The Argonauts of North Liberty

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"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like a monumental tablet over dead ashes, had its functions superseded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--"

"Not at home?" interrupted Mrs. Blandford, with a slight start. "I left
him here."

"Mebbee so, but folks nowadays don't 'pear to keer much whether they
break the Sabbath or not, trapsen' raound town in and arter meetin'
hours, ez if 'twor gin'ral tranin' day--and hez gone out agin."

"Go on," said Mrs. Blandford, curtly.

"Wa'al, the stranger sez, sez he, 'Show me the way to the stables,' sez
he, and without taken' no for an answer, ups and meanders through the
hall, outer the kitchen inter the yard, ez if he was justice of the
peace; and when he gets there he sez, 'Fetch out his hoss and harness
up, and be blamed quick about it, and tell Ned Blandford that Dick
Demorest hez got to leave town to-night, and ez ther ain't a blamed
puritanical shadbelly in this hull town ez would let a hoss go on hire
Sunday night, he guesses he'll hev to borry his.' And afore I could
say Jack Robinson, he tackles the hoss up and drives outer the yard,
flinging this two-dollar-and-a-half-piece behind him ez if I wur a
Virginia slave and he was John C. Calhoun hisself. I'd a chucked it
after him if it hadn't been the Lord's Day, and it mout hev provoked
disturbance."

"Mr. Demorest is worldly, but one of Edward's old friends," said Mrs.
Blandford, with a slight kindling of her eyes, "and he would not have
refused to aid him in what might be an errand of grace or necessity. You
can keep the money, Ezekiel, as a gift, not as a wage. And go to bed. I
will sit up for Mr. Blandford."

She passed out and up the staircase into her bedroom, pausing on her way
to glance into the empty back parlor and take the lamp from the table.
Here she noticed that her husband had evidently changed his clothes
again and taken a heavier overcoat from the closet. Removing her own
wraps she again descended to the lower apartment, brought out the volume
of sermons, placed it and the lamp in the old position, and with
her abstracted eyes on the page fell into her former attitude. Every
suggestion of the passionate, half-frenzied woman in the kitchen of the
house only four doors away, had vanished; one would scarcely believe she
had ever stirred from the chair in which she had formally received
her husband two hours before. And yet she was thinking of herself and
Demorest in that kitchen.

His prompt and decisive response to her appeal, as shown in this last
bold and characteristic action, relieved, while it half piqued her. But
the overruling destiny which had enabled her to bring him from his hotel
to her mother's house unnoticed, had protected them while there, had
arrested a dangerous meeting between him and herself and her husband in
her own house, impressed her more than all. It imparted to her a hideous
tranquillity born of the doctrines of her youth--Predestination! She
reflected with secret exultation that her moral resolution to fly from
him and her conscientiously broken promise had been the direct means of
bringing him there; that step by step circumstances not in themselves
evil or to be combated had led her along; that even her husband and
mother had felt it their duty to assist towards this fateful climax! If
Edward had never kept up his worldly friendship, if she had never been
restricted and compassed in her own; if she had ever known the freedom
of other girls,--all this might not have happened. She had been elected
to share with Demorest and her husband the effects of their ungodliness.
She was no longer a free agent; what availed her resolutions? To
Demorest's imperious hope, she had said, "God knows." What more could
she say? Her small red lips grew white and compressed; her face rigid,
her eyes hollow and abstracted; she looked like the genius of asceticism
as she sat there, grimly formulating a dogmatic explanation of her
lawless and unlicensed passion.

The wind had risen to a gale without, and stirred even the sealed
sepulchre of the fireplace with dull rumblings and muffled moans. At
times the hot-air drum in the corner seemed to expand as with some
pent-up emotion. Strange currents of air crossed the empty room like the
passage of unseen spirits, and she even fancied she heard whispers at
the window. This caused her to rise and open it, when she found that the
sleet had given way to a dry feathery snow that was swarming through
the slits of the shutter; a faint reflection from the already whitened
fences glimmered in the panes. She shut the window hastily, with a
little shiver of cold. Where was Demorest in this storm? Would it
stop him? She thought with pride now of the dominant energy that had
frightened her, and knew it would not. But her husband?--what kept him?
It was twelve o'clock; he had seldom stayed out so late before. During
the first half hour of her reflections she had been relieved by his
absence; she had even believed that he had met Demorest in the town,
and was not alarmed by it, for she knew that the latter would avoid
any further confidence, and cut short any return to it. But why had not
Edward returned? For an instant the terrible thought that something had
happened, and that they might both return together, took possession
of her, and she trembled. But no; Demorest, who had already taken such
extreme measures, could not consistently listen to any suggestion for
delay. As her only danger lay in Demorest's presence, the absence of her
husband caused her more undefinable uneasiness than actual alarm.