Wayside Courtships Part 38

"Next stop. We're only a few minutes late. Expect to meet friends there?"

"No; thought I'd get a lunch, that's all."

At the junction the car became pretty well filled with people. Two or three Norwegian families came clattering in, the mothers clothed in heavy shawls and cheap straw hats, the flaxen-haired children in faded cottonade and blue denims. They filled nearly half the seats. Several drummers came in, laughing loudly, bearing heavy valises. Then Allen heard above the noise the shrill but sweet voice of a girl, and caught the odor of violets as two persons pa.s.sed him and took a seat just before him.

The man he knew by sight and reputation as a very brilliant young lawyer, Edward Benson, of Heron Lake. The girl he knew instantly to be utterly alien to this land and people. She was like a tropic bird seen amid the scant foliage of northern hills. There was evidence of great care and taste in every fold of her modish dress. Her hat was simple but in the latest city fas.h.i.+on, and her gloves were spotless. She gave off an odor of cleanliness and beauty.

She was very young and slender. Her face was piquant but not intellectual, and scarcely beautiful. It pleased rather by its life and motion and oddity than by its beauty. She looked at her companion in a peculiar way--trustfully almost reverently--and yet with a touch of coquetry which seemed perfectly native to every turn of her body or glance of her eyes.

The young lawyer was a fine Western type of self-made man. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but walked a little stooping, like a man of fifty.

He wore a long Prince Albert frock coat hanging loosely from his rather square shoulders. His white vest was a little soiled by his watch chain and his tie was disarranged.

His face was very fine and good. His eyes were gray-blue, deep and quiet but slightly smiling, as were his lips, which his golden-brown mustache shaded but did not hide. He was kept smiling in this quizzical way by the nervous chatter of the girl beside him. His profile, which was the view Allen had of him, was handsome. The strong, straight nose and abrupt forehead formed a marked contrast to the rather characterless nose and retreating forehead of the girl.

The first words that Allen distinguished out of the merry war in which they seemed engaged were spoken in the tone of pretty petulance such women use, a coquette's defense.

"You did, you did, you _did_. _Now!_ You know you did. You told me that.

You told me you despised girls like me."

"I said I despised women who had no object in life but dress," he replied, rather soberly.

"But you were hopping on me; you meant me, now! You can't deny it. You despise me, I know you do!" She challenged his flattery in her pouting self-depreciation.

The young man tried to stop her in her course, to change her mood, which was descending to real feeling. His low words could not be heard.

"Yes, yes, try to smooth it over, but you can't fool me any more. But I don't want you to flatter me and lie to me the way Judge Stearns did,"

she said, with a sudden change of manner. "I like you because you're square."

The phrase with which she ended seemed to take on a new meaning uttered by those red lips in childish pout.

"Now, why are you down on the judge? I don't see," said the man, as if she had gone back to an old attack.

"Well, if you'd seen what I have you'd understand." She turned away and looked out of the window. "Oh, this terrible country! I'd die out here in six weeks. I know I should."

The young lawyer was not to be turned aside.

"Of course I'm pleased to have you throw the judge over, and employ me, but, all the same, I think you do him an injustice. He's a good, square man."

"Square man!" she said, turning to him with a sudden fury in her eyes.

"Do you call it square for a man--married, and gray-haired, too--to take up with a woman like Mrs. Sh.e.l.lberg? Say, do you, now?"

"Well, I don't quite believe----"

"Oh, I _lie_, do I?" she said, with another swift change to reproach.

"You can't take my word for Mrs. Sh.e.l.lberg's visit to his office."

"But he was her lawyer."

"But you know what kind of a woman she is! She didn't need to go there every day or two, did she? What did he always receive her in his private office for? Come, now, tell me that."

"I don't know that he did," persisted the lawyer.

A sort of convulsion pa.s.sed over her face, her little hands clinched, and the tears started into her eyes. Her voice was very quiet.

"You think I lie, then?"

"I think you are mistaken, just as other jealous women have----"

"You think I'm jealous, do you?"

"You act like a jeal----"

"Jealous of that gray-haired old wretch? No, sir! I--I--" She struggled to express herself. "I liked him, and I hated to lose all my faith in men. I thought he was good and honest when he prayed--Oh, I've seen him pray in church, the old hypocrite!" her fury returned at the recollection.

Her companion's face grew grave. The smile went out of his eyes, leaving them dark and sorrowful.

"I understand you now," he said, at last. She turned to look at him. "My practice in the divorce business out here has almost destroyed my faith in women. If it weren't for my wife and sister----"

She broke in eagerly: "Now I _know_ you know what I mean. Sometimes I think men are--devils." She thrust this word forth, and her little face grew dark and strained. "But the judge kept me from thinking--I never loved my father; he didn't care for me; all he wanted to do was to make ten thousand barrels of beer a year and sell it; and the judge seemed like a father to me till _she_ came and destroyed my faith in him."

"But--well, let Mrs. S. go. There are lots of good men and pure women in the world. It's dangerous to think there aren't--especially for a handsome young woman like you. You can't afford to keep in that kind of a mood long."

She looked at him curiously. "That's what I like about you," she said soberly. "You talk to me as if I had some sense--as if I was a human being. If you were to flatter me, now, and make love to me, I never would believe in any man again."

He smiled again in his frank, good way, and drew a picture from his pocket. It was a picture of a woman bending down over a laughing, naked child, sprawling frogwise in her lap. The woman's face was broad and intellectual and handsome. The look of splendid maternity was in her eyes. They both looked at the picture in silence. The girl sighed.

"I wish I was as good as that woman looks."

"You can be if you try."

"Not with a big Chicago brewer for a father and a husband that beats you whenever the mood takes him."

"I admit that's hard. I think the atmosphere of that Heron Lake hotel isn't any great help to you."

"Oh, they're a gay lot there! We fight like cats and dogs." A look of slyness and boldness came over her face. "Mrs. Sh.e.l.lberg hates me as hard as I do her. She used to go around telling, 'It's very peculiar, you know'"--she imitated her rival's voice--"'but no matter which end of the dining room I sit, all the men look that way!'"

The young lawyer laughed at her in spite of himself.

"But they don't, now. That's the reason she hates me," she said, in conclusion. "The men don't notice her when I'm around."

To hear her fresh young lips utter those words with their vile inflections was like taking a sudden glimpse into the underworld where harlots dwell and the spirits of unrestrained l.u.s.ts dance in the shadowy recesses of the human heart.

Allen, hearing this fragmentary conversation, fascinated yet uneasy, looked at the pair with wonder. They seemed unconscious of their public situation.

The young lawyer looked straight before him while the girl, swept on by her ign.o.ble rage, displayed still more of the moral ulceration which had been injected into her young life.

"I don't see what men find about her to like--unless it is her eyes.

She's got beautiful eyes. But she's vulgar--ugh! The stories she tells--right before men, too! She'd kill any one that got ahead of her, that woman would! And yet she'll come into my room and cry and cry and say: 'Don't take him away from me! Leave him to me.' Ugh! It makes me sick." She stamped her foot, then added, irrelevantly: "She wears a wig, too. I suppose that old fool of a judge thinks it's her own hair."