His thought ran to Mrs. Laithe"s brother, who had come to town the week before, bronzed and bearded and violent with enthusiasm for his Western life. He decided that a talk with Bartell would be tonic to his mood; the bare mention of familiar names and places would hearten him--of the Wimmenuche and Bar-7, Old Baldy and Dry Fork. And perhaps he had seen Ben lately; the two might even have driven down to Pagosa together.
And it would be an excuse for seeing her. For two months he had sought her only thus, with something he could hold in his mind as an excuse, for he was abashed by that nameless thing that troubled her, and troubled, as well, the little man who had meant so much to him--for Teevan, when the brandy was low, continued to speak of women.
He walked quickly round to the house in Ninth Street, where he asked for Bartell. But only Mrs. Laithe was at home. This embarra.s.sed him, great as was his solicitude for her. She had sought his confidence more than once of late, but he could not tell her of doubts only half defined, of fears vague to absurdity, of anxieties that might well be baseless. He thought that now he could have talked, finding her alone, but for once she seemed rather curiously preoccupied. They sat together in the library with only a half light, the two windows opened for random breezes. Suddenly, as her face was toward him, dim though the light was, he caught the look that had troubled him so hauntingly in the spring. He knew that look now; it was the look he had seen on his father"s face in the last year of his life--the look of a spirit divesting itself of the flesh.
"You _are_ ill," he said, trying to speak lightly under his sudden alarm. "Let me have a better look at you." He turned the light to a full blaze. Her wonted paleness was warmed to a sinister flush about the eyes and the upper face, and, though her eyes flashed bravely at him in denial, the bones were sharp above her hollowed cheeks, and her once rounded chin had become lean. She shivered as she spoke.
"I"m a little exhausted by the heat; nothing more. Lower the light, please. I don"t care to be studied just now."
"But I know you"re not well. You ought to go off some place. Get out to pasture at once. You"ve been "over-packed," kept too long on the trail."
"You, too? They all say it. It"s so easy to say."
"And easy to do."
"It"s hard to do, and yet I"m afraid I must. I"ve felt that I ought to be here with my charges--you have been one of them." She brightened with a sudden inspiration. "You need rest yourself. Your face shows it.
You"ve been depressed a long time, you are worried now. Let us both rest. My aunt up at Kensington has wanted me there--the aunt my sister is with. She"d be glad to have you as well. It"s a big house and she likes young people. There! Will you go with me?"
She rose, waiting, electrified, for his answer. Instantly he felt that he wished this above all things. There he could find himself, fortify his soul for any number of Teevans--perhaps fortify her own.
"I"ll go," he answered heartily. "It will be good for us both."
She fell into her chair with a long "Ah!" then she gave the purring little laugh, like that of a child made happy. "We shall go for two blessed weeks and forget this place with its wretched tangles."
"I"m your man!" he said, rising and taking her hand with his old boyish enthusiasm. "Can we start early?"
She kept her hand in his while she laughed again. "The train goes from the Grand Central at one. I"ll wire Aunt Joyce."
Outside Ewing met Bartell, but he did not talk of the San Juan.
"You must see to your sister," he said. "She looks the way my father did. You ought to get her out of here. She"s going off for two weeks, but that won"t set her right. Go look at her!"
Bartell found his sister where Ewing had left her.
"Well, Nell, how is it now? What did Birley say?"
She stirred impatiently in her chair. "He wouldn"t commit himself. He told me to rest away from here for two weeks and then come back to see a specialist he"d send me to, a man who knows--such things."
"I just met Ewing--he spoke of how badly you look. I"m worried, Nell.
You"re not going to be left here."
"I must tell you something, dear--oh, a ghastly joke, if ever there was one: You know that one death trap of a tenement I"ve had so much trouble with----"
"Where all those consumptives were? Yes."
"They"ve died there like sheep. I had it inspected--I wanted to have the owner compelled to build it over or something, but we always found that the law had been cunningly met with--not the spirit of it, but the letter. The airshafts and drains were bad enough to kill, but not bad enough to hurt the owner. Yesterday I determined to find out who the owner was, to make a personal appeal. I was willing to buy the place myself."
She stopped in a fit of coughing, a dry, hard, tearing cough that left her exhausted.
"Well, Sis?"
"I went to the agents--this will make you cry or laugh; I did both--and I found they were my agents--the house was my house."
"Poor Sis!"
"One of those d.i.c.k left--_mine_, you understand. I"ve been spending the blood of those people, eating, wearing, amusing myself with it."
"Yes, and going down there to get caught in the same trap. I don"t see anything funny about that."
"Alden Teevan would. I must tell him of it--my own dungeon closing in on me."
"Nonsense! You"re morbid, girl. Tenements have got to be dirty. Trinity Church itself has a fine bunch of the worst kind."
"I"m not a church, dear. This tenement is coming down. I gave orders to-day."
"Well, you stay away from it. You"re in bad shape, my girl."
"Two weeks at Kensington will put me right."
"Two weeks nothing! See here, if you act up, I"ll rope you and hustle you out to the ranch and close herd you there for about six months."
She smiled weakly at him.
"I shall be all right, dear--but you can help me upstairs now."
"Too tired for a roof garden?"
"I"m afraid so."
"Or a broiled lobster?"
"Not to-night, dear."
He helped her up the stairs, alternately scolding her for her weakness and protesting that broiled lobsters were all that kept him from forgetting the existence of Manhattan.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE LITTLE LAND
Ewing found Kensington like a village dropped from the clouds of stageland, its wide, gra.s.s-bordered streets arched with giant elms and flanked by square old houses, drowsing behind their flower gardens and green lawns. The house to which he went was equally a stage house. Only in that land of pretense had he seen its like: a big, square, gray house, its drab slate roof and red chimneys all but hidden by the elms that towered above it like mammoth feather dusters, its wide piazzas screened from the street by a h.o.a.ry hedge of lilac. The house seemed to drowse in a comfortable lethargy, confident of the rect.i.tude of builders long dead who had roughhewn its beams and joined them with wooden pins before a day of nails. In Ewing"s own room, far up between the hunched shoulders of the house, the windows gave closely on one of the elms, so that he could hear its whispers night and morning from his canopied bed of four posts. The other rooms were broad and low of ceiling, and there were long, high-backed sofas, slim-legged chairs, and tables of mahogany or rosewood, desks, cabinets, and highboys of an outlandish grace, that charmed with hints of a mellowed past--of past overlaying past in sleeping strata.
The woman whose house this was seemed to Ewing to be its true spirit.
She, too, drowsed anciently, a thing of old lace and lavender, yet of a certain gentle and antique sprightliness, of cheeks preserving a hint of time-worn pink, mellowed like the sc.r.a.p of her flowered wedding dress shut between the leaves of an "Annual" half a century old.
And Ewing found in the house, too, the girl who had once talked half an hour with him by an exigent tea table. She had been a thing of shy restraint then, showing with an almost old-fashioned simplicity against her background of townish sophistication. Now he found her demurely modern in this huddle of mellowed relics. She it was who interpreted for him the antique mysteries of house and town. She paraded before him the treasures of her aunt, from the pewter plates and silver-gilt candelabra to camphor-scented brocades long hidden in cedar chests in the ghostly attic. But she performed her office with irreverence; as when, in the attic"s gloom, she held the festal gown of some departed great-grandmother before her own robust figure to show how tiny were grandmothers in those days, for the yoke but a little more than half spanned her breadth as she smirked above it in scorn of its narrowness.