“What you shaking hands with me for?” demanded the late prisoner.
“Because you are going outside, man, instead of back to jail,” his counsel laughed. “What are you looking like that for, while I’m trying to congratulate you?”
Armand Denis put his elbow on the high desk beside him—a slim, meditative figure in a costume from which the fragrance of gasoline still breathed after weeks of deodorizing prison confinement. He had very black curling hair, a complexion Sicilian in darkness by nature and tan, and extremely blue, expressive eyes.
“As near as I can gather from this courtmartial they’ve been putting me through,” he reflected aloud, “I’m sentenced to ten years in jail for hitting that cross-eyed, dopey, clumsy, reckless——”
“Never mind, Denis; he is dead. Yes, but you heard the judge suspend sentence on condition that you pay the widow and children twenty-five dollars a month. You’re free as air while you keep that paid.”
“Oh, I am, am I? Then I can leave this type 1492, one-cylinder State to-night?”
The honorable counsel paused.
“Well, hardly that,” he delicately amended. “You see, you’re under a kind of surveillance. It is a pretty large State; you ought to be content.”
“Content!” Denis straightened himself with a supple play of trained muscles. “Content? I’m a racing driver’s mechanician, I am, and there’s not a motor-car race track in your whole big, dead place. How am I going to earn twenty-five cents a month here? My money comes in chunks; when there’s racing going on I get enough to last for when there isn’t. I was engaged for all next season, East and South. What am I going to do?”
“You—er—killed a man, you know. penalty attached.”
Denis regarded him bitterly.
“Yes; my machine is coming through a dark alley, one street-lamp at the end of the block and city rules forbidding me to use my searchlights, when a drunk idiot lurches right off the sidewalk and pushes his face against my radiator. Does any one want to hit him? Didn’t I lug him around to a doctor? He was hardly touched, anyhow; I believe he died out of sheer ugly spite.”
“All that is why the judge suspended sentence,” soothed his defender. “You seemed willing to pay the twenty-five.”
“I guess I’d seem willing to pay anything to keep out of prison for ten years,” was the grim retort. “Do I read the bulletin right when I see me down to hunting work as a chauffeur?”
“Chauffeurs are well paid.”
“I’d like to run over a judge. But I’ll come around to your camp next month with the pension.”
“Don’t forget,” suggested the other humorously.
“It’s not likely,” said Denis. “I’ve been taking a memory course. I guess I’ll go out.”
It was raining out—a rain that froze as it fell over shining sidewalks and slimy streets. The city lay coldly indifferent to the stranger within its gates.
“A chauffeur!” breathed Denis of the course, in a loathing oddly blended with homesickness, and remained on the court-house steps to contemplate the metropolis of his fall.
A fair-haired young woman came down the white, wide stairs a little later, and paused an instant beside him to raise her umbrella. She did not appear to need assistance, nor was Denis in a mood for gallantry, yet they looked at one another. And from some sympathetic meeting of the minds she spoke, quite simply and with the pleasantest interest,
“You’d best not stand in the sleet. There are lots of nicer places in this town.”
The vainest man could not have misconstrued; she looked a Celtic madonna, broad of brow, wise and serene of glance. Moreover, she went straight on down the steps in her cheap, black gown, under her cheap, black umbrella.
“Gee,” said Denis, and gazed dazedly around. “Nicer places in this town?”
The sparkling elixir of cheerfulness had been poured into his thoughts. Presently he smiled queerly and went down into the world again.
On the first of the next month he appeared at his lawyer’s office and paid the twenty-five dollars.
“Then you’re working?” deduced Mr. Blackstone.
“Well, I haven’t taken to getting money any other way,” Denis conceded.
“Chauffeur?”
“You’ve named it. I’m driving one of the first horseless carriages ever built, for a man who found out that the citizens of this town don’t want a chauffeur who’s under sentence for hitting some one, and so I was to rent cheap. This story has been pretty well announced, and people seem to think I’ve got a habit of smashing things.”
“It’s lucky you met this man.”
“It is—for him,” agreed Denis dryly. “He’s got a professional driver for hostler’s wages and a mechanician who can knock down his car and overhaul it every other day, as it needs. If I die doing this, send my remains to New York or I’l| haunt your town.”
“You won’t die,” comforted the other. “You are the most blatantly healthy-looking young person I ever saw.”
“Hard luck,” said Armand Denis.
The next month he duly came again.
“What happens in this State if you kill a man with a club?” he inquired, as he passed over five five-dollar bills.
“You get hanged.”
“It might be worth it,” was the dark reflection. “Something will happen yet between the dear little fellow I’m driving for and me.”
“Would it be impertinent to ask what he pays you, Denis?”
“That.”
“What! The bare twenty-five?”
“Sure; he knows what I’ve got to have. But I have to hurry here on a full run for fear I’ll forget and buy myself a newspaper or a postage stamp.”
Finding no adequate reply, Mr. Blackstone silently watched him retire.
The next month there was an innovation in the routine. Denis did not produce the twenty-five dollars upon entering the office, but kept his hands in his pockets.
“I’ve a fancy to pay the lady myself,” he announced. “Tell me where to find her training camp, will you?”
Even the small cities have suburbs. It was to the suburbs that Denis was directed. The row of diminutive, shabby cottages showed little diversity of architecture. Only one stood out among its fellows by the ostentatious splendor of a new coat of whitewash, and the equally ostentatious cleanliness of a most delicious baby seated on the white doorsill.
“My whitewash,” soliloquized Denis as he read the house number, not grudgingly but practically. And he winked at the chuckling baby.
“Come in,” called a serene, cheerful voice. “I know it’s the milk.”
“It’s not milk,” deprecated Denis, obeying—and halting, transfixed.
She looked even more like a Celtic madonna than the day on the court-house steps, for she was bareheaded now and held in her arms the twin of the delicious baby outside. But her cordial smile was unaltered, if surprised.
“Come in, Mr. Denis,” she invited. “But don’t shut the door yet, for Effie is out there and it’s too cold for her.”
“You know me,” he feebly began.
“I saw you at court, though you didn’t see me.”
“Then you’re Mrs, Carter?”
“Susy Carter,” she nodded. “Won’t you sit down while I bring in the baby?”
But Denis was still standing in the center of the neat, brightly useful room when she returned; a room proclaimed parlor by rag carpet and draperies of turkey-red cotton, in spite of a glowing kitchen stove in one corner.
“I didn’t guess it was you who spoke to me in the rain,” he said quite humbly. “You gave mea new start, but I didn’t guess——”
Femininely clairvoyant, she divined the his inarticulateness.
“It wasn’t your fault that you ran into Jim.” she stated, her direct brown eyes lifted to his. “I felt that right along, Mr. Denis, although of course I hadn’t seen the accident and couldn’t help you. You see, I know Jim. If there was any way of being contrary, or starting across the street at the wrong time, or stumbling over anything, he’d have done it. He couldn’t help it; he was built contrary And then it was Saturday night—he always drank too much Saturdays and Wednesdays. So I’ve felt you weren’t to blame, and don’t let it worry you.”
Denis looked at her as she sat in the rocking chair, one two-year-old nestling in her lap and the other leaning against her knee. As the day on the court-house steps, he felt some warm and soothing influence settling through and through him.
“I haven’t,” he avowed simply. “It hasn’t worried me, because, honestly—I couldn’t help it. But I’m ruled off the course, just the same. Motor racing is my work and there’s none of it around here. I’ve put up with being a chauffeur for the meanest man ever, until yesterday I got into a row with him and that’s off. That’s why I came to you myself—to ask if you could get along on twenty for a few days. If you can’t, all right; I’ll manage somehow.”
“Why, of course,” she assented cordially. “This is awfully hard on you.”
His blue eyes became more boyish than ever in their sudden hungry wistfulness.
“I’m so lonesome it aches,” he confessed. “I—sometimes it seems as if I’d have to see the other fellows or explode. And I was to have raced with George next spring. I suppose it’s all right, but I don’t see it.”
She held out her hand in farewell, her silence full of a rare thing—a woman’s understanding of man’s longing for man and comrade-hunger. And enveloped in that warmth of sympathy Denis unexpectedly melted to incoherent confidence.
“I haven’t told any one, I never meant to—and I never will, this don’t count—but I can’t let you think I killed your husband. There was some one with me in the car that night; I wasn’t driving. When she hit the man, I put her out quick and told her to run for it in the dark. No one saw; it’s safe. I can trust you to know.”
Stunned, Susy gazed at him.
“You didn’t,” she began.
“No.”
“It was a girl?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re standing all this for no fault of your own?”
“It was my fault,” said Denis shortly. “I shouldn’t have let her drive at night.”
Susy mechanically stooped to lift the baby tugging at her skirts.
“She’s letting you do it. She won’t tell? The judge and jury would have let her go because she was a woman—they always do.”
“She went East that night on the first train. I told her to go. She–well, she isn’t the kind that get into courtrooms; it would shake her all up.”
The situation was beyond the scope of comment. Nor did the masculine Denis wish speech from his confidante.
“Don’t trouble about–me,” urged Susy as they shook hands at the door. “I mean——”
“I understand,” he nodded gratefully.
But after he had gone she found the twenty dollars lying on the table beside which he had stood.
It was a week later that she received a five-dollar bill by mail, with scrawled across the envelope the single word. “Thanks.”
At the end of the month he brought the due twenty-five dollars. The odor of gasoline no longer followed him, he looked tired and less buoyantly alive. But his blue eyes smiled brilliantly at his hostess and he made no communications.
This time Susy kept him to tea, it being Saturday night.
“Does candy hurt babies,” he diffidently inquired.
“Not a bit,” was the cheerful assurance.
So it happened that Armand Denis held Jeffie and Effie on either knee and watched them gurglingly absorb peppermint stick, while their mother set out the supper.
“I like kiddies,” the guest remarked. “These are awful pretty. I never picked one up before; they look so light-built and easy wrecked. But they’re all right.”
“They’re good company around,” Susy assented, her soft eyes richly maternal. “Come up to the table.”
It was a flawless evening.
“Next month?” invited the hostess when he was leaving.
“It feels good to have something to wait for,” he accepted.
The next month was slow in passing, but it ended. The evening opened auspiciously; the twins remembered Denis and toddled to meet him with shrieks, and he had not forgotten to bring peppermint sticks.
He was obviously thinner. So obviously, that Susy hesitated when he gave her the usual money on departing.
“Don’t you—won’t you keep some?” she ventured.
Denis shook his dark head.
“No, sir. You keep it for you and the kiddies.”
She touched with timidity a sealed subject.
“Since you didn’t run over Jim I feel as if I hadn’t the right.”
“It was my fault; I’ll stand for it. Good-night.”
At the foot of the steps he turned back to where she stood in the lighted doorway.
“You’ve been awful good to me–good-night.”
The next month missed its climax. Susy prepared a festive tea and dressed the babies gayly, but Denis did not come. Nor did the following week bring message or money from him.
Winter reached its height and reluctantly began to recede step by step before the advance of spring. Two months passed and the silence continued unbroken.
It was at the commencement of the third month that a more virile step than usual sounded at the entrance to the whitewashed cottage and a shadow fell across the open door. Susy stood up, a heap of sewing rolling from her lap, and turned to the man on the threshold.
“I’ve been sick,” said Denis unsteadily. “I’ve been in a hospital–I didn’t know anything or I’d have written——”
His grim defensiveness broke before the unshaken confidence in her clear face.
“I knew you couldn’t come,” she serenely answered, although her lips were trembling. “Only sometimes I was afraid you were dead. I didn’t dare ask, because they would have hunted for you and arrested you if they’d known you weren’t coming here.”
To both “they” meant the machinery of the law.
Denis laid his hand on the side of the door, scrutinizing her avidly, incredulously.
“You didn’t let them know? You let them think I was coming here and paying you every month?”
“I signed their receipts, yes. I was sure you’d have come if you could.”
“I guessed, when my head cleared up so I could remember, that I was in for the ten years,” slowly said Denis. “There hadn’t been any of my work in this place, so I had earned thirty-five dollars a month driving a grocer’s cart while I was well. But I wasn’t used to it and it pulled me down.”
“You gave me twenty-give!”
He colored with a boy’s embarrassment.
“That was all right. But I wasn’t living very luxurious, and I got pleuropneumonia. I just want you to know I wasn’t shirking. When I began to get better at the hospital, I’d forgotten all this—I thought I was getting well after a smash-up on the race course, as I’ve done before. Until yesterday it all came back, and I believed I was in for it.”
Speechless, she shook her head, beckoning him to a chair. And Denis obediently crossed at her bidding.
“I’m going to get tea,” she stated, determinedly matter-of-fact.
But she had not set many dishes on the table before she looked up to find him watching her. And whether it was the change wrought in him by illness, or the unconscious admiration and content of his gaze, Susy dropped the loaf of bread in a passionate gesture of indignation and protective pity.
“Where is that girl?” she demanded. “How can she leave you like this? Why I, just a friend, I’ve tried to help! I’ve sewed and washed and told lies to keep you from more trouble. And she, the girl you want to marry, does nothing?”
“You worked!” echoed Denis rising. “You hadn’t money to live?”
Scarlet, she yet stood firm.
“I could sign receipts for that lawyer to give the judge, but I had to keep the people around here from guessing that you weren’t paying. Yes, I worked. And now, where’s that girl?”
“That girl——What girl? Oh!” he laughed. “Honey, she was the daughter of the millionaire who owned the car; I never saw her before that night and I never want to see her again. But I had to look after her, since she’d been put in my charge. Honey, if I were East I’d do it better, but right here I’ll take care of you and the kiddies.”
“I need to take care of you,” yielded Susy the maternal, in tears of rejection.
Three days later Mrs. Armand Denis led her surprised husband to the office of his lawyer.
“He has got a telegram for you,” she explained. “I was here to see him yesterday.”
It was a telegram from New York, and the exile greedily tore it open, scarcely waiting to accept gracefully the congratulation of Mr. Blackstone. A glance devoured the contents, and he turned to Susy in vivid excitement and helplessness.
“From George–he’s waited to get me to race with him this season. And I–I’ve got to stay here. I can’t go.”
But Susy’s face shone radiant, her indulgent eyes smiled into his.
“Why not, if you take us?” she asked.
“Susy!”
“You see, as you have taken charge of Mrs. Denis for life,” interposed Mr. Blackstone, “and as you ahve been getting along so well, the court has decided to leave you perfectly free, until your wife complains of you. Which, I fancy, will be some time, eh?”
“Free?” echoed Denis; his tone suggested the crash of faling barriers. “Free?” He crushed Susy’s hands in his in a mounting fervor of exultation.
“Honey, honey, come get the kiddies and the tickets for New York. We’re going home.”
“I’m ready,” said Susy.