The Argonauts of North Liberty

“I’ve lit the fire in the bedroom for you to change your clothes by,” she said, as he entered; then evading the caress which this wifely attention provoked, by bending still more primly over her book, she added, “Go at once. You’re making everything quite damp here.”

He returned in a few moments in his slippers and jacket, but evidently found the same difficulty in securing a conjugal and confidential contiguity to his wife. There was no apparent social centre or nucleus of comfort in the apartment; its fireplace, sealed by an iron ornament like a monumental tablet over dead ashes, had its functions superseded by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his wife’s easy withdrawal from side-by-side familiarity.

“Demorest has been urging me very strongly to go to California, but, of course, I spoke of you,” he said, stealing his hand into his wife’s lap, and possessing himself of her fingers.

Mrs. Blandford slowly lifted her fingers enclosed in his clasping hand and placed them in shameless publicity on the volume before her. This implied desecration was too much for Blandford; he withdrew his hand.

“Does that man propose to go with you?” asked Mrs. Blandford, coldly.

“No; he’s preoccupied with other matters that he wanted me to talk to you about,” said her husband, hesitatingly. “He is—”

“Because”—continued Mrs. Blandford in the same measured tone, “if he does not add his own evil company to his advice, it is the best he has ever given yet. I think he might have taken another day than the Lord’s to talk about it, but we must not despise the means nor the hour whence the truth comes. Father wanted me to take some reasonable moment to prepare you to consider it seriously, and I thought of talking to you about it to-morrow. He thinks it would be a very judicious plan. Even Deacon Truesdail—”

“Having sold his invoice of damaged sugar kettles for mining purposes, is converted,” said Blandford, goaded into momentary testiness by his wife’s unexpected acquiescence and a sudden recollection of Demorest’s prophecy. “You have changed your opinion, Joan, since last fall, when you couldn’t bear to think of my leaving you,” he added reproachfully.

“I couldn’t bear to think of your joining the mob of lawless and sinful men who use that as an excuse for leaving their wives and families. As for my own feelings, Edward, I have never allowed them to stand between me and what I believed best for our home and your Christian welfare. Though I have no cause to admire the influence that I find this man, Demorest, still holds over you, I am willing to acquiesce, as you see, in what he advises for your good. You can hardly reproach ME, Edward, for worldly or selfish motives.”

Blandford felt keenly the bitter truth of his wife’s speech. For the moment he would gladly have exchanged it for a more illogical and selfish affection, but he reflected that he had married this religious girl for the security of an affection which he felt was not subject to the temptations of the world—or even its own weakness—as was too often the case with the giddy maidens whom he had known through Demorest’s companionship. It was, therefore, more with a sense of recalling this distinctive quality of his wife than any loyalty to Demorest that he suddenly resolved to confide to her the latter’s fatuous folly.

“I know it, dear,” he said, apologetically, “and we’ll talk it over to-morrow, and it may be possible to arrange it so that you shall go with me. But, speaking of Demorest, I think you don’t quite do HIM justice. He really respects YOUR feelings and your knowledge of right and wrong more than you imagine. I actually believe he came here to-night merely to get me to interest you in an extraordinary love affair of his. I mean, Joan,” he added hastily, seeing the same look of dull repression come over her face, “I mean, Joan—that is, you know, from all I can judge—it is something really serious this time. He intends to reform. And this is because he has become violently smitten with a young woman whom he has only seen half a dozen times, at long intervals, whom he first met in a railway train, and whose name and residence he don’t even know.”

There was an ominous silence—so hushed that the ticking of the allegorical clock came like a grim monitor. “Then,” said Mrs. Blandford, in a hard, dry voice that her alarmed husband scarcely recognized, “he proposed to insult your wife by taking her into his shameful confidence.”

“Good heavens! Joan, no—you don’t understand. At the worst, this is some virtuous but silly school-girl, who, though she may be intending only an innocent flirtation with him, has made this man actually and deeply in love with her. Yes; it is a fact, Joan. I know Dick Demorest, and if ever there was a man honestly in love, it is he.”

“Then you mean to say that this man—an utter stranger to me—a man whom I’ve never laid my eyes on—whom I wouldn’t know if I met in the street—expects me to advise him—to—to—” She stopped. Blandford could scarcely believe his senses. There were tears in her eyes—this woman who never cried; her voice trembled—she who had always controlled her emotions.

He took advantage of this odd but opportune melting. He placed his arm around her shoulders. She tried to escape it, but with a coy, shy movement, half hysterical, half girlish, unlike her usual stony, moral precision. “Yes, Joan,” he repeated, laughingly, “but whose fault is it? Not HIS, remember! And I firmly believe he thinks you can do him good.”

“But he has never seen me,” she continued, with a nervous little laugh, “and probably considers me some old Gorgon—like—like—Sister Jemima Skerret.”

Blandford smiled with the complacency of far-reaching masculine intuition. Ah! that shrewd fellow, Demorest, was right. Joan, dear Joan, was only a woman after all.

“Then he’ll be the more agreeably astonished,” he returned, gayly, “and I think YOU will, too, Joan. For Dick isn’t a bad-looking fellow; most women like him. It’s true,” he continued, much amused at the novelty of the perfectly natural toss and grimace with which Mrs. Blandford received this statement.

“I think he’s been pointed out to me somewhere,” she said, thoughtfully; “he’s a tall, dark, dissipated-looking man.”

“Nothing of the kind,” laughed her husband. “He’s middle-sized and as blond as your cousin Joe, only he’s got a long yellow moustache, and has a quick, abrupt way of talking. He isn’t at all fancy-looking; you’d take him for an energetic business man or a doctor, if you didn’t know him. So you see, Joan, this correct little wife of mine has been a little, just a little, prejudiced.”

He drew her again gently backwards and nearer his seat, but she caught his wrists in her slim hands, and rising from the chair at the same moment, dexterously slipped from his embrace with her back towards him. “I do not know why I should be unprejudiced by anything you’ve told me,” she said, sharply closing the book of sermons, and, with her back still to her husband, reinstating it formally in its place on the cabinet. “It’s probably one of his many scandalous pursuits of defenceless and believing women, and he, no doubt, goes off to Boston, laughing at you for thinking him in earnest; and as ready to tell his story to anybody else and boast of his double deceit.” Her voice had a touch of human asperity in it now, which he had never before noticed, but recognizing, as he thought, the human cause, it was far from exciting his displeasure.

“Wrong again, Joan; he’s waiting here at the Independence House for me to see him to-morrow,” he returned, cheerfully. “And I believe him so much in earnest that I would be ready to swear that not another person will ever know the story but you and I and he. No, it is a real thing with him; he’s dead in love, and it’s your duty as a Christian to help him.”

There was a moment of silence. Mrs. Blandford remained by the cabinet, methodically arranging some small articles displaced by the return of the book. “Well,” she said, suddenly, “you don’t tell me what mother had to say. Of course, as you came home earlier than you expected, you had time to stop THERE—only four doors from this house.”

“Well, no, Joan,” replied Blandford, in awkward discomfiture. “You see I met Dick first, and then—then I hurried here to you—and—and—I clean forgot it. I’m very sorry,” he added, dejectedly.

“And I more deeply so,” she returned, with her previous bloodless moral precision, “for she probably knows by this time, Edward, why you have omitted your usual Sabbath visit, and with WHOM you were.”

“But I can pull on my boots again and run in there for a moment,” he suggested, dubiously, “if you think it necessary. It won’t take me a moment.”

“No,” she said, positively; “it is so late now that your visit would only show it to be a second thought. I will go myself—it will be a call for us both.”

“But shall I go with you to the door? It is dark and sleeting,” suggested Blandford, eagerly.

“No,” she replied, peremptorily. “Stay where you are, and when Ezekiel and Bridget come in send them to bed, for I have made everything fast in the kitchen. Don’t wait up for me.”

She left the room, and in a few moments returned, wrapped from head to foot in an enormous plaid shawl. A white woollen scarf thrown over her bare brown head, and twice rolled around her neck, almost concealed her face from view. When she had parted from her husband, and reached the darkened hall below, she drew from beneath the folds of her shawl a thick blue veil, with which she completely enveloped her features. As she opened the front door and peered out into the night, her own husband would have scarcely recognized her.

With her head lowered against the keen wind she walked rapidly down the street and stopped for an instant at the door of the fourth house. Glancing quickly back at the house she had left and then at the closed windows of the one she had halted before, she gathered her skirts with one hand and sped away from both, never stopping until she reached the door of the Independence Hotel.

CHAPTER III

Mrs. Blandford entered the side door boldly. Luckily for her, the austerities of the Sabbath were manifest even here; the bar-room was closed, and the usual loungers in the passages were absent. Without risking the recognition of her voice in an inquiry to the clerk, she slipped past the office, still muffled in her veil, and quickly mounted the narrow staircase. For an instant she hesitated before the public parlor, and glanced dubiously along the half-lit corridor. Chance befriended her; the door of a bedroom opened at that moment, and Richard Demorest, with his overcoat and hat on, stepped out in the hall.

With a quick and nervous gesture of her hand she beckoned him to approach. He came towards her leisurely, with an amused curiosity that suddenly changed to utter astonishment as she hurriedly lifted her veil, dropped it, turned, and glided down the staircase into the street again. He followed rapidly, but did not overtake her until she had reached the corner, when she slackened her pace an instant for him to join her.

“Lulu,” he said eagerly; “is it you?”

“Not a word here,” she said, breathlessly. “Follow me at a distance.”

She started forward again in the direction of her own house. He followed her at a sufficient interval to keep her faintly distinguishable figure in sight until she had crossed three streets, and near the end of the next block glided up the steps of a house not far from the one where he remembered to have left Blandford. As he joined her, she had just succeeded in opening the door with a pass-key, and was awaiting him. With a gesture of silence she took his hand in her cold fingers, and leading him softly through the dark hall and passage, quickly entered the kitchen. Here she lit a candle, turned, and faced him. He could see that the outside shutters were bolted, and the kitchen evidently closed for the night.

As she removed the veil from her face he made a movement as if to regain her hand again, but she drew it away.

“You have forced this upon me,” she said hurriedly, “and it may be ruin to us both. Why have you betrayed me?”

“Betrayed you, Lulu—Good God! what do you mean?”

She looked him full in the eye, and then said slowly, “Do you mean to say that you have told no one of our meetings?”

“Only one—my old friend Blandford, who lives—Ah, yes! I see it now. You are neighbors. He has betrayed me. This house is—”

“My father’s!” she replied boldly.

The momentary uneasiness passed from Demorest’s resolute face. His old self-sufficiency returned. “Good,” he said, with a frank laugh, “that will do for me. Open the door there, Lulu, and take me to him. I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done, my girl, nor need you be. I’ll tell him my real name is Dick Demorest, as I ought to have told you before, and that I want to marry you, fairly and squarely, and let him make the conditions. I’m not a vagabond nor a thief, Lulu, if I have met you on the sly. Come, dear, let us end this now. Come—”

But she had thrown herself before him and placed her hand upon his lips. “Hush! are you mad? Listen to me, I tell you—please—oh, do—no you must not!” He had covered her hand with kisses and was drawing her face towards his own. “No—not again, it was wrong then, it is monstrous now. I implore you, listen, if you love me, stop.”

He released her. She sank into a chair by the kitchen-table, and buried her flushed face in her hands.

He stood for a moment motionless before her. “Lulu, if that is your name,” he said slowly, but gently, “tell me all now. Be frank with me, and trust me. If there is anything stands in the way, let me know what it is and I can overcome it. If it is my telling Ned Blandford, don’t let that worry you, he’s as loyal a fellow as ever breathed, and I’m a dog to ever think he willingly betrayed us. His wife, well, she’s one of those pious saints—but no, she would not be such a cursed hypocrite and bigot as this.”

“Hush, I tell you! WILL you hush,” she said, in a frantic whisper, springing to her feet and grasping him convulsively by the lapels of his overcoat. “Not a word more, or I’ll kill myself. Listen! Do you know what I brought you here for? why I left my—this house and dragged you out of your hotel? Well, it was to tell you that you must leave me, leave HERE—go out of this house and out of this town at once, to-night! And never look on it or me again! There! you have said we must end this now. It is ended, as only it could and ever would end. And if you open that door except to go, or if you attempt to—to touch me again, I’ll do something desperate. There!”

She threw him off again and stepped back, strangely beautiful in the loosened shackles of her long repressed human emotion. It was as if the passion-rent robes of the priestess had laid bare the flesh of the woman dazzling and victorious. Demorest was fascinated and frightened.

“Then you do not love me?” he said with a constrained smile, “and I am a fool?”

“Love you!” she repeated. “Love you,” she continued, bowing her brown head over her hanging arms and clasped hands. “What then has brought me to this? Oh,” she said suddenly, again seizing him by his two arms, and holding him from her with a half-prudish, half-passionate gesture, “why could you not have left things as they were; why could we not have met in the same old way we used to meet, when I was so foolish and so happy? Why could you spoil that one dream I have clung to? Why didn’t you leave me those few days of my wretched life when I was weak, silly, vain, but not the unhappy woman I am now. You were satisfied to sit beside me and talk to me then. You respected my secret, my reserve. My God! I used to think you loved me as I loved you—for THAT! Why did you break your promise and follow me here? I believed you the first day we met, when you said there was no wrong in my listening to you; that it should go no further; that you would never seek to renew it without my consent. You tell me I don’t love you, and I tell you now that we must part, that frightened as I was, foolish as I was, that day was the first day I had ever lived and felt as other women live and feel. If I ran away from you then it was because I was running away from my old self too. Don’t you understand me? Could you not have trusted me as I trusted you?”

“I broke my promise only when you broke yours. When you would not meet me I followed you here, because I loved you.”

“And that is why you must leave me now,” she said, starting from his outstretched arms again. “Do not ask me why, but go, I implore you. You must leave this town to-night, to-morrow will be too late.”

He cast a hurried glance around him, as if seeking to gather some reason for this mysterious haste, or a clue for future identification. He saw only the Sabbath-sealed cupboards, the cold white china on the dresser, and the flicker of the candle on the partly-opened glass transom above the door. “As you wish,” he said, with quiet sadness. “I will go now, and leave the town to-night; but”—his voice struck its old imperative note—“this shall not end here, Lulu. There will be a next time, and I am bound to win you yet, in spite of all and everything.”

She looked at him with a half-frightened, half-hysterical light in her eyes. “God knows!”

“And you will be frank with me then, and tell me all?”

“Yes, yes, another time; but go now.” She had extinguished the candle, turned the handle of the door noiselessly, and was holding it open. A faint light stole through the dark passage. She drew back hastily. “You have left the front door open,” she said in a frightened voice. “I thought you had shut it behind me,” he returned quickly. “Good night.” He drew her towards him. She resisted slightly. They were for an instant clasped in a passionate embrace; then there was a sudden collapse of the light and a dull jar. The front door had swung to.

With a desperate bound she darted into the passage and through the hall, dragging him by the hand, and threw the front door open. Without, the street was silent and empty.

“Go,” she whispered frantically.

Demorest passed quickly down the steps and disappeared. At the same moment a voice came from the banisters of the landing above. “Who’s there?”

“It’s I, mother.”

“I thought so. And it’s like Edward to bring you and sneak off in that fashion.”

Mrs. Blandford gave a quick sigh of relief. Demorest’s flight had been mistaken for her husband’s habitual evasion. Knowing that her mother would not refer to the subject again, she did not reply, but slowly mounted the dark staircase with an assumption of more than usual hesitating precaution, in order to recover her equanimity.

The clocks were striking eleven when she left her mother’s house and re-entered her own. She was surprised to find a light burning in the kitchen, and Ezekiel, their hired man, awaiting her in a dominant and nasal key of religious and practical disapprobation. “Pity you wern’t tu hum afore, ma’am, considerin’ the doins that’s goin’ on in perfessed Christians’ houses arter meetin’ on the Sabbath Day.”

“What’s the difficulty now, Ezekiel?” said Mrs. Blandford, who had regained her rigorous precision once more under the decorous security of her own roof.

“Wa’al, here comes an entire stranger axin for Squire Blandford. And when I tells he warn’t tu hum—”

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