Ewing's Lady Part 23

Challenged thus directly, he felt shame at the thought of confession equally direct. He would come to it only by winding ways, a.s.serting at first that there was no trouble; then that the trouble was but a little one; and insisting at last that, though the trouble was great, it might have been greater.

Her eyes beat upon him insistently while she drove him to these admissions. Then she was eager with attention while he compelled himself to details. He told of his two weeks' humiliation at the school, not sparing himself, confessing his lack of power, and the pain this discovery had cost him. When he had finished, with a self-belittling shrug, she sat silent, bending forward, her hands loosely clasped, her eyes fixed away from him.

Now that it was over he felt a sudden lightening of his mood, a swift consciousness of reliance on the woman, a foreknowledge that her words would profit him. At last she brought her eyes upon him and cut to the heart of his woe with a single stroke.

"The thing is nothing in itself." He drew a long breath of relief. "It's in the way you take it. If it weakens you, it's bad. If it strengthens you, it's good. Call the thing 'failure' if you like--but what has it done to you?"

"Why, of course"--he broke off to laugh under her waiting look--"of course I'm still in the race. I see now that I haven't really doubted myself at all." He looked at her with sudden sharpness. "I'd be ashamed to doubt myself before you." He sprang to his feet in the excitement of this discovery and stood alertly before her.

"It doesn't mean anything, does it?" he went on quickly. "You believe in me?"

She laughed defensively. "I believe in you now. You look so much less like a whipped schoolboy."

"I won't forget again. That school isn't for me. I can do things those poor charcoal dusters won't do for years yet. I know that. Baldwin said they'd spoil me if I wasn't stubborn, and I _was_ stubborn--I am. You believe I'm stubborn, don't you?"

She smiled a.s.surance. "You have it--can you use it?"

"You'll see!" He sat down, continuing almost apologetically, "I worried more about the effect on others than on myself. It was that threw me down, a fear that other people might think I was some pretentious fool who had come here to get over big things and stumbled at the first little one. I was deathly afraid of hurting other people."

His eyes had been steadily upon hers with an under-current of consciousness for what he would have called the "queerness" of her look, a baffling look that hinted of many things--of sympathy, consternation, rejoicing, even of embarra.s.sment, and yet it had not distinctly been any one of these, so quick had been the play of light in her eyes to the moment they fell before his.

She released her breath with a sound like a sigh, as if she had been holding it, and there was another look in her eyes when she at last raised them to his, one that he could not read, save that it was wholly serious and, he felt, peculiarly a woman's look.

"I am sure," she began, "that no one--no one you consider in this way, could think less of you for a failure. You ought to know that. I want you to know it." She rose from her chair and stepped to the table with a little shrug, turning over the leaves of a magazine, her back toward him. At last she turned her head only, looking at him over one shoulder and speaking with a laughing, reckless impatience.

"Oh, fail--fail--fail as often as you like--fail a hundred times and then--fail." He felt his cheeks burning under her vehemence. She turned about, facing him squarely.

"Have I said enough? Do you know what I think of failures now?"

He rose and stood before her. "You don't know what you've done for me.

You don't know--" Again came that crude impulse to take her in his arms.

It left him feeling like a criminal. As if she had discerned this she resumed her seat, speaking quickly.

"Go back to that studio and do things. Do them your own way. It's a better way for you than any they can teach you, and the next time----"

"The next time I have a h.e.l.l----"

"--a h.e.l.l of doubt--don't wait--come to me." She rose from her chair.

"You don't know all this has meant to me," he said feelingly as she gave him her hand.

"Good night!" And though the gray eyes were hidden from his, there was the look in them of one who knows more than she is thought to know.

As Ewing went out the man was admitting the younger Teevan, who asked for Mrs. Laithe. Ewing wished it had been the father. He had much of good to tell the little man now.

Neither Mrs. Laithe nor Teevan spoke of Ewing after their greeting, though each was so busy in thought of him that their talk was scant and aimless for the first five minutes. Alden Teevan was brought back to her at length by noticing the drawn, tired look of her face, for the sparkle that Ewing had left there was gone.

"Nell, you look done up. I'm no alarmist, but you really need to be frightened. What is it you're doing to take you down so--the same old round? Is it a visiting guild now, or the Comforters of the Worthy Poor, or just amateur nursing of sin, sickness, and death?"

She smiled wanly.

"The same old round, Alden. I can't keep away from it when I am here. I know it so well. No one could keep away who knew it well."

"Futile, futile, futile! Are you equal to a revolution?"

"More's the pity, no. And I've no time for one. I've a whole family of consumptives on my hands at this moment, father, mother, two girls and a boy."

"And you wear yourself out over a few minor effects like that, instead of going at the cause. You may save one or two of those people--none of them of any value, individually; while the same energy put to the root of the evil might save thousands--and they _are_ of value in the ma.s.s.

Think me calloused if you like, but that's mere common sense economy of effort. You and I--our cla.s.s--make them live as they do, and we grow maudlin over it and take them a little soup and many tracts. But we won't remit our t.i.thes. We keep them down to breed more misery for the exercise of our little philanthropic fads. I'm radical, you see."

She turned her head away with a hand wave that seemed to dismiss an argument familiar and outworn.

"I know--but I must do what I can."

He faced her with a sudden insistent energy.

"Come away, Nell--come farther off. You're too close to the ugly things now--you lose the perspective. Come away--and come with me, won't you, Nell? Come away and live. I must say it--I must ask it--come!"

He read the inexorable in the lift of her head.

"I understand, Alden--and I thank you--but no." She glanced across at him and continued more lightly, "I wasn't meant to go far off--to go above timber line, as Mr. Ewing would say."

He felt bitterness rising in him at her mention of the name, but he laughed it away.

"You'll always do the hardest thing, Nell. I know that. But I--well, one of the old heathen--Herac.l.i.tus, wasn't it?--remarked that the a.s.s, after all, would have his thistles rather than much fine gold."

She laughed. "Dad would say, the more a.s.s he, if he wouldn't."

"I know--we'd rather have our own particular thistles, each of us. But to live a day or two before we die, Nell! Come with me--stop trying to mount the whirlwind. You'll only be thrown."

Again she shook her head, and gently shaped "No!" with her lips. It was too unemotionally decisive to warrant of any further urging, and he became silent, with something of pain in his face that her eye caught.

"I'm sorry, Alden--I've never liked you better--but I'd rather you didn't ask."

"You wouldn't have come before, would you, Nell--three months ago?" And she answered "No" again, very quickly.

"I must play my little game out in my own way," she continued. "I must stay beside some one--beside people--who still have heart for trying."

"Someone, Nell?"

She caught her lip.

"Everyone who has fresh hope and stubbornness in defeat."

"If you'd let me, Nell--" There was the note of real pleading in his tone.

"No, Alden."

"Friends, though?" he queried, seeming at last convinced.