The Wayfarers Part 39

"No; but I can sometimes get it for other people! I could have gone to Rondell Brothers and got it."

"Rondell Brothers? I thought they were difficult to approach."

"That depends. I was with Rondell's boy in Cuba when he had the fever, and he's always said-but that's neither here nor there. Apart from that, they've had their eye on your husband lately. You can't hide the quality of a man like him, Mrs. Alexander; it shows in a hundred ways that he doesn't think of. They have had dealings with him, though he doesn't know it-it's been through agents. Mr. Warren, one of their best men, has, it seems, taken a fancy to him. I shouldn't wonder if they'd take over the typometer as it stands, and work Alexander in with it. If Rondell Brothers really take up anyone--!" Girard did not need to finish.

Even Lois and Dosia had heard of Rondell Brothers, the great firm that was known from one end of the country to the other-a commercial house whose standing was as firm, as unquestioned, as the Bank of England, and almost as conservative. Apart from this, its reputation was unique. The house was more than a commercial establishment: it was an inst.i.tution, in which for three generations the firm known as Rondell Brothers had carried on, in the conduct of their business-and carried to high advantage-the principles of personal honor and honesty and fair dealing.

No boy or man of good character, intelligence, and industry was ever connected with Rondell's without its making for his advancement; to get a position there was to be a.s.sured of his future. Their young men stayed with them, and rose steadily higher as they stayed, or went out from them strong to labor, backed with a solid backing. The number of young firms whom Rondell Brothers had started and made, and whose profit also afterwards profited them, were more than had ever been counted. They were never deceived, for they had an unerring faculty for knowing their own kind. No firm was keener. Straight on the nail themselves, they exacted the same quality in others. What they traded in needed no other guaranty than the name of Rondell.

If Rondell Brothers took Justin's affairs in hand! Lois felt a hope that sent life through her veins.

"Oh, let us hurry home!" she pleaded, and tried to quicken her pace, though it was Girard who supported her, else she must have fallen, while Dosia slipped a little behind, still trying to keep her place by his side, so that she might meet his look when he turned to her.

"You're so tired," he whispered, with a break in his voice, "and I can't help you!" and she tried to beat back that dear pity and longing with her comforting "No, no, no! I'm not really tired"; her voice thrilled with life, though her feet stumbled.

In that walk beside him, toiling slowly on and on in the bright, far solitude of those empty fields, where even their hands might not touch, they two were so heart-close-so heavenly, so fulfillingly near!

Once he whispered in a yearning distress, "Why are you crying?" And she answered through those welling tears:

"I'm only crying because I'm so glad you're here!"

After a while there was a sound of wheels-wheels! Only a sulky, it proved to be-a mere half-wagon set low down in the springs, and a trotting horse in front, driven by a round-faced boy in a derby hat, the turnout casting long, thin shadows ahead before Girard stopped it.

"You'll have to take another pa.s.senger," he said, after explaining matters to the half-unwilling boy, who crowded himself at last to the farthest edge of the seat, so that Lois might take possession of the six inches allotted to her.

She held out her arms hastily. "My boy!" she said, but it was a voice that had hope in it once more.

"Oh, yes, I forgot; here's the baby," said Girard, looking curiously at the bundle before handing it to her. "We'll meet you at the Haledon station very soon now; my friends will have left my hat and coat there for me."

In another moment the little vehicle was out of sight, jogging around a bend of the road.

So still was the night! Only that long, curving runnel of the brook again accompanied the silence. Not a leaf moved on the bushes of those far-swelling fields or on the hill that hid their summit; the air was like the moonlight, so fragrantly cool with the odors of the damp fern and birch. The straight, supple figure of Girard still stood in the roadway, bareheaded, with that powerful effect which he had, even here, of absorbing all the life of the scene.

Dosia experienced the inexplicable feeling of the girl alone, for the first time, with the man who loves her and whom she loves. At that moment she loved him so much that she would have fled anywhere in the world from him.

The next moment he said in a matter-of-fact tone:

"Sit down on that stone, and let me shake out your shoes before we go on; they're full of earth."

She obeyed with an open-eyed gaze that dwelt on him while he knelt down and loosened the bows, and took off the little clumpy low shoes, shaking them out carefully, and then put them on once more, retying the bows neatly with long, slowly accomplis.h.i.+ng fingers.

"They'll get full of earth again," she protested, her voice half lost in the silence.

"Then I'll take them off and shake them out over again."

He stood up, brus.h.i.+ng the sand from his palms, smiling down at her as she stood up also. "I've always dreamed of doing that," he said simply.

"I've dreamed of taking you in my arms and carrying you off through the night-as I couldn't that first time! I've longed so to do it. There have been times when I couldn't _stand_ it to see you, because you weren't mine." Then-her hands were in his, his dear, protecting hands, the hands she loved, with their thrilling, long-familiar touch, claiming as well as giving.

"Oh-_Dosia!_" he said below his breath.

As their eyes dwelt on each other in that long look, all that had hurt love rose up between them, and pa.s.sed away, forgiven. She foresaw a time when all her life before he came into it would have dropped out of remembrance as a tale that is told. And now--

It seemed that he was going to be a very splendid lover!

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The summer was nearly at an end-a summer that had brought rehabilitation to the Typometer Company, yet rehabilitation of a certain kind, under strict rule, strict economy, endless work. Nominally the same thing, the typometer was now but one factor of trade among a dozen other patented inventions under the control of Rondell Brothers.

If there was not quite the same personal flavor as yet in Justin's relation to the business which had seemed so inspiringly his own, there was a larger relation to greater interests, a wider field, a greater sense of security, and a sense of justice in the change; he felt that he had much to learn. There was something in him that could not profit where other men profited-that could not take advantage when that advantage meant loss to another. He was not great enough alone to reconcile the narrowing factors of trade with that warring law within him. The stumbling of Cater would have been another stumbling-block if it had not been that one; that for which Leverich, with Martin always behind him, had chosen Justin first had been the very thing that had fought against them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _He held out his arm unconsciously as Lois stole into the room_]

The summer was far spent. Justin had been working hard. It was long after midnight. Lois slept, but Justin could not; he rose and went into the adjoining room, and sat down by the open window. The night had been very close, but now a faint breath stirred from somewhere out of the darkness. It was just before the dawn-Justin looked out into a gloom in which the darkness of trees wavered uncertainly and brought with it a vague remembrance. He had done all this before. When? Suddenly he recollected the night he had sat at this same window, at the beginning of this terrible journey, and his thoughts and feelings then; his deep loneliness of soul, the prevision of the pain even of fulfillment-an endless, endless arid waste, with the welling forth of that black spirit of evil in his own nature as the only vital thing to bear him secret company-a moment that was wolfish to his better nature. Almost with the remembrance came the same mood, but only as reflected in the surface of his saner nature, not arising from it.

As he gazed, wrapped in self-communing, on the vague formlessness of the night, it began gradually to dissolve mysteriously, and the outlines of the trees and the surrounding objects melted into view; a bird sang from somewhere near by, a heavenly, clear, full-throated call that brought a shaft of light from across the world, broadening, as the eye leaped to it, into a great and spreading glory of flame.

It had rained just before; the drops still hung on bush and tree, and as the dazzling radiance of the sun touched them every drop also radiated light, prismatic and scintillating-an almost audibly tinkling joy. So indescribably wonderful and beautiful, yet so tender, seemed this scene-as of a mighty light informing the least atom of our tearful human existence-that the profoundest depths of Justin's nature opened to the illumination.

In that moment, with calm eyes, and lips firmly pressed together, his thoughts reached upward; far, far upward. For the first time, he felt in accordance with something divine and beyond-an accordance that seemed to solve the meaning of life; what had gone and what was to come. All the hopes, the planning, the seeking and slaving, whatever they accomplished or did not accomplish, they fas.h.i.+oned us, ourselves. As it had been, so it still would be. But for what had gone before, he had not had this hour.

It was the journey itself that counted-the dear joys by the way, that come even through suffering and through pain-the joy of the red dawn, of the summer breeze, of the winter sun; the joy of children, the joy of companions.h.i.+p.

He held out his arm unconsciously as Lois stole into the room.

THE END