The next day proved no better. A cold drizzle of rain had set in, and the mist from the river and the mist from the ocean seemed to come in from both directions and envelop the city. Wherever she went, people were cross and kept her waiting a long time, often standing, so that she grew footsore and weary beyond expression, and her appearance became draggled and forlorn. She had to invest one of her few dollars in an umbrella, and the light serge coat that she wore was scarcely thick enough to keep her from shivering. The evil thought came to her that she had been a fool to give up her money for another who was doubtless fully able to pay his own bills.
Yet even in her extremity she was not sorry for what she had done. Perhaps she had not done wisely as some men count wisdom, but how could she have done otherwise? She had to get the specialist. The outcome had proved that Benedict would not have lived without the operation. And she could not go away without paying the doctor and leaving something for their board and trouble. Doubtless Benedict would return and try to do something also. That was right, for she had left but a small pittance for such royal reception as had been given them all these days. Besides, there were the clothes she was wearing. They were not many, but they were worth far more than the money she had left. And so she dismissed the thought.
That night she went to the YWCA and took a room, but the next day and the next brought no more success in securing a position. Now there stalked beside her grim Want, with menace in his mien, and he waited for her outside every office she entered looking for work. It seemed incredible that with so many positions as there were, every one was filled before she got there or for some reason she would not do. Perhaps the draggled condition of her garments had somewhat to do with her losing some of them. At one place it was necessary that she speak and read Spanish; another wanted references, which of course she could not give without waiting to write to former employers; a third would take only an elderly woman; a fourth had decided to take a man, and so on. She tramped many weary miles and used an incredible number of precious nickels taking long rides in the subways and elevated trains.
At last one night she was sure of getting a position to take care of three little children at the seashore. But she lost it because she didn't have caps and aprons to wear, and the new mistress would not advance the money for them. She came back to her room utterly discouraged with just twenty-five cents between herself and absolute want.
Fifteen cents must go for supper. She had had nothing all day but a glass of milk and some crackers. She must eat now or give up and die. Tomorrow her next week's room rent was due, and she had nothing with which to pay it, and so she must move out. There would be ten cents left to get breakfast. Five of it would buy a glass of milk and a tiny envelope of crackers; with the other five she could telephone to the Waldorf Astoria to Mrs. Patton. She had come to it at last! There was nothing else to be done.
Sitting sadly in a corner of the big dining room with the chatter of dishes and conversation going on all about her, she ate her fifteen-cent supper and tried to be thankful for it, but hunger had gone beyond itself, and it seemed almost impossible to swallow anything. Perhaps she ought to have taken only a glass of milk again when she was so tired and weak and saved the other ten cents. When she had forced down the last crumb, she went out to a telephone booth and called up the Waldorf Astoria. She had meant to wait until morning, but she concluded that when one had a disagreeable thing to do, it was just as well to get it over with at once, and there seemed to be no chance of anything better turning up by morning. She had exhausted her list of possibilities.
After much waiting, she got the number and asked for Mrs. Adelia Patton. After another long delay and some explanations, she was told that Mrs. Patton had left the day before for California and expected to be gone all winter. Yes, she had gone with a party of friends. Yes, she had a companion, a Miss Denworthy, who used to be with her.
Gail hung up the receiver and sat back in the little booth, faint with dismay. This was the last straw. What could she do? Her situation seemed hopeless.
After a time, she mustered courage to creep up to her room and throw herself on the bed. She was too tired to weep. She just lay there and breathed, every breath a slow sob. It seemed to her that the end had come. This was no test. This was just plain being up against it. Had she done wrong? Ought she to have kept her money when another was in need and she the only one by to help? Ought she to have stayed down there till that young man came back and let him pay her for the things she had done for him?
Her soul came to itself with this thought. No, never! A thousand times rather die of starvation than have that experience reduced to dollars and cents. No, she would compel herself to forget her misery and go to sleep now, and in the morning she would go out and force a living from the world. It was always darkest before the morning, and surely, she thought, life could be no darker for her than it was at this moment. The morning must dawn bright; she would make things come her way. Was it not her courage that Benedict had praised over and over again? She must have courage now.
So at last she fell asleep.
Chapter 10
When Clinton Benedict started on a sea voyage on the Baltic, he had a definite purpose in mind. He wanted to get away by himself and think. Matters in his life had become so perplexing that he felt a crisis had arrived. He was not altogether sure of himself. He wanted to get away from everything that was distracting and find himself again and know where he stood.
When Dorothy Stanford first crossed his life, he had thought her the most beautiful and accomplished young woman he had ever seen and had turned to her as directly and frankly as a flower turns to the sun.
She had smiled upon him with that subtle, dreamy smile of hers, looking at him tantalizingly from half-drooped lashes; gazing admiringly up into his face when they were alone as if he were all the world to her; averting her eyes with a long sweeping look and a turn of her head, or a coquettish appeal to some other man when in company. At first, he had thought this charming, as if their friendship were a thing too sacred to flaunt before the world, and he had cherished her words and tones and glances as if they were jewels, every one more brilliant than the last. But of late her attitude had grown torturing. She was always slipping away with someone else, always having some beautiful excuse afterward, with that flowerlike droop of her slender neck and head, just where the light could catch the polish of her soft dusky hair that set her face off like a misty frame. He could but forgive her when she drooped her head like that, showing the tiny curl on her white neck where the hair was drawn upward. Dorothy Stanford had been canny enough to keep her own beautiful hair and a certain graceful manner not common among modern girls. She knew the charm of being unique. If she had copied other girls, Benedict would not have looked twice at her. She knew this and was always careful to make much of her sweet old-fashioned pose when in his presence. It never occurred to him in those days that Miss Dorothy knew the value to a hair's breadth of that curl and attitude.
She certainly was a most popular girl in Washington, and her admirers flocked after her everywhere. It seemed selfish in a man to insist upon so young and beautiful a girl tying herself down to him. She told him sweetly that she did not think it was right for her to make so momentous a decision at once. She was young and just out, and it wasn't fair either to him or to herself. What could a man say to a thing like that? It seemed true. Yet he could not go away and leave her, for when he wavered from the deepest devotion and tried to forget her charming face, she called him to her side with one of those adorable smiles and made him think she was the one and only woman in the world, and that in her secret heart she worshipped him.
There came a time when he could no longer rest on such a basis. He had insisted on some understanding between them, and she had reluctantly consented to an engagement but declared it must be kept secret for a time, that she would not have her good times spoiled so soon, and when he tenderly reproached her and told her that if she really loved him her good times wo
uld be just the beginning, she pouted and called him cross. And then she would be so adorable with her shy upward glances and her thrilling smiles and caressing words that he would forgive her again.
It had been a trying summer. They had been at various seaside and mountain resorts, at house parties galore, and had seen much of each other, yet always at a distance or in a large company, and Dorothy had managed it so that she was far oftener seen with other men than with himself. Moreover, there had been numerous occasions recently when she had not kept her promises to him and had gone instead with someone else when he had been waiting for her. She always had a plausible excuse and looked so sweet in giving it that he would relent and excuse her to himself, and sometimes even look tender over her childlike innocence in not knowing that she was hurting him. She seemed a little, gentle, tender thing to be protected and loved and forgiven always because she was of different clay from men, just a little soft thistledown butterfly thing that must not be troubled with thinking about big questions like love and honor. She was pure and blameless, of course. He could not think of sin or blame in connection with her.
One night she had tried him beyond endurance, looking into the eyes of a man whom he had warned her against. And finally she went off with this man during a time she had promised to himself. In his very face she did it while he stood with folded arms and sad reproachful eyes, looking at her as sternly as he could bring himself to look at one he thought he loved. She had tried to smile it away and wave a good-bye to him, but when she saw his face there came a look of Eve turned out of Eden into her eyes, and thinking of it afterward, there was no word that he could use to describe her but slinking. It seemed that she had slunk ashamed away from him.
At midnight when he walked in the lovely grounds of the mansion where they were staying, he came upon the two standing in the moonlight, the man's arm caressingly about her, her eyes looking up into his face.
Benedict had a gentle reasoning talk with her, and all her excuses were prettily made, with a tear here and a smile there, yet somehow the memory of that moonlight vision would not be dispelled, and her words seemed emptier than usual. Their relations had become more and more strained, she insisting that it was her right to do as she pleased at least until her year was up, and he was troubled and perplexed. Could it be that he did not love her after all?
It shocked him that her power over him was waning. He began to find himself questioning whether her excuses were always sincere. When he tried to look back and recall their conversations, there seemed but little substance to them, and yet of so fine a fiber was the man that it hurt him that he harbored even for a second such thoughts of her he thought he loved.
Three times he tried to get away from it all by deliberately refusing invitations where he knew she was to be, thinking thus to leave her free to go her way. But always she managed to call him to her side so that he was not long away. Once he went after he had refused an invitation because she asked him to do it for her sake. He wondered why she wished it afterward. It could not be just that she might have more to give her admiration. He would not think that of her. And when she set herself to please him, he would fling his doubts to the winds and trust her in the face of everything.
He grew grave when others were merry, and she rallied him on his solemnity. He hunted out the grandmothers and the little children at the house parties and gave them a good time. In this sane atmosphere his moral perspective cleared, and he was able to see things more rationally once more. Dorothy Stanford lost some of her glamour and appeared, in bald simplicity, a selfish, silly, pretty, empty-headed little flirt. Only his strong sense of loyalty still held him to her. He began to long to get away from it all somewhere, regretting that he had arranged to be absent from his business for the entire summer.
At last he took a decisive step. A short sea voyage seemed to offer him the quiet and leisure he desired. He left with very brief farewells the summer resort where Dorothy Stanford had taken up her court for a couple of weeks and set sail.
During the quiet and the beauty of that first evening on shipboard, he had sat apart from the throng of travelers, avoiding all acquaintances, and looking off to sea trying to get a comprehensive view of himself. He watched the heaving green-blue sea turn into purple with golden flecks. The horizon line of crimson and gold was rent with heavy thunder lines of blue and gray that betokened a storm. He saw the stars come out and the silver moon come up from somewhere behind the world and make a path of silver across the purple dark. He felt the infinite beauty about him. Before he went to his stateroom, he had fully made up his mind to break with Dorothy Stanford, and to do it before his return to her world. He knew by many experiences that if he tried to break with her face-to-face, she would find some way to hold him as she had done many times before. Now he was convinced she did not care for him, almost convinced that he did not care for her. For as he had sat looking off at the vast, heaving sea in its panoramic beauty, his soul had seemed to grow large and strong, and something that had bound him seemed to break and set him free. Dorothy Stanford's arts and wiles dwindled away into trifling toys, and life looked full and fair before him. There were things to live for if a woman had proved false, woman of course meaning one particular woman who, for the time being, represented all to his mind. When he went to sleep that night, it was with no feeling of loss or longing for the trifling girl who had played with him so long. He had resolved to make his life big with other things and leave women out of consideration entirely.
When, therefore, Gail Desmond in the wild panic of the catastrophe dawned upon his startled mind and gave one look out of her clear eyes into his and asked in that cool, quiet voice, "What shall I do?" he was startled even in that stressful moment to find that a woman still had power over him. Of course he must help a woman. That it meant the risk of his own life was nothing. He had never been a self-centered man, nor a coward, and these days he was not holding his life very dear anyway. Maybe the biggest, broadest thing he could do with it was to lay it down to save even a woman. Women were more helpless than men. They could not help being what they were, perhaps. They used their arts to get what they wanted because they had no other way of obtaining their desires. They were helpless, and therefore a strong man must help them in a time of need.
That was his last conscious thought before things got too strenuous for him to do anything but act.
When he awoke after long, dark, smothering hours of mental distress, he found himself the weak and helpless one, lying in a strange bed. And a woman, an unknown helpless woman, was taking care of him and being eyes and ears and voice and hands and feet to him. He looked on her face and lived in the light of her eyes. Gradually he acquired the knowledge that this helpless woman with the wonderful true eyes and the pure face had saved his life. Somewhere back in those hours of stress and storm and wild waves he had a memory of soft arms and his head pillowed tenderly, but he could not be sure that it was anything but a hallucination. He used to lie and watch her in those slow days of convalescence when he seemed to be swinging on a hair between heaven and earth. It seemed to him that all that kept him from going out entirely was her smile. It seemed as though he had never known a real woman before, or perhaps this one was an angel. She grew into his soul from day to day as if she fitted there. Dorothy Stanford was as if she had never been. The very memory of her had dropped away.
When he came back into life again far enough to really think and remember more than vague impressions, he thought of Dorothy Stanford. He was amazed at himself that he could ever have thought he cared for her when all the time there was in the world this wonderful, tender, beautiful dream woman who moved about him with a sort of uncanny sense of what he needed, whose spirit signaled his through smiles and the lighting of her eyes at every moment of the day or night when he was waking and needed her.
Later, when moral sense and honor returned to guard the way, he knew that just as soon as he was well he would find Dorothy Stanford and set himself free from any co
bweb chains that bound him. He knew now beyond a suspicion of a doubt that he did not love her, and never had.
After all, his whole mind had been so taken up with Gail Desmond during those beautiful days of recovery that Dorothy Stanford became a mere infinitesimal speck on the horizon of his happiness. A speck that must be forever wiped off someday if she did not disappear of herself, but so small a speck that she was seldom noticed. In fact, if it had not been for the man's fine sense of honor, there would have been no real reason to feel himself bound in the least by a girl who had so plainly violated all possible limits of honor in her treatment of him. And why? He was forced to admit now that it seemed to be because of her love for playing with men and subjecting them to her charms.
The very morning that the wind took a part in the story and flung the society column straight into Clinton Benedict's hands with Dorothy Stanford's face looking guilefully up to him, he had decided when he first woke up that that day should see a letter written to the girl that would make her understand plainly that from this time forth she was nothing to him. But when he read the heading of the column under her picture, "Dorothy Stanford Betrothed to Arthur Hanson Briggs," his heart leaped up with joy, for Dorothy had saved him the trouble of writing the letter. He read the paragraph about the announcement of the engagement with growing delight, laughing aloud as he took in the reference to himself as drowned. Then, for a second, his impulse would have made him turn to the girl beside him and tell her of his great love for her. But again the honor that held him to a fine straight course throughout his life put out a warning hand. Better go at once and see Dorothy Stanford, and then he could come back to Gail with a clear record and tell her all.
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