hours," said Mrs. Snow. "I did not want her to go to the ball, late hours knock her up for days.

William shows the effect of it, too-his right hand is all swelled up.

He says he doesn't know how it got so, but I think it's from dancing too much."