The Helpers

"And you made a straight shoot for a church – for our church and our pew. Good boy! You knew right where to find us on a Sunday evening, didn't you?"

Jeffard laughed again. Since a time unremembered of him it had not been so easy to laugh and be glad.

"Don't believe him, Mrs. Bartrow," he protested. "My motive was a little mixed, I'll confess, but it was altogether better than that. I was passing, and it occurred to me that I hadn't seen the inside of an American church for a long time."

"Or of any other kind, I'll be bound," Bartrow amended; and then, in a spirit of sheer ruthlessness: "Why don't you say something, Connie? Call him down and make him tell the truth about it."

"You don't give any one a chance to say anything," retorts the quiet one, with a summer-lightning flash of the old mock-antagonism. And then to Jeffard: "We are all very glad to see you again, Mr. Jeffard. Will you be in town long?"

Bartrow took the words out of his mouth and made answer for him.

"Of course he will; he is going to settle down and be home-folks – aren't you, Jeffard? Fall in and let's walk to where we can wrestle it out without freezing. It's colder than ordinary charity standing here."

Now the way to his hotel lay behind him and Jeffard hesitated. Whereupon Bartrow turned with a laugh derisive.

"Come on, you two. Have you forgotten the formula, Jeffard? I'll prompt you, and you can say it over after me. 'Miss Elliott, may I have the pleasure of seeing you' – "

Myra pounced upon the mocker and dragged him away; and Constance cut in swiftly.

"You mustn't mind what Dick says. He calls going to church 'dissipation,' and he is never quite responsible afterward. Won't you go home with us, Mr. Jeffard?"

Jeffard murmured something about a hotel and an appointment, but he had been waiting only for an intimation that he was forgiven. So they went on together, walking briskly, as the frosty night demanded, but they were not able to overtake the twain in advance. For a time they were both tongue-tied, and for a wonder it was the man who first rose superior to the entanglements of memory. But he was careful to choose the safest of commonplaces for a topic. They were ascending Capitol Hill, and by way of a beginning he said, "Are you living in this part of the city now?"

"Yes; in the old place on Colfax. Dick ran across the owner in California last autumn and bought it."

"It is a very pleasant place," Jeffard ventured, still determined to keep on ground of the safest.

"Do you know it?" she said, quickly.

"Oh, yes; – er – that is, I know where it is. I passed it one morning a long time ago."

"While we were living there?"

"Yes."

Silence again for one entire square and part of another. Then she said, "How did you know it was our house?"

He laid hold of his courage and told the truth. "I met your father a block or two down the avenue and I was hoping I might come upon the place where you lived. I found it. You were on the veranda, tying up the new shoots of a climbing rose."

"My 'Marechal Niel,'" she said. "It is dead now; they let it freeze last winter."

He held his peace for a time, but the rejoinder strove for speech, and had it, finally.

"The memory of it lives," he said. "I shall always see you as I saw you that morning, whatever comes between. You had on some sort of a dress that reminded me of the old Greek draperies, and you were standing on the arm of a big chair."

They were at the gate, and she let him open it for her. Bartrow and Myra were waiting for them at the veranda step. He realized that the ground was no longer safe, and would have taken his leave at the door. But Dick protested vigorously.

"No, you don't – drop out again like a ship in a fog. We've been laying for you, Uncle Steve and I, ever since you absconded last summer, and you don't get away this time without taking your medicine. Run him in there, Connie, and hang on to him while I go get my slippers and a cigar."

"There" was the cozy library, with a soft-coal fire burning cheerily in the grate, and the book-lined walls inviting enough to beckon any homeless one. But Jeffard was far beyond any outreaching of encompassments inviting or repellent. Constance drew up a chair for him before the fire, but he stood at the back of it and looked down upon her.

"Miss Elliott, there is something that I should like to tell you about – if it is far enough in the past," he said, when they were alone.

She was sitting with clasped hands, and there was a look in her eyes in the swift upglancing that he could not fathom. So he waited for her to give him leave.

"Is it about Mr. Lansdale?" she asked.

"Yes. I was with him up to the last, and I thought that – that you might like to know what I can tell you."

She gave him liberty, and he told the story of the jaunt afield, dwelling chiefly on the day-to-day improvement in Lansdale's health, and stumbling a little when he came to speak of their last evening together.

"It was a hard blow for me," he said, at the end of it, and his voice was low and unsteady with emotion. "You know what had gone before – what I had lost and couldn't regain; and having failed at all points I had hoped to succeed in this: to bring him back to you sound and well. And when the possibility was fairly within reach it was taken out of my hands forever."

She was silent for a little time, fighting a sharp battle with reticence new-born and masterful. When she spoke it was as one who is constrained to walk with bare feet in a thorny path of frankness.

"To bring him back to me, you say; and in your letter to Dick you said that your sorrow was second only to mine. Was he not your friend, as well as mine?"

"I loved him," said Jeffard, simply; "but not as you did."

Again the struggle was upon her, and for a moment she thought that the sound of Dick's returning footsteps would be the signal of a blessed release. But the heart of sincerity would not be denied.

"Let there be no more misunderstandings," she said, bravely. "We have all wronged you so deeply that you have a right to know the truth. Mr. Lansdale was my friend – as he was yours."

"But he meant to be more," Jeffard persisted – "and if he had come back with the courage of health to help him say it, you would not have denied him."

She made a little gesture of dissent.

"His health had nothing to do with it. And – and he said it before he went away."

Jeffard smiled. "You have halved the bitterness of it for me – as you would have lessened my reward if I had succeeded in bringing him back alive and well. My motive was mixed, as most human promptings are, – I can see that now, – but the better part of it was a desire to prove to you that I could do it for your sake. My debt to you is so large that nothing short of self-effacement can ever discharge it."

"How can you say that!" she burst out. "Wasn't I one of the three who ought to have believed in you? – the one who promised and failed and made it harder for you at every turn? You owe me nothing but scorn."

He contradicted her gravely. "I owe you everything that has been saved out of the wreck of the man who once sat beside you in the theatre and found fault with the world for his own shortcomings. You are remorseful now because you think you misjudged me; but you must believe me when I tell you that it was my love for you that saved me, at the end of the ends, – that kept me from doing precisely what you thought I had done. It was a fearful temptation. Garvin had fairly tossed the thing into the abyss."

"I know; but it was only a temptation, and you did not yield to it."

"No; I was able to put it aside in the strength born of four words of yours. At a time when I had forgotten God and so was willing to think that He had forgotten me, you said 'I believe in you.' You remember it?"

She nodded assent, looking up with shining eyes to say, "Don't make me ashamed that I hadn't the strength to go on believing in you."

"Don't say that. You have nothing to regret. My silence was the price of Garvin's safety, at first, and I knew what the cost would be when I determined to pay it. Later on the fault was mine; but then I found that I had unconsciously been counting upon blind loyalty; yours, and Dick's, and Lansdale's; – counting upon it after I had done everything to make it impossible. I had told Dick in the beginning, and I tried to tell Lansdale. Dick wanted to believe in me, – has wanted to all along, I think, – but Lansdale had drawn his own conclusions, and he made my explanation fit them. It hurt, and I gave place to bitterness."

"And yet you would have saved him for – for – "

"For that which I couldn't have myself. Yes; but you know the motive."

She met his gaze with a new light shining in the steadfast eyes. "I am not worthy," she said, softly; and he went quickly to stand beside her.