Almost n.o.body called on Kedzie. She took a pride in smothering her complaints from Jim, who was not very much alive to her hours. He was busy, too. He had joined the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard, and it absorbed a vast amount of his time. He had gone to the Plattsburg encampment the summer before and had kept up with the correspondence-school work in map problems, and finally he had obtained a second lieutenancy in the Seventh Regiment. It was his little protest against the unpreparedness of the nation as it toppled on the brink of the crater where the European war boiled and smoked.

One midnight after a drill he found Kedzie crying bitterly. He took her in his arms, and his tenderness softened her pride so that she wept like a disconsolate baby and told him how lonely she was. n.o.body called; n.o.body invited her out; n.o.body took her places. She had no friends, and her husband had abandoned her for his old regiment.

He was deeply touched by her woe and promised that he would take better care of her. But his military engagements were not elastic. He dared not neglect them. They took more and more of his evenings and invaded his days. Besides, he was poor company for Kedzie's mood. He had little of the humming-bird restlessness, and he could not keep up with her flights. She had darted her beak into a flower, and its nectar was finished for her before she had realized that it was a flower.

He felt that what she needed was friends of her own s.e.x. There were women enough who would accept Kedzie's company and gad with her, vie with her quivering speed. But they were not the sort he wanted her to fly with. He wanted her to make friends with the Charity Coe type.

The next day Jim grew desperate enough to call on Charity. She was out, but expected in at any moment. He sat down to wait for her. The room, the books, the piano--all spoke of her lovingly and lovably. He went to the piano and found there the song she had played for him once in Newport--"Go, Lovely Rose!"

He thought it a marvelous coincidence that it should be there on the rack. Like most coincidences, this was not hard to explain. It chanced to be there because Charity played it often. She was lonelier than Kedzie and almost as helpless to amuse herself. She read vastly, but the stories of other people's unhappy loves were a poor anodyne for her own.

She thought incessantly of Jim Dyckman. Remembering the song she had played for him, and his bitter comment on the verse, "Tell her that wastes her time and me," she hunted it out, and the plaintive chimes of Carpenter's music made a knell for her own hopes.

She had played it this very afternoon and wrought herself to such sardonic regret that she forced herself into the open air. She walked a mile or two, but slunk back home again to be rid of the crowds.

She was thinking of Dyckman when she entered her house. She let herself in with her own key, and, walking into the drawing-room, surprised him at the piano, reading the tender elegy of the rose.

"Jim!" she gasped.

"Charity!" he groaned.

Their souls seemed to rush from their bodies and embrace. But their bodies stood fast before the abyss that gaped between them.

She whipped off her glove before she gave him her hand. That meeting of the flesh was so bitter-sweet that their hands unclasped guiltily by a kind of honest instinct of danger.

"What on earth brought you here?" Charity faltered.

"Why--I--Well, you see--it's like this." He groped for words, but, having no genius in invention, he blurted the truth helplessly: "I came to ask you if you wouldn't--You see, my poor wife isn't making out very well with people--she's lonesome--and blue--and--why can't you lend a hand and make friends with her?"

Charity laughed aloud. "Oh, Jim, Jim, what a darling old numskull you are!"

"In general, yes; but why just now?"

"Your wife will never make friends with me."

"Of course she will. She's lonely enough to take up with anybody."

"Thanks!"

"Well, will you call?"

"Have you told her you were going to ask me to?"

"Not yet."

"Then I'll call, on one condition."

"What's that, Charity Coe?"

"That you don't tell her. You'd better not, or she'll have my eyes and your scalp."

"But you'll call, won't you?"

"Of course. Anything you say--always."

"You're the d.a.m.nedest decentest woman in the world, Charity Coe; and if--"

He paused. It is just as well not to go iffing about such matters.

Charity stopped short in her laughter. She and Jim stared at each other again across that abyss. It was terribly deep, but only a step over.

They heard the door-bell faintly, and a sense of guilt confused them again. Jim rose and wished himself out of it.

"It's only Prissy Atterbury," said Charity.

Prissy came in tugging at the ferocious mustaches that only emphasized his lady-like carriage. He paused on the door-sill to stare and gasp, "My Gawd, at it again!"

They did not know what he meant, and he would not explain that he had seen them together ages ago and spread the gossip that they were in intrigue. The coincidence of his recurrence on their scene was not strange, for Charity had been using him as a kind of messenger-boy.

Prissy was that sort. He looked the gentleman and was, a somewhat too gentle gentleman, but very useful to ladies who needed an uncompromising escort and were no longer young enough to permit of chaperonage. He was considered perfectly harmless, but he was a fiend of gossip, and he rejoiced in the recrudescence of the Jim and Charity affair.

Jim confirmed Prissy's eager suspicions by taking himself off with a maximum of embarra.s.sment. Charity went to the door with him--to kiss him good-by, as Prissy gloatingly supposed, but actually to say:

"I'll call on your wife to-morrow."

"You're an angel," said Jim, and meant it.

He thought all the way home what an angel she was, and Charity was thinking at the same time what a fool she had been to let Peter Cheever dazzle her to the fact that Jim Dyckman was the one man in the world that she belonged to. She needed just him and he just her.

CHAPTER XII

Sometimes Jim Dyckman was foolish enough to wish that he had been his wife's first lover. But a man has to get up pretty early to be that to any woman. The minxes begin to flirt with the milk-bottle, then with the doctor, and then to cherish a precocious pa.s.sion for the first rag sailor-doll.

Jim had come as near as any man may to being a woman's first love in the case of Charity, and what good had it done him? He was the first boy Charity had ever played with. Her nurse had bragged about her to his nurse when Charity was just beginning to take notice of other than alimentary things. By that time Jim was a blase roue of five and his main interest in Charity was a desire to poke his finger into the soft spot in her head.

The nurses restrained him in time, and his proud, young, little mother of then, when she heard of it, decided that he was destined to be a great explorer. His young father sniffed that he was more likely to be a gynecologist. They had a grand quarrel over their son's future. He became none of the things they feared or hoped that he would and he carried out none of his own early ambitions.

His first impressions of Charity had ranged from contempt, through curiosity, to protectiveness and affection. She got his heart first by being helpless. He began by picking up the things she let fall from her carriage or threw overboard and immediately cried for again. She had been human enough to do a good deal of that. When things c.u.mbered her crib or her perambulator she brushed them into s.p.a.ce and then repented after them.

Following her marriage to Peter Cheever she did just that with Jim Dyckman. His love cluttered up her domestic serenity and she chucked it overboard. And then she wanted it again. Then her husband chucked her overboard and she felt that it would not be so lonesome out there since Jim would be out there, too. But she found that he had picked himself up and toddled away with Kedzie. And now he could not pick Charity up any more. His wife wouldn't let him.

Jim did not know that he wanted to pick Charity up again till he called on her to ask her to call on his wife and pick Kedzie up out of her loneliness. It was a terrific thought to the simple-minded Jim when it came over him that the Charity Coe he had adored and given up as beyond his reach on her high pedestal was now lying at the foot of it with no worshiper at all.

Jim was the very reverse of a sn.o.b. Kedzie had won his devotion by seeming to need it. She had lost it by showing that she cared less for him than for the things she thought he could get for her. And now Charity needed his love.

There were two potent principles in Jim's nature, as in many another man's and woman's; one was an instant eagerness to help anybody in trouble; another was an instant resentment of any coercion. Jim could endure neither bossing nor being bossed; restraint of any sort irked him. There may have been Irish blood in him, but at any rate the saying was as true of him as of the typical Irishman--"You can lead him to h.e.l.l easier than you can drive him an inch."