The Helpers. Lynde Francis
to-night if I hadn't found Mrs. Calmaine's invitation. She has been very good to me in a social way, and I could do no less than come." He said it apologetically, as if the dip into the social pool on the eve of the new setting forth demanded an explanation.
She smiled up at him. "Does it need an apology? Are you sorry you came?"
"Sorry? It's the one wise thing I've done these four months. I shall always be glad – and thankful." It was on his tongue to say more; to dig the pit of confession still deeper, as one who, finding himself at the shrine of compassionate purity, would be assoilzied for all the wrong-doings and follies and stumblings of a misguided past; to say many things for which he had no shadow of warrant, and to which the self-contained young woman on the step before him could make no possible rejoinder; but the upcoming of the man whose name stood next on Connie's card saved him. A moment later he was taking his leave.
"Not going to break away now, are you, Jeffard?" said the fortunate one, helping Connie to rise.
"Yes; I must cut it short. I leave town in the morning. Miss Elliott, will you bid me Godspeed?"
She put her hand in his and said what was meet; and to the man who stood beside her the parting appeared to be neither more nor less than conventionally formal. But when Jeffard was free of the house and swinging along on his way cityward, the spirit of it made itself a name to live; and out of the God-speed and the kindly phrase of leavetaking the new-blown fire of good intention distilled a subtle liqueur of jubilance which sang in his veins like the true wine of rejuvenescence; so nearly may the alchemy of pure womanhood transmute sounding brass, or still baser metal, into the semblance of virgin gold.
So Jeffard went his way reflective, and while he mused the fire burned and he saw himself in his recent stumblings in the valley of dry bones as a thing apart. From the saner point of view it seemed incredible that he could ever have been the thrall of such an ignoble passion as that which had so lately despoiled him and sent him to tramp the streets like a hungry vagrant. As yet the lesson was but a few hours old, but the barrier it had thrown up between the insensate yesterday and the rational to-day seemed safely impassable. In the strength of reinstated reason, confidence returned; and close upon the heels of confidence, temerity. His reverie had led him past the corner where he should have turned westward, and when he took cognizance of his surroundings he was standing opposite the alley-way of the glass-eyed doors. He glanced at his watch. It was midnight. Twenty-four hours before, almost to the minute, he had been dragged irresistibly across the street and up the carpeted stair to the lair of the dementia-demon.
He looked up at the carefully shaded windows, and a sudden desire to prove himself came upon him. Not once since the first hot flashes of the fever had begun to quicken his pulse, had he been able to go and look on and return scathless. But was he not sane now? and was not the barrier well builded? If it were not – if it stood only upon the lack of opportunity —
He crossed the street and threaded the narrow alley, tramping steadily as one who goes into battle, – a battle which may be postponed, but which may by no means be evaded. The swing doors gave back under his hand, and a minute later he stood beside the table with the inlaid cards in its centre, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and his breath coming in sharp little gasps.
It was a perilous moment for any son of Adam who has been once bitten by the dog of avarice gone mad. The run of luck was against the bank, and the piles of counters under the hands of the haggard ones girdling the table grew and multiplied with every turn of the cards. Jeffard's lips began to twitch, and the pupils of his eyes narrowed to two scintillant points. Slowly, and by almost imperceptible advances, his right hand crept from its covert, the fingers tightly clenched upon the small roll of bank-notes, – the Providential windfall which must provision any future argosy of endeavor.
The dealer ran the cards with monotonous precision, his hands moving like the pieces of a nicely adjusted mechanism. Jeffard's fingers unclosed and he stood staring down at the money in his palm as if the sight of it fascinated him. Then he turned quickly and tossed it across to the banker. "Reds and whites," he said; and the sound of his own voice jarred upon his nerves like the rasping of files in a saw-pit.
Two hours later, he was again standing on the narrow footway in the alley, with the swing doors winging to rest behind him. Two hours of frenzied excitement in the dubious battle with chance, and the day of penitence and its hopeful promise for the future were as if they had not been. Halfway across the street he turned and flung his clenched fist up at the shaded windows, but his tongue clave to his teeth and the curse turned to a groan with a sob at the end of it. And as he went his way, sodden with weariness, the words of a long-forgotten allegory were ringing knell-like in his ears: —
"When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh in dry places seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty and swept and garnished. Then goeth he and taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first."
CHAPTER V
It was on the day following the dancing party at the Calmaines' that Constance Elliott arrayed herself in a modest street dress, and ran down to the library where Miss Van Vetter was writing letters.
"You'd better change your mind, Myra, and come along with me. It'll do you good to see how the other half lives," she said coaxingly.
Miss Van Vetter calmly finished her sentence before she replied.
"Thank you, Connie; but I believe not. I know it is the proper fad nowadays to go slumming, but I can't do it; it's a matter of principle with me."
Connie's eyebrows arched in mild surprise. "That's a new one," she commented. "I've heard all kinds of excuses, but never that. How do you diagram it?"
"It is simple enough. One sees plenty of misery in the ordinary course of things without making a specialty of looking for it; and when you've done everything that your money and sympathy can do, it is only a single drop in the great ocean of human wretchedness, after all. More than that, you have added to the sum total of the world's suffering by just so much as the miseries of the others hurt you through your compassion."
"Myra, dear, if I didn't know that you are better than your theories, I should try to humble you. What will you do if the evil day ever comes to you?"
"Unload my woes upon some such angelic and charitable sister of mercy as you are, I suppose," rejoined Miss Van Vetter complacently. "But that doesn't make it necessary for me to go about and shed literal tears with those who weep, now. I prefer to do it by proxy." She took a gold piece from her purse and offered it to Constance. "Take this, and make some poor wretch comfortable for ten or fifteen minutes on my account."
Miss Elliott was not yet canonized, and she refused the contribution with an indignant little stamp of her foot. "Myra Van Vetter, you're worse than a heathen! I wouldn't touch your money with the tip of my finger; I'd be afraid it would burn me. I hope you'll learn for yourself some day what the cold shoulder of charity is – there!" And she swept out of the room with as much dignity as five-feet-one-and-a-half may compass upon extraordinary occasions.
Once on the other side of the library door, she laughed softly to herself and was instantly Connie the serene again.
"It does me a whole lot of good to boil over once in a while," she said, going out on the veranda. "Myra serves one beneficent end in the cosmogony in spite of herself: she's a perfect safety-valve for me. Tommie-e-e-e! O Tom! Are you out there?"
A ragged boy, sitting on the curb and shaking dice with a pair of pebbles, sprang up and ran to the gate. When the latch baffled him, as it usually did from the outside, he vaulted the fence and stood before her.
"Prompt as usual, aren't you, Tommie?"
"Ain't got nothin' else to do but to be promp'. Is it a baskit, dis time, 'r wot?"
"It's a basket, and you'll find it in the kitchen."
Five minutes later the dwellers in the avenue might have seen a small procession headed townwards. Its component parts were a dainty little lady, walking very straight with her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and a ragged