The Helpers

CHAPTER XXXI

"She's gone to her rest, at last, poor soul, and it's happy she'd be if it wasn't for the childer."

Constance had been waiting through the long hours of the afternoon for Margaret's return from Owen David's shanty on the North Side; waiting for the summons to the death-bed of the mother of Owen David's children. She had promised to go, wherefore her heart smote her and the ready tears welled up at Margaret's announcement.

"Oh, Margaret! Why didn't you come for me!"

"'Twas no use at all, Miss Constance; 'twas her last word she said to you this morning, when she asked you to try once more with Owen for the childer's sake. When you'd gone she turned her face to the wall, and we never knew when her soul went out."

"Was Owen there?"

"He was; and it's sober he was for the first time in many a day. He took it hard; them Welsh are flighty people, anyway."

"He ought to take it hard," said Constance, with as near an approach to vindictiveness as the heart of compassion would sanction. "Has everything been done?"

Margaret nodded. "The neighbors were that kind; and it's poor hard-working people they are, too."

"I know," said Constance. She was making ready to go out, and she found her purse and counted its keepings. They were as scanty as her will to help was plenteous. Myra's check had been generous, but the askings were many, and there was no more than the sweet savor of it left. "I'm sure I don't know what Owen will do," she went on. "I suppose there isn't money enough to bury her."

Margaret had taken off her hat and jacket and she was suddenly impelled to go to work. The lounge-cover was awry, and in the straightening of it she said: —

"Don't you be worrying about that, now, Miss Constance. It was Owen himself that was giving me the money for the funeral when I was leaving."

"Owen? Where did he get it? He hasn't had a day's work for a month."

Margaret was smoothing the cover and shaking the pillows vigorously. "Sure, that's just what I was thinking" (slap, slap), "but I've his money in my pocket this blessed minute. So you just go and say a sweet word to the childer, Miss Constance, and don't you be worrying about anything."

Connie's hand was on the door-knob, but she turned with a sudden sinking of the heart, and a swift impulse that sent her across the room to Margaret's side.

"Margaret, you gave Owen that money before he gave it to you. Where did you get it?"

Margaret left off beating the pillows and slipped upon her knees to bury her face in one of them.

"I knew you'd be asking that," she sobbed, and then: "Haven't I been working honest every day since Christmas? And does it be taking all I earn to keep me, I'd like to know?"

Constance went down on her knees beside the girl, and what she said was to One who was merciful even to the Magdalenes. When she rose the pain of it was a little dulled, and she went back to the charitable necessities in a word.

"Is there any one to watch with her to-night, Margaret?"

The girl lifted a tear-stained face, and the passionate Irish eyes were swimming, and Constance turned away because her loving compassion was greater than her determination to be judicially severe.

"I'm one," Margaret answered; "and Mrs. Mulcahey'll come over when her man gets home."

"Very well. I'll go over and give the children their suppers and put them to bed. I'll stay till you come, and you can bring Tommie to take me home."

Constance went upon her mission heavy-hearted; and in the hovel across the river found comfort in the giving of comfort. The David children were all little ones, too young to fully realize their loss; and when they had been fed and hushed to sleep, and one of David's fellow workmen had taken the husband away for the night, Constance sat down in the room with the dead to wait for Margaret. For a heart less pitiful or a soul less steadfast, the silence of the night and the solitary watch with the sheeted figure on the bed might have been unnerving; but in all her life Constance had never had to reckon with fear. Hence, when the door opened behind her without a preliminary knock, and a footstep crossed the threshold, she thought it was one of the neighbors and rose softly with her finger on her lip. But when she saw who it was, she started back and made as if she would retreat to the room where the children were.

"You!" she said. "Why are you here?"

"I beg your pardon." Jeffard said it deferentially, almost humbly. "I didn't expect to find you here; I was looking for – for the man, you know. What has become of him?"

The hesitant pause in the midst of the explanation opened the door for a swift suspicion, – a suspicion too horrible to be entertained, and yet too strong to be driven forth. There was righteous indignation in her eyes when she went close to him and said: —

"Can you stand here in the presence of that" – pointing to the sheeted figure on the bed – "and lie to me? You expected to meet Margaret Gannon here. You have made an appointment with her – an assignation in the house of the dead. Shame on you!"

It should have crushed him. It did for the moment. And when he rallied it was apparently in a spirit of the sheerest hardihood.

"You are right," he said; "I did expect to meet Margaret. With your permission, I'll go outside and wait for her."

She flashed between him and the door and put her back to it.

"Not until you have heard what I have to say, Mr. Jeffard. I've been wanting to say it ever since Tommie told me, but you have been very careful not to give me a chance. You know this girl's story, and what she has had to fight from day to day. Are you so lost to every sense of justice and mercy as to try to drag her back into sin and shame after all her pitiful strugglings?"

"It would seem so," Jeffard retorted, and his smile was harder than his words. "It is quite conceivable that you should believe it of the man who once took your charity and made a mock of it. May I go now?"

"Oh, no, not yet; not until you have promised me to spare and slay not, for this once. Think of it a moment; it is the price of a human soul! And it is such a little thing for you to concede."

The hard smile came and went again.

"Another man might say that Margaret has come to be very beautiful, Miss Elliott."

The indignation was gone out of her eyes, and her lips were trembling.

"Oh, how can you be so hard!" she faltered. "Will nothing move you?"

He met the beseeching with a steady gaze that might have been the outlooking of a spirit of calm superiority or the cold stare of a demon of ruthlessness. The mere suggestion of the alternative made her hot and cold by turns.

"I wonder that you have the courage to appeal to me," he said, at length. "Are you not afraid?"

"For Margaret's sake I am not afraid."

"You are very brave – and very loyal. Do you wonder that I was once moved to tell you that I loved you?"

"How can you speak of that here – and now!" she burst out. "Is there no measure of the hardness of your heart? Is it not enough that you should make me beg for that which I have a right to demand?"

He went apart from her at that to walk softly up and down in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, – to walk for leaden-winged minutes that seemed hours to Constance, waiting for his answer. At the final turn he lifted the sheet from the face of the dead woman and looked long and earnestly, as one who would let death speak where life was dumb and inarticulate. Constance watched him with her heart in a turmoil of doubt and fear. The doubt was of her own making, as the fear was of his. She had thought that this man was known to her, in his potentialities for good or evil, in his stumblings upon the brink of the abyss, and in his later plunge into the depths of wrongdoing; but now that she was brought face to face with him, her prefigurings took new shapes and she feared to look upon them. For the potentialities had suddenly become superhuman, and love itself stood aghast at the possibilities. In the midst of it he stood before her again.

"What is it that you would have me do?" he asked.

The tone of it assured her that her battle was fought and won; but at the moment of victory she had not the strength to make terms with him.

"You know what you ought to do," she said, with eyes downcast.

"The 'oughts' are sometimes terribly hard, Miss Elliott. Haven't you found them so?"

"Sometimes." She was finding one of them sufficiently hard at that moment to compel the admission.

"But they are never impossible, you would say, and that is true also. You asked me a few moments ago if there was nothing that would move me, and I was tempted. But that is past. Will you suffer me to go now?"

She stood aside, but her hand was still on the latch of the door.

"You have not promised," she said.

"Pardon me; I was hoping you would spare me. The cup is of my own mixing, but the lees are bitter. Must I drain them?"

"I – I don't understand," she rejoined.

"Don't you? Consider it a moment. You have taken it for granted that I had it in my heart to do this thing, and, knowing what you do of me, the inference is just. But I have not admitted it, and I had hoped you would spare me the admission which a promise would imply. Won't you leave me this poor shadow of refutation?"

She opened the door for him.

"Thank you; it is much more than I deserve. Since you do not ask it, you shall have the assurance, – the best I can give. I shall leave Denver in a day or two, and you may take your own measures for safeguarding Margaret in the interval. Perhaps it won't be as difficult as you may imagine. If I have read her aright you may ask large things of her loyalty and devotion to you."

The battle was over, and she had but to hold her peace to be quit of him. But having won her cause it was not in the loving heart of her to let him go unrecompensed.

"You are going away? Then we may not meet again. I gave you bitter words a few minutes ago, Mr. Jeffard, but I believed they were true. Won't you deny them – if you can?"

His foot was across the threshold, but he turned to smile down upon her.

"You are a true woman. You said I lied to you, and now you ask me to deny it, knowing well enough that the denial will afterward stand for another falsehood. I know what you think of me, – what you are bound to think of me; but isn't it conceivable that I would rather quench that fire than add fuel to it?"

"But you are going away," she insisted.

"And since we may never meet again, you crave the poor comfort of a denial. You shall have it for what it is worth. When you are inclined to think charitably of me, go back to first principles and remember that the worst of men have sometimes had promptings which were not altogether unworthy. Let the major accusation stand, if you choose; I did have an appointment here with Margaret Gannon. But when your faith in humankind needs heartening, conceive that for this once the tryst was one which any woman might have kept with me. Believe, if you care to, that my business here this evening was really with this poor fellow whose sins have found him out. Would you like to be able to believe that?"

For the first time since doubt and fear had gotten the better of indignation she was able to lift her eyes to his.

"I will believe it," she said gratefully.

He smiled again, and she was no longer afraid. Now that she came to think of it, she wondered if she had ever been really afraid of him.

"Your faith is very beautiful, Miss Elliott. I am glad to be able to give it something better than a bare suggestion to build on. Will you give this to Margaret when she comes?"

It was a folded paper, with a printed title and indorsement blanks on the back. She took it and glanced at the filing. It was the deed to a burial lot in the name of Owen David.

"Oh!" she said; and there was a world of contrition and self-reproach in the single word. "Can you ever forgive me, Mr. Jeffard?"

As once before, when Lansdale had proffered it, Jeffard pushed aside the cup of reinstatement.

"Don't take too much for granted. Remember, the indictment still stands. Margaret Gannon's tempter might have done this and still merit your detestation."

And at the word she was once more alone with the still figure on the bed.

CHAPTER XXXII

For what reason Constance, left alone in the house of the dead, went softly from the lighted room to kneel at the bedside of the sleeping children in the lean-to beyond – to kneel with her face in her hands and her heart swelling with emotions too great for any outlet save that of sorrowful beseechings, – let those adjudge who have passed in some crucial moment from loss to gain, and back to loss again. There was a pitiful heart cry in the prayer for help because she knew now that love, mighty and unreasoning, must be reckoned with in every future thought of this man; love heedless of consequences, clinging first to an imagined ideal, and now to the sorrowful wreck of that ideal; love lashed into being, it may be, by the very whip of shame, acknowledged only to be chained and dungeoned in the Castle of Despair, but alive and pleading, and promising yet to live and plead though hope were dead.

It was thus that Margaret found her an hour later; and in the darkness of the little room the true-hearted Irish girl knelt beside her saint, with her strong arms around the weeping one, and a sob of precious sympathy in the outpouring of words.

"There now – there now, Miss Constance! is it kneeling here and crying for these poor left ones that you are? Sure it's the Holy Virgin herself that'll be mothering them, and the likes of them. And Owen'll be doing his part, too. It's a changed man he is."

Constance shook her head. She was too sincere to let the lesser reason stand for the greater, even with Margaret.

"I do grieve for them, Margaret; but – but it isn't that."

"It isn't that, do you say? Then I know full well what it is, and it's the truth I'm going to tell you, Miss Constance, for all the promisings he made me give him. 'Tis Mr. Jeffard's money that's to go for the funeral, and it was him left it with me to give to Owen. He told me you'd not take it from him, and 'twas his own free gift. Ever since he came back he's been giving me money for the poor ones, and making me swear never to tell you; but it was for your sweet sake, Miss Connie, and not for mine. I'd want to die if you didn't believe that."

"Oh, Margaret! are you telling me the truth? I do so want to believe it!"

Margaret rose and drew her confessor to the half-open door; to the bedside of the sheeted one.

"A little while ago she was alive and talking to you, Miss Constance, and you believed her because you knew she was going fast. If I'd be like that, I'd tell you the same."

"I believe you, Margaret – I do believe you; and, oh, I'm so thankful! It would break my heart to have you go back now!"

"Don't you be worrying for me. Didn't I say once that the devil might fly away with me, but I'd not live to leave him have the good of it? When that time comes, Miss Constance, it's another dead woman you'll be crying over. And now you'll go home and take your rest; the good old father is waiting on the doorstep for you."

Even with his daughter, Stephen Elliott was the most reticent of men; and on the little journey up the river front and across the viaduct he plodded along in silence beside her, waiting for her to speak if she had anything to say. Constance had a heart full to overflowing, but not of the things which lend themselves to speech with any father; and when she broke the silence it was in self-defense, and on the side of the commonplace.

"Have you decided yet where you will go?" she asked, knowing that the arrangements for the prospecting trip were all but completed.

"N – no, not exactly. Except that I never have gone with the rush, and I don't mean to this time. There's some pretty promising country around up back of Dick's mountain, and I've been thinking of that."

"I wish you would go into the Bonanza district," she said. "If I'm to stay with Dick and Myra, it will be a comfort to know that you are not very far away."

The old man plodded another square before he succeeded in casting his thought into words.

"I was wondering if that wasn't the reason why I want to go there. I'm not letting on to anybody about it, but I'm getting sort of old and trembly, Connie; and you're about all I have left."

She slipped her arm an inch or two farther through his. "Must it be, poppa? Can't we get along without it? I'll be glad to live like the poorest of them, if we can only be together."

"I know; you're a good daughter to me, Connie, and you'd go into the hospital on Dr. Gordon's offer to-morrow, if I'd say the word. But I think the last strike I made rather spoiled me. I got sort of used to the flesh-pots, and I haven't got over feeling for my check-book yet. I guess I'll have to try it once more before we go on the county."

She would have said more had there been more to say. But her arguments had all been exhausted when the prospecting fever had set in, and she could only send him forth with words of heartening and a brave God-speed.

"I'm not going to put things in the way," she said; "but I'd go with you and help dig, if you'd let me. The next best thing will be to have you somewhere within reach, and I shall be comforted if you can manage to keep Topeka Mountain in sight. But you won't."

"Yes, I will, daughter; the string pulls about as hard at my end as it does at yours, and I'll tell you what I'll do. The gulches that I had in mind are all up at the head of Myriad Creek, and I'll ship the 'stake' to Dick, and make the Myriad a sort of outfitting camp. How will that strike you?"

"That will be fine," she said; adding, in an upflash of the old gayety: "and when you've located your claim, Myra and I will come and turn the windlass for you."

They were climbing the stairs to the darkened suite on the third floor, and at the door Constance found a telegraph messenger trying to pin a non-delivery notice to the panel. She signed his blank by the hall light, and read the message while her father was unlocking the door and lighting the lamp.

"It is from Myra," she explained; "and it's good news and bad. Do you remember what Dick was telling us the other evening about his drunken blacksmith?"

"The fellow that went into the blast-choke after the dead man?"

"Yes. He is down with mountain fever, and Myra says nothing but good nursing will save him. Dick has got his story out of him at last; he is Margaret Gannon's father."

"Humph! what a little world this is! I suppose you will send Margaret right away?"

"I shall go with her to-morrow morning. I'll tell Dick what you are going to do, and you can come when you are ready."

The old man nodded acquiescence. "It'll be better for you to go along; she'll be all broke up. Want me to go and wire Dick?"

"If you will. I should have asked the boy to wait, but he was gone before I had opened the envelope. Tell Dick to keep him alive at any cost, and that we'll be there to-morrow evening."

When her father was gone, Constance sat down to piece out the discoveries, comforting and harrowing, of the foregone hour, and to set them over against each other in a field which was as yet too near to be retrospective. She tried to stand aside for herself, and to see and consider only those to whom her heart went out in loving compassion and sympathy; but it was inevitable that she should finally come to a re-reading of the letter taken from its hiding-place in the photograph frame. She dwelt upon it with a soft flush spreading slowly from neck to cheek, reading it twice and yet once again before she laid it in the little wall-pocket of a grate and touched a match to it.

"For his sake and for mine," she said softly, as she watched it shrivel and blacken in the flame. "That is what I must do – burn my ships so that I can't go back."

The charred wraith of the letter went up the chimney in the expiring gasp of the flame, and there was the sound of a familiar step in the corridor. She went quickly to open the door for the late visitor. It was Lansdale, come to say what must be said on the eve of parting, and to ask for his answer to a conditional plea made in a moment when the consumptive's optimism had carried him off his feet.

CHAPTER XXXIII

The periods of the scene-shifter, in life as in life's mimicking on any stage, have fallen into disesteem. In any flight of fancy or plodding journey of fact these are flat countries to be traversed; interregnums which, however replete with incident for the actors themselves, are deemed alike unworthy of the playwright's outworking or the chronicler's recording. To the audience waiting beyond the footlights these are mere breathing spaces of music-hastened minutes standing for whatever lapses of days, weeks or months the story of the play involves; but for the scene-shifter they are gaps toil-filled, with fierce strivings and wrestlings and doughty compellings of the animate and inanimate perversities.

None the less, for the toiler behind the scenes there are compensations, for the audience, the entr'acte is a solution of continuity, more or less skillfully bridged, according to the playwright's gift; but the worker of transformations knows no break in the action. For him the story of the play is complete, marching evenly to its climax through spoken line and drop-curtained interregnum.

The curtain has rung down upon an interior in an apartment house. It is to rise upon a flashlight picture of a summer night scene in a mountain-girt valley. The walls of the homelike interior vanish, and in their stead dim reaches of the forest-clad mountains suggest themselves. A stream tumbles over the boulders in its bed with a hollow roar hinting at canyoned plungings above; and on the margin of it a quaking aspen blinks its many-lidded eyes in the light of a camp fire.