CHAPTER XXVII
“I’M GOING BACK TO JOE”
“HE’S in a bad way with pneumonia,” Paddock explained as he met Wayne at the door. “He crept in here this morning before daylight with a high fever and I put him to bed and got a nurse for him. He’s been out of his head this afternoon and he has asked for you repeatedly. It is kind of you to come. Miss Morley came to help with the cooking class and she’s with him now, to relieve the nurse for an hour. Will you come up?”
Joe lay on Paddock’s own bed. The room was darkened and out of the shadows Jean rose to meet them.
“He’s asleep now, but he has been asking for you. He said he had something he wanted to say to you.”
“I will wait,” said Wayne.
He talked with Paddock a few minutes in the hall; there was little question of Joe’s recovery, Paddock said, but both lungs were affected and his temperature soared high. There were many sick in the town, and many unemployed required help. Paddock’s smile had never been so sad but he wore the air of a man of affairs and the joy of his work was in his dark, homely face.
“Make yourself at home. If you can stay a little while it would please the boy, if he should know you.”
The sick man’s harsh breathing alone disturbed the quiet of the room. Wayne sat near the door, and it was some time before the figure on the bed and Jean’s outline beyond, her hand resting lightly on the sick man’s wrist, became clear to him. The ticking of a watch on the table at Jean’s side reached Wayne fitfully; and once when she bent down to see the time her head was caught in the lamp’s glow, and the purity of her profile and her sweet, womanly solicitude touched him. He thought of her rather than of the stricken man who lay between them.
Not since those dark days long ago when his mother lay ill in her familiar chamber had he looked upon sickness. He recalled those days now—the shielded lamp, the gloom, the silence, the waiting. And then he recurred to his interview with Joe in the garage. That had been a day of events, surely! And much had happened since. He experienced a pang of guilt at his neglect of Joe, who had made the long and toilsome journey to Ironstead to find refuge with Paddock. Life, clearly, was a mixed business, an ill-rehearsed play, where no one knew his lines and where the exits and entrances were all haphazard.
The sick man stirred and tossed restlessly. Jean was at once alert, bending over him anxiously. Abruptly he began to speak, the words harsh and indistinct, breaking from him in little moans; but the sense of what he said as Wayne caught it was this:
“He can’t have you, Jean. He’s my friend, but he can’t take you away from me.... He saw your picture in my room, but he doesn’t know about us.... Don’t you be scared; I’m not goin’ to hurt you. I won’t follow you any more.... I want to go back to the hills where we came from, Jean. I want to see Golden Bridge and the place where we played when we were kids. I want to see the men with black faces comin’ out of the ground.... He’s the best friend I ever had but he can’t have you.... You go on and draw pictures of the breaker boys and the dirty Dago babies. I’ll keep away from you.... Don’t you call strikes on me, Mr. Umpire! I tell you my left arm’s all right. I’m pitchin’ the game of my life; over the plate, every one of ’em. All right, give him his base: you’re rotten, you’re rotten, I say.”
His voice died hoarsely in his throat and the room seemed quieter than ever as he ceased. The ticking of the watch rose and fell; Jean was a shadow, silent and vague as shadows are. Wayne had risen when Joe began to speak, looking down upon Jean as she knelt clasping the sick man’s hands. The nurse came softly in and heard Jean’s report of the hour.
“I will come again in the morning—or I will stay now,” said Jean.
“No; you can do nothing to-night. But to-morrow at the same hour I should be glad to have you come again.”
“I shall be here,” said Jean.
“He will be better; he will get well,” the nurse whispered, anticipating her question. “He is very strong and I’ve seen many worse cases recover.”
“He didn’t know me,” said Wayne, when he was alone with Jean in the hall.
“No—but he will be glad when they tell him afterward,” she replied, and he saw that she had been crying.
“If you are going into town you will let me go with you—please?”
“Yes; I’m going at once,” she answered indifferently.
Below they found Paddock engaged in placing cots in the assembly room.
“Boarding house burned down and I’m going to take in a few of the boys. You might lend a hand on these chairs, Craighill—pile ’em in the corner—good! And you, Miss Morley, if you’ll show me what to do with these blankets, we’ll soon have a grand dormitory.”
Cots and bedding had been brought out from town and these were opened and distributed; Wayne, glad to be doing something, did the heaviest lifting. Jean, moving about silently, unfolded and placed the blankets. Some of the men to be sheltered were already coming in, receiving Paddock’s cordial greeting as they appeared at the door.
“That will do beautifully,” beamed Paddock, surveying the lines of cots with satisfaction. “Thank you very much. Joe will be all right. He’s as hard as nails and a mere congestion of the lungs can’t hurt him particularly. Good of you to come, Craighill. Sorry I can’t give you both something to eat, but we had a fine line of hungry fellows to-day and they cleaned me out.”
The minister stepped into the crisp white night for his last words with them. He was not a deep searcher of souls, but this man and woman puzzled and interested him greatly. He noted their fine height, their vigorous, free walk; and knowing much of both their lives he was moved to pity for them.
On the long journey into the city they spoke little. Jean was preoccupied and Wayne was glad to be silent. What had Joe and Jean been to each other? Whatever the relationship it had meant much to the young man, as proved by his incoherent murmurings. Jean and Wayne had the car to themselves much of the time, but she did not speak except to answer his occasional questions.
“It is late; you will miss your dinner. If you will go to the house I can telephone Mrs. Craighill to have supper ready for you.”
“Oh, no; they will give me something at the boarding house. My grandfather is there and he will be troubled if I don’t come.”
“Mr. Gregory is here again?”
“He comes and goes. I think I ought to tell you that he is preparing to press his claim against Colonel Craighill in that Sand Creek matter. I have urged him not to, but he is old and ill and I sometimes think his mind is unsettled. I ought to take him away. As long as I’m here he has an excuse for coming. I ought to give up my work, and take him back home—to our own home at Denbeigh.”
“It’s an unfortunate matter—the whole business. My father’s interest in the Sand Creek Company is very small. He has nothing to do with the management of the company.”
“That’s where the trouble comes in. It’s not the business side of it any more; it’s the feeling grandfather has that it was a personal matter between him and your father. He insists on looking at it that way.”
“I think there’s a real claim. I will see what I can do with the officers of the company. It will be no trouble whatever,” he said, roused at the prospect of serving her.
“Please do not! I don’t think that would satisfy grandfather at all. He wants the offer of a settlement to come from Colonel Craighill. I appreciate your kind feeling about it, but please do nothing; it would not help.”
A Russian woman with a shawl wrapped round her head entered the car dragging a child of three by the hand. The little boy, planted on a seat directly opposite Jean, fixed his great, wondering eyes upon her.
“The poor little dear,” she murmured; “I’ve been wanting just that type, but now it doesn’t seem quite fair to try to catch him.”
She drew from the pocket of her long coat a small memorandum book and a lead-pencil stub and began sketching. The mother stared and frowned, not quite understanding, but Jean was all intent on the white, wistful face opposite, and Wayne, watching her, marked her earnestness, her complete absorption. She had snatched off her gloves in her haste and he picked them up and unconsciously smoothed them as he watched her hand fly over the paper. The lurching car did not trouble her; she finished one sketch and began another, tearing the first sheet from the pad and thrusting it into her pocket. Finally, she held this second attempt up and inspected it, turning it so that Wayne might see. It was his first glimpse of any of her work and he was amazed at her cleverness; her few bold strokes had brought the sad little face to paper; the folded baby hands were there, with pathos in their tiny clasp. Jean thrust it away in her coat and crossed the aisle to speak to the mother, who supplemented her scant English with smiles of appreciation as the stranger praised her child. A little later as the mother left the car Wayne dropped a silver dollar into the baby’s hand.
“You must always pay a model for sitting. What are you going to do with the sketch?”
“Oh, I have use for it. Maybe you will see it again some day.”
They transferred to another line to complete the journey to Jean’s boarding house. Wayne had expected to leave her at the door. He was surprised when she asked him in.
“I would like to see you a moment, Mr. Craighill, if you can wait.”
She turned up the gas in a dingy parlour whose shabby upholstery retained the vague conglomerate odours of boiled vegetables. The place was hot and he threw open his coat but she did not ask him to sit down. She closed the door and stood beside it, as though to emphasize the brevity of the interview.
“I must tell you something—something you have a right to know. I ought to have told you at your house the other morning, but I could not do it then. It pleased me—I may as well tell you that; it can make no difference now—I was pleased that you wanted my friendship, that you asked me to help you. It flattered me, I suppose, but I knew at once that it was all wrong. I had known from the first time you spoke to me and even after we met again at the parish house, that we must not know each other. It was all wrong, very wrong. And to-day you heard what Joe said. He was delirious and didn’t even know who we were; but what he said about me had a meaning. We were born in the same town—up there at Denbeigh. His father and mine both worked in the anthracite mines; we went to school together; I went to the high school, but Joe had to stop and go to work. When I was eighteen we ran off and were married by a minister in Scranton. I think he really loved me and I was fond of him, but I had been better educated than Joe. He was a miner, but had quit that to play baseball. He was a good player, they said, and could make more money travelling about than by working in the mines. But it was a mistake, our marrying, and I saw at once that it wouldn’t do. After three months I wrote to him while he was away that I would not live with him—that it was all ended. My grandfather got a divorce for me—I know now that was wrong, too. Joe did nothing to prevent it; but after I came to Pittsburg last fall I began meeting him, and he would follow me sometimes. He had taken it hard, poor Joe! And I was anxious to go on with my studies—that was the real trouble; and Joe didn’t know or care about those things. He used to laugh at my pictures and say they were very pretty; but he was never unkind to me. He was a good boy—a clean, upright boy; and I brushed him out of my life as you would sweep dust out of a room. It was not right—it was not right—it was not right!”
She stood rigidly against the wall, her plain, long coat thrown open and disclosing her simplest and cheapest of gowns. When she had spoken to him in his father’s library of the nobility of labour it had been with an exultance that thrilled him; she had told him this pitiful little story in hurried whispers, dry-eyed but with uplifted head.
“I am glad you told me; but you are taking it hard now because Joe is so ill. You have no right to accuse yourself; you and Joe are wholly different; your marriage was a boy-and-girl affair and utterly unfit. The law has freed you, as it should free people who make such mistakes. You have the ambition and ability to do something in the world. Joe is a good boy but he could never tiptoe up to you. You did only the right thing,” Wayne ran on glibly. “Your life is your own to do with as you like: you would have no right to throw it away or waste it.”
The unreality of a situation in which he was weighing right and wrong for another was not lost on him; and he was fully conscious that his words made no impression on her. She was intent with her own thoughts and her eyes rested upon him unseeingly. She had hinted before at reasons why they should not know each other, but he had assumed that these were chiefly his own reputation and the divergent paths to which they were born. But he knew now that she was a divorced woman; she had been the wife of a coal miner, a ball player, his own servant. These facts swept in review before him and he met them with full gaze, giving full value to every point. She was young, and they exercised on each other an attraction with which it might be possible to trifle; and yet no evil thought came into his heart. She had opened the slender book of her life to its marred page; her life, like his, had failed at the start; but into this knowledge he read a new kinship between them.
He attempted to reason her out of her position and failed.
“It was wrong; it was a great sin,” she persisted.
Suddenly he stood at her side and seized her hands.
“Jean! Jean! You are a free woman. You mean all there is in the world to me of purity and goodness and sweetness. I need you! I need you! And I believe you need me. Let us begin our lives again, Jean. I will be so good to you; I will love you so much—so much.”
But she flung open the door behind her.
“You must go,” she said, with averted head; “you must go!”
“But you are wrong; oh, you are very wrong, Jean! You care; I know you care. I want you to belong to me,” he whispered.
“I have my own duty; I see it clearly now. I have been wicked and selfish. I thought only of myself when I left Joe; and if he should die now it would be my fault, my sin.”
Her distress was great and the tears coursed down her cheeks. Then she threw up her head in the way he loved. Her lips trembled but there was no mistaking her words.
“I’m going back to Joe; I’m going back to him.”