Bessie asked the sleepy man who opened
her aunt’s door whether her brother had come
in yet, and found that he had not. She helped
her aunt off up-stairs with her maid, and when she
came down again she sent the man to bed; she told
him she was going to sit up and she would let her
brother in. The caprices of Alan’s
latch-key were known to all the servants, and the
man understood what she, meant. He said he had
left a light in the reception-room and there was a
fire there; and Bessie tripped on down from the library
floor, where she had met him. She had put off
her ball dress and had slipped into the simplest and
easiest of breakfast frocks, which was by no means
plain. Bessie had no plain frocks for any hour
of the day; her frocks all expressed in stuff and style
and color, and the bravery of their flying laces and
ribbons, the audacity of spirit with which she was
herself chicqued together, as she said. This
one she had on now was something that brightened her
dull complexion, and brought out the best effect of
her eyes and mouth, and seemed the effluence of her
personal dash and grace. It made the most of her,
and she liked it beyond all her other negligees for
its complaisance.
She got a book, and sat down in a
long, low chair before the fire and crossed her pretty
slippers on the warm hearth. It was a quarter
after three by the clock on the mantel; but she had
never felt more eagerly awake. The party had
not been altogether to her mind, up to midnight, but
after that it had been a series of rapid and vivid
emotions, which continued themselves still in the
tumult of her nerves, and seemed to demand an indefinite
sequence of experience. She did not know what
state her brother might be in when he came home; she
had not seen anything of him after she first went
out to supper; till then, though, he had kept himself
straight, as he needs must; but she could not tell
what happened to him afterward. She hoped that
he would come home able to talk, for she wished to
talk. She wished to talk about herself; and as
she had already had flattery enough, she wanted some
truth about herself; she wanted Alan to say what he
thought of her behavior the whole evening with that
jay. He must have seen something of it in the
beginning, and she should tell him all the rest.
She should tell him just how often she had danced with
the man, and how many dances she had sat out with him;
how she had pretended once that she was engaged when
another man asked her, and then danced with the jay,
to whom she pretended that he had engaged her for
the dance. She had wished to see how he would
take it; for the same reason she had given to some
one else a dance that was really his. She would
tell Alan how the jay had asked her for that last dance,
and then never come near her again. That would
give him the whole situation, and she would know just
what he thought of it.
What she thought of herself she hardly
knew, or made believe she hardly knew. She prided
herself upon not being a flirt; she might not be very
good, as goodness went, but she was not despicable,
and a flirt was despicable. She did not call
the audacity of her behavior with the jay flirting;
he seemed to understand it as well as she, and to meet
her in her own spirit; she wondered now whether this
jay was really more interesting than the other men
one met, or only different; whether he was original,
like Alan himself, or merely novel, and would soon
wear down to the tiresomeness that seemed to underlie
them all, and made one wish to do something dreadful.
In the jay’s presence she had no wish to do
anything dreadful. Was it because he was dreadful
enough for both, all the time, without doing anything?
She would like to ask Alan that, and see how he would
take it. Nothing seemed to put the jay out, so
far as she had tried, and she had tried some bold
impertinences with him. He was very jolly through
them all, and at the worst of them he laughed and
asked her for that dance, which he never came to claim,
though in the mean time he brought her some belated
supper, and was devoted to her and her aunt, inventing
services to do for them. Then suddenly he went
off and did not return, and Mr. Westover mysteriously
reappeared, and got their carriage.
She heard a scratching at the key-hole
of the outside door; she knew it was Alan’s
latch. She had left the inner door ajar that there
might be no uncertainty of hearing him, and she ran
out into the space between that and the outer door
where the fumbling and scraping kept on.
“Is that you, Alan?” she
called, softly, and if she had any doubt before, she
had none when she heard her brother outside, cursing
his luck with his key as usual.
She flung the door open, and confronted
him with another man, who had his arms around him
as if he had caught him from falling with the inward
pull of the door. Alan got to his feet and grappled
with the man, and insisted that he should come in
and make a night of it.
Bessie saw that it was Jeff, and they
stood a moment, looking at each other. Jeff tried
to free himself with an appeal to Bessie: “I
beg your pardon, Miss Lynde. I walked home with
your brother, and I was just helping him to get in I
didn’t think that you ”
Alan said, with his measured distinctness:
“Nobody cares what you think. Come in,
and get something to carry you over the bridge.
Cambridge cars stopped running long ago. I say
you shall!” He began to raise his voice.
A light flashed in a window across the way, and a sash
was lifted; some one must be looking out.
“Oh, come in with him!”
Bessie implored, and at a little yielding in Jeff
her brother added:
“Come in, you damn jay!” He pulled at
Jeff.
Jeff made haste to shut the door behind
them. He was laughing; and if it was from mere
brute insensibility to what would have shocked another
in the situation, his frank recognition of its grotesqueness
was of better effect than any hopeless effort to ignore
it would have been. People adjust themselves
to their trials; it is the pretence of the witness
that there is no trial which hurts, and Bessie was
not wounded by Jeff’s laugh.
“There’s a fire here in
the reception-room,” she said. “Can
you get him in?”
“I guess so.”
Jeff lifted Alan into the room and
stayed him on foot there, while he took off his hat
and overcoat, and then he let him sink into the low
easy-chair Bessie had just risen from. All the
time, Alan was bidding her ring and have some champagne
and cold meat set out on the side-board, and she was
lightly promising and coaxing. But he drowsed
quickly in the warmth, and the last demand for supper
died half uttered on his lips.
Jeff asked across him: “Can’t
I get him up-stairs for you? I can carry him.”
She shook her head and whispered back,
“I can leave him here,” and she looked
at Jeff with a moment’s hesitation. “Did
you do you think that any one
noticed him at Mrs. Enderby’s?”
“No; they had got him in a room
by himself the caterer’s men had.”
“And you found him there?”
“Mr. Westover found him there,” Jeff answered.
“I don’t understand.”
“Didn’t he come to you after I left?”
“Yes.”
“I told him to excuse me ”
“He didn’t.”
“Well, I guess he was pretty
badly rattled.” Jeff stopped himself in
the vague laugh of one who remembers something ludicrous,
and turned his face away.
“Tell me what it was!” she demanded, nervously.
“Mr. Westover had been home
with him once, and he wouldn’t stay. He
made Mr. Westover come back for me.”
“What did he want with you?”
Jeff shrugged.
“And then what?”
“We went out to the carriage,
as soon as I could get away from you; but he wasn’t
in it. I sent Mr. Westover back to you and set
out to look for him.”
“That was very good of you.
And I thank you for your kindness to my
brother. I shall not forget it. And I wish
to beg your pardon.”
“What for?” asked Jeff, bluntly.
“For blaming you when you didn’t come
back for the dance.”
If Bessie had meant nothing but what
was fitting to the moment some inherent lightness
of nature played her false. But even the histrionic
touch which she could not keep out of her voice, her
manner, another sort of man might have found merely
pathetic.
Jeff laughed with subtle intelligence. “Were
you very hard on me?”
“Very,” she answered in
kind, forgetting her brother and the whole terrible
situation.
“Tell me what you thought of
me,” he said, and he came a little nearer to
her, looking very handsome and very strong. “I
should like to know.”
“I said I should never speak to you again.”
“And you kept your word,”
said Jeff. “Well, that’s all right.
Good-night-or good-morning, whichever it is.”
He took her hand, which she could not withdraw, or
feigned to herself that she could not withdraw, and
looked at her with a silent laugh, and a hardy, sceptical
glance that she felt take in every detail of her prettiness,
her plainness. Then he turned and went out, and
she ran quickly and locked the door upon him.