When Arsdale with the nurse at his
heels rushed up-stairs, he found his sister before
the mirror combing her hair. There was nothing
hysterical about her, but her white calmness in itself
was ominous.
“What is it, Elaine?”
he panted, “has Donaldson gone mad?”
“No,” she answered, “I
should say that he is quite sane now.”
“But what the deuce was the
trouble with him? He looked as though he had
lost his senses.”
“Perhaps he has just found them.”
The nurse interrupted him, in an aside,
“I would n’t agitate her
further.” To the girl, she said, “Don’t
you think you had better lie down for a little, Miss
Arsdale?”
“Please don’t worry about
me,” she replied calmly, “I am going to
change my dress and then I shall come down-stairs.
I wish you would go to Marie both of you.
It is she who needs attention.”
“But ” broke in Arsdale.
“There’s a good boy.
Do what you can to make her comfortable. I will
join you in a few minutes.”
Uncomprehending, Arsdale reluctantly
led the way out. She closed the door behind
them and turned to her mirror again.
“Well,” demanded her reflection,
“what are you going to do now?”
“Do? I shall go on as I have always done.”
“Shall you?”
“Why not? There is Ben.
Perhaps we shall go out into the country to live perhaps
we shall travel.”
“Shall you?”
“That is certainly the sensible thing to do.”
“Shall you?”
She smoothed back the hair from her throbbing temples.
“He looked very much in need of help,”
suggested the mirror.
“Who?”
“Peter Donaldson.”
“Oh,” gasped Elaine, “why did he
do it? Why did he do it?”
The mirror recognized the question
as one which every woman has asked at least once in
her lifetime. But somehow this did not swerve
her from her insistence.
“You must judge him from what
you yourself have seen of him,” the mirror harped
back to Donaldson’s own words.
“He acted bravely before me before
Ben. He did do bravely,” cried the girl.
“And yet below these acts he
had a craven heart?” hinted she of the mirror.
“No. No. It isn’t possible!
It isn’t possible!”
“But he admitted the dreadful thing he tried
to do.”
“That was the folly of a moment.
He has grown through it. He asked no mercy asked
no pardon. Did n’t you see the expression
upon his haggard face as he left the room?”
“Were you looking?” queried
she of the mirror in surprise. “Your eyes
were away from him.”
“But one couldn’t help but see that!”
The woman in the mirror found herself suddenly put
upon the defensive.
“Where has he gone?” cried the girl.
“What is he going to do now?”
“Will he do bravely whatever lies before him?”
“Yes. He will! He will!”
“How do you know?”
“I know. That is enough.”
“Then why do you not call him back?”
The girl’s cheeks grew scarlet.
“The shame of what I told him yesterday!”
“Was it not a bit brave of him to turn away
from you?”
“He should have explained to
me at that time why he was going. He needed
me then.”
“Do you not suppose that he
knew it? Do you not suppose that it took the
strength of a dozen men to go alone to what he thought
was waiting for him?”
“I know nothing.”
“And yet you saw his eyes as
he stood before you then? And you saw his eyes
as he left you five minutes ago?”
“I won’t see. I can’t risk again!”
“Yet you love him?”
Once again the flaming scarlet in
her cheeks. Her lips trembled. She turned
away from the mirror.
“I said nothing of love,” she insisted.
“Yet you love him?”
“Why did he do it?” she moaned.
“Yet you love him?”
“He did so bravely he spoke so bravely,
yet ”
“He learned. If, of all
the world of men, you were to choose one to stand
by your side when hardest pressed, whom would you choose?”
“I would choose him,” answered the girl
without hesitation.
“Why?”
“Because ”
“After all, is n’t that
enough? You would trust him to fight an eternity
as he has fought for you these few days. Twice
he staked his life for you once his good
name.”
“But he thought he was soon to die.”
“All the more precious the time that was left.”
Her eyes brightened.
“Yes. Yes. I had not thought of
that.”
“Yet he did this and further
risked what was left to save an unknown messenger
boy.”
“Oh, he did well!”
“Then he came to you like a
man and told what you might never have discovered,
just because he wished to stand clean before you.”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Why did he do that?” demanded her reflection.
“I I don’t know.”
“Why did he do that?”
“Because ”
“After all, isn’t that enough?”
“But he said nothing. If only he had turned
back!”
“What right had he to say the
thing you wish? If he had been less a man he
would have turned back.”
“Where has he gone? What is he going to
do?”
“Why don’t you find out?”
“It would be unmaidenly.”
“Yes, and very womanly. Do you owe him
nothing?”
“I owe him everything.”
“Then ”
“I must send Ben to find him.
I must oh, but I need n’t do anything
more?”
“No. Nothing more.”
Her heart pounded in her throat in
her eagerness to finish her toilet. Her fingers
were so light that she could scarcely hold her comb.
She hurried into a fresh gown and then down-stairs
where she found Ben anxiously pacing the library.
He appeared greatly agitated anchorless.
“Ben,” she began, “I
had no right to allow Peter Donaldson to go away as
I did.”
“Little sister,” he demanded, “was
he unkind to you?”
“No. No,” she broke
in eagerly, “he was most generous with me.
But for the moment I could n’t see it.
It was my fault that he went.”
“But what was the cause of it?”
he insisted, puzzled and dazed by the whole episode.
“It was nothing that counts
now. I want you to promise me, Ben, that you
will never refer to it, that you will never permit
him to tell you of it.”
His face cleared.
“Just a little tiff? But
he took it hard. I never saw a man so worked
up over anything.”
“It belongs to the past,”
she hurried on, eager to allow it to pass as he interpreted
it. “It would be cruel to him to bring
it up again. Will you promise me, Ben?”
“I will promise. But I
’m afraid you overdid it. It is going to
be hard to straighten him out.”
“No. It is all straightened
out now. All that remains for you to do is to
find him and say that I that I wish him
to come back for lunch.”
“Is it that simple?”
He smiled, his easy-going nature glad
to seize upon anything that promised relief from such
a jumble as this.
“You must say nothing more than
that,” she put in, frightened at the sound of
her own words. Supposing that he would not come supposing
that even now she had presumed too far?
“You will tell him just that?”
“Yes,” he agreed, “and
this morning I would have thought that it was enough.”
“It is enough now whatever happens,”
she said hastily.
“I must hurry back to Marie,”
she concluded breathlessly. “You must
not delay. It may be that he is planning to leave
town. If so, you must catch him before he starts.”
He placed his arm tenderly about her
slight waist and led her to the foot of the stairs.
“You will let me know as soon
as you come in?” she pleaded.
“Yes, and don’t worry while I ’m
gone.”
Arsdale did not take a cab.
He needed a walk to clear his head. The air
was balmy with the fragrance of growing things and
he was sensitive to its influence as he had never
been in his life. As he strode along he felt
twice his normal size. And yet what a puppet
he was as compared to this Donaldson who had been
willing to take upon his shoulders the ghastly burden
which had been his own. He himself might bear
it to-day, but yesterday it would have crushed him.
He had not realized how low he had sunk until he
learned that it was considered a possibility that
he might have committed such crimes as those.
If at first the suspicion had roused his wrath, the
sober truth that Jacques under the same influence
was actually guilty had been enough to disarm him.
The past was like a nightmare, and this Donaldson
was the man who had found his hand in the dark and
roused him. He quickened his pace. A small
black dog nosing about the fresh dirt thrown from an
excavation to his left attracted his attention to
a new house which was going up. He glanced at
the men at work and then stood still in his tracks.
Down there, in his shirt sleeves, bent over a shovel
was Peter Donaldson.
It was impossible to believe, but
he stared at the illusion with his hands getting cold.
Then he turned back to the dog. It was the same
pup Donaldson had brought into the house with him.
He riveted his eyes once more upon
the figure standing out among his fellow workers like
a uniformed general in a rabble. He strode to
the side of the foreman of the gang who stood near.
“Who is that man down there?” he demanded.
“Dunno,” the foreman answered
briefly, “he asked fer work this mornin’
and I give him a job.”
“I ’m going to speak to him.”
“Fire erway.”
Arsdale clambered into the hole and
reached Donaldson’s side before the latter glanced
up. When he did raise his head, it was with an
easy, unembarrassed nod of recognition.
“Good Lord,” gasped Arsdale, “it
is you!”
“Yes.”
Donaldson wiped his wet brow.
He was not in particularly good training for such
heavy work.
“But what the deuce ”
“I needed money for a night’s
lodging and took the first job that offered,”
he explained.
There was nothing melodramatic in
his speech or attitude. He was not posing.
He spoke of his necessity in the matter-of-fact way
in which he had accepted it. It was necessary
to earn the sheer essentials of life, in order to
get a footing to get sufficient capital
to open up his office again. He would not have
borrowed if he could, and a penniless lawyer in New
York is in as bad a position as a penniless tramp.
Not only was he glad of this opportunity to earn a
couple of dollars, but he found pleasure, in spite
of the physical strain, in this most elemental of
employments. There was something in the act of
forcing his shovel into the earth that brought him
comfort in the thought that he was beginning in the
cleanest of all clean ways. He was earning his
first dollar like a pioneer. He was earning it
by the literal sweat of his brow.
He turned back from Arsdale’s
astonished expression to his task.
“See here, Donaldson,”
protested the latter excitedly, “this is absurd!
You must quit this. I ’ve money enough ”
“And I have n’t,”
interrupted Donaldson heaving a shovel full of moist
dirt into the waiting dump cart.
Even Arsdale was checked by the expression
he caught in Donaldson’s eyes. He ventured
nothing further, but, bewildered, stood there, dumb
a moment, before he remembered his message.
“I came out to find you,”
he managed to speak. “Elaine wants you
to come back to lunch.”
“What?”
Donaldson paused in his work and searched Arsdale’s
face.
“What did you say?” he demanded slowly.
“Elaine wants you to come back for lunch.
She sent me to find you.”
Arsdale saw Donaldson’s lungs
expand. He saw every vein in his face throb
with new life. He saw him grow before his eyes
to the capacity of two men. He saw him step
forth from this aching begrimed shell into a new physique
as vibrant with fresh strength as a young mountaineer.
It was as startling a metamorphosis as though the man
had been touched with a magician’s wand.
“Thank you,” answered
Donaldson on a deep intake of breath. “I
shall be glad to come.”
“Drop your shovel then and come along now.”
“No,” he replied, as he
dug his spade deep into the soil, “I can’t
quit my job. The whistle blows at noon.”
At noon! At the seventh noon,
the whistle was to blow! He tossed the weight
of two ordinary shovelfuls of gravel into the cart
as lightly as a child tosses a bean bag.
Perceiving the uselessness of further
argument Arsdale climbed out to the bank, and, sitting
on a big boulder, watched Donaldson with dazed fascination.
The foreman passed him once.
“May be cracked,” he remarked,
“but I ‘d’ take a hundred men, the
likes of him.”
“You could n’t find them
on two continents,” answered Arsdale.
The dog made overtures of friendship
and he took him on his knee.
Donaldson never glanced up.
With the precision of a machine he bent over his shovel,
lifted, and threw without pause. The men near
him looked askance at such unceasing labor.
In time, the foreman blew a shrill
note on a whistle and as though he had applied a brake
connected with every man, the shovels dropped and
the motley gang scrambled for their dinner pails.
Donaldson for the first time then lifted his face
to Arsdale. The seventh noon had come, and never
had a midday been ushered in to such a sweet note as
the foreman had blown on his penny whistle.
Donaldson, picking up his coat, made
his way to the side of Arsdale, who had risen to meet
him with Sandy barking at his heels.
“I have only an hour,”
apologized Donaldson, “I ’m afraid I ’m
hardly in a condition to go into the house.”
“You are n’t coming back here?”
“Yes.”
Once again Arsdale found his protest
choked at his lips. What was the use of talking
to a man in such a stubborn mood as this? He
led the way to the house.
In the hall, he shouted up the stairs,
“Elaine, Peter Donaldson is here!”
The girl stepped from the library
clutching the silken curtains. She hesitated
a moment at sight of him and then faltering forward,
offered her hand.
“I ’m glad you came back,” she said.
His fingers closed over her own with
a decisiveness that made her catch her breath.
As the woman in the mirror had divined, there was
nothing more left for her to do.
“But the old chump is going
again in an hour,” choked Arsdale, “he
’s taken a job shovelling dirt.”
She met Donaldson’s eyes.
For a moment they questioned him. Then her
own eyes grew moist and she smiled. The joy of
it all was too much for her. She stooped and
patted Sandy who was clawing her skirts for recognition.
“Oh, little dog,” she
whispered in his silken ear, “I am glad you came
back. Glad glad glad!”